Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  ‘Soon after that it seemed to me that I was somehow metamorphosed into a little tabor and she into a little owl. At that point my sleep was shattered and I awoke with a start, all troubled, perplexed and angry. There’s a good plateful of dreams for you. Make a good meal of them and expound them as you understand them. Let’s go have breakfast, Carpalim.’

  ‘If I have any competence in the art of divining by dreams,’ said Pantagruel, ‘I do understand: your wife will not actually plant horns on your forehead where, as satyrs wear them, they can clearly be seen, but she will not be faithful nor loyal in her marriage, and will abandon herself to other men and make you a cuckold. Artemidorus clearly expounds the point the same way as I do.

  ‘Moreover you will not be metamorphosed into a little tabor but she will beat you like a tabor at a marriage-feast; nor will she become a little owl but she will rob you, as is the nature of horn-owls.

  ‘And so you can see that your dreams agree with the Virgilian lots: you will be cuckolded, you will be beaten and you will be robbed.’

  Then Frère Jean gave a shout and said, ‘He’s stating the truth, by God. My good chap, you’ll be cuckolded, I assure you. Tut, tut, tut: you’ll be Magister Noster de Cornibus! God help you! Give us a couple of words of a sermon and I’ll pass the plate all round the parish!’

  ‘Quite the contrary,’ said Panurge. ‘My dream foretells that I shall have an abundance of good things in my marriage, a cornucopia. You say they will be satyrs’ horns. Yea. Amen! Amen! I give you my fiat (or to be different from the pope, my fiatur). Thus shall I have my bradawl eternally at the ready and inexhaustible – something which all men desire but few are vouchsafed by the heavens – and therefore never shall I a cuckold be, since lack of the above is the sine qua non, the one and only cause, turning husbands into cuckolds.

  ‘What makes vagrants beg? They have nothing at home to stuff into their pouches. What drives the wolf from the woods? The need for a bit of meat. What turns wives into harlots? You get me! I appeal to the lawyers and to those gentlemen the presidents, counsellors, barristers, procurers and other glossators of that venerable legal rubric On Wives frigid or bewitched.

  ‘You – do pardon me if I give any offence – seem evidently to err in interpreting horns as cuckoldom.

  – Diana wears horns on her head in the form of a handsome crescent: does that make her a cuckold! She’s never even been married! How the devil could she be a cuckold then? For goodness’ sake speak properly or she might give you horns of the kind she gave to Actaeon.

  – That good god Bacchus wears horns; so do Pan, Jupiter Ammon and many others. Are they all cuckolds then? Must Juno be a slut? – for that would follow by the figure of rhetoric called metalepsis, as calling a child a bastard or a foundling in the presence of its father and mother is a way of implying indirectly and implicitly that the father is a cuckold and the mother a slut.

  ‘Let us put it better. The horns which my wife was giving me are horns of plenty, horns of an abundance of all good things. I can assure you of that. In the meanwhile I shall be as merry as a tabor at a marriage-feast, ever rumbling, ever rolling, ever beating and farting. Believe you me, that is a presage of my good fortune: my wife will be neat and pretty like a lovely little owl: Who believeth it not, then

  straight to gibbet from Hell!

  Noël, noël.’

  ‘I note,’ said Pantagruel, ‘the last detail which you gave and compare it to the first. At the beginning you were steeped in delight by your dream: at the end you awoke with a start, troubled, perplexed and angry…’

  ‘True,’ said Panurge, ‘for I hadn’t eaten!’

  ‘… I foresee that everything will be bleak. Take it to be true that any sleep which ends with a start, leaving the person troubled and angry, is either a symptom of ill or portends ill:

  – a symptom of ill: namely of an illness which is obstinate, malignant, pestiferous and occult, lurking within the centre of the body; under the influence of sleep which (according to medical theory) always increases the powers of concoction, it would begin to manifest itself and move towards the surface; by that dire movement, repose would be dissipated and the primary sensitive organ warned to react to it and provide for it: it is as the proverbs say: To stir up a hornets’ nest, or, To trouble the waters of the Camarinus, or To wake a sleeping cat;

  – portends ill: that is to say when the soul, by her reaction to the content of somnial divination, leads us to understand that some ill is destined and prepared there, which will soon produce its effect. Examples:

  – in the dreaming and terrifying awakening of Hecuba and the dream of Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus; from which, once it was over, they both awoke (says Ennius) horrified with a start; and indeed Hecuba saw Priam, her husband and her children slain and her homeland destroyed, while Eurydice soon died wretchedly;

  – in Aeneas, who, while dreaming that he was talking with Hector, who was dead, suddenly awoke with a start: that very night Troy was indeed pillaged and burnt. On another occasion he dreamt that he caught sight of his Lares and Penates, awoke in terror and suffered next day a terrifying storm at sea.

  [– In Turnus, who, incited to go to war by a spectral vision of a Fury in the underworld, awoke with a start, deeply troubled: then, after a long series of catastrophes, he was slain by that same Aeneas.]

  ‘There are hundreds of other examples.

  ‘While I am telling you about Aeneas, note that Fabius Pictor states that nothing was ever done or undertaken by Aeneas, and that nothing ever happened to him, which he had not known beforehand from divination by dreams.

  ‘Those examples do not lack reason, for if sleep and repose are a special gift and boon of the gods, as the philosophers maintain and the poet attests, saying:

  Then unto men the heavens sent gentle sleep,

  Their gift to weary humans, gracious, deep.

  then such a gift cannot terminate in disturbance and anxiety without portending some huge misery. Otherwise repose would not be repose, boon be no boon but something coming not from friendly gods but from inimical devils: as the common saying has it, έχθϱων Aδώϱα δώϱα.6

  ‘It is as if you were to see the paterfamilias, seated at a richly laden table with a good appetite, leap to his feet in alarm at the beginning of his meal. Any who did not know why would be astounded. What was up? Well, he had heard his menservants cry Fire; his maidservants cry Stop thief; his children cry Murder. At which he must needs abandon his meal and rush out to put things right and re-establish order.

  ‘In truth I recall that the Cabbalists and the Massoretes (expositors of Holy Writ) when teaching by what distinctions one can judge the truth of any appearances by angels (for the angel of Satan often transfigures himself into an angel of light) say that the distinction is that, whenever the good angel of consolation appears to man, he frightens him at first but finally consoles him, whereas the evil angel of temptation delights him at first but finally leaves him perturbed, anxious and perplexed.’

  The Excuse of Panurge; and an exegesis of a monastical cabbala concerning salted beef

  CHAPTER 15

  [There is a sustained play on to hear and to understand (both entendre in French.)

  Cabbalistic knowledge is semi – secret knowledge, handed down from person to person amongst initiates.

  Erasmus supplies the adage, II, VIII, LXXXIV, ‘The belly has no ears’, and, above all, I, VI, XC, ‘We do not see what is in the pouch behind us’. In his commentary Erasmus cites the fable of Aesop, which Rabelais resumes. It was one of the most authoritative condemnations ever of self-love, philautia, the source of all errors.]

  ‘May God keep from ill,’ said Panurge, ‘him who sees well yet hears not. I can see you all right, but I can’t hear you one little bit. I don’t know what you mean. A famished belly hath no ears! By God, I’m roaring mad with hunger. I’ve just done a most enormous stint: it would take more than Signor Sly to trick me again into this dreaming business this twelvem
onth. “Have no supper at all, for the devil’s sake!” Crikey! Frère Jean, let’s go and get some breakfast.

  [‘Once I’ve well and truly breakfasted and have my stomach well and truly stuffed with fodder and grain from the stall, I can, at a pinch, if needs be, go without dinner. But without supper! Crikey! That’s quite wrong. It’s an offence to Nature.

  ‘Nature has made the day for Man to do things, to toil, to work every one in his vocation. So that we can do it more fittingly she has furnished us with a candle: the bright and happy light of the Sun. At eventide Nature begins to withdraw from us and tacitly says to us: “You are good folk, my children. You have toiled enough. The night is coming: it is right to cease your labours and to restore your strength with good bread, good wine and good viands, to enjoy yourselves for a while, to lie down and rest so as to be fresh and eager for work on the morrow as before.”

  ‘Falconers do just that. Once they have fed their birds they do not make them fly on full stomachs. They allow them time to digest on their perches.

  ‘That was perfectly understood by the good pope who first instituted fasting. He ordained that one should fast until the hour of Nones; the rest of the day was left free for feeding.

  ‘In former times only few ever ate dinner: monks, say, or canons, for they’ve got nothing else to do. Every day is a feast day for them and they meticulously follow that monastic saying, From Mass to mess. Not even for their abbot would they delay settling down to table where, while stuffing themselves, they’ll wait for the abbot as long as he likes: but not otherwise and under no other circumstances. Yet everyone would have supper, except for a few mad dreamers; which is why supper is called coena, that is, common to all.7

  ‘You know that all right, Frère Jean. Come on, my friend, by all the devils, come on! My stomach, mad with hunger, is barking like a dog. Following the example of the Sybil with Cerberus, let us toss plenty of sops into its gullet to quieten it down.]

  ‘You like a Prime-time sop of bread-and-dripping, Frère Jean: I prefer a soup of giblets associated with a slice of nine-lessons plougher.’

  ‘I know what you mean!’ Frère Jean replied. ‘That metaphor has been served up from the cloister cooking-pot. The plougher is a bull formerly used, or still used, for ploughing; nine lessons means cooked to perfection. For in my days, whenever the monastic fathers got up for mattins, they, following a certain ancient practice – cabbalistic: not written but passed down from hand to hand – performed certain noteworthy preliminaries before going into church: they shat in the shitteries, pissed in the pisseries, spat in the spitteries, melodiously hacked in the hackeries and raved in the raveries, so as to bring nothing impure into divine service. Which done, they would devoutly proceed to the Sainte Chapelle (for that was their name for the monastery’s kitchen in their enigmatic jargon) and there devoutly urge that the beef for the breakfast of Our Lord’s monastic brethren be put then and there on the spit.

  ‘Often they lit the fire under the pot themselves.

  ‘Now when there were nine lessons at mattins they quite reasonably got up earlier than when mattins were selvaged with but two or three, intensifying their hunger and thirst by their yelping from their parchment antiphonaries. Now (following the aforesaid cabbala) the earlier they got up in the morning, the sooner the beef was put on the fire; the longer it stayed there, the longer it cooked; the longer it cooked, the more tender it became: it was kinder on the teeth, gave more pleasure to the palate and was lighter on the stomach, and provided better nourishment for those excellent monks, such being their Founders’ sole aim and original intention, considering that monks by no means eat to live: they live to eat. They only have one life in this world. Come on, Panurge!’

  ‘This time,’ said Panurge, ‘I can hear you, you bollock of velvet, you bollock claustral and cabbalistic. I have a stake in that cabbala. I will forego principal, usance and all interest. I will be satisfied with the expenditures, seeing that you have so eloquently expounded for us the culinary and monastic cabbala.

  ‘Come on, Carpalim. Come on Frère Jean, me old money-belt! And good day to you, my good lords all. I have dreamt enough to deserve a drink. Come on.’

  Panurge had not finished the last word when Epistemon cried out in a loud voice, saying:

  ‘To know, foresee, recognize and predict the woes of others is, amongst human beings, common and ordinary: but O! how rare it is one’s own woes to predict, recognize, foresee and know. And how wisely did Aesop illustrate that in his fables, saying that every man is born into this world with a beggar’s-wallet over his shoulder; in the pouch hanging down in front are kept the faults and defects of others forever exposed to our gaze and knowledge: in the pouch hanging down behind are kept our own faults and defects, where never are they seen nor known save by those to whom the heavens show a benevolent aspect.’

  How Pantagruel counsels Panurge to consult the Sybil of Panzoust

  CHAPTER 16

  [Panzoust is a village in the pays of Rabelais, between Chinon and I’lle-Bouchard.

  The principal Mosaic text for condemning the consulting of witches is Deuteronomy 17:10–11. Thomas Aquinas cites it twice when distinguishing between licit and illicit means of divination.

  An Old Testament savour is provided by the allusions to Tobias and the angel (Tobit 3:14) and to the ‘shekel of the Sanctuary’ (mentioned several times in Numbers 7).

  Alexander’s incredulity is taken from Lucian’s A Professor of Public Speaking, 5.

  An adage of Erasmus is alluded to: I, III, XII, ‘A woman of Thessaly’.

  Panurge’s (twisted) list of philosophers who profitably consulted women is shown up as laughable when it ends with Magister Noster Ortwinus, who was mocked in the satirical Letters of Obscure Men and by many humanists for his opposition to Reuchlin and the study of Hebrew.]

  A little later Pantagruel summoned Panurge and said to him:

  ‘The love which I bear you, matured over long stretches of time, invites me to think of your good and your welfare. Now listen to my plan: I have been told that there is a most remarkable sybil at Panzoust near Le Croulay who foretells all things to come. Make your way to her, taking Epistemon along as a companion and hear what she has to tell you.’

  ‘Perhaps she is a Canidia,’ said Epistemon, ‘a sagana, a witch and a sorceress. I am led to think so because that place is notorious for abounding in more witches than Thessaly ever was. I will not willingly go there. It is illicit, being prohibited by the law of Moses.’

  ‘Well, we’re not Jews,’ said Pantagruel, ‘nor is it an admitted and proven fact that she is a sorceress. Let us put off the sifting and sieving of such matters until after you get back. How can we tell whether she is not an eleventh Sybil, a second Cassandra. Even if she is not a sybil and unworthy of such a name, what risk do you run by consulting her about your perplexity, especially since she is reckoned to know more, and understand more, than is customary in that part of the world and amongst her sex. What harm is there in always learning something, knowing of something, even from a sot, a pot, a mug, a kitten or a mitten?

  ‘Remember Alexander the Great: having won a victory over King Darius at Arbela, he, in the presence of his satraps, once denied a hearing to some fellow, only vainly to regret it thousands upon thousands of times. There he was, victorious in Persia, but so far from his ancestral kingdom of Macedonia that it deeply worried him that he could find no way of getting news from it, partly on account of the enormous distance between the two lands, partly because of the barrier of huge rivers, the hurdles of deserts and the obstacles of mountains. During such critical and anxious reflections – which were no small concern, for his lands might have been occupied, a new king installed and a new colony planted there before he could learn of it and counter it – there appeared before him a man from Sidonia, a merchant experienced and intelligent yet unprepossessing and fairly poor, who firmly declared that he had discovered ways and means by which, in less than five days, Alexander’s own count
ry could learn of his Indian victories and he could learn of the situation in Macedonia and Egypt. Alexander reckoned the claim to be so outrageous and unfeasible that he would not give the man a hearing nor grant him an audience. What would it have cost him to listen and to learn what that man had discovered? What harm or hurt would he have suffered from knowing what were the means and method which that man wanted to show him?

  ‘It seems to me that it was not without cause that Nature fashioned us with open ears without imposing upon them any gate or closure as she has with our eyes, tongues and all other bodily apertures. I think that it was to enable us, night and day, continuously to hear and perpetually to learn from our sense of hearing, for it is of all our senses the most apt for learning. That man might have been an angel (that is to say, a messenger) from God, sent as was Raphael to Toby. Alexander despised him too quickly, and for very long afterwards he repented of having done so.’

  ‘You put it well,’ replied Epistemon, ‘but you will never convince me that it is very profitable to seek counsel and advice from a woman, especially from such a woman in that part of the world.’

  ‘I,’ said Panurge, ‘find that I have done very well by the counsel of women, especially old ones. Following their advice I have enjoyed one or two exceptional stools. Such women are, my friend, real pointer-hounds, real legal rubrics. And those who call them sage-women speak quite properly. My custom, my style, is to call them presage-women. Sage they indeed are, for they are skilled in knowledge, but I call them presage since they divinely predict and foretell all things with certainty. Sometimes I call them not Maunettes (‘Unclean-women’) but Monetae (‘Admonishing-women’) like the Juno of the Romans. For admonitions, salutary and profitable, come to us every day from them. Ask Pythagoras, Socrates, Empedocles and Magister Noster Ortwinus.