The Reformation

by Will Durant

  He was still so wedded to scholarship that he neglected his duties at the hospital, and was dismissed. He might have had trouble buttering his bread had not Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris and co-founder of the Collège de France, taken Rabelais with him as physician on a mission to Italy (January 1534). Returning to Lyons in April, Rabelais published there in October La vie très horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel (The Very Horrible Life of the Great Gargantua, father of Pantagruel). This second volume, which was later to form Book One of the full work, contained such rollicking satires of the clergy that it won another Sorbonnian condemnation. Soon the two stories, published together, outsold every publication in France except the Bible and The Imitation of Christ. 27 Again, we are told, King Francis laughed and applauded.

  But on the night of October 17–18, 1534, the posting of insulting Protestant placards on Paris buildings and the King’s own doors changed him from a protector of humanists into a persecutor of heretics. Rabelais had again concealed his authorship, but it was widely suspected, and he had good reason to fear that the Sorbonne, carrying the King in its train, would demand the scandalous writer’s head. Again Jean du Bellay came to his rescue. Now a cardinal, the genial churchman snatched the endangered scholar-physician-pornographer out of his Lyons den and took him to Rome (1535). It was Rabelais’ luck to find there an enlightened pope. Paul III forgave him his neglect of his monastic and priestly duties, and gave him permission to practice medicine. As amende honorable Rabelais expunged from future editions of his now “double-backed” book the passages most offensive to orthodox taste; and when Étienne Dolet played a trick on him by publishing, without permission, an unexpurgated edition, he crossed him from the roster of his friends. Under the protection of the Cardinal he studied again at Montpellier, received the doctorate in medicine, lectured to large audiences there, and then returned to Lyons to resume his life as physician and scholar. In June 1537, Dolet described him as conducting an anatomy lesson by dissecting an executed criminal before an assemblage of students.

  Thereafter we know only snatches of his undulant career. He was in the suite of the King at the historic meeting of Francis I and Charles V in Aiguesmortes (July 1538). Two years later we find him at Turin as physician to Guillaume du Bellay, brother to the Cardinal, and now French ambassador to Savoy. About this time spies found in Rabelais’ correspondence some items that raised a flurry in Paris. He hurried to the capital, faced the matter out bravely, and was exonerated by the King (1541). Despite renewed condemnations of Gargantua and Pantagruel by the Sorbonne, Francis gave the harassed author a minor post in the government as maître des requêtes (commissioner of petitions), and official permission to publish Book Two of Pantagruel, which Rabelais gratefully dedicated to Marguerite of Navarre. The volume aroused such commotion among the theologians that Rabelais judged it discreet to take refuge in Metz, then part of the Empire. There he served for a year as physician in the city hospital (1546–47). In 1548 he thought it safe to return to Lyons, and in 1549 to Paris. Finally his ecclesiastical protectors secured his appointment (1551) as parish priest of Meudon, just southwest of the capital, and the hunted, aging gadfly resumed his sacerdotal robes. Apparently he delegated the duties of his benefice to subordinates, and confined himself to using the income.28 So far as we know he was still curé of Meudon when, a bit anomalously, he published what is now Book Four of his work (1552). This was dedicated to Odet, Cardinal de Chatillon, presumably with permission; evidently there were then in France high churchmen of the learning and lenience of the Italian Renaissance cardinals. Nevertheless the book was denounced by the Sorbonne, and its sale was forbidden by the Parlement. Francis I and Marguerite were now dead, and Rabelais found no favor with the somber Henry II. He absented himself for a while from Paris, but soon returned. There, after a long illness, he died (April 9, 1553). An old story tells how, when he was asked on his deathbed where he expected to go, he answered, Je vais chercher un grand peut-être—“I go to seek a great perhaps.” 29 Alas, it is a legend.

  2. Gargantua

  The Prologue to Book One (originally Book Two) gives at once the taste and smell of the whole:

  Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you and none else do I .dedicate my writings).... To have eyed the outside of Socrates and esteemed of him by his external appearance, you would not have given the peel of an onion for him.... You, my good disciples, and some other jolly fools of ease and leisure, reading the pleasant titles of some books of our invention... are too ready to judge that there is nothing in them but jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and recreative lies.... . But . . in the perusal of this treatise you shall find... a doctrine of a more profound and abstract consideration... as well in what concerneth our religion, as matters of public state, and life economical.... A certain addle-headed coxcomb saith [ill] of my books, but a bren for him... Frolic now, my lads, cheer up your hearts, and joyfully read.... . Pull away, Supernaculum!

  This is Urquhart’s famed translation, which sometimes overdoes the original, but is here quite faithful to it, even with pithy words now no longer permitted in learned discourse. In these two paragraphs we have Rabelais’ spirit and aim: serious satire clothed in neck-saving buffoonery, and sometimes smeared with unfumigated smut. We proceed at our own risk, thankful that the printed word does not smell, and trusting to find some diamonds in the dunghill.

  Gargantua begins with a peerless genealogy Scriptural in form. The father of the giant was Grangousier, King of Utopia; the mother was Gargamelle. She bore him for eleven months, and when her pains began their friends gathered for a merry bout of wine, alleging that nature abhors a vacuum. “On with a sheep’s courage!” the proud father tells his wife painlessly; “dispatch this boy, and we will speedily fall to work... making another.” For a moment she wishes him the fate of Abélard; he proposes to accomplish this forthwith, but she changes her mind. The unborn Gargantua, finding the usual outlet of maternity blocked by an untimely astringent, “entered the vena cava” of Gargamelle, climbed through her diaphragm and neck, and “issued forth by the left ear.” As soon as he was born he cried out, so loudly that two counties heard him, À boire! à boire! à boire!—“Drink! drink! drink!” 17,913 cans of milk were set aside for his nourishment, but he early showed a preference for wine.

  When it came time to educate the young giant, and make him fit to succeed to the throne, he received as tutor Maître Jobelin, who made a dolt of him by stuffing his memory with dead facts and befuddling his reason with Scholastic argument. Driven to a desperate expedient, Gargantua turned the boy over to the humanist Ponocrates. Teacher and pupil went off to Paris to get the latest education. Gargantua rode on a tremendous mare, whose swishing tail cut down vast forests as she proceeded; hence part of France is a plain. Arrived in Paris, Gargantua alighted on a tower of Notre Dame; he took a fancy to the bells, and purloined them to hang them about his horse’s neck. Ponocrates began the re-education of the spoiled giant by giving him an enormous purgative to cleanse the bowels and the brain, which are near allied. So purified, Gargantua became enamored of education; he began zealously to train at once his body, his mind, and his character; he studied the Bible, the classics, and the arts; he learned to play the lute and the virginal and to enjoy music; he ran, jumped, wrestled, climbed, and swam; he practiced riding, jousting, and the skills needed in war; he hunted to develop his courage; and to develop his lungs he shouted so that all Paris heard him. He visited metalworkers, stonecutters, goldsmiths, alchemists, weavers, watchmakers, printers, dyers, and “giving them somewhat to drink,” studied their crafts; he took part every day in some useful physical work; and sometimes he went to a lecture, or a trial, or to “the sermons of evangelical preachers” (a Protestant touch).

  Amid all this education Gargantua was suddenly called back to his father’s realm, for another king, Picrochole, had declared war on Grangousier. Why? Rabelais steals a story from Plutarch’s Life of Py
rrhus, and tells how Picrochole’s generals boasted of the lands they would conquer under his leadership: France, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Italy, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Greece, Jerusalem.... . Picrochole rejoices and swells. But an old philosopher asks him: “What shall be the end of so many labors and crosses?” “When we return,” answers Picrochole, “we shall sit down, rest, and be merry.” “But,” suggests the philosopher, “if by chance you should never come back, for the voyage is long and dangerous, were it not better for us to take our rest now?” “Enough,” cried Picrochole; “go forward; I fear nothing.... He that loves me, follow me” (I, xxxiii). Gargantua’s horse almost wins the war against Picrochole by drowning thousands of the enemy with one simple easement.

  But the real hero of the war was Friar John, a monk who loved fighting more than praying, and who let his philosophical curiosity venture into the most dangerous alleys. “What is the reason,” he asks, “that the thighs of a gentlewoman are always fresh and cool?”—and though he finds nothing about this engaging problem in Aristotle or Plutarch, he himself gives answers rich in femoral erudition. All the King’s men like him, feed and wine him to his paunch’s content; they invite him to take off his monastic robe to allow more eating, but he fears that without it he will not have so good an appetite. All the faults that the Protestant reformers alleged against the monks are satirized through this jolly member of their tribe: their idleness, gluttony, guzzling, prayer-mumbling, and hostility to all but a narrowing range of study and ideas. “In our abbey,” says Friar John, “we never study, for fear of the mumps” (I, xxxix).

  Gargantua proposed to reward the Friar’s good fighting by making him abbot of an existing monastery, but John begged instead to be given the means of establishing a new abbey, with rules “contrary to all others.” First, there should be no encompassing walls; inmates are to be free to leave at their pleasure. Second, there is to be no exclusion of women; however, only such women shall enter as are “fair, well-featured, of a sweet disposition,” and between the ages of ten and fifteen. Third, only men between twelve and eighteen will be accepted, and they must be comely, and of good birth and manners; no sots or bigots may apply, no beggars, lawyers, judges, scribes, usurers, gold-graspers, or “sniveling hypocrites.” Fourth, no vows of chastity, poverty, or obedience; the members may marry, enjoy wealth, and in all matters be free. The abbey is to be called Theleme, or What You Will, and its sole rule will be Fais ce que vous vouldras—“Do what you wish.” For “men that are free, wellborn, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them to virtuous actions and withdraws them from vice; and this instinct is called Honor” (I, lvii). Gargantua provided the funds for this aristocratic anarchism, and the abbey rose according to specifications which Rabelais gave in such detail that architects have made drawings of it. He provided for it a library, a theater, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a football field, a chapel, a garden, a hunting park, orchards, stables, and 9,332 rooms. It was an American hotel in vacation land. Rabelais forgot to provide a kitchen, or to explain who would do the menial work in this paradise.

  3. Pantagruel

  After Gargantua had succeeded his father as king he took his turn at procreation and pedagogy. At the age of “four hundred fourscore forty and four years” he begot Pantagruel on Badebec, who died in giving birth; whereat Gargantua “wept like a cow” for his wife, and “laughed like a calf” over his robust son. Pantagruel grew up to Brobdingnagian proportions. In one of his meals he inadvertently swallowed a man, who had to be excavated by a mining operation in the young giant’s digestive tract. When Pantagruel went to Paris for his higher schooling Gargantua sent him a letter redolent of the Renaissance:

  MOST DEAR SON:

  ... Although my deceased father, of happy memory, Grangousier, had bent his best endeavors to make me profit in all perfection and political knowledge, and that my labor and study was fully correspondent to, yea, went beyond his desire; nevertheless, as thou may’st well understand, the time then was not so proper and fit for learning as it is at present... for that time was darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance, and savoring a little of the infelicity and calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the divine goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity, and that with such amendment and increase of knowledge, that now hardly should I be admitted unto the first form of the little grammar-school boys.....

  Now the minds of men are qualified with all manner of discipline, and the old sciences revived which for many ages were extinct; now the learned languages are to their pristine purity restored—viz., Greek (without which a man may be ashamed to account himself a scholar), Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean, and Latin. Printing likewise is now in use, so elegant, and so correct, that better cannot be imagined.....

  I intend... that thou learn the languages perfectly.... Let there be no history which thou shalt not have ready in thy memory.... Of the liberal arts of geometry, arithmetic, and music, I gave thee some taste when thou wert yet little... proceed further in them... As for astronomy, study all the rules thereof; let pass nevertheless .... astrology... as being nothing else but plain cheats and vanities. As for the civil law, of that I would have thee to know the texts by heart, and then to confer them with philosophy ...

  The works of nature I would have thee study exactly.... Fail not most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian, and Latin physicians, not despising the talmudists and cabalists; and by frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of the microcosm, which is man. And at some hours of the day apply thy mind to the study of the Holy Scriptures: first in Greek the New Testament.... then the Old Testament in Hebrew.....

  But because, as the wise man Solomon saith, wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul; it behooveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God. ., . Be serviceable to all thy neighbors, and love them as thyself; reverence thy preceptors; shun the conversation of those whom thou desirest not to resemble, and receive not in vain the graces which God hath bestowed upon thee. And when thou shalt see that thou hast attained to all the knowledge that is to be acquired in that part, return unto me, that 1 may see thee, and give thee my blessing before I die....

  Thy father,

  GARGANTUA30

  Pantagruel studied zealously, learned many languages, and might have become a bookworm had he not met Panurge. Here again, even more than in Friar John, the subordinate character stands out more clearly than his master, as Sancho Panza sometimes outshines the Don. Rabelais does not find full scope for his irreverent humor and riotous vocabulary in Gargantua or Pantagruel; he needs this quarter-scoundrel, quarter-lawyer, quarter-Villon, quarter-philosopher as a vehicle for his satire. He describes Panurge (which means “Ready to do anything”) as lean like a starving cat, walking gingerly “as if he trod on eggs”; a gallant fellow, but a little lecherous, and “subject to a kind of disease... called lack of money”; a pickpocket, a “lewd rogue, a cozener, a drinker... and very dissolute fellow,” but “otherwise the best and most virtuous man in the world” (II, xiv, xvi). Into Panurge’s mouth Rabelais puts his most ribald sallies. Panurge particularly resented the habit which the ladies of Paris adopted, of buttoning their blouses up the back; he sued the women in court, and might have lost, but he threatened to start a similar custom with male culottes, whereupon the court decreed that women must leave a modest but passable opening in front (II, xvii). Angered by a woman who scorned him, Panurge sprayed her skirts, while she knelt in prayer at church, with the effluvia of an itching pet; when the lady emerged, all the 600,014 male dogs of Paris pursued her with unanimous and indefatigable devotion (II, xxi-xxii). Pantagruel, himself a very mannerly prince, takes to this rascal as a relief from philosophy, and invites him on every expedition.

  As the story rollicks on into Book Three, Panurge debates with himself and others whether he should marry
. He lists the arguments pro and con through a hundred pages, some sparkling, many wearisome; but in those pages we meet the man who married a dumb wife, and the renowned jurist Bridlegoose, who arrives at his soundest judgments by throwing dice. The Prologue to Book Four catches a cue from Lucian and describes a “consistory of gods” in heaven, with Jupiter complaining about the unearthly chaos reigning on the earth, the thirty wars going on at once, the mutual hatreds of the peoples, the divisions of theologies, the syllogisms of the philosophers. “What shall we do with this Ramus and Galland... who together are setting all Paris by the ears?” Priapus counsels him to turn these two Pierres into stones (pierres); here Rabelais steals a pun from Scripture.

  Returning to earth, he records in Books Four and Five* the long Gulliverian voyages of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar John, and a royal Utopian fleet to find the Temple of the Holy Bottle, and to ask whether Panurge should marry. After a score of adventures, satirizing Lenten fasts, Protestant pope-haters, bigot pope-olators, monks, dealers in fake antiques, lawyers (“furred cats”), Scholastic philosophers, and historians, the expedition reaches the Temple. Over the portal is a Greek inscription to the effect that “in wine there is truth.” In a near-by fountain is a half-submerged bottle, from which a voice emerges, gurgling, TRINC; and the priestess Bacbuc explains that wine is the best philosophy, and that “not laughing but drinking .... cool, delicious wine... is the distinguishing character of man.” Panurge is happy to have the oracle confirm what he has known all the time. He resolves to eat, drink, and be married, and to take the consequences manfully. He sings an obscene hymeneal chant, and Bacbuc dismisses the party with a blessing: “May that intellectual sphere whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere, whom we call GOD, keep you in His Almighty protection” (V, xlii). So, with a typical blend of lubricity and philosophy, the great romance comes to an end.