The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, Alain René le Sage [most read books .txt] 📗

is not

so clear as usual, give me warning of it instantly. Do not be

afraid of offending by frankness and sincerity, to put me in mind

of my own frailty will be the strongest proof of your affection

for me. Besides, your very interest is concerned in it, for if it

should, by any spite of chance towards you, come to my ears that

the people say in town, “His grace’s sermons produce no longer

their accustomed impression, it is time for him to abandon his

pulpit to younger candidates,” I do assure you most seriously and

solemnly, you will not only lose my friendship, but the provision

for life that I have promised you. Such will be the result of

your silly tampering with truth.

 

Here my patron left off to wait for my answer, which was an echo

of his speech, and a promise of obeying him in all things. From

that moment there were no secrets from me; I became the prime

favourite. All the household, except Melchior de la Ronda, looked

at me with an eye of envy. It was curious to observe the manner

in which the whole establishment, from the highest to the lowest,

thought it necessary to demean themselves towards his grace’s

confidential secretary; there was no meanness to which they would

not stoop to curry favour with me; I could scarcely believe they

were Spaniards. I left no stone unturned to be of service to

them, without being taken in by their interested assiduities. My

lord archbishop, at my entreaty, took them by the hand. He got a

company for one, and fitted him out so as to make a handsome

figure in the army. Another he sent to Mexico, with a

considerable appointment which he procured him; and I obtained a

good slice of his bounty for my friend Melchior. It was evident

from these facts, that if the prelate was not particularly active

in good works, at least he rarely gave a churlish refusal, when

any one had the courage to importune him for his benevolence.

 

But what I did for a priest seems to deserve being noticed more

at large. One day a certain licentiate, by name Lewis Garcias, a

well-looking man still in the prime of life, was presented to me

by our steward, who said — Signor Gil Blas, in this honest

ecclesiastic you behold one of my best friends. He was formerly

chaplain to a nunnery. Scandal has taken a few liberties with his

chastity. Malicious stories have been trumped up to hurt him in

my lord archbishop’s opinion, who has suspended him, and

unfortunately is so strongly prejudiced by his enemies, as to be

deaf to any petition in his favour. In vain have we interested

the first people in Grenada to get him re-established; our master

will not hear of it.

 

These first people in Grenada, said I, have gone the wrong way to

work. It would have been much better if no interest at all had

been made for the reverend licentiate. People have only done him

a mischief by endeavouring to serve him. I know my lord

archbishop thoroughly: entreaties and importunate recommendations

do but aggravate the ill condition of a clergyman who lies under

his displeasure: it is but a very short time ago since I heard

him mutter the following sentiment to himself The more persons a

priest, who has been guilty of any misconduct, engages to speak

to me in his behalf, the more widely is the scandal of the church

disseminated, and the more severe is my treatment of the

offender. That is very unlucky, replied the steward; and my

friend would be put to his last shifts if he did not write a good

hand. But, happily, he has the pen of a ready scribe, and keeps

his head above water by the exercise of that talent. I was

curious to see whether this boasted hand writing was so much

better than my own. The licentiate, who had a specimen in his

pocket, shewed me a sheet which I admired very much: it had all

the regularity of a writing-master’s copy. In looking over this

model of penman ship, an idea occurred to me. I begged Garcia to

leave this paper in my hands, saying, that I might be able to do

something with it which should turn out to his advantage; that I

could not explain myself at that moment, but would tell him more

the next day. The licentiate, to whom the steward had evidently

talked big about my capacity to serve him, withdrew in as good

spirits as if he had already been restored to his functions.

 

I was in earnest in my endeavour that he should be so, and lost

no time in setting to work. Happening to be alone with the

archbishop, I produced the specimen. My patron was delighted with

it. Seizing on this favourable opportunity, May it please your

grace, said I, since you are determined not to put your homilies

to the press, I should very much like them at last to be

transcribed in this masterly manner.

 

I am very well satisfied with your performance, answered the

prelate, but yet I own that it would be a pleasant thing enough

to have a copy of my works in that hand. Your grace, replied I,

has only to signify your wishes. The man who copies so well is a

licentiate of my acquaintance. It will give him so much the more

pleasure to gratify you, as it may be the means of interesting

your goodness to extricate him from the melancholy situation to

which he has the misfortune at present to be reduced.

 

The prelate could not do otherwise than inquire the name of this

licentiate. I told him it was Lewis Garcias. He is in despair at

having drawn down your censure upon him. That Garcias,

interrupted he, if I am not mistaken, was chaplain in a convent

of nuns, and has been brought into the ecclesiastical court as a

delinquent. I recollect some very heavy charges which have been

sent me against him. His morals are not the most exemplary. May

it please your grace, interrupted I in my turn, it is not for me

to justify him in all points; but I know that he has enemies. He

maintains that the authors of the informations you have received

are more bent on doing him an ill office than on vindicating the

purity of religion. That very possibly may be the case, replied

the archbishop; there are a great many firebrands in the world.

Besides, though we should take it for granted that his conduct

has not always been above suspicion, he may have repented of his

sins; in short, the mercies of heaven are infinite, however

heinous our transgressions. Bring that licentiate before me, I

take off his suspension.

 

Thus it is that men of the most austere character descend from

their altitudes, when interest or a favourite whim reduces them

to the level of the frail. The archbishop granted, without a

struggle, to the empty vanity of having his works well copied,

what he had refused to the most respectable applications. I

carried the news with all possible expedition to the steward, who

communicated it to his friend Garcias. That licentiate, on the

following day, came to return me thanks commensurate with the

favour obtained. I presented him to my master, who contented

himself with giving him a slight reprimand, and put the homilies

into his hand, to copy them out fair. Garcias performed the task

so satisfactorily, that he was reinstated in the cure of souls,

and was afterwards preferred to the living of Gabia, a large

market town in the neighbourhood of Grenada.

 

CH. IV. — The Archbishop is afflicted with a stroke of apoplexy.

How Gil Blas gets into a dilemma, and how he gets out.

 

WHILE I was thus rendering myself a blessing first to one and

then to the other, Don Ferdinand de Leyva was making his

arrangements for leaving Grenada. I called on that nobleman

before his departure, to thank him once more for the advantageous

post he had procured me. My expressions of satisfaction were so

lively, that he said — My dear Gil Blas, I am delighted to find

you in such good humour with my uncle the archbishop. I am

absolutely in love with him, answered I. His goodness to me has

been such as I can never sufficiently acknowledge. Less than my

present happiness could never have made me amends for being at so

great a distance from Don Caesar and his son. I am persuaded,

replied he, that they are both of them equally chagrined at

having lost you. But possibly you are not separated for ever;

fortune may some day bring you together again. I could not hear

such an idea started without being moved by it. My sighs would

find vent; and I felt at that moment so strong an affection for

Don Alphonso, that I could willingly have turned my back on the

archbishop and all the fine prospects that were opening to me,

and have gone back to the castle of Leyva, had but a

mortification taken place in the back of the scarecrow which had

frightened me away. Don Ferdinand was not insensible to the

emotions that agitated me, and felt himself so much obliged by

them, that he took his leave with the assurance of the whole

family always taking an anxious interest in my fate.

 

Two months after this worthy gentleman had left us, in the

luxuriant harvest of my highest favour, a lowering storm came

suddenly over the episcopal palace; the archbishop had a stroke

of apoplexy. By dint of immediate applications and good nursing,

in a few days there was no bodily appearance of disease

remaining. But his reverend intellects did not so easily recover

from their lethargy. I could not help observing it to myself in

the very first discourse that he composed. Yet there was not such

a wide gap between the merits of the present and the former ones,

as to warrant the inference that the sun of oratory was many

degrees advanced in its post-meridian course. A second homily was

worth waiting for; because that would clearly determine the line

of my conduct. Alas, and well-a-day! when that second homily

came, it was a knock-down argument. Sometimes the good prelate

moved forward, and sometimes he moved backwards; sometimes he

mounted up into the garret; and sometimes dipped down into the

cellar. It was a composition of more sound than meaning,

something like a superannuated schoolmaster’s theme, when he

attempts to give his boys more sense than he possesses of his

own, or like a capuchin’s sermon, which only scatters a few

artificial flowers of paltry rhetoric over a barren desert of

doctrine.

 

I was not the only person whom the alteration struck. The

audience at large, when he delivered it, as if they too had been

pledged to watch the advances of dotage, said to one another in a

whisper all round the church — Here is a sermon, with symptoms

of apoplexy in every paragraph. Come, my good Coryphaeus of the

public taste in homilies, said I then to myself prepare to do

your office. You see that my lord archbishop is going very fast -

- you ought to warn him of it, not only as his bosom friend, on

whose sincerity he relies, but lest some blunt fellow should

anticipate you, and bolt out the truth in an offensive manner. In

that case you know the consequence; you would be struck out of

his will, where no doubt you have a more convertible bequest than

the licentiate S�dillo’s library.

 

But as reason, like Janus, looks at things with two faces, I

began to consider the