In reading this edition of Le Sage’s Le Diable boiteux, I’m getting an eighteenth century two-fer-one. A book written in French in the early eighteenth century, and a translation by Tobias Smollett in the middle of the century. This edition very specifically focuses on the question of translation and involves a whole raft of appendices and endnotes that dig into those weeds a little too far for my own purposes, I just wanted to read a good story.
While The Devil Upon Crutches didn’t exactly give me a good story, it did give me a patchwork of pretty decent stories, some just character sketches, some full narratives. I’m not quite sure it’s compelling enough to fight a duel over the last copy in a shop, as apparently some French people did with the original release, but it’s an entertaining read nonetheless.
Smollett translated this work when he was still in his hack-life, before he married into wealth and played the part of disinterested gentleman. It was written after Roderick Random and about the same time as Peregrine Pickle, and was seemingly written as a result of Smollett’s successful translation of Le Sage’s Gil Blas but before his most prestigious translation work of Don Quixote.
There’s a preface called ‘Asmodeus’s Crutches’, which summarises the whole book, placed at the beginning before the reader has read any of it. It’s annoying. But then the book starts. A Spanish man with the extremely lengthy name of Don Cleophas Leandro Perez Zambullo is emerging from a lover’s window, where he is waylaid by a group of ruffians who want to force him to marry the woman or die. In his escape from them, he climbs rooftops and finds his way into a dusty attic full of strange, alchemical items. He hears a voice from a jar asking to be released. Despite the voice saying he is a demon, Zambullo releases him.
The demon is Asmodeus, he is not one of the top demons, he can’t poke kings or lawyers, but he has his own thing. He’s the demon in charge of creating silly fads and fashions (so thanks to him for Labubus), he’s also the demon in charge of prompting unsuitable love matches and general daft love shenanigans. He is utterly grateful to Zambullo and so decides to give him a tour of Madrid from a demon’s eye perspective.
They fly up into the air, where Asmodeus is seemingly able to take the tops of houses to see what’s inside “as a man sees what is in a pie when the upper crust is taken off”. He’s also able to read the inner thoughts and histories of the people and the two essentially go on a little tour, taking in the sights. As such, they get to see many of the things people sniggered at in the eighteenth century, people disguising their own infirmity and ugliness, cuckolded husbands and unfaithful wives, general deception and disguise.
I particularly liked the handsome beau, who comes home and takes out his teeth, off his wig, then his wooden arm and leg, sleeping with “what’s left of him”. In the same house there’s a beauty who once accidentally dropped her false rump at the altar during mass. The demon says that if were not a devil he’d “choose to be a father of the Holy Inquisition”, as everyone dotes on them. One 35 year old one has a mild cold and is inundated with widows bearing cough syrups.
They see a tragic poet who gives birth to twins.. or at least couplets, before having an argument with a comic poet about which form of poetry is the most difficult. This fight has them romping about in their underwear and looking silly. They visit a prison and see a highwayman receiving a file in a loaf of broad, follow Death on his rounds (frequently seeing how happy the relatives in for a payday are) and even dive into dreams. Asmodeus says that dreams are just wishes that the heart makes when we’re fast asleep and all have rational explanations.
Occasionally, Asmodeus finds people with a more involved story, and we get little interpolated novellas. There’s one about a rich man, Count Belfour, who wants Leonora as a sidepiece and corrupts her duenna onto his side. It gets complicated, with disguises, a brother coming back from university, and a whole lot of razzmatazz until reaching a happy ending. It’s a decent little amatory tale of its sort. The second volume has an even more involved love story, with a genuine love triangle, people being captured by Barbary pirates as slaves, kidnapping - and all that other stuff. The point of this tale, to Asmodeus, is the lasting friendship between two of the male characters, something that he says could not have happened if they were women because “women have no friendships.” Fair to say, the demon is not all-knowing.
There was a little action scene at the end of the first volume. A house was burning down with a young lady in it, and the father pronounces that whoever will save her can marry her. Asmodeus goes down, dressed as Zambullo, and rescues her, looking like Zambullo did it. At the end of the book, he takes Zambullo back to the family to claim his ‘reward’, and so everything ends happily - except for Asmodeus, who is summoned back into the alchemists chamber and presumably locked in a bottle again.
This is one of those eighteenth-century fictions where many of the parts are interesting, there are some genuinely engaging little snapshots and stories and some funny little lines, but it doesn’t build to much of a whole. As such, the time spent is enjoyable, but it doesn’t hold the imagination much afterwards.
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