René Le Sage was born in the Morbihan, on the 8th of May, 1668:[1] and in that year Racine produced "Les Plaideurs," and Molière was playing his "Avare." The father of Le Sage was a man slightly lettered,--as much so as could be expected of an honourable provincial attorney, one who lived from day to day like a lord, without troubling himself too much as to the future fortunes of his only son. The father died when the child was only fourteen years of age; and soon afterwards the youthful René lost his mother. He was now alone, under the guardianship of an uncle, and he was fortunate enough to be placed under the tutelage of those learned masters of the youth of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits who subsequently became the instructors of Voltaire, as they have been of all France of the great age. Thanks to this talented and paternal teaching, our young orphan quickly penetrated into the learned and poetical mysteries of that classic antiquity, which is yet in our days, and will be to the end of time, the exhaustless source of taste, of style, of reason, and of good sense. It is to praise Le Sage to say that he was educated with as much care and assiduity as Molière and Racine, as La Fontaine and Voltaire; they one and all prepared themselves, by severest study, and by respect for their masters, to become masters in their turn; and they have themselves become classic writers, because they reverenced their classic models,--which may, in case of need, serve as an example for the beaux-esprits of our own time.
[1] According to Moreri, in his "Grand Dictionnaire Historique," (folio, Paris, 1759,) and he cites as his authority M. Titon de Tillet's second supplement to the "Parnasse Français," Le Sage was born at Ruis in Brittany, in 1677. There is, however, every reason to believe that M. Jules Janin is correct, both as to the year and the place of his birth, notwithstanding that Mr. Chalmers, in his "Biographical Dictionary," while he assigns to the former the year 1668, places the latter at Vannes, as does also the "Biographie Universelle," which he appears to have followed.
But, when this preliminary education was completed, and when he left these learned mansions, all filled with Greek and Latin, all animated with poetic fervour, Le Sage encountered those terrible obstacles that await invariably, as he emerges from his studies, every young man without family, and destitute of fortune. The poet Juvenal has well expressed it, in one of his sublimest verses: "They with difficulty rise, whose virtues are opposed by the pinching wants of home."