Inside his cloak he had over twenty-six pouches and pokes, always kept full. In one he kept a small leaden thimble and a small knife, sharp as a furrier’s needle: with them he cut purses; in another, some verjuice, which he flung into the eyes of the folk he came across; in another, burrs, with tiny wings attached made out of gosling or capon feathers, which he stuck on to the gowns and bonnets of solid citizens, and he occasionally fashioned them into lovely horns which they wore everywhere about town, and sometimes all their lives! Made into the form of a male member he also stuck them on to the hoods of women from behind.
In yet another poke he kept a pile of little cornets full of fleas and lice borrowed from the beggars in the Cimetière de Saint-Innocent, which, using quill-pens or writing-reeds, he threw on to the collars of the most sugary of the young ladies, especially in church for, during Mass, evensong and sermon, he never sat up in the choir-stalls but always down in the nave with the women.
In another he kept an ample supply of hooks and pins with which he often tacked men and women together during tightly crowded gatherings, above all if the women were wearing robes of Italian taffeta: when they wanted to leave they ripped all their dresses apart!
In yet another he kept a tinderbox furnished with a wick, tinder-matches, flint and all other requisites; in another, two or three burning-glasses: with which he would sometimes drive men mad in church – and women too, upsetting their composure, for he said there was but an antistrophe between Woman mucking about in the fane and Woman fucking about in the main;72 finally, in another, he kept a store of needles and thread which he used for countless little devilish devices.
As he was leaving the Palais one day just when a Franciscan was about to say Mass for the magistrates in the Great Hall, he helped him to robe and don his vestments. During the robing, he stitched the Franciscan’s alb to his cassock and shirt. As my Lords of the Court came in to cake their seats to hear the Mass, Panurge withdrew. But when, after the Dismissal, that wretched friar wanted to divest himself of his alb, he brought his cassock and shirt up with it, since they were well stitched together, and bared himself up to his shoulders, revealing his dick to all and sundry; which without a doubt it was not a small one. The friar kept on tugging, revealing all the more until one of the members of the Court said: ‘Does this lair friar really want us to make our offertory by kissing his bum? Let Saint-Anthony’s wildfire kiss it!’
From thenceforth it was decreed that those wretched caloyers should no longer divest in public but in their sacristies, especially when women were present, for it could give rise to the sin of envy.
And everybody asked why friars had such tools which were so long. But our aforesaid Panurge excellently solved that problem, saying:
‘The reason why asses have such big ears is simply because their dams fail to put babies’ bonnets on their little heads, as Petrus de Alliaco states in his Suppositions.73 Likewise, what causes the tools of those poor, handsome fathers74 to be so big is that they never wear breeches with crotches, which allows their poor old member freedom to dangle freely; but the reason why they have them correspondingly plump is because such wagging about causes the bodily humours to run down into the aforesaid members since, as the lawyers put it: Continual agitation and motion are the cause of attraction.’
Item: he had another pocket full of plume-alum itching-powder, some of which he would toss down the backs of the women he deemed most haughty, making them strip off before everybody, while others jumped about like a cock on hot coals or drum-sticks on a tabor. Still others charged madly about the streets: Panurge ran after them and, like a courteous and gracious gentleman, threw his cloak over the backs of those who were taking their clothes off.
Item: in another pocket he kept a little medicine-bottle full of rancid oil. When he came across either woman or man wearing a fine new garment he smeared it over them, spoiling all the nicest parts under the pretext of stroking them with his fingers, saying, ‘Now here is good cloth! Here is good satin and good taffeta! May God grant you, Madam, your noble heart’s desire. New dress: new friend. May God preserve you in it.’
And so saying he would put his hand on their collars. The filthy mark would stay there for ever, [so outrageously engraved on soul, body and fame, that] the devil himself could never remove it.
Finally he would cry, ‘Madam, mind you don’t fall in. There’s a [dirty] great hole right there in front of you!’
Another pocket he kept full of euphorbium, finely ground into a powder; he also kept in it a beautiful lace-work handkerchief which he had purloined from that pretty laundry-girl in the galleries of the Sainte Chapelle75 while removing a louse from her bosom – he had put it there!
Then, when he was in the company of some good ladies, he would get them talking about fine linen and place his hand on their bosoms, saying, ‘Is this Flanders-wool? Is it from Hainaut?’
And he would then pull out his handkerchief saying,
‘Take this. Take this. Look at the work in it. It’s from Fontarabie.’
Then he would shake it about really hard under their noses, making them sneeze for four hours without a pause. Meanwhile he would break wind like a cart-horse. And the ladies would giggle and say,
‘What! Farting, Panurge?’
‘Not at all, Madam,’ he would say; ‘I’m tuning myself to the counterpoint of the music you are sounding through your nose.’
In another pocket he kept a dentist’s pincers, a hooked prod, a pelican and certain other implements: there was no door or coffer which he could not pick open with them.
In another he kept little thimbles with which he most craftily thimblerigged, for his fingers were adroit, like Minerva’s and Arachne’s. Once he was a quack touting theriac.
And whenever he changed a gold crown or some other coin, the money-changer would have had to be far more fly than Maître Mouche76 if Panurge failed to make five or six large silver coins manifestly, openly and visibly vanish without causing any lesion or laceration: the money changer would have felt but the breeze of it.
*
[Later a new chapter begins here: How Panurge gained indulgences and married off old women; and of the legal actions he undertook in Paris. Chapter 17.
‘The farthing which has never known father or mother’, is an echo of the Farce of Maître Pathelin.
The fun at the expense of pardons – indulgences – is in the Lutheran and Erasmian tradition of satirizing them as abuses, but it is perhaps even more in the comic wake of Folengo. Fanurge’s use of Hebrew to justify his theft was topical; Hebrew had been established, against the wishes of the Sorbonne, as the third language to be studied with Greek and Latin in the Trilingual Academy recently founded by François I. Rabbi Khimi’s grammar had just been published in Latin by Sebastian Muenster. Panurge’s Hebrew examples are taken principally from the New Testament.]
One day I found him somewhat downcast and taciturn, and supposed that he had not got a penny, so I said to him:
‘You’re ill, Panurge, as I can tell from your physiognomy. And I understand your malady: you have diarrhoea of the purse. But don’t worry: I still have sixpence farthing which have never known father or mother and which will no more let you down in your need than the pox.’
To which he replied:
‘A shit for the money! One of these days I shall have only too much of it, for I possess a philosopher’s stone which can attract money out of purses as the magnet attracts iron.
‘But would you like to come and get some pardons?’
‘Upon my word,’ I replied to him, ‘I don’t go in much for pardons in this world: and whether I shall do so in the next, I do not know. All right. In God’s name let us go in for a pennyworth, neither more nor less.’
‘Lend me a penny then,’ he said, ‘against interest.’
‘None of that,’ I said: ‘I’ll gladly give it to you.
And he said, ‘Grate vobis, Dominos.’77
So off we went, beginning with the church
of Saint-Gervais. I obtained my pardons from the first booth only – a little of that sort of thing goes a long way with me! – and then I set about saying my brief prayers and Orisons of Saint Bridget. Panurge, however, bought pardons at all the booths and always tendered silver coins to each of the pardoners. From there we proceeded to Notre-Dame, to Saint-Jean’s and Saint-Antoine’s as well as to other churches which had a stall selling pardons. I didn’t acquire any more myself, but Panurge kissed the relics at all the stalls and at each one made a donation. To cut matters short, when we got back he took me for a drink at the tavern called Le Château and showed me ten or twelve of his pouches full of money. At which I made a sign of the cross, saying,
‘Where did you get so much money from in so short a time?’
He replied that he had helped himself from the pardoners’ collecting-bowls.
‘For in tendering my first penny, I did it so subtly that it appeared to be a large silver coin. Then I helped myself with one hand to twelve shillings change, or at least to twelve brass pennies or twopenny pieces, and with the other, to three or four florins. And so in all the churches we went to.’
‘Indeed,’ I said, ‘you are damning yourself like a serpent. You’re a thief, and sacrilegious.’
‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘So it seems to you, but it does not seem so to me, for those pardoners gave it to me when they said, as they offered me their relics to kiss, “Thou shalt receive an hundredfold” – that is, for one coin I may take a hundred. – For “Thou shalt receive” was spoken after the manner of the Hebrews who use the future for the imperative, as in the Law Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve, and Thou shalt love thy neighbour;78 in other cases too. Therefore, whenever a pardoner said to me, “Thou shalt receive an hundredfold,” he meant “Receive an hundredfold”. It is expounded thus by Rabbi Khimi, Rabbi Ben Ezra and all the Massoretes. [See Bartolus ad loc.].
‘Moreover Pope Sixtus awarded me a pension of fifteen hundred pounds, drawn on his own inheritance and the treasure of the Church, because I cured him of a cankerous tumour which was so tormenting him that he thought he was crippled for life. So I help myself with my own hands. Nothing like doing that with the aforesaid ecclesiastical treasury! Oh, my friend,’ he went on, ‘if only you knew how I buttered my parsnips during the crusade you would be amazed! It was worth more than six thousand florins to me.’
‘Where the devil have they gone?’ I asked. ‘You haven’t got a farthing left now.’
‘Where they came from,’ he said. ‘They have simply changed masters. But I used some three thousand of them to marry off – not young maidens: they can find husbands easily enough – but huge sempiternal old crones with no teeth in their gullets, considering that those good women had made very good use of their time in their youth, raising their bums and playing at squeeze-crupper with all comers until nobody wanted them any more; and therefore, by God, I will have them swived again for one last time before they die. And so I would give one of them a hundred florins; another, six score, another three hundred, depending on how horrible, ghastly and abominable they were; for the more horrid and ghastly they were the more they had to be given, otherwise the devil himself would never have wanted to service them.
‘Then I would straightway go off to some hulking great builder’s mate and arrange the marriage myself; but I would show him the coins before showing the crones, saying, “This is for you, my friend, if you are ready for a good bit of slap-and-tickle.”
‘The poor wretches would then stiffen up like old he-mules.79 I would make them ready by feasting and drinking of the best, with plenty of spices to get those old women in the mood and on heat.80
‘To cut a long story short, they worked away like all good souls, though in the case of the most horribly ugly and decrepit women I would have a bag put over their faces.
‘I did lose a lot over my lawsuits as well.’
‘And what lawsuits can you have had?’ I said. ‘You have no house or lands.’
‘My friend,’ he said, ‘under the instigation of the devil in Hell the young ladies of this town had invented the mode of high-cut collars or neckbands which so hid their bosoms that you could no longer slip your hands underneath, since they had placed the slits at the back, while in front everything was fastened tight; at which their doleful and dispirited lovers were not very happy.
‘One fine day – a Tuesday – I presented my petition about it to the Court, constituting myself a party in a suit against the said young ladies, pleading the great damage I would suffer from it and threatening that if the Court did not issue an order against them I would, for the same reason, stitch my codpiece on to the backside of my breeches. To sum it up, those young ladies formed a syndicate [, exposed their fundamentals] and established proxies to defend their cause; but I sued them so vigorously that, by decree of the Court, it was declared that those high neckbands be no longer worn unless slightly slotted at the front.
‘But that set me back a lot.
‘I also had a very filthy and dirty little lawsuit against Master Pooh-pooh81 and his lot, restraining them from clandestinely reading the books of the Scentences at night and permitting it only in the fair light of day and in the sight of all the theologians within the lecture halls of the Sorbonne. For that I was condemned to pay costs because of some procedural flaw in the law-serjeant’s report.82
‘On another occasion I formulated a complaint in the Court against the mules of the presidents, counsellors and others, contending that, whenever they were left to champ their bits in the lower yard of the Palais, the counsellors’ wives should make them ample bibs in order that they should never befoul the pavement with their slobberings so that the mule-lads of the Palais should be enabled freely to play on the aforesaid pavement at donkey-dice or at I-deny-Gosh83 without splitting their breeches at the knee.
‘The verdict was fine, but it cost me a good deal.
‘And now add up the expenses of the little feasts I put on, day after day, for all those pages of the Palais.’
‘To what end?’ I asked.
‘My friend,’ he replied, ‘you have no fun in this world. I have more fun than the king! If you join in with me we shall have a deuce of a time.’
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘By Saint Up-in-the-air-ius, one of these days you’re going to be hanged.’
‘And one of these days you’re going to be buried. Which is the more honourable: the air or the ground? O, what a dull beast you are! And Jesus Christ: was he not hanged in the air?
‘But apropos:84 while those lads of the Palais are feasting, I look after their mules for them, and I always make a cut in a thong of the stirrups of one of those beasts on the mounting-side, so that it is just holding on by a thread. Whenever the stout puffed-up counsellor or others come out to hop on, they fall down flat like pigs in front of everybody, providing a good hundred francs-worth of laughter. And what makes me laugh even more is that once they are back in their lodgings, they thrash my Lord the Page like green rye! So I never complain of the cost of feasting them.’
In the end he had (as I said above) sixty-three ways of procuring money, but two hundred and fourteen ways of spending it – not counting the replenishment of his sub-nasal maw.
How a Great Scholar from England wished to argue against Pantagruel, and was vanquished by Panurge
CHAPTER 13
[Becomes Chapter 18.
Any Englishman was long called Thomas. The fusion of Thomas with the Greek thauma (wonder, marvel) makes the English Thomas here into a thaumaturge.
Pantagruel is ‘greater than Solomon’. In that at least, though comic, he is like Jesus. The debate by signs and gestures develops that theme. The Queen of Sheba ‘tried Solomon with hard questions’. It was widely assumed that, not having a shared language, they communicated by signs. Jesus takes up the theme of her visit to Solomon in order to condemn by an emphatic repetition of the word ‘sign’ those who perversely still seek signs which do not lead to h
imself, who is greater than Solomon. Interlocking texts of the Old and New Testament form an essential backcloth to the comedy, but the laughter itself is centred on a linguistic truism: there are ‘natural’ signs we all understand and conventional ones we all have to learn. Conventional signs include such as are treated by the Venerable Bede, whose treatise on conversing by signs had been printed for the first time in Venice in 1525. Thaumaste, a monomaniac, assumes that Panurge’s natural signs convey deep conventional meanings, whereas they are coarse natural signs (as can be proved by any reader who makes them).
Texts cited include the reference to ‘the Queen of Sheba, who came from the uttermost parts of the East and the Persian Sea to see the order of the house of Solomon the Wise and to hear his wisdom’ (based upon II Chronicles 9:1–12 and I (IV) Kings 10:1–13). In Matthew 12:42 the Queen of Sheba is alluded to as the ‘The Queen of the South who shall rise up in the judgement with this generation and shall condemn it, for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon: and behold, a greater than Solomon is here’. This is a good example of Shrovetide fun at the expense of otherwise hallowed parts of Scripture. Plato and the other examples of seekers after wisdom are serious ones too, but treated here in the same laughing spirit.
In the first line the original reading ‘a grandissimo scholar called Thaumaste’ later becomes ‘a learned man called Thaumaste’.
In James 1:17, ‘every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights’. Here used lightly in fun, that text will be used in earnest in the Third Book.
The phrase towards the end of the chapter placed between asterisks was added in the Juste 1534 edition but is not retained after the Juste 1537 edition. It was too audaciously funny.]
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 13