LE SAGE, ALAIN RENE (1668-1747), French novelist and dramatist, was born at Sarzeau in Brittany, on May 8, 1668. He went to school with the Jesuits at Vannes and was called to the bar in Paris in 1692. In 1694 he turned to literature. He found a valuable patron in the abbe de Lyonne, who gave him an annuity of 600 livres, and recommended him to exchange the classics for Spanish literature, of which he was himself a student and collector.
Le Sage began by translating plays chiefly from Rojas and Lope de Vega. He was nearly forty before he obtained anything like decided success. But in i7o7 his admirable farce of Crispin rival de son maitre was acted with great applause ; and Le Diable boiteux was published. Notwithstanding the success of Crispin, the actors did not like Le Sage, and refused a small piece of his called Les Etrennes (1707). He thereupon altered it into Turcaret, his theatrical masterpiece, and one of the best comedies in French literature. This appeared in 1709.
The first two parts of Gil Bias de Santillane appeared in 1715. Strange to say, it was not so popular as Le Diable boiteux. Le Sage did not bring out the third part till 1724, nor the fourth till 1735. Notwithstanding the great merit and success of Tur caret and Crispin, the Theatre Francais did not welcome him, and in the year of the publication of Gil Blas he began to write for the Theatre de la Foire—the comic opera held in booths at festival time. According to one computation he produced, either alone or with others, about a hundred pieces, varying from strings of songs with no regular dialogues, to comediettas only distinguished from regular plays by the introduction of music.
He was also industrious in prose fiction.
Besides finishing Gil Blas he translated the Orlando inna morato (1721), rearranged Guzman d'Alfarache (1732), pub lished two more or less original novels, Le Bachelier de Sala. manque and Estevanille Gonzales, and in 1733 produced the Vie et aventures de M. de Beaucliesne, which resembles certain works of Defoe. Le Sage was also the author of La Valise trouvee, a collection of imaginary letters, and of some minor pieces, of which Une journee des parques is the most remarkable. This laborious life he continued until 174o. At Boulogne Le Sage spent the last seven years of his life, dying on Nov. 17, 1747. His last work, Melange amusant de saillies d'esprit et de traits historiques les plus frappants, had appeared in Le Sage is an important figure in European literature. His work may be divided into three parts. The first contains his Theatre de la Foire and his few miscellaneous writings, the second his two remarkable plays Crispin and Turcaret, the third his prose fictions. In the first two he swims within the general literary current in France ; he can and must be compared with others of his own nation. But in the third he emerges altogether from merely national comparison. He formed no school in
France; he followed no French models. His work is a parenthesis in the general development of the French novel. His literary ancestors are Spaniards, his literary contemporaries and suc cessors are Englishmen.
In mere form Le Sage is not original. He does little more than adopt that of the Spanish picaroon romance of the 16th and 17th century. Often, too, he prefers merely to rearrange and adapt existing work, and still oftener to give himself a kind of start by adopting the work of a preceding writer as a basis. But he never, in any work that pretends to originality at all, is guilty of anything that can fairly be called plagiarism. He is, on the con trary, fond of suggesting indebtedness when he is really dealing with his own funds. Thus the Diable boiteux borrows the title, and for a chapter or two the plan and almost the words, of the Diablo Cojuelo of Luis Velez de Guevara. But after a few pages Le Sage leaves his predecessor alone. Even the plan of the Spanish original is entirely discarded, and the incidents, the episodes, the style, are as independent as if such a book as the Diablo Cojuelo had never existed. The case of Gil Blas is still more remarkable. It was at first alleged that Le Sage had bor rowed it from the Marcos de Obregon of Vincent Espinel; but though this book furnished Le Sage with separate incidents and hints for more than one of his books, Gil Bias as a whole is not in the least indebted to it. Afterwards Father Isla asserted that Gil Bias was a mere translation from an actual Spanish book— an assertion at once incapable of proof and disproof, inasmuch as there is no trace whatever of any such book.
Le Sage has not only the characteristic, which Homer and Shakespeare have, of absolute truth to human nature as dis tinguished from truth to this or that national character, but he has also what has been called the quality of detachment. He never takes sides with his characters as Fielding (whose master, with Cervantes, he certainly was) sometimes does. Asmodeus and Don Cleofas, Gil Blas and the Archbishop and Doctor Sangrado, are produced by him with exactly the same impartiality of attitude. Except that he brought into novel writ ing this highest quality of artistic truth, it perhaps cannot be said that Le Sage did much to advance prose fiction in itself. But in individual excellence his works have few rivals. Nor should it be forgotten, as it sometimes is, that Le Sage was a great master of French style, the greatest unquestionably between the classics of the 17th century and the classics of the i8th.
See Barbaret, Lesage et le Thecitre de la Foire (1888) ; L. Claretier, Lesage romancier (189o) ; E. Lintilhac, Le Sage (1893) in the series of Grands Ecrivains francais; Galli, Le realisme pittoresque chez Lesage (191o).