Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  pod-shelled b.,

  exhausted b.,

  [incongruous b.,

  failing b.,

  done-in b.,]

  tired-out b.,

  screwed-out b.,

  prostrate b.,

  beshitten b.,

  crouching b.,

  slumbering b.,

  creamed-off b.,

  squeezed-dry b.,

  passed-by b.,

  caitive b.,

  restive b.,

  putative b.,

  minced b.,

  worm-rinsed b.,

  pinchbeck b.,

  bowed b.,

  cowed b.,

  poor old b.,

  ill-complexioned b.,

  ill-tempered b.,

  ill-graced b.,

  corked b.,

  flabby b.,

  diaphanous b.,

  drained b.,

  dripped dry b.,

  [squashed b.,

  shattered b.,]

  scattered b.,

  tattered b.,

  mitred b.,

  chapter-housed b.,

  whipped-cream b.,

  quibbled b.,

  shrivelled b.,

  pimpled b.,

  dirty b.,

  daubed b.,

  voided b.,

  furrowed b.,

  chagrined b.,

  haggard b.,

  unhelved b.,

  glum b.,

  wormy b.,

  gloomy b.,

  poohy b.,

  fagged out b.,

  scabby b.,

  weary b.,

  castrated b.,

  frustrated b.,

  ablated b.,

  sphacelated b.,

  engraved b.,

  gawky b.,

  [mealie-skin b.,]

  leprous b.,

  hernia’d b.,

  varicose b.,

  [gangrened b.,

  wormy b.,]

  pox-sore b.,

  nobbled b.,

  ragged b.,

  gewgawed b.,

  dull-brown b.,

  watered-down b.,

  too-cocky b.,

  podgy b.,

  abject b.,

  worm-riddled b.,]

  trepanned b.

  smoke-dried b.,

  sun-dried b.,

  emaciated b.,

  castrated b.,

  mule-prick b.,

  puff-pastry b.,

  marinated b.,

  [ulcerated b.,

  extirpated b.,]

  gutted b.,

  bowel-bound b.,

  mildewed b.,

  pock-marked b.,

  cut-up b.,

  buffeted b.,

  watered-down b.,

  adulterated b.,

  shredded b.,

  cupping-horned b.,

  cupping-glassed b.,

  gob-smacked b.,

  [picked-bare b.,

  slashed-faced b.,

  chapped b.,

  bitter b.,

  wheezing b.,

  stinking b.,]

  barrel-reeking b.,

  bottle-stinking b.,

  ale-stinking b.,

  frigid b.,

  fistulous b.,

  scrupulous b.,

  [languorous b.,

  crack-pot b.,]

  defective b.,

  decrepit b.,

  diminutive b.,

  downing b.,

  frowning b.,

  ape-like b.,

  ugly old b.,

  vainly hoping b.,

  blighted b.,

  macerated b.,

  unworthy b.,

  paralytic b.,

  antedated b.,

  degraded b.,

  one-armed b.,

  gammy b.,

  rattled b.,

  bat-back b.,

  glower-back b.,

  farty kick-back b.,

  jaded b.,

  hauled-in b.,

  gravelled b.,

  disparate b.,

  desolate b.,

  disconsolate b.,

  declining b.,

  ponging b.,

  solecizing b.,

  appellant b.,

  skinny b.,

  grill-barred b.,

  [ulcerated b.,]

  assassinated b.,

  botched-up b.,

  stripped b.,

  sluggish b.,

  nonchalant b.,

  as-nothing b.,

  heavy-cake b.,

  zero b.,

  mawkish b.,

  threadbare b.,

  crumpled b.,

  clientless b.,

  [feverish b.,]

  you bollocked away [to the devil], Panurge, my friend.17

  ‘Since thus it is predestined for you, would you make the planets run retrograde, dislocate all the celestial spheres, suggest to the Motor Intelligences that they should go wandering astray, blunt the spindles of the Fates, accuse their spinning-rings, slander their spools, discredit their dividers, condemn their threads and unwind their clews? Quartan fever to you, old bollock! You would be doing worse than the Giants. Come on now, Big-balls: what would you rather be, not cuckold but jealous, not knowing but cuckold?’

  ‘I’d rather be neither one nor the other,’ Panurge replied. ‘But if ever I did find that I was a cuckold, [‘d soon knock things into shape, or else the world would have run out of cudgels!

  ‘Faith, Frère Jean, it would be better for me never to get married.

  ‘Harken to what the bells are telling me now we are closer:

  Marry not; marry not,

  not, not, no, no;

  If thou dost marry –

  marry not, marry not –

  Thou shalt regret it,

  gret it, regret it;

  Cuckold shalt be.

  ‘Might worthy of God! I’m beginning to get really annoyed. Do all you robed-wearing big-heads have no remedy at all? Has Nature left humans so bereft: that a married man cannot go through this world of ours without falling into the dangerous deeps of cuckoldom!’

  ‘I am quite willing to tell you of a device,’ said Frère Jean, ‘by means of which your wife will never cuckold you without your knowledge and consent.’

  ‘I beseech you to tell it to me,’ said Panurge, ‘my velvety Bollock.’

  ‘Take,’ said Frère Jean, ‘the ring of Hans Carvel, that great lapidary of the king of Melinda.

  ‘Hans Carvel was a learned, experienced and scholarly man, a good man, sensible, of good judgement, courteous, kind, a giver of alms, a philosopher full of fun moreover, and a good and merry companion if ever there was one, with a bit of a paunch, always wagging his head and somewhat ungainly. In his old age he took to wife the daughter of Concordat, the bailiff; she was young, beautiful, active, comely, welcoming and gracious (too much so towards her neighbours and servants).

  ‘And so it befell that after a few weeks he grew as jealous as a tiger and began to suspect her of getting her bum drummer-boy’d somewhere else. To counter which he gave her her fill of many a fine tale of the havoc wrought by adultery. He frequently read to her from The Legends of Good Wives, preached to her about pudicity and compiled for her a treatise in praise of conjugal fidelity in which he inveighed good and strong against flirtatious wives, and gave her a lovely collar studded all over with Orient sapphires. Despite which he found her so froward and so welcoming to her neighbours that his jealousy grew and grew.

  ‘During one of the many nights that he was lying beside her racked by such torments, he dreamt that he was addressing the devil and telling him of his misery. The devil comforted him and placed a ring on his big finger saying: “This ring I give you: as long as it remains on your finger your wife will never be carnally known by another man without your knowledge and consent.”

  ‘“Thank you kindly, Monsieur Devil,” said Hans Carvel. “If ever anyone takes that ring off my finger I shall renounce Mahoun.”

  ‘The devil vanished, and Hans Carvel awoke fu
ll of joy, finding himself with his finger up his wife’s thingummy.

  ‘I was forgetting to tell how his wife, when she felt it, drew back her bum as if to say: “Yes! No! That’s not what goes in there!” And it seemed to Hans Carvel that some man was trying to steal his ring. Is that not an infallible remedy? If you trust me you’ll follow that example and ever wear your wife’s ring on your finger.’

  Their road and their conversation ended here.

  How Pantagruel brought together a theologian, a physician, a legist and a philosopher over the perplexity of Panurge

  CHAPTER 29

  [In subsequent editions Rabelais changed his good theologian’s name from Parathadée to Hippothadée. He is almost always called Hippo-thadée today, so his name is exceptionally changed here by anticipation to its later form. Para + Thadée might mean ‘Another Thadeus’, that is, another Saint Jude. Hippothadée could possibly be a very oblique allusion to Melanchthon, whose followers were called Philippists. At all events he is modest and pious, the ideal evangelical and Erasmian theologian.

  Self-love deceives. That basic belief is underlined by serious wordplay (in the spirit of Plato’s Cratylus): in French, amour de soi (love of self) more than hints with its near-homophone at the effects of self-love – not least in the case of the self-loving Panurge – it déçoit, it deceives, the self-lover.

  As Roman Law and its glossators recommend in perplex cases, we now leave individual consultations on what in legal terms is the hypothesis (namely, Should Panurge marry?) for expert opinions on the thesis (Should any man marry?). The various roles attributed to the theologians, physicians, lawyers and jurisconsults are standard: Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (written in Italian for the French Court) takes the line which Panurge supports and which Pantagruel rejects.

  The legal phrase ‘the dice of judgement’, used here in its usual, metaphorical sense, is soon to be developed in unexpected ways.]

  On arriving at the palace they gave to Pantagruel an account of their journey and showed him the ditty of Raminagrobis. Pantagruel read it once, read it twice, then said: ‘No reply so far has pleased me more. He means, in sum, that when venturing into wedlock each man must be the arbiter of his own thoughts and seek counsel from himself. That has always been my opinion and I told you as much when you first brought it up with me: but you quietly laughed, I remember, and I realized that your amour de soi – your philautia – vous déçoit.

  ‘Let us proceed otherwise. Here’s how. All that we have and are consists in three things: soul, body and possessions. Three kinds of people are severally devoted nowadays to the conservation of each of them: theologians for the soul; physicians for the body; jurisconsults for our possessions. My advice is that we have a theologian, a physician and a jurisconsult round to dinner on Sunday. Then, together, we can discuss your perplexity.’

  ‘By Saint Picault,’ Panurge replied, ‘we shall achieve nothing worthwhile. I can tell that already. See how our world is out of joint: we entrust our souls to theologians, most of whom are heretics; our bodies to physicians, who all abhor medicines; and our possessions to lawyers, who never go to law with each other.’

  ‘You are talking like Il Cortegiano, said Pantagruel, ‘but I deny the first assertion, noting that the main, indeed the sole and unique occupation, of good theologians is to extirpate heresies by word, deed and writing (far from being tainted by them), and to implant deeply within human hearts the true and living Catholic faith.

  ‘The second I approve of, noting that physicians so order the prophylactic and health-conserving side in their own cases that they have no need of the therapeutic, which cures by medicines.

  ‘The third I concede, noting that good lawyers are so preoccupied with pleading and making legal rejoinders on behalf of the affairs of others that they have neither time nor leisure to pay attention to their own.

  ‘And so for our theologian next Sunday let us take our own Père Hippothadée; for physician, Dr Rondibilis; and for legist, our friend Bridoye.

  ‘I further advise that we should move into the tetrad – the perfect number of the Pythagoreans – and so make up the fourth by inviting our loyal subject Trouillogan the philosopher, especially seeing that an accomplished philosopher such as he is replies affirmatively to all doubts expounded to him.

  ‘Carpalim. Arrange for us to have all four of them here to dinner next Sunday.’

  ‘I believe,’ said Epistemon, that you could never have chosen better ones throughout the kingdom. I don’t simply mean as touching the accomplishments of each one in his vocation (which are far beyond the dice of judgement) but because, as a bonus, Rondibilis is now married and used not to be; Hippothadée is not married and never has been; Bridoye once was married and now isn’t; Trouillogan is and was.

  ‘I’ll relieve Carpalim of a chore. If you agree I shall go and invite Bridoye myself; I have known him for years and want to speak to him in the interests of the career of an admirable and learned son of his who is studying law at Toulouse under the aegis of the most learned and virtuous Boissoné.’

  ‘Act as you think best,’ said Pantagruel. ‘And let me know if I can do anything to advance the son of Seigneur Boissoné, and the honour of Boissoné too, for I love and revere him as one of the most capable men of his profession. I shall be most delighted to see to it.’

  How Hippothadée the theologian gives advice to Panurge about the undertaking of a marriage

  CHAPTER 30

  [Much turns on a sentence of Samt Faul: ‘It is better to wed than to burn’ (I Corinthians 7:9), taken to mean, as it generally was, to burn with lust, not to burn in Hell). By quoting Saint Paul as saying: ‘It is far better to wed than to burn, the theologian pre-empts any attempt to make ‘better’ here mean ‘less bad’. Hippothadée rejects those many denigrators of marriage who, since Saint Jerome, made Saint Paul’s judgement into a morose and coarse alternative to celibacy. It is further interpreted in the light of Matthew 19:10–11, from which evangelicals deduced that celibate chastity, being a special gift from God, cannot be imposed on anyone ever. Hippothadée gives a markedly evangelical turn to his questions and answers, drawing on the Lord’s Prayer, the teaching of Saint James (1:17) that God is ‘the Giver of all good gifts’ and on the marriage service (with formulas still in use today). For his Classical wisdom Rabelais draws above all on Plutarch’s Marriage Precepts, doubtless following Erasmus.

  The allusion to a ‘goose which my wife won’t roast’ is another echo of Pathelin.

  For the ‘privy counsel of God’ see Rabelais’ Almanac for the Year 1533.

  The ‘valiant woman’ (in Latin, the mulier fortis) described by Solomon is to be found in Proverbs 31]

  Dinner was no sooner ready the following Sunday than the guests appeared, except for Bridoye, the puisne judge of Fonsbeton. When the dessert was brought in Panurge gave a deep bow and said:

  ‘Gentlemen: but one word: should I marry or not? If my doubt is not resolved by you I shall take it to be insoluble [like the Insolubilia of Petrus de Alliaco], for each of you, respectively in his vocation, has been selected, chosen and picked out like fine petits pois on the sorting-tray.’

  Père Hippothadée, at the bidding of Pantagruel and to the respectful acclaim of those present, answered with unbelievable modesty:

  ‘Beloved, you have asked me for counsel, but first of all you must seek counsel from yourself. Do you feel in your body any importunate prickings of the flesh?’

  ‘Very strongly,’ replied Panurge. ‘May that not offend you, Mon Père.’

  ‘No, Beloved, it does not,’ said Hippothadée. ‘But in that struggle do you have God’s special gift and grace of continence?’

  ‘No, by my faith,’ replied Panurge.

  Then get married, Beloved, for it is far better to wed than to burn with the fire of lust.’

  ‘That,’ exclaimed Panurge, ‘is what I call talking graciously, with no circumbilivaginating about the pot! I deeply thank you, Monsieu
r Notre Père.

  ‘Without fail I shall get married, and that right soon. I invite you to the wedding. Cock’s blood! We shall have a fine old feast. You shall wear my wedding-ribbons and, Beef’s Body! we shall tuck into a goose which my wife will never roast. Moreover, if it would please you to favour me with so great an honour, I shall invite you in return to lead the maidens in their first dance.

  ‘There remains one little ounce of doubt to dispose of – a little one, I mean, less than nothing. I shan’t be cuckolded, shall I?’

  ‘Indeed not, Beloved,’ replied Hippothadée; ‘if it please God, no.’

  ‘Aah!!’ cried Panurge. ‘The might of God comes to our aid! Where are you despatching me to, good people? To conditionals, which in dialectics allow of all contradictions, all impossibilities: If my transalpine mule could fly, my transalpine mule would have wings. If God so wishes, I shall not be cuckolded: but then, if God so wishes, a cuckold I shall be! If it were a condition which I could obviate I would not be entirely without hope, but you are referring me to the privy counsel of God and to the Chamber of his minute pleasures. How do you Frenchmen find the way there, then?

  ‘I think it would be better for you, Mon Père, not to come to my wedding. The din and hurly-burly of all the guests would disturb all your testament. You like repose, silence, solitude. I think you’d rather not come. And then you dance pretty badly and would feel awkward opening the ball. I’ll have some rillettes sent up to your room; some wedding-ribbons too. And if you like, you can drink us a toast.’

  ‘Beloved,’ said Hippothadée, ‘take what I say aright, I beseech you. When I say to you please God, am I treating you wrongly? Is it badly put? Is that a condition which is blasphemous or an obstacle to your faith? Is it not to honour our Lord, our Creator, Protector, Servator? Is it not to recognize Him as the only Giver of all good gifts? Is it not to declare that we all depend on His loving kindness; that we are as nothing, are worth nothing, can do nothing, unless His holy grace is infused upon us? Is it not to apply a canonical proviso to everything we undertake, is it not to remit everything which we propose to what He may dispose by His holy will, in earth, as it is in Heaven? Is that not truly to hallow His holy name?