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

was no one at home but a person to take

care of the house, who told me that his master was just gone to

the castle of Leyva, having been sent for on account of

Seraphina’s dangerous illness.

 

The count’s absence was altogether unexpected: here was no longer

any inducement to stay at Toledo, and all my plans were changed

at once. Finding myself so near Madrid, I resolved to go thither.

It came into my head that I might make my way at court, where

talents of the first order, as I had heard, were not absolutely

necessary to fill situations of the first consequence. On the

very next morning I took advantage of back carriage, to be set

down in the renowned capital of Spain. Fortune took me kindly by

the hand, and introduced me to a higher cast of parts than those

I had hitherto filled.

 

CH. XII. — Gil Blas takes lodgings in a ready-furnished house.

He gets acquainted with Captain Chinchilla. That officer’s

character and business at Madrid.

 

ON my first arrival at Madrid, I fixed my head-quarters in a

lodging-house, where resided, among other persons, an old

captain, who was come from the distant part of New Castile, to

solicit a pension at court, and he thought his claims but too

well founded. His name was Don Annibal de Chinchilla. It was not

without much staring that I saw him for the first time. He was a

man about sixty, of gigantic stature, and of anatomical leanness.

His whiskers were like brushwood, fencing off the two sides of

his face as high as his temples. Besides that, he was short in

his reckoning by an arm and a leg, there was a vacancy for an

eye, which Polypheme would have supplied as he did, had patches

of green silk been then in the fashion; and his features were

hacked sufficiently to illustrate a treatise of geometry. With

these exceptions, his configuration was much like that of another

man. As to his mental qualities, he was not altogether without

understanding; and what he wanted in quickness he made up by

gravity. His principles were rigid in the extreme; and it was his

particular boast to be delicate on the point of honour.

 

After two or three interviews, he distinguished me by his

confidence. I soon got into all his personal history: he related

on what occasions he had left an eye at Naples, an arm in

Lombardy, and a leg in the Low Countries. The most admirable

circumstance in all his narratives of battles and sieges, was,

that not a single feature of the swaggerer peeped out; not a word

escaped him to his own honour and glory; though one could readily

have forgiven him for making some little display of the half

which was still extant of himself, as a set-off against the

dilapidations which had deducted so largely from the usual

contexture of a man. Officers who return from their campaigns

without a scratch upon their skin or a love-lock out of place,

are not always so humble in their pretensions.

 

But he told me that what gave him most uneasiness was, the having

wasted a considerable portion of his private fortune on military

objects, so that he had not more than a hundred ducats a year

left; a poor establishment for such a pair of whiskers, a

gentleman’s lodging, and an amanuensis to multiply memorials by

wholesale. For in point of fact, my worthy friend, added he,

shrugging his shoulders, I present one, with a blessing on my

endeavours, every day, and the last meets with the same attention

as the first. You would say that it was an even bet between the

prime minister and me, which of us two shall be fired first; the

memorialist or the receiver of the memorials. I have often had

the honour, too, of addressing the king on the same subject; but

the rector and his curate say grace in the same key; and in the

mean time, my castle of Chinchilla is falling to ruin for want of

necessary repairs.

 

Faint heart never won fair lady, said I most wisely to the

captain; you are perhaps on the eve of finding all your marches

and countermarches repaid with usury. I must not flatter myself

with that pleasing expectation, answered Don Annibal. It is but

three days since I spoke to one of the minister’s secretaries;

and if I am to trust his representations, I have only to hold up

my head and look big. What then did he say to you? replied I. Had

those poor dumb mouths your wounds no eloquence, to wring a

hireling pittance for their profuse expense of blood? You shall

judge for yourself, resumed Chinchilla. This secretary told me in

good plain terms: My honest friend, you need not boast so much of

your zeal and your fidelity; you have only done your duty in

exposing yourself to danger for your country. Naked glory is the

true and honourable recompense of gallant actions, and as such is

the prize at which a Spaniard aims. You therefore argue on false

principles, if you consider the bounty you solicit as a debt. In

case it should be granted, you will owe that favour exclusively

to the royal goodness, which in its extreme condescension

requites those of its subjects who have served the state

valiantly. Thus you see, pursued the captain, that if I had a

hundred lives they are all pledged, and that I am likely to go

back as hungry as I came.

 

A brave man in distress is the most touching object in this

world. I exhorted him to stick close, and offered to write his

memorials out fair for nothing. I even went so far as to open my

purse to him, and to beg it as a favour that he would draw upon

me for whatever he wanted. But he was not one of those folks who

never wait to be asked twice on such occasions. So much the

reverse, that with a commendable delicacy on the subject, he

thanked me for my kindness, but refused it peremptorily. He

afterwards told me that, for fear of spunging upon any one, he

had accustomed himself, by little and little, to live with such

sobriety, that the smallest quantity of food was sufficient for

his subsistence; which was but too true. His daily fare was

confined to vegetables, by dint whereof his component parts were

confined to skin and bone. That he might have no witnesses how

ill he dined, he usually shut himself up in his chamber at that

meal. I prevailed so far with him, however, by repeated

entreaties, as to obtain that we should dine and sup together:

then, undermining his pride by little indirect artifices of

compassion, I ordered more provision and wine than I could

consume to my own share. I pressed him to eat and drink. At first

he made difficulties about it; but in the end there was no

resisting my hospitality. After a time, his modesty becoming

fainter as his diet was more flush, he helped me off with my

dinner and lightened my bottle almost without asking.

 

One day, after four or five glasses, when his stomach had renewed

its intimacy with a more generous system of feeding, he said to

me with an air of gaiety: Upon my word, Signor Gil Blas, you have

very winning ways with you; you make me do just whatever you

please. There is something so hearty in your welcome as to

relieve me from all fear of trespassing on your generous temper.

My captain seemed at that moment so entirely to have got rid of

his bashfulness, that if I had been in the humour to have seized

the lucky moment, and to have pressed my purse once more on his

acceptance, I am much mistaken if he would have refused it. I did

not put him to the trial; but rested satisfied with having made

him my messmate, and taken the trouble not only to copy out his

memorials, but to assist him in their composition. By dint of

having written homilies out fair, I had learnt the knack of

phraseology, and was become a sort of author. The old officer on

his side had some little vanity about writing well. Both of us

thus contending for the prize, the bursts of eloquence would have

done honour to the most celebrated professors of Salamanca. But

it was in vain that we sat on opposite sides of the table, and

drained our genius to the very dregs, to nourish the flowers of

rhetoric in these memorials; you might as well have planted an

orange-grove on the sea-beach. In whatever new light we placed

Don Annibal’s services, it was all the same at court, the

connoisseurs were decided about their merit; so that the battered

veteran had no reason to sing the praises of that spirit which

leads officers on to spend their family estates in the service.

In the virulence of his spleen he cursed the planet under which

he was born, and sent Naples, Lombardy, and the Low Countries to

the devil.

 

That his mortification might be pressed down and running over, it

happened to his face one day that a poet, introduced by the Duke

of Alva, having recited a sonnet before the king on the birth of

an infant; was gratified with a pension of five hundred ducats. I

believe the lop-limbed captain would have gone raving mad at it,

if I had not taken some pains to recompense his spirit. What is

the matter with you? said I, seeing him quite beside himself.

There is nothing in all this which ought to go so terribly

agaiust the grain. Ever since Mount Parnassus swelled above the

subject plain, have not poets pleaded the privilege of laying

princes under contribution to their muse? There is not a crowned

head in Christendom that has not substituted a pensioned laureate

for the household fool of less refined times. And between

ourselves, this species of patronage, for the most part galloping

down full drive to posterity on the saddle of Pegasus, raises a

hue and cry in honour of royal munificence; but bounty to persons

who are lost in a crowd, however deserving, adds nothing to the

bulk or stature of posthumous renown. Augustus must have drained

his treasury by gratuities, and yet how few of the names on his

pension-list have come down to us! But distant ages shall be

informed, as we are, in all the hyperbole of poetic diction, that

his benefits descended on Virgil like the rain from heaven, whose

drops arithmetic has no combinations to count, no principles by

which to reason on their number.

 

But let me talk ever so classically to Don Annibal, there was a

confounded acidity in that sonnet which curdled all the milky

ingredients of his moral composition; it was impossible to chew,

swallow, and digest such food with human organs; and he was fully

determined to give the matter up at once. It seemed right,

nevertheless, by way of playing for his last stake, to present

one more memorial to the Duke of Lerma, and if that failed there

was an end of the game. For this purpose we went together to the

prime minister’s. There we met a young man who, after saluting

the captain, said to him in a tone of affection: My old and dear

master, is it your own self that I see? What business brings you

to this mart of favour? If you have occasion for any one to speak

a good word for you, do not spare my lungs; they are entirely at

your service. How is this, Pedrillo? answered the officer; to

hear you talk it should seem as if you held some important post

in