Gil Blas, Alain-René Lesage [best romance ebooks .txt] 📗

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 infanta, 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 against 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 honor 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 favor? If you have occasion for anyone 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 this house.”

“At least,” replied the young man, “I have influence enough here to put an honest rustic like you into the right train.”

“That being the case,” resumed the captain with a smile, “I place myself under your protection.”

“I accept the pledge,” rejoined Pedrillo. “You have only to acquaint me with your particular taste, and I engage to give you a savory slice out of the ministerial pasty.”

We had no sooner opened our minds to this young fellow, so full of kind assurances, than he inquired where Don Annibal resided; then, promising that we should hear from him on the following day, he vanished without informing us what he meant to do, or even telling us whether he belonged to the Duke of Lerma’s household. I was curious to know what this Pedrillo was, whose turn of mind appeared to be so brisk and active.

“He is a brave lad,” said the captain, “who waited on me some years ago, but finding me out at elbows, went away in search of a better service. There was no offence to me in all that; it is very natural to change when one cannot be worse off. The creature is pleasant enough, not deficient in parts, and happy in a spirit of intrigue which would wheedle with the devil. But notwithstanding all his fine pretence, I am not sanguine in my reckoning on the zeal he has just testified for me.”

“Perhaps,” said I, “there may be some plausibility in his designs. Should he be a retainer, for example, to any of the duke’s principal officers, it will be in his power to serve you. You have lived too long in the world not to know that in great houses everything is done by party and cabal; that the masters are governed by two or three upper servants about their persons, who, in their turn, are governed by that multitude of menials attendant upon them.”

On the next morning we saw Pedrillo at our breakfast table. “Gentlemen,” said he, “if I did not explain myself yesterday as to my means of serving Captain Chinchilla, it was because we were not in a place where such a communication could be made with safety. Besides, I was disposed to ascertain whether the thing was feasible, before you were made parties in it. Understand, then, that I am the confidential servant of Señor Don Rodrigo de Calderona, the Duke of Lerma’s first secretary. My master, who is much addicted to women, goes almost every evening to sup with a little Aragonian nightingale, whom he keeps in a cage near the purlieus of the court. She is quite a young girl from Albarracín, a most lovely creature. She has some wit as well as beauty, and sings enchantingly; they call