Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  ‘I am not sure which I ought to abominate more: either the tyrannical arrogance of those dreaded Moles who do not remain behind the grills of their mystagogical temples but meddle in concerns diametrically opposed to their vocation, or else the superstitious passivity of the married who have sanctioned their barbaric laws and obeyed them, failing to see (yet it is clearer than the Morning Star) that those connubial edicts are entirely to the advantage of their mysteriarchs and of no good or profit whatsoever to married folk, which, in itself, is enough to render their edicts iniquitous [and devious].

  ‘By a reciprocal temerity the married could establish laws for their mysteriarchs governing their rituals and sacrifices, seeing that they tithe the goods of the married and gnaw away at the earnings arising from their toil and the sweat of their brows in order to maintain themselves in abundance and keep themselves in comfort; and (in my judgement) such laws would be no more wrong nor more insolent than the laws the married receive of them. For (as you very well said) there used to be not one single law in the world which gave children the freedom to marry without the knowledge, permission and consent of their fathers.

  ‘Now, thanks to the laws of which I have spoken, there is no pimp, blackguard or criminal, no vile, stinking, leprous bit of gallows-fodder, no bandit, no thief, no evildoer, who, in those lands, despite all her kinsfolk, may not seize and abduct from her father’s house and her mother’s arms any daughter he chooses, no matter how noble, beautiful, rich, modest and chaste, once that pimp has conspired with some mysteriarch who will eventually share in the spoils. Could a worse or more callous deed be done by Goth, Scythian or Massagete against an enemy fort, long besieged, taken at great cost and subdued by main force?

  ‘Those heartbroken fathers and mothers see – abducted from their homes by some uncouth, unknown stranger, some putrid, syphilitic, cadaverous, sinister, penniless dog – their beautiful, delicate, rich and blossoming daughters, whom they have so fondly brought up in every virtuous activity and educated in all that is honest, hoping, when the time was opportune, to give them away in wedlock to the sons of their neighbours and long-established friends who had been brought up and educated with the same care, so as to attain to that joy of the married who see descendants born from them who are like them, not only inheriting the virtues of their fathers and mothers but also their goods and their property.

  ‘Think what a sight it is for them!

  – Do not believe that even the desolation of the Roman People and their Confederates was more enormous after hearing of the death of Germanicus Drusus.

  – Do not believe that even the dismay of the Spartans was more heart-rending when they saw Helen of Greece furtively stolen by that adulterous Trojan.

  – Do not believe that their grief and wailing were any less than those of Ceres when her daughter Proserpine was snatched from her; of Isis, at the loss of Osiris; of Venus, at the death of Adonis; of Hercules, at the loss of Hylas; of Hecuba at the abduction of Polyxenes.

  ‘And yet the parents are so smitten by fear of the devil and by superstition that they dare not challenge it since the mysteriarch was there, plotting it all.39

  ‘So they shut themselves away in their homes, robbed of the daughters they loved so much, the father cursing the hour and the day that he ever got married, the mother lamenting that she had not miscarried during so sad and wretched a pregnancy, both ending their days in tears and lamentations when it would have been right to end them happily in close union with their daughters.

  ‘Some, beside themselves and as it were insane, have drowned themselves, hanged themselves, killed themselves from grief and sorrow, unable to bear such shame.

  ‘Others have been of a more heroic mind and, following the example of the sons of Jacob avenging the rape of their sister Dinah, have discovered the lecher, in partnership with his mysteriarch40 clandestinely seducing their daughters with words and suborning them, have at once hacked them to pieces, killing them like felons and scattering their corpses over the fields for the wolves and the crows.

  ‘Confronted by a deed so virile and noble their companion mysteriarchal moles have trembled and made miserable lamentations, framing dreadful protests, most pressingly begging and imploring the secular arm and the civil power to act, wildly urging and advocating that such cases be visited with exemplary punishment. Yet there has never been found one paragraph, rubric or chapter anywhere in natural equity, the law of nations or Roman law, which threatens punishment or torture for any such deed. Reason resists it; Nature opposes it: for there is not one virtuous man in all the world whose mind is not more utterly distraught on hearing the news of the abduction, shaming and dishonouring of his daughter than of her death. Now any father discovering a murderer wickedly lying in wait to commit homicide against the person of his daughter can by reason, and must by nature, kill him on the spot: never will he be apprehended by Justice. No wonder, then, if he, coming across the lecher, abetted by his mystagogue,41 suborning his daughter and ravishing her from his home, can and must – even if she be consenting – put both men to a dishonourable death and cast out their corpses to be ripped apart by wild beasts as being unworthy of sepulchre (as we term that sweet, desired and ultimate embrace of Earth, our great nursing mother).

  ‘My dearest son, see that no such laws are ever introduced into this kingdom after my death. As long as I am alive with breath in my body, I shall keep all in excellent order, God being my helper.

  ‘Now since you leave it to me to decide about your marriage, I am in favour of it and will make provision for it.

  ‘Prepare for Panurge’s voyage. Take with you Epistemon, Frère Jean and anyone else you choose. Make use of my wealth at your complete discretion: whatever you do can only delight me. From my arsenal at Thalassa fit out as many of my ships as you will, with such pilots, seamen and interpreters as you will, and when the wind is right, spread your sails in the name of God our Servator and under His protection. While you are away I shall be busy arranging a wife for you, and festivities for your marriage, which shall be glorious if ever there were any.’

  How Pantagruel prepared to put to sea, and of the plant called pantagruelion

  CHAPTER 49

  [Was originally Chapter 46.

  An artistically contrived display of rhetorical and dialectical virtuosity brings the Third Book to a close. In Chapters 2 to 5 Panurge, as an expert in rhetoric and the Topics, gave us a display of perverted ingenuity: like a devilish lawyer he could make black seem white. Here again we have a display of great ingenuity, but one which properly reveals (under the veil of an easily pierced enigma), the vast and varied uses which a humble plant can be put to. The apparently miraculous plant pantagruelion is soon perceived to be hemp, or more correctly hemp-and-flax (taken since Pliny to be one and the same plant) together with asbestos, thought of as linum asbestinum, a plant of the same species. Rabelais is taking up a challenge. For Pliny, hemp-and-flax is a natural miracle with a thousand uses too many to relate.

  Pliny treats of smyrnium olusatrum in his Natural History (19, 8, 48, §62).

  The immediate inspiration of Rabelais is the short enigmatic praise of hemp-and-flax in Calcagnini’s posthumous Works, where the plant is named Linelaeon. Calcagnini is to prove a major influence on Rabelais in the Fourth Book of 1552.

  Rabelais’ botanical erudition is not original; it lay mostly in the common domain.

  ‘Passer-over-Perilous-Ways’ was the name which Jean Bouchet gave himself. Bouchet was a moralizing poet and a long-time friend of Rabelais. They exchanged poems, which Bouchet printed.

  The ships of Ajax numbered twelve (Iliad, 2, 557).]

  A few days later Pantagruel, having taken congee of our good Gargantua, who was devoutly praying for his son’s voyage, arrived at the harbour of Thalassa near Saint-Malo accompanied by Panurge, Epistemon, Frère Jean des Entommeures (the Abbot of Thélème) and others of his noble household – notably by Xenomanes the great traveller and Passer-over-Perilous-Ways, who had an
swered Panurge’s summons since he held some minor property in feudal fee to the Châtellenie of Salmagundi.

  Once arrived there, Pantagruel fitted out his ships, which numbered as many as Ajax once brought from Salamis to convey the Greeks to Troy. He took on board seamen, pilots, oarsmen, interpreters, craftsmen and fighting men, and loaded provisions, artillery, munitions, clothing, cash and other stores needed for a long and hazardous voyage.

  I noticed that, amongst other things, he took on plenty of his plant pantagruelion, both the green, untreated kind and the dressed and preserved.

  The plant called pantagruelion has a small root, somewhat hard and rounded, terminating in a bluntish point, white, of few filaments and penetrating less than a cubit below ground. From the root grows a single, round, ferulaceous stem, green outside, whitish within, hollow like the stalks of smyrnium olusatrum, beans and gentiane, woody, straight, friable, slightly grooved in the manner of shallowly striated columns, full of fibres in which consists the entire merit of the plant, particularly of the kind called mesa (that is to say, middle) and the kind called mylasea.

  It normally grows to some five or six feet, although it sometimes exceeds the height of a lance, namely when it is found in a soft, greasy, light soil, damp but not cold (as in Les Sables-d’Olonne or the soil in Rosea, near Praeneste in Sabinia) provided it does not lack rain over the Festival of the Fishermen and at the summer solstice; according to Theophrastus it can even exceed the height of trees, as does the tree-mallow, despite its being a plant which dies back annually and not at all a tree with perennial roots, trunk, stem and branches; from its stem grow big, strong branches.

  It has leaves thrice as long as wide, evergreen, somewhat rough to the touch like prickly-ox-tongue, rather hard, and crenate round the edges like a sickle or like betony, each ending in a point shaped like a Macedonian spear or the lancet which surgeons use. Their shape is not very different from the leaves of the ash or of agrimony and so close to that of the eupatorium that several botanists, having misnamed it ‘garden eupatorium’, have mistaken pantagruelion for wild eupatorium. The leaves grow equidistantly in rows round the stem, five or seven to a row. Nature has so favoured this plant that she has endowed it with leaves of those two uneven numbers, which are so holy and mysterious.

  To delicate noses the leaves have a strong and unpleasant smell.

  The seed [comes from near the head of the stem, just a little below. It] is as profuse as that of any plant there is; spherical, oblong or lozenge-shaped, bright black or somewhat tawny, fairly hard, enveloped in a fragile husk, relished by all songbirds such as linnets, goldfinches, larks, canaries, yellow-hammers and so on, but in men it suppresses semen if eaten copiously and often [; and although the Greeks used to make the seeds into some kind of fried tidbit, tarts or fritters nibbled after supper as a delicacy and to enhance the taste of the wine, they are nevertheless difficult to concoct and hard on the stomach; they produce bad-quality blood and, because of their excessive heat, have an impact on the brain, filling the head with troublesome and painful vapours].

  And just as there are two sexes in many plants, male and female, as we can see in laurels, palms, oaks, holm-oaks, asphodels, mandrakes, ferns, agarics, aristolochias, cypresses, terebinths, pennyroyals, peonies and so on, in this plant too there is a male, which bears no flowers whatsoever but an abundance of seeds, and a female, which proliferates in little whitish flowerets which serve no useful purpose and produce no worthwhile seeds; and as in similar plants the female’s leaves are broader and not as tough as the male’s, and the female does not grow as high.

  Pantagruelion is sowed at the first return of the swallow; it is gathered in when the cicada begins to sound hoarse.

  How this celebrated pantagruelion must be dressed and put to use

  CHAPTER 50

  [There was originally no chapter-break at this point.

  English versions of some of the Latin names have been slipped in between dashes when it helps things along.

  The men who earn their living by walking backwards are rope-makers, who move backwards as they entwine the strands of rope fed to them between their legs. Not all the explanations are clear. For example, Aristolochia helps lying-in women with their lochial fluids. Saffron comes from the crocus, which was named after the lover Crocus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 4, 283.]

  Pantagruelion is dressed over the autumn equinox in various ways, depending upon people’s ingenuity and local conditions.

  The first directions which Pantagruel gave were: to strip the stalk of its leaves and seeds; to macerate it in stagnant – not running – water for five days if the weather is dry and the water warm, or for some nine or twelve if the weather is cloudy and the water cold; then to dry it: in the sun, stripping off the outer layer in the shade and separating the fibres (in which, as we said, consist its excellence and its value) from the woody parts, which are useless except for producing a bright blaze, or as tinder, or, by children at play, for blowing up their pig’s bladders.

  Wine lovers secretly use them at times as straws for sucking and siphoning new wine through the bung-hole. Some Panta-gruelists nowadays avoid the manual labour involved in separating the plants by using certain contunding machines (constructed in the shape made by ferocious Juno when she interlocked her fingers, heckle-shaped, to impede the birth of Hercules from Alcmene his mother)42 by means of which they break and heckle out the woody part, setting it aside as useless but keeping the fibres.

  That is the only way to prepare it which satisfies those who (against everyone else’s opinion and in a manner deemed paradoxical by all philosophers) earn their living by walking backwards.

  Those who desire more evidently to increase its value do what we are told to be the pastime of the three Fatal Sisters [, the nightly diversion of noble Circe] and the long-maintained pretext of Penelope to her fond suitors during the absence of her husband Ulysses. That is how pantagruelion realizes its incalculable properties, some of which I shall expound to you (for to tell you all is for me impossible) if I may first explain its name.

  Plants are, I find, named for different reasons.

  Some take their names from whoever first discovered, understood, demonstrated, cultivated, domesticated and acclimatized them: thus, herb-mercury, from Mercury; panace, from Panace, the daughter of Aesculapius; artemisia vulgaris – mugwort – from Artemis (Diana, that is); eupatorium, from King Eupator; sedum telephium – ‘live-long’ – from Telephus; Euphorbia – ‘spurge’ – from Euphorbus, the physician to King Juba; clymenus, from Clymenos; alcibiadon, from Alcibiades; gentian, from Gentius, King of Sclavonia.

  And that privilege of imposing one’s name on plants thus identified was formerly so highly prized that, just as there once arose a quarrel between Neptune and Pallas over which of them should give its name to the land which they had discovered together – which was subsequently called Athens from Athene (Minerva, that is) – so too Lyncus, King of Scythia, strove treacherously to murder young Triptolemus (who had been despatched to men by Ceres in order to reveal wheat to them, which was then still unknown) so that, having killed him, he could impose his own name on it and to his eternal honour and glory be called the discoverer of that grain which is so useful and so necessary to the life of humankind; for which act of treachery he was metamorphosed by Ceres into a caracal or lynx. Likewise, there were once great and protracted wars waged between certain idle kings in Cappadocia: their sole dispute was over which of their names should be given to a certain plant – valerian – which on account of that conflict was called polemonia, meaning warlike.

  Other plants have kept the names of the regions from which they were introduced elsewhere, as malum medicum for a citrus fruit from Media where it was first found; malum punicum for pomegranates brought from Punicia (that is, from Carthage); ligusticum (that is, lovage) brought from Liguria (the coast of Genoa); rhabarbarum – rhubarb – from the barbarian river Rha as Ammanianus testifies; and similarly santonica, fenugreek, castanea
– chestnuts – mala persica – peaches – and sabina herba – juniper – and stoechas – French lavender – from my Iles d’Hyères, which the Ancients called the Stoechades; then spica celtica – spikenard – and so on.

  Others take their names by antiphrasis and contradiction; hence absinthe, which is the opposite of pinthe – tipple – because it is not pleasant to drink; or holosteon (meaning ‘all of bone’) – by opposition, for there is no plant in nature which is more brittle and yielding.

  Others are named from their virtues and effects, as aristolochia, which helps women with their lochial fluids in childbirth; lichen, which cures skin diseases of that name; mallow, which is emollient; callitriche, which beautifies the hair; alyssum, ephemerum, bechium, nasturtium (that is, Orleans cress), hyoscyame, henbane, and so on;

  others from the remarkable features seen in them, as the heliotrope (that is, the marigold), which follows the sun, opening at sunrise, stretching upwards as the sun ascends, drooping when it sets and closing up when the sun hides itself; the adiantum, since, despite growing close to water, it never retains moisture, even if you plunge it into water for a very long time; hieracia – hawkweed – eryngion and so on;

  others from the metamorphoses of men and women with similar names, as daphne (that is, the laurel) from Daphne; myrtle, from Myrsine; pitys – pine – from Pitys; cinara (that is, the artichoke); narcissus, saffron, smilax and so on;