Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  ‘Beloved, you will, please God, not be cuckolded. To know what is His pleasure in this matter there is no need to fall into despair as being something over which one must consult His privy counsel and journey into the chamber of His holiest pleasures: God is good and has granted us the boon of having revealed it, declared it and clearly explained it through Holy Scripture. There you will find that you will never be a cuckold – that is to say, that your wife will never prove shameless – if you take a woman who is the issue of decent people, one instructed in virtue and in all things honourable, never having haunted nor frequented any but moral company; one loving and fearing God: loving to please God by keeping His holy commandments; fearing to offend Him and forfeit His grace through lack of faith or by any transgression of His holy law, in which adultery is rigorously forbidden and the wife told to cleave to her husband alone, to cherish him, serve him and entirely to love him after God.

  ‘To reinforce such teachings you for your part must support her in your conjugal love, continue to behave like a wise and decent man and set her a good example: you will live purely, chastely and virtuously within your habitation, just as you wish her, on her part, to live; for it is not the mirror which is highly decorated with gilt and precious jewels that is called good and perfect but the one which most truly reflects the objects set before it: so too that wife is not to be most esteemed who is rich, beautiful, elegant or born from a noble lineage, but she who strives, with God’s help, to form herself in good grace and conform herself to the morals of her husband. Look at the Moon: she does not accept light from Mercury nor Jupiter nor Mars nor any other planet or star in the heavens: she accepts it only from her husband, the Sun, and never receives more than he bestows upon her by infusion while he is turned towards her. And in the same way you will be the model and exemplar of virtue and honour for your wife, and will ceaselessly beseech the grace of God for your protection.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Panurge, twiddling the ends of his moustache, ‘do you want me to marry the valiant woman described by Solomon? She’s dead; no doubt about that. God forgive me, but as far as I know I’ve never set eyes on her.

  ‘Many thanks all the same, Father. Eat this slice of marzipan: it’ll aid your digestion. And drink a bumper of mulled claret: it’s a tonic and good for the stomach.

  ‘Let us get on.’

  How Rondibilis, the physician, advises Panurge

  CHAPTER 31

  [Behind Rondibilis probably lies Dr Rondelet, a distinguished physician at Montpellier. Rondibilis advocates the teachings about semen of the Platonico-Hippocratic school which, on this matter, was opposed to Galen. Rabelais draws freely on the Laws of Marriage of his friend Tiraqueau.

  For the tale of Cupid, see Lucían, Dialogues of the Gods, 19.

  At least one adage of Erasmus is relevant: II, III, XCVII, ‘Venus is cold without Ceres and Bacchus’.

  For Socrates, to be a philosopher means ‘to practise dying’. (Plato: Phaedo, 67D–68B). Because a true philosopher strives to liberate his soul from his body in philosophical rapture, philosophy is truly a practising of death, death being conceived as the final separation on Earth of body and soul. For Erasmus and his followers that idea of Socrates is central to the whole of Christianity, conceived as the philosophy of Christ.]

  Panurge, continuing to talk, went on to say:

  ‘After he had dealt with Fray Cauldaureil, the first words uttered by the man who was castrating the brown-clad monks at Saussignac were “Now for the others!” I say the same: now for the others! Come on, Notre Maître Rondibilis: dispatch this for me! Should I marry or not?’

  ‘By the amblings of my mule!’ replied Rondibilis, ‘I have no idea how I ought to answer that problem. You state that you feel within you the barbed prickings of the flesh. I find from our faculty of medicine – and we have taken it from the conclusions of the ancient Platonists – that carnal concupiscence can be restrained by five means: By wine.’

  ‘I can believe that,’ said Frère Jean. ‘When I am really drunk, all I ask is to go to sleep.’

  ‘I mean, by wine taken intemperately, since lack of temperance produces a lowering of the temperature of the blood, a slackening of the sinews, a dispersing of the generative semen, an hebetation of the senses and a subverting of locomotion, all of which are impediments to the act of generation. You do indeed find Bacchus, the god of drunkards, painted beardless, dressed in women’s attire, as being entirely effeminate, a eunuch, a gelding.

  ‘It is otherwise with wine taken temperately, as is pointed out by that ancient proverb which says that without the company of Ceres and Bacchus Venus is frigid. According to the account in Diodorus Siculus it was the opinion of the Ancients (and particularly of the Lampsacians, as Pausanias bears witness) that Signor Priapus was the son of Bacchus and Venus.

  ‘Secondly: by certain drugs and simples which render a man feeble, spell-bound, and incapable of the generative act. Experiments have shown that to be true of nymphea heraclia, the Amerinian osier or willow, hempseed, honeysuckle, tamarisk, agnus-castus, mandrake, hemlock, the lesser orchis, the skin of an hippopotamus, etc., which, within the human body, by their elemental powers and specific qualities, freeze and deaden the fertile seed or alternatively disperse the spirits which must conduct it to the organs destined by Nature to that end, or else oppilate the passages and conduits through which it can be ejaculated: as, on the contrary we have other substances which increase a man’s ardour, excite him and dispose him towards the act of Venus.’

  ‘Thank God,’ said Panurge, ‘I have no need of those.

  ‘And thank you too, Notre Maître. Do not feel upset by what I say about them: it is not from any ill-will towards you.

  ‘Thirdly: by assiduous toil, for by that is produced such a relaxation of the body that the blood, which is spread throughout it for the alimentation of each member, has not the time, opportunity nor ability to produce that secretion which is semen, that residue from the third concoction, Nature reserving it expressly for herself as far more necessary for the conservation of his individual person than for the increase of the human race and species. That is why Diana – who is continuously engaged in her work of hunting – is called chaste. That is why the camps of the Ancients in which soldiers and athletes were engaged in their work were called castra, from casta, chaste. Hippocrates too, in Of Air, Water and Places, writes of some contemporary peoples in Syria who were as effete as eunuchs in the sports of Venus because they were always at work and out riding, just as philosophers tell us that sloth, on the contrary, is the mother of just.

  ‘When Ovid was asked whan made Aegistus an adulterer, he just replied that it was because he was slothful and that if anyone were to banish sloth from this world the arts of Cupid would soon perish away: his bow, quiver and darts would become a useless burden to him, for he is far from being so fine an archer that he can – as the Parthians could – “strike cranes flying through the air or stags bounding through the forest” (meaning human beings toiling and moiling). Cupid requires them to be tranquil, sitting and lying down, and at leisure. And indeed when Theophrastus was once asked what sort of beast, what sort of thing, he took passing love-affairs to be, he replied that lechery was the occupation of folk not otherwise occupied. That is why, when the sculptor Canachus of Sicyon wished to convey that idleness, sloth and languidness governed debauchery, he carved his Venus sitting down, not standing up as his predecessors had done.

  ‘Fourthly: by fervent study, for in that activity is produced such an unbelievable dispersal of the spirits that not enough are left to drive the seminal secretion to its intended organs and so to swell up the vena cava, the duty of which is to ejaculate it for the propagation of humankind.

  ‘That such is the case, contemplate the form of a man concentrating on any subject of study: you will see all the arteries of his brain as taut as the string of a cross-bow in order skilfully to provide enough spirits to fill the ventricles of his common sense – that is, of his ima
gination, apprehension, ratiocination and judgement, memory and recall – and to flow expeditiously from one to the other through the conduits at the extremities of the rete mirabile (manifest in dissections) in which terminate those arteries which originate in the left ventricle of the heart and which, along their complex circuits, refine the vital spirits into animal spirits: with the result that in such a studious person you will see all his natural faculties suspended and all his external senses cease: in short, you would conclude that he no longer lives inside himself but is abstracted out of himself by ecstasy, and you would say that Socrates did not abuse the term when he said that philosophy was nothing else than practising dying.

  ‘That may perhaps explain why Democritus blinded himself, preferring to lose his sight rather than decrease his contemplations which he felt to be interrupted by his restless eyes. Thus Pallas, the goddess of Wisdom, the protectrix of studious folk, is called Virgin; virgin too are the Muses; and the Graces dwell externally in chastity.

  ‘And I remember having read that when Cupid was once asked by Venus his mother why he never shot at the Muses, he replied that he found them so beautiful, so pure, so comely, so chaste, and all so continuously occupied – one in contemplating the heavenly bodies, one in calculating numbers, one in measuring geometrical figures, one in devising rhetoric, one in writing poetry and another in composing music – that as he drew near them he unbent his bow, pressed shut his quiver and doused his torch, in fear and trembling lest he should harm them; then he stripped the blindfold from his eyes so as to have a clearer view of their faces and listen to their chants and their poetic songs, finding in them the greatest pleasure in the world, so much so that he often felt himself caught away by their beauties and moral graces and lulled to sleep by their harmony: far be it from him to wish to shoot at them or distract them from their studies.

  ‘Under the same heading I include what Hippocrates wrote in the book already mentioned when talking about the Scythians as well as in his treatise On Generation, where he says that all humans are incapable of generation once you have severed their parotid arteries (which are found beside the ears), for the reason which I have already expounded when I was talking of the dispersal of the spirits and their blood of which those arteries are the vessels; he also holds that the greater part of the generative substance derives from the brain and the spinal column.

  ‘Fifthly: by the act of Venus.’

  ‘I was waiting for you there,’ said Panurge, ‘and make that my own! Anybody who wants to do so may use the previous ones.’

  ‘That,’ said Frère Jean, ‘is what Fray Scyllino, the prior of Saint-Victor-les-Marseille, calls macerating the flesh; and I opine (as did the hermit at Sainte-Radegonde above Chinon) that the hermits in the Thebaid could not more appropriately macerate their bodies, tame their lewd sensuality and subdue the rebellion of the flesh than by doing it some twenty-five or thirty times [a day].’

  ‘Panurge, now, I see,’ said Rondibilis, ‘is well-proportioned in his limbs, well-tempered in his humours, well-complexioned in his spirits, of the proper age, at the appropriate moment and with a balanced determination to get married. If he were to meet a wife of similar temperament they would beget offspring worthy of some transpontine monarchy. And the sooner the better if he wants to see them provided for.’

  ‘Monsieur Notre Maître,’ said Panurge, ‘and so I shall: never doubt it, and right soon. During your learned consultation this flea I have in my ear tickled me as never before. I will keep a place for you at the marriage-feast. We shall have a good time and a half, I promise you! You’ll kindly bring your wife with you – and her neighbours: that goes without saying.

  ‘And now for some honest sport.’

  How Rondibilis declares cuckoldry to be one of the adjuncts of matrimony

  CHAPTER 32

  [S.P.Q.R. stands for Senatus populusque Romanus (The Roman people and Senate). To Panurge it means si peu que rien (so little as to be nothing). The jest is here transposed in the translation to an English equivalent.

  Rondelet’s domain is the Natural. He draws on sound authorities, including the Letter to Dionysus of Pseudo-Hippocrates, The Laws of Marriage of Tiraqueau, and the Marriage Precepts of Plutarch.

  In this chapter woman, as in Virgil, is ‘fickle and variable’ (tacitly cited from Aeneid, IV, 569).

  Woman’s instability is explained with the help of Plato, but (as was true of other medical authorities of the time) it exploits a passage ripped out of context. Plato in the Timaeus, 91 A-D, made both male and female human beings each subject to a different ‘animal’ which drove them to sexual intercourse. Galen (in On Affected Parts and elsewhere) cited – in total isolation from its context – only the ‘animal’ which worked in woman: the womb, ‘an animal avid for generation’. (The parallel ‘animal’ of the male is simply not mentioned.) The animal within a woman makes her whole life unstable and precarious. Many insisted as here, on Plato’s authority, that the womb was indeed an animal in the strictest sense: it is capable of self-movement and can distinguish between smells, qualities used in the diagnosis and treatment of hysteria. Others insisted that its movements were ‘accidental’ (incidental and secondary). Here such contentions are severely rejected.

  The only change later made is to turn ‘five hundred times’ into ‘five hundred and five’.]

  ‘There remains,’ continued Panurge, ‘one little item to void. You have, sometime or other, seen on the gonfalon of Rome, S.P.Q.R., that is, Such a Piddling Question Really. I shan’t be cuckolded, shall I?’

  ‘Haven of Grace!’ cried Rondibilis, ‘What are you asking of me! Will you be cuckolded! My friend, I am married, you soon will be; but inscribe this saying on your brain with a pen of iron: every married man is in danger of being cuckolded. Cuckoldom is naturally one of the adjuncts of matrimony. The shadow no more naturally follows the body than cuckoldom follows married men; and whenever you hear these words of a man, He is married, you will not be thought an inexperienced construer of natural consequences if you say, He therefore is, has been, will be, or may be cuckolded’

  ‘Hypochondriums of all the devils!’ Panurge exclaimed. ‘What are you telling me!’

  ‘My friend,’ replied Rondibilis, ‘one day when Hippocrates was leaving Lango for Polystylo to visit Democritus the philosopher, he wrote a letter to his old friend Dionysius asking him (since he did not want his wife to remain at home by herself) to take her to her father’s and mother’s during his absence. They were decent folk of sound reputation, but he nevertheless should keep a careful eye on her and spy out where she went with her mother and what sort of people called on her at her parents’ place: “Not,” he wrote, “that I distrust her virtue and modesty, which in the past have been known and proven to me: but she is, after all, a woman.”

  ‘My friend, the nature of wives is figured for us by the Moon in the following way amongst others: they efface themselves, restrain themselves and hide themselves away in the sight and presence of their husbands: when they are absent they seize their opportunity, have a good time, roam and trot about, lay aside their hypocrisy and manifest themselves, just as the Moon, when in conjunction with the Sun, is never visible in Heaven or earth, yet when in opposition – being farthest from the Sun – she shines forth in all her fulness, revealing all, especially at night.

  ‘So, too, all women are… women.

  ‘When I say woman I mean a sex so weak, so fickle, so variable, so changeable, so imperfect, that Nature – speaking with all due reverence and respect – seems to me, when she made woman, to have strayed from that good sense with which she had created and fashioned all things. I have pondered over it five hundred times yet I can reach no solution except that Nature had more regard for the social delight of man and the perpetuating of the human species than for the perfection of individual womanhood. Certainly Plato does not know into which category to put women: rational animal or irrational beast; for Nature has placed within their bodies, in a hidden intest
inal place, an animal (an organ not found in men) in which from time to time certain humours are engendered – saline, nitrous, boracic, caustic, gnawing, stabbing and painfully irritating – from the sharp pangs and painful throbbing of which (since that organ is all sinews and quickened sensitivity) their whole body is convulsed, all their senses ravished, all their emotions heightened and all their thoughts confused, to such an extent that if Nature had not dewed their foreheads with a little modesty you would see them hunting the fly-cord as though they were mad, more awesomely than the Proetides ever did, or the Mimallonides or the bacchic Thyades on the day of their bacchanalia, because that terrifying animal is colligate with all the principal parts of the body, as is evident from dissections.

  ‘I call it an animal following the doctrines of the Academics as much as the Peripatetics, for if having its own proper motion is a clear indication that a body is animate (as Aristotle puts it) and if every entity which can move of itself is termed an animal, then Plato is right to call it an animal, recognizing in it as he does its own proper motions (of suffocation, prolapsus, corrugation and irritation) so violent indeed that all other sensations and motions are withdrawn from the woman on account of them, as though she was suffering from lipomythy, [syncope,] epilepsy, apoplexy and a real likeness of death. In addition we can discern in it a clear distinguishing between smells: women can feel it recoiling from foul odours and being drawn towards aromatic ones.