Le Sage
ALAIN RENE LE SAGE, author of one of the world's most remarkable books, was born on December 13, 1668, in a small town of western France. He died, nearly eighty years later, in 1747.
Unlike many men of genius, Le Sage did not go through life doing spectacular things. His father, who held some responsible legal positions, left a considerable fortune when Le Sage became an orphan as a child. His guardians either stole or invested with criminal carelessness the lad's money, but he was given a good education and was admitted to the bar. Fees came in slowly and Le Sage faced extreme poverty. Yet he dared to marry and turned to the stage for means of support.
For years he wrote, never really successful, but never actually in want. He was nearly forty years of age when a comedy gave him a Parisian reputation, and a novel made him known to France. The first two parts of "Gil Blas" were published in 1715, but they were not liked so well as his earlier story. Le Sage, however, knew how good it was, and he labored over it as devotedly as a great sculptor over a block of marble. The third part was not published until 1724, and not until 1735 was the last part put forth. During these twenty years he had also turned out play after play, and numerous books. He did not cease to write until after his seventieth birthday had passed. Outside of France Le Sage will always live because of his one book that ranks among the world's masterpieces. "Gil Blas" is life itself, an animated picture of Spain in its most colorful period. "It is a work," says Sir Walter Scott, "which renders the reader pleased with himself and mankind, where faults are placed before him in the light of follies rather than vices, and where misfortunes are so interwoven with the ludicrous that we laugh in the very act of sympathizing with them."