And, you enfeoffed sufferers from the gout, note how, in that way, Pantagruel made one angel into two, which is the opposite to what happened to Charlemagne, who made two devils out of one when he planted the Saxons in Flanders and the Flemish in Saxony: for, not being able to keep in subjection the Saxons whom he had annexed to the Empire and restrain them from breaking out into rebellion at any moment every time he was diverted into Spain or some other far-off lands, he transported them to a country of his which was naturally loyal, namely Flanders, whilst the inhabitants of Hainault and Flanders, who were his natural subjects, he transported to Saxony, never doubting of their fealty even after they had migrated to foreign lands. But it transpired that the Saxons persisted in their rebelliousness and original obstinacy, and the Flemings, now dwelling in Saxony, became imbued with the manners and waywardness of the Saxons.
How Panurge was made the Châtelain of Salmagundi in Dipsody, eating his corn when ’twas but grass
CHAPTER 2
[In Gargantua it was Alcofrybas (the ‘author’ of the tale) who was given Salmagundi. Here it is given to Panurge, who, greatly changed from the trickster of Pantagruel – he never appears in Gargantua of course – is now the spinner of words and arguments who can twist the most hallowed moral maxims so as to justify imprudence, profligacy and a contempt for thrifr. He is so wrong-headed that he even admires the Sorbonne! ‘To eat one’s corn in the blade’ (that is, ‘when it is but grass’) is the height of imprudence and folly. (Similarly for a landowner to cut down his tali trees was a sign of dire poverty.
A ‘bishop – or, what amounts to the same thing, his beneficed income – for a year’ is gobbled up by the annates (the obligatory payment of his first year’s income to his patrons).
Cato the Censor, in his book On Agriculture, teaches that a prudent householder should always produce and sell more than he buys.
A celebrated maxim of Plato, cited by Cicero and so enjoying the support of the great Greek and of the great Roman, held that ‘We are not born for ourselves alone, but of our birth our country demands a part and our friends demand a part.’ Panurge can abuse even such a maxim, which Erasmus says is one of the most famous of all (Adages, IV, VI, LXXXI, ‘No one is born for himself’).
The Roman sumptuary laws cited with approval by Pantagruel derive from Macrobius (Saturnalia, III, 17) supplemented by the commentary of Erasmus on another adage (I, IX, XLIV, ‘He did a Protervia’).
The Thomas Aquinas of legend was said to have finished composing a hymn to Christ in his head just as he was also finishing a dish of lamprey. When, to allude to his hymn, he quoted aloud one of Christ’s last words on the Cross, ‘It is finished’, the shocked bystanders thought he was referring to his lamprey.
Rabelais plays on the Latin etymology of dilapidate, which is a compound of lapis, a stone.]
In establishing the order of government in the whole of Dipsody Pantagruel assigned to Panurge the castellany of Salmagundi, worth an assured annual income of 6789106789 golden royals in cash, apart from an unsure income from cockchafers and snails which, year in year out, amounted to between 2435768 and 2435769 of those ducats stamped with a long-fleeced sheep. Occasionally, when it was a good year for snails and there was a run on cockchafers, the total reached 1234554321 seraphs. Not every year, though.
Now my Lord the new Châtelain managed things so well and so wisely that in less than a fortnight he had dilapidated both the assured and unsure income for the next three years. He did not, as you might say, literally dilapidate it by founding monasteries, erecting chapels, building colleges and hospitals nor, indeed by casting his bacon to the dogs, but spent it rather on hundreds of little banquets and jolly parties open to all-comers, particularly to good fellows, young girlies and big cuddly women, chopping down his timber, burning their trunks to sell the cinders, borrowing in advance, buying dear and selling cheap, and eating his corn when ’twas but grass.
When Pantagruel was informed of this he was, in himself, neither indignant, angry nor troubled. I have told you before and tell you again: he was the best little giant of a fellow who ever girded himself with a sword. He took everything in good part: every deed he interpreted favourably. He never tormented himself: he never took offence. He would moreover have quitted the God-made mansion of Reason if he had been otherwise saddened or depressed: for all the goods which the heavens cover and this earth contains in all its dimensions – height, depth, length or breadth – are not worth stirring our emotions or troubling our wits or our minds. He simply drew Panurge aside and gently pointed out to him that, if he chose to live that way without being otherwise thrifty, it would be impossible or, at the very least, hard to make him rich.
‘Rich!’ Panurge replied. ‘Have you fixed your mind on that? Have you worried about making me rich in this world? Ye gude God and gude men all, think about living joyfully! Let there be no other care, no other concern within the sacrosanct mansion of your Heaven-given brain. Let its calm never be troubled by clouds of thought thickened by worry and care. As long as you are alive, joyful, merry and bright I shall be more than rich.
‘All the world is crying, Thrift! Thrift! But some talk of thrift who have no idea what it is. Counsel should be taken from me. By me you would then be advised that what is imputed to me as a vice is done in imitation of the University and Parlement of Paris, places wherein dwell the true stream and living Idea of Pantheology (and of all justice too). He who doubts that and does not firmly believe it is a heretic. For they, in one single day, gobble up their bishop – or, what amounts to the same thing, his beneficed income – for a year, and sometimes for two: that is on the day he is inducted. No excuse, unless he would be instantly lapidated.
‘I am also acting in accordance with the four cardinal virtues:
i: Prudence: by taking money in advance. Who knows who will be alive and kicking? Who knows whether this world will last for another three years! And even if it does, is there any man so daft as to promise himself to live three years more?
No man is by the gods made sure
That he shall see one morrow more.
ii: Justice:
– Commutative, by buying dear (I mean on credit) and selling cheap (for ready cash). What does Cato write on the subject in his book on husbandry? The paterfamilias, he says, must be a constant vendor. By which he means it is impossible for him not to be rich in the end, so long as there remain any goods in his barns.
– Distributive, by providing fodder for good (note good) and noble companions whom Fortune has tossed like Ulysses on to the Rock of Good Appetite with no provision of eatables; and for girlies who are good (note good) and young (note young), for, according to the judgement of Hippocrates, youth is intolerant of hunger especially when vivacious, jolly, bouncy and full of fun. Which girlies are willing and delighted to give pleasure to all fine fellows; so Platonic and Ciceronian are they that they regard themselves as having been born into this world not for themselves alone, but, of their very persons, they keep a part for their country and a part for their friends.
iii: Fortitude: by chopping down trees like a second Milo; felling those darkling forests (which serve as lairs for wolves, wild-boars and foxes, and as dens for brigands and murderers, mole-holes for assassins, workshops for counterfeiters and hideaways for heretics) and flattening them into open moors and beautiful wastelands, fiddling with my tall trees and preparing seats for Doomsday eve.
iv: Temperance: eating my corn when ’tis but grass; living like a hermit on roots and salad-leaves, freeing myself from sensual appetites and so putting money aside for the crippled and them that suffer. And by so doing I economize on the hoeing – which costs money – on the harvesters, who like a tipple without water, and on the gleaners, who have to be given fouaces, on threshers, who (as is authoritatively said by Virgil’s Thestylis) never leave a single bulb of garlic, onion or shallot in your gardens; on the millers, who are normally thieves, and on bakers, who are not much better.
‘Are
those negligible savings, apart from the depredations of field-mice, the grain rotting in barns and the nibbling of weevils and termites?
‘From corn when ’tis yet but grass you can make a lovely green sauce: it is easily concocted and readily digested; it enlivens your brain, gladdens your animal spirits, delights your sight, whets your appetite, flatters your taste-buds, steels your heart, tickles your palate, clarifies your complexion, tones up your muscles, tempers the blood, lightens the diaphragm, freshens up the liver, unbungs the spleen, comforts the kidneys, settles the bladder, limbers up the spondyls, voids the ureters, dilates the spermatic vessels, tightens up the genital sinews, purges the bladder, swells the genitals, retracts the foreskin, hardens the glans and erects the member; it improves the belly and makes you break wind, fart, let off, defecate, urinate, sneeze, hiccup, cough, gob, spew, yawn, dribble snot, breathe deep, breathe in, breathe out, snore, sweat, and get your gimlet up, together with hundreds of other extraordinary benefits.’
‘I well understand you,’ said Pantagruel; ‘you conclude that those who are not very bright could never spend so much in so short a time. You are not the first to conceive that heresy. Nero maintained it and admired above all other human beings his uncle Gaius Caligula who, in a few days, with remarkable inventiveness, had managed to squander all the treasure and patrimony which Tiberius had bequeathed to him.
‘So (instead of [keeping and] observing the Roman sumptuary laws regulating food and dress:
the lex Orchia,
the lex Fannia,
the lex Didia,
the lex Licinia,
the lex Cornelia,
the lex Lefridania,
the lex Antia,
and the laws of the Corinthians,
by which each person was rigorously forbidden to spend per annum more than his annual income) you have performed a Protervia – Protervia being for the Romans what the Pascal Lamb is for the Jews: everything edible had to be eaten and all the rest cast into the fire, keeping nothing back for the morrow.
‘I can rightly say of you what Cato said of Albidius, who, after devouring by his extravagant expenditure everything he possessed, had nothing left but his house, so he set fire so as to be able to say, “It is finished,” as was subsequently said by Saint Thomas Aquinas when he had consumed a whole lamprey. Not that it matters.’
How Panurge makes a eulogy of debtors and borrowers
CHAPTER 3
[Panurge will never be out of debt.
Marsilio Ficino in a famous Commentary on Plato’s Symposium made the whole universe cohere in mutual love: Panurge twists that platonizing ideal of mutual loving dependency and applies it to his self-loving, one-way debts, never to be repaid.
To claim to be a creator, sensu stricto, is to claim to be God.
Hesiod in his Works and Days famously places virtue serenely on a plateau at the top of a mountain, only to be reached by toiling up a stony path. Once reached, Virtue is a source of constant delight. (Rabelais returns seriously to the theme in the Fourth Book, Chapter 57.)
Especially perhaps for Renaissance Platonists, Man is a microcosm, a ‘little world’ corresponding to the great world which is the Macrocosm.
Erasmus is again present through the Adages: I, I, LXX, ‘Man is a wolf to man, and I, I, IV, LXXIV, ‘To fish in the air, to hunt in the sea’ (that is, to give oneself useless trouble, or, to attempt the impossible).
One of Aesop’s most famous fables tells how the other members, selfishly conspiring against the stomach, are shown that they are wrong. Throughout these chapters Panurge is flouting the wisdom summarized by Erasmus in the adage I, VI, LXXXVIII, ‘Live within your own harvest’. Cf. also the adages later exploited in Chapter 25.]
‘But,’ Pantagruel asked, ‘when will you be out of debt?’
‘At the Greek Kalends,’ Panurge replied, ‘when all the world is happy and when you can inherit from yourself!
‘God forbid that I should ever be out of debt! For then I would find nobody to lend me a penny. Who leaven leaves not at the eve: no risen dough hath in the morn! Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever praying God to grant you a good, long and blessèd life. Fearing to lose what you owe him, he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company; he will be constantly acquiring new lenders for you, so that you can borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men’s spoil.
‘In days of yore in Gaul when, by decree of the Druids, the serfs, servants and attendants were burnt alive at the funerals and obsequies of their lords and masters, were they not greatly afraid that their lords and masters should die? For they had to die with them. Were they not incessantly beseeching their great god Mercury, with Dis, the Father of the ducat, long to preserve them in good health? Were they not concerned to treat and serve them well? For then the) could at least live together until they died.
‘Believe me, your creditors, all the more fervently, will pray God that you should live and fear lest you should die: more than the hand they love the hand-out, and more than their lives, their pennies. Witness those money-lenders of Landerousse who recently hanged themselves when they saw the price of corn and wine take a plunge as the good weather came back.’
Pantagruel making no reply, Panurge went on:
‘True Gosh! When I think of it, you are trying to drive me into a corner by holding my debts and creditors against me. By Jove! For that one quality I considered myself to be venerable, revered and awesome, since despite the opinion of all the philosophers (who say nothing can be made from nothing), I, who possess nothing – no primeval matter – have been a Maker, a Creator.
‘I have created. What? Why, all those lovely nice lenders. A lender – I maintain, up to the stake, exclusively – is a creature both lovely and nice. He who nothing lends is a creature unlovely and nasty, a creation of the great villainous divel in Hell.
‘And make what? Why debts! – O thing most rare and with the patina of Antiquity! – Debts, I say, exceeding the number of syllables resulting from the combination of all the consonants with all the vowels, which was long ago cast and calculated by that noble man Xenocrates. If you estimate the perfection of debtors from the multitude of their lenders you will not go wrong in applied mathematics.
‘Can you imagine how good I feel each morning when I see all those lenders around me, so humble, obsequious and prodigal with their bowings, or when I note that, should I bestow a more open countenance or a more cheerful welcome on one rather than the others, the scoundrel believes he will be paid off first and be the first in the queue, taking my smile for ready cash. I feel that I am still playing God in the passion-play at Saumur, accompanied by his angels and cherubims, that is by my guardian spirits, my disciples, supplicants, petitioners and perpetual bedesmen. And I took it for true (once I saw that everybody nowadays has such a fervent, strident longing to make debts and lenders new) that the mountain of the heroic virtues described by Hesiod – I got top marks for him in my degree – consisted of debts, to which all human beings are seen to aim and aspire but few can climb because of the ruggedness of the path.
‘Not all who would can be debtors: not all who would can create lenders. And you want to boot me out of such downy felicity!
‘Worse still: I give myself to bonnie Saint Bobelin if all my life I have not reckoned debts to be, as it were, a connection and colligation between Heaven and Earth (uniquely preserving the lineage of Man without which, I say, all human beings would soon perish) and perhaps to be that great World Soul which, according to the Academics, gives life to all things.
‘That it really is so, evoke tranquilly in your mind the Idea and Form of a world – take if you like the thirtieth of the worlds imagined by Metrodorus [or the seventy-eighth imagined by Petron] – in which there were no debtors or lenders at all. A universe sans debts! Amongst the heavenly bodies there would be no regular course whatsoever: all would be in disarray. Jupiter, reckoning that he owed no debt to Saturn, would dispossess him of
his sphere, and with his Homeric chain hold in suspension all the Intelligences, gods, heavens, daemons, geniuses, heroes, devils, earth, sea and all the elements; Saturn would ally himself to Mars and throw all that world into perturbation. Mercury would no longer bind himself to serve the others and would no longer be their Camillus (as he was dubbed in the Etruscan tongue), being in no wise indebted to them. No longer would Venus be venerated, for she would have lent nothing. The Moon would remain dark and bloody: why should the Sun share his light with her? He was under no obligation to her. The Sun would never shine on their Earth: the heavenly bodies would pour no good influences down upon it, since that Earth refrained from lending them food in the form of mists and vapours by which they are fed (as Heraclitus stated, the Stoics proved and Cicero affirmed).
‘Between the elements there will be no mutual sharing of qualities, no alternation, no transmutation whatsoever: one will not think itself obliged to the other: it has lent it nothing. From earth no longer will water be made, nor water transmuted into air; from air fire will not be made, and fire will not warm the earth. Earth will bring forth nothing but monsters, Titans, [Aloidae,] giants. The rain will not rain, the light will shed no light, the wind will not blow, and there will be no summer, no autumn. Lucifer will tear off his bonds and, sallying forth from deepest Hell with the Furies, the Vengeances and the hornèd devils, will seek to turf the gods of both the greater and the lesser nations out from their nests in the heavens.
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 43