‘In addition I extol to the high heavens the ancient custom of the Germans, who prized the counsel of old women as the shekel of the Sanctuary and revered it with all their hearts; to the extent that they had wisely accepted their counsels and replies the Germans prospered in fortune. Witness old Aurinia and that good-dame Velleda in the times of Vespasian. Believe you me, old age in women ever abounds in the qualities of the sable – I mean, the sybil.
‘Come on. Come on. With the help and power of God, come on.
‘Farewell, Frère Jean. Look after my codpiece.’
‘All right,’ said Epistemon. ‘I will follow you, protesting that if she employs in her answers any lots or enchantments I shall leave you at her door and remain no longer in your company.’
How Panurge talks with the Sybil of Panzoust
CHAPTER 17
[In ‘52 the text begins: ‘Their journey took three days. On the third they were shown…’
The Greek epithet applied to Heraclitus, skoteinos (‘obscure’), led to punning condemnations of the obscurity of Duns Scotus.
Jupiter, Neptune and Mercury forged Orion by urinating into a chamber-pot.
Homer’s ‘old stoker woman’ standing by the fire (Odyssey, XVIII, 27), to whom Ulysses is compared by Irus the beggar, is evoked by Rabelais in Greek, again with no concession whatsoever to his Greek-less reader. (He again had in mind an adage of Erasmus: I, VI, LXXXVI, ‘Poorer than Irus’, where Homer is mentioned.
Sibyls were associated with Virgil’s Aeneid, 6, in which we also meet the Golden Bough (136ff., 406ff.). Rabelais’ Sibyl becomes a burlesque figure partly based on that section of Aeneid, 6, as well as on 3, 443–53: 74–6, and, for the Hole of the Sibyl, 6, 9–11.]
Their journey took six days. On the seventh they were shown the house of the woman soothsayer set under a large, spreading chestnut-tree on the flank of a mountain. Without difficulty they entered the thatched hovel, which was badly built, badly furnished and all smoky.
‘No matter,’ said Epistemon. ‘When Heraclitus, that great Scotist and opaque philosopher, entered into a similar dwelling he was in no wise put out, explaining to his followers and disciples that the gods could reside there just as easily as in palaces crammed with delights. Such I think was the hovel of [that most-famous Hecate when she entertained young Theseus; such too that of] Hireus (or, Oenopion), where Jupiter, Neptune and Mercury did not disdain to enter, eat and lodge, paying the bill by forging Orion in a chamber-pot.’
They found the old woman in the chimney-corner.
‘She is a real Sibyl,’ Epistemon exclaimed, ‘a real naive portrait as drawn by Homer with τᾕ χαµινοĩ’8
The old crone was in a bad way, badly dressed, badly fed, toothless, bleary-eyed, bent, snotty and droopy. She was preparing a potage of greens, yellow bacon-rind and an old meat-bone for its savour.
‘Green and blue!’ said Epistemon, ‘we’re wasting our time: we shall never get a reply out of her: we’ve not brought along the Golden Bough.’
‘I’ve seen to that,’ replied Panurge. ‘I have here in my game-bag a golden ring in the company of some nice merry Carolus shillings.’
After saying those words Panurge made a deep bow and presented her with six smoked ox-tongues, a huge butter-jar full of fried meat-balls, a flagon full of drink, and a ram’s-cod stuffed with newly minted Carolus-shillings; then finally he made a profound obeisance and placed upon her leech-finger a very handsome golden ring in which was splendidly set a toadstone from Beuxes.
Then in a few words he expounded the motive for his visit, courteously begging her to give him her advice and to foretell the future awaiting his projected marriage.
The old crone stayed silent for a while, thoughtful and sucking her teeth; then she sat down on an upturned barrel and took into her hands three ancient spindles, twisting and twiddling them between her fingers in a variety of ways. She tested their points and retained the sharpest one in her hand, tossing the other two under a mortar used for pestling millet. Then she took up her spools and spun them round nine times. At the ninth turn she gazed at them, no longer touching them and waited until they had completely stopped.
I next saw her tug off one of her éclos – we call them sabots – and place her apron over her head (as priests do with their amices when about to say Mass) tying it under her chin with an old pied and parti-coloured cloth. Thus bedizened she took a deep draught from the flagon, extracted three Carolus-shillings from the ram’s cod and placed them in three walnut shells, which she deposited in the bottom of her feather jar.
Next she gave three turns round about the chimney-piece with her broom, cast into the fire a half-truss of heather, and then a dry laurel-branch, watching it burning in silence and noting that it made no crackle nor any other sound. At which she uttered a dreadful shriek and forced through her teeth a few outlandish words with strange terminations, such that Panurge said to Epistemon:
‘By God’s virtue, I’m all of a tremble! I believe I’m under a spell. [She’s not talking Christian. Look: she seems to me to have grown four spans taller than she was when she covered her head with her apron. What’s meant by that chomping of her chops? What’s portended by that jectigation of her shoulders? Why is she humming through her lips like a monkey dismembering crayfish?] My ears are ringing. I think I can hear Proserpine kicking up a shindy; the devils will soon come bursting out just where we are! Nasty creatures! Let’s get away quick. Serpent of God! I’m dying of fright. I do not like devils. They upset me and are nasy. Fly! Farewell, my Lady; many thanks for all your kindnesses.
‘I shall never get married. No. I reject it now as I always have done.’
At which he started to scamper out of the room, but the old woman forestalled him, holding the spindle in her hand and going out into the backyard by her hovel where grew an ancient sycamore-tree. She shook it thrice; on eight of the leaves which tumbled down she briefly scribbled with her spindle a few short lines of verse. She then tossed them to the winds and said to Panurge, ‘Go and seek them if you wish; find them if you can: the fated lot of your marriage is written on them.’
With those words she withdrew to her den; on the threshold of the door she drew her kirtle, petticoat and shift right up to her armpits and showed them her bum. Panurge observed it and said to Epistemon, ‘By the blood of the wooden Ox: Behold! The Hole of the Sybil.’
She suddenly bolted the door behind her and was never seen again. They chased after the leaves and gathered them up, but not without difficulty, for the wind had scattered them all over the bushes down in the valley. Then, after setting them in the right order leaf by leaf, they found the following verdict in verse:
Shuck you she will,
Your fame too;
Swell up she will,
Not with you;
And suck she will
Your good bit,
But flay not will
All of it.
How Pantagruel and Panurge diversely expound the Sibyl’s verse
CHAPTER 18
[Rabelais draws on an adage of Erasmus: I, X, LXXVI, ‘Magistracy reveals the man’.
‘palintokia’ means either a second exacting of interest or a second birth (tokos meaning both ‘interest’ and ‘birth’).
‘Palingenesy’ is a Stoic term for the restoration of the body after its dissolution. Augustine uses it in the City of God (22, 28) to mean rebirth.
‘Glubere’ and ‘deglubere’ in Latin (literally, ‘to peel’ or ‘to skin’) are used with the sense of to perform fellation by Catullus (of Lesbia) 58, 5, and by Ausonius, Epigram 71, 5.
Women started on the task of skinning men at the Creation, then widely taken to date from some five or six thousand years earlier. ‘Artus Bumbler’ renders the imaginary ‘Artus Culletant’.]
Having collected the leaves, Epistemon and Panurge returned to the court of Pantagruel, happy in part, but in part put out: happy, because they were back; put out, by the hardships of the road which they found
rough, stone-strewn and badly maintained.
They gave Pantagruel a full report of their journey and the circumstances of the Sibyl. Finally they presented him with the leaves of the sycamore-tree and showed him what was written in the short lines of verse.
Once he had read them through, Pantagruel said to Panurge with a sigh:
‘A fine state you are in! The Sibyl’s prophecy clearly expounds what has already been noted both by the Virgilian lots and your own dreams: you will be dishonoured by your wife; she will make you a cuckold, abandoning herself to another man, and by another man bearing a child; she will rob you of something important and she will batter you about, flaying and bruising some part of your body.’
‘You understand the exposition of these latter prophecies,’ said Panurge, ‘as much as a sow understands spices. Be not offended by what I say, as I do feel a bit put out.
‘Note my words: it is the contrary which is true. The old woman states that, just as a bean is not visible unless it is shucked, so too my qualities and perfections would never be widely known unless I were to be married. How many times have I heard you say that magistracy and office reveal the man (which means that we know for certain what a man’s character is and what he is worth only after he is called upon to manage affairs). Before that, when a man lives in private, you never know for certain what he’s like any more than you know a bean in a pod. So much for the first item. Otherwise, would you really maintain that the good reputation of an honourable man hangs on the backside of a whore!
‘The second couplet says my wife will swell up – understand by that the greatest joy of marriage – but not with me. Golly, I believe that! She will swell up with some lovely little boy. I love all of him already: I’m quite dotty about him. He’ll be my own little darling. From now on, no botheration in this world, however great and distracting, will enter my mind without my shrugging it off by simply looking at him and listening to him chattering away with his childish chatter.
‘Blessèd be that old woman! Golly, I shall arrange a good income for her in my Salmagundian lands, not some running rent, as for some silly dons running courses, but a settled one like fine professors in their chairs.
‘Otherwise would you really expect my wife to bear me in her flanks – conceive me, give birth to me – so that people should say, “Panurge is a second Bacchus: twice-born, born again,” as was [Hippolytus, and as was] Proteus, first by Thetis and secondly by the mother of Apollonius the philosopher, and as were the two Palici hard by the river Simethos in Sicily – and say, “In Panurge is restored the ancient palintokia, (that second-birth of the Megarians) and the palingenesy of Demo-critus?”
‘Wrong.
‘Never mention it to me again.
‘The third couplet says of my wife: And suck she will Your good bit.
‘I am well disposed towards it: you realize that it refers to that one-ended baton dangling between my legs. I swear to you, I promise you, that I will keep it succulent and well supplied. She will not suck it off in vain: half-a-peck of juice at least shall be eternally therein. You expound this locus allegorically and interpret it as referring to thieving or theft. I approve of that exegesis and I like the allegory, but not with the sense you give to it. Doubtless the pure affection which you bear for me pulls you towards the opposite – refractory – side, since scholars say that love is a thing which is wondrously apprehensive and that without fear there is no good love.
‘But I am sure that deep down inside you know that any theft in this passage means (as in so many other writers, Latin and Ancient) the sweet fruits of dalliance, which Venus wishes to be secretly and thievishly plucked. Why? Honestly, now! It is because that nice little thingummybob, done privily, between two doors, on the stairs, behind an arras, in hugger-mugger, or on a pile of loose faggots, is more pleasing to the Cyprian goddess – and I agree with that, without prejudice to a better judgement – than when performed Cynic fashion openly in sight of the sun, or between rich canopies, within gilded curtains, with plenty of time, in luxury, while crimson fans and tufts of Indic feathers waft away the flies, and the female meanwhile picks her teeth with a blade of straw pulled from the bottom of the palliasse.
‘Otherwise can you really mean that she would rob me by sucking as one slurps oysters in their shells or as the women of Cilicia (according to Dioscorides) gather the grains of alkermes! Wrong! A woman who robs does not suck but pluck, she fills not her gob but her fob; steals, and conjures away by slight of hand.
‘The fourth couplet says of my wife: But flay not will, All of it. How nicely put! You take that to mean assault and battery. Let’s change the subject. Raise your minds, I beseech you, a little above earthly thoughts to a high contemplation of the wonders of Nature. Here you stand self-condemned for the mistakes you have committed by perversely expounding the prophetic utterances of that hallowed Sibyl.
‘Supposing, but neither admitting nor conceding, that my wife, at the instigation of the fiend from Hell, desired to play me a dirty trick and undertook to do so, shaming me, cuckolding me up to the bum, robbing me and affronting me, she would never achieve her desire and undertaking. The reason which moves me to make that last point is extracted from the profundities of monastical pantheology.
‘I was told it once by Frère Artus Bumbler – it was one Monday morning when we were both sharing a pint of andouil-lettes; it was raining, I remember; may God give him good-day! – women, at the beginning of the world or soon afterwards, seeing that the men sought to be their masters in all things, conspired together to flay them alive. And to that effect they vowed, confirmed and by the holy blood of Gosh, swore an oath amongst themselves. But O! The vain projects of Womankind! O! The frailty of the female sex! They began to flay Man – to deglubere him as Catullus puts it – with that member which they liked best, namely with the sinewy vena cava. That was more than six thousand years ago, and yet they have never got beyond flaying its helmet!
After a while Jewish men, out of vexation, began to trim it and cut it off themselves by circumcision, since they preferred to be dubbed cut-down and pruned-back Marranos rather than men woman-beflayed, like other nations.
‘My wife, in no wise derogating from that common project, will flay me that bit (if it has not been done already). I freely consent to that. But not flay all of me. I do assure you of that, good my king.’
‘You,’ said Epistemon, ‘say nothing about the fact that the laurel branch (in our sight, with the Sibyl gazing at it and shrieking in a frenzied frightening voice) burnt without a crackle or any other sound. That, you know, is a baneful augury and a most redoubtable sign, vouched for by Proper-tius, Tibullus, that subtle philosopher Porphyry, Eustathius, Homer’s Iliad and others.’
‘You really are adducing some ripe old asses,’ replied Panurge. ‘They were as mad as poets, as raving as philosophers, as full of the finest folly as is their philosophy.’
How Pantagruel praises the counsel of mutes
CHAPTER 19
[We now see that Panurge is indeed deceived by the devil, who works through self-love. Rabelais draws on Lucian’s dialogue Of the Syrian Goddess and, for Tiridates, on his Dialogue of the Dance, completed by matter from Budé’s learned treatise On Money.
Roman law plays an important part in this chapter: the account of lip-reading by a certain Nello de Gabrielis is taken from a well-known gloss of Bartolus, a medieval legal scholar who is not always honoured by Rabelais, though this particular gloss is cited here with respect as by Renaissance students of Law in general.
The tale of the Syrian boys who spontaneously spoke Phrygian is taken from Herodotus (II, 2) an author whom Rabelais had worked on and partly translated when still a Franciscan. The important assertion that there is no natural language goes back to Aristotle’s On Interpretation and was taken up by Dante and Thomas Aquinas as well as by many lawyers who were professionally interested in the origin of languages, the sense of words and their possible interpretations. (Under the influence of Plato
those ideas will be deepened and developed in the Fourth Book.)
The tale of the naughty nun appears – very chastely told – in two works of Erasmus: Ecclesiastes and Fish-eating. Erasmus claims to have heard it in a sermon delivered by a Dominican. (‘Bottome’ represents ‘Fessue’; ‘Stiffly-Redeem-if, Redimet.)]
Those words once said, Pantagruel for some time kept silent; he seemed deep in thought. He then said to Panurge:
‘You are seduced by the Evil Spirit; but listen: I read that long ago the truest and surest oracles were not those delivered in writing or uttered in words. Even people who were considered discriminating and intelligent were many a time misled over them, partly on account of the ambiguities, amphiboles and obscurities in the words, partly because of the terseness of the judgements. That is why Apollo, the god of divination, was called Loxias (‘oblique’) in Greek. Oracles expounded by [gestures and] signs were deemed truest and surest. Such was the opinion of Heraclitus. And thus [did Jupiter vaticinate at Amon and] Apollo prophesy amongst the Assyrians, which is why they portrayed Apollo with a long beard, as a venerable old person of settled wisdom, not naked, young and beardless as portrayed by the Greeks.
‘Let us employ that method and seek advice from someone who is dumb, using signs not words.’
‘I agree,’ replied Panurge.
‘But,’ said Pantagruel, ‘it should be one who is mute because he was born deaf, for there is no purer mute than one who has never been able to hear.’
‘What do you mean!’ replied Panurge. ‘If it were true that no one ever spoke who had never heard any speech I could bring you logically to infer a proposition both paradoxical and absurd. But let it drop. You do not credit, then, what Herodotus wrote of those two boys who, by order of Psammeticus, the king of the Egyptians, were confined to a hut, brought up in perpetual silence and after a period of time uttered the word becus (the Phrygian word for bread)?’
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 49