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

I kept my tongue within my teeth, and thereby passed, in the estimation of the guests, for a close, confidential, politic, trustworthy young statesman.

The party respectively retired home after dinner to take their usual nap, when Don Caesar and his son, yielding to a similar inclination, shut themselves up in their apartments.

For my own part, full of impatience to see a town which I had so often heard extolled for its beauty, I went out of the governor’s palace with the intention of walking through the streets. At the gate a man accosted me with the following address: “Will Señor de Santillane allow me to take the liberty of paying my respects to him?” I asked him who and what he was. “I am Don Caesar’s valet-de-chambre,” answered he, “but was one of his ordinary footmen during your stewardship; I used to make my court to you every morning, and you used to take a great deal of notice of me. I regularly gave you intelligence of what was passing in the house. Do you recollect my apprising you one day that the village surgeon of Leyva was privately admitted into Dame Lorenza Sephora’s bedchamber?”

“It is a circumstance which I have by no means forgotten,” replied I. “But now that we are talking of that formidable duenna, what is become of her?”

“Alas!” resumed he, “the poor creature moped and dwindled after your departure, and at length gave up the ghost, more to the grief of Seraphina than of Don Alphonso, who seemed to consider her death as no great evil.”

Don Caesar’s valet-de-chambre, having thus acquainted me with Sephora’s melancholy end, made a humble apology for having presumed to stop my walk, and then left me to continue my progress. I could not help paying the tribute of a sigh to the memory of that ill-fated duenna; and her decease affected me the more because I taxed myself with that melancholy catastrophe, though a moment’s reflection would have convinced me that the grave owed its precious prey to the inroads of her cancer, rather than to the cruel charms of my person.

I looked with an eye of pleasure upon everything worth notice in the town. The archbishop’s marble palace feasted my eyes with all the magnificence of architecture; nor were the piazzas which surrounded the exchange much inferior in commercial grandeur; but a large building at a distance, with a great crowd standing before the doors, attracted all my attention. I went nearer, to ascertain the reason why so great a concourse of both sexes was collected, and was soon let into the secret by reading the following inscription in letters of gold on a tablet of black marble over the door: La Posada de los Representantes.4 The playbills announced for that day a new tragedy, never performed, and gave the name of Don Gabriel Triaquero as the author.

V

Gil Blas goes to the play, and sees a new tragedy⁠—The success of the piece⁠—The public taste at Valencia.

I stopped for some minutes before the door, to make my remarks on the people who were going in. There were some of all sorts and sizes. Here was a knot of genteel-looking fellows, whose tailors at least had done justice to their fashionable pretensions; there, a mob of ill-favored and ill-mannered mortals, in a garb to identify vulgarity. To the right was a bevy of noble ladies, alighted from their carriages to take possession of their private boxes; to the left, a tribe of female traders in lubricity, who came to sell their wares in the lobby. This mixed concourse of spectators, as various in their minds as in their faces, gave me an itching inclination to increase their number. Just as I was taking my check, the governor and his lady drove up. They spied me out in the crowd, and having sent for me, took me with them to their box, where I placed myself behind them, in such a position as to converse at my ease with either.

The theatre was filled with spectators from the ceiling downwards, the pit thronged almost to suffocation, and the stage crowded with knights of the three military orders. “Here is a full house,” said I to Don Alphonso. “You are not to consider that as anything extraordinary,” answered he; “the tragedy now about to be produced is from the pen of Don Gabriel Triaquero, the most fashionable dramatic writer of his day. Whenever the playbill announces any novelty from this favorite author, the whole town of Valencia is in a bustle. The men as well as the women talk incessantly on the subject of the piece: all the boxes are taken; and on the first night of performance there is a risk of broken limbs in getting in, though the price of admission is doubled, with the exception of the pit, which is too authoritative a part of the house for the proprietors to tamper with its patience.”

“What a paroxysm of partiality!” said I to the governor. “This eager curiosity of the public, this hotheaded impatience to be present at the first representation of Don Gabriel’s pieces gives me a magnificent idea of that poet’s genius.”

At this period of our conversation the curtain rose. We immediately left off talking, to fix our whole attention on the stage. The applauses were rapturous even at the prologue: as the performance advanced, every sentiment and situation, nay, almost every line of the piece, called forth a burst of acclamation; and at the end of each act the clapping of hands was so loud and incessant, as almost to bring the building about our ears. After the dropping of the curtain, the author was pointed out to me, going about from box to box, and with all the modesty of a successful poet, submitting his head to the imposition of those laurels which the genteeler, and especially the fairer part of the audience had prepared for his coronation.

We returned to the