Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage (best romance books of all time TXT) 📕

of made dishes. This reason, or rather the turn of countenance with which it was alleged, seemed to imply more than was expressed. ‘You have not told me,’ said I, ‘the real meaning of your not eating the fricassee; do have the goodness to explain it at once.’

“ ‘Since you are so curious to be made acquainted with it,’ replied he, ‘I must own that I have an insuperable aversion to cramming my stomach with meats in masquerade, since one evening at an inn on the road between Toledo and Cuenca, they served me up, instead of a wild rabbit, a hash of tame cat; enough, of all conscience, ever after to set my intestines in battle array against all minces, stews, and forcemeats.’

“No sooner had the muleteer let me into this secret, than, in spite of the hunger which raged within me, my appetite left me completely in the lurch. I conceived, in all the horrors of extreme loathing, that I had been eating a cat dressed up as the double of a rabbit; and the fricassee had no longer any power over my senses, except by producing a strong inclination to retch. My companion did not lessen my tendency that way, by telling me that the innkeepers in Spain, as well as the pastry-cooks, were very much in the habit of making that substitution. The drift of the conversation was, as you may perceive, very much in the nature of a lenitive to my stomach; so much so, that I had no mind to meddle any more with the dish of undefinables, nor even to make an attack upon the roast meat, for fear the mutton should have performed its duty by deputy as well as the rabbit. I jumped up from table, cursing the cookery, the cook, and the whole establishment; then, throwing myself down upon the sofa, I passed the night with less nausea than might reasonably have been expected. The day following, with the dawn, after having paid the reckoning with as princely an air as if we had been treated like princes, away went I from Illescas, bearing my faculties so strongly impregnated with fricassee, that I took every animal which crossed the road, of whatever species or dimensions, for a cat.

“We got to Madrid betimes, where I had no sooner settled with my carrier, than I hired a ready-furnished lodging near the Sun-gate. My eyes, though accustomed to the great world, were, nevertheless, dazzled by the concourse of nobility which was ordinarily seen in the quarter of the court. I admired the prodigious number of carriages, and the countless list of gentlemen, pages, gentlemen’s gentlemen, and plain, downright footmen, in the train of the grandees. My admiration exceeded all bounds on going to the king’s levee, and beholding the monarch in the midst of his court. The effect of the scene was enchanting, and I said to myself, ‘It is no wonder they should say that one must see the court of Madrid, to form an adequate idea of its magnificence: I am delighted to have directed my course hither, and feel a sort of prescience within me that I shall not come away without taking fortune by surprise.’ I caught nothing napping, however, but my own prudence, in making some thriftless, expensive acquaintance. My money oozed away in the rapid thaw of my propriety and better judgment, so that it became a measure of expedient degradation to throw away my transcendent merit on a pedagogue of Salamanca, whom some family lawsuit or other concern had brought to Madrid, where he was born, and where chance, more whimsical than wise, thrust me within the horizon of his knowledge. I became his right hand, his prime, principal agent, and dogged him at the heels to the university when he returned thither.

“My new employer went by the name of Don Ignacio de Ipiña. He furnished himself with the handle of don, inasmuch as he had been tutor to a nobleman of the first rank, who had recompensed his early services with an annuity for life: he likewise derived a snug little salary from his professorship in the university; and, in addition to all this, laid the public under a yearly contribution of two or three hundred pistoles for books of uninstructive morality, which he protruded from the press periodically by weight and measure. The manner in which he worked up the shreds and patches of his composition deserves a notice somewhat more than cursory. The heavy hours of the forenoon were spent in muzzing over Hebrew, Greek, and Latin authors, and in writing down upon little squares of card every pithy sentence or striking thought which occurred in the morning’s reading. According to the progress of this literary Pam in winning tricks from the ancients, he employed me to score up his honors in the form of an Apollo’s wreath: these metaphysical garlands were strung upon wire, and each garland made a pocket volume. What an execrable hash of wholesome viands did we cook up! The commandments set at loggerheads with an utter confusion of tables; Epicurean conclusions grafted on stoical premises! Tully quoting Epictetus, and Seneca supporting his antitheses on the authority of monkish rhyme! Scarcely a month elapsed without our putting forth at least two volumes, so that the press was kept continually groaning under the weight of our transgressions. What seemed most extraordinary of all was, that these literary larcenies were palmed upon the purchasers for spick and span new wares, and if, by any strange and improbable chance, a thickheaded critic should stumble with his noddle smack against some palpable plagiarism, the author would plead guilty to the indictment, and make a merit of serving up at secondhand

“What Gellius or Stobaeus hashed before,
Though chewed by blind old scholiasts o’er and o’er.

“He was also a great commentator, and filled his notes chock-full of so much erudition as to multiply whole pages of discussion upon what homely common sense would have consigned