Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

[Becomes Chapter 35.

  Gymnaste shows skill and dexterity worthy of his name.

  Agios ho Theos’ (‘Holy is God’ – Hagios ho Theos) was retained in Greek by the Latin Church in the liturgy for Good Friday.

  ‘Ab hoste maligno libera nos, Domine!’ (‘From the hostile fiend deliver us, O Lord’) is again taken from the liturgy. The ‘hostis malignus’ (the ‘hostile enemy’) is the devil, the foul fiend.]

  On hearing such words, some of them began to be frightened and crossed themselves with all their hands, thinking that Gymnaste was a devil in disguise. One of them called Bonny Johannie [, a captain in the local trainband,] tugged his Book of Hours from his codpiece and bawled out, ‘Agios ho Theos. If you be of God, speak: if you be of t’Other: be off!’

  But he went not off.

  Several of the band heard that and deserted their comrades, all of which Gymnaste was noting and considering. He therefore made as if to dismount but, having swung down his horse’s left flank, he twisted on his stirrup, his bastard sword by his side, and having nimbly slid underneath along the girth, sprang into the air, stood with both feet; on the saddle, his bum facing the horse’s head and said, ‘My scrotum proceeds backwards!’

  From that position, he then cut a caper on one foot, turning to the left and never failing to come back to his original stance without in any way varying it.

  At which Tri-ffart said,

  ‘I shall not attempt that just now: I have my reasons!’

  ‘Ah well!’ said Gymnaste, ‘I did that wrong. I shall undo it.’

  With great strength and agility he then repeated the caper, spinning to the right.

  Having accomplished it, he placed his right thumb on the pommel of the saddle, raised the whole of his body into the air (with the entire weight bearing on the muscle and sinews of that thumb) and twirled three times round.

  The fourth time he flipped over backwards and, without touching a thing, leapt between the ears of his steed; there he raised his body aloft, with all the weight bearing on his left thumb. In that position he spun round like a mill-wheel; then, slapping the flat of his right hand against the middle of the saddle, he gave himself such a twirl that he seated himself sideways on the crupper as the ladies do.

  After which, with utter ease, he swung his right leg over the saddle and took up position on the crupper, ready to ride off.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘I had better put myself between the saddlebows.’ And so, pressing down with both thumbs on the crupper in front of him, he turned a backwards somersault and landed correctly between the two bows of the saddle. Then he somersaulted again into the air and came down, feet together, between the saddle-bows; then, with his arms stretched out like a cross, he spun round over a hundred times, shouting meanwhile, ‘I am furious, ye devils, furious, furious. Hold me back, ye devils! Hold me! Hold me!’

  While he was vaulting about like that, the yokels said to each other in great amazement: ‘By Saint Buddocks, ‘tis an hobgoblin or a devil done up in disguise, From the hostile fiend, free us good Lord!’

  Then they fled in a rout, each glancing behind like a dog making off with a goose-wing.

  Gymnaste, seeing his advantage, dismounted, unsheathed his sword and, with great swipes, fell upon the most substantial of those bumpkins and battered them into piles of injured, bruised and wounded. Not one of them offered any resistance (for they all thought he was a famished devil, partly on account of his miraculous vaultings and partly because of the words which Tri-ffart had used when calling him a ‘poor devil’) save Tri-ffart alone, who treacherously attempted to split open his skull with his lansquenet’s broad-sword, but Gymnaste’s armour was so good that he felt no more than the weight of it and, quickly twisting round, hurled a flying blow at the aforesaid Tri-ffart, who was shielding only his upper parts, so that, with one blow, he cut through his stomach, colon and half of the liver, at which he fell to the ground, as he did so spewing up four tureens of sops with his soul all mixed up in them.

  That done, Gymnaste withdraws, well aware that matters hazardous should never be pursued to the end and that knights should treat Good Fortune with reverence, never outraging nor provoking her.

  And so, mounting his steed, he gives it the spur and makes straight for La Vauguyon, bringing Prelinguand with him.

  How Gargantua slighted the castle near the ford at Vède: and how they crossed that ford

  CHAPTER 34

  [Becomes Chapter 36.

  The war is still in the pays of Rabelais. There is an allusion to Aelian, On the Nature of Animals, 16, 25 a text that would have been appreciated by a chivalrous audience.

  In the first edition, one of the speeches of Gargantua is wrongly attributed to Grandgousier. Corrected in ‘35, it is tacitly corrected here too.]

  Once arrived, he gave an account of the state in which he had found the enemy and of the stratagem he had employed – he alone against their entire cohort – asserting that they were no more than peasants, pillagers and brigands, quite ignorant of the art of war, adding that they should set out in confidence, for it would be extremely easy to strike them down like cattle.

  Whereat Gargantua, accompanied as we have already said, mounted his great mare and, coming across on the way a big, tall elder-tree (locally called Saint Martin’s Tree because it grew from a staff which, long ago, Saint Martin had planted there), he said, ‘Just what I wanted! That tree will double up for my staff and my lance.’ And so he wrenched it easily from the ground, stripped off the branches and trimmed it to his liking. Meanwhile his mare, to relieve her belly, pissed so abundantly that she formed a flood seven leagues wide and all her stale sped down towards the ford at Vède, so increasing the flow that all that band of enemies – except for a few who had taken the path towards the hills on the left – were therein drowned most horribly.

  On arriving at the forest of Vède, Gargantua was warned by Eudemon that remnants of the enemy were still inside the castle, so, to find out, he hollered as loud as he could, ‘Are you there, or not? If you are, be off: if you’re not, I have nothing to add.’

  But a renegade gunner up on the parapet fired a shot from his cannon and struck him violently on the right temple: yet it did him no more harm than if he had hurled a plum at him.

  ‘What is this!’ said Gargantua. ‘Chucking grape-seeds at us, are you!? The vendange will cost you dear.’ (He did indeed think that the round-shot was a grape-seed.)

  On hearing the noise, those who were delayed in the castle by their pillaging rushed up into the towers and fortifications, shooting over nine thousand and twenty-five rounds from their falconets and harquebuses, all aiming them so thick and fast at Gargantua’s head that he exclaimed, ‘Ponocrates, my friend, the flies here are blinding me: hand me a branch from one of those willows to brush them away’ – thinking, you see, that the lead-shot and stone-shot from the guns were gad-flies.

  Ponocrates informed him that the only flies about were the gun-shot fired from the castle. So Gargantua battered the towers and fortifications with his big tree, and with many a great blow razed them to the ground. By which means all inside were crushed and smashed into smithereens.

  After leaving there, they came to the bridge by the mill-pond and found the ford covered with corpses forming such a mass that they clogged up the mill-race. (They were the men who had perished in the mare’s urinal flood.)

  There they wondered how to get across, given the hindrance of those corpses. But Gymnaste said,

  ‘If those devils got across it, then so shall I, easily.’

  ‘The devils did get across it,’ said Eudemon, ‘to bear away the souls of the damned.’

  ‘Then by Saint Trinian he will do so,’ said Ponocrates, ‘as a logical consequence.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed I will,’ said Gymnaste, ‘or stay stuck on the way.’

  And giving his horse the spur, he confidently went across without his horse ever taking fright at the dead bodies (for, following the teachings of Aelian, he had trained
it to fear neither weapons nor corpses, not by killing folk as Diomedes killed the Thracians, nor following what Ulysses did – as Homer tells us – by dragging the bodies of his foes before the hooves of his horses, but by putting a dummy corpse amongst its litter and making it habitually walk over it when he gave it its oats).

  The other three followed him across without trouble, except for Eudemon, whose horse plunged its right hoof, fetlock-deep, into the paunch of a great, fat peasant lying drowned on his back, and could not pull it out again. And the horse remained there hobbled until Gargantua used the end of his staff to thrust the remainder of the peasant’s guts deep into the water while the horse lifted its hoof. And, behold – a hippiatric miracle! – the aforesaid horse was cured of an exostosis on that hoof by a touch from the innards of that fat clod-hopper.

  How Gargantua combed cannon-balls out of his hair

  CHAPTER 35

  [Becomes Chapter 37.

  Philip of Bergamo’s continuation of a Supplement to his Chronicles gives rise to the smiling appeal to the ‘Supplement to the Supplement of the Chronicles’. The antifeminist narrator of the first paragraph is Maître Alcofrybas, not Rabelais in person, but some did take Rabelais to be an antifeminist. For many at the time such antifeminist remarks were part of standard comic cheek.

  The Collège de Montaigu was the butt of much humanist satire. The mockery of it is at the expense of Noel Béda. That Opportunity has to be seized by the forelock since she is bald behind is a Classical commonplace, mentioned by Erasmus (Adages, IV, IX, XXXIX, To catch by the hair).]

  Issuing forth from the banks of the Vède, they shortly came to the château of Grandgousier, who was awaiting them with great longing. On Gargantua’s arrival they gave him a mighty welcome: never were seen people more full of joy. For the Supplement to the Supplement of the Chronicles states that Gargamelle died then of joy. Personally I know nothing about that, and care very little for her nor for any other woman there be.

  What is true is that Gargantua, while putting on fresh clothes and tidying up his hair with his comb (which was seven rods long,32 and set with huge complete elephant-tusks) drew out more than seven clusters of cannon-shot which had remained in his hair from that demolition in the forest at Vède. Seeing which his father Grandgousier mistook them for lice and said to him:

  ‘Well, my son, have you brought all the way here those “sparrow-hawks of Montaigu”? I never intended you to take up residence there.’

  At which Ponocrates replied,

  ‘Sire. You must not think that I placed him in that louse-ridden college called Montaigu. Seeing the enormous cruelty and wickedness that I found there, I would sooner have lodged him with the beggars of Saint-Innocent’s, since the galley-slaves of the Moors and the Tartars, and murderers in their prison-tower, indeed the very dogs in your house, are better treated than the wretched inmates of that College. If I were King of Paris, the devil take me if I wouldn’t set fire to it inside and burn both the Principal and the regents who tolerate such inhuman behaviour before their very eyes.’

  Then, raising aloft one of the cannon-balls, he said,

  ‘These are cannon-shot which, when he was passing through the forest at Vède, struck your son Gargantua through the treachery of your foes; but they have received such retribution that they all perished in the razing of the castle, as did the Philistines by the ingenuity of Samson and those who were crushed by the tower of Siloam (of whom it: is written in Luke 13).

  ‘My opinion is that we should hunt down the foe while luck is with us. For Opportunity wears all her hair in front: once she has gone by you can never call her back: behind, her head is bald, and she never returns.’

  ‘Truly,’ said Grandgousier, ‘not just now, for I intend to feast you tonight. You are right welcome.’

  Which said, supper was got ready, and as an extra there were roasted sixteen oxen, three heifers, thirty-two calves, sixty-three milk-fed kids, ninety-five sheep, three hundred suckling-pigs basted in good sweet wine, eleven score of partridges, seven hundred woodcock, four hundred capons from Loudon and Cornouaille-en-Bretagne, six thousand pullets and as many pigeons, six hundred guinea-fowl, fourteen hundred leverets, three hundred and three bustards, and one thousand seven hundred cockerels.

  Venison they could not procure at short notice, but the Abbot of Turpenay sent eleven wild boars and the Seigneur de Grammond eighteen red deer; with that came two score of pheasants33 from the Seigneur des Essars and a few dozen wood-pigeons, water-hens, gargenays, bitterns, curlews, plovers, [francolins,] grouse, woodcocks, [lapwings,] black-headed water-fowl, spoonbills, herons, lesser white herons, heron-shaws, fen-ducks, egrets, storks and bustards, [three orange-coloured flamingos (called phoenicopters), bustards, turkeys, with plenty of couscous,] together with an abundance of soups.

  Nothing was lacking: they had plenty to eat.

  The dishes were prepared by Grandgousier’s chefs: Lapsauce, Gallimaufrey and Straingravy.

  Janot, Miguel and Bottoms-up made an excellent job of preparing the drinks.

  How Gargantua ate six pilgrims in his lettuce

  CHAPTER 36

  [Becomes Chapter 38.

  Evangelicals and reformers alike disliked pilgrimages, believing them to have been condemned by Saint Paul.

  The first edition refers in error to ‘five of the prisoners’, instead of ‘five of the pilgrims’. The error, corrected in ‘35, is tacitly corrected here too.

  Solemn ‘applications’ of Psalms to real contemporary events were much appreciated at the French Court; but Renaissance taste delighted in laughing at matters which were elsewhere taken with the utmost seriousness. The Psalm cited is the 124th (123rd).]

  Our tale requires that we narrate what befell six pilgrims returning from Saint Sebastian’s near Nantes who, seeking shelter for the night and fearing enemies, hid in the garden upon the pea-stalks between the cabbages and lettuces. Now Gargantua felt rather empty and asked if it were possible to find any lettuces for a salad. On hearing that there were some of the biggest and loveliest in all the land – for they were as large as plum or walnut trees – he was pleased to go himself and bring back in his hands those he liked. With them he carried off the six pilgrims who were so terrified that they dared not speak nor cough.

  As the lettuces were being first washed at the fountain the pilgrims whispered softly to each other, ‘What’s to be done? We’re drowning here amongst these lettuce-leaves. Shall we say something? But if we do he will kill us as spies.’

  And as they were pondering thus, Gargantua put them and the lettuces into a kitchen bowl as big as the wine-butt at Châteaux, and was eating them with some salt, oil and vinegar to cool himself down for supper.

  He had already ingurgitated five of the pilgrims. The sixth was hiding under a piece of lettuce in the bowl, but his staff stuck out above it. On noticing it, Grandgousier said to Gargantua,

  ‘That, I think, is a snail’s horn. Don’t eat it.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Gargantua. ‘They’re good all this month.’

  And so, pulling on the staff, he brought the pilgrim out with it, swallowed him into his maw, drank an awe-inspiring swig of pineau and then waited for supper to be ready.

  The pilgrims, thus devoured, avoided as well as they could the mill-stones of his teeth: they thought that they had been thrown into a deep dungeon within the prisons. When Gargantua took that huge swig they almost drowned in his mouth and the torrent of wine all but swept them down into the chasm of his stomach. However, leaning on their staves and stepping from stone to stone like pilgrims to Mont-Saint-Michel, they managed to reach safety along the line of his gums. But by mischance, one of them, prodding about with his staff to see whether they were secure, roughly struck the edge of a dental cavity and a nerve in the lower jaw, causing intense pain to Gargantua, who began to yell at the anguish he was enduring. So to ease the ache he called for his toothpicks and, going outside towards a chestnut-tree beloved by rooks, he ejected Messieurs the Pilgr
ims; for he caught one by the legs, another by the shoulder, another by his pilgrim’s wallet, another by his purse, another by his scarf. And as for the wretched fellow who had struck him with his staff, he was hooked by the cod-piece: which, however, proved a stroke of luck for him, since Gargantua lanced a cancerous tumour which had been torturing him ever since they had passed through Ancenis.

  And thus those ejected pilgrims fled at a good trot through the young vines. And the pain was eased.

  At that same moment, since everything was ready, Gargantua was called to supper by Eudemon and said, ‘I shall go and piss away my misery.’ He then pissed so copiously that his urine cut off the pilgrims’ route and they were obliged to cross a great ditch. Following the line of the clump of trees called La Touche, every one of them, save Fournillier, tumbled into a trap set in the middle of the path to catch wolves. They escaped thanks to hard work by Fournillier, who tore through the ropes and cords. Once extricated, they lay down for the rest of that night in a hut near Le Coudray.

  There they were much comforted in their afflictions by the good words of one of their company named Weary-legs, who proved to them that this trial of theirs had been foretold by David in a Psalm:

  When men rose up against us, they had swallowed us up quick – i.e., when we were eaten in a salad taken with a grain of salt;

  When they were so wrath fully displeased at us, Yea the waters had drowned us – i.e., when he took that long swig;

  the stream had gone over our soul – i.e., when we crossed the great ditch:

  Peradventure there had gone even over our soul an insupportable water – i.e. from his urine, by which he cut off our path;

  But praised be the Lord: who hath not given us over for a prey unto their teeth.

  Our soul is escaped even as a sparrow out of the snare of the fowler, when we fell into that trap, the snare is broken – i.e., by Fournillier – and we are delivered. Our help standeth, etc.