Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  ‘Therefore take it to mean the contrary. The prognostic signifies that my wife will be decent, modest and loyal, not armour-clad, surly or brainless, nor a brain-child like Pallas; nor will handsome Jupiter be my rival, dipping his bread in my sauce when we sup together at table. Just think of his deeds and the fine things he got up to! He was the most debauched, the most franciscanly – I mean the most frankly – lecherous male there ever has been, as rutting as a wild boar.

  ‘Yes, and if Agathocles of Babylon is not lying, he was brought up more goatish than a goat by a sow on Dicte in Candia. Others say too that he was suckled by a nanny-goat called Amalthea. And then (by Acheron!) in one single day he rammed one-third of the entire world: beasts, humans, rivers and mountains – Europa, that is. On account of that ramification the Ammonians had him portrayed in the form of a ram rampant, a hornèd ram.

  ‘But I know how to protect myself from that horn-bearer. Believe you me: he will not find in me some stupid Amphitrion, some complaisant Argus with his hundred goggles, some cowardly Acrisius, some dreamer like Lycus of Thebes, some lunatic like Agenor, someone phlegmatic like Asopus, some hairy-pawed Lycaon, some yokelish Corytus of Tuscany, some long-spined Atlas. Well might he metamorphose himself hundreds of times into a swan, bull, satyr, shower of gold, cuckoo (as he did when he deflowered Juno, his sister), into an eagle, ram, [pigeon, as he did when in love with that maiden Phthia who dwelt in Aegia,] fire, snake, even indeed a flea, into the atoms of Epicurus or, like a Magister Noster, into second intentions: I’ll nab ’im with me ’ook.’

  ‘And do you know what I shall do to him? Golly: what Saturn did to Coelus his father – Seneca foretold it of me and Lactantius has confirmed it – and what Rhea did to Atys: I will slice off his balls a hair’s breadth from his bum. For which reason he will never be pope, “because he hath no testiculos”.’

  ‘Whoa there, my lad; whoa!’ said Pantagruel. ‘Just open the book for a second time.’

  Then Panurge came across the line:

  Membra quatit gelidusque coit formidine sanguis

  Breaks his bones, shatters his limbs in a trice;

  For fear thereof the blood doth turn to ice.

  ‘That means she will maul you, back and belly.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ replied Panurge, ‘the prognostication is all about me: it says that if my wife annoys me I will maul her like a tiger. My Saint Martin’s staff will do the job. And in default of a stick, if I don’t eat her alive – as Cambies, the king of the Lydians, ate his – the devil may eat me.’

  ‘You,’ said Pantagruel, ‘are most stout of heart! Hercules wouldn’t take you on in such an ecstasy! But that is what folk say: one Johnnie counts as a double, and even Hercules dared not take on two.’

  ‘I am a complaisant Johnnie, am I!’

  ‘No, no, no,’ replied Pantagruel: ‘I was thinking of a score in tric-trac and backgammon.’

  At the third go Panurge came across this line:

  Foemineo praedae et spoliorum ardebat amore

  She keenly burnt, as is the female’s usage,

  To go for loot and pillage all the baggage.

  ‘That means,’ said Pantagruel, ‘that she will rob you. According to those three lots I can see you in a fine old mess: you will be cuckolded, beaten and robbed.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ replied Panurge, ‘that line of verse means that she will love me with a perfect love. Our satirist was telling no lie when he said that a woman ablaze with the extremes of love sometimes finds pleasure in stealing from her beloved. And do you know what she steals? A glove, or the cord of his flies, to make him search for it. Some trifle. Nothing of importance.

  ‘Similarly those little quarrels, those squabbles which surge up at times between lovers, reanimate and stimulate love, just as we sometimes find cutlers, for example, hammering their whetstones the better to hone up their tools.

  ‘That is why I take those three lots to be in my favour.

  ‘Otherwise: I appeal.’

  ‘One can never appeal, said Pantagruel, against verdicts reached by lots and Fortune, as our ancient jurisconsults affirm and as Baldus states in the ultimate Law: Codex: “Common matters concerning legates”. The reason is that Fortuna recognizes no superior authority with whom an appeal against her or her lots can be lodged. And in such a case the minor cannot be fully restored to his former status, as Baldus clearly states, in the law: “The Praetor says”; final paragraph; Pandects: “Concerning minors”.’

  How Pantagruel advises Panurge to foretell his good or bad fortune in marriage from dreams

  CHAPTER 13

  [Divination from dreams held a place of honour in the Classical and biblical sources and authorities consulted by Renaissance scholars. Rabelais, following many other erudite authors including Erasmus, believed that a man or woman’s mind (or spirit) may leave its body in rapture or in dreams, or at least strive to do so. That belief was held by theologians, philosophers and scholars generally. Rabelais is well within the scholarly context of his time, but not all the books he refers to were extant, some being known only from being mentioned by other authors.

  The interpretation of Homer’s and Virgil’s two gates, one of ivory, one of horn, derives eventually from Macrobius’ Dream of Scipio. The gates were best known from the Aeneid, Book 6.

  More than once Rabelais, as here, applies the Classical rule of the Golden Mean to feasting and fasting, which would have horrified many ecclesiastical traditionalists: There is an echo of an adage of Erasmus: III, VIII, XII. ‘A hungry man is not to be disturbed’.

  ‘Nονς’ (‘Nous’) is the mind or spirit.]

  ‘Now then, since we cannot agree together over how to expound Virgilian lots, let us try another means of divination.’

  ‘Which?’ asked Panurge.

  ‘A good, ancient and valid one,’ said Pantagruel: ‘by dreams. For by dreaming – under the conditions described by Hippocrates in his book On Dreams, by Plato, Plotinus, Iamblicus, Synesius, Aristotle, Xenophon, Galen, Plutarch, Artemidorus Daldianus, Herophilus, [Quintus Calaber, Theocritus, Pliny, Athenaeus] and others – the soul often foresees what is to come.

  ‘There is no need to prove that to you at greater length. You will grasp it from a common analogy: you know how nurses, after their babes have been properly changed, properly fed and given the breast, and lie soundly asleep, can freely go out and enjoy themselves, being granted leave, as it were, to do what they want for an hour since their presence about the cradle would seem unnecessary: in the same way each of our souls, while her body is asleep and concoction has been completed in all its stages, can go and enjoy herself, revisiting her homeland in Heaven, since nothing more is required of her before we awake.

  ‘From there she is granted the signal favour of participating in her primal and divine origin and of contemplating that infinite [and Intellectual] Sphere | whose centre is in every place in the universe and whose circumference nowhere: God, that is, by the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus] in whom there is no becoming, no transience, no waning, all times being the present; there she discerns not only things past amongst the motions here below but also things to come; she bears them back to her body, and as she expounds them to friends via her body’s organs and senses she is termed prophetic and vaticinatory.

  ‘It is true that she cannot report them as purely as she saw them, being hampered by the imperfection and weakness of our bodily senses: similarly the Moon, on receiving her light from the Sun, does not impart it to us as bright, pure, vibrant and blazing as she received it. That is why, for divinations made during sleep, there is still the need of an interpreter (, an adroit, wise, rational and consummate oneirocrites, or oneiropolos as the Greeks call him).

  ‘That is why Herodotus would say that nothing was revealed to us by dreams nor anything hidden: we are merely given some pointer, some indication of things to come, either for our own happiness and unhappiness or else for the happiness and unhappiness of others. The Holy Scriptures testify to
it and lay history confirms it, revealing to us hundreds of events which happened in accordance with the dreams of the person dreaming or equally the dreams of others.

  ‘The Atlantes and the people living on the isle of Thasos (one of the Cyclades) are deprived of that benefit: in their lands nobody has ever had dreams.

  ‘So too were Cleon of Daulia and Thrasymedes, and in our days the learned Frenchman Villanovanus, none of whom ever had dreams.

  ‘Tomorrow, then, at the time when the joyful, rosy-fingered dawn chases away the darkness of the night, devote yourself to dreaming deeply. In the meantime strip yourself of all human affections: of love, hate, hope or fear.

  ‘For as, in days gone by, the great prophet Proteus never predicted future events when he was transformed and disguised as fire, water, tiger, dragon or with any other strange mask, but to make predictions had to be restored to his own natural form: so too, no man can receive divine inspiration and the art of prophecy unless that part in him which is most divine – that is his Νους or Mens – be still, tranquil, peaceful, and neither preoccupied nor distracted by any exterior passions or affections.’

  ‘I will do that,’ said Panurge. ‘Must I eat a lot or a little for supper this evening? I don’t ask that without a cause: for if I go without a good substantial supper I get no proper sleep and have nothing at night but silly dreams, dreams as hollow then as my belly is.’

  ‘No supper at all would be better for you,’ replied Pantagruel, ‘given your plumpness and your habits. Amphiareus, a prophet of Antiquity, required those who desired to receive his oracles through their dreams to eat nothing at all that day and to touch no wine for three days beforehand.

  ‘We shall not follow so extreme and strict a regime. I do indeed believe that a man stuffed with viands and awash with wine finds it hard to receive notice of matters spiritual: I am not however of the opinion of those who think that after long and stubborn fasts they can enter more deeply into a contemplation of matters celestial.

  ‘You may recall that my father Gargantua (whom with respect I mention) often told us that the writings of such jejuna-ting hermits were as insipid, jejune and vilely salivating as were their bodies when they wrote them, and that it is hard for a man’s spirits to be good and serene when his body is in a state of inanition, seeing that the philosophers and physicians affirm that our animal spirits arise, are born and act through our arterial blood, purified and refined to perfection in the rete mirabile which lies beneath the ventricles of the brain. They cite us the example of a philosopher who, the better to mediate, reason and write, persuades himself that he is in solitude, far from the crowd, yet all about him dogs are barking, wolves howling, lions roaring, horses whinnying, elephants trumpeting, snakes hissing, asses braying, grasshoppers stridulating, turtle-doves uttering their lamentations: that is to say, he is more disturbed than he would be at the fairs of Fontenay or Niort because hunger is in his stomach: to remedy which, his stomach barks, his eyes are dazzled and his veins suck out some of the substance proper to the flesh-creating organs and draw down the wandering mind which is neglecting to look after its nurseling and natural host which is the body. It is as though a hawk on the fist, wishing to soar into the air and take to its wings, were to be at once hauled back lower by its leash.

  ‘On this subject they cite the authority of Homer, the Father of all philosophy, who says that the Greeks stopped weeping out of grief for Patroclus, the great friend of Achilles, when, and only when, hunger showed itself and their bellies swore to supply no more tears. For in a body exinantiated by long fasts there remained nothing from which to produce tears to weep.

  ‘In all cases the Mean is to be praised, and you will stick to it here. For supper you will not eat any haricot beans, hare or any other meat, nor octopus (polyp) nor cabbage nor any food which might obfuscate or confuse your animal spirits. For just as a looking-glass cannot reflect the likeness of objects exposed before it if its sheen is clouded by breath or darkened by age, so too the mind cannot receive ideas from divination by dreams if its body is muddied and disturbed by vapours and exhalations from the above-mentioned foods, on account of the indissoluble sympathy which exists between body and mind.

  ‘You will eat good pears from Crustumenia and Bergamo, a short-start apple, a few plums from Touraine and some cherries from my orchard. In your case there is no reason why you should fear that your dreams will be rendered dubious, deceptive or suspect by such fruits, as the Peripatetics have indeed declared them to be in autumn-tide, when human beings eat much more fruit than in any other season, and as it is taught mystically by the ancient poets and seers that vain, deceptive dreams lie hidden beneath the leaves carpeting the ground, for it is in the autumn that leaves fall from the trees, since the fermentation which naturally abounds in fresh fruit and which readily evaporates by ebullition in the animal parts (as we can see happen with the must of wine) has already long since been exhaled and dispersed.

  ‘And you will drink some clear water from my fountain.’

  ‘The terms are a bit hard on me,’ said Panurge, ‘but I agree to them all the same, cost me what it may, while protesting that I intend to have my breakfast early tomorrow morning, right after my dream-session. In addition I commend myself to Homer’s twin gates, to Morpheus, to Icelon, Phantasus and Phobetor. If they succour me in my need I shall set up a merry altar for them entirely composed of soft eiderdown.

  [‘Were I in the temple of Ino betwixt Oetylus and Thalamae my perplexity would be resolved by her during my sleep through beautiful and happy dreams.]’

  He then asked Pantagruel:

  ‘Wouldn’t it be a good thing if I stuck a few laurel branches under my pillow?’

  ‘There is no need of that,’ replied Pantagruel. ‘It is superstitious; and what has been written on such matters by Serapion Ascalonites, Antiphon, Philochorus, Artemon and Fulgentius Planciades is full of abuses.

  ‘I would say the same of a crocodile’s left shoulder and (with due respect to Democritus) of a chameleon; similarly, of that stone of the Bactrians called eumetrides, and of horn-ammonite (which is the name given by the Ethiopians to a precious stone which, like the horns of Jupiter Ammon, is gold in colour and shaped like a ram’s horn; they assert that the dreams of any who wear it are as true and infallible as holy oracles).

  ‘Perhaps that is what Homer and Virgil meant by the two gates of dreams to which you have commended yourself.

  – one gateway is of ivory; through it enter dreams which are confused, deceptive and uncertain, just as it is impossible to see through ivory however fine-drawn it may be: its density and opacity impede penetration by our visive spirits and so the reception of visible forms;

  – the other gateway is of horn, through which enter dreams which are certain, true and infallible, just as all forms appear clearly and distinctly through horn on account of its translucency and transparency.’

  ‘You mean to imply,’ said Frere Jean, ‘that the dreams of horn-bearing cuckolds such as Panurge will be – God helping, and his wife – are ever true and infallible.’

  Panurge’s dream and its interpretation

  CHAPTER 14

  [It is in Genesis 37:19 that Joseph’s brothers say, ‘Here comes our dreamer’.

  Renaissance writers never seem to tire of jests about horns (cornes,) and cuckoldry. The unfortunately named Petrus de Cornibus was a don at the Sorbonne.

  It was a principle going back to Synesius that one should tell one’s dreams to one’s friends and then calmly abide by their interpretations, since such friends should be free from prejudice and emotion and above all from our own self-love, which leads us all too readily to twist divination in our favour.

  The erudition is all supported by reputable sources.

  The problem of Panurge is turning into what lawyers called a ‘perplex case’. In such cases the laws are clear but their application to specific circumstances is not. Such legal perplexities can be made worse by the devil and his agents, and, as S
aint Paul warns his followers (II Corinthians 11:14) ‘the angel of Satan often transfigures himself into an angel of light’.

  Panurge’s perplexity is proving a diabolical one. Several adages of Erasmus are concerned with perplexity, including: III, Χ, XXX, ‘Perplexed’; and III, VIII, XL, ‘Perplexed and disturbed in mind’. Several other adages of Erasmus are relevant, including: I, III, LXXIV, ‘To satisfy Momus’; I, I, LX, ‘To annoy hornets’; I, I, LXIV, ‘To disturb the Camarina’, and I, III, XXXVI, ‘έχθϱών αδώϱα δώϱα: enemies’ gifts are no gifts’, which Rabelais cites in Greek, as a common saying, without any concession to his readers.

  ‘Fiat’, (so be it) is good Latin: ‘fiatur’ is not. Fiat is the sign of approval written on papal Bulls.]

  The next morning, about seven o’clock, Panurge presented himself before Pantagruel; in the chamber with him were Epistemon, Frère Jean des Entommeures, Ponocrates, Eudemon, Carpalim and others; to whom Pantagruel said as Panurge appeared, ‘Here comes our dreamer!’

  ‘Those words once cost most dear,’ said Epistemon, ‘and the sons of Jacob paid a high price for them.’

  At which Panurge said,

  ‘I’m at Guillot the Dreamer’s, all bemused: I’ve had more than enough dreams but I can’t make anything out of them, except that in my dream I had a wife who was young, elegant and utterly beautiful, who treated me with affection and caressed me as her own little darling. Never was man more carefree nor happier. She stroked me, tickled me, patted my hair, kissed me, put her arms round my neck and playfully placed two pretty little horns high up on my forehead. I fooled about and expostulated that she ought to have placed them below my eyes, so that I could more easily see where I should strike with them, and also so that Momus should find no imperfection in her (as he did in Nature’s positioning of horns on bulls). But, despite my expostulations that dear little idiot thrust them further in. It didn’t hurt me one bit, which is quite remarkable.