Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

others, from similarities: as hippuris (that is, horse-tail), because it does resemble a horse’s tail; alopecuros, because it resembles a fox’s tail; psylion, which does look like a flea; delphinium, like a dolphin; bugloss, like an ox’s tongue; iris, which in its flowers is like a rainbow, myosotis, like the ear of a mouse; coronopus, like the foot of a crow; and so on.

  And, by naming the other way round, the Fabii were called after faba (the bean); the Pisos, from the pea – pisum; the Lentuli, from lentils; the Ciceros from cicer (chick-pea). And from a more intimate resemblance still are named Venus’ navel-wort, Venus’ hair, Venus’ bath-tub, Jupiter’s beard, Jupiter’s eye, Mars’ blood, Mercury’s fingers [, the hermodactyl] and so on;

  others, from their shapes, as the trefoil, which has three leaves; the pentaphyllon, which has five leaves; the serpolet, which snakes over the ground; helxine, petasites – sun-cap – myrobalans – plums – which the Arabs call béen since they resemble acorns and are oily.

  Why this plant is called pantagruelion, and of its wonderful qualities

  CHAPTER 51

  [Was originally Chapter 47.

  Pantagruel’s plant pantagruelion provides the material for hangmen’s ropes as well as for tablecloths, bed-linen, the ‘bundles’ (sacks) for lawyers and so on.

  In this chapter Rabelais invites a comparison with Lucian’s True History. It ends (under the influence of Calcagnini probably) with the air of mythology. Pliny is a pessimist for whom one of the uses of hemp-and-flax is especially regrettable: the making of sails for sailing-ships. Not so for Rabelais. These chapters are full of smiles and optimism, foreseeing a time when another plant will be discovered which will take men to the Moon, shake the gods of Lucian in their heavens and find men seating at table with them and marrying their goddesses, the only two ways to immortality mentioned by Servius in his commentary on Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, explaining the line cited in Chapter 12.

  Rabelais cites for the second time an adage of Erasmus, III, X, XCIII, ‘The Arrogance of the Giants’. Cf. the criticism of Panurge in Chapter 28.]

  It is for all such reasons (except the fabulous, for God forbid that we should make any use of fable in this Oh-so-True History!) our plant is called pantagruelion, for Pantagruel first discovered it. I do not mean the plant itself but one particular use for it, which is more loathed and feared by thieves and is more inimical and hostile to them than burdock and devil’s-guts are to flax; the reed is to heather; [shave-grass to reapers; choke-weed to chick-peas; the straw-weed called aegilops to barley; hatchet-fitch to lentils; antranium to beans; tares to wheat; ivy to walls;] the common water-lily and the Heraclean variety to lecherous monks; birch and cane to undergraduates of the Collège de Navarre; cabbage to vine; garlic to the magnet; onion to eyesight; fern-seed to expectant mothers; willow-seed to wanton nuns; the shade of the yew to such as sleep under it; aconite – wolf’s-bane – to leopards and wolves; the scent of fig-trees to mad bulls; hemlock to goslings; purslane to teeth, and oil to trees: for indeed many a thief have we seen end their lives hanging high from a short piece of pantagruelion, following the examples of Phyllis, the Queen of the Thracians, Bonosus, the Emperor of Rome, Amata, the wife of King Latinus, Iphis, Auctolia, Licambes, Arachne, [Phaeda, Leda,] Acheus the King of Lydia and so on, all of whom were angry for no other reason but that, without their being otherwise ill, it strangled the conduits through which good jests come out and good nibbles go in, more dreadfully than would a severe bout of angina or a deadly quinsy.

  And we have heard others, at the very moment that Atropus was cutting the thread of their lives, grievously bewailing and lamenting that Pantagruel had them by the throat! Oh dear! It was not Pantagruel: he has never been a hangman: it was pantagruelion doing duty as a halter and serving as a neckerchief! They were speaking improperly; falling into a solecism, unless you excuse them on the grounds of synecdoche (that is, taking the discovery for the discoverer, as when one says Ceres for bread and Bacchus for wine). I swear to you now, by the jests contained in that bottle keeping cool in yonder tub, that our noble Pantagruel never took any persons by the throat save only such as are negligent about obviating an imminent thirst.

  It is also called pantagruelion from similarity: for when Pantagruel was born into this world he was as tall as the plant in question, being easily measured since he was delivered during a period of thirst, just when that plant is harvested and the Dog star of Icarus bays at the Sun, turning folk into troglodytes, constrained to live in cellars and underground shelters.

  It is also called pantagruelion because of its virtues and peculiar properties, for, just as Pantagruel has been the Idea and Exemplar of all joyous perfection – I suppose that not one of you drinkers has any doubt about that! – so too I recognize in pantagruelion so many virtues, so many powers, such perfection, and so many wonderful effects, that if only it had been acknowledged for its qualities at the time when (as the prophet43 tell us) the trees chose a wooden monarch to reign and dominate over them, it would, without a doubt, have carried the majority of votes and ballots cast.

  Shall I go on? If Oxylus, the son of Orius had spawned pantagruelion of his sister Hamadryas, he would have been more delighted with our plant than with all his eight children put together, children much celebrated by our mythologists whose names are kept in eternal remembrance: the eldest was a daughter, Vine; next came a son called Fig; another was Walnut; another Oak; another, Cornel-cherry; another, Sugar-berry; another, Poplar, and the last one was called Elm, who was a great surgeon in his time.44

  I will refrain from telling you how, when the sap of pantagruelion is drained off and dripped into the ear, it kills all species of noxious parasites which may have been engendered in it by putrefaction, as well as any other living thing which may have found its way in. Why, so great is its power that, if you put some of its sap into a pail of water you will see that water set at once like a junket; the water thus curdled is a good remedy for the gripe and convulsions in horses.

  If you boil its roots in water it will relax tense sinews, contracted joints, podagric sclerosis and swellings caused by gout.

  If you desire quickly to cure a scald or a burn, apply some pantagruelion to it, raw, just as it naturally grows in the earth, without any processing or compounding. And be sure to change the dressing as soon as you notice it drying out over the wound.

  Without pantagruelion our kitchens would be shocking and our tables repellent even when laden with every kind of delicacy; our beds would be without charm, even though bedecked with gold, silver, amber, ivory and porphyry. Without it the miller could bring no corn to the mill and take home no flour.

  Without it, how would lawyers bring their bundles into court?

  Without it, how could we carry plaster into the workshop?

  Without it, how would we draw water from the well? Without it how could notaries-public, clerks, secretaries and scriveners manage?

  Would not all legal deeds and rent-agreements perish? Would not the noble art of printing perish? What could printers make their tympans from!

  How would bells be tolled!

  With it the priests of Isis are vested, the pontiffs are robed, and all humans swaddled when first laid down.

  All the wool-trees of Seres, all the cotton-trees of Tylos by the Persian Sea, all the cotton-bushes of Araby, all the cotton-vines of Malta could never clothe as many folk as this modest plant. It protects armies from rain and cold more efficiently than skin-tents ever did; it shelters theatres and amphitheatres from the heat; it nets off woods and coppices for the pleasure of the huntsman; it is let down into waters, both fresh and salt, for the profit of fishermen; with it are moulded and formed winter boots, summer boots, heavy boots, gaiters, ankle-boots, country-shoes, court-shoes, slippers and cobblers’ down-at-heels. With it are bows bent, cross-bows readied and catapults fashioned. And, as if it were some sacred plant such as verbena (which is revered by the happy and unhappy souls of the dead) the corpses of dead human beings are never buri
ed without it.

  I will go further: by means of pantagruelion things invisible are visibly trapped, arrested, captured, and kept as it were in prison: once arrested and captured they briskly turn great heavy grind-stones, to the signal advantage of our human life, and I am indeed absolutely astonished that such a discovery was hidden for so many centuries from the thinkers of Antiquity, given the priceless benefits which derive from it and given the unbearable drudgery men had to endure in working their pounding-mills.

  And by its means the billowing air itself is contained and huge merchantmen, spacious ships and great galleons with room for a thousand or ten thousand men, are propelled from their moorings and sail wherever their skippers desire. Thanks to such means nations whom Nature appeared to have kept apart, hidden away, inaccessible and unknown have come to us and we to them: something that the very birds could not do, however light their feathers, no matter what freedom Nature has given them to sail through the air. Taprobana has seen Lapland; Java, the Rhipean Mountains; Phebol shall see Thélème; Icelanders and Greenlanders shall drink the waters of the Euphrates; by such means the North Wind has seen the dwelling-place of the South, the East Wind has visited the West, so that the celestial Intelligences and the gods of both sea and land have all been terrified, seeing, by the use of that hallowed plant pantagruelion, the people of the Arctic come clearly into the angle of vision of the people of Antarctica when they cross the Atlantic, pass through both the Tropics, tack beneath the Torrid Zone, take readings of the entire Zodiac, disport themselves below the line of the Equinox and glimpse both the Poles at once, level with their horizons.

  The gods of Olympus, similarly terrified, said:

  ‘By exploiting the virtues of his plant, Pantagruel has put new and painful thoughts into our minds, worse than those stirred by those giant Aloïdae. He will shortly be married; by his wife he will have children. We cannot gainsay that destiny, for it has passed through the hands and spindles of the Fates, those sisters, daughters of Necessity. It could well be that another plant will be discovered by his children, one having similar powers, by means of which human beings will be enabled to visit the sources of the hail, the sluice-gates of the rains, the smithy of the thunderbolts; they will be able to invade the regions on the Moon, penetrate the territories of the Signs of the Zodiac and settle there, some in the golden Eagle; some in the Ram; others in the Crown; others in the Harp, and others in the silver Lion, sitting down at table with us and taking our goddesses to wife, the only ways by which humans can be deified.’

  To avert which they finally referred for a remedy to a debate in Council.

  Of a certain species of pantagruelion which cannot be consumed by fire

  CHAPTER 52

  [Originally there was no chapter-break here.

  Pantagruelion asbestos can be used to preserve ashes during cremation.

  In Pliny manna is a kind of vegetable juice which hardens into grains.

  The history of Caesar and the people of Larignum is taken from Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar.

  That the entrance to Truth is hard and stone-strewn is perhaps an extension and an echo of Hesiod’s fable about the path to Virtue in his Works and the Days, which will be developed in the Fourth Book, Chapter 57. For the ivy-wood funnel which separates water from wine see Pliny, Natural History, 16, 35, 63, and Gargantua, Chapter 22.

  Sceptical Jews ‘seek a sign’ in 1 Corinthians 1:22.

  The final lines in this very Classical peroration are an echo of Virgil’s Second Georgic. Solid utility and even great new inventions and adventures have been derived, and will be derived in the future, not from verbosity such as Panurge’s but from human ingenuity working on the qualities of a humble plant such as hemp-and-flax and, no doubt one day, of a newly discovered plant resembling it.]

  What I have told you is already great and wonderful, but if you would venture to believe in some further transcendent quality in our hallowed pantagruelion, I would tell you of it.

  Believe it or believe it not: it is all the same to me; it is enough for me to have told you the truth. And tell you the truth I shall. But to attain to Truth – for her entrance is very hard and stone-strewn – I ask you this: if I had put two measures of wine and one of water into this bottle and thoroughly mixed them, how could you separate them out? How could you so segregate them that you could return me the wine without the water and the water without the wine, in the same measures as I had put into it? Again: if those carters and bargees of yours who supply your households with a certain number of barrels, tuns and casks of wine from Graves, Orleans, Beaune and Mirevaux had pinched half of it, drunk it and then topped up the barrels with water (as the men of Limoges do by the clog-full when carting wines from Argenton and Saint-Gaultier), how would you get rid of all that water? How would you purify the wine?

  Yes, I know! You are going to tell me about an ivy funnel. It’s in print. It’s true and confirmed by hundreds of experiments. You knew that already. But those who did not know about it and had never seen it would never deem it possible.

  But to get on. Supposing we belonged to the time of Scylla, Marius, Caesar and other Roman Emperors or our Ancient Druids, when the corpses of their lords and kin were burnt, and supposing you desired to drink the ashes of your wives and children infused in some good white wine (as Artemisia did with the ashes of her husband Mausolus) or, alternatively, to preserve those ashes entire in some urn or reliquary, how could you keep the ashes apart, completely segregated from the burnt ashes of the funeral pyre? Tell me now! By my fig, you’d be embarrassed! But I will disembarrass you by telling you that if you take a length of that hallowed pantagruelion – enough to cover the corpse and wrap it up tight – binding it and stitching it with thread of the same material, you can throw it on to a pyre as big and as hot as you please: the fire will burn the body through the pantagruelion and reduce its flesh and bones to ashes; as for the pantagruelion itself, it will not only not be consumed in the fire, it will lose not one single atom of the ashes enclosed within it; and you will get with it not one single atom of the ashes of the pyre, whilst the pantagruelion itself will eventually emerge from the fire fairer, whiter, cleaner than when you cast it in. That is why it is called asbestos. You will find quantities of it going cheap in Carpasium and in the lands about Syene. O, what a great and marvellous thing it is! Fire, which devours all, wastes all, consumes all, uniquely cleans, purges and whitens that asbestine pantagruelion from Carpasium.45

  If you remain distrustful and, like Jews and unbelievers, seek proof and a practical sign, take one fresh egg and tie some of this hallowed pantagruelion around it. Thus bound, place it within a brazier as big and as hot as you like. Leave it in as long as you like. Eventually you will take out your egg, cooked hard and burnt, yet without any deterioration, change or scorching of the hallowed pantagruelion. You will have performed that experiment for less than fifty thousand Bordeaux crowns reduced to the twelfth part of a farthing!

  Do not compare that to the salamander. That is a fallacy. I quite agree that a small fire of straw invigorates the salamander and makes it happy; but I assure you that it is asphyxiated and consumed in a big furnace like any other animal. We have seen it from an experiment; Galen proved it and confirmed it long ago in Book 3, Of Temperaments [, and Dioscorides asserts it in Book 2].

  Do not bring up here feather-alum nor that wooden tower in the Piraeus which Lucius Scylla could never get to catch fire because Archelaus, the governor of the town, had daubed it all over with alum. [Make no comparison here with that tree which Alexander Cornelius called eon, saying that it resembled the oak which harbours mistletoe. According to him, no more than oak-mistletoe can it be consumed by fire nor harmed by water, and from it was constructed and fitted out that most famous of ships, the Argos. Find somebody to believe that! Not me, though.]

  Do not make a comparison, either, with that species of tree, however wonder-working it might be, which you can see in the mountains of Briançon and Ambrun: fro
m its root it produces our good agaric; from its trunk it exudes a resin so excellent that Galen ventures to make it equal to terebinthina; it retains for us on its delicate leaves that fine ‘honey from Heaven’ we call manna, which cannot be consumed by fire despite being oily and sticky. In Greek and Latin you call it larrix; the Alpine dwellers call it melze; the Paduans and the Venetians call it larege, which gave its name to Larignum, that fortress in the Piedmont which eluded Julius Caesar on his way to Gaul.

  For the use of his army on its passage, he had ordered all the inhabitants and citizens of the Alps and the Piedmont to bring stores and munitions to stage-posts stationed along the military road. Everyone obeyed except those within Larignum, who, relying on the natural strength of the site, refused to contribute. To punish them for their refusal that Emperor led his army straight to Larignum. Before the gate of the fortress stood a tower built of great beams of larix, bound alternately together like a stack of wood extending to such a height that from the holes in the projecting parapet they could easily rain down stones and iron billets to beat off those who approached them. When Caesar learned that those inside had no other defences but stones and iron billets which they could hardly do more than lob down at such approaches, he ordered his soldiers to toss a great many faggots round the tower and set fire to them. It was instantly done. As the fire took to the faggots, the flames were so great and reached so high that they engulfed the whole fortress. It was then supposed that the tower would soon catch fire and burn right down. Yet when the flames died away and the faggots were all burnt, that tower emerged whole and entirely undamaged. Reflecting on which, Caesar ordered that a circumvallation of trenches and dug-outs be constructed all round that tower, beyond the reach of the stones.

  The Larignians did then agree to terms of surrender, and from their own accounts Caesar learnt of the astonishing nature of that wood which produces neither flame, fire nor charcoal.