Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  Very differently acted the sages of Egypt in Antiquity when they wrote in those letters they called hieroglyphics, which none understood who did not know – and all understood who did know – the qualities, properties and natures of the objects portrayed. Horus Apollo wrote two books in Greek about them and Polyphilus developed them further in his Dream of Love. In France you have a taste of it in the device of my Lord the Admiral which was originally sported by Octavian Augustus.

  But I shall let my skiff sail no further amongst such distasteful gulfs and shallows. I am returning to dock in the port I set out from.

  I very much hope to write more fully about all this one day, demonstrating, both by philosophical arguments and authorities acknowledged and approved since the most venerable antiquity, which colours there are in nature, how many there are and what may be signified by each of them, if the Prince wishes and commands it – he who with his command grants power and knowledge.9

  What the colours white and blue do signify

  CHAPTER 9

  [Becomes Chapter 10.

  Rabelais argues that colours have meanings which are natural, not arbitrarily imposed. He starts from Aristotle’s Topics. His argument is impressive and convincing (flawed only if one denies that all joy is contrary in species to all sadness). The true nature of white is shown by the Greek of Matthew 17:2 and the Latin version of it by Erasmus which Rabelais cites: the Lord’s raiment became at the Transfiguration ‘as white as the light’. (The Vulgate here wrongly says ‘as snow’.) In medieval times Bartholus followed the Vulgate and so was mistaken. Lorenzo Valla scornfully corrected him. Erasmus finds Valla ‘too wordy’ on the subject. Rabelais does not. Medieval artists often make the light gold: Renaissance artists, white. Some of the greatest legal scholars wrangled over the meanings of colours, Baïf, for example. Rabelais’ erudition is impressive but not necessarily rare or original. Natural Law is universal but allows of cultural or perverse exceptions.

  The account of the old woman who clung to life, saying ‘Light is good’, is attributed to Varro in the Adages of Vulpius. She appears also in the Praise of Folly of Erasmus.]

  White then signifies happiness, gladness, joy: signifying it not abusively but with a good title. You may discover that to be true if, setting your emotions aside, you listen to what I shall expound to you.

  Aristotle maintains that if you postulate two notions to be contrary in their species, such as good and evil, virtue and vice, cold and hot, black and white, pleasure and pain, grief or sadness, etc., and if you pair them together in such a manner that the contrary of one species corresponds rationally to the contrary of another, it follows that the other contrary must be appropriate to the remaining one.

  To give an example: virtue and vice are contraries within one species. So are good and evil. When one of the contraries of the first species corresponds with one of the second, as virtue with good – for one knows that virtue is good – so the two remaining contraries, evil and vice, must also correspond, since vice is indeed evil.

  Once you have grasped that rule of logic, take those two contraries, joy and sadness, and then these two, black and white, since they are contraries in nature. Now, if black signifies grief, then white will rightly signify joy.

  And that signification was not laid down by any human imposition but accepted by that universal consent which philosophers term the Law of Nations, the jus gentium, the universal law, valid in all lands. You are well aware that all peoples, all nations and tongues (I except the ancient Syracusans and a few Argives whose minds were askew) whenever they want outwardly to show sadness, don black. All mourning is in black. Such universal agreement is not reached without Nature providing some argument or reason which every person can immediately grasp without further instruction from anybody: that is what we call a Natural Law. By white under the same guidance from Nature the entire world has understood joy, happiness, gladness, pleasure and delight. In times past the Thracians and Cretans used white stones to signify the more auspicious and happy days, and black the sad and inauspicious ones. Is the night not malign, sad and melancholy? Privation makes it black and gloomy. And does not the light rejoice the whole of nature?

  Now light is white: whiter than anything else there is. To prove it I could refer you to the treatise of Lorenzo Valla Against Bartholus, but you will be satisfied by the testimony of the Gospels: in Matthew it is said of our Lord at the Transfiguration that his raiment was made white as the light. By that luminous whiteness Jesus enabled his three apostles to understand the idea and form of eternal bliss.

  All humans rejoice in light, as is shown by that old woman without a tooth in her head who could still mumble, Bona lux (‘Light is good’).

  Did not Toby reply, after he had lost his sight and was greeted by Raphael (Tobit 5), ‘What manner of joy shall be to me who see not the light of Heaven’? And by being clad in such a colour the angels bore witness to the joy of the whole universe at the Resurrection of our Saviour (John 20) and at his Ascension (Acts I). Saint John the Evangelist too (Revelation 4 and 7) saw the faithful in the hallowed New Jerusalem ‘arrayed’ in similar ‘white garments’.

  Read the ancient authorities, Greek as well as Latin:

  – you will find that the town of Alba (the prototype of Rome) was founded and named because of the discovery of a white sow;

  – you will find that whenever it was decreed that a victorious captain could enter Rome in triumph he did so in a chariot drawn by white horses; so too a captain who entered with an ovation, for they could not by any sign or colour more definitely express joy at their arrival than by whiteness;

  – you will find that Pericles, the General of the Athenians, wished those of his soldiers who drew the white beans by lot to spend the day in joy, happiness and repose, while the other group were to be out fighting.

  I could expound hundreds of other texts and exempla for you, but this is not the place to do so.

  By understanding the above you can solve a conundrum accounted insoluble by Alexander of Aphrodisias: why does the lion, which terrifies all beasts by its mere cry and roar, fear and revere a white cock? It is (as Proclus states in his book On Sacrifice and Magic) because the presence of the power of the sun (which is the instrument and source of all light, both terrestrial and sidereal) is more befittingly symbolized in the white cock – both for its colour and for its properties and specificity – than in the lion. He adds that devils have often been seen in the form of a lion, only suddenly to vanish in the presence of a white cock.

  That is why the Gali (the French, that is, who are called thus since they are by nature as white as milk (called gala by the Greeks) delight in wearing white plumes in their bonnets: for they are naturally joyful, candid, gracious and well loved, and have as their symbol and device the whitest of all flowers: the lily. If you ask how Nature brings us to understand joy and happiness by the colour white, I reply that it is by analogy and correspondences: for just as – externally – white scatters and disperses our vision, producing a manifest disintegration of those bodily spirits which make sight possible (according to the opinions of Aristotle in the Problems and of the specialists in vision, and as you yourselves can tell from experience when you cross mountains covered with snow and complain of not being able to see properly, which Xenophon describes as happening to his companions and which Galen explains in detail in Book 10 of his treatise On the Use of Parts of the Body), so too – internally – the heart is disintegrated by exceeding joy and suffers a manifest dispersal of its vital spirits; which dispersal can so increase that the heart would be left bereft of all means of support and life consequently extinguished [by that excess of joy as Galen states in Book 12 of On the Method of Curing and] as the said Galen demonstrates in Book 5 of On Parts Affected and Book 2 of On the Causes of Symptoms; and as happened in the past (witness Cicero in Book 1 of the Tusculan Disputations), Verrius, Aristotle, Livy after the battle of Cannae, Pliny, Book 7, Chapters 32 and 53, Aulus Gellius, in Book 3, Chapt
er 15, and others, to Diagoras of Rhodes, Chilo, Sophocles, Dionysius the Tyrant of Sicily, Philippides, Philemon, Polycrita, Philistion, Marcus Juventius and others, who died of joy; and as Avicenna (in the Second Canon, and in his book On the Strengths of the Heart) says of saffron, which so stimulates the heart that, taken in excessive doses, it robs it of life by superabundant dissolution and dilation. [See Alexander of Aphrodisias in Chapter 19 of the First Book of his Problems. The case rests.

  Hey!] I have gone deeper into this than I planned when I started, so here I will strike my sails, reserving the rest for my book to be entirely taken up with this matter. I shall merely say in one word that blue signifies Heaven and all things celestial by the same symbolism by which white signifies joy and delight.

  Gargantua’s childhood

  CHAPTER 10

  [Becomes Chapter 11.

  Prom erudite declamations to moral fun, dominated in part by proverbs and saws. We see the uproarious results of leaving young Gargantua to himself in the hands of lubricious peasant women chosen by his rustic father.

  ‘To skin the renard’ (or, ‘the fox’) is to puke during excessive drinking. The expression appears twice in the long addition, which dates from 1535.

  Gargantua’s father was King of the Butterflies.]

  From three years of age to five Gargantua, by order of his father, was brought up and grounded in all the appropriate disciplines. Like little country boys he spent his time drinking, eating and sleeping; eating, sleeping and drinking; sleeping, drinking and eating.

  He was forever wallowing in the mire, dirtying his nose, scrabbling his face, treading down the backs of his shoes, gaping at flies and chasing the butterflies (over whom his father held sway); he would pee in his shoes, shit over his shirt-tails, [wipe his nose on his sleeves,] dribble snot into his soup and go galumphing about.

  [He would drink out of his slippers, regularly scratch his belly on wicker-work baskets, cut his teeth on his clogs, get his broth all over his hands, drag his cup through his hair, hide under a wet sack, drink with his mouth full, eat girdle-cake but not bread, bite for a laugh and laugh while he bit, spew in his bowl, let off fat farts, piddle against the sun, leap into the river to avoid the rain, strike while the iron was cold, dream day-dreams, act the goody-goody, skin the renard, clack his teeth like a monkey saying its prayers, get back to his muttons, turn the sows into the meadow, beat the dog to teach the lion, put the cart before the horse, scratch himself where he ne’er did itch, worm secrets out from under your nose, let things slip, gobble the best bits first, shoe grasshoppers, tickle himself to make himself laugh, be a glutton in the kitchen, offer sheaves of straw to the gods, sing Magnificat at Mattins and think it right, eat cabbage and squitter puree, recognize flies in milk, pluck legs off flies, scrape paper clean but scruff up parchment, take to this heels, swig straight from the leathern bottle, reckon up his bill without Mine Host, beat about the bush but snare no birds, believe clouds to be saucepans and pigs’ bladders lanterns, get two grists from the same sack, act the goat to get fed some mash, mistake his fist for a mallet, catch cranes at the first go, link by link his armour make, always look a gift horse in the mouth, tell cock-and-bull stories, store a ripe apple between two green ones, shovel the spoil back into the ditch, save the moon from baying wolves, hope to pick up larks if the heavens fell in, make virtue out of necessity, cut his sops according to his loaf, make no difference twixt shaven and shorn, and skin the renard every day.]

  His father’s little dogs would eat out of his bowl, and he would eat with them; he would bite their ears and they would scratch his nose; he would puff at their bums and they would lick his chops.

  And what d’ye think, laddies! May the drams make ‘ee poorly! That naughty little lecher was forever groping his nurses, above, below; before, behind. And – gee up, little donkey – he was already beginning to put his codpiece through its paces. Every day his nurses would bedeck it with posies, fine ribbons, fair flowers and tufts of lace, and spend their time working it between their fingers like dough in the kneading-trough, and, as though they enjoyed the game, guffawing when it pricked up its ears.

  One called it my little bung; another, my little prickle; another, my corral brand; another my stopper, my wimble, my ram-rod, my bradawl, [my drooping stalk, my rough-and-tumble, my poting-stick,] my pretty little red chidling and my little trollopy-bollocky.

  ‘It’s mine!’ said one.

  ‘It’s mine,’ said another.

  ‘And what about me!’ said a third. ‘Am I to get nothing? ‘Struth then, I’ll cut it off!’

  ‘Oh!’ said another, ‘You’ll hurt him, m’Lady. Do you go round cutting off little boys’ whatsits?’

  [He’d be just Master, with no appendage!]

  And to keep him amused like the local children they made him a lovely whirligig out of the sails of a Mirabeau windmill.

  Gargantua’s hobby-horses

  CHAPTER 11

  [Becomes Chapter 12.

  The boy giant, like many children, is a chatterbox and interested in his natural functions. His mad education emphasizes these traits.

  In parts of France, including Rabelais’ own pays, houses built into cliffs have entrances at the top as well as below at ground level.

  ‘To land someone with the Monk’ is to leave him holding the baby. It originally meant to submit someone to torture.

  Plays on the word pape (pope) are routine in the time of Rabelais but rarely translatable: papelard means ‘a bacon-sucker’ and hence a Lenten hypocrite. Parpaillons (or papillons) are butterflies.

  There is another play between sense (side, direction) and cents (hundreds). The words are left as they are.]

  Then, so that he would be good once astride his whole life long, they fashioned a lovely big wooden horse for him, and he got it to prance, jump, run round circles, kick up its heels and dance, walk, trot, step high, gallop, amble, pace like a pony and a gelding, and then to run like a camel or a wild ass.

  And (just as monks change their dalmatics according to the feast-days) he would change the colour of its coat to bay, sorrel, dapple-grey, rat-skin, dun-yellow, roan, cow-hide, black-spotted, red-speckled, piebald or lily-white.

  Gargantua himself made another hunting hobby-horse from a huge woodman’s drag, another everyday hobby-horse from the beam of a wine-press and a mule (complete with a sumptercloth for his bedchamber) from a gigantic oak. He had ten or a dozen other hobby-horses forming a relay, and seven more for riding at post. And every one of them he put to bed close by him.

  One day the Seigneur de Grudge-crumb came to visit his father in great state and pomp. That very same day there similarly came le Duc de Free-meals and le Comte de Wet-whistle. Gracious me, with so many people about, space was a bit short, particularly for stabling. So in order to find out whether there were any unused stabling elsewhere on the estate, the major-domo and the lodgings-steward of the Seigneur de Grudge-crumb addressed themselves to Gargantua, a little boy, furtively asking him where was the stabling for the big horses – believing that children will readily tell you anything.

  So he led them up the grand staircase of the château, through the upper hall into a wide gallery by which they went into a great tower. As they were climbing up yet more stairs the lodging-steward said to the major-domo,

  ‘This lad is having us on: stables are never at the top of the house!’

  ‘You’re wrong there,’ said the major-domo, ‘for I know houses in Lyons, La Baumette and Chinon – in other places too – where the stables are at the highest point of the building. There may be a way-out at the top. But to be more certain I shall ask him about it.’

  He then asked Gargantua,

  ‘Where are you taking us, my dear little chap?’

  ‘To my big horses’ stables,’ he said. ‘We shall soon be there. Let’s just climb up those steps.’

  Then he led them through another great hall into his bedroom and, opening the door, said,

  ‘Here are the st
ables you were asking about. Here’s my Spanish-horse, here’s my gelding, my courser, my ambler.’

  Then, pressing a great beam of wood on to them, he said,

  ‘This is my Friesland-pony. I got him in Frankfurt; but he can be yours now. He’s a lovely little colt and can put up with a lot. With half-a-dozen spaniels, a couple of greyhounds and a male falcon you will be kings of hare and partridge throughout the winter.’

  ‘By Saint John,’ they said, ‘a lot of good that’s done us! This time we’ve been landed with the Monk!’

  [‘That I deny,’ said Gargantua. ‘He’s not been here for three days.’]

  Guess what it was better for them to do: hide away in embarrassment or laugh at the entertainment.

  As they were making their way down in confusion, Gargantua asked them,

  ‘Would you like to have a poogumajig?’

  ‘What is that, then?’ they replied.

  ‘Five turds,’ he said, ‘to make you a face-mask.’

  ‘Even if we were set to roast today we’d never get burnt,’ said the major-domo. ‘We’ve been too well basted! Well, my dear little chap, you’ve put bales of straw over our horns all right! One of these days I shall see you made pope!’

  ‘A pape I mean to be!’ said Gargantua, ‘then you’ll be a papillon and my nice little popinjay a perfect papelard.’

  The lodgings-steward said, ‘Well, well, well.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gargantua. ‘But guess how many stitches there are in mummy’s mantle.’

  ‘Sixteen,’ said the lodgings-steward.

  ‘You’re not speaking Gospel truth,’ said Gargantua. ‘There’s a front to it in one sense and a back to it in the other sense: you got the cents all wrong!’