Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  ‘That it is so, even now we can still see how, in all well-run households, amongst the relics and vestiges of ancient times, they send such newly wed husbands off (after Lord knows how many days) to see their uncle, in order to absent them from their wives, make them rest awhile and take on victuals the better to return to the fray, even though they often have neither aunt nor uncle; just as King Pétaud did not exactly dismiss us after the battle of Cornabons but sent Courcaillet and me back to our hearths. Courcaillet is still looking for his.

  ‘When I was a little boy my grandad’s godmother would sing to me:

  Saying a prayer and telling of beads

  Are meant for those who them do ken:

  A piper off to work in the meads

  Is twice the man trudging home again.

  ‘What brings me to my opinion is this: that first year planters of vines could scarcely have eaten any grapes nor drunk any wine from their labours; nor could builders live in their newly constructed houses during the first year without the risk of dying of suffocation from a shortage of breath (as Galen learnedly notes in Book Two of On Difficulties of Respiration).

  ‘If I asked you that, it was not without well-caused causation nor well-resonant reason. I hope you don’t mind!’

  How Panurge had a flea in his ear and gave up sporting his magnificent codpiece

  CHAPTER 7

  [As a mark of perpetual slavery, the Jewish master of a Jewish slave had to pierce the slave’s ear if he refused his freedom after seven years’ service (Deuteronomy 15:15 ff.). In the time of Rabelais ‘to have a flea in one’s ear’ meant to burn with lust. Panurge is the slave of his concupiscence.

  Again the word-spinning of Panurge is answered by Pantagruel with a quotation from Saint Paul: this time Romans 15:5, one of the central texts favoured by liberal evangelicals and reformers: ‘Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind’. Theologically and philosophically, that injunction is applied to ‘things indifferent’, that is, to everything which, being neither good nor bad in itself, depends on one’s own mind. The mind itself, under grace, is the battle-ground of the Evil Spirit versus the Good. For Christian liberals such monastic institutions as celibacy, poverty and obedience were ‘things indifferent’, their value depending on how they were conceived and practised. In the Renaissance as in Classical and Christian Antiquity the heart was primarily the seat of thought not of the emotions.

  There is a traditional, untranslatable pun on à propos (with the same sense as in English) and âpre aux pots (bitter to poes).

  A further pun plays on bureau, brown ‘bureau-cloth’, and bureau in the sense of a desk in the Treasury (the Cour des Comptes,).]

  The next morning Panurge had his right ear pierced in the Jewish style and hung from it a small golden ring inlaid with silver-thread; in its culet was set a flea. Now (so that you shall be in no doubt, for it is a fine thing always to be well informed) that flea was black and the upkeep of it, duly accounted for, amounted to hardly less per quarter than the nuptials of an Hyrcanian tigress – say 600,000 Spanish pence. Once free of debt he was annoyed by such an excessive outlay, thereafter maintaining the flea in the manner of tyrants and lawyers: that is, by the blood and sweat of those subjected to them. He took four ells of coarse brown bureau-cloth and draped it over himself like a long cloak with a single seam. He refrained from wearing his trunk-hose and clipped a pair of spectacles on to his bonnet. Thus arrayed, he appeared before Pantagruel, who found his disguise very strange, especially since he could no longer see the magnificent codpiece which was to Panurge a sacred anchor, his last refuge from the shipwrecks of adversity.

  Good-hearted Pantagruel could not fathom this mystery, so he interrogated him, asking what he meant by such a proso-popoea.

  ‘I,’ said Panurge, ‘have got a flea in my ear: I want to get married.’

  ‘And good luck to you,’ said Pantagruel; ‘you have made me most happy. But truly – though I would not swear to it on a red-hot iron – it is not the style of lovers, is it, to wear their hose dangling down, to let their shirt-tails hang over un-breeched knees and to sport a long cloak of brown bureau-cloth (which, amongst respectable and manly folk is an unusual colour for ankle-length cloaks)? Although some followers of peculiar sects and heresies once went thus accoutred (and despite there being many who attributed that to charlatanism, hypocrisy and a desire to impose upon simple folk) I nevertheless do not wish to condemn them nor to make an adverse judgement on them.

  ‘Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, especially over things external, extraneous and indifferent, which are neither good nor evil in themselves since they do not spring from our hearts and thoughts which are the forge of all good and all evil: good, if the emotions are good and governed by the clean Spirit: evil, if the emotions are perverted out of equity by the foul Spirit. I am however displeased by novelty and any contempt for normal customs.’

  ‘The colour,’ said Panurge, ‘is apropos – bitter to poes – it’s my bureau. From henceforth I mean to work on it and keep a close eye on my affairs. You never saw a man as nasty as I shall be, now I’m out of debt – unless God helps me.

  ‘Look, here are my goggles. If you saw me from afar you would rightly take me for Frère Jean Bourgeois: next year I shall, I think, preach yet another crusade! Then God save our bollocks.

  ‘You see this brown bureau-cloth? Believe me: some occult property resides in it, known only to a few! I just put it on this morning, and I’m mad already, raging, and piping-hot to be married and plough up my wife like a brown devil without fear of a drubbing.

  ‘O what a great head of my household I shall be! After my death I shall be cremated on a pyre-of-honour, so as to have my ashes as a memorial and exemplar of the perfect householder. Crikey. My accountant had better not play about on my bureau, stretching esses into efs – sous into francs! Otherwise blows from my fist would trot all over his dial!

  ‘Look at me, front and back: it’s in the style of the toga, the ancient dress of the Roman in times of peace. I based the style of it on Trajan’s column in Rome and on the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus too. I am weary of war, weary of soldiers’ cloaks and tunics. My shoulders are all bowed down from wearing armour. May arms cease: may togas reign (at least for all the coming year if I get married, as you quoted to me yesterday from the Law of Moses). As for my breeches, my great aunt Laurence told me in days gone by that breeches were made for codpieces. That I do believe, using the same induction as that nice old twerp Galen in Book Nine of On the Use of our Members, where he says that the head was made for the eyes: for Nature could well have placed our heads in our laps or on our elbows, but, having ordained that eyes should discern things afar, she fixed them on to the head at the highest part of the body as on a pole, just as we find lighthouses and tall beacons erected high above our sea-ports so that their beams may be seen from afar.

  ‘And since I would like to give myself a breather from the art of war – for a year at least – that is, to get married, I no longer wear a codpiece nor, consequently, my trunk-hose. For the codpiece is the primary item of a fighting man’s armour. And I maintain up to the stake, (exclusively of course), that Turks are not properly clad in their armour, seeing that the wearing of codpieces is outlawed by their religion.’

  How the codpiece is the primary item of armour amongst fighting-men

  CHAPTER 8

  [Rabelais has just mocked Galen on human sexuality. He is compared to Pathelin’s aunt Laurence. Galen did indeed maintain that the head was made primarily for the eyes. Others maintained that it was made, more nobly, for the brain. Similarly Galen held and taught that the testicles form a ‘principal member’ so important that it would be preferable for a man to have no heart (the seat of thought as well as of emotions) than no testicles. The quarrel raged in the time of Rabelais, for it centres on the production of semen: Galen – to the angry amusement of his opponents – held that semen was produced in and by the balls. Those who, like Rabel
ais, followed Hippocrates in this matter, believed that semen originated in all the principal members and, after descending the spinal column, was stored in (not produced by) the testicles. For Galen, the species is more important that the individual: for Hippocrates (and Rabelais who follows him) the perfecting of the individual man is more important that the good of the species. (That is less surely so for the individual woman. See below, Chapter 33.)

  The discovery of the real nature of semen and its production lay a long way in the future. In the Renaissance the question was one of real actuality. Galen rejoiced that even idiots could produce semen and thus children: followers of Hippocrates did not, holding that semen should be sown responsibly and that the child, once born, be educated to resemble not merely his sire’s body but his persona. (See Pantagruel, Chapter 8, Gargantua’s letter to his son.)

  For Man in his helpless state at birth Rabelais draws upon the preface to the Seventh Book of Pliny’s Natural History and, again, on Erasmus (Adages, IV, I, I, ‘War is sweet to those who have not experienced it’). For Moses and his fig-leaf Panurge seeks to draw on the authority of Genesis 1.

  The priapic poem at the end appears in an anthology, Fleurs de la poésie françoyse, of 1534.

  The works of Justinian and Chiabrena mentioned near the end are fictional. Chiabrena (in French, Shit-turds) sounds like a play on the Italian surname chiabrera.]

  ‘Do you wish to maintain,’ said Pantagruel, ‘that the codpiece is the primary item of fighting-armour? That is a very novel and paradoxical assertion, for we usually say that donning of armour begins with the spurs.’

  ‘I do so maintain,’ Panurge replied, ‘nor am I wrong to do so. See how Nature, intending that the plants, trees, herbs and zoophytes created by her should endure and be perpetuated through all succeeding ages – the individuals dying but the species surviving – carefully clad in armour the seeds and buds in which such perpetuation lies; and so with remarkable cunning she furnished and covered them with pods, shucks, teguments, husks, calyxes, shells, spikes, egrets, skins or prickly spines, which form fine, sturdy, natural codpieces for them. Manifest examples are found in peas, beans, chick-peas, nuts, peaches, cotton, bitter-apples, corn, poppies, lemons, chestnuts: in all plants generally, in which we can clearly see that the seeds and buds are covered, protected and armour-clad more than any other part of them.

  ‘Not so has Nature provided for the perpetuation of the human race: in the state of innocence, in the primeval Age of Gold, she created Man naked, tender, fragile, without offensive or defensive armour, as an animate being not a plant: an animate being, I say, born for peace not war, an animate being born for the mirific enjoyment of all fruit and vegetable life, an animate being born for peaceful dominion over all the beasts.

  ‘When, with the succession of the Age of Iron – the Reign of Jupiter – there came an increase in wickedness between human beings, the earth began to bring forth nettles, thistles, thorns and other forms of revolt against Man on the part of vegetable life, and virtually all the animals, for their part, became fatally disposed to emancipate themselves from him and quietly conspired no longer to slave for him and no longer to obey him insofar as they could resist him, rather doing him harm according to their abilities and powers.

  ‘Man therefore, desiring to maintain his original privileges and to prolong his original domination, and not being able easily to forego the servitude of many of the beasts, found it necessary to don some novel armour.’

  ‘By Holy Goosequim!’ exclaimed Pantagruel, ‘since the last rains came you have developed into a great fill-up-it, Sir – I mean, philosopher!’

  ‘Reflect,’ said Panurge, ‘how Nature inspired man to arm himself and which part of his body he first protected with armour. It was, by God’s virtue, the balls.

  Sir Priapus, once he had done,

  Begged her no more, for he had won.

  That is witnessed to by Moses, the Hebrew Captain and philosopher, who affirms that Man protected himself with a glorious and gallant codpiece, made – a most beautiful device! – from fig-leaves, which are in every way suited and naturally appropriate (by their strength, serrations, curl, sheen, size, colour, odour, quality and capacity) to the covering and protecting of balls (save only those horrifying balls of Lorraine which gallop unbridled down into the hose, loathing the mansion of proud codpieces and knowing nothing of good order: witness Viardière, that noble ‘King’ Valentin of Mardi Gras, whom I came across in Nancy one May-day when, in the name of elegance, he was scrubbing his balls spread out on a table in the manner of a Spanish cloak). So, unless you want to talk incorrectly, you should no longer say when you send a train-band soldier off to the wars, Look after your wine-jar, Tévot! – your noddle, that is – but, by all the devils in Hell, Look after your milk-jug, Tévot! – that is, your balls. Lose your head, and only an individual has perished: lose your balls, and there would perish the whole human race. That is what moved the gallant Claudius Galen (in Book One of On Semen) boldly to conclude that it would be better to have no heart than no testicles – by better meaning less bad – for in them consists, as in a sacred promptuary, that seed which conserves the human race. And for less than a hundred francs I would believe that such were the very stones by which Deucalion and Pyrrha renewed the human race which had been wiped out by the [poetic] Flood. That is what moved the courageous Justinian (in Book 4 of On the Removal of Hypocrites) to locate the summum bonum in breeches and codpieces.

  ‘For that and other reasons the Seigneur de Merville, the better to follow his king to the wars, was trying on a new suit of armour one day (since he could no longer make good use of his old half-rusty one, the flesh of his guts having for some years by then distanced itself from his kidneys) when his wife reflected with a pensive mind that he was taking scant care of that billet-doux rod they shared in their marriage (seeing that he was protecting it with nothing but chain-mail) and decided that he should arm it most efficiently with a gabion, a great jousting helmet lying useless in his closet. The following lines about her are written in the Third Book of The Maidens’ Chiabrena:

  She saw her husband dear his armour don,

  Save for the codpiece: he on battle bent.

  ‘I am afraid,’ said she, ‘It may get dent!

  ‘That part I love the best put something on!’

  What! For such words should she be set upon?

  No, no, I say: she was concerned for it,

  Afraid of harm for that which she did long:

  That goodly part, her nicest tasty bit.

  So stop being amazed at my novel accoutrements.’

  How Panurge seeks advice from Pantagruel over whether he ought to marry

  CHAPTER 9

  [A chapter in which the replies echo the last words of the question. (Erasmus made the form popular and respectable in his colloquy entitled ‘Echo’.) Here it is a means of casting the decision back to Panurge.

  Two of the adages of Erasmus are relevant: I, IV, XXXII, To cast every dice’, and I, VII, XCIX (more or less) ‘To scratch one another’s back’.

  From Ecclesiastes 4:1 is cited ‘Woe to him that is alone’. It was often quoted by those arguing against enforced celibacy and in favour of marriage.

  It was Seneca who wrote (Epistle 94) that ‘what you have done to others will be done unto you’.

  The Sage who said ‘Where there is no wife he greatly mourneth who is ill’ is the author of Ecclesiasticus (36:27).]

  Since Pantagruel made no reply, Panurge went on and said with a deep sigh:

  ‘Sire, you have heard my resolve, which is to get married (unless all holes are alas locked, bolted and barred). For the love you have so long borne me, I implore you to give me your advice.’

  ‘Once you have cast the dice, so decided and firmly resolved,’ said Pantagruel, ‘there should be no more talking: all that remains is to implement it.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Panurge, ‘but I wouldn’t want to implement it without your good advice and counsel.
’

  ‘I do so advise you,’ said Pantagruel; ‘and that is my counsel.’

  ‘But,’ said Panurge, ‘if you knew that it would be better for me to stay as I am, without embarking on some novelty, I would rather never marry.’

  ‘Never marry then,’ replied Pantagruel.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Panurge; ‘but would you want me to live alone all my life without a conjugal mate! You know the Scripture, Woe to him that is alone. The single man never enjoys such comfort as those who marry.’

  ‘Marry then,’ said Pantagruel, ‘for God’s sake.’

  ‘But,’ said Panurge, ‘suppose my wife made a cuckold of me! It’s been a good year for cuckolds you know. That would be enough to make me fly off the hinges with torment. I’m quite fond of cuckolds; they seem nice fellows and I enjoy hanging round them, but I would rather die than be one. That is a jab to bear which I dare not.’

  ‘Dare not get married then,’ Pantagruel replied, ‘for the judgement of Seneca is true without exception: “What you have done to others will be done unto you.”’

  ‘Did you say,’ asked Panurge, ‘without exception?’

  ‘Without exception is what he says,’ Pantagruel replied.

  ‘Ho, ho!’ said Panurge, ‘by a tiny little devil, he means in this world or the next! Truly, though: since I can no more do without a woman than a blind man can do without a stick (for my bradawl must trot, otherwise I could never live), is it not better that I should keep company with one decent, honest wife than be changing about, day after day, in constant danger of a cudgelling or even worse of the pox? For no decent wife has ever interested me: no insult is implied to her Man.’