Claude Lesage, the father of the novelist…

Claude Lesage, the father of the novelist Alain-René Lesage, had held the united positions of advocate, notary and registrar of the royal court in Rhuys.

His mother's name was Jeanne Brenugat.

Both Lesage's father and mother died when Lesage was very young, and he was left in the care of his uncle who wasted his education and fortune.

Père Bochard, of the Order of the Jesuits, Principal of the College in Vannes, had become interested in the boy on account of his natural talents and cultivated Lesage's taste for literature.

Lesage at age twenty-five in 1693 had gone to Paris "to pursue his philosophical studies".

He had in August 1694 married the daughter of a joiner, Marie Elizabeth Huyard.

She was beautiful but had no fortune, and Lesage had little practice.

About this time, he encountered an old schoolfellow, the dramatist Antoine Danchet, who is said to have advised him to take up literature.

He began as a translator, and published in 1695 a French version of the Epistles of Aristaenetus, which was not successful.

Shortly afterwards, he had found a valuable patron and adviser in the Abbé de Lyonne, who bestowed on him an annuity of six hundred livres, and recommended him to exchange the classics for Spanish literature, of which he was himself a student and collector.

Spanish literature was once very popular in France when the queens of the house of Austria sat upon the throne, but had become neglected by Lesage's time.

Lesage had begun by translating plays chiefly from Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla and Lope de Vega.

Le Traître puni and Le Point d'honneur from the former and Don Félix de Mendoce from the latter had been acted or published in the first two or three years of the eighteenth century.

He had in 1704, translated the continuation of Don Quixote by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, and soon afterwards had adapted a play from Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Don César Ursin, which had been successful at court and damned in the city.

Lesage was, however, nearly forty before he obtained decided success.

Hs farce, Crispin rival de son maître, was well received in 1707, and Le Diable boiteux (The Devil with Two Sticks) (with a frontispiece by Louise-Magdeleine Horthemels) had been published and ran to several editions. (Lesage will alter and improve this play in 1725, giving it its present form.)

Notwithstanding the success of Crispin, the actors do not like Lesage, and had refused a small piece of his called Les Étrennes (1707).

He thereupon alters it into Turcaret (1709), first produced on February 14, 1709 at the Comédie-Française; this comedy is considered his theatrical masterpiece.