Gargantua and Pantagruel
by François Rabelais · English · Gutenberg #1200 · 1,855,043 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Author: François Rabelais
Illustrator: Gustave Doré
Translator: Peter Anthony Motteux
Sir Thomas Urquhart
Release date: August 8, 2004 [eBook #1200]
Most recently updated: October 29, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1200
Credits: Produced by Sue Asscher and David Widger
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
The original Project Gutenberg edition of this ebook was a text file
prepared by Sue Asscher in 1998, from:
"MASTER FRANCIS RABELAIS FIVE BOOKS OF THE LIVES, HEROIC
DEEDS AND SAYINGS OF GARGANTUA AND HIS SON PANTAGRUEL",
Translated into English by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty
and Peter Antony Motteux.
The publisher's name and location were not included.
Sue Asscher added the following information regarding the printed book
she scanned:
"The text of the first Two Books of Rabelais has been reprinted from the
first edition (1653) of Urquhart's translation. Footnotes initialled
'M.' are drawn from the Maitland Club edition (1838); other footnotes
are by the translator. Urquhart's translation of Book III. appeared
posthumously in 1693, with a new edition of Books I. and II., under
Motteux's editorship. Motteux's rendering of Books IV. and V. followed
in 1708. Occasionally (as the footnotes indicate) passages omitted by
Motteux have been restored from the 1738 copy edited by Ozell."
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL ***
MASTER FRANCIS RABELAIS
FIVE BOOKS OF THE LIVES, HEROIC DEEDS AND SAYINGS OF
GARGANTUA AND HIS SON PANTAGRUEL
Translated into English by
Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty
and
Peter Antony Motteux
The text of the first Two Books of Rabelais has been reprinted from the
first edition (1653) of Urquhart’s translation. Footnotes initialled ‘M.’
are drawn from the Maitland Club edition (1838); other footnotes are by the
translator. Urquhart’s translation of Book III. appeared posthumously in
1693, with a new edition of Books I. and II., under Motteux’s editorship.
Motteux’s rendering of Books IV. and V. followed in 1708. Occasionally (as
the footnotes indicate) passages omitted by Motteux have been restored from
the 1738 copy edited by Ozell.
CONTENTS.
Introduction
THE FIRST BOOK.
J. De la Salle, to the Honoured, Noble Translator of Rabelais.
Rablophila
The Author’s Prologue to the First Book
Rabelais to the Reader
Chapter 1.I.--Of the Genealogy and Antiquity of Gargantua
Chapter 1.II.--The Antidoted Fanfreluches: or, a Galimatia of extravagant
Conceits found in an ancient Monument
Chapter 1.III.--How Gargantua was carried eleven months in his mother’s
belly
Chapter 1.IV.--How Gargamelle, being great with Gargantua, did eat a huge
deal of tripes
Chapter 1.V.--The Discourse of the Drinkers
Chapter 1.VI.--How Gargantua was born in a strange manner
Chapter 1.VII.--After what manner Gargantua had his name given him, and how
he tippled, bibbed, and curried the can
Chapter 1.VIII.--How they apparelled Gargantua
Chapter 1.IX.--The colours and liveries of Gargantua
Chapter 1.X.--Of that which is signified by the colours white and blue
Chapter 1.XI.--Of the youthful age of Gargantua
Chapter 1.XII.--Of Gargantua’s wooden horses
Chapter 1.XIII.--How Gargantua’s wonderful understanding became known to
his father Grangousier, by the invention of a torchecul or wipebreech
Chapter 1.XIV.--How Gargantua was taught Latin by a Sophister
Chapter 1.XV.--How Gargantua was put under other schoolmasters
Chapter 1.XVI.--How Gargantua was sent to Paris, and of the huge great mare
that he rode on; how she destroyed the oxflies of the Beauce
Chapter 1.XVII.--How Gargantua paid his welcome to the Parisians, and how
he took away the great bells of Our Lady’s Church
Chapter 1.XVIII.--How Janotus de Bragmardo was sent to Gargantua to recover
the great bells
Chapter 1.XIX.--The oration of Master Janotus de Bragmardo for recovery of
the bells
Chapter 1.XX.--How the Sophister carried away his cloth, and how he had a
suit in law against the other masters
Chapter 1.XXI.--The study of Gargantua, according to the discipline of his
schoolmasters the Sophisters
Chapter 1.XXII.--The games of Gargantua
Chapter 1.XXIII.--How Gargantua was instructed by Ponocrates, and in such
sort disciplinated, that he lost not one hour of the day
Chapter 1.XXIV.--How Gargantua spent his time in rainy weather
Chapter 1.XXV.--How there was great strife and debate raised betwixt the
cake-bakers of Lerne, and those of Gargantua’s country, whereupon were
waged great wars
Chapter 1.XXVI.--How the inhabitants of Lerne, by the commandment of
Picrochole their king, assaulted the shepherds of Gargantua unexpectedly
and on a sudden
Chapter 1.XXVII.--How a monk of Seville saved the close of the abbey from
being ransacked by the enemy
Chapter 1.XXVIII.--How Picrochole stormed and took by assault the rock
Clermond, and of Grangousier’s unwillingness and aversion from the
undertaking of war
Chapter 1.XXIX.--The tenour of the letter which Grangousier wrote to his
son Gargantua
Chapter 1.XXX.--How Ulric Gallet was sent unto Picrochole
Chapter 1.XXXI.--The speech made by Gallet to Picrochole
Chapter 1.XXXII.--How Grangousier, to buy peace, caused the cakes to be
restored
Chapter 1.XXXIII.--How some statesmen of Picrochole, by hairbrained
counsel, put him in extreme danger
Chapter 1.XXXIV.--How Gargantua left the city of Paris to succour his
country, and how Gymnast encountered with the enemy
Chapter 1.XXXV.--How Gymnast very souply and cunningly killed Captain
Tripet and others of Picrochole’s men
Chapter 1.XXXVI.--How Gargantua demolished the castle at the ford of Vede,
and how they passed the ford
Chapter 1.XXXVII.--How Gargantua, in combing his head, made the great
cannon-balls fall out of his hair
Chapter 1.XXXVIII.--How Gargantua did eat up six pilgrims in a salad
Chapter 1.XXXIX.--How the Monk was feasted by Gargantua, and of the jovial
discourse they had at supper
Chapter 1.XL.--Why monks are the outcasts of the world; and wherefore some
have bigger noses than others
Chapter 1.XLI.--How the Monk made Gargantua sleep, and of his hours and
breviaries
Chapter 1.XLII.--How the Monk encouraged his fellow-champions, and how he
hanged upon a tree
Chapter 1.XLIII.--How the scouts and fore-party of Picrochole were met with
by Gargantua, and how the Monk slew Captain Drawforth, and then was taken
prisoner by his enemies
Chapter 1.XLIV.--How the Monk rid himself of his keepers, and how
Picrochole’s forlorn hope was defeated
Chapter 1.XLV.--How the Monk carried along with him the Pilgrims, and of
the good words that Grangousier gave them
Chapter 1.XLVI.--How Grangousier did very kindly entertain Touchfaucet his
prisoner
Chapter 1.XLVII.--How Grangousier sent for his legions, and how Touchfaucet
slew Rashcalf, and was afterwards executed by the command of Picrochole
Chapter 1.XLVIII.--How Gargantua set upon Picrochole within the rock
Clermond, and utterly defeated the army of the said Picrochole
Chapter 1.XLIX.--How Picrochole in his flight fell into great misfortunes,
and what Gargantua did after the battle
Chapter 1.L.--Gargantua’s speech to the vanquished
Chapter 1.LI.--How the victorious Gargantuists were recompensed after the
battle
Chapter 1.LII.--How Gargantua caused to be built for the Monk the Abbey of
Theleme
Chapter 1.LIII.--How the abbey of the Thelemites was built and endowed
Chapter 1.LIV.--The inscription set upon the great gate of Theleme
Chapter 1.LV.--What manner of dwelling the Thelemites had
Chapter 1.LVI.--How the men and women of the religious order of Theleme
were apparelled
Chapter 1.LVII.--How the Thelemites were governed, and of their manner of
living
Chapter 1.LVIII.--A prophetical Riddle
THE SECOND BOOK.
For the Reader
Mr. Hugh Salel to Rabelais
The Author’s Prologue
Chapter 2.I.--Of the original and antiquity of the great Pantagruel
Chapter 2.II.--Of the nativity of the most dread and redoubted Pantagruel
Chapter 2.III.--Of the grief wherewith Gargantua was moved at the decease
of his wife Badebec
Chapter 2.IV.--Of the infancy of Pantagruel
Chapter 2.V.--Of the acts of the noble Pantagruel in his youthful age
Chapter 2.VI.--How Pantagruel met with a Limousin, who too affectedly did
counterfeit the French language
Chapter 2.VII.--How Pantagruel came to Paris, and of the choice books of
the Library of St. Victor
Chapter 2.VIII.--How Pantagruel, being at Paris, received letters from his
father Gargantua, and the copy of them
Chapter 2.IX.--How Pantagruel found Panurge, whom he loved all his lifetime
Chapter 2.X.--How Pantagruel judged so equitably of a controversy, which
was wonderfully obscure and difficult, that, by reason of his just decree
therein, he was reputed to have a most admirable judgment
Chapter 2.XI.--How the Lords of Kissbreech and Suckfist did plead before
Pantagruel without an attorney
Chapter 2.XII.--How the Lord of Suckfist pleaded before Pantagruel
Chapter 2.XIII.--How Pantagruel gave judgment upon the difference of the
two lords
Chapter 2.XIV.--How Panurge related the manner how he escaped out of the
hands of the Turks
Chapter 2.XV.--How Panurge showed a very new way to build the walls of
Paris
Chapter 2.XVI.--Of the qualities and conditions of Panurge
Chapter 2.XVII.--How Panurge gained the pardons, and married the old women,
and of the suit in law which he had at Paris
Chapter 2.XVIII.--How a great scholar of England would have argued against
Pantagruel, and was overcome by Panurge
Chapter 2.XIX.--How Panurge put to a nonplus the Englishman that argued by
signs
Chapter 2.XX.--How Thaumast relateth the virtues and knowledge of Panurge
Chapter 2.XXI.--How Panurge was in love with a lady of Paris
Chapter 2.XXII.--How Panurge served a Parisian lady a trick that pleased
her not very well
Chapter 2.XXIII.--How Pantagruel departed from Paris, hearing news that the
Dipsodes had invaded the land of the Amaurots; and the cause wherefore the
leagues are so short in France
Chapter 2.XXIV.--A letter which a messenger brought to Pantagruel from a
lady of Paris, together with the exposition of a posy written in a gold
ring
Chapter 2.XXV.--How Panurge, Carpalin, Eusthenes, and Epistemon, the
gentlemen attendants of Pantagruel, vanquished and discomfited six hundred
and threescore horsemen very cunningly
Chapter 2.XXVI.--How Pantagruel and his company were weary in eating still
salt meats; and how Carpalin went a-hunting to have some venison
Chapter 2.XXVII.--How Pantagruel set up one trophy in memorial of their
valour, and Panurge another in remembrance of the hares. How Pantagruel
likewise with his farts begat little men, and with his fisgs little women;
and how Panurge broke a great staff over two glasses
Chapter 2.XXVIII.--How Pantagruel got the victory very strangely over the
Dipsodes and the Giants
Chapter 2.XXIX.--How Pantagruel discomfited the three hundred giants armed
with free-stone, and Loupgarou their captain
Chapter 2.XXX.--How Epistemon, who had his head cut off, was finely healed
by Panurge, and of the news which he brought from the devils, and of the
damned people in hell
Chapter 2.XXXI.--How Pantagruel entered into the city of the Amaurots, and
how Panurge married King Anarchus to an old lantern-carrying hag, and made
him a crier of green sauce
Chapter 2.XXXII.--How Pantagruel with his tongue covered a whole army, and
what the author saw in his mouth
Chapter 2.XXXIII.--How Pantagruel became sick, and the manner how he was
recovered
Chapter 2.XXXIV.--The conclusion of this present book, and the excuse of
the author
THE THIRD BOOK.
Francois Rabelais to the Soul of the Deceased Queen of Navarre
The Author’s Prologue
Chapter 3.I.--How Pantagruel transported a colony of Utopians into Dipsody
Chapter 3.II.--How Panurge was made Laird of Salmigondin in Dipsody, and
did waste his revenue before it came in
Chapter 3.III.--How Panurge praiseth the debtors and borrowers
Chapter 3.IV.--Panurge continueth his discourse in the praise of borrowers
and lenders
Chapter 3.V.--How Pantagruel altogether abhorreth the debtors and borrowers
Chapter 3.VI.--Why new married men were privileged from going to the wars
Chapter 3.VII.--How Panurge had a flea in his ear, and forbore to wear any
longer his magnificent codpiece
Chapter 3.VIII.--Why the codpiece is held to be the chief piece of armour
amongst warriors
Chapter 3.IX.--How Panurge asketh counsel of Pantagruel whether he should
marry, yea, or no
Chapter 3.X.--How Pantagruel representeth unto Panurge the difficulty of
giving advice in the matter of marriage; and to that purpose mentioneth
somewhat of the Homeric and Virgilian lotteries
Chapter 3.XI.--How Pantagruel showeth the trial of one’s fortune by the
throwing of dice to be unlawful
Chapter 3.XII.--How Pantagruel doth explore by the Virgilian lottery what
fortune Panurge shall have in his marriage
Chapter 3.XIII.--How Pantagruel adviseth Panurge to try the future good or
bad luck of his marriage by dreams
Chapter 3.XIV.--Panurge’s dream, with the interpretation thereof
Chapter 3.XV.--Panurge’s excuse and exposition of the monastic mystery
concerning powdered beef
Chapter 3.XVI.--How Pantagruel adviseth Panurge to consult with the Sibyl
of Panzoust
Chapter 3.XVII.--How Panurge spoke to the Sibyl of Panzoust
Chapter 3.XVIII.--How Pantagruel and Panurge did diversely expound the
verses of the Sibyl of Panzoust
Chapter 3.XIX.--How Pantagruel praiseth the counsel of dumb men
Chapter 3.XX.--How Goatsnose by signs maketh answer to Panurge
Chapter 3.XXI.--How Panurge consulteth with an old French poet, named
Raminagrobis
Chapter 3.XXII.--How Panurge patrocinates and defendeth the Order of the
Begging Friars
Chapter 3.XXIII.--How Panurge maketh the motion of a return to Raminagrobis
Chapter 3.XXIV.--How Panurge consulteth with Epistemon
Chapter 3.XXV.--How Panurge consulteth with Herr Trippa
Chapter 3.XXVI.--How Panurge consulteth with Friar John of the Funnels
Chapter 3.XXVII.--How Friar John merrily and sportingly counselleth Panurge
Chapter 3.XXVIII.--How Friar John comforteth Panurge in the doubtful matter
of cuckoldry
Chapter 3.XXIX.--How Pantagruel convocated together a theologian,
physician, lawyer, and philosopher, for extricating Panurge out of the
perplexity wherein he was
Chapter 3.XXX.--How the theologue, Hippothadee, giveth counsel to Panurge
in the matter and business of his nuptial enterprise
Chapter 3.XXXI.--How the physician Rondibilis counselleth Panurge
Chapter 3.XXXII.--How Rondibilis declareth cuckoldry to be naturally one of
the appendances of marriage
Chapter 3.XXXIII.--Rondibilis the physician’s cure of cuckoldry
Chapter 3.XXXIV.--How women ordinarily have the greatest longing after
things prohibited
Chapter 3.XXXV.--How the philosopher Trouillogan handleth the difficulty of
marriage
Chapter 3.XXXVI.--A continuation of the answer of the Ephectic and
Pyrrhonian philosopher Trouillogan
Chapter 3.XXXVII.--How Pantagruel persuaded Panurge to take counsel of a
fool
Chapter 3.XXXVIII.--How Triboulet is set forth and blazed by Pantagruel and
Panurge
Chapter 3.XXXIX.--How Pantagruel was present at the trial of Judge
Bridlegoose, who decided causes and controversies in law by the chance and
fortune of the dice
Chapter 3.XL.--How Bridlegoose giveth reasons why he looked upon those law-
actions which he decided by the chance of the dice
Chapter 3.XLI.--How Bridlegoose relateth the history of the reconcilers of
parties at variance in matters of law
Chapter 3.XLII.--How suits at law are bred at first, and how they come
afterwards to their perfect growth
Chapter 3.XLIII.--How Pantagruel excuseth Bridlegoose in the matter of
sentencing actions at law by the chance of the dice
Chapter 3.XLIV.--How Pantagruel relateth a strange history of the
perplexity of human judgment
Chapter 3.XLV.--How Panurge taketh advice of Triboulet
Chapter 3.XLVI.--How Pantagruel and Panurge diversely interpret the words
of Triboulet
Chapter 3.XLVII.--How Pantagruel and Panurge resolved to make a visit to
the Oracle of the Holy Bottle
Chapter 3.XLVIII.--How Gargantua showeth that the children ought not to
marry without the special knowledge and advice of their fathers and mothers
Chapter 3.XLIX.--How Pantagruel did put himself in a readiness to go to
sea; and of the herb named Pantagruelion
Chapter 3.L.--How the famous Pantagruelion ought to be prepared and wrought
Chapter 3.LI.--Why it is called Pantagruelion, and of the admirable virtues
thereof
Chapter 3.LII.--How a certain kind of Pantagruelion is of that nature that
the fire is not able to consume it
THE FOURTH BOOK.
The Translator’s Preface
The Author’s Epistle Dedicatory
The Author’s Prologue
Chapter 4.I.--How Pantagruel went to sea to visit the oracle of Bacbuc,
alias the Holy Bottle
Chapter 4.II.--How Pantagruel bought many rarities in the island of
Medamothy
Chapter 4.III.--How Pantagruel received a letter from his father Gargantua,
and of the strange way to have speedy news from far distant places
Chapter 4.IV.--How Pantagruel writ to his father Gargantua, and sent him
several curiosities
Chapter 4.V.--How Pantagruel met a ship with passengers returning from
Lantern-land
Chapter 4.VI.--How, the fray being over, Panurge cheapened one of
Dingdong’s sheep
Chapter 4.VII.--Which if you read you’ll find how Panurge bargained with
Dingdong
Chapter 4.VIII.--How Panurge caused Dingdong and his sheep to be drowned in
the sea
Chapter 4.IX.--How Pantagruel arrived at the island of Ennasin, and of the
strange ways of being akin in that country
Chapter 4.X.--How Pantagruel went ashore at the island of Chely, where he
saw King St. Panigon
Chapter 4.XI.--Why monks love to be in kitchens
Chapter 4.XII.--How Pantagruel passed by the land of Pettifogging, and of
the strange way of living among the Catchpoles
Chapter 4.XIII.--How, like Master Francis Villon, the Lord of Basche
commended his servants
Chapter 4.XIV.--A further account of catchpoles who were drubbed at
Basche’s house
Chapter 4.XV.--How the ancient custom at nuptials is renewed by the
catchpole
Chapter 4.XVI.--How Friar John made trial of the nature of the catchpoles
Chapter 4.XVII.--How Pantagruel came to the islands of Tohu and Bohu; and
of the strange death of Wide-nostrils, the swallower of windmills
Chapter 4.XVIII.--How Pantagruel met with a great storm at sea
Chapter 4.XIX.--What countenances Panurge and Friar John kept during the
storm
Chapter 4.XX.--How the pilots were forsaking their ships in the greatest
stress of weather
Chapter 4.XXI.--A continuation of the storm, with a short discourse on the
subject of making testaments at sea
Chapter 4.XXII.--An end of the storm
Chapter 4.XXIII.--How Panurge played the good fellow when the storm was
over
Chapter 4.XXIV.--How Panurge was said to have been afraid without reason
during the storm
Chapter 4.XXV.--How, after the storm, Pantagruel went on shore in the
islands of the Macreons
Chapter 4.XXVI.--How the good Macrobius gave us an account of the mansion
and decease of the heroes
Chapter 4.XXVII.--Pantagruel’s discourse of the decease of heroic souls;
and of the dreadful prodigies that happened before the death of the late
Lord de Langey
Chapter 4.XXVIII.--How Pantagruel related a very sad story of the death of
the heroes
Chapter 4.XXIX.--How Pantagruel sailed by the Sneaking Island, where
Shrovetide reigned
Chapter 4.XXX.--How Shrovetide is anatomized and described by Xenomanes
Chapter 4.XXXI.--Shrovetide’s outward parts anatomized
Chapter 4.XXXII.--A continuation of Shrovetide’s countenance
Chapter 4.XXXIII.--How Pantagruel discovered a monstrous physeter, or
whirlpool, near the Wild Island
Chapter 4.XXXIV.--How the monstrous physeter was slain by Pantagruel
Chapter 4.XXXV.--How Pantagruel went on shore in the Wild Island, the
ancient abode of the Chitterlings
Chapter 4.XXXVI.--How the wild Chitterlings laid an ambuscado for
Pantagruel
Chapter 4.XXXVII.--How Pantagruel sent for Colonel Maul-chitterling and
Colonel Cut-pudding; with a discourse well worth your hearing about the
names of places and persons
Chapter 4.XXXVIII.--How Chitterlings are not to be slighted by men
Chapter 4.XXXIX.--How Friar John joined with the cooks to fight the
Chitterlings
Chapter 4.XL.--How Friar John fitted up the sow; and of the valiant cooks
that went into it
Chapter 4.XLI.--How Pantagruel broke the Chitterlings at the knees
Chapter 4.XLII.--How Pantagruel held a treaty with Niphleseth, Queen of the
Chitterlings
Chapter 4.XLIII.--How Pantagruel went into the island of Ruach
Chapter 4.XLIV.--How small rain lays a high wind
Chapter 4.XLV.--How Pantagruel went ashore in the island of Pope-Figland
Chapter 4.XLVI.--How a junior devil was fooled by a husbandman of Pope-
Figland
Chapter 4.XLVII.--How the devil was deceived by an old woman of Pope-
Figland
Chapter 4.XLVIII.--How Pantagruel went ashore at the island of Papimany
Chapter 4.XLIX.--How Homenas, Bishop of Papimany, showed us the Uranopet
decretals
Chapter 4.L.--How Homenas showed us the archetype, or representation of a
pope
Chapter 4.LI.--Table-talk in praise of the decretals
Chapter 4.LII.--A continuation of the miracles caused by the decretals
Chapter 4.LIII.--How, by the virtue of the decretals, gold is subtilely
drawn out of France to Rome
Chapter 4.LIV.--How Homenas gave Pantagruel some bon-Christian pears
Chapter 4.LV.--How Pantagruel, being at sea, heard various unfrozen words
Chapter 4.LVI.--How among the frozen words Pantagruel found some odd ones
Chapter 4.LVII.--How Pantagruel went ashore at the dwelling of Gaster, the
first master of arts in the world
Chapter 4.LVIII.--How, at the court of the master of ingenuity, Pantagruel
detested the Engastrimythes and the Gastrolaters
Chapter 4.LIX.--Of the ridiculous statue Manduce; and how and what the
Gastrolaters sacrifice to their ventripotent god
Chapter 4.LX.--What the Gastrolaters sacrificed to their god on interlarded
fish-days
Chapter 4.LXI.--How Gaster invented means to get and preserve corn
Chapter 4.LXII.--How Gaster invented an art to avoid being hurt or touched
by cannon-balls
Chapter 4.LXIII.--How Pantagruel fell asleep near the island of Chaneph,
and of the problems proposed to be solved when he waked
Chapter 4.LXIV.--How Pantagruel gave no answer to the problems
Chapter 4.LXV.--How Pantagruel passed the time with his servants
Chapter 4.LXVI.--How, by Pantagruel’s order, the Muses were saluted near
the isle of Ganabim
Chapter 4.LXVII.--How Panurge berayed himself for fear; and of the huge cat
Rodilardus, which he took for a puny devil
THE FIFTH BOOK.
The Author’s Prologue
Chapter 5.I.--How Pantagruel arrived at the Ringing Island, and of the
noise that we heard
Chapter 5.II.--How the Ringing Island had been inhabited by the Siticines,
who were become birds
Chapter 5.III.--How there is but one pope-hawk in the Ringing Island
Chapter 5.IV.--How the birds of the Ringing Island were all passengers
Chapter 5.V.--Of the dumb Knight-hawks of the Ringing Island
Chapter 5.VI.--How the birds are crammed in the Ringing Island
Chapter 5.VII.--How Panurge related to Master Aedituus the fable of the
horse and the ass
Chapter 5.VIII.--How with much ado we got a sight of the pope-hawk
Chapter 5.IX.--How we arrived at the island of Tools
Chapter 5.X.--How Pantagruel arrived at the island of Sharping
Chapter 5.XI.--How we passed through the wicket inhabited by Gripe-men-all,
Archduke of the Furred Law-cats
Chapter 5.XII.--How Gripe-men-all propounded a riddle to us
Chapter 5.XIII.--How Panurge solved Gripe-men-all’s riddle
Chapter 5.XIV.--How the Furred Law-cats live on corruption
Chapter 5.XV.--How Friar John talks of rooting out the Furred Law-cats
Chapter 5.XVI.--How Pantagruel came to the island of the Apedefers, or
Ignoramuses, with long claws and crooked paws, and of terrible adventures
and monsters there
Chapter 5.XVII.--How we went forwards, and how Panurge had like to have
been killed
Chapter 5.XVIII.--How our ships were stranded, and we were relieved by some
people that were subject to Queen Whims (qui tenoient de la Quinte)
Chapter 5.XIX.--How we arrived at the queendom of Whims or Entelechy
Chapter 5.XX.--How the Quintessence cured the sick with a song
Chapter 5.XXI.--How the Queen passed her time after dinner
Chapter 5.XXII.--How Queen Whims’ officers were employed; and how the said
lady retained us among her abstractors
Chapter 5.XXIII.--How the Queen was served at dinner, and of her way of
eating
Chapter 5.XXIV.--How there was a ball in the manner of a tournament, at
which Queen Whims was present
Chapter 5.XXV.--How the thirty-two persons at the ball fought
Chapter 5.XXVI.--How we came to the island of Odes, where the ways go up
and down
Chapter 5.XXVII.--How we came to the island of Sandals; and of the order of
Semiquaver Friars
Chapter 5.XXVIII.--How Panurge asked a Semiquaver Friar many questions, and
was only answered in monosyllables
Chapter 5.XXIX.--How Epistemon disliked the institution of Lent
Chapter 5.XXX.--How we came to the land of Satin
Chapter 5.XXXI.--How in the land of Satin we saw Hearsay, who kept a school
of vouching
Chapter 5.XXXII.--How we came in sight of Lantern-land
Chapter 5.XXXIII.--How we landed at the port of the Lychnobii, and came to
Lantern-land
Chapter 5.XXXIV.--How we arrived at the Oracle of the Bottle
Chapter 5.XXXV.--How we went underground to come to the Temple of the Holy
Bottle, and how Chinon is the oldest city in the world
Chapter 5.XXXVI.--How we went down the tetradic steps, and of Panurge’s
fear
Chapter 5.XXXVII.--How the temple gates in a wonderful manner opened of
themselves
Chapter 5.XXXVIII.--Of the temple’s admirable pavement
Chapter 5.XXXIX.--How we saw Bacchus’s army drawn up in battalia in mosaic
work
Chapter 5.XL.--How the battle in which the good Bacchus overthrew the
Indians was represented in mosaic work
Chapter 5.XLI.--How the temple was illuminated with a wonderful lamp
Chapter 5.XLII.--How the Priestess Bacbuc showed us a fantastic fountain in
the temple, and how the fountain-water had the taste of wine, according to
the imagination of those who drank of it
Chapter 5.XLIII.--How the Priestess Bacbuc equipped Panurge in order to
have the word of the Bottle
Chapter 5.XLIV.--How Bacbuc, the high-priestess, brought Panurge before the
Holy Bottle
Chapter 5.XLV.--How Bacbuc explained the word of the Goddess-Bottle
Chapter 5.XLVI.--How Panurge and the rest rhymed with poetic fury
Chapter 5.XLVII.--How we took our leave of Bacbuc, and left the Oracle of
the Holy Bottle
Introduction.
Had Rabelais never written his strange and marvellous romance, no one would
ever have imagined the possibility of its production. It stands outside
other things--a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of
childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of
popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of
baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the
comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. Throughout the
whole there is such a force of life and thought, such a power of good
sense, a kind of assurance so authoritative, that he takes rank with the
greatest; and his peers are not many. You may like him or not, may attack
him or sing his praises, but you cannot ignore him. He is of those that
die hard. Be as fastidious as you will; make up your mind to recognize
only those who are, without any manner of doubt, beyond and above all
others; however few the names you keep, Rabelais’ will always remain.
We may know his work, may know it well, and admire it more every time we
read it. After being amused by it, after having enjoyed it, we may return
again to study it and to enter more fully into its meaning. Yet there is
no possibility of knowing his own life in the same fashion. In spite of
all the efforts, often successful, that have been made to throw light on
it, to bring forward a fresh document, or some obscure mention in a
forgotten book, to add some little fact, to fix a date more precisely, it
remains nevertheless full of uncertainty and of gaps. Besides, it has been
burdened and sullied by all kinds of wearisome stories and foolish
anecdotes, so that really there is more to weed out than to add.
This injustice, at first wilful, had its rise in the sixteenth century, in
the furious attacks of a monk of Fontevrault, Gabriel de Puy-Herbault, who
seems to have drawn his conclusions concerning the author from the book,
and, more especially, in the regrettable satirical epitaph of Ronsard,
piqued, it is said, that the Guises had given him only a little pavillon in
the Forest of Meudon, whereas the presbytery was close to the chateau.
From that time legend has fastened on Rabelais, has completely travestied
him, till, bit by bit, it has made of him a buffoon, a veritable clown, a
vagrant, a glutton, and a drunkard.
The likeness of his person has undergone a similar metamorphosis. He has
been credited with a full moon of a face, the rubicund nose of an
incorrigible toper, and thick coarse lips always apart because always
laughing. The picture would have surprised his friends no less than
himself. There have been portraits painted of Rabelais; I have seen many
such. They are all of the seventeenth century, and the greater number are
conceived in this jovial and popular style.
As a matter of fact there is only one portrait of him that counts, that has
more than the merest chance of being authentic, the one in the Chronologie
collee or coupee. Under this double name is known and cited a large sheet
divided by lines and cross lines into little squares, containing about a
hundred heads of illustrious Frenchmen. This sheet was stuck on pasteboard
for hanging on the wall, and was cut in little pieces, so that the
portraits might be sold separately. The majority of the portraits are of
known persons and can therefore be verified. Now it can be seen that these
have been selected with care, and taken from the most authentic sources;
from statues, busts, medals, even stained glass, for the persons of most
distinction, from earlier engravings for the others. Moreover, those of
which no other copies exist, and which are therefore the most valuable,
have each an individuality very distinct, in the features, the hair, the
beard, as well as in the costume. Not one of them is like another. There
has been no tampering with them, no forgery. On the contrary, there is in
each a difference, a very marked personality. Leonard Gaultier, who
published this engraving towards the end of the sixteenth century,
reproduced a great many portraits besides from chalk drawings, in the style
of his master, Thomas de Leu. It must have been such drawings that were
the originals of those portraits which he alone has issued, and which may
therefore be as authentic and reliable as the others whose correctness we
are in a position to verify.
Now Rabelais has here nothing of the Roger Bontemps of low degree about
him. His features are strong, vigorously cut, and furrowed with deep
wrinkles; his beard is short and scanty; his cheeks are thin and already
worn-looking. On his head he wears the square cap of the doctors and the
clerks, and his dominant expression, somewhat rigid and severe, is that of
a physician and a scholar. And this is the only portrait to which we need
attach any importance.
This is not the place for a detailed biography, nor for an exhaustive
study. At most this introduction will serve as a framework on which to fix
a few certain dates, to hang some general observations. The date of
Rabelais’ birth is very doubtful. For long it was placed as far back as
1483: now scholars are disposed to put it forward to about 1495. The
reason, a good one, is that all those whom he has mentioned as his friends,
or in any real sense his contemporaries, were born at the very end of the
fifteenth century. And, indeed, it is in the references in his romance to
names, persons, and places, that the most certain and valuable evidence is
to be found of his intercourse, his patrons, his friendships, his
sojournings, and his travels: his own work is the best and richest mine in
which to search for the details of his life.
Like Descartes and Balzac, he was a native of Touraine, and Tours and
Chinon have only done their duty in each of them erecting in recent years a
statue to his honour, a twofold homage reflecting credit both on the
province and on the town. But the precise facts about his birth are
nevertheless vague. Huet speaks of the village of Benais, near Bourgeuil,
of whose vineyards Rabelais makes mention. As the little vineyard of La
Deviniere, near Chinon, and familiar to all his readers, is supposed to
have belonged to his father, Thomas Rabelais, some would have him born
there. It is better to hold to the earlier general opinion that Chinon was
his native town; Chinon, whose praises he sang with such heartiness and
affection. There he might well have been born in the Lamproie house, which
belonged to his father, who, to judge from this circumstance, must have
been in easy circumstances, with the position of a well-to-do citizen. As
La Lamproie in the seventeenth century was a hostelry, the father of
Rabelais has been set down as an innkeeper. More probably he was an
apothecary, which would fit in with the medical profession adopted by his
son in after years. Rabelais had brothers, all older than himself.
Perhaps because he was the youngest, his father destined him for the
Church.
The time he spent while a child with the Benedictine monks at Seuille is
uncertain. There he might have made the acquaintance of the prototype of
his Friar John, a brother of the name of Buinart, afterwards Prior of
Sermaize. He was longer at the Abbey of the Cordeliers at La Baumette,
half a mile from Angers, where he became a novice. As the brothers Du
Bellay, who were later his Maecenases, were then studying at the University
of Angers, where it is certain he was not a student, it is doubtless from
this youthful period that his acquaintance and alliance with them should
date. Voluntarily, or induced by his family, Rabelais now embraced the
ecclesiastical profession, and entered the monastery of the Franciscan
Cordeliers at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Lower Poitou, which was honoured by his
long sojourn at the vital period of his life when his powers were ripening.
There it was he began to study and to think, and there also began his
troubles.
In spite of the wide-spread ignorance among the monks of that age, the
encyclopaedic movement of the Renaissance was attracting all the lofty
minds. Rabelais threw himself into it with enthusiasm, and Latin antiquity
was not enough for him. Greek, a study discountenanced by the Church,
which looked on it as dangerous and tending to freethought and heresy, took
possession of him. To it he owed the warm friendship of Pierre Amy and of
the celebrated Guillaume Bude. In fact, the Greek letters of the latter
are the best source of information concerning this period of Rabelais’
life. It was at Fontenay-le-Comte also that he became acquainted with the
Brissons and the great jurist Andre Tiraqueau, whom he never mentions but
with admiration and deep affection. Tiraqueau’s treatise, De legibus
connubialibus, published for the first time in 1513, has an important
bearing on the life of Rabelais. There we learn that, dissatisfied with
the incomplete translation of Herodotus by Laurent Valla, Rabelais had
retranslated into Latin the first book of the History. That translation
unfortunately is lost, as so many other of his scattered works. It is
probably in this direction that the hazard of fortune has most discoveries
and surprises in store for the lucky searcher. Moreover, as in this law
treatise Tiraqueau attacked women in a merciless fashion, President Amaury
Bouchard published in 1522 a book in their defence, and Rabelais, who was a
friend of both the antagonists, took the side of Tiraqueau. It should be
observed also in passing, that there are several pages of such audacious
plain-speaking, that Rabelais, though he did not copy these in his Marriage
of Panurge, has there been, in his own fashion, as out spoken as Tiraqueau.
If such freedom of language could be permitted in a grave treatise of law,
similar liberties were certainly, in the same century, more natural in a
book which was meant to amuse.
The great reproach always brought against Rabelais is not the want of
reserve of his language merely, but his occasional studied coarseness,
which is enough to spoil his whole work, and which lowers its value. La
Bruyere, in the chapter Des ouvrages de l’esprit, not in the first edition
of the Caracteres, but in the fifth, that is to say in 1690, at the end of
the great century, gives us on this subject his own opinion and that of his
age:
‘Marot and Rabelais are inexcusable in their habit of scattering filth
about their writings. Both of them had genius enough and wit enough to do
without any such expedient, even for the amusement of those persons who
look more to the laugh to be got out of a book than to what is admirable in
it. Rabelais especially is incomprehensible. His book is an enigma,--one
may say inexplicable. It is a Chimera; it is like the face of a lovely
woman with the feet and the tail of a reptile, or of some creature still
more loathsome. It is a monstrous confusion of fine and rare morality with
filthy corruption. Where it is bad, it goes beyond the worst; it is the
delight of the basest of men. Where it is good, it reaches the exquisite,
the very best; it ministers to the most delicate tastes.’
Putting aside the rather slight connection established between two men of
whom one is of very little importance compared with the other, this is
otherwise very admirably said, and the judgment is a very just one, except
with regard to one point--the misunderstanding of the atmosphere in which
the book was created, and the ignoring of the examples of a similar
tendency furnished by literature as well as by the popular taste. Was it
not the Ancients that began it? Aristophanes, Catullus, Petronius,
Martial, flew in the face of decency in their ideas as well as in the words
they used, and they dragged after them in this direction not a few of the
Latin poets of the Renaissance, who believed themselves bound to imitate
them. Is Italy without fault in this respect? Her story-tellers in prose
lie open to easy accusation. Her Capitoli in verse go to incredible
lengths; and the astonishing success of Aretino must not be forgotten, nor
the licence of the whole Italian comic theatre of the sixteenth century.
The Calandra of Bibbiena, who was afterwards a Cardinal, and the Mandragola
of Machiavelli, are evidence enough, and these were played before Popes,
who were not a whit embarrassed. Even in England the drama went very far
for a time, and the comic authors of the reign of Charles II., evidently
from a reaction, and to shake off the excess and the wearisomeness of
Puritan prudery and affectation, which sent them to the opposite extreme,
are not exactly noted for their reserve. But we need not go beyond France.
Slight indications, very easily verified, are all that may be set down
here; a formal and detailed proof would be altogether too dangerous.
Thus, for instance, the old Fabliaux--the Farces of the fifteenth century,
the story-tellers of the sixteenth--reveal one of the sides, one of the
veins, so to speak, of our literature. The art that addresses itself to
the eye had likewise its share of this coarseness. Think of the sculptures
on the capitals and the modillions of churches, and the crude frankness of
certain painted windows of the fifteenth century. Queen Anne was, without
any doubt, one of the most virtuous women in the world. Yet she used to go
up the staircase of her chateau at Blois, and her eyes were not offended at
seeing at the foot of a bracket a not very decent carving of a monk and a
nun. Neither did she tear out of her book of Hours the large miniature of
the winter month, in which, careless of her neighbours’ eyes, the mistress
of the house, sitting before her great fireplace, warms herself in a
fashion which it is not advisable that dames of our age should imitate.
The statue of Cybele by the Tribolo, executed for Francis I., and placed,
not against a wall, but in the middle of Queen Claude’s chamber at
Fontainebleau, has behind it an attribute which would have been more in
place on a statue of Priapus, and which was the symbol of generativeness.
The tone of the conversations was ordinarily of a surprising coarseness,
and the Precieuses, in spite of their absurdities, did a very good work in
setting themselves in opposition to it. The worthy Chevalier de
La-Tour-Landry, in his Instructions to his own daughters, without a thought
of harm, gives examples which are singular indeed, and in Caxton’s
translation these are not omitted. The Adevineaux Amoureux, printed at
Bruges by Colard Mansion, are astonishing indeed when one considers that
they were the little society diversions of the Duchesses of Burgundy and of
the great ladies of a court more luxurious and more refined than the French
court, which revelled in the Cent Nouvelles of good King Louis XI.
Rabelais’ pleasantry about the woman folle a la messe is exactly in the
style of the Adevineaux.
A later work than any of his, the Novelle of Bandello, should be kept in
mind--for the writer was Bishop of Agen, and his work was translated into
French--as also the Dames Galantes of Brantome. Read the Journal of
Heroard, that honest doctor, who day by day wrote down the details
concerning the health of Louis XIII. from his birth, and you will
understand the tone of the conversation of Henry IV. The jokes at a
country wedding are trifles compared with this royal coarseness. Le Moyen
de Parvenir is nothing but a tissue and a mass of filth, and the too
celebrated Cabinet Satyrique proves what, under Louis XIII., could be
written, printed, and read. The collection of songs formed by Clairambault
shows that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were no purer than the
sixteenth. Some of the most ribald songs are actually the work of
Princesses of the royal House.
It is, therefore, altogether unjust to make Rabelais the scapegoat, to
charge him alone with the sins of everybody else. He spoke as those of his
time used to speak; when amusing them he used their language to make
himself understood, and to slip in his asides, which without this sauce
would never have been accepted, would have found neither eyes nor ears.
Let us blame not him, therefore, but the manners of his time.
Besides, his gaiety, however coarse it may appear to us--and how rare a
thing is gaiety!--has, after all, nothing unwholesome about it; and this is
too often overlooked. Where does he tempt one to stray from duty? Where,
even indirectly, does he give pernicious advice? Whom has he led to evil
ways? Does he ever inspire feelings that breed misconduct and vice, or is
he ever the apologist of these? Many poets and romance writers, under
cover of a fastidious style, without one coarse expression, have been
really and actively hurtful; and of that it is impossible to accuse
Rabelais. Women in particular quickly revolt from him, and turn away
repulsed at once by the archaic form of the language and by the
outspokenness of the words. But if he be read aloud to them, omitting the
rougher parts and modernizing the pronunciation, it will be seen that they
too are impressed by his lively wit as by the loftiness of his thought. It
would be possible, too, to extract, for young persons, without
modification, admirable passages of incomparable force. But those who have
brought out expurgated editions of him, or who have thought to improve him
by trying to rewrite him in modern French, have been fools for their pains,
and their insulting attempts have had, and always will have, the success
they deserve.
His dedications prove to what extent his whole work was accepted. Not to
speak of his epistolary relations with Bude, with the Cardinal d’Armagnac
and with Pellissier, the ambassador of Francis I. and Bishop of Maguelonne,
or of his dedication to Tiraqueau of his Lyons edition of the Epistolae
Medicinales of Giovanni Manardi of Ferrara, of the one addressed to the
President Amaury Bouchard of the two legal texts which he believed antique,
there is still the evidence of his other and more important dedications.
In 1532 he dedicated his Hippocrates and his Galen to Geoffroy d’Estissac,
Bishop of Maillezais, to whom in 1535 and 1536 he addressed from Rome the
three news letters, which alone have been preserved; and in 1534 he
dedicated from Lyons his edition of the Latin book of Marliani on the
topography of Rome to Jean du Bellay (at that time Bishop of Paris) who was
raised to the Cardinalate in 1535. Beside these dedications we must set
the privilege of Francis I. of September, 1545, and the new privilege
granted by Henry II. on August 6th, 1550, Cardinal de Chatillon present,
for the third book, which was dedicated, in an eight-lined stanza, to the
Spirit of the Queen of Navarre. These privileges, from the praises and
eulogies they express in terms very personal and very exceptional, are as
important in Rabelais’ life as were, in connection with other matters, the
Apostolic Pastorals in his favour. Of course, in these the popes had not
to introduce his books of diversions, which, nevertheless, would have
seemed in their eyes but very venial sins. The Sciomachie of 1549, an
account of the festivities arranged at Rome by Cardinal du Bellay in honour
of the birth of the second son of Henry II., was addressed to Cardinal de
Guise, and in 1552 the fourth book was dedicated, in a new prologue, to
Cardinal de Chatillon, the brother of Admiral de Coligny.
These are no unknown or insignificant personages, but the greatest lords
and princes of the Church. They loved and admired and protected Rabelais,
and put no restrictions in his way. Why should we be more fastidious and
severe than they were? Their high contemporary appreciation gives much
food for thought.
There are few translations of Rabelais in foreign tongues; and certainly
the task is no light one, and demands more than a familiarity with ordinary
French. It would have been easier in Italy than anywhere else. Italian,
from its flexibility and its analogy to French, would have lent itself
admirably to the purpose; the instrument was ready, but the hand was not
forthcoming. Neither is there any Spanish translation, a fact which can be
more easily understood. The Inquisition would have been a far more serious
opponent than the Paris’ Sorbonne, and no one ventured on the experiment.
Yet Rabelais forces comparison with Cervantes, whose precursor he was in
reality, though the two books and the two minds are very different. They
have only one point in common, their attack and ridicule of the romances of
chivalry and of the wildly improbable adventures of knight-errants. But in
Don Quixote there is not a single detail which would suggest that Cervantes
knew Rabelais’ book or owed anything to it whatsoever, even the
starting-point of his subject. Perhaps it was better he should not have
been influenced by him, in however slight a degree; his originality is the
more intact and the more genial.
On the other hand, Rabelais has been several times translated into German.
In the present century Regis published at Leipsic, from 1831 to 1841, with
copious notes, a close and faithful translation. The first one cannot be
so described, that of Johann Fischart, a native of Mainz or Strasburg, who
died in 1614. He was a Protestant controversialist, and a satirist of
fantastic and abundant imagination. In 1575 appeared his translation of
Rabelais’ first book, and in 1590 he published the comic catalogue of the
library of Saint Victor, borrowed from the second book. It is not a
translation, but a recast in the boldest style, full of alterations and of
exaggerations, both as regards the coarse expressions which he took upon
himself to develop and to add to, and in the attacks on the Roman Catholic
Church. According to Jean Paul Richter, Fischart is much superior to
Rabelais in style and in the fruitfulness of his ideas, and his equal in
erudition and in the invention of new expressions after the manner of
Aristophanes. He is sure that his work was successful, because it was
often reprinted during his lifetime; but this enthusiasm of Jean Paul would
hardly carry conviction in France. Who treads in another’s footprints must
follow in the rear. Instead of a creator, he is but an imitator. Those
who take the ideas of others to modify them, and make of them creations of
their own, like Shakespeare in England, Moliere and La Fontaine in France,
may be superior to those who have served them with suggestions; but then
the new works must be altogether different, must exist by themselves.
Shakespeare and the others, when they imitated, may be said always to have
destroyed their models. These copyists, if we call them so, created such
works of genius that the only pity is they are so rare. This is not the
case with Fischart, but it would be none the less curious were some one
thoroughly familiar with German to translate Fischart for us, or at least,
by long extracts from him, give an idea of the vagaries of German taste
when it thought it could do better than Rabelais. It is dangerous to
tamper with so great a work, and he who does so runs a great risk of
burning his fingers.
England has been less daring, and her modesty and discretion have brought
her success. But, before speaking of Urquhart’s translation, it is but
right to mention the English-French Dictionary of Randle Cotgrave, the
first edition of which dates from 1611. It is in every way exceedingly
valuable, and superior to that of Nicot, because instead of keeping to the
plane of classic and Latin French, it showed an acquaintance with and
mastery of the popular tongue as well as of the written and learned
language. As a foreigner, Cotgrave is a little behind in his information.
He is not aware of all the changes and novelties of the passing fashion.
The Pleiad School he evidently knew nothing of, but kept to the writers of
the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century. Thus words out
of Rabelais, which he always translates with admirable skill, are frequent,
and he attaches to them their author’s name. So Rabelais had already
crossed the Channel, and was read in his own tongue. Somewhat later,
during the full sway of the Commonwealth--and Maitre Alcofribas Nasier must
have been a surprising apparition in the midst of Puritan severity--Captain
Urquhart undertook to translate him and to naturalize him completely in
England.
Thomas Urquhart belonged to a very old family of good standing in the North
of Scotland. After studying in Aberdeen he travelled in France, Spain, and
Italy, where his sword was as active as that intelligent curiosity of his
which is evidenced by his familiarity with three languages and the large
library which he brought back, according to his own account, from sixteen
countries he had visited.
On his return to England he entered the service of Charles I., who knighted
him in 1641. Next year, after the death of his father, he went to Scotland
to set his family affairs in order, and to redeem his house in Cromarty.
But, in spite of another sojourn in foreign lands, his efforts to free
himself from pecuniary embarrassments were unavailing. At the king’s death
his Scottish loyalty caused him to side with those who opposed the
Parliament. Formally proscribed in 1649, taken prisoner at the defeat of
Worcester in 1651, stripped of all his belongings, he was brought to
London, but was released on parole at Cromwell’s recommendation. After
receiving permission to spend five months in Scotland to try once more to
settle his affairs, he came back to London to escape from his creditors.
And there he must have died, though the date of his death is unknown. It
probably took place after 1653, the date of the publication of the two
first books, and after having written the translation of the third, which
was not printed from his manuscript till the end of the seventeenth
century.
His life was therefore not without its troubles, and literary activity must
have been almost his only consolation. His writings reveal him as the
strangest character, fantastic, and full of a naive vanity, which, even at
the time he was translating the genealogy of Gargantua--surely well
calculated to cure any pondering on his own--caused him to trace his
unbroken descent from Adam, and to state that his family name was derived
from his ancestor Esormon, Prince of Achaia, 2139 B.C., who was surnamed
Ourochartos, that is to say the Fortunate and the Well-beloved. A Gascon
could not have surpassed this.
Gifted as he was, learned in many directions, an enthusiastic
mathematician, master of several languages, occasionally full of wit and
humour, and even good sense, yet he gave his books the strangest titles,
and his ideas were no less whimsical. His style is mystic, fastidious, and
too often of a wearisome length and obscurity; his verses rhyme anyhow, or
not at all; but vivacity, force and heat are never lacking, and the
Maitland Club did well in reprinting, in 1834, his various works, which are
very rare. Yet, in spite of their curious interest, he owes his real
distinction and the survival of his name to his translation of Rabelais.
The first two books appeared in 1653. The original edition, exceedingly
scarce, was carefully reprinted in 1838, only a hundred copies being
issued, by an English bibliophile T(heodore) M(artin), whose interesting
preface I regret to sum up so cursorily. At the end of the seventeenth
century, in 1693, a French refugee, Peter Antony Motteux, whose English
verses and whose plays are not without value, published in a little octavo
volume a reprint, very incorrect as to the text, of the first two books, to
which he added the third, from the manuscript found amongst Urquhart’s
papers. The success which attended this venture suggested to Motteux the
idea of completing the work, and a second edition, in two volumes, appeared
in 1708, with the translation of the fourth and fifth books, and notes.
Nineteen years after his death, John Ozell, translator on a large scale of
French, Italian, and Spanish authors, revised Motteux’s edition, which he
published in five volumes in 1737, adding Le Duchat’s notes; and this
version has often been reprinted since.
The continuation by Motteux, who was also the translator of Don Quixote,
has merits of its own. It is precise, elegant, and very faithful.
Urquhart’s, without taking liberties with Rabelais like Fischart, is not
always so closely literal and exact. Nevertheless, it is much superior to
Motteux’s. If Urquhart does not constantly adhere to the form of the
expression, if he makes a few slight additions, not only has he an
understanding of the original, but he feels it, and renders the sense with
a force and a vivacity full of warmth and brilliancy. His own learning
made the comprehension of the work easy to him, and his anglicization of
words fabricated by Rabelais is particularly successful. The necessity of
keeping to his text prevented his indulgence in the convolutions and
divagations dictated by his exuberant fancy when writing on his own
account. His style, always full of life and vigour, is here balanced,
lucid, and picturesque. Never elsewhere did he write so well. And thus
the translation reproduces the very accent of the original, besides
possessing a very remarkable character of its own. Such a literary tone
and such literary qualities are rarely found in a translation. Urquhart’s,
very useful for the interpretation of obscure passages, may, and indeed
should be read as a whole, both for Rabelais and for its own merits.
Holland, too, possesses a translation of Rabelais. They knew French in
that country in the seventeenth century better than they do to-day, and
there Rabelais’ works were reprinted when no editions were appearing in
France. This Dutch translation was published at Amsterdam in 1682, by J.
Tenhoorn. The name attached to it, Claudio Gallitalo (Claudius
French-Italian) must certainly be a pseudonym. Only a Dutch scholar could
identify the translator, and state the value to be assigned to his work.
Rabelais’ style has many different sources. Besides its force and
brilliancy, its gaiety, wit, and dignity, its abundant richness is no less
remarkable. It would be impossible and useless to compile a glossary of
Voltaire’s words. No French writer has used so few, and all of them are of
the simplest. There is not one of them that is not part of the common
speech, or which demands a note or an explanation. Rabelais’ vocabulary,
on the other hand, is of an astonishing variety. Where does it all come
from? As a fact, he had at his command something like three languages,
which he used in turn, or which he mixed according to the effect he wished
to produce.
First of all, of course, he had ready to his hand the whole speech of his
time, which had no secrets for him. Provincials have been too eager to
appropriate him, to make of him a local author, the pride of some village,
in order that their district might have the merit of being one of the
causes, one of the factors of his genius. Every neighbourhood where he
ever lived has declared that his distinction was due to his knowledge of
its popular speech. But these dialect-patriots have fallen out among
themselves. To which dialect was he indebted? Was it that of Touraine, or
Berri, or Poitou, or Paris? It is too often forgotten, in regard to French
patois--leaving out of count the languages of the South--that the words or
expressions that are no longer in use to-day are but a survival, a still
living trace of the tongue and the pronunciation of other days. Rabelais,
more than any other writer, took advantage of the happy chances and the
richness of the popular speech, but he wrote in French, and nothing but
French. That is why he remains so forcible, so lucid, and so living, more
living even--speaking only of his style out of charity to the others--than
any of his contemporaries.
It has been said that great French prose is solely the work of the
seventeenth century. There were nevertheless, before that, two men,
certainly very different and even hostile, who were its initiators and its
masters, Calvin on the one hand, on the other Rabelais.
Rabelais had a wonderful knowledge of the prose and the verse of the
fifteenth century: he was familiar with Villon, Pathelin, the Quinze Joies
de Mariage, the Cent Nouvelles, the chronicles and the romances, and even
earlier works, too, such as the Roman de la Rose. Their words, their turns
of expression came naturally to his pen, and added a piquancy and, as it
were, a kind of gloss of antique novelty to his work. He fabricated words,
too, on Greek and Latin models, with great ease, sometimes audaciously and
with needless frequency. These were for him so many means, so many
elements of variety. Sometimes he did this in mockery, as in the humorous
discourse of the Limousin scholar, for which he is not a little indebted to
Geoffroy Tory in the Champfleury; sometimes, on the contrary, seriously,
from a habit acquired in dealing with classical tongues.
Again, another reason of the richness of his vocabulary was that he
invented and forged words for himself. Following the example of
Aristophanes, he coined an enormous number of interminable words, droll
expressions, sudden and surprising constructions. What had made Greece and
the Athenians laugh was worth transporting to Paris.
With an instrument so rich, resources so endless, and the skill to use
them, it is no wonder that he could give voice to anything, be as humorous
as he could be serious, as comic as he could be grave, that he could
express himself and everybody else, from the lowest to the highest. He had
every colour on his palette, and such skill was in his fingers that he
could depict every variety of light and shade.
We have evidence that Rabelais did not always write in the same fashion.
The Chronique Gargantuaine is uniform in style and quite simple, but cannot
with certainty be attributed to him. His letters are bombastic and thin;
his few attempts at verse are heavy, lumbering, and obscure, altogether
lacking in harmony, and quite as bad as those of his friend, Jean Bouchet.
He had no gift of poetic form, as indeed is evident even from his prose.
And his letters from Rome to the Bishop of Maillezais, interesting as they
are in regard to the matter, are as dull, bare, flat, and dry in style as
possible. Without his signature no one would possibly have thought of
attributing them to him. He is only a literary artist when he wishes to be
such; and in his romance he changes the style completely every other
moment: it has no constant character or uniform manner, and therefore
unity is almost entirely wanting in his work, while his endeavours after
contrast are unceasing. There is throughout the whole the evidence of
careful and conscious elaboration.
Hence, however lucid and free be the style of his romance, and though its
flexibility and ease seem at first sight to have cost no trouble at all,
yet its merit lies precisely in the fact that it succeeds in concealing the
toil, in hiding the seams. He could not have reached this perfection at a
first attempt. He must have worked long at the task, revised it again and
again, corrected much, and added rather than cut away. The aptness of form
and expression has been arrived at by deliberate means, and owes nothing to
chance. Apart from the toning down of certain bold passages, to soften
their effect, and appease the storm--for these were not literary
alterations, but were imposed on him by prudence--one can see how numerous
are the variations in his text, how necessary it is to take account of
them, and to collect them. A good edition, of course, would make no
attempt at amalgamating these. That would give a false impression and end
in confusion; but it should note them all, and show them all, not combined,
but simply as variations.
After Le Duchat, all the editions, in their care that nothing should be
lost, made the mistake of collecting and placing side by side things which
had no connection with each other, which had even been substituted for each
other. The result was a fabricated text, full of contradictions naturally.
But since the edition issued by M. Jannet, the well-known publisher of the
Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, who was the first to get rid of this patchwork,
this mosaic, Rabelais’ latest text has been given, accompanied by all the
earlier variations, to show the changes he made, as well as his
suppressions and additions. It would also be possible to reverse the
method. It would be interesting to take his first text as the basis,
noting the later modifications. This would be quite as instructive and
really worth doing. Perhaps one might then see more clearly with what care
he made his revisions, after what fashion he corrected, and especially what
were the additions he made.
No more striking instance can be quoted than the admirable chapter about
the shipwreck. It was not always so long as Rabelais made it in the end:
it was much shorter at first. As a rule, when an author recasts some
passage that he wishes to revise, he does so by rewriting the whole, or at
least by interpolating passages at one stroke, so to speak. Nothing of the
kind is seen here. Rabelais suppressed nothing, modified nothing; he did
not change his plan at all. What he did was to make insertions, to slip in
between two clauses a new one. He expressed his meaning in a lengthier
way, and the former clause is found in its integrity along with the
additional one, of which it forms, as it were, the warp. It was by this
method of touching up the smallest details, by making here and there such
little noticeable additions, that he succeeded in heightening the effect
without either change or loss. In the end it looks as if he had altered
nothing, added nothing new, as if it had always been so from the first, and
had never been meddled with.
The comparison is most instructive, showing us to what an extent Rabelais’
admirable style was due to conscious effort, care, and elaboration, a fact
which is generally too much overlooked, and how instead of leaving any
trace which would reveal toil and study, it has on the contrary a
marvellous cohesion, precision, and brilliancy. It was modelled and
remodelled, repaired, touched up, and yet it has all the appearance of
having been created at a single stroke, or of having been run like molten
wax into its final form.
Something should be said here of the sources from which Rabelais borrowed.
He was not the first in France to satirize the romances of chivalry. The
romance in verse by Baudouin de Sebourc, printed in recent years, was a
parody of the Chansons de Geste. In the Moniage Guillaume, and especially
in the Moniage Rainouart, in which there is a kind of giant, and
occasionally a comic giant, there are situations and scenes which remind us
of Rabelais. The kind of Fabliaux in mono-rhyme quatrains of the old
Aubery anticipate his coarse and popular jests. But all that is beside the
question; Rabelais did not know these. Nothing is of direct interest save
what was known to him, what fell under his eyes, what lay to his hand--as
the Facetiae of Poggio, and the last sermonnaires. In the course of one’s
reading one may often enough come across the origin of some of Rabelais’
witticisms; here and there we may discover how he has developed a
situation. While gathering his materials wherever he could find them, he
was nevertheless profoundly original.
On this point much research and investigation might be employed. But there
is no need why these researches should be extended to the region of fancy.
Gargantua has been proved by some to be of Celtic origin. Very often he is
a solar myth, and the statement that Rabelais only collected popular
traditions and gave new life to ancient legends is said to be proved by the
large number of megalithic monuments to which is attached the name of
Gargantua. It was, of course, quite right to make a list of these, to draw
up, as it were, a chart of them, but the conclusion is not justified. The
name, instead of being earlier, is really later, and is a witness, not to
the origin, but to the success and rapid popularity of his novel. No one
has ever yet produced a written passage or any ancient testimony to prove
the existence of the name before Rabelais. To place such a tradition on a
sure basis, positive traces must be forthcoming; and they cannot be adduced
even for the most celebrated of these monuments, since he mentions himself
the great menhir near Poitiers, which he christened by the name of
Passelourdin. That there is something in the theory is possible. Perrault
found the subjects of his stories in the tales told by mothers and nurses.
He fixed them finally by writing them down. Floating about vaguely as they
were, he seized them, worked them up, gave them shape, and yet of scarcely
any of them is there to be found before his time a single trace. So we
must resign ourselves to know just as little of what Gargantua and
Pantagruel were before the sixteenth century.
In a book of a contemporary of Rabelais, the Legende de Pierre Faifeu by
the Angevin, Charles de Bourdigne, the first edition of which dates from
1526 and the second 1531--both so rare and so forgotten that the work is
only known since the eighteenth century by the reprint of Custelier--in the
introductory ballad which recommends this book to readers, occur these
lines in the list of popular books which Faifeu would desire to replace:
‘Laissez ester Caillette le folastre,
Les quatre filz Aymon vestuz de bleu,
Gargantua qui a cheveux de plastre.’
He has not ‘cheveux de plastre’ in Rabelais. If the rhyme had not
suggested the phrase--and the exigencies of the strict form of the ballade
and its forced repetitions often imposed an idea which had its whole origin
in the rhyme--we might here see a dramatic trace found nowhere else. The
name of Pantagruel is mentioned too, incidentally, in a Mystery of the
fifteenth century. These are the only references to the names which up
till now have been discovered, and they are, as one sees, of but little
account.
On the other hand, the influence of Aristophanes and of Lucian, his
intimate acquaintance with nearly all the writers of antiquity, Greek as
well as Latin, with whom Rabelais is more permeated even than Montaigne,
were a mine of inspiration. The proof of it is everywhere. Pliny
especially was his encyclopaedia, his constant companion. All he says of
the Pantagruelian herb, though he amply developed it for himself, is taken
from Pliny’s chapter on flax. And there is a great deal more of this kind
to be discovered, for Rabelais does not always give it as quotation. On
the other hand, when he writes, ‘Such an one says,’ it would be difficult
enough to find who is meant, for the ‘such an one’ is a fictitious writer.
The method is amusing, but it is curious to account of it.
The question of the Chronique Gargantuaine is still undecided. Is it by
Rabelais or by someone else? Both theories are defensible, and can be
supported by good reasons. In the Chronique everything is heavy,
occasionally meaningless, and nearly always insipid. Can the same man have
written the Chronique and Gargantua, replaced a book really commonplace by
a masterpiece, changed the facts and incidents, transformed a heavy icy
pleasantry into a work glowing with wit and life, made it no longer a mass
of laborious trifling and cold-blooded exaggerations but a satire on human
life of the highest genius? Still there are points common to the two.
Besides, Rabelais wrote other things; and it is only in his romance that he
shows literary skill. The conception of it would have entered his mind
first only in a bare and summary fashion. It would have been taken up
again, expanded, developed, metamorphosed. That is possible, and, for my
part, I am of those who, like Brunet and Nodier, are inclined to think that
the Chronique, in spite of its inferiority, is really a first attempt,
condemned as soon as the idea was conceived in another form. As its
earlier date is incontestable, we must conclude that if the Chronique is
not by him, his Gargantua and its continuation would not have existed
without it. This would be a great obligation to stand under to some
unknown author, and in that case it is astonishing that his enemies did not
reproach him during his lifetime with being merely an imitator and a
plagiarist. So there are reasons for and against his authorship of it, and
it would be dangerous to make too bold an assertion.
One fact which is absolutely certain and beyond all controversy, is that
Rabelais owed much to one of his contemporaries, an Italian, to the
Histoire Macaronique of Merlin Coccaie. Its author, Theophilus Folengo,
who was also a monk, was born in 1491, and died only a short time before
Rabelais, in 1544. But his burlesque poem was published in 1517. It was
in Latin verse, written in an elaborately fabricated style. It is not dog
Latin, but Latin ingeniously italianized, or rather Italian, even Mantuan,
latinized. The contrast between the modern form of the word and its Roman
garb produces the most amusing effect. In the original it is sometimes
difficult to read, for Folengo has no objection to using the most
colloquial words and phrases.
The subject is quite different. It is the adventures of Baldo, son of Guy
de Montauban, the very lively history of his youth, his trial, imprisonment
and deliverance, his journey in search of his father, during which he
visits the Planets and Hell. The narration is constantly interrupted by
incidental adventures. Occasionally they are what would be called to-day
very naturalistic, and sometimes they are madly extravagant.
But Fracasso, Baldo’s friend, is a giant; another friend, Cingar, who
delivers him, is Panurge exactly, and quite as much given to practical
joking. The women in the senile amour of the old Tognazzo, the judges, and
the poor sergeants, are no more gently dealt with by Folengo than by the
monk of the Iles d’Hyeres. If Dindenaut’s name does not occur, there are
the sheep. The tempest is there, and the invocation to all the saints.
Rabelais improves all he borrows, but it is from Folengo he starts. He
does not reproduce the words, but, like the Italian, he revels in drinking
scenes, junkettings, gormandizing, battles, scuffles, wounds and corpses,
magic, witches, speeches, repeated enumerations, lengthiness, and a
solemnly minute precision of impossible dates and numbers. The atmosphere,
the tone, the methods are the same, and to know Rabelais well, you must
know Folengo well too.
Detailed proof of this would be too lengthy a matter; one would have to
quote too many passages, but on this question of sources nothing is more
interesting than a perusal of the Opus Macaronicorum. It was translated
into French only in 1606--Paris, Gilley Robinot. This translation of
course cannot reproduce all the many amusing forms of words, but it is
useful, nevertheless, in showing more clearly the points of resemblance
between the two works,--how far in form, ideas, details, and phrases
Rabelais was permeated by Folengo. The anonymous translator saw this quite
well, and said so in his title, ‘Histoire macaronique de Merlin Coccaie,
prototype of Rabelais.’ It is nothing but the truth, and Rabelais, who
does not hide it from himself, on more than one occasion mentions the name
of Merlin Coccaie.
Besides, Rabelais was fed on the Italians of his time as on the Greeks and
Romans. Panurge, who owes much to Cingar, is also not free from
obligations to the miscreant Margutte in the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci.
Had Rabelais in his mind the tale from the Florentine Chronicles, how in
the Savonarola riots, when the Piagnoni and the Arrabiati came to blows in
the church of the Dominican convent of San-Marco, Fra Pietro in the scuffle
broke the heads of the assailants with the bronze crucifix he had taken
from the altar? A well-handled cross could so readily be used as a weapon,
that probably it has served as such more than once, and other and even
quite modern instances might be quoted.
But other Italian sources are absolutely certain. There are few more
wonderful chapters in Rabelais than the one about the drinkers. It is not
a dialogue: those short exclamations exploding from every side, all
referring to the same thing, never repeating themselves, and yet always
varying the same theme. At the end of the Novelle of Gentile Sermini of
Siena, there is a chapter called Il Giuoco della pugna, the Game of Battle.
Here are the first lines of it: ‘Apre, apre, apre. Chi gioca, chi gioca
--uh, uh!--A Porrione, a Porrione.--Viela, viela; date a ognuno.--Alle
mantella, alle mantella.--Oltre di corsa; non vi fermate.--Voltate qui;
ecco costoro; fate veli innanzi.--Viela, viela; date costi.--Chi la fa?
Io--Ed io.--Dagli; ah, ah, buona fu.--Or cosi; alla mascella, al fianco.
--Dagli basso; di punta, di punta.--Ah, ah, buon gioco, buon gioco.’
And thus it goes on with fire and animation for pages. Rabelais probably
translated or directly imitated it. He changed the scene; there was no
giuooco della pugna in France. He transferred to a drinking-bout this
clatter of exclamations which go off by themselves, which cross each other
and get no answer. He made a wonderful thing of it. But though he did not
copy Sermini, yet Sermini’s work provided him with the form of the subject,
and was the theme for Rabelais’ marvellous variations.
Who does not remember the fantastic quarrel of the cook with the poor devil
who had flavoured his dry bread with the smoke of the roast, and the
judgment of Seyny John, truly worthy of Solomon? It comes from the Cento
Novelle Antiche, rewritten from tales older than Boccaccio, and moreover of
an extreme brevity and dryness. They are only the framework, the notes,
the skeleton of tales. The subject is often wonderful, but nothing is made
of it: it is left unshaped. Rabelais wrote a version of one, the ninth.
The scene takes place, not at Paris, but at Alexandria in Egypt among the
Saracens, and the cook is called Fabrac. But the surprise at the end, the
sagacious judgment by which the sound of a piece of money was made the
price of the smoke, is the same. Now the first dated edition of the Cento
Novelle (which were frequently reprinted) appeared at Bologna in 1525, and
it is certain that Rabelais had read the tales. And there would be much
else of the same kind to learn if we knew Rabelais’ library.
A still stranger fact of this sort may be given to show how nothing came
amiss to him. He must have known, and even copied the Latin Chronicle of
the Counts of Anjou. It is accepted, and rightly so, as an historical
document, but that is no reason for thinking that the truth may not have
been manipulated and adorned. The Counts of Anjou were not saints. They
were proud, quarrelsome, violent, rapacious, and extravagant, as greedy as
they were charitable to the Church, treacherous and cruel. Yet their
anonymous panegyrist has made them patterns of all the virtues. In reality
it is both a history and in some sort a romance; especially is it a
collection of examples worthy of being followed, in the style of the
Cyropaedia, our Juvenal of the fifteenth century, and a little like
Fenelon’s Telemaque. Now in it there occurs the address of one of the
counts to those who rebelled against him and who were at his mercy.
Rabelais must have known it, for he has copied it, or rather, literally
translated whole lines of it in the wonderful speech of Gargantua to the
vanquished. His contemporaries, who approved of his borrowing from
antiquity, could not detect this one, because the book was not printed till
much later. But Rabelais lived in Maine. In Anjou, which often figures
among the localities he names, he must have met with and read the
Chronicles of the Counts in manuscript, probably in some monastery library,
whether at Fontenay-le-Comte or elsewhere it matters little. There is not
only a likeness in the ideas and tone, but in the words too, which cannot
be a mere matter of chance. He must have known the Chronicles of the
Counts of Anjou, and they inspired one of his finest pages. One sees,
therefore, how varied were the sources whence he drew, and how many of them
must probably always escape us.
When, as has been done for Moliere, a critical bibliography of the works
relating to Rabelais is drawn up--which, by the bye, will entail a very
great amount of labour--the easiest part will certainly be the bibliography
of the old editions. That is the section that has been most satisfactorily
and most completely worked out. M. Brunet said the last word on the
subject in his Researches in 1852, and in the important article in the
fifth edition of his Manuel du Libraire (iv., 1863, pp. 1037-1071).
The facts about the fifth book cannot be summed up briefly. It was printed
as a whole at first, without the name of the place, in 1564, and next year
at Lyons by Jean Martin. It has given, and even still gives rise to two
contradictory opinions. Is it Rabelais’ or not?
First of all, if he had left it complete, would sixteen years have gone by
before it was printed? Then, does it bear evident marks of his
workmanship? Is the hand of the master visible throughout? Antoine Du
Verdier in the 1605 edition of his Prosopographie writes: ‘(Rabelais’)
misfortune has been that everybody has wished to “pantagruelize!” and
several books have appeared under his name, and have been added to his
works, which are not by him, as, for instance, l’Ile Sonnante, written by a
certain scholar of Valence and others.’
The scholar of Valence might be Guillaume des Autels, to whom with more
certainty can be ascribed the authorship of a dull imitation of Rabelais,
the History of Fanfreluche and Gaudichon, published in 1578, which, to say
the least of it, is very much inferior to the fifth book.
Louis Guyon, in his Diverses Lecons, is still more positive: ‘As to the
last book which has been included in his works, entitled l’Ile Sonnante,
the object of which seems to be to find fault with and laugh at the members
and the authorities of the Catholic Church, I protest that he did not
compose it, for it was written long after his death. I was at Paris when
it was written, and I know quite well who was its author; he was not a
doctor.’ That is very emphatic, and it is impossible to ignore it.
Yet everyone must recognize that there is a great deal of Rabelais in the
fifth book. He must have planned it and begun it. Remembering that in
1548 he had published, not as an experiment, but rather as a bait and as an
announcement, the first eleven chapters of the fourth book, we may conclude
that the first sixteen chapters of the fifth book published by themselves
nine years after his death, in 1562, represent the remainder of his
definitely finished work. This is the more certain because these first
chapters, which contain the Apologue of the Horse and the Ass and the
terrible Furred Law-cats, are markedly better than what follows them. They
are not the only ones where the master’s hand may be traced, but they are
the only ones where no other hand could possibly have interfered.
In the remainder the sentiment is distinctly Protestant. Rabelais was much
struck by the vices of the clergy and did not spare them. Whether we are
unable to forgive his criticisms because they were conceived in a spirit of
raillery, or whether, on the other hand, we feel admiration for him on this
point, yet Rabelais was not in the least a sectary. If he strongly desired
a moral reform, indirectly pointing out the need of it in his mocking
fashion, he was not favourable to a political reform. Those who would make
of him a Protestant altogether forget that the Protestants of his time were
not for him, but against him. Henri Estienne, for instance, Ramus,
Theodore de Beze, and especially Calvin, should know how he was to be
regarded. Rabelais belonged to what may be called the early reformation,
to that band of honest men in the beginning of the sixteenth century,
precursors of the later one perhaps, but, like Erasmus, between the two
extremes. He was neither Lutheran nor Calvinist, neither German nor
Genevese, and it is quite natural that his work was not reprinted in
Switzerland, which would certainly have happened had the Protestants looked
on him as one of themselves.
That Rabelais collected the materials for the fifth book, had begun it, and
got on some way, there can be no doubt: the excellence of a large number
of passages prove it, but--taken as a whole--the fifth book has not the
value, the verve, and the variety of the others. The style is quite
different, less rich, briefer, less elaborate, drier, in parts even
wearisome. In the first four books Rabelais seldom repeats himself. The
fifth book contains from the point of view of the vocabulary really the
least novelty. On the contrary, it is full of words and expressions
already met with, which is very natural in an imitation, in a copy, forced
to keep to a similar tone, and to show by such reminders and likenesses
that it is really by the same pen. A very striking point is the profound
difference in the use of anatomical terms. In the other books they are
most frequently used in a humorous sense, and nonsensically, with a quite
other meaning than their own; in the fifth they are applied correctly. It
was necessary to include such terms to keep up the practice, but the writer
has not thought of using them to add to the comic effect: one cannot
always think of everything. Trouble has been taken, of course, to include
enumerations, but there are much fewer fabricated and fantastic words. In
short, the hand of the maker is far from showing the same suppleness and
strength.
A eulogistic quatrain is signed Nature quite, which, it is generally
agreed, is an anagram of Jean Turquet. Did the adapter of the fifth book
sign his work in this indirect fashion? He might be of the Genevese family
to whom Louis Turquet and his son Theodore belonged, both well-known, and
both strong Protestants. The obscurity relating to this matter is far from
being cleared up, and perhaps never will be.
It fell to my lot--here, unfortunately, I am forced to speak of a personal
matter--to print for the first time the manuscript of the fifth book. At
first it was hoped it might be in Rabelais’ own hand; afterwards that it
might be at least a copy of his unfinished work. The task was a difficult
one, for the writing, extremely flowing and rapid, is execrable, and most
difficult to decipher and to transcribe accurately. Besides, it often
happens in the sixteenth and the end of the fifteenth century, that
manuscripts are much less correct than the printed versions, even when they
have not been copied by clumsy and ignorant hands. In this case, it is the
writing of a clerk executed as quickly as possible. The farther it goes
the more incorrect it becomes, as if the writer were in haste to finish.
What is really the origin of it? It has less the appearance of notes or
fragments prepared by Rabelais than of a first attempt at revision. It is
not an author’s rough draft; still less is it his manuscript. If I had not
printed this enigmatical text with scrupulous and painful fidelity, I would
do it now. It was necessary to do it so as to clear the way. But as the
thing is done, and accessible to those who may be interested, and who wish
to critically examine it, there is no further need of reprinting it. All
the editions of Rabelais continue, and rightly, to reproduce the edition of
1564. It is not the real Rabelais, but however open to criticism it may
be, it was under that form that the fifth book appeared in the sixteenth
century, under that form it was accepted. Consequently it is convenient
and even necessary to follow and keep to the original edition.
The first sixteen chapters may, and really must be, the text of Rabelais,
in the final form as left by him, and found after his death; the framework,
and a number of the passages in the continuation, the best ones, of course,
are his, but have been patched up and tampered with. Nothing can have been
suppressed of what existed; it was evidently thought that everything should
be admitted with the final revision; but the tone was changed, additions
were made, and ‘improvements.’ Adapters are always strangely vain.
In the seventeenth century, the French printing-press, save for an edition
issued at Troyes in 1613, gave up publishing Rabelais, and the work passed
to foreign countries. Jean Fuet reprinted him at Antwerp in 1602. After
the Amsterdam edition of 1659, where for the first time appears ‘The
Alphabet of the French Author,’ comes the Elzevire edition of 1663. The
type, an imitation of what made the reputation of the little volumes of the
Gryphes of Lyons, is charming, the printing is perfect, and the paper,
which is French--the development of paper-making in Holland and England did
not take place till after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes--is
excellent. They are pretty volumes to the eye, but, as in all the reprints
of the seventeenth century, the text is full of faults and most
untrustworthy.
France, through a representative in a foreign land, however, comes into
line again in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in a really
serious fashion, thanks to the very considerable learning of a French
refugee, Jacob Le Duchat, who died in 1748. He had a most thorough
knowledge of the French prose-writers of the sixteenth century, and he made
them accessible by his editions of the Quinze Joies du Mariage, of Henri
Estienne, of Agrippa d’Aubigne, of L’Etoile, and of the Satyre Menippee.
In 1711 he published an edition of Rabelais at Amsterdam, through Henry
Bordesius, in five duodecimo volumes. The reprint in quarto which he
issued in 1741, seven years before his death, is, with its engravings by
Bernard Picot, a fine library edition. Le Duchat’s is the first of the
critical editions. It takes account of differences in the texts, and
begins to point out the variations. His very numerous notes are
remarkable, and are still worthy of most serious consideration. He was the
first to offer useful elucidations, and these have been repeated after him,
and with good reason will continue to be so. The Abbe de Massy’s edition
of 1752, also an Amsterdam production, has made use of Le Duchat’s but does
not take its place. Finally, at the end of the century, Cazin printed
Rabelais in his little volume, in 1782, and Bartiers issued two editions
(of no importance) at Paris in 1782 and 1798. Fortunately the nineteenth
century has occupied itself with the great ‘Satyrique’ in a more competent
and useful fashion.
In 1820 L’Aulnaye published through Desoer his three little volumes,
printed in exquisite style, and which have other merits besides. His
volume of annotations, in which, that nothing might be lost of his own
notes, he has included many things not directly relating to Rabelais, is
full of observations and curious remarks which are very useful additions to
Le Duchat. One fault to be found with him is his further complication of
the spelling. This he did in accordance with a principle that the words
should be referred to their real etymology. Learned though he was,
Rabelais had little care to be so etymological, and it is not his theories
but those of the modern scholar that have been ventilated.
Somewhat later, from 1823 to 1826, Esmangart and Johanneau issued a
variorum edition in nine volumes, in which the text is often encumbered by
notes which are really too numerous, and, above all, too long. The work
was an enormous one, but the best part of it is Le Duchat’s, and what is
not his is too often absolutely hypothetical and beside the truth. Le
Duchat had already given too much importance to the false historical
explanation. Here it is constantly coming in, and it rests on no evidence.
In reality, there is no need of the key to Rabelais by which to discover
the meaning of subtle allusions. He is neither so complicated nor so full
of riddles. We know how he has scattered the names of contemporaries about
his work, sometimes of friends, sometimes of enemies, and without
disguising them under any mask. He is no more Panurge than Louis XII. is
Gargantua or Francis I. Pantagruel. Rabelais says what he wants, all he
wants, and in the way he wants. There are no mysteries below the surface,
and it is a waste of time to look for knots in a bulrush. All the
historical explanations are purely imaginary, utterly without proof, and
should the more emphatically be looked on as baseless and dismissed. They
are radically false, and therefore both worthless and harmful.
In 1840 there appeared in the Bibliotheque Charpentier the Rabelais in a
single duodecimo volume, begun by Charles Labiche, and, after his death,
completed by M. Paul Lacroix, whose share is the larger. The text is that
of L’Aulnaye; the short footnotes, with all their brevity, contain useful
explanations of difficult words. Amongst the editions of Rabelais this is
one of the most important, because it brought him many readers and
admirers. No other has made him so well and so widely known as this
portable volume, which has been constantly reprinted. No other has been so
widely circulated, and the sale still goes on. It was, and must still be
looked on as a most serviceable edition.
The edition published by Didot in 1857 has an altogether special character.
In the biographical notice M. Rathery for the first time treated as they
deserve the foolish prejudices which have made Rabelais misunderstood, and
M. Burgaud des Marets set the text on a quite new base. Having proved,
what of course is very evident, that in the original editions the spelling,
and the language too, were of the simplest and clearest, and were not
bristling with the nonsensical and superfluous consonants which have given
rise to the idea that Rabelais is difficult to read, he took the trouble
first of all to note the spelling of each word. Whenever in a single
instance he found it in accordance with modern spelling, he made it the
same throughout. The task was a hard one, and Rabelais certainly gained in
clearness, but over-zeal is often fatal to a reform. In respect to its
precision and the value of its notes, which are short and very judicious,
Burgaud des Marets’ edition is valuable, and is amongst those which should
be known and taken into account.
Since Le Duchat all the editions have a common fault. They are not exactly
guilty of fabricating, but they set up an artificial text in the sense
that, in order to lose as little as possible, they have collected and
united what originally were variations--the revisions, in short, of the
original editions. Guided by the wise counsels given by Brunet in 1852 in
his Researches on the old editions of Rabelais, Pierre Jannet published the
first three books in 1858; then, when the publication of the Bibliotheque
Elzevirienne was discontinued, he took up the work again and finished the
edition in Picard’s blue library, in little volumes, each book quite
distinct. It was M. Jannet who in our days first restored the pure and
exact text of Rabelais, not only without retouching it, but without making
additions or insertions, or juxtaposition of things that were not formerly
found together. For each of the books he has followed the last edition
issued by Rabelais, and all the earlier differences he gives as variations.
It is astonishing that a thing so simple and so fitting should not have
been done before, and the result is that this absolutely exact fidelity has
restored a lucidity which was not wanting in Rabelais’s time, but which had
since been obscured. All who have come after Jannet have followed in his
path, and there is no reason for straying from it.
FRANCIS RABELAIS.
THE FIRST BOOK.
To the Honoured, Noble Translator of Rabelais.
Rabelais, whose wit prodigiously was made,
All men, professions, actions to invade,
With so much furious vigour, as if it
Had lived o’er each of them, and each had quit,
Yet with such happy sleight and careless skill,
As, like the serpent, doth with laughter kill,
So that although his noble leaves appear
Antic and Gottish, and dull souls forbear
To turn them o’er, lest they should only find
Nothing but savage monsters of a mind,--
No shapen beauteous thoughts; yet when the wise
Seriously strip him of his wild disguise,
Melt down his dross, refine his massy ore,
And polish that which seem’d rough-cast before,
Search his deep sense, unveil his hidden mirth,
And make that fiery which before seem’d earth
(Conquering those things of highest consequence,
What’s difficult of language or of sense),
He will appear some noble table writ
In the old Egyptian hieroglyphic wit;
Where, though you monsters and grotescoes see,
You meet all mysteries of philosophy.
For he was wise and sovereignly bred
To know what mankind is, how ‘t may be led:
He stoop’d unto them, like that wise man, who
Rid on a stick, when ‘s children would do so.
For we are easy sullen things, and must
Be laugh’d aright, and cheated into trust;
Whilst a black piece of phlegm, that lays about
Dull menaces, and terrifies the rout,
And cajoles it, with all its peevish strength
Piteously stretch’d and botch’d up into length,
Whilst the tired rabble sleepily obey
Such opiate talk, and snore away the day,
By all his noise as much their minds relieves,
As caterwauling of wild cats frights thieves.
But Rabelais was another thing, a man
Made up of all that art and nature can
Form from a fiery genius,--he was one
Whose soul so universally was thrown
Through all the arts of life, who understood
Each stratagem by which we stray from good;
So that he best might solid virtue teach,
As some ‘gainst sins of their own bosoms preach:
He from wise choice did the true means prefer,
In the fool’s coat acting th’ philosopher.
Thus hoary Aesop’s beasts did mildly tame
Fierce man, and moralize him into shame;
Thus brave romances, while they seem to lay
Great trains of lust, platonic love display;
Thus would old Sparta, if a seldom chance
Show’d a drunk slave, teach children temperance;
Thus did the later poets nobly bring
The scene to height, making the fool the king.
And, noble sir, you vigorously have trod
In this hard path, unknown, un-understood
By its own countrymen, ‘tis you appear
Our full enjoyment which was our despair,
Scattering his mists, cheering his cynic frowns
(For radiant brightness now dark Rabelais crowns),
Leaving your brave heroic cares, which must
Make better mankind and embalm your dust,
So undeceiving us, that now we see
All wit in Gascon and in Cromarty,
Besides that Rabelais is convey’d to us,
And that our Scotland is not barbarous.
J. De la Salle.
Rablophila.
The First Decade.
The Commendation.
Musa! canas nostrorum in testimonium Amorum,
Et Gargantueas perpetuato faces,
Utque homini tali resultet nobilis Eccho:
Quicquid Fama canit, Pantagruelis erit.
The Argument.
Here I intend mysteriously to sing
With a pen pluck’d from Fame’s own wing,
Of Gargantua that learn’d breech-wiping king.
Decade the First.
I.
Help me, propitious stars; a mighty blaze
Benumbs me! I must sound the praise
Of him hath turn’d this crabbed work in such heroic phrase.
II.
What wit would not court martyrdom to hold
Upon his head a laurel of gold,
Where for each rich conceit a Pumpion-pearl is told:
III.
And such a one is this, art’s masterpiece,
A thing ne’er equall’d by old Greece:
A thing ne’er match’d as yet, a real Golden Fleece.
IV.
Vice is a soldier fights against mankind;
Which you may look but never find:
For ‘tis an envious thing, with cunning interlined.
V.
And thus he rails at drinking all before ‘em,
And for lewd women does be-whore ‘em,
And brings their painted faces and black patches to th’ quorum.
VI.
To drink he was a furious enemy
Contented with a six-penny--
(with diamond hatband, silver spurs, six horses.) pie--
VII.
And for tobacco’s pate-rotunding smoke,
Much had he said, and much more spoke,
But ‘twas not then found out, so the design was broke.
VIII.
Muse! Fancy! Faith! come now arise aloud,
Assembled in a blue-vein’d cloud,
And this tall infant in angelic arms now shroud.
IX.
To praise it further I would now begin
Were ‘t now a thoroughfare and inn,
It harbours vice, though ‘t be to catch it in a gin.
X.
Therefore, my Muse, draw up thy flowing sail,
And acclamate a gentle hail
With all thy art and metaphors, which must prevail.
Jam prima Oceani pars est praeterita nostri.
Imparibus restat danda secunda modis.
Quam si praestiterit mentem Daemon malus addam,
Cum sapiens totus prodierit Rabelais.
Malevolus.
(Reader, the Errata, which in this book are not a few, are casually lost;
and therefore the Translator, not having leisure to collect them again,
craves thy pardon for such as thou may’st meet with.)
The Author’s Prologue to the First Book.
Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified
blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings), Alcibiades,
in that dialogue of Plato’s, which is entitled The Banquet, whilst he was
setting forth the praises of his schoolmaster Socrates (without all
question the prince of philosophers), amongst other discourses to that
purpose, said that he resembled the Silenes. Silenes of old were little
boxes, like those we now may see in the shops of apothecaries, painted on
the outside with wanton toyish figures, as harpies, satyrs, bridled geese,
horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, thiller harts, and other
such-like counterfeited pictures at discretion, to excite people unto
laughter, as Silenus himself, who was the foster-father of good Bacchus, was
wont to do; but within those capricious caskets were carefully preserved and
kept many rich jewels and fine drugs, such as balm, ambergris, amomon, musk,
civet, with several kinds of precious stones, and other things of great
price. Just such another thing was Socrates. For to have eyed his outside,
and esteemed of him by his exterior appearance, you would not have given the
peel of an onion for him, so deformed he was in body, and ridiculous in his
gesture. He had a sharp pointed nose, with the look of a bull, and
countenance of a fool: he was in his carriage simple, boorish in his
apparel, in fortune poor, unhappy in his wives, unfit for all offices in the
commonwealth, always laughing, tippling, and merrily carousing to everyone,
with continual gibes and jeers, the better by those means to conceal his
divine knowledge. Now, opening this box you would have found within it a
heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than human understanding, an admirable
virtue, matchless learning, invincible courage, unimitable sobriety, certain
contentment of mind, perfect assurance, and an incredible misregard of all
that for which men commonly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel, toil
and turmoil themselves.
Whereunto (in your opinion) doth this little flourish of a preamble tend?
For so much as you, my good disciples, and some other jolly fools of ease
and leisure, reading the pleasant titles of some books of our invention, as
Gargantua, Pantagruel, Whippot (Fessepinte.), the Dignity of Codpieces, of
Pease and Bacon with a Commentary, &c., are too ready to judge that there
is nothing in them but jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and
recreative lies; because the outside (which is the title) is usually,
without any farther inquiry, entertained with scoffing and derision. But
truly it is very unbeseeming to make so slight account of the works of men,
seeing yourselves avouch that it is not the habit makes the monk, many
being monasterially accoutred, who inwardly are nothing less than monachal,
and that there are of those that wear Spanish capes, who have but little of
the valour of Spaniards in them. Therefore is it, that you must open the
book, and seriously consider of the matter treated in it. Then shall you
find that it containeth things of far higher value than the box did
promise; that is to say, that the subject thereof is not so foolish as by
the title at the first sight it would appear to be.
And put the case, that in the literal sense you meet with purposes merry
and solacious enough, and consequently very correspondent to their
inscriptions, yet must not you stop there as at the melody of the charming
syrens, but endeavour to interpret that in a sublimer sense which possibly
you intended to have spoken in the jollity of your heart. Did you ever
pick the lock of a cupboard to steal a bottle of wine out of it? Tell me
truly, and, if you did, call to mind the countenance which then you had.
Or, did you ever see a dog with a marrowbone in his mouth,--the beast of
all other, says Plato, lib. 2, de Republica, the most philosophical? If
you have seen him, you might have remarked with what devotion and
circumspectness he wards and watcheth it: with what care he keeps it: how
fervently he holds it: how prudently he gobbets it: with what affection
he breaks it: and with what diligence he sucks it. To what end all this?
What moveth him to take all these pains? What are the hopes of his labour?
What doth he expect to reap thereby? Nothing but a little marrow. True it
is, that this little is more savoury and delicious than the great
quantities of other sorts of meat, because the marrow (as Galen testifieth,
5. facult. nat. & 11. de usu partium) is a nourishment most perfectly
elaboured by nature.
In imitation of this dog, it becomes you to be wise, to smell, feel and
have in estimation these fair goodly books, stuffed with high conceptions,
which, though seemingly easy in the pursuit, are in the cope and encounter
somewhat difficult. And then, like him, you must, by a sedulous lecture,
and frequent meditation, break the bone, and suck out the marrow,--that is,
my allegorical sense, or the things I to myself propose to be signified by
these Pythagorical symbols, with assured hope, that in so doing you will at
last attain to be both well-advised and valiant by the reading of them:
for in the perusal of this treatise you shall find another kind of taste,
and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will
disclose unto you the most glorious sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as
well in what concerneth your religion, as matters of the public state, and
life economical.
Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was a-couching
his Iliads and Odysses, had any thought upon those allegories, which
Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Cornutus squeezed out of him,
and which Politian filched again from them? If you trust it, with neither
hand nor foot do you come near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have
been as little dreamed of by Homer, as the Gospel sacraments were by Ovid
in his Metamorphoses, though a certain gulligut friar (Frere Lubin
croquelardon.) and true bacon-picker would have undertaken to prove it, if
perhaps he had met with as very fools as himself, (and as the proverb says)
a lid worthy of such a kettle.
If you give no credit thereto, why do not you the same in these jovial new
chronicles of mine? Albeit when I did dictate them, I thought upon no more
than you, who possibly were drinking the whilst as I was. For in the
composing of this lordly book, I never lost nor bestowed any more, nor any
other time than what was appointed to serve me for taking of my bodily
refection, that is, whilst I was eating and drinking. And indeed that is
the fittest and most proper hour wherein to write these high matters and
deep sciences: as Homer knew very well, the paragon of all philologues,
and Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Horace calls him, although a
certain sneaking jobernol alleged that his verses smelled more of the wine
than oil.
So saith a turlupin or a new start-up grub of my books, but a turd for him.
The fragrant odour of the wine, O how much more dainty, pleasant, laughing
(Riant, priant, friant.), celestial and delicious it is, than that smell of
oil! And I will glory as much when it is said of me, that I have spent
more on wine than oil, as did Demosthenes, when it was told him, that his
expense on oil was greater than on wine. I truly hold it for an honour and
praise to be called and reputed a Frolic Gualter and a Robin Goodfellow;
for under this name am I welcome in all choice companies of Pantagruelists.
It was upbraided to Demosthenes by an envious surly knave, that his
Orations did smell like the sarpler or wrapper of a foul and filthy
oil-vessel. For this cause interpret you all my deeds and sayings in the
perfectest sense; reverence the cheese-like brain that feeds you with these
fair billevezees and trifling jollities, and do what lies in you to keep me
always merry. Be frolic now, my lads, cheer up your hearts, and joyfully
read the rest, with all the ease of your body and profit of your reins.
But hearken, joltheads, you viedazes, or dickens take ye, remember to drink
a health to me for the like favour again, and I will pledge you instantly,
Tout ares-metys.
Rabelais to the Reader.
Good friends, my Readers, who peruse this Book,
Be not offended, whilst on it you look:
Denude yourselves of all depraved affection,
For it contains no badness, nor infection:
‘Tis true that it brings forth to you no birth
Of any value, but in point of mirth;
Thinking therefore how sorrow might your mind
Consume, I could no apter subject find;
One inch of joy surmounts of grief a span;
Because to laugh is proper to the man.
Chapter 1.I.
Of the Genealogy and Antiquity of Gargantua.
I must refer you to the great chronicle of Pantagruel for the knowledge of
that genealogy and antiquity of race by which Gargantua is come unto us.
In it you may understand more at large how the giants were born in this
world, and how from them by a direct line issued Gargantua, the father of
Pantagruel: and do not take it ill, if for this time I pass by it,
although the subject be such, that the oftener it were remembered, the more
it would please your worshipful Seniorias; according to which you have the
authority of Plato in Philebo and Gorgias; and of Flaccus, who says that
there are some kinds of purposes (such as these are without doubt), which,
the frequentlier they be repeated, still prove the more delectable.
Would to God everyone had as certain knowledge of his genealogy since the
time of the ark of Noah until this age. I think many are at this day
emperors, kings, dukes, princes, and popes on the earth, whose extraction
is from some porters and pardon-pedlars; as, on the contrary, many are now
poor wandering beggars, wretched and miserable, who are descended of the
blood and lineage of great kings and emperors, occasioned, as I conceive
it, by the transport and revolution of kingdoms and empires, from the
Assyrians to the Medes, from the Medes to the Persians, from the Persians
to the Macedonians, from the Macedonians to the Romans, from the Romans to
the Greeks, from the Greeks to the French.
And to give you some hint concerning myself, who speaks unto you, I cannot
think but I am come of the race of some rich king or prince in former
times; for never yet saw you any man that had a greater desire to be a
king, and to be rich, than I have, and that only that I may make good
cheer, do nothing, nor care for anything, and plentifully enrich my
friends, and all honest and learned men. But herein do I comfort myself,
that in the other world I shall be so, yea and greater too than at this
present I dare wish. As for you, with the same or a better conceit
consolate yourselves in your distresses, and drink fresh if you can come by
it.
To return to our wethers, I say that by the sovereign gift of heaven, the
antiquity and genealogy of Gargantua hath been reserved for our use more
full and perfect than any other except that of the Messias, whereof I mean
not to speak; for it belongs not unto my purpose, and the devils, that is
to say, the false accusers and dissembled gospellers, will therein oppose
me. This genealogy was found by John Andrew in a meadow, which he had near
the pole-arch, under the olive-tree, as you go to Narsay: where, as he was
making cast up some ditches, the diggers with their mattocks struck against
a great brazen tomb, and unmeasurably long, for they could never find the
end thereof, by reason that it entered too far within the sluices of
Vienne. Opening this tomb in a certain place thereof, sealed on the top
with the mark of a goblet, about which was written in Etrurian letters Hic
Bibitur, they found nine flagons set in such order as they use to rank
their kyles in Gascony, of which that which was placed in the middle had
under it a big, fat, great, grey, pretty, small, mouldy, little pamphlet,
smelling stronger, but no better than roses. In that book the said
genealogy was found written all at length, in a chancery hand, not in
paper, not in parchment, nor in wax, but in the bark of an elm-tree, yet so
worn with the long tract of time, that hardly could three letters together
be there perfectly discerned.
I (though unworthy) was sent for thither, and with much help of those
spectacles, whereby the art of reading dim writings, and letters that do
not clearly appear to the sight, is practised, as Aristotle teacheth it,
did translate the book as you may see in your Pantagruelizing, that is to
say, in drinking stiffly to your own heart’s desire, and reading the
dreadful and horrific acts of Pantagruel. At the end of the book there was
a little treatise entitled the Antidoted Fanfreluches, or a Galimatia of
extravagant conceits. The rats and moths, or (that I may not lie) other
wicked beasts, had nibbled off the beginning: the rest I have hereto
subjoined, for the reverence I bear to antiquity.
Chapter 1.II.
The Antidoted Fanfreluches: or, a Galimatia of extravagant Conceits found
in an ancient Monument.
No sooner did the Cymbrians’ overcomer
Pass through the air to shun the dew of summer,
But at his coming straight great tubs were fill’d,
With pure fresh butter down in showers distill’d:
Wherewith when water’d was his grandam, Hey,
Aloud he cried, Fish it, sir, I pray y’;
Because his beard is almost all beray’d;
Or, that he would hold to ‘m a scale, he pray’d.
To lick his slipper, some told was much better,
Than to gain pardons, and the merit greater.
In th’ interim a crafty chuff approaches,
From the depth issued, where they fish for roaches;
Who said, Good sirs, some of them let us save,
The eel is here, and in this hollow cave
You’ll find, if that our looks on it demur,
A great waste in the bottom of his fur.
To read this chapter when he did begin,
Nothing but a calf’s horns were found therein;
I feel, quoth he, the mitre which doth hold
My head so chill, it makes my brains take cold.
Being with the perfume of a turnip warm’d,
To stay by chimney hearths himself he arm’d,
Provided that a new thill-horse they made
Of every person of a hair-brain’d head.
They talked of the bunghole of Saint Knowles,
Of Gilbathar and thousand other holes,
If they might be reduced t’ a scarry stuff,
Such as might not be subject to the cough:
Since ev’ry man unseemly did it find,
To see them gaping thus at ev’ry wind:
For, if perhaps they handsomely were closed,
For pledges they to men might be exposed.
In this arrest by Hercules the raven
Was flayed at her (his) return from Lybia haven.
Why am not I, said Minos, there invited?
Unless it be myself, not one’s omitted:
And then it is their mind, I do no more
Of frogs and oysters send them any store:
In case they spare my life and prove but civil,
I give their sale of distaffs to the devil.
To quell him comes Q.B., who limping frets
At the safe pass of tricksy crackarets:
The boulter, the grand Cyclops’ cousin, those
Did massacre, whilst each one wiped his nose:
Few ingles in this fallow ground are bred,
But on a tanner’s mill are winnowed.
Run thither all of you, th’ alarms sound clear,
You shall have more than you had the last year.
Short while thereafter was the bird of Jove
Resolved to speak, though dismal it should prove;
Yet was afraid, when he saw them in ire,
They should o’erthrow quite flat down dead th’ empire.
He rather choosed the fire from heaven to steal,
To boats where were red herrings put to sale;
Than to be calm ‘gainst those, who strive to brave us,
And to the Massorets’ fond words enslave us.
All this at last concluded gallantly,
In spite of Ate and her hern-like thigh,
Who, sitting, saw Penthesilea ta’en,
In her old age, for a cress-selling quean.
Each one cried out, Thou filthy collier toad,
Doth it become thee to be found abroad?
Thou hast the Roman standard filch’d away,
Which they in rags of parchment did display.
Juno was born, who, under the rainbow,
Was a-bird-catching with her duck below:
When her with such a grievous trick they plied
That she had almost been bethwacked by it.
The bargain was, that, of that throatful, she
Should of Proserpina have two eggs free;
And if that she thereafter should be found,
She to a hawthorn hill should be fast bound.
Seven months thereafter, lacking twenty-two,
He, that of old did Carthage town undo,
Did bravely midst them all himself advance,
Requiring of them his inheritance;
Although they justly made up the division,
According to the shoe-welt-law’s decision,
By distributing store of brews and beef
To these poor fellows that did pen the brief.
But th’ year will come, sign of a Turkish bow,
Five spindles yarn’d, and three pot-bottoms too,
Wherein of a discourteous king the dock
Shall pepper’d be under an hermit’s frock.
Ah! that for one she hypocrite you must
Permit so many acres to be lost!
Cease, cease, this vizard may become another,
Withdraw yourselves unto the serpent’s brother.
‘Tis in times past, that he who is shall reign
With his good friends in peace now and again.
No rash nor heady prince shall then rule crave,
Each good will its arbitrement shall have;
And the joy, promised of old as doom
To the heaven’s guests, shall in its beacon come.
Then shall the breeding mares, that benumb’d were,
Like royal palfreys ride triumphant there.
And this continue shall from time to time,
Till Mars be fetter’d for an unknown crime;
Then shall one come, who others will surpass,
Delightful, pleasing, matchless, full of grace.
Cheer up your hearts, approach to this repast,
All trusty friends of mine; for he’s deceased,
Who would not for a world return again,
So highly shall time past be cried up then.
He who was made of wax shall lodge each member
Close by the hinges of a block of timber.
We then no more shall Master, master, whoot,
The swagger, who th’ alarum bell holds out;
Could one seize on the dagger which he bears,
Heads would be free from tingling in the ears,
To baffle the whole storehouse of abuses.
The thus farewell Apollo and the Muses.
Chapter 1.III.
How Gargantua was carried eleven months in his mother’s belly.
Grangousier was a good fellow in his time, and notable jester; he loved to
drink neat, as much as any man that then was in the world, and would
willingly eat salt meat. To this intent he was ordinarily well furnished
with gammons of bacon, both of Westphalia, Mayence and Bayonne, with store
of dried neat’s tongues, plenty of links, chitterlings and puddings in
their season; together with salt beef and mustard, a good deal of hard roes
of powdered mullet called botargos, great provision of sausages, not of
Bolonia (for he feared the Lombard Boccone), but of Bigorre, Longaulnay,
Brene, and Rouargue. In the vigour of his age he married Gargamelle,
daughter to the King of the Parpaillons, a jolly pug, and well-mouthed
wench. These two did oftentimes do the two-backed beast together, joyfully
rubbing and frotting their bacon ‘gainst one another, in so far, that at
last she became great with child of a fair son, and went with him unto the
eleventh month; for so long, yea longer, may a woman carry her great belly,
especially when it is some masterpiece of nature, and a person
predestinated to the performance, in his due time, of great exploits. As
Homer says, that the child, which Neptune begot upon the nymph, was born a
whole year after the conception, that is, in the twelfth month. For, as
Aulus Gellius saith, lib. 3, this long time was suitable to the majesty of
Neptune, that in it the child might receive his perfect form. For the like
reason Jupiter made the night, wherein he lay with Alcmena, last
forty-eight hours, a shorter time not being sufficient for the forging of
Hercules, who cleansed the world of the monsters and tyrants wherewith it
was suppressed. My masters, the ancient Pantagruelists, have confirmed
that which I say, and withal declared it to be not only possible, but also
maintained the lawful birth and legitimation of the infant born of a woman
in the eleventh month after the decease of her husband. Hypocrates, lib.
de alimento. Plinius, lib. 7, cap. 5. Plautus, in his Cistelleria.
Marcus Varro, in his satire inscribed The Testament, alleging to this
purpose the authority of Aristotle. Censorinus, lib. de die natali.
Arist. lib. 7, cap. 3 & 4, de natura animalium. Gellius, lib. 3, cap. 16.
Servius, in his exposition upon this verse of Virgil’s eclogues, Matri
longa decem, &c., and a thousand other fools, whose number hath been
increased by the lawyers ff. de suis, et legit l. intestato. paragrapho.
fin. and in Auth. de restitut. et ea quae parit in xi mense. Moreover upon
these grounds they have foisted in their Robidilardic, or Lapiturolive law.
Gallus ff. de lib. et posth. l. sept. ff. de stat. hom., and some other
laws, which at this time I dare not name. By means whereof the honest
widows may without danger play at the close buttock game with might and
main, and as hard as they can, for the space of the first two months after
the decease of their husbands. I pray you, my good lusty springal lads, if
you find any of these females, that are worth the pains of untying the
codpiece-point, get up, ride upon them, and bring them to me; for, if they
happen within the third month to conceive, the child should be heir to the
deceased, if, before he died, he had no other children, and the mother
shall pass for an honest woman.
When she is known to have conceived, thrust forward boldly, spare her not,
whatever betide you, seeing the paunch is full. As Julia, the daughter of
the Emperor Octavian, never prostituted herself to her belly-bumpers, but
when she found herself with child, after the manner of ships, that receive
not their steersman till they have their ballast and lading. And if any
blame them for this their rataconniculation, and reiterated lechery upon
their pregnancy and big-belliedness, seeing beasts, in the like exigent of
their fulness, will never suffer the male-masculant to encroach them, their
answer will be, that those are beasts, but they are women, very well
skilled in the pretty vales and small fees of the pleasant trade and
mysteries of superfetation: as Populia heretofore answered, according to
the relation of Macrobius, lib. 2. Saturnal. If the devil will not have
them to bag, he must wring hard the spigot, and stop the bung-hole.
Chapter 1.IV.
How Gargamelle, being great with Gargantua, did eat a huge deal of tripes.
The occasion and manner how Gargamelle was brought to bed, and delivered of
her child, was thus: and, if you do not believe it, I wish your bum-gut
fall out and make an escapade. Her bum-gut, indeed, or fundament escaped
her in an afternoon, on the third day of February, with having eaten at
dinner too many godebillios. Godebillios are the fat tripes of coiros.
Coiros are beeves fattened at the cratch in ox-stalls, or in the fresh
guimo meadows. Guimo meadows are those that for their fruitfulness may be
mowed twice a year. Of those fat beeves they had killed three hundred
sixty-seven thousand and fourteen, to be salted at Shrovetide, that in the
entering of the spring they might have plenty of powdered beef, wherewith
to season their mouths at the beginning of their meals, and to taste their
wine the better.
They had abundance of tripes, as you have heard, and they were so
delicious, that everyone licked his fingers. But the mischief was this,
that, for all men could do, there was no possibility to keep them long in
that relish; for in a very short while they would have stunk, which had
been an undecent thing. It was therefore concluded, that they should be
all of them gulched up, without losing anything. To this effect they
invited all the burghers of Sainais, of Suille, of the Roche-Clermaud, of
Vaugaudry, without omitting the Coudray, Monpensier, the Gue de Vede, and
other their neighbours, all stiff drinkers, brave fellows, and good players
at the kyles. The good man Grangousier took great pleasure in their
company, and commanded there should be no want nor pinching for anything.
Nevertheless he bade his wife eat sparingly, because she was near her time,
and that these tripes were no very commendable meat. They would fain, said
he, be at the chewing of ordure, that would eat the case wherein it was.
Notwithstanding these admonitions, she did eat sixteen quarters, two
bushels, three pecks and a pipkin full. O the fair fecality wherewith she
swelled, by the ingrediency of such shitten stuff!
After dinner they all went out in a hurl to the grove of the willows,
where, on the green grass, to the sound of the merry flutes and pleasant
bagpipes, they danced so gallantly, that it was a sweet and heavenly sport
to see them so frolic.
Chapter 1.V.
The Discourse of the Drinkers.
Then did they fall upon the chat of victuals and some belly furniture to be
snatched at in the very same place. Which purpose was no sooner mentioned,
but forthwith began flagons to go, gammons to trot, goblets to fly, great
bowls to ting, glasses to ring. Draw, reach, fill, mix, give it me without
water. So, my friend, so, whip me off this glass neatly, bring me hither
some claret, a full weeping glass till it run over. A cessation and truce
with thirst. Ha, thou false fever, wilt thou not be gone? By my figgins,
godmother, I cannot as yet enter in the humour of being merry, nor drink so
currently as I would. You have catched a cold, gammer? Yea, forsooth,
sir. By the belly of Sanct Buff, let us talk of our drink: I never drink
but at my hours, like the Pope’s mule. And I never drink but in my
breviary, like a fair father guardian. Which was first, thirst or
drinking? Thirst, for who in the time of innocence would have drunk
without being athirst? Nay, sir, it was drinking; for privatio
praesupponit habitum. I am learned, you see: Foecundi calices quem non
fecere disertum? We poor innocents drink but too much without thirst. Not
I truly, who am a sinner, for I never drink without thirst, either present
or future. To prevent it, as you know, I drink for the thirst to come. I
drink eternally. This is to me an eternity of drinking, and drinking of
eternity. Let us sing, let us drink, and tune up our roundelays. Where is
my funnel? What, it seems I do not drink but by an attorney? Do you wet
yourselves to dry, or do you dry to wet you? Pish, I understand not the
rhetoric (theoric, I should say), but I help myself somewhat by the
practice. Baste! enough! I sup, I wet, I humect, I moisten my gullet, I
drink, and all for fear of dying. Drink always and you shall never die.
If I drink not, I am a-ground, dry, gravelled and spent. I am stark dead
without drink, and my soul ready to fly into some marsh amongst frogs; the
soul never dwells in a dry place, drouth kills it. O you butlers, creators
of new forms, make me of no drinker a drinker, a perennity and
everlastingness of sprinkling and bedewing me through these my parched and
sinewy bowels. He drinks in vain that feels not the pleasure of it. This
entereth into my veins,--the pissing tools and urinal vessels shall have
nothing of it. I would willingly wash the tripes of the calf which I
apparelled this morning. I have pretty well now ballasted my stomach and
stuffed my paunch. If the papers of my bonds and bills could drink as well
as I do, my creditors would not want for wine when they come to see me, or
when they are to make any formal exhibition of their rights to what of me
they can demand. This hand of yours spoils your nose. O how many other
such will enter here before this go out! What, drink so shallow? It is
enough to break both girds and petrel. This is called a cup of
dissimulation, or flagonal hypocrisy.
What difference is there between a bottle and a flagon. Great difference;
for the bottle is stopped and shut up with a stopple, but the flagon with a
vice (La bouteille est fermee a bouchon, et le flaccon a vis.). Bravely
and well played upon the words! Our fathers drank lustily, and emptied
their cans. Well cacked, well sung! Come, let us drink: will you send
nothing to the river? Here is one going to wash the tripes. I drink no
more than a sponge. I drink like a Templar knight. And I, tanquam
sponsus. And I, sicut terra sine aqua. Give me a synonymon for a gammon
of bacon. It is the compulsory of drinkers: it is a pulley. By a
pulley-rope wine is let down into a cellar, and by a gammon into the
stomach. Hey! now, boys, hither, some drink, some drink. There is no
trouble in it. Respice personam, pone pro duos, bus non est in usu. If I
could get up as well as I can swallow down, I had been long ere now very
high in the air.
Thus became Tom Tosspot rich,--thus went in the tailor’s stitch. Thus did
Bacchus conquer th’ Inde--thus Philosophy, Melinde. A little rain allays a
great deal of wind: long tippling breaks the thunder. But if there came
such liquor from my ballock, would you not willingly thereafter suck the
udder whence it issued? Here, page, fill! I prithee, forget me not when
it comes to my turn, and I will enter the election I have made of thee into
the very register of my heart. Sup, Guillot, and spare not, there is
somewhat in the pot. I appeal from thirst, and disclaim its jurisdiction.
Page, sue out my appeal in form. This remnant in the bottom of the glass
must follow its leader. I was wont heretofore to drink out all, but now I
leave nothing. Let us not make too much haste; it is requisite we carry
all along with us. Heyday, here are tripes fit for our sport, and, in
earnest, excellent godebillios of the dun ox (you know) with the black
streak. O, for God’s sake, let us lash them soundly, yet thriftily.
Drink, or I will,--No, no, drink, I beseech you (Ou je vous, je vous
prie.). Sparrows will not eat unless you bob them on the tail, nor can I
drink if I be not fairly spoke to. The concavities of my body are like
another Hell for their capacity. Lagonaedatera (lagon lateris cavitas:
aides orcus: and eteros alter.). There is not a corner, nor coney-burrow in
all my body, where this wine doth not ferret out my thirst. Ho, this will
bang it soundly. But this shall banish it utterly. Let us wind our horns
by the sound of flagons and bottles, and cry aloud, that whoever hath lost
his thirst come not hither to seek it. Long clysters of drinking are to be
voided without doors. The great God made the planets, and we make the
platters neat. I have the word of the gospel in my mouth, Sitio. The
stone called asbestos is not more unquenchable than the thirst of my
paternity. Appetite comes with eating, says Angeston, but the thirst goes
away with drinking. I have a remedy against thirst, quite contrary to that
which is good against the biting of a mad dog. Keep running after a dog,
and he will never bite you; drink always before the thirst, and it will
never come upon you. There I catch you, I awake you. Argus had a hundred
eyes for his sight, a butler should have (like Briareus) a hundred hands
wherewith to fill us wine indefatigably. Hey now, lads, let us moisten
ourselves, it will be time to dry hereafter. White wine here, wine, boys!
Pour out all in the name of Lucifer, fill here, you, fill and fill
(peascods on you) till it be full. My tongue peels. Lans trinque; to
thee, countryman, I drink to thee, good fellow, comrade to thee, lusty,
lively! Ha, la, la, that was drunk to some purpose, and bravely gulped
over. O lachryma Christi, it is of the best grape! I’faith, pure Greek,
Greek! O the fine white wine! upon my conscience, it is a kind of taffetas
wine,--hin, hin, it is of one ear, well wrought, and of good wool.
Courage, comrade, up thy heart, billy! We will not be beasted at this
bout, for I have got one trick. Ex hoc in hoc. There is no enchantment
nor charm there, every one of you hath seen it. My ‘prenticeship is out, I
am a free man at this trade. I am prester mast (Prestre mace, maistre
passe.), Prish, Brum! I should say, master past. O the drinkers, those
that are a-dry, O poor thirsty souls! Good page, my friend, fill me here
some, and crown the wine, I pray thee. Like a cardinal! Natura abhorret
vacuum. Would you say that a fly could drink in this? This is after the
fashion of Switzerland. Clear off, neat, supernaculum! Come, therefore,
blades, to this divine liquor and celestial juice, swill it over heartily,
and spare not! It is a decoction of nectar and ambrosia.
Chapter 1.VI.
How Gargantua was born in a strange manner.
Whilst they were on this discourse and pleasant tattle of drinking,
Gargamelle began to be a little unwell in her lower parts; whereupon
Grangousier arose from off the grass, and fell to comfort her very honestly
and kindly, suspecting that she was in travail, and told her that it was
best for her to sit down upon the grass under the willows, because she was
like very shortly to see young feet, and that therefore it was convenient
she should pluck up her spirits, and take a good heart of new at the fresh
arrival of her baby; saying to her withal, that although the pain was
somewhat grievous to her, it would be but of short continuance, and that
the succeeding joy would quickly remove that sorrow, in such sort that she
should not so much as remember it. On, with a sheep’s courage! quoth he.
Despatch this boy, and we will speedily fall to work for the making of
another. Ha! said she, so well as you speak at your own ease, you that are
men! Well, then, in the name of God, I’ll do my best, seeing that you will
have it so, but would to God that it were cut off from you! What? said
Grangousier. Ha, said she, you are a good man indeed, you understand it
well enough. What, my member? said he. By the goat’s blood, if it please
you, that shall be done instantly; cause bring hither a knife. Alas, said
she, the Lord forbid, and pray Jesus to forgive me! I did not say it from
my heart, therefore let it alone, and do not do it neither more nor less
any kind of harm for my speaking so to you. But I am like to have work
enough to do to-day and all for your member, yet God bless you and it.
Courage, courage, said he, take you no care of the matter, let the four
foremost oxen do the work. I will yet go drink one whiff more, and if in
the mean time anything befall you that may require my presence, I will be
so near to you, that, at the first whistling in your fist, I shall be with
you forthwith. A little while after she began to groan, lament and cry.
Then suddenly came the midwives from all quarters, who groping her below,
found some peloderies, which was a certain filthy stuff, and of a taste
truly bad enough. This they thought had been the child, but it was her
fundament, that was slipped out with the mollification of her straight
entrail, which you call the bum-gut, and that merely by eating of too many
tripes, as we have showed you before. Whereupon an old ugly trot in the
company, who had the repute of an expert she-physician, and was come from
Brisepaille, near to Saint Genou, three score years before, made her so
horrible a restrictive and binding medicine, and whereby all her larris,
arse-pipes, and conduits were so oppilated, stopped, obstructed, and
contracted, that you could hardly have opened and enlarged them with your
teeth, which is a terrible thing to think upon; seeing the Devil at the
mass at Saint Martin’s was puzzled with the like task, when with his teeth
he had lengthened out the parchment whereon he wrote the tittle-tattle of
two young mangy whores. By this inconvenient the cotyledons of her matrix
were presently loosed, through which the child sprang up and leaped, and
so, entering into the hollow vein, did climb by the diaphragm even above
her shoulders, where the vein divides itself into two, and from thence
taking his way towards the left side, issued forth at her left ear. As
soon as he was born, he cried not as other babes use to do, Miez, miez,
miez, miez, but with a high, sturdy, and big voice shouted about, Some
drink, some drink, some drink, as inviting all the world to drink with him.
The noise hereof was so extremely great, that it was heard in both the
countries at once of Beauce and Bibarois. I doubt me, that you do not
thoroughly believe the truth of this strange nativity. Though you believe
it not, I care not much: but an honest man, and of good judgment,
believeth still what is told him, and that which he finds written.
Is this beyond our law or our faith--against reason or the holy Scripture?
For my part, I find nothing in the sacred Bible that is against it. But
tell me, if it had been the will of God, would you say that he could not do
it? Ha, for favour sake, I beseech you, never emberlucock or inpulregafize
your spirits with these vain thoughts and idle conceits; for I tell you, it
is not impossible with God, and, if he pleased, all women henceforth should
bring forth their children at the ear. Was not Bacchus engendered out of
the very thigh of Jupiter? Did not Roquetaillade come out at his mother’s
heel, and Crocmoush from the slipper of his nurse? Was not Minerva born of
the brain, even through the ear of Jove? Adonis, of the bark of a myrrh
tree; and Castor and Pollux of the doupe of that egg which was laid and
hatched by Leda? But you would wonder more, and with far greater
amazement, if I should now present you with that chapter of Plinius,
wherein he treateth of strange births, and contrary to nature, and yet am
not I so impudent a liar as he was. Read the seventh book of his Natural
History, chap.3, and trouble not my head any more about this.
Chapter 1.VII.
After what manner Gargantua had his name given him, and how he tippled,
bibbed, and curried the can.
The good man Grangousier, drinking and making merry with the rest, heard
the horrible noise which his son had made as he entered into the light of
this world, when he cried out, Some drink, some drink, some drink;
whereupon he said in French, Que grand tu as et souple le gousier! that is
to say, How great and nimble a throat thou hast. Which the company
hearing, said that verily the child ought to be called Gargantua; because
it was the first word that after his birth his father had spoke, in
imitation, and at the example of the ancient Hebrews; whereunto he
condescended, and his mother was very well pleased therewith. In the
meanwhile, to quiet the child, they gave him to drink a tirelaregot, that
is, till his throat was like to crack with it; then was he carried to the
font, and there baptized, according to the manner of good Christians.
Immediately thereafter were appointed for him seventeen thousand, nine
hundred, and thirteen cows of the towns of Pautille and Brehemond, to
furnish him with milk in ordinary, for it was impossible to find a nurse
sufficient for him in all the country, considering the great quantity of
milk that was requisite for his nourishment; although there were not
wanting some doctors of the opinion of Scotus, who affirmed that his own
mother gave him suck, and that she could draw out of her breasts one
thousand, four hundred, two pipes, and nine pails of milk at every time.
Which indeed is not probable, and this point hath been found duggishly
scandalous and offensive to tender ears, for that it savoured a little of
heresy. Thus was he handled for one year and ten months; after which time,
by the advice of physicians, they began to carry him, and then was made for
him a fine little cart drawn with oxen, of the invention of Jan Denio,
wherein they led him hither and thither with great joy; and he was worth
the seeing, for he was a fine boy, had a burly physiognomy, and almost ten
chins. He cried very little, but beshit himself every hour: for, to speak
truly of him, he was wonderfully phlegmatic in his posteriors, both by
reason of his natural complexion and the accidental disposition which had
befallen him by his too much quaffing of the Septembral juice. Yet without
a cause did not he sup one drop; for if he happened to be vexed, angry,
displeased, or sorry, if he did fret, if he did weep, if he did cry, and
what grievous quarter soever he kept, in bringing him some drink, he would
be instantly pacified, reseated in his own temper, in a good humour again,
and as still and quiet as ever. One of his governesses told me (swearing
by her fig), how he was so accustomed to this kind of way, that, at the
sound of pints and flagons, he would on a sudden fall into an ecstasy, as
if he had then tasted of the joys of paradise; so that they, upon
consideration of this, his divine complexion, would every morning, to cheer
him up, play with a knife upon the glasses, on the bottles with their
stopples, and on the pottle-pots with their lids and covers, at the sound
whereof he became gay, did leap for joy, would loll and rock himself in the
cradle, then nod with his head, monochordizing with his fingers, and
barytonizing with his tail.
Chapter 1.VIII.
How they apparelled Gargantua.
Being of this age, his father ordained to have clothes made to him in his
own livery, which was white and blue. To work then went the tailors, and
with great expedition were those clothes made, cut, and sewed, according to
the fashion that was then in request. I find by the ancient records or
pancarts, to be seen in the chamber of accounts, or court of the exchequer
at Montsoreau, that he was accoutred in manner as followeth. To make him
every shirt of his were taken up nine hundred ells of Chasteleraud linen,
and two hundred for the gussets, in manner of cushions, which they put
under his armpits. His shirt was not gathered nor plaited, for the
plaiting of shirts was not found out till the seamstresses (when the point
of their needle (Besongner du cul, Englished The eye of the needle.) was
broken) began to work and occupy with the tail. There were taken up for
his doublet, eight hundred and thirteen ells of white satin, and for his
points fifteen hundred and nine dogs’ skins and a half. Then was it that
men began to tie their breeches to their doublets, and not their doublets
to their breeches: for it is against nature, as hath most amply been
showed by Ockham upon the exponibles of Master Haultechaussade.
For his breeches were taken up eleven hundred and five ells and a third of
white broadcloth. They were cut in the form of pillars, chamfered,
channelled and pinked behind that they might not over-heat his reins: and
were, within the panes, puffed out with the lining of as much blue damask
as was needful: and remark, that he had very good leg-harness,
proportionable to the rest of his stature.
For his codpiece were used sixteen ells and a quarter of the same cloth,
and it was fashioned on the top like unto a triumphant arch, most gallantly
fastened with two enamelled clasps, in each of which was set a great
emerald, as big as an orange; for, as says Orpheus, lib. de lapidibus, and
Plinius, libro ultimo, it hath an erective virtue and comfortative of the
natural member. The exiture, outjecting or outstanding, of his codpiece
was of the length of a yard, jagged and pinked, and withal bagging, and
strutting out with the blue damask lining, after the manner of his
breeches. But had you seen the fair embroidery of the small needlework
purl, and the curiously interlaced knots, by the goldsmith’s art set out
and trimmed with rich diamonds, precious rubies, fine turquoises, costly
emeralds, and Persian pearls, you would have compared it to a fair
cornucopia, or horn of abundance, such as you see in antiques, or as Rhea
gave to the two nymphs, Amalthea and Ida, the nurses of Jupiter.
And, like to that horn of abundance, it was still gallant, succulent,
droppy, sappy, pithy, lively, always flourishing, always fructifying, full
of juice, full of flower, full of fruit, and all manner of delight. I avow
God, it would have done one good to have seen him, but I will tell you more
of him in the book which I have made of the dignity of codpieces. One
thing I will tell you, that as it was both long and large, so was it well
furnished and victualled within, nothing like unto the hypocritical
codpieces of some fond wooers and wench-courtiers, which are stuffed only
with wind, to the great prejudice of the female sex.
For his shoes were taken up four hundred and six ells of blue
crimson-velvet, and were very neatly cut by parallel lines, joined in
uniform cylinders. For the soling of them were made use of eleven hundred
hides of brown cows, shapen like the tail of a keeling.
For his coat were taken up eighteen hundred ells of blue velvet, dyed in
grain, embroidered in its borders with fair gilliflowers, in the middle
decked with silver purl, intermixed with plates of gold and store of
pearls, hereby showing that in his time he would prove an especial good
fellow and singular whipcan.
His girdle was made of three hundred ells and a half of silken serge, half
white and half blue, if I mistake it not. His sword was not of Valentia,
nor his dagger of Saragossa, for his father could not endure these hidalgos
borrachos maranisados como diablos: but he had a fair sword made of wood,
and the dagger of boiled leather, as well painted and gilded as any man
could wish.
His purse was made of the cod of an elephant, which was given him by Herr
Pracontal, proconsul of Lybia.
For his gown were employed nine thousand six hundred ells, wanting
two-thirds, of blue velvet, as before, all so diagonally purled, that by
true perspective issued thence an unnamed colour, like that you see in the
necks of turtle-doves or turkey-cocks, which wonderfully rejoiced the eyes
of the beholders. For his bonnet or cap were taken up three hundred, two
ells and a quarter of white velvet, and the form thereof was wide and round,
of the bigness of his head; for his father said that the caps of the
Marrabaise fashion, made like the cover of a pasty, would one time or other
bring a mischief on those that wore them. For his plume, he wore a fair
great blue feather, plucked from an onocrotal of the country of Hircania the
wild, very prettily hanging down over his right ear. For the jewel or
brooch which in his cap he carried, he had in a cake of gold, weighing three
score and eight marks, a fair piece enamelled, wherein was portrayed a man’s
body with two heads, looking towards one another, four arms, four feet, two
arses, such as Plato, in Symposio, says was the mystical beginning of man’s
nature; and about it was written in Ionic letters, Agame ou zetei ta eautes,
or rather, Aner kai gune zugada anthrotos idiaitata, that is, Vir et mulier
junctim propriissime homo. To wear about his neck, he had a golden chain,
weighing twenty-five thousand and sixty-three marks of gold, the links
thereof being made after the manner of great berries, amongst which were set
in work green jaspers engraven and cut dragon-like, all environed with beams
and sparks, as king Nicepsos of old was wont to wear them: and it reached
down to the very bust of the rising of his belly, whereby he reaped great
benefit all his life long, as the Greek physicians know well enough. For
his gloves were put in work sixteen otters’ skins, and three of the
loupgarous, or men-eating wolves, for the bordering of them: and of this
stuff were they made, by the appointment of the Cabalists of Sanlouand. As
for the rings which his father would have him to wear, to renew the ancient
mark of nobility, he had on the forefinger of his left hand a carbuncle as
big as an ostrich’s egg, enchased very daintily in gold of the fineness of a
Turkey seraph. Upon the middle finger of the same hand he had a ring made
of four metals together, of the strangest fashion that ever was seen; so
that the steel did not crash against the gold, nor the silver crush the
copper. All this was made by Captain Chappuys, and Alcofribas his good
agent. On the medical finger of his right hand he had a ring made
spire-wise, wherein was set a perfect Balas ruby, a pointed diamond, and
a Physon emerald, of an inestimable value. For Hans Carvel, the king of
Melinda’s jeweller, esteemed them at the rate of threescore nine millions,
eight hundred ninety-four thousand, and eighteen French crowns of Berry, and
at so much did the Foucres of Augsburg prize them.
Chapter 1.IX.
The colours and liveries of Gargantua.
Gargantua’s colours were white and blue, as I have showed you before, by
which his father would give us to understand that his son to him was a
heavenly joy; for the white did signify gladness, pleasure, delight, and
rejoicing, and the blue, celestial things. I know well enough that, in
reading this, you laugh at the old drinker, and hold this exposition of
colours to be very extravagant, and utterly disagreeable to reason, because
white is said to signify faith, and blue constancy. But without moving,
vexing, heating, or putting you in a chafe (for the weather is dangerous),
answer me, if it please you; for no other compulsory way of arguing will I
use towards you, or any else; only now and then I will mention a word or
two of my bottle. What is it that induceth you, what stirs you up to
believe, or who told you that white signifieth faith, and blue constancy?
An old paltry book, say you, sold by the hawking pedlars and balladmongers,
entitled The Blason of Colours. Who made it? Whoever it was, he was wise
in that he did not set his name to it. But, besides, I know not what I
should rather admire in him, his presumption or his sottishness. His
presumption and overweening, for that he should without reason, without
cause, or without any appearance of truth, have dared to prescribe, by his
private authority, what things should be denotated and signified by the
colour: which is the custom of tyrants, who will have their will to bear
sway in stead of equity, and not of the wise and learned, who with the
evidence of reason satisfy their readers. His sottishness and want of
spirit, in that he thought that, without any other demonstration or
sufficient argument, the world would be pleased to make his blockish and
ridiculous impositions the rule of their devices. In effect, according to
the proverb, To a shitten tail fails never ordure, he hath found, it seems,
some simple ninny in those rude times of old, when the wearing of high
round bonnets was in fashion, who gave some trust to his writings,
according to which they carved and engraved their apophthegms and mottoes,
trapped and caparisoned their mules and sumpter-horses, apparelled their
pages, quartered their breeches, bordered their gloves, fringed the
curtains and valances of their beds, painted their ensigns, composed songs,
and, which is worse, placed many deceitful jugglings and unworthy base
tricks undiscoveredly amongst the very chastest matrons and most reverend
sciences. In the like darkness and mist of ignorance are wrapped up these
vain-glorious courtiers and name-transposers, who, going about in their
impresas to signify esperance (that is, hope), have portrayed a sphere--and
birds’ pennes for pains--l’ancholie (which is the flower colombine) for
melancholy--a waning moon or crescent, to show the increasing or rising of
one’s fortune--a bench rotten and broken, to signify bankrupt--non and a
corslet for non dur habit (otherwise non durabit, it shall not last), un
lit sans ciel, that is, a bed without a tester, for un licencie, a
graduated person, as bachelor in divinity or utter barrister-at-law; which
are equivocals so absurd and witless, so barbarous and clownish, that a
fox’s tail should be fastened to the neck-piece of, and a vizard made of a
cowsherd given to everyone that henceforth should offer, after the
restitution of learning, to make use of any such fopperies in France.
By the same reasons (if reasons I should call them, and not ravings rather,
and idle triflings about words), might I cause paint a pannier, to signify
that I am in pain--a mustard-pot, that my heart tarries much for’t--one
pissing upwards for a bishop--the bottom of a pair of breeches for a vessel
full of fart-hings--a codpiece for the office of the clerks of the
sentences, decrees, or judgments, or rather, as the English bears it, for
the tail of a codfish--and a dog’s turd for the dainty turret wherein lies
the love of my sweetheart. Far otherwise did heretofore the sages of
Egypt, when they wrote by letters, which they called hieroglyphics, which
none understood who were not skilled in the virtue, property, and nature of
the things represented by them. Of which Orus Apollon hath in Greek
composed two books, and Polyphilus, in his Dream of Love, set down more.
In France you have a taste of them in the device or impresa of my Lord
Admiral, which was carried before that time by Octavian Augustus. But my
little skiff alongst these unpleasant gulfs and shoals will sail no
further, therefore must I return to the port from whence I came. Yet do I
hope one day to write more at large of these things, and to show both by
philosophical arguments and authorities, received and approved of by and
from all antiquity, what, and how many colours there are in nature, and
what may be signified by every one of them, if God save the mould of my
cap, which is my best wine-pot, as my grandam said.
Chapter 1.X.
Of that which is signified by the colours white and blue.
The white therefore signifieth joy, solace, and gladness, and that not at
random, but upon just and very good grounds: which you may perceive to be
true, if laying aside all prejudicate affections, you will but give ear to
what presently I shall expound unto you.
Aristotle saith that, supposing two things contrary in their kind, as good
and evil, virtue and vice, heat and cold, white and black, pleasure and
pain, joy and grief,--and so of others,--if you couple them in such manner
that the contrary of one kind may agree in reason with the contrary of the
other, it must follow by consequence that the other contrary must answer to
the remanent opposite to that wherewith it is conferred. As, for example,
virtue and vice are contrary in one kind, so are good and evil. If one of
the contraries of the first kind be consonant to one of those of the
second, as virtue and goodness, for it is clear that virtue is good, so
shall the other two contraries, which are evil and vice, have the same
connection, for vice is evil.
This logical rule being understood, take these two contraries, joy and
sadness; then these other two, white and black, for they are physically
contrary. If so be, then, that black do signify grief, by good reason then
should white import joy. Nor is this signification instituted by human
imposition, but by the universal consent of the world received, which
philosophers call Jus Gentium, the Law of Nations, or an uncontrollable
right of force in all countries whatsoever. For you know well enough that
all people, and all languages and nations, except the ancient Syracusans
and certain Argives, who had cross and thwarting souls, when they mean
outwardly to give evidence of their sorrow, go in black; and all mourning
is done with black. Which general consent is not without some argument and
reason in nature, the which every man may by himself very suddenly
comprehend, without the instruction of any--and this we call the law of
nature. By virtue of the same natural instinct we know that by white all
the world hath understood joy, gladness, mirth, pleasure, and delight. In
former times the Thracians and Cretans did mark their good, propitious, and
fortunate days with white stones, and their sad, dismal, and unfortunate
ones with black. Is not the night mournful, sad, and melancholic? It is
black and dark by the privation of light. Doth not the light comfort all
the world? And it is more white than anything else. Which to prove, I
could direct you to the book of Laurentius Valla against Bartolus; but an
evangelical testimony I hope will content you. Matth. 17 it is said that,
at the transfiguration of our Lord, Vestimenta ejus facta sunt alba sicut
lux, his apparel was made white like the light. By which lightsome
whiteness he gave his three apostles to understand the idea and figure of
the eternal joys; for by the light are all men comforted, according to the
word of the old woman, who, although she had never a tooth in her head, was
wont to say, Bona lux. And Tobit, chap.5, after he had lost his sight,
when Raphael saluted him, answered, What joy can I have, that do not see
the light of Heaven? In that colour did the angels testify the joy of the
whole world at the resurrection of our Saviour, John 20, and at his
ascension, Acts 1. With the like colour of vesture did St. John the
Evangelist, Apoc. 4.7, see the faithful clothed in the heavenly and blessed
Jerusalem.
Read the ancient, both Greek and Latin histories, and you shall find that
the town of Alba (the first pattern of Rome) was founded and so named by
reason of a white sow that was seen there. You shall likewise find in
those stories, that when any man, after he had vanquished his enemies, was
by decree of the senate to enter into Rome triumphantly, he usually rode in
a chariot drawn by white horses: which in the ovation triumph was also the
custom; for by no sign or colour would they so significantly express the
joy of their coming as by the white. You shall there also find, how
Pericles, the general of the Athenians, would needs have that part of his
army unto whose lot befell the white beans, to spend the whole day in
mirth, pleasure, and ease, whilst the rest were a-fighting. A thousand
other examples and places could I allege to this purpose, but that it is
not here where I should do it.
By understanding hereof, you may resolve one problem, which Alexander
Aphrodiseus hath accounted unanswerable: why the lion, who with his only
cry and roaring affrights all beasts, dreads and feareth only a white cock?
For, as Proclus saith, Libro de Sacrificio et Magia, it is because the
presence of the virtue of the sun, which is the organ and promptuary of all
terrestrial and sidereal light, doth more symbolize and agree with a white
cock, as well in regard of that colour, as of his property and specifical
quality, than with a lion. He saith, furthermore, that devils have been
often seen in the shape of lions, which at the sight of a white cock have
presently vanished. This is the cause why Galli or Gallices (so are the
Frenchmen called, because they are naturally white as milk, which the
Greeks call Gala,) do willingly wear in their caps white feathers, for by
nature they are of a candid disposition, merry, kind, gracious, and
well-beloved, and for their cognizance and arms have the whitest flower
of any, the Flower de luce or Lily.
If you demand how, by white, nature would have us understand joy and
gladness, I answer, that the analogy and uniformity is thus. For, as the
white doth outwardly disperse and scatter the rays of the sight, whereby
the optic spirits are manifestly dissolved, according to the opinion of
Aristotle in his problems and perspective treatises; as you may likewise
perceive by experience, when you pass over mountains covered with snow, how
you will complain that you cannot see well; as Xenophon writes to have
happened to his men, and as Galen very largely declareth, lib. 10, de usu
partium: just so the heart with excessive joy is inwardly dilated, and
suffereth a manifest resolution of the vital spirits, which may go so far
on that it may thereby be deprived of its nourishment, and by consequence
of life itself, by this perichary or extremity of gladness, as Galen saith,
lib. 12, method, lib. 5, de locis affectis, and lib. 2, de symptomatum
causis. And as it hath come to pass in former times, witness Marcus
Tullius, lib. 1, Quaest. Tuscul., Verrius, Aristotle, Titus Livius, in his
relation of the battle of Cannae, Plinius, lib. 7, cap. 32 and 34, A.
Gellius, lib. 3, c. 15, and many other writers,--to Diagoras the Rhodian,
Chilon, Sophocles, Dionysius the tyrant of Sicily, Philippides, Philemon,
Polycrates, Philistion, M. Juventi, and others who died with joy. And as
Avicen speaketh, in 2 canon et lib. de virib. cordis, of the saffron, that
it doth so rejoice the heart that, if you take of it excessively, it will
by a superfluous resolution and dilation deprive it altogether of life.
Here peruse Alex. Aphrodiseus, lib. 1, Probl., cap. 19, and that for a
cause. But what? It seems I am entered further into this point than I
intended at the first. Here, therefore, will I strike sail, referring the
rest to that book of mine which handleth this matter to the full.
Meanwhile, in a word I will tell you, that blue doth certainly signify
heaven and heavenly things, by the same very tokens and symbols that white
signifieth joy and pleasure.
Chapter 1.XI.
Of the youthful age of Gargantua.
Gargantua, from three years upwards unto five, was brought up and
instructed in all convenient discipline by the commandment of his father;
and spent that time like the other little children of the country, that is,
in drinking, eating, and sleeping: in eating, sleeping, and drinking: and
in sleeping, drinking, and eating. Still he wallowed and rolled up and
down himself in the mire and dirt--he blurred and sullied his nose with
filth--he blotted and smutched his face with any kind of scurvy stuff--he
trod down his shoes in the heel--at the flies he did oftentimes yawn, and
ran very heartily after the butterflies, the empire whereof belonged to his
father. He pissed in his shoes, shit in his shirt, and wiped his nose on
his sleeve--he did let his snot and snivel fall in his pottage, and
dabbled, paddled, and slobbered everywhere--he would drink in his slipper,
and ordinarily rub his belly against a pannier. He sharpened his teeth
with a top, washed his hands with his broth, and combed his head with a
bowl. He would sit down betwixt two stools, and his arse to the ground
--would cover himself with a wet sack, and drink in eating of his soup. He
did eat his cake sometimes without bread, would bite in laughing, and laugh
in biting. Oftentimes did he spit in the basin, and fart for fatness, piss
against the sun, and hide himself in the water for fear of rain. He would
strike out of the cold iron, be often in the dumps, and frig and wriggle
it. He would flay the fox, say the ape’s paternoster, return to his sheep,
and turn the hogs to the hay. He would beat the dogs before the lion, put
the plough before the oxen, and claw where it did not itch. He would pump
one to draw somewhat out of him, by griping all would hold fast nothing,
and always eat his white bread first. He shoed the geese, kept a
self-tickling to make himself laugh, and was very steadable in the kitchen:
made a mock at the gods, would cause sing Magnificat at matins, and found
it very convenient so to do. He would eat cabbage, and shite beets,--knew
flies in a dish of milk, and would make them lose their feet. He would
scrape paper, blur parchment, then run away as hard as he could. He would
pull at the kid’s leather, or vomit up his dinner, then reckon without his
host. He would beat the bushes without catching the birds, thought the
moon was made of green cheese, and that bladders are lanterns. Out of one
sack he would take two moultures or fees for grinding; would act the ass’s
part to get some bran, and of his fist would make a mallet. He took the
cranes at the first leap, and would have the mail-coats to be made link
after link. He always looked a given horse in the mouth, leaped from the
cock to the ass, and put one ripe between two green. By robbing Peter he
paid Paul, he kept the moon from the wolves, and hoped to catch larks if
ever the heavens should fall. He did make of necessity virtue, of such
bread such pottage, and cared as little for the peeled as for the shaven.
Every morning he did cast up his gorge, and his father’s little dogs eat
out of the dish with him, and he with them. He would bite their ears, and
they would scratch his nose--he would blow in their arses, and they would
lick his chaps.
But hearken, good fellows, the spigot ill betake you, and whirl round your
brains, if you do not give ear! This little lecher was always groping his
nurses and governesses, upside down, arsiversy, topsyturvy, harri
bourriquet, with a Yacco haick, hyck gio! handling them very rudely in
jumbling and tumbling them to keep them going; for he had already begun to
exercise the tools, and put his codpiece in practice. Which codpiece, or
braguette, his governesses did every day deck up and adorn with fair
nosegays, curious rubies, sweet flowers, and fine silken tufts, and very
pleasantly would pass their time in taking you know what between their
fingers, and dandling it, till it did revive and creep up to the bulk and
stiffness of a suppository, or street magdaleon, which is a hard rolled-up
salve spread upon leather. Then did they burst out in laughing, when they
saw it lift up its ears, as if the sport had liked them. One of them would
call it her little dille, her staff of love, her quillety, her faucetin,
her dandilolly. Another, her peen, her jolly kyle, her bableret, her
membretoon, her quickset imp: another again, her branch of coral, her
female adamant, her placket-racket, her Cyprian sceptre, her jewel for
ladies. And some of the other women would give it these names,--my
bunguetee, my stopple too, my bush-rusher, my gallant wimble, my pretty
borer, my coney-burrow-ferret, my little piercer, my augretine, my dangling
hangers, down right to it, stiff and stout, in and to, my pusher, dresser,
pouting stick, my honey pipe, my pretty pillicock, linky pinky, futilletie,
my lusty andouille, and crimson chitterling, my little couille bredouille,
my pretty rogue, and so forth. It belongs to me, said one. It is mine,
said the other. What, quoth a third, shall I have no share in it? By my
faith, I will cut it then. Ha, to cut it, said the other, would hurt him.
Madam, do you cut little children’s things? Were his cut off, he would be
then Monsieur sans queue, the curtailed master. And that he might play and
sport himself after the manner of the other little children of the country,
they made him a fair weather whirl-jack of the wings of the windmill of
Myrebalais.
Chapter 1.XII.
Of Gargantua’s wooden horses.
Afterwards, that he might be all his lifetime a good rider, they made to
him a fair great horse of wood, which he did make leap, curvet, jerk out
behind, and skip forward, all at a time: to pace, trot, rack, gallop,
amble, to play the hobby, the hackney-gelding: go the gait of the camel,
and of the wild ass. He made him also change his colour of hair, as the
monks of Coultibo (according to the variety of their holidays) use to do
their clothes, from bay brown, to sorrel, dapple-grey, mouse-dun,
deer-colour, roan, cow-colour, gingioline, skewed colour, piebald, and the
colour of the savage elk.
Himself of a huge big post made a hunting nag, and another for daily
service of the beam of a vinepress: and of a great oak made up a mule,
with a footcloth, for his chamber. Besides this, he had ten or twelve
spare horses, and seven horses for post; and all these were lodged in his
own chamber, close by his bedside. One day the Lord of Breadinbag
(Painensac.) came to visit his father in great bravery, and with a gallant
train: and, at the same time, to see him came likewise the Duke of
Freemeal (Francrepas.) and the Earl of Wetgullet (Mouillevent.). The house
truly for so many guests at once was somewhat narrow, but especially the
stables; whereupon the steward and harbinger of the said Lord Breadinbag,
to know if there were any other empty stable in the house, came to
Gargantua, a little young lad, and secretly asked him where the stables of
the great horses were, thinking that children would be ready to tell all.
Then he led them up along the stairs of the castle, passing by the second
hall unto a broad great gallery, by which they entered into a large tower,
and as they were going up at another pair of stairs, said the harbinger to
the steward, This child deceives us, for the stables are never on the top
of the house. You may be mistaken, said the steward, for I know some
places at Lyons, at the Basmette, at Chaisnon, and elsewhere, which have
their stables at the very tops of the houses: so it may be that behind the
house there is a way to come to this ascent. But I will question with him
further. Then said he to Gargantua, My pretty little boy, whither do you
lead us? To the stable, said he, of my great horses. We are almost come
to it; we have but these stairs to go up at. Then leading them alongst
another great hall, he brought them into his chamber, and, opening the
door, said unto them, This is the stable you ask for; this is my jennet;
this is my gelding; this is my courser, and this is my hackney, and laid on
them with a great lever. I will bestow upon you, said he, this Friesland
horse; I had him from Frankfort, yet will I give him you; for he is a
pretty little nag, and will go very well, with a tessel of goshawks, half a
dozen of spaniels, and a brace of greyhounds: thus are you king of the
hares and partridges for all this winter. By St. John, said they, now we
are paid, he hath gleeked us to some purpose, bobbed we are now for ever.
I deny it, said he,--he was not here above three days. Judge you now,
whether they had most cause, either to hide their heads for shame, or to
laugh at the jest. As they were going down again thus amazed, he asked
them, Will you have a whimwham (Aubeliere.)? What is that, said they? It
is, said he, five turds to make you a muzzle. To-day, said the steward,
though we happen to be roasted, we shall not be burnt, for we are pretty
well quipped and larded, in my opinion. O my jolly dapper boy, thou hast
given us a gudgeon; I hope to see thee Pope before I die. I think so, said
he, myself; and then shall you be a puppy, and this gentle popinjay a
perfect papelard, that is, dissembler. Well, well, said the harbinger.
But, said Gargantua, guess how many stitches there are in my mother’s
smock. Sixteen, quoth the harbinger. You do not speak gospel, said
Gargantua, for there is cent before, and cent behind, and you did not
reckon them ill, considering the two under holes. When? said the
harbinger. Even then, said Gargantua, when they made a shovel of your nose
to take up a quarter of dirt, and of your throat a funnel, wherewith to put
it into another vessel, because the bottom of the old one was out.
Cocksbod, said the steward, we have met with a prater. Farewell, master
tattler, God keep you, so goodly are the words which you come out with, and
so fresh in your mouth, that it had need to be salted.
Thus going down in great haste, under the arch of the stairs they let fall
the great lever, which he had put upon their backs; whereupon Gargantua
said, What a devil! you are, it seems, but bad horsemen, that suffer your
bilder to fail you when you need him most. If you were to go from hence to
Cahusac, whether had you rather, ride on a gosling or lead a sow in a
leash? I had rather drink, said the harbinger. With this they entered
into the lower hall, where the company was, and relating to them this new
story, they made them laugh like a swarm of flies.
Chapter 1.XIII.
How Gargantua’s wonderful understanding became known to his father
Grangousier, by the invention of a torchecul or wipebreech.
About the end of the fifth year, Grangousier returning from the conquest of
the Canarians, went by the way to see his son Gargantua. There was he
filled with joy, as such a father might be at the sight of such a child of
his: and whilst he kissed and embraced him, he asked many childish
questions of him about divers matters, and drank very freely with him and
with his governesses, of whom in great earnest he asked, amongst other
things, whether they had been careful to keep him clean and sweet. To this
Gargantua answered, that he had taken such a course for that himself, that
in all the country there was not to be found a cleanlier boy than he. How
is that? said Grangousier. I have, answered Gargantua, by a long and
curious experience, found out a means to wipe my bum, the most lordly, the
most excellent, and the most convenient that ever was seen. What is that?
said Grangousier, how is it? I will tell you by-and-by, said Gargantua.
Once I did wipe me with a gentle-woman’s velvet mask, and found it to be
good; for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my
fundament. Another time with one of their hoods, and in like manner that
was comfortable. At another time with a lady’s neckerchief, and after that
I wiped me with some ear-pieces of hers made of crimson satin, but there
was such a number of golden spangles in them (turdy round things, a pox
take them) that they fetched away all the skin of my tail with a vengeance.
Now I wish St. Antony’s fire burn the bum-gut of the goldsmith that made
them, and of her that wore them! This hurt I cured by wiping myself with a
page’s cap, garnished with a feather after the Switzers’ fashion.
Afterwards, in dunging behind a bush, I found a March-cat, and with it I
wiped my breech, but her claws were so sharp that they scratched and
exulcerated all my perinee. Of this I recovered the next morning
thereafter, by wiping myself with my mother’s gloves, of a most excellent
perfume and scent of the Arabian Benin. After that I wiped me with sage,
with fennel, with anet, with marjoram, with roses, with gourd-leaves, with
beets, with colewort, with leaves of the vine-tree, with mallows,
wool-blade, which is a tail-scarlet, with lettuce, and with spinach leaves.
All this did very great good to my leg. Then with mercury, with parsley,
with nettles, with comfrey, but that gave me the bloody flux of Lombardy,
which I healed by wiping me with my braguette. Then I wiped my tail in the
sheets, in the coverlet, in the curtains, with a cushion, with arras
hangings, with a green carpet, with a table-cloth, with a napkin, with a
handkerchief, with a combing-cloth; in all which I found more pleasure than
do the mangy dogs when you rub them. Yea, but, said Grangousier, which
torchecul did you find to be the best? I was coming to it, said Gargantua,
and by-and-by shall you hear the tu autem, and know the whole mystery and
knot of the matter. I wiped myself with hay, with straw, with
thatch-rushes, with flax, with wool, with paper, but,
Who his foul tail with paper wipes,
Shall at his ballocks leave some chips.
What, said Grangousier, my little rogue, hast thou been at the pot, that
thou dost rhyme already? Yes, yes, my lord the king, answered Gargantua, I
can rhyme gallantly, and rhyme till I become hoarse with rheum. Hark, what
our privy says to the skiters:
Shittard,
Squirtard,
Crackard,
Turdous,
Thy bung
Hath flung
Some dung
On us:
Filthard,
Cackard,
Stinkard,
St. Antony’s fire seize on thy toane (bone?),
If thy
Dirty
Dounby
Thou do not wipe, ere thou be gone.
Will you have any more of it? Yes, yes, answered Grangousier. Then, said
Gargantua,
A Roundelay.
In shitting yes’day I did know
The sess I to my arse did owe:
The smell was such came from that slunk,
That I was with it all bestunk:
O had but then some brave Signor
Brought her to me I waited for,
In shitting!
I would have cleft her watergap,
And join’d it close to my flipflap,
Whilst she had with her fingers guarded
My foul nockandrow, all bemerded
In shitting.
Now say that I can do nothing! By the Merdi, they are not of my making,
but I heard them of this good old grandam, that you see here, and ever
since have retained them in the budget of my memory.
Let us return to our purpose, said Grangousier. What, said Gargantua, to
skite? No, said Grangousier, but to wipe our tail. But, said Gargantua,
will not you be content to pay a puncheon of Breton wine, if I do not blank
and gravel you in this matter, and put you to a non-plus? Yes, truly, said
Grangousier.
There is no need of wiping one’s tail, said Gargantua, but when it is foul;
foul it cannot be, unless one have been a-skiting; skite then we must
before we wipe our tails. O my pretty little waggish boy, said
Grangousier, what an excellent wit thou hast? I will make thee very
shortly proceed doctor in the jovial quirks of gay learning, and that, by
G--, for thou hast more wit than age. Now, I prithee, go on in this
torcheculative, or wipe-bummatory discourse, and by my beard I swear, for
one puncheon, thou shalt have threescore pipes, I mean of the good Breton
wine, not that which grows in Britain, but in the good country of Verron.
Afterwards I wiped my bum, said Gargantua, with a kerchief, with a pillow,
with a pantoufle, with a pouch, with a pannier, but that was a wicked and
unpleasant torchecul; then with a hat. Of hats, note that some are shorn,
and others shaggy, some velveted, others covered with taffeties, and others
with satin. The best of all these is the shaggy hat, for it makes a very
neat abstersion of the fecal matter.
Afterwards I wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a
calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an
attorney’s bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer’s lure. But,
to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps,
bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is
none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed,
if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine
honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful
pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the
temporate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut
and the rest of the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of
the heart and brains. And think not that the felicity of the heroes and
demigods in the Elysian fields consisteth either in their asphodel,
ambrosia, or nectar, as our old women here used to say; but in this,
according to my judgment, that they wipe their tails with the neck of a
goose, holding her head betwixt their legs, and such is the opinion of
Master John of Scotland, alias Scotus.
Chapter 1.XIV.
How Gargantua was taught Latin by a Sophister.
The good man Grangousier having heard this discourse, was ravished with
admiration, considering the high reach and marvellous understanding of his
son Gargantua, and said to his governesses, Philip, king of Macedon, knew
the great wit of his son Alexander by his skilful managing of a horse; for
his horse Bucephalus was so fierce and unruly that none durst adventure
to ride him, after that he had given to his riders such devilish falls,
breaking the neck of this man, the other man’s leg, braining one, and
putting another out of his jawbone. This by Alexander being considered,
one day in the hippodrome (which was a place appointed for the breaking and
managing of great horses), he perceived that the fury of the horse
proceeded merely from the fear he had of his own shadow, whereupon getting
on his back, he run him against the sun, so that the shadow fell behind,
and by that means tamed the horse and brought him to his hand. Whereby his
father, knowing the divine judgment that was in him, caused him most
carefully to be instructed by Aristotle, who at that time was highly
renowned above all the philosophers of Greece. After the same manner I
tell you, that by this only discourse, which now I have here had before you
with my son Gargantua, I know that his understanding doth participate of
some divinity, and that, if he be well taught, and have that education
which is fitting, he will attain to a supreme degree of wisdom. Therefore
will I commit him to some learned man, to have him indoctrinated according
to his capacity, and will spare no cost. Presently they appointed him a
great sophister-doctor, called Master Tubal Holofernes, who taught him his
ABC so well, that he could say it by heart backwards; and about this he was
five years and three months. Then read he to him Donat, Le Facet,
Theodolet, and Alanus in parabolis. About this he was thirteen years, six
months, and two weeks. But you must remark that in the mean time he did
learn to write in Gothic characters, and that he wrote all his books--for
the art of printing was not then in use--and did ordinarily carry a great
pen and inkhorn, weighing about seven thousand quintals (that is, 700,000
pound weight), the penner whereof was as big and as long as the great
pillars of Enay, and the horn was hanging to it in great iron chains, it
being of the wideness of a tun of merchant ware. After that he read unto
him the book de modis significandi, with the commentaries of Hurtbise, of
Fasquin, of Tropdieux, of Gualhaut, of John Calf, of Billonio, of
Berlinguandus, and a rabble of others; and herein he spent more than
eighteen years and eleven months, and was so well versed in it that, to try
masteries in school disputes with his condisciples, he would recite it by
heart backwards, and did sometimes prove on his finger-ends to his mother,
quod de modis significandi non erat scientia. Then did he read to him the
compost for knowing the age of the moon, the seasons of the year, and tides
of the sea, on which he spent sixteen years and two months, and that justly
at the time that his said preceptor died of the French pox, which was in
the year one thousand four hundred and twenty. Afterwards he got an old
coughing fellow to teach him, named Master Jobelin Bride, or muzzled dolt,
who read unto him Hugutio, Hebrard[‘s) Grecism, the Doctrinal, the Parts,
the Quid est, the Supplementum, Marmotretus, De moribus in mensa servandis,
Seneca de quatuor virtutibus cardinalibus, Passavantus cum commento, and
Dormi secure for the holidays, and some other of such like mealy stuff, by
reading whereof he became as wise as any we ever since baked in an oven.
Chapter 1.XV.
How Gargantua was put under other schoolmasters.
At the last his father perceived that indeed he studied hard, and that,
although he spent all his time in it, he did nevertheless profit nothing,
but which is worse, grew thereby foolish, simple, doted, and blockish,
whereof making a heavy regret to Don Philip of Marays, Viceroy or Depute
King of Papeligosse, he found that it were better for him to learn nothing
at all, than to be taught such-like books, under such schoolmasters;
because their knowledge was nothing but brutishness, and their wisdom but
blunt foppish toys, serving only to bastardize good and noble spirits, and
to corrupt all the flower of youth. That it is so, take, said he, any
young boy of this time who hath only studied two years,--if he have not a
better judgment, a better discourse, and that expressed in better terms
than your son, with a completer carriage and civility to all manner of
persons, account me for ever hereafter a very clounch and bacon-slicer of
Brene. This pleased Grangousier very well, and he commanded that it should
be done. At night at supper, the said Des Marays brought in a young page
of his, of Ville-gouges, called Eudemon, so neat, so trim, so handsome in
his apparel, so spruce, with his hair in so good order, and so sweet and
comely in his behaviour, that he had the resemblance of a little angel more
than of a human creature. Then he said to Grangousier, Do you see this
young boy? He is not as yet full twelve years old. Let us try, if it
please you, what difference there is betwixt the knowledge of the doting
Mateologians of old time and the young lads that are now. The trial
pleased Grangousier, and he commanded the page to begin. Then Eudemon,
asking leave of the vice-king his master so to do, with his cap in his
hand, a clear and open countenance, beautiful and ruddy lips, his eyes
steady, and his looks fixed upon Gargantua with a youthful modesty,
standing up straight on his feet, began very gracefully to commend him;
first, for his virtue and good manners; secondly, for his knowledge,
thirdly, for his nobility; fourthly, for his bodily accomplishments; and,
in the fifth place, most sweetly exhorted him to reverence his father with
all due observancy, who was so careful to have him well brought up. In the
end he prayed him, that he would vouchsafe to admit of him amongst the
least of his servants; for other favour at that time desired he none of
heaven, but that he might do him some grateful and acceptable service. All
this was by him delivered with such proper gestures, such distinct
pronunciation, so pleasant a delivery, in such exquisite fine terms, and so
good Latin, that he seemed rather a Gracchus, a Cicero, an Aemilius of the
time past, than a youth of this age. But all the countenance that
Gargantua kept was, that he fell to crying like a cow, and cast down his
face, hiding it with his cap, nor could they possibly draw one word from
him, no more than a fart from a dead ass. Whereat his father was so
grievously vexed that he would have killed Master Jobelin, but the said Des
Marays withheld him from it by fair persuasions, so that at length he
pacified his wrath. Then Grangousier commanded he should be paid his
wages, that they should whittle him up soundly, like a sophister, with good
drink, and then give him leave to go to all the devils in hell. At least,
said he, today shall it not cost his host much if by chance he should die
as drunk as a Switzer. Master Jobelin being gone out of the house,
Grangousier consulted with the Viceroy what schoolmaster they should choose
for him, and it was betwixt them resolved that Ponocrates, the tutor of
Eudemon, should have the charge, and that they should go altogether to
Paris, to know what was the study of the young men of France at that time.
Chapter 1.XVI.
How Gargantua was sent to Paris, and of the huge great mare that he rode
on; how she destroyed the oxflies of the Beauce.
In the same season Fayoles, the fourth King of Numidia, sent out of the
country of Africa to Grangousier the most hideously great mare that ever
was seen, and of the strangest form, for you know well enough how it is
said that Africa always is productive of some new thing. She was as big as
six elephants, and had her feet cloven into fingers, like Julius Caesar’s
horse, with slouch-hanging ears, like the goats in Languedoc, and a little
horn on her buttock. She was of a burnt sorrel hue, with a little mixture
of dapple-grey spots, but above all she had a horrible tail; for it was
little more or less than every whit as great as the steeple-pillar of St.
Mark beside Langes: and squared as that is, with tuffs and ennicroches or
hair-plaits wrought within one another, no otherwise than as the beards are
upon the ears of corn.
If you wonder at this, wonder rather at the tails of the Scythian rams,
which weighed above thirty pounds each; and of the Surian sheep, who need,
if Tenaud say true, a little cart at their heels to bear up their tail, it
is so long and heavy. You female lechers in the plain countries have no
such tails. And she was brought by sea in three carricks and a brigantine
unto the harbour of Olone in Thalmondois. When Grangousier saw her, Here
is, said he, what is fit to carry my son to Paris. So now, in the name of
God, all will be well. He will in times coming be a great scholar. If it
were not, my masters, for the beasts, we should live like clerks. The next
morning--after they had drunk, you must understand--they took their
journey; Gargantua, his pedagogue Ponocrates, and his train, and with them
Eudemon, the young page. And because the weather was fair and temperate,
his father caused to be made for him a pair of dun boots,--Babin calls them
buskins. Thus did they merrily pass their time in travelling on their high
way, always making good cheer, and were very pleasant till they came a
little above Orleans, in which place there was a forest of five-and-thirty
leagues long, and seventeen in breadth, or thereabouts. This forest was
most horribly fertile and copious in dorflies, hornets, and wasps, so that
it was a very purgatory for the poor mares, asses, and horses. But
Gargantua’s mare did avenge herself handsomely of all the outrages therein
committed upon beasts of her kind, and that by a trick whereof they had no
suspicion. For as soon as ever they were entered into the said forest, and
that the wasps had given the assault, she drew out and unsheathed her tail,
and therewith skirmishing, did so sweep them that she overthrew all the
wood alongst and athwart, here and there, this way and that way, longwise
and sidewise, over and under, and felled everywhere the wood with as much
ease as a mower doth the grass, in such sort that never since hath there
been there neither wood nor dorflies: for all the country was thereby
reduced to a plain champaign field. Which Gargantua took great pleasure to
behold, and said to his company no more but this: Je trouve beau ce (I
find this pretty); whereupon that country hath been ever since that time
called Beauce. But all the breakfast the mare got that day was but a
little yawning and gaping, in memory whereof the gentlemen of Beauce do as
yet to this day break their fast with gaping, which they find to be very
good, and do spit the better for it. At last they came to Paris, where
Gargantua refreshed himself two or three days, making very merry with his
folks, and inquiring what men of learning there were then in the city, and
what wine they drunk there.
Chapter 1.XVII.
How Gargantua paid his welcome to the Parisians, and how he took away the
great bells of Our Lady’s Church.
Some few days after that they had refreshed themselves, he went to see the
city, and was beheld of everybody there with great admiration; for the
people of Paris are so sottish, so badot, so foolish and fond by nature,
that a juggler, a carrier of indulgences, a sumpter-horse, or mule with
cymbals or tinkling bells, a blind fiddler in the middle of a cross lane,
shall draw a greater confluence of people together than an evangelical
preacher. And they pressed so hard upon him that he was constrained to
rest himself upon the towers of Our Lady’s Church. At which place, seeing
so many about him, he said with a loud voice, I believe that these buzzards
will have me to pay them here my welcome hither, and my Proficiat. It is
but good reason. I will now give them their wine, but it shall be only in
sport. Then smiling, he untied his fair braguette, and drawing out his
mentul into the open air, he so bitterly all-to-bepissed them, that he
drowned two hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and eighteen, besides
the women and little children. Some, nevertheless, of the company escaped
this piss-flood by mere speed of foot, who, when they were at the higher
end of the university, sweating, coughing, spitting, and out of breath,
they began to swear and curse, some in good hot earnest, and others in
jest. Carimari, carimara: golynoly, golynolo. By my sweet Sanctess, we
are washed in sport, a sport truly to laugh at;--in French, Par ris, for
which that city hath been ever since called Paris; whose name formerly was
Leucotia, as Strabo testifieth, lib. quarto, from the Greek word leukotes,
whiteness,--because of the white thighs of the ladies of that place. And
forasmuch as, at this imposition of a new name, all the people that were
there swore everyone by the Sancts of his parish, the Parisians, which are
patched up of all nations and all pieces of countries, are by nature both
good jurors and good jurists, and somewhat overweening; whereupon Joanninus
de Barrauco, libro de copiositate reverentiarum, thinks that they are
called Parisians from the Greek word parresia, which signifies boldness and
liberty in speech. This done, he considered the great bells, which were in
the said towers, and made them sound very harmoniously. Which whilst he
was doing, it came into his mind that they would serve very well for
tingling tantans and ringing campanels to hang about his mare’s neck when
she should be sent back to his father, as he intended to do, loaded with
Brie cheese and fresh herring. And indeed he forthwith carried them to his
lodging. In the meanwhile there came a master beggar of the friars of St.
Anthony to demand in his canting way the usual benevolence of some hoggish
stuff, who, that he might be heard afar off, and to make the bacon he was
in quest of shake in the very chimneys, made account to filch them away
privily. Nevertheless, he left them behind very honestly, not for that
they were too hot, but that they were somewhat too heavy for his carriage.
This was not he of Bourg, for he was too good a friend of mine. All the
city was risen up in sedition, they being, as you know, upon any slight
occasion, so ready to uproars and insurrections, that foreign nations
wonder at the patience of the kings of France, who do not by good justice
restrain them from such tumultuous courses, seeing the manifold
inconveniences which thence arise from day to day. Would to God I knew the
shop wherein are forged these divisions and factious combinations, that I
might bring them to light in the confraternities of my parish! Believe for
a truth, that the place wherein the people gathered together, were thus
sulphured, hopurymated, moiled, and bepissed, was called Nesle, where then
was, but now is no more, the oracle of Leucotia. There was the case
proposed, and the inconvenience showed of the transporting of the bells.
After they had well ergoted pro and con, they concluded in baralipton, that
they should send the oldest and most sufficient of the faculty unto
Gargantua, to signify unto him the great and horrible prejudice they
sustain by the want of those bells. And notwithstanding the good reasons
given in by some of the university why this charge was fitter for an orator
than a sophister, there was chosen for this purpose our Master Janotus de
Bragmardo.
Chapter 1.XVIII.
How Janotus de Bragmardo was sent to Gargantua to recover the great bells.
Master Janotus, with his hair cut round like a dish a la Caesarine, in his
most antique accoutrement liripipionated with a graduate’s hood, and having
sufficiently antidoted his stomach with oven-marmalades, that is, bread and
holy water of the cellar, transported himself to the lodging of Gargantua,
driving before him three red-muzzled beadles, and dragging after him five
or six artless masters, all thoroughly bedaggled with the mire of the
streets. At their entry Ponocrates met them, who was afraid, seeing them
so disguised, and thought they had been some masquers out of their wits,
which moved him to inquire of one of the said artless masters of the
company what this mummery meant. It was answered him, that they desired to
have their bells restored to them. As soon as Ponocrates heard that, he
ran in all haste to carry the news unto Gargantua, that he might be ready
to answer them, and speedily resolve what was to be done. Gargantua being
advertised hereof, called apart his schoolmaster Ponocrates, Philotimus,
steward of his house, Gymnastes, his esquire, and Eudemon, and very
summarily conferred with them, both of what he should do and what answer he
should give. They were all of opinion that they should bring them unto the
goblet-office, which is the buttery, and there make them drink like
roysters and line their jackets soundly. And that this cougher might not
be puffed up with vain-glory by thinking the bells were restored at his
request, they sent, whilst he was chopining and plying the pot, for the
mayor of the city, the rector of the faculty, and the vicar of the church,
unto whom they resolved to deliver the bells before the sophister had
propounded his commission. After that, in their hearing, he should
pronounce his gallant oration, which was done; and they being come, the
sophister was brought in full hall, and began as followeth, in coughing.
Chapter 1.XIX.
The oration of Master Janotus de Bragmardo for recovery of the bells.
Hem, hem, gud-day, sirs, gud-day. Et vobis, my masters. It were but
reason that you should restore to us our bells; for we have great need of
them. Hem, hem, aihfuhash. We have oftentimes heretofore refused good
money for them of those of London in Cahors, yea and those of Bourdeaux in
Brie, who would have bought them for the substantific quality of the
elementary complexion, which is intronificated in the terrestreity of their
quidditative nature, to extraneize the blasting mists and whirlwinds upon
our vines, indeed not ours, but these round about us. For if we lose the
piot and liquor of the grape, we lose all, both sense and law. If you
restore them unto us at my request, I shall gain by it six basketfuls of
sausages and a fine pair of breeches, which will do my legs a great deal of
good, or else they will not keep their promise to me. Ho by gob, Domine, a
pair of breeches is good, et vir sapiens non abhorrebit eam. Ha, ha, a
pair of breeches is not so easily got; I have experience of it myself.
Consider, Domine, I have been these eighteen days in matagrabolizing this
brave speech. Reddite quae sunt Caesaris, Caesari, et quae sunt Dei, Deo.
Ibi jacet lepus. By my faith, Domine, if you will sup with me in cameris,
by cox body, charitatis, nos faciemus bonum cherubin. Ego occiditunum
porcum, et ego habet bonum vino: but of good wine we cannot make bad
Latin. Well, de parte Dei date nobis bellas nostras. Hold, I give you in
the name of the faculty a Sermones de Utino, that utinam you would give us
our bells. Vultis etiam pardonos? Per diem vos habebitis, et nihil
payabitis. O, sir, Domine, bellagivaminor nobis; verily, est bonum vobis.
They are useful to everybody. If they fit your mare well, so do they do
our faculty; quae comparata est jumentis insipientibus, et similis facta
est eis, Psalmo nescio quo. Yet did I quote it in my note-book, et est
unum bonum Achilles
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