Gargantua and Pantagruel
Page 53
There are three quotations from Scripture light-heartedly made by Frère Jean as ‘Breviary Stuff: ‘Go forth – we that live – and multiply’, which conflates the commandment given to Adam in Genesis to go forth and multiply with words from Psalm 112:18 – ‘we that live’ – which makes that commandment universal. For the Day of Judgement, ‘when He shall come to judge’, cf. among other texts, Psalm 95 (96) 13.
Words made up from mataeo (such as ‘mataeologian’ elsewhere in Rabelais and ‘mataeobefuddledized’ here) imply uselessness, emptiness and so on.]
Panurge was disturbed by the words of Herr Trippa, and once they had passed the village of Huymes, he approached Frère Jean and said to him in a tremulous voice while scratching his left ear:
‘Perk me up a while, you old fat-guts. I feel all mentally mataeobefuddledized by the talk of that devil-ridden maniac. Hearken unto me, my dear bollock,
kindly bollock,
famous b.,
fatted b.,
patted b.,
leaded b.,
milky b.,
felted b.,
bosun’s b.,
veined b.,
sculptured b.,
stucco’d b.,
grotesque b.,
arabesque b.,
steel-braced b.,
trussed-hare b.,
[antiquarian b.,]
assured b.,
madder-red b.,
mangled b.,
embroidered b.,
pied b.,
tin-smithed b.,
hammered b.,
interlarded b.,
sworn b.,
burgher’s b.,
grained b.,
primed b.,
railing b.,
tarred b.,
swaddled-up b.,
disposed-of b.,
doctoral-hooded b.,
tattered b.,
varnished b.,
ebony b.,
brazil-wood b.,
boxwood b.,
[organized b.,
latin b.,]
winch-braced b.,
hook-braced b.,
long-sword b.,
frenetic b.,
raving b.,
passionate b.,
heaped-up b.,
well-measured b.,
stuffed b.,
bloated b.,
polished b.,
pretty b.,
well-seasoned b.,
lively b.,
positive b.,
gerundive b.,
genitive b.,
active b.,
giant b.,
vital b.,
oval b.,
don’s b.,
claustral b.,
monkish b.,
virile b.,
subtle b.,
respectable b.,
reserved b.,
idle b.,
audacious b.,
ten-ton b.,
wanton b.,
manual b.,
gluttonous b.,
absolved b.,
resolved b.,
sinewy b.,
rounded b.,
twinned b.,
stylish b.,
Turkish b.,
fecund b.,
fitting b.,15
sibillant b.,
currycombed b.,
gentle b.,
urgent b.,
common-to-all b.,
becoming b.,
brisk b.,
prompt b.,
nimble b.,
lucky b.,
pendant b.,
fatted-calf b.,
everyday b.,
high-warp b.,
exquisite b.,
requisite b.,
great-fun b.,
great-bum b.,
prick-hot b.,
scabby b.,
Guelfish b.,
Ursine b.,
patronymic b.,
cuddly b.,
wasp-stinging b.,
alidadic b.,
amalgamic b.,
algebraic b.,
[well-selected b.,
well-connected b.,
house-affected b.,]
forceful b.,
graceful b.,
hungry b.,
insuperable b.,
relievable b.,
agreeable b.,
[redoubtable b.,
horrible b.,
affable b.,
profitable b.
memorable b.,
notable b.,
palpable b.,
muscular b.,
horse-armoured b.,
subsidiary b.,
tragical b.,
satirical b.,
transpontine b.,
repercussive b.,
digestive b.,
convulsive b.,
incarnative b.,
restorative b.,
sigillative b.,
masculinizing b.,
staliionizing b.,
[donkeynizing b.,]
satisfied b.,
fulminating b.,
thundering b.,
glistening b.,
beating b.,
ramming b.,
ardent b.,
aromatizing b.,
resonant b.,
diaspermatizing b.,
sprucifyine b.,
snoring b.,
lecher b.,
robber b.,
frolicker b.,
wiggling b.,
waggling b.,
knuckle-rapping b.,
[aborted b.,
chalotted b.,
censored b.,]
toussled b.,
riddled b.,
tumble-bum b.,
Frère Jean, my friend, you fire-gun bollock, you joggle-bum bollock, I feel great respect for you and was keeping you for the ultimate tidbit. I beseech you: give me your advice. Ought I to marry or no?’
Frère Jean good-humouredly replied:
‘Get yourself married, for the devil’s sake; get yourself married, and ring me a double carillon with your balls. As soon as you can, I say, and I mean it. The evening of this very day order the banns and the bedstead! Mighty God! What are you keeping yourself for? Don’t you know that the end of the world’s drawing nigh? We’re nearer to it by two poles and one yard than we were yesterday. Antichrist has already been born, so they tell me. True, he is still only pawing at his nurse and his governesses, for he’s but a toddler and has yet to display his riches. As long as a sack of corn costs less than three silver patacoons, and a cask of wine but six copper blanks, Go forth – we that live – and multiply. Scripture that is: Breviary stuff. In the Day of Judgement, when He shall come to judge, do you really want them to find you with your balls full?’
‘You, Frère Jean,’ said Panurge, ‘have a very transparent and tranquil mind, you metropolitan bollock, and you speak to the point. That’s just what Leander of Abydos in Asia prayed for to Neptune and all the gods of the sea while swimming from Sestos to Europe across the Hellespont to call upon Hero, his lady-love:
If by your grace I swim across this Sound,
What matter if, returning, I am drowned!
He did not want to die with his bollocks full.
‘And my counsel is that from henceforth, in all my lands of Salmagundi, whenever it is decided by the courts to hang a malefactor, he will be made to pound away like a pelican for a day or two beforehand, so well that there will not be left enough in his seminal tools to write a Greek letter Y. So precious a substance must not be stupidly lost. He might possibly engender a man-child. And then he would die without regret, leaving a man for a man.’
[How Frère Jean merrily advises Panurge]
CHAPTER 27
[There is no chapter-break here in the first edition, yet the following chapter was already numbered 28. The interpolation of this chapter-break in 1552 therefore entailed no renumbering of the chapters which follow.
‘Privileges are lost by non-usage�
� was a legal maxim.
There was a French saying: ‘Those girls are like bells: you can make them say anything you want.’
There had never been a Marchioness of Winchester. Perhaps there is a confused allusion to the many brothels in the London domains of the Bishop of Winchester, whose inmates were known as ‘Winchester Geese’.
Solomon, a sexually experienced man if ever there was one, classed the ‘mouth of the womb’ amongst the three things which cannot be satisfied (Proverbs 30:15–16). Aristotle held a similar opinion (Problems, 260).
Erasmus has an adage: (I, I, VII), ‘Dodonaean Brass’ and also (II, X, XXV), ‘A wall of brass’.
Priapus as ‘god of the gardens’ was a fertility god for the Ancients.]
‘By Saint Rigomé!’ said Frère Jean, ‘I’m not counselling you, my dear friend Panurge, to do anything that I wouldn’t do in your place. Only give care and attention to leaving no gaps and to keeping up with your thrusts. If you stop for a while you’ll have had it, poor wretch, and there will happen to you what happens to wet-nurses. If they give up suckling children they lose their milk. If you don’t exercise your mentula, she’ll lose her milk too and serve only as a pisser, and your bollocks likewise will serve merely as game-bags.
‘I warn you. I’ve seen it experienced by many a man: they wouldn’t when they could, so couldn’t when they would. As the law-clerks say: All privileges are lost by non-usage. And therefore, sonny, keep all those humble little troglodytes and codpiece-ites down there sempiternally ploughing:16 see that they never live off their means, doing nothing, like gentlemen.’
‘No fear of that, Frère Jean,’ replied Panurge; ‘left bollock of mine, I believe you. You go roundly to work, you do. Without reservations or verbiage you have clearly dissipated any fear that might have intimidated me. And may the heavens grant you to serve the ball always hard and low.
‘All right then: upon your word I shall get myself married, and not play a fault. And I shall always have a few pretty chambermaids for you when you come to visit me: you will be the patron of their sorority. So much for the first part of the sermon.’
‘Hark!’ said Frère Jean. ‘The oracle of the bells of Varennes: what are they telling?’
‘I can hear them,’ Panurge replied. ‘By my thirst, their ring is more fateful than that of the cauldrons of Jupiter in Dordona. Hark
Marry thee, marry thee,
Marry, marry.
If thou dost marry thee,
Marry, marry.
Great good shalt thou find therein, find therein:
Marry, marry.
I shall get married, I assure you. All the elements invite me to. Let those words of mine be unto you as a wall of brass.
‘As for the second point, it seems to me that you have some doubts about – indeed suspect – my potential paternity, as though the erect god of the gardens were not favourable towards me. I beseech you to be so good as to believe that I have him under strict orders, docile, benevolent, all in all attentive and obedient. It suffices to loosen its leash – its fly-strings, I mean – show it its prey close by and say, Fetch it, boy! Then, even if my wife were as much of a glutton for the pleasures of Venus as ever were Messalina or the Marchioness of Winchester in England, I beseech you to believe that I would still have plenty to satisfy her with.
‘I am not unaware of what Solomon says – and he spoke like a knowledgeable scholar – nor of what Aristotle declared after him: that women are by nature insatiable; but I do want people to know that, by the same measure, my tool is indefatigable too.
‘Don’t bring up as models at this point those celebrated lechers Hercules, Proculus, Caesar and Mahomet (who boasts in his Alcoran of having more power in his genitals than sixty bo’suns: the lecher was lying).
‘Don’t bring up that Indian so celebrated by Theophrastes, Pliny and Athenaeus, who, with the aid of a certain herbal simple, brought it off seventy times or more in a single day. I do not believe it. That number is hypothetical. Do not trust it, I beseech you. But do believe the following [, and you will believe only what is true], that my natural organ, – my blessèd Ithyphallus, my Signor Thingummybobba d’Albinga – is number one in the world.
‘Now listen, my Bollockling. Have you ever seen the habit of the monk of Castres? When it was left in any house openly or secretly, those who dwelt or lived there suddenly – because of its horrifying powers – all started to rut: man and beast, men and women, down to the very cats and rats. Well, I swear to you that I have before now discovered certain energies even more lawless in my codpiece.
‘I shall not speak to you of house or hut, of sermon or market, but of the passion-play which they were putting on at Saint Maxent: as I was coming into the pit one day I saw – on account of the powers and occult properties of my codpiece – everyone, actors and audience both, suddenly fall into such awesome temptation that there was not one angel, one man, one male or female devil who did not want to fornicate! The prompter abandoned his copy; the fellow playing Saint Michael slid down like a deus ex machina, the male devils burst out of Hell and bore away all the poor little females. Even Lucifer raged and broke his bonds.
‘In short, on witnessing such disorder I quit the place, following the example of Cato the Censor, who, on seeing that the festivities of the Floralia were thrown into disorder by his presence, ceased to be a spectator.’
How Frère Jean gave support to Panurge in his doubts over cuckoldom
CHAPTER 28
[Panurge’s rhetoric fails to convince even himself. He becomes the ageing comic husband of the farces, destined to be cuckolded, bullied and robbed by his future wife.
The ‘Motor Intelligences’ are moral and spiritual beings who guide the heavenly bodies and may show their approval of spiritual men and women. Panurge would dislocate the whole universe if he were ever successfully to oppose them. He would be acting ‘worse than the Giants’ (who attacked the gods by piling Mount Pelion on to Mount Ossa). Cf. Erasmus, Adages, III, X, XCIII, ‘The Arrogance of the Giants’, cited again in Chapter 51. The basic tale of the ring that saves from cuckoldom appears in Poggio, Ariosto and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles.
The epithets applied to Panurge’s bollocks suggest flaccidity, weakness and bad qualities generally. The text given is essentially that of the first edition with the additions as usual in square brackets, but some epithets were dropped: they figure in the notes.]
‘I see what you mean,’ said Frère Jean, but time overmasters all things. There is no marble, no porphyry but has its old age and decline. Even if you’re not there yet, in a few years’ time I shall hear you confessing that some folk we know have balls dangling down for lack of a game-pouch.
‘Already I can see the hair greying on your head. Your beard, with its shadings of grey and white and tan and black, looks to me like a mappamundi! Look. Here is Asia; here are the Tigris and the Euphrates. Here is Africa and the mountains of the Moon. Here are the marshes of the Nile. Over there is Europe. Can you see Thélème? This tuft here, which is completely white, is the Hyperborean Mountains. ’Pon my thirst, my friend, when the snows are on the mountains (I mean the head and the chin) there is no great heat in the vales of the codpiece.’
‘Chilblains, to you!’ Panurge replied. ‘You don’t understand your Topics. When the snow is on the mountains, then thunderbolts and lightnings, shooting-pains and hypertrophies, red flushes and rumblings, tempests and all the devils are in the valleys. Would you like to experience that? Then go into Switzerland and contemplate Lake Wunderberlich, four leagues from Berne over towards Sion. [You reproach me with my greying hair, failing to see that it is of the nature of the leek, for the head to be white when the tail is green, stiff and full of vigour.]
‘It is true that I can just about make out one sign in me suggestive of old age – I mean a green old age. Don’t tell anyone. It’ll remain a secret between the two of us. I do find good wine more delightful to my taste than I used to: and more than I once did, I fear enco
unters with poor wine. Note that that does somehow suggest the westering sun and signify that noon-day is past.
‘But what of it? I – still as pleasant a companion as ever, or more so – am not worried about that. Devil! No. What I fear is that, through some prolonged absence of Pantagruel, our king, of whom it is my duty to be the companion [even if he went to the devil], my wife should make me a cuckold.
‘There you have the operative word; for everybody I have spoken to about it threatens me with it and asserts that it is predestined to me by the heavens.’
‘Not every man who would be cuckolded is so,’ replied Frère Jean. ‘If you are a cuckold, ergo your wife will be beautiful; ergo she will treat you well; ergo you will have many friends: ergo you will be saved. Monastical topics, they are. You, you old sinner, will be better off for it: you’ll never have had it so easy! You’ll have lost nothing. You’ll grow even richer. And if thus it were so predestined would you want to go against it? Say on, wilted bollock,
musty b.,
macerated b.,
mouldy b.,
cold-kneaded b.,
dangling b.,
chilly b.,
[appellant b.,]
fallen-down b.,
paltry b.,
faded b.,