Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  [But Thaumaste, as one not satisfied, placed his left thumb against the tip of his nose while closing the rest of his said left hand. At which Panurge put his two index fingers either side of his mouth, pulling it as far back as he could and baring all his teeth; and with his two thumbs he pulled his eyelids very deeply down, making a very ugly grimace, or so it seemed to the audience.]

  *

  [Becomes: How Thaumaste tells of the abilities and learning of Pan-urge. Chapter 20.

  ‘And, behold a greater than Solomon is here’ (Matthew 12:42; Luke 11:31) reinforces the links between Scripture and Shrovetide fun: the Pantagruel of this book is again a kind of comic Christ. That is reinforced by Matthew 10:34 and Luke 6:40: ‘The disciple is not above his Master’, the disciple here being Panurge and the master Pantagruel. The connections with the Old Testament are maintained by the citing of Psalm 143 (142):6, ‘like unto a thirsty land’. Rabelais quotes Matthew not from the Latin Vulgate but from the Latin version of Erasmus in which ‘Solomon’ replaces the traditional ‘Salomon’. The Sorbonne disapproved of all such changes, including ‘Moses’ for ‘Moïse’.

  In French festive contexts, at least since François Villon, it was common to praise ‘Noah who planted the vine’ (from Genesis 9:20).

  By implication the ‘signs’ of the Jewish cabbala, geomancy, magic, astrology, alchemy, and of certain kinds of philosophy are all condemned – but in Shrovetide terms.]

  Thaumaste next rose to his feet and, doffing his bonnet, thanked the said Panurge politely. Then, in a loud voice, he addressed everyone present: ‘My Lords, now is the time to quote the Gospel saying, “And, behold a greater than Solomon is here.”

  ‘For here, in your presence, you have an incomparable treasure, namely my Lord Pantagruel, whose fame drew me from the depths of England to confer with him about inexhaustible doubts weighing on my mind concerning magic, alchemy, the cabbala, geomancy as much as astrology and philosophy.92

  ‘But at present I am moved to anger against Fame, who seems to me to be envious of him since she does not report a thousandth part of what he effectively is. You have seen how one sole disciple of his has satisfied me, telling me more than I ever asked for, and has in addition both revealed and solved for me other incalculable doubts. In that way he has, I can assure you, broached for me the true well and abyss of the encyclopedia of erudition – of such a sort that I, indeed, never thought I could find any man who knew merely the first elements of it – namely when we disputed by signs without uttering one word, nay, half a word. Soon I shall write down what we have treated and resolved so that nobody should ever think that it was all but tomfoolery, and I shall have it printed so that each man may learn from it as I have done. You can judge what the Master might have said when the disciple achieved such a feat, for The disciple is not above his Master.

  ‘In all things may God be praised; and I humbly thank you for the honour you did me with this formal debate. May God eternally reward you for it.’

  Pantagruel made a similar act of gratitude to all who were present. On leaving, he took Thaumaste off to dine with him. And you may believe that they drank guts to the ground, like all good souls at Hallowe’en, until they were slurring,93 ‘Eh! Where d’you sprung from?’

  Holy Dame! How they swigged from the leathern bottle [while flagons went the rounds and all trumpeted out,

  ‘Swig!’

  ‘Pass it on!’

  ‘Wine, boy!’

  ‘Plonk it in, for the devil’s sake, plonk!’]

  No man failed to drink some twenty-five to thirty hogsheads. And know ye how? ‘Like unto a thirsty land.’ For it was hot; and they had grown thirsty.

  Touching the explanation of the theses advanced by Thaumaste and the meanings of the signs used by them in their disputation, I would like to expound them to you according to their joint accounts, but I have been told that Thaumaste has produced a large tome, printed in London, in which he reveals all, omitting nothing; so for the while I shall desist.

  How Panurge was in love with a great dame in Paris, and of the trick he played on her

  CHAPTER 14

  [This later becomes: How Panurge was in love with a great dame in Paris. Chapter 21.

  Panurge’s rhetoric works on a fair and gullible lady of Paris in the heartless spirit of the farce and the conte, in which pomposity gets its comic deserts.

  Panurge’s original equivocation was a play on à Beaumont le Viconte (at the place called Beaumont-le-Viconte) turned into à beau con le vit monte (up fair cunt the cock mounts). Here it has been transposed into a similar English play on words.

  In the first sentence ‘German-style’ became ‘Romanesque-style’.]

  Panurge began to grow in reputation throughout the city of Paris because of the disputation he had won against the Englishman, and from then on embellished his codpiece, decorating it on top with embroidery-slashings in the German style.

  Fashionable folk praised him in public and a ballad was composed about him which the little boys sang as they dragged themselves mus-tardily to school.

  He was welcome at all social gatherings of dames and damsels, with the result that he became vainglorious, so much so that he set out to get on top of one of the great dames of the town.

  In fact, abandoning all the long preambles and protestations usually made by doleful and contemplative ‘Lenten lovers’ [– the kind who shun flesh –] he said to her one day:

  ‘Madam, it would be of very great utility to the whole commonweal, delectable to you, of honour to your lineage and essential to me, that you should be covered by my stock. Believe me, for the experience will prove it to you!’

  At those words the lady thrust him a good hundred leagues off, saying, ‘You wretched idiot: what right have you to address such words to me? To whom do you think you are speaking? Be off, and never appear before me again: it would not take much for me to have your arms and legs lopped off!’

  ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it would be nothing to me to have my arms and legs lopped off, provided that you and I should first have had a fine bit of fun playing the manikin with your lower pedals; for,’ he said, displaying his lengthy codpiece, ‘here is my John Thomas who would love to strike up a jig for you which you would feel in the very marrow of your bones. He’s a chivalrous fellow who knows [full] well how to linger over preliminaries and nice little inguino-scrotal protuberances round your rat-trap. There’s nothing to do after him but sweep up the dust.’

  To which the lady replied,

  ‘Go away, you wretched man. Go away. If you say one word more to me I shall call folk in and have you thrashed on the spot.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Panurge, ‘you are not as nasty as you say you are. No. Or else I have been deceived by your physiognomy: for the earth would sooner mount to the heavens, the high heavens sink into the abyss and the whole order of Nature be perverted rather than that there should be a drop of venom or malice in such beauty and elegance as are yours. They do indeed say that

  Scarcely one belle can you find,

  Who’s not a rebel and unkind;

  but that is said of common beauties.

  ‘Your beauty, however, is so excellent, so unique, so divine, that I am convinced that Nature set it in you as a model of excellence to enable us to understand what she can achieve when she wishes to employ all her power and wit. There is nothing in you but honey and sugar and manna from Heaven. ’Tis to you that Paris should have awarded the golden apple, not to Venus. No! Not to Juno nor Minerva. Never was there such magnificence in Juno, such wisdom in Minerva, such elegance in Venus as there are in you.

  ‘Ye gods and goddesses above! How blessèd is the man to whom grace shall be given to enfold you in his arms, to kiss you and to rub his slice of bacon against you. That man, by God, shall be me! I know it. I can see it clearly, for fully you love me already. [I am predestined to that by the fairies.] So to gain time let us get on with it!’94

  And he sought to take her in his arms, but she pret
ended to make for the window to call on her neighbours for help. So he got out quick, saying to her as he fled,

  ‘Wait for me here, my Lady. I shall go and fetch them myself; you needn’t bother.’

  And he went on his way, not greatly disturbed by the rejection he had experienced, and having no less of a good time.

  The following morning, there he was in church at the hour she went to Mass. As she came in he offered her holy water and deeply bowed before her. After that he went and familiarly knelt down beside her and said,

  ‘Madam, you should know that I am so deeply in love with you that I can neither piddle nor pooh. What you make of it all I know not, but what if I come to some harm?’

  ‘Go away,’ she said. ‘I really do not care. Let me get on with my prayers to God.’

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘can you make an equivocation out of Buckingham Fair?’

  ‘I’ve no idea!’ she said.

  ‘It’s Fucking ‘em bare,’ he said. ‘And now pray God to grant me what your own noble heart desires. And would you kindly give me your rosary please?’

  ‘Take it,’ she said, ‘and stop bothering me.’

  So saying, she attempted to draw forth her rosary (which was of Socatrine aloe-wood interlarded with marker-beads of gold), but Panurge whipped out one of his knives, slashed it loose and made off with it to the rag-and-bone men, saying,

  ‘Do you fancy my dagger?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No!’

  ‘But while on the subject,’ he said, ‘it is yours to command, body and earthly goods, bowels and innards.’

  The lady meanwhile was by no means happy about her rosary, it being one of the things which gave her her standing in church, and she thought to herself,

  ‘That [fine] spinner of words is some lunatic from lands afar. I’ll never get my beads back. What will my husband say! He’ll be cross with me: but I shall tell him that some thief cut them off inside church. He will believe that easily enough once he sees this end of the ribbon still on my belt.’

  Panurge went to see her after dinner, carrying up his sleeve a fat purse stuffed with [lawyers’ counting-tallies and] tokens. He began by asking,

  ‘Who loves the other more: you me, or me you?’

  To which she replied,

  ‘As far as I am concerned, I certainly do not hate you, since I love everyone, as God commands.’

  ‘While on the subject,’ he said, ‘you are in love with me, aren’t you?’

  ‘I have told you many times already,’ she said, ‘not to address such words to me. If you say anything more, I will show you that I am not one to whom you should talk of dishonour. Now be off; and give me back my beads in case my husband asks me about them.’

  ‘What, Madam,’ said he, ‘your beads? Upon my oaf, I shall not do that, but I would like to give you others instead. Would you prefer them to be of enamelled gold in the form of great spheres, or of lovers’ knots, or simply of massy gold as in great ingots? Or would you prefer them to be of ebony, or of large hyathcinthine gems, [of huge cut garnets] with marker-beads of fine turquoises; or of beautiful engraved topazes, of fine sapphires or fine balas-rubies interspersed with marker-beads of twenty-eight faceted diamonds?

  ‘But no, no! They are all too small. I know of a beautiful rosary composed of fine emeralds with marker-beads of ambergris [cut in the round]; its clasp is decorated with a Persian pearl as big as an orange. It costs a mere twenty-five thousand ducats. I would like to make you a present of it, for I have got enough cash.’

  As he said that, he made his counters chink as though they were sun-crowns.

  ‘Would you like a length of violet-crimson velvet, scarlet-dyed, or a piece of satin, either brocaded or dyed crimson? Would you like silver chains, gold-work, earrings, bejewelled fillets for you hair? Say yes, that is all. Up to fifty thousand ducats means nothing to me.’

  By the force of those words he made her mouth water, but she said to him,

  ‘No. I do thank you, but I want nothing from you.’

  ‘By God,’ he said, ‘I want something from you, though: something which will cost you nothing, and you will have lost nothing. Get hold of this,’ he added, displaying his lengthy codpiece. ‘Here is someone [, Master Jack Daw,] looking for a lodging.’

  After that he attempted to embrace her, but she began to cry out – not too loud, though.

  Then Panurge revealed his trickster’s face and said to her,

  ‘So you won’t let me have a little go then! Squitters to you! You don’t merit such a thing nor such an honour: by God I’ll have you ridden by dogs.’

  So saying, he fled away fast for fear of a whacking [, of which he was by nature fearful].

  *

  [Becomes: How Panurge played a prank on that Lady of Paris which was by no means to her advantage. Chapter 22.

  The Lady of Paris gets her farcical come-uppance.

  Rabelais later added a Virgilian or Ovidian savour to his farce by replacing ‘bitch in heat’ by ‘orgose lycisca’. In Virgil, Eclogue, 3, 18 and in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3, 122, lycisca (wolf-dog) is the name of a bitch; orgose is apparently formed on the basis of the Greek verb orgaō (to be on heat).

  Here in the original text one of ‘those ghastly dogs’ ‘beshat’ the lady of Paris as well as piddling all over her. That is cut out. Faecal terms are indeed quite misplaced here: urine is made laughable in ways in which faeces never are elsewhere in Rabelais. Faeces imply a very different condemnation, frequently with devilish overtones.

  Rabelais also twice replaced culleter, a verb which, though it means here I think something like ‘cocking a leg, has within it more than a hint of the cul (the behind) which is thus eliminated.]

  You should note that the following day was the great festival of Corpus Christi, when all the women dress up in their magnificent finery and when the said lady had donned for the occasion a most beautiful robe of crimson satin and a tunic of very costly white velvet.

  Now on the Vigil of that festival-day Panurge searched far and wide for a bitch on heat.

  Using his belt as a lead, he brought one back to his room; all that day and all that night he fed her very well. In the morning he put her down, abstracting from her a substance well known to the ancient Greek geomancers, chopping it up into the smallest pieces he could, hiding them thoroughly and carrying them off. He then went to the church where the lady would have to go to follow the procession customary at that festival.

  Panurge offered her the holy water as she came in, greeting her most courteously. A short while after she had said her private orisons, he went and sat beside her in the pew and handed her a rondeau composed as follows:

  RONDEAU

  Beloved Lady, since this once my case

  I told you truly, I have lost the race.

  Must I be chased away for good and all

  Who did no harm to you and showed no gall,

  By libel, letter, nor by action base?

  You could have said, ‘Dear friend, may God’s

  good grace

  Go with you now: I shall await your pace,

  And warmly cherish your becoming face,

  Just now: this once.’

  To tell you of my love is no disgrace,

  Nor how my heart with love is all ablaze.

  My Lady, I am bound in Beauty’s thrall.

  Nothing I seek but you my Love to call,

  And cuntrify you, doing it apace

  Just now: this once.

  And as she opened the missive to see what it was, Panurge promptly scattered the materia medica he had brought over various parts of her garments, especially in the folds of her sleeves and gown.

  Then he said to her:

  ‘Poor lovers are not always at their ease, my Lady. Where I am concerned, I trust that the bad nights, travails and torments brought on by my love for you will lead to an equivalent reduction in the pains of Purgatory. At the very least pray that God may give me patience in my suffering.’

  Panurg
e had not finished his speech before all the dogs in that church came over to the lady following the flair of the materia medica he had sprinkled all over her. Every dog came, big and small, plump and skinny, all cocking a leg, sniffing about her and piddling all over her.

  [It was the most horrible trick in all the world.]

  Panurge chased them up a bit. He then took leave of the Lady and withdrew to a side-chapel to watch the fun. For those ghastly dogs beshat her and piddled all over her garments, until there was one huge hound which was pissing all over her head while others did it over her sleeves and her crupper and the puppies did it over her shoes, so that the women there had a job to rescue her.

  Panurge laughed and laughed, and said to one of the great men of the town, ‘I think that lady must be on heat; or else some hound has freshly lined her.’

  When Panurge saw that all those dogs were growling round her as they usually do with a bitch on heat, he went off in search of Pantagruel. And in all the streets where he came across any dogs he gave them a kick, saying, ‘Not going with your mates to the nuptials then! Off you go. [For the devil’s sake] off you go.’

  Having reached Pantagruel’s lodgings, he said to him, ‘I pray you, my master, come and see all the dogs in town, clustered round a lady – the fairest dame in this town – all wanting to have their knobs playing loose in her socket!’95

  To which Pantagruel readily agreed, and witnessed the comedy, which he found most novel and beautiful. But the best was during the procession when six hundred [thousand and fourteen] dogs were to be found about her, inflicting a thousand ordeals upon her. And, wherever she had passed, fresh dogs came and followed her tracks, pissing all along the road where her garments had touched. Everybody stopped before that spectacle, contemplating the expressions of those dogs which were springing up as high as her neck and ruining her fine accoutrements; she could find no remedy but to withdraw to her mansion. And all the dogs came following after [while she hid herself – and her chambermaids laughed].