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Gil Blas: Alfonso

Here again he had easy work, but, getting into trouble about a girl, was compelled to leave the city. On his way to Toledo he rescued a young nobleman, named Don Alfonso, from arrest. They became friends, and after Don Alfonso reached his home he and his father became Gil Blas's patrons, placing him as secretary to their relative, the Archbishop of Granada, who was inordinately vain and as broad as he was long.

Gil Blas praised his sermons and was regarded as a young man of excellent judgment until after the prelate's mind was affected by apoplexy and his homilies became discordant ravings. Gil Blas obeyed the archbishop's command to tell him if he fell short in his preaching and was ignominiously packed off. Reduced to extremities once more, he posed as the brother to a disreputable actress and thus secured the position of secretary to a Portuguese grandee, the Marques de Marialva. The trick was discovered. He returned to Madrid, and after many amusing and not always creditable adventures was appointed under-secretary to the Duke of Lerma, prime minister to the king. His duties may be gaged by his comment, "One makes a merit of any dirty work in the service of the great."

His experience with the upper and the lower world, with actors, poets, libertines, physicians, bandits, adventures, and hidalgos and their servants, had sharpened his wits, and his native ability and smattering of education gave him growing influence. He was courted, flattered, and bribed; his conceit and avarice became colossal.

He declared that "a court had all the soporific virtues of Lethe in the case of poor relations" and confessed that "every trace of his former gay and generous temper had disappeared."

Pride came before a fall. Having been employed to procure a questionable mistress for the heir-apparent, he was arrested by the king's orders and thrown into the dungeon of Segovia. The prince intervened, but he was exiled from the two Castiles. All his property was seized and his mercenary engagement to a wealthy jeweler's daughter was broken. Then his friend Don Alfonso, whom he had got appointed as governor of Valencia, presented him with a small estate near that city. On his way thither he stopped at his birthplace and found his uncle a mental wreck and his mother worn out in caring for his dying father. He gave his father a pompous funeral, and settled an annuity on his mother, but the townspeople were so indignant with him for his neglect of his family that they threatened to mob him.

Glad to escape with his life, he reached Valencia, where he was received at his new home by seven or eight servants provided by Don Alfonso. He got rid of most of them and lived frugally, marrying Antonia, daughter of his farmer, Don Basilio. But his idyllic happiness ended with the death of his wife in childbirth.

Soon afterward the crown prince came to the throne and offered him a place of high responsibility. Gil Blas, who had learned wisdom, replied that "all he wanted was a good situation where there was no inducement to violate his conscience, and where the favors of his prince were not likely to be bartered for filthy lucre."

He was made confidant to the prime minister, who intrusted him with the education of his illegitimate son and heir. This brought him a title. After some years when the duke lost the king's favor, Gil Blas followed him into retirement, and on his death was remembered with a bequest of ten thousand pistoles. He returned to his beautiful estate, made a second marriage, and lived, happy and respected, training his children wisely and confiding to his memoirs all his errors, crimes, joys, and sorrows, together with his opinions of literature, society, and the stage. His narrative is interspersed with long and fascinating stories related by various characters whom he had met; these and his own adventures furnish a vivid picture of the romantic Spain of the seventeenth century.

Gil Blas is one of the wisest and most amusing of romances, and though it is not free from the coarseness permitted at that time, vice is not depicted attractively and its teaching is generally moral.