Background
He was born in Sarzeau, Brittany, France in December 13, 1668.
(Ce livre est une oeuvre du domaine public éditée au forma...)
Ce livre est une oeuvre du domaine public éditée au format numérique par Norph-Nop. Lachat de lédition Kindle inclut le téléchargement via un réseau sans fil sur votre liseuse et vos applications de lecture Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005R8GGJO/?tag=2022091-20
He was born in Sarzeau, Brittany, France in December 13, 1668.
In 1692 he became a lawyer.
He turned to writing to make a living and spent the next fifty years in Paris.
Clearly out of step with the revered conventions of the Comédie Française, Lesage began a long feud with "respectable" theatrical people of his time and henceforth dedicated his dramatic talents to the production, singly or in collaboration, of more than 100 farcical vaudevilles. The influence of Lesage on the novel remains far more profound and permanent. Of his many plays two are still given, Crispin rival de son maîtremaitre (1707) and Turcaret, first presented in 1709.
In Turcaret the financier who used to be a valet is fleeced by a baroness, robbed by his attendants, and finally arrested for knavery as his valet Frontin takes his place.
This portrait of the heartless usurer Turcaret is a biting satire pointed at the unscrupulous gougers of taxes. Of Lesage's novels, mention should be made of one adaptation from the Spanish, Le Diable boiteux (1709), in which a limping devil lifts the roofs off homes to report what he sees of the inanities of their occupants.
The important lifework of Lesage, however, was the romance of Gil Blas, the first two books appearing in 1715, a third in 1724, and the last in 1735.
It is a story of roguery; the setting is Spanish, but the characters and situations are French. Gil Blas is a young student who is sent by his priestly uncle to study at the University of Salamanca.
He never arrives, but is engulfed in a long series of adventures.
He turned to Spain instead of to England and exploited his inexhaustible Castilian sources.
Some claimed that there was a Spanish original for Gil Blas and that Lesage adapted it as he had done for many of his books.
No such work existed, however; Gil Blas' sources are in Lesage, his readings, and his keen satirical observations of his contemporaries from the time of Louis XIV through the minority of Louis XV.
Lesage wrote several other novels, all of lesser importance: they include Les Aventures de M. Robert Chevalier, dit de Beauchêne (1732), set in French Canada and filled with swashbucklers and Indians, and other experiments in the picaresque such as Don Guzman d'Alfarache (1732) and Le Bachelier de Salamanque (1736).
In 1743 he moved to Boulogne on the Channel. His last years werespent far from Parisian distractions, at Boulogne-sur-Mer, in just the sort of happy retreat among devoted members of his family which had been the reward of his worldly-wise hero Gil Blas.
( Fraud, theft, extortion and sexual corruption are the t...)
(Ce livre est une oeuvre du domaine public éditée au forma...)
Lesage differed from his contemporary Voltaire, for Lesage had no philosophic disposition, but was merely an attentive observer and reported without propaganda.
In 1694 he married.
To support his family of three sons and one daughter, he produced novels and plays in rapid succession.