The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I — A Closer Reading

From Theology to Chronicle

The first five selections move from late antiquity to the late Middle Ages, each illustrating a different mode of prose. Augustine's City of God excerpt uses balanced clauses to contrast imperial power with divine justice: “To give this power to good men… and to bad men also.” Boethius, writing from prison, adopts a dialogue form to examine happiness, while Aquinas defines it in scholastic terms. Thomas à Kempis then shifts to exhortation, urging the reader to “strive for eternal life.”

The chroniclers break this pattern. Ville-Hardouin reports the 1204 sack of Constantinople with a matter-of-fact tone that makes the violence stark: “the city was taken and all the riches of it.” Joinville’s account of Greek fire is similarly vivid, describing the weapon as “a great pot full of fire” that “came flying through the air.” These passages ground abstract ideas in sensory detail, showing how prose can record events as well as ideas.

Satire and the Picaresque Voice

Rabelais’s three excerpts mark a turning point. The first describes Gargantua’s childhood with grotesque humor: “he was a great lubber, and a great booby.” The second, on education, parodies scholastic methods, and the third outlines the utopian Abbey of Thélème, whose rule is “Do what thou wilt.” The translation by Urquhart and Motteux preserves Rabelais’s wordplay and rhythmic excess.

Le Sage’s Gil Blas excerpts, from later in the volume, continue the satirical vein but in a more controlled style. The narrator, a young man apprenticed to a doctor, describes his first patients with ironic detachment: “I began on an alguazil in a pleurisy; he was condemned to be bled with the utmost rigor of the law.” The humor lies in the gap between the narrator’s incompetence and his professional confidence. This picaresque voice—self-interested, observant, and morally ambiguous—contrasts sharply with the earnestness of the earlier religious writers.

The Art of Flattery and Self-Interest

In the second Gil Blas excerpt, the protagonist becomes an archbishop’s favorite by transcribing a homily with perfect accuracy. When the archbishop asks for criticism, Gil Blas replies with calculated modesty: “it is not for me, with my confined education… to aim at making critical remarks.” The narrator notes that the archbishop “was an arrant author at the bottom: there is something in that dye that not heaven itself can wash out.”

This passage reveals how Le Sage uses the first-person perspective to expose social maneuvering. The reader sees both the flattery and the archbishop’s vanity, but the narrator never condemns his own actions. Earlier in the volume, Philippe de Comines’s portrait of Louis XI offers a more straightforward assessment of a ruler’s character. Comparing the two shows how the picaresque narrator’s self-interest complicates moral judgment, a technique that later novelists would refine.

Structure and Selection in the Anthology

The editors have organized the volume chronologically by author’s birth, but the excerpts themselves are not arranged by genre. Augustine and Boethius appear alongside chroniclers and satirists, creating a mosaic of prose styles. The table of contents shows that each selection is introduced by a brief biographical note, though these are not included in the excerpts provided.

Readers may notice that the volume includes only one female author, Marguerite d’Angoulême, whose story “Of Husbands Who Are Unfaithful” from the Heptameron appears between Comines and Rabelais. The selection from Calvin’s Institutes and Du Bellay’s defense of the French language add a polemical and critical dimension. The anthology thus offers a survey of Continental prose that emphasizes variety over completeness, and the excerpts are best read as samples of each writer’s characteristic method rather than as self-contained works.

Because the excerpts are brief and often begin in medias res, readers should pay attention to the editorial notes that precede each selection (not included in the provided text). The volume rewards a comparative approach: reading Rabelais alongside Calvin, or Ville-Hardouin alongside Le Sage, highlights how prose forms adapt to different purposes. The picaresque voice of Gil Blas is particularly instructive for understanding the development of narrative irony in European fiction.

Years at the reference desk taught me that even the oldest voices yearn for conversation. That Continental volume, with its patient shaping of narrative across centuries, felt like a long, unhurried breath. It reminded me of the Copy of Letters Sent to Great-Britain by His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, the Hon. Andrew Oliver, and Several Other Persons — Text and Context, where every phrase seems to weigh its own consequence. Both whisper about how much a single voice can carry.