First issued between 1715 and 1735, it sold three to five times more copies in France than popular, contemporary books like Gulliver’s Travels or Robinson Crusoe did in England and was soon translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian.

Like many novels of its period Gil Blas purports to be an autobiography, in this case of a young man born in Oviedo in northern Spain in the last years of the sixteenth century who sets out as a raw teenager to make his fortune, whose innocence gets him into no end of trouble, who gradually wises up, learns to deal with the wiles of both men and women, eventually gravitates into the service of the most powerful men in his native Spain, and is finally ennobled for his services to the King and retires to his country estate, healthy, wealthy and wise.

In the course of his adventures after initial misfortunes Gil Blas is first employed as a valet to an elderly canon before becoming an assistant to a charlatan doctor of medicine. Both these experiences end badly but bring him to Madrid where he is engaged as a manservant to a man-about-town, then to a young rake, as valet to an actress, then to an elderly aristocratic soldier, to this soldier’s daughter and then after an adventure in Salamanca to the daughter’s father-in-law, and then as major-domo to a duchess who hosts a literary salon.

After a new series of upsets, he becomes the steward managing a landowner’s estates, secretary to the Archbishop of Grenada, steward to a Sicilian aristocrat with a fixation for a pet monkey, an assistant to the first minister’s man of business, and then assistant to the first minister himself, the Count of Lerma, and on his disgrace assistant and then secretary to the Count-Duke of Olivares, his replacement.

Through all this emerges a portrait of a world filled with charlatans, swindlers and tricksters, robbers and pirates, libertines and courtesans, in which love is noble but seduction is frequent and entertaining.