* * * * *

It was not till two years afterwards that I learnt that Uncle Silas was found next morning dead of an overdose of laudanum, and that Dudley had disappeared.

Milly married her good little clergyman.  I am Lady Ilbury now, happy in the affection of a beloved and noble-hearted husband.  A tiny voice is calling “Mamma;” the shy, useless girl you have known is now a mother, thinking, and trembling while she smiles, how strong is love, how frail is life.

* * * * *

RENE LE SAGE

Gil Blas

Except that he was born at Sarzeau, in Brittany, on May 8, 1668, and that he was the son of the novelist Claude le Sage, little is known of the youth of Alain Rene le Sage.  Until he was eighteen he was educated with the Jesuits at Vannes, when, it is conjectured he went to Paris to continue his studies for the Bar.  An early marriage drove him to seek a livelihood by means of literature, and shortly afterwards he found a valuable and sympathetic friend and patron in the Abbe de Lyonne, who not only bestowed upon him a pension of about L125, but also gave him the use of his library.  The first results of this favour were adaptations of two plays from Rojas and Lope de Vega, which appeared some time during the first two or three years of the eighteenth century.  Le Sage’s reputation as a playwright and as a novelist rests, oddly enough, in each case on one work.  As the author of “Tuscaret,” produced in 1709, he contributed to the stage one of the best comedies in the French language; as author of “The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillana” he stands for all time in the front rank of the world’s novelists.  Here he brought the art of story-writing to the highest level of artistic truth.  The first and second parts of the work appeared in 1715, the third in 1724, and the fourth in 1735.  Le Sage died at Boulogne on November 17, 1747.

I.—­I Start on my Travels

My uncle, Canon Perez, was a worthy priest.  To live well was, in his opinion, the chief duty of man.  He lived very well.  He kept the best table in the town of Oviedo.  I was very glad of this, as I lived with him, my parents being too poor to keep me.

My uncle gave me an excellent education.  He even learned to read so as to be able to teach me himself.  There were few ecclesiastics of his rank in Spain in the early part of the seventeenth century who could read a breviary as well as he could when I left him, at the age of seventeen, to continue my duties at the University of Salamanca.

“Here are forty ducats, Gil Blas,” he said to me when we parted.  “And you can take my old mule and sell it when you reach Salamanca.  Then you will be able to live comfortable until you obtain a good position.”