ALAIN RENÉ LE, author of Gil Blas, and the greatest of the French novelists, was born at Sarzeau, near the town of Vannes in Brittany, on the 8th of May 1668. His father, Claude Le Sage, a lawyer, who held the office of registrar of the Cour Royale de Ruis, having died while his son was yet young, left him a small property, and entrusted him to the care of a worthless uncle, who sent him to the Jesuit's college of Vannes, but who seems otherwise to have neglected both the fortune and education of the future novelist. Pére Bochard, principal of his college, early detected the lurking genius of the young scholar, and took great pleasure in cultivating his growing taste for letters. On leaving this institution, he was compelled to accept of an office in connection with the collection of taxes of Brittany, which he held for five or six years. Leaving this situation, he went to Paris in 1692, and entered the university with the intention of prosecuting the study of philosophy. His youth, talents, and taste, combined with a remarkably handsome person, soon gained ready access for Le Sage to the best society of the French capital. In 1694 he married a beautiful girl, the daughter of a joiner in Paris, and with this date begins the activity of a long and a very happy life. He was induced by Danchet, professor of rhetoric at Chartres, whom he had known at the university of Paris, to translate into French the Letters of Aristaenetus. This volume appeared at Chartres in 1695, at the expense of the professor, but with the imprint of Rotterdam. Le Sage continued to frequent the literary circles of Paris, and had the good fortune to make the friendship of the Abbé de Lymone, who, besides bestowing upon him a pension of 600 livres, deserves the gratitude of posterity, for introducing him to the literature of Spain, which he was afterwards to combine in such a striking manner with that of his own country. Then followed each other in quick succession the comedy of Le Traître Punir in 1700, translated, or rather imitated from the Spanish of De Roxas; Don Felix de Mendocé in 1700, from a piece by Lope de Vega; Le Point d'Honneur, a comedy also taken from De Roxas; and Les Nouvelles Aventures de Don Quichotte, from the Spanish of Avellaneda. In none of these works, however, did the translator meet with any success. Le Sage had now reached his thirty-eighth year, and a superficial observer would have pronounced his life a failure. Genius, however, of the permanent kind, is usually of slow growth; and while Le Sage had been wasting, according to some, the brightest years of his life in idle folly, he was nevertheless receiving a discipline in making his own the wonderful wealth of the Spanish drama, which should ultimately open up for him a more brilliant triumph than any which the French nation then knew. Hitherto he had confined himself to translations or imitations. He was now to enter more boldly upon his voyage to literary fame, by committing himself more freely to the element than hitherto had been the case. In 1707 his comedy of Don César Ursin appeared at the Théâtre Français, with no success; but a small piece of his own, entitled Crispin, Rival de son Maître, had a brilliant run, and is said to be almost equal to Molière in the truthfulness of its dialogue. The success of his next work, the Diable Boitier, 1707, was enormous. Its title and plan were derived from El Diablo-Coyucho of Guevara, but the fancy, the gaiety, the wit, and the vivacity of it, were entirely the work of his charming French pen. Its pictures and characters, many of whom were sketched from real Parisian life, were purely French, and yet truly world-wide; and its nervous, clear, and uncommonly accurate style, gained for it a lasting reputation. (See "Le Sage" in the article ROMANCE.) He increased this work by an additional volume in 1726, and in 1737 added to it the Entretien des Cheminées de Madrid. In 1708 he brought forth a regular comedy in five acts called Turcaret, in which he satirized with unsparing hand those financiers and men of business, who, inflated by their sudden rise in the world, so frequently outrage all propriety, and even decency, by the absurdity of their conduct and the rudeness of their manners. A cabal of those concerned in the finances clubbed together to put it down, but an order from Monseigneur, dated 15th October 1708, "commanded" the king's company to play it forthwith. It was accordingly performed on the 14th of February 1709, and had a much greater success than could have been expected. An anecdote of this period illustrates well the character of Le Sage. Chancing one day to be some hours late for a meeting which had been arranged at the Hotel de Bouillon, at which he was to read his manuscript comedy, when he appeared he pled an engagement as an excuse, upon which the Duchess of Bouillon haughtily remarked that he had made the company lose two hours. "It is easy to make up the loss, madam," replied Le Sage; "I will not read my comedy, and you will thus regain the lost time." He stepped out of the hotel, and never after could he be prevailed on to return. Shortly after, he broke off all connection with the Théâtre Français. He offered them a small piece in 1708, called La Toutine, but it was not performed till 1732. This, combined with other indignities, created in Le Sage that bitter dislike towards performers which all readers of his romance will remember. He never permits an opportunity to slip without holding them up to indignant scorn.

With the exception of the comic opera De la Foire, for which he composed, either in whole or in part, upwards of a hundred small pieces, calculated to beguile the tedium of the hour, he bade adieu to the theatres, and began to compose those delightful romances for which posterity have never ceased to bless the name of Le Sage. His great work, Gil Blas de Santillane, which was published in the following order—2 vols. in 1710, 1 vol. in 1724, and 1 vol. in 1735, raised his fame to the very highest pitch, and secured it upon an immovable basis. "Few," says Sir Walter Scott, in his biographical notice of Le Sage, "have ever read this charming book without remembering..." Sage, Le, as one of the most delightful occupations of their life, the time which they first employed in the pursuit; and there are few also who do not occasionally turn back to its pages with all the vivacity which attends the recollection of early love." (See ROMANCE.)

Three distinct charges have been made against this work. The first was brought by Bruzen de la Martinière, and followed up by Voltaire in his Siècle de Louis XIV, in 1752, who unite in pronouncing the Gil Blas "to be entirely taken from Espinel's Marcos de Obregon," an accusation as absurd as it was malignant. The secret of Voltaire's dislike to the book was his having been subjected to a personal caricature in it. The next attack on the authenticity of Gil Blas was made by the Jesuit Father Isla, who published a Spanish translation of it, claiming it as "stolen from the Spanish, and now restored to its own country and native language by a Spaniard who does not choose to have his nation trifled with." Isla declares, without the shadow of proof, that it was originally the performance of an Andalusian advocate, who had given his manuscript to Le Sage when on a visit to Spain, as French secretary to some ambassador. This was of course as great a fiction as the first charge; for neither manuscript nor advocate were ever forthcoming, and Le Sage was never in Spain. These two charges have both been refuted by Le Comte François de Neufchâteau, in his Examen de la Question de savoir si Le Sage est Auteur de Gil Blas, 1819. A third, and in some respects a more ingenious, attack was made upon the reputation of Le Sage by Llorente, in two works, the one in French, the other in Spanish, 1822, who asserts that Gil Blas was the work of Solis, for this very good reason, that no one was capable, in the judgment of Llorente, of writing such a romance except the eminent historian. Ticknor, who in his Spanish Literature devotes some pages to an examination of these charges, remarks—"There is a ready answer to all such merely conjectural criticism. Le Sage proceeded, as an author in romantic fiction, just as he had done when he wrote for the public theatre; and the results at which he arrived in both cases are remarkably similar; . . . the Gil Blas, the greatest of all his works of prose fiction, is the result of his confirmed strength, and in its characteristic merits is as much his own as the Turcaret. On this point the internal evidence is as decisive as the external."

Le Sage meanwhile pursued his honest labour, and reaped the fruits of his industry by securing an independence. His Roland l'Amoureux, 1717, was a rather poor imitation of Bojardo's Orlando Innamorato; but his Guzman d'Alfarache, which appeared in 1732, was a great improvement upon the original Spanish work of Aleman. In the same year he published the Les Aventures de Robert dit le Chevalier de Beauchene, 2 vols., a sort of Paul Jones who scoured the West Indian seas during that period. This work was followed in 1733 by L'Histoire d'Esterenille Gonzales surnommé le Garçon de bonne Humeur, 2 vols., avowedly imitated from El Escudero Obregon, but to which it bears a very distant resemblance. Next year he published Une Journée des Parques, a philosophical piece, written with great wit and boldness. In 1738 appeared the Bachelier de Salamanca; and in 1740 La Valise Trouvée, which appeared anonymously. His last work, The Melange Amusant de Saillies d'Esprit et de Traits Historiques les plus frappants, a lively collection of anecdotes and criticisms, was published in 1743. The long domestic tranquillity and happiness which Le Sage had enjoyed, and which was only interrupted by his eldest and youngest son becoming actors, was now wearing gradually to a close. His eldest son, who had been bred to the bar, and who, on assuming the sock, took the name of Montménil, gained a high reputation as an actor. This very amiable man died suddenly in 1743, shortly after he had been reconciled to his father. His second son became canon of the cathedral of Boulogne, and on his father's ceasing to ply his pen, had the gratification of affording him a shelter in his retirement. Le Sage died at his son's residence on the 17th November 1747, in his seventy-ninth year.

Most of Le Sage's works of any importance were published under the title of Oeuvres Choisies de Le Sage, 15 vols. 8vo, Paris, 1783, and 16 vols. 8vo, Paris, 1810. The Diable Boiteux has been translated into English under the title of The Devil on Two Sticks; the Vanillo Gonzalez, and most of his other novels of much importance, have likewise been translated into English. The Gil Blas, which has appeared in all the languages of Europe, has been translated into English by Dr Smollett.