Gil Blas is related to Lesage's play
Turcaret (1709). In both works, Lesage uses witty valets in the service of thieving masters, women of questionable morals, cuckolded yet happy husbands, gourmands, ridiculous poets, false savants, and dangerously ignorant doctors to make his point. Each class and each occupation becomes an archetype.
References and allusions in other works Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions reading
Gil Blas in his
Confessions (Book IV, 1731–1732), saying it came highly recommended by Mademoiselle du Chatelet who "had a taste for that kind of moral observation which leads to the knowledge of mankind". Rousseau commented that "I read this performance with pleasure, but my judgment was not yet ripe enough to relish that sort of reading".
Gil Blas is referred to by
Jonathan Swift in his satirical
Directions to Servants, dated 1731, with recommendations for the servants of rich masters to take the most advantage and have the least trouble in their daily tasks. In the chapter aimed at the "House Steward and Land Steward", Swift specifically instructs the reader to look up what Gil Blas has to say on the matter, as a more qualified source thus acknowledged. The 1751 play
Gil Blas by the British writer
Edward Moore was performed at the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane with
David Garrick in the title role.
Vasily Narezhny imitated Lesage in his 1814 novel
A Russian Gil Blas ().
The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) by the British diplomat
James Morier was modelled on
Gil Blas. 's novel
Der jüdische Gil Blas (
The Jewish Gil Blas) was published in 1834.
Gil Blas is alluded to in
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's
Venus in Furs. The character Wanda von Dunajew ascribes the cause of her own free thinking to an early introduction to classical works; these include
Gil Blas, which she read at the age of ten.
Gil Blas is referred to in
Honoré de Balzac's
Facino Cane. The protagonist promises to spare the narrator "tales of adventures worthy of Gil Blas". In his 1835 book
A Steam Voyage Down the Danube Michael Joseph Quin says "The favourite book of my youth was
Gils Blas" on meeting a group of Wallachian merchants who he suspected would try to take advantage of him. The Spanish writer
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón appropriated the main character for his 1852 novella ''
Death's Friend'', which otherwise is a variation of the folk tale "
Godfather Death", set in 18th-century Spain. In
Oliver Wendell Holmes's
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1857), the Autocrat begins Section IX with the famous quote from Lesage's Preface: "
Aqui esta encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcia": "Here is enclosed the soul of the lawyer Pedro Garcia". This signals that his own readers, like the two bachelors of Salamanca who discover Garcia's gravestone, will need to "fix on the moral concealed" beneath the surface of his recollections if they are to receive any benefit from them. In a letter to
William Dean Howells dated 5 July 1875,
Mark Twain tells of just completing the manuscript for
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (written in the third person) and deciding against taking Tom into adulthood: to do so, he says, "would be fatal ... in any shape but autobiographically – like Gil Blas". Scholar Walter Blair in
Mark Twain and Huck Finn (1960) thus concludes that Twain's new novel,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which, picaresque-like, "would run its protagonist 'through life', had to be written in the first person;
Gil Blas was the model". In his plan for the novel
The Life of a Great Sinner,
Dostoevsky notes that the
concision of this work will at times mirror that of
Gil Blas. Gil Blas is also mentioned in chapter III of Dostoyevsky's
A Gentle Creature, in which the narrator asks, "Why, didn't she tell me that amusing story about Gil Blas and the Archbishop of Granada herself the day before yesterday? We were discussing books. She was telling me about the books she had been reading that winter, and it was then that she told me about the scene from
Gil Blas." In ''A Rogue's Life'' by
Wilkie Collins the rogue declares, "I am as even-tempered a rogue as you have met with anywhere since the days of Gil Blas."
Edgar Allan Poe considered it among "the finest narratives in the world". Also he mentions the archbishop in
Gil Blas in the short story "
The Angel of the Odd": the angel makes a low bow and departs, wishing, in the language of the archbishop, (much happiness and a little more common sense).
Italo Calvino's main character in
The Baron in the Trees reads the book and lends it to a brigand.
Gil Blas is mentioned in
Thomas Flanagan's 1979 novel
The Year of the French, in which poet Owen MacCarthy mentions having it with him "on [his] ramblings, years ago". Flanagan uses the book to connect the poor Irish citizens and their French allies in the
Irish Rebellion of 1798, illustrating that the Irish may not all be as simple as Arthur Vincent Broome, the loyalist narrator, presumes. This allusion to
Gil Blas also connects the somewhat roguish MacCarthy to the picaresque protagonist Gil Blas. Chapter 7 of
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, relates the story of Gil Blas to Steerforth and Traddles. Poor Traddles' teeth chatter and are overheard by the brutish head master Creakle who goes on to "handsomely flog" Traddles "for disorderly conduct".
Charles Dickens, in
American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy," invokes "the mysterious master of Gil Blas" in reference to a pig in New York City. One of
Thomas Edison's closest early friends, Milton F. Adams, was referred to as a modern Gil Blas for his life of travel and dissolution as a "tramp operator", roaming from place to place and as far away as Peru as an itinerant
telegraph operator. In
The House of the Seven Gables Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his description of Holgrave (chapter XII), says "A romance on the plan of Gil Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a romance." His implication is that the normal experiences of a young American, such as Holgrave, are so extraordinary in comparison with those of Gil Blas, that they make the latter's adventures seem ordinary. Hawthorne then writes, "The experience of many individuals among us, who think it hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate success ... may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist would imagine for a hero." According to
Vincent Cronin's biography, the first thing that the 15-year-old
Napoleon did on arriving in Paris was to buy a copy of
Gil Blas. In
Two Years Before the Mast by
Richard Henry Dana Jr., the author describes the passengers aboard his ship the
Alert, as it sailed along the California coast in 1836 from Monterey to Santa Barbara. The author writes: "Among our passengers was a young man who was the best representation of a decayed gentleman I had ever seen. He reminded me much of some of the characters in Gil Blas." Describing Don Juan Bandiniand, he writes: "He was of the aristocracy of the country, his family being of pure Spanish blood, and once of great importance in Mexico ... Don Juan had with him a retainer, who was as much like many of the characters in Gil Blas as his master. He called himself a private secretary, though there was no writing for him to do, and he lived in the steerage with the carpenter and sailmaker." In the novel
Confessions of Con Cregan, the Irish Gil Blas by
Charles Lever, the eponymous hero of the title states he has not only read
Gil Blas, but also knows it almost by heart.
Gil Blas was the name of a nationalist Brazilian literary journal in 1920, reflecting the Gallic leanings of Brazil's literary scene in the early 20th century and the resonance of the picaresque character in Brazilian culture. In the fantasy novel
Silverlock by
John Myers Myers, the character Lucius Gil Jones is a composite of Lucius in
The Golden Ass by
Apuleius, Gil Blas, and Tom Jones in
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by
Henry Fielding. In
The Social History of Bourbon (1963),
Gerald Carson notes that the education of young men in
antebellum Kentucky meant they "read law with the local judge, studied medicine at the Louisville Medical Institute, wrote stilted verses in the neoclassical fashion, read
Gil Blas and books on surveying, farming, and distilling". In his 1954 novel
A Fable,
William Faulkner has General of Division Gragnon obsessively reading
Gil Blas during his house arrest after his front-line division mutinies. A member of his staff had died protecting a car with prominent visitors by forcing them to stop short of where an incoming shell landed. When he was arrested, Gragnon remembered this officer telling him about
Gil Blas and located the book among his effects. In his preface to
The Ambassadors,
Henry James mentions the narration methods of
Gil Blas and
David Copperfield as alternatives to the narrative technique he himself used in
The Ambassadors.
Washington Irving's
A Tour on the Prairies includes a section describing a wanderer on the American prairie frontier, whom he refers to as a "Gil Blas of the frontier".
Thomas Jefferson included
Gil Blas in his list of recommendations to Robert Skipwith of books for a general personal library. According to
Schopenhauer, it is one of the few novels showing "what is really going on in the world". In
O homem que sabia javanês, a short story by
Lima Barreto, written in 1911 and published by
Gazeta da Tarde, an allusion is made between the characters of Castelo and Gil Blas. In chapter 5 of his
Education of a Wandering Man,
Louis L'Amour describes his "good fortune" in finding an abandoned copy of
Gil Blas in a laundry room. He later reads it by firelight in the camp where he worked skinning dead cattle "not once but twice, on the plains of West Texas." In the 1892 novel
Ask Mama published by Bradbury, Agnew & Co. the mule of Gil Blas is referred to when, referring to his horses, "as a buyer he [Major Yammerton] made them out to be all faults, as a seller when they suddenly seemed to become the paragons of perfection". ==Operatic adaptations==