Gargantua and Pantagruel
Page 65
The only complication with the ‘52 text lies in the cancels introduced into some copies Cancels (reprinted pages) were made so as to celebrate the French Royal victories of May 1552 in German lands (see note 5).
The text translated is that of the Quart Livre in the Textes Littéraires Français, edited by Robert Marichal, first published by Droz of Geneva in 1947 and several times reprinted.
THE FOURTH BOOK OF
THE HEROIC DEEDS AND
SAYINGS OF OUR
GOOD GIANT PANTAGRUEL
Composed by Maître François Rabelais
Doctor of Medicine
AT PARIS
From the printing-house of Michel Fezandat, on Mount
Saint-Hilaire, in the Hôtel d’Albret.
With the privilège of the King
Contents
To the most-illustrious Prince and Most-Reverend Lord the Cardinal de Châtillon
The Royal privilège
The Prologue of the Author Maître François Rabelais for the Fourth Book of the heroic deeds and sayings of Pantagruel
1 How Pantagruel put to sea to visit the oracle of the Dive Bacbuc
2 How Pantagruel purchased several objects in the Isle of Medamothi
3 How Pantagruel received a letter from Gargantua his father, and of a curious way of obtaining news very quickly from distant lands afar
4 How Pantagruel writes a letter to Gargantua his father and sends him several things, rare and beautiful
5 How Pantagruel met a ship of voyagers returning from Land of the Lanterns
6 How, once the wrangle was settled, Panurge haggles with Dindenault over one of his sheep
7 Wrangling between Panurge and Dindenault: continued
8 How Panurge drowned the merchant and his sheep in the sea
9 How Pantagruel arrived in the Isle of Ennasin, and of the curious kinships in that land
10 How Pantagruel landed on the Island of Cheli over which ruled the saintly King Panigon
11 Why monks are readily found in kitchens
12 How Pantagruel passed Procuration; and of the strange way of life amongst the Chicanous
13 How, following the example of François Villon, the Seigneur de Basché lauds his people
14 Chicanous drubbed in the house of Basché: continued
15 How ancient marriage customs are renewed by Chicanous
16 How Frère Jean assayed the temperament of the Chicanous
17 How Pantagruel called at the islands of Tohu and Bohu and of the curious death of Bringuenarilles, the swallower of windmills
18 How Pantagruel escaped from a mighty storm at sea
19 How Panurge and Frère Jean comported themselves during the storm
20 How the seamen let their ship run before the wind at the height of the storm
21 The storm: continued. And a short discussion about wills drawn up at sea
22 The end of the storm
23 How Panurge acted the brave companion once the storm was over
24 How Panurge is declared by Frère Jean to have been needlessly afraid during the storm
25 How Pantagruel landed after the storm on the islands of the Macraeons
26 How the good Macrobe tells Pantagruel about the Manor and the Departure of Heroes
27 How Pantagruel reasons about the Departures of Heroic souls: and of the awe-inspiring prodigies which preceded the death of the late Seigneur de Langey
28 How Pantagruel relates a poignant History touching upon the death of Heroes
29 How Pantagruel called in at the Island of Tapinois over which reigned Quarêmeprenant
30 How Xenomanes describes Quarêmeprenant anatomically
31 The Anatomy of Quarêmeprenant as touching his external parts
32 The physical features of Quarêmeprenant: continued
33 How Pantagruel descried a monstrous Physeter near the Ile Farouche
34 How the monstrous Physeter was killed by Pantagruel
35 How Pantagruel landed on the Ile Farouche, the ancient dwelling-place of the Chidlings
36 How an ambush was laid against Pantagruel by the Chidlings of the Ile Farouche
37 How Pantagruel sent for Colonels Poke-Banger and Spoilchidling, with a notable disquisition on the proper names of places and persons
38 That Chidlings are not to be despised by human beings
39 How Frère Jean allies himself with the kitchen-men to combat the Chidlings
40 How Frère Jean set up the Sow; and of the doughty cooks enclosed therein
41 How Pantagruel broke Chidlings across his knee
42 How Pantagruel parleyed with Niphleseth, the Queen of the Chidlings
43 How Pantagruel landed on the Island of Ruach
44 How little rains abate great winds
45 How Pantagruel landed on the island of the Papefigues
46 How that little young devil was outwitted by the ploughman from Papefigue-land
47 How the devil was deceived by an old woman of the land of the Papefigues
48 How Pantagruel landed on the Island of the Papimanes
49 How Homenaz, the Bishop of the Papimanes, displayed to us the uranopetary Decretals
50 How we were shown by Homenaz the archetype of a pope
51 Light conversation over dinner in praise of the Decretals
52 Miracles produced by the Decretals: continued
53 How gold is shrewdly abstracted from France by virtue of the Decretals
54 How Homenaz gave Pantagruel some Good-Christian pears
55 How on the high seas Pantagruel heard divers Words as they thawed out
56 How amongst the frozen Words Pantagruel came across words both of gullet and gules
57 How Pantagruel landed at the manor of Messer Gaster, the first Master of Arts of this world
58 How in the Court of the Master-Inventor Pantagruel denounced the Engastrimyths and the Gastrolaters
59 Of the absurd statue called Manduces; and how and what the Gastrolaters sacrificed to their Ventripotent God
60 How the Gastrolaters sacrificed to their god during their interlarded fast-days
61 How Gaster invented means of gathering and conserving grain
62 How Gaster invented the art by means of which one can remain untouched and unwounded by cannonballs
63 How Pantagruel dozed off when near the isle of Chaneph, and the problems put forward once he awoke
64 How no answer was given by Pantagruel to the questions put forward
65 How Pantagruel, with his household, raises good weather
66 How, near the isle of the Ganabin, the Muses are saluted at the orders of Pantagruel
67 How Panurge messed himself out of sheer funk; and how he mistook the mighty cat Rodilardus for a little devil
To the most-illustrious Prince and Most-Reverend Lord the Cardinal de Châtillon
[For the first time Rabelais prefaces his new book with a formal, signed letter of dedication addressed to a patron. That patron, Odet de Châtillon, had assured him of the support and encouragement of Henri II, his king. He adds his own encouragement to that of Cardinal Jean Du Bellay. Rabelais can at last dare say what he wants to say. Châtillon was a member of a powerful trio, the nephews of Anne de Montmorency. Two were already open Protestants. Well after Rabelais was dead, the third, Cardinal Odet de Châtillon, fled to Anglican England with his wife.
Rabelais, deeply influenced by the works of Celio Calcagnini, has turned his new book into ‘mythologies’.
For the medical anecdotes here Rabelais retells what he wrote in the Prologue of the ‘48 Fourth Book.
For the Emperor Augustus and his daughter Julia see Erasmus (Apophthegms, IV, Octavius Caesar Augustus, 45).
Rabelais links rebarbative (crabby, unattractive) with rhubarb.
The Anagnost (Reader) who read Rabelais’ works to Franois I was Pierre Du Chastel, Bishop of Mâcon and later of Orleans.
For ‘agelasts’, non-laughers, see Erasmus, Adages, II, V, LXXII, ‘Un
laughing stone’.
The ‘Gallic Hercules’ drew men to him by his eloquence.
Alexikakos, a title of Hercules applied by Rabelais to Cardinal Odet de Châtillon, means ‘Averter of Evil’. The Cardinal’s sympathies already lay with the Lutherans and Anglicans not with Geneva and the Eglise Réformée. Calvin was shocked by the likening of him to Moses.]
Most-illustrious Prince: you have already been duly informed how I have been daily solicited, begged and importuned by so many great personages for the sequel of my pantagruelic mythologies, on the grounds that many of the ailing, the sick, the weary or the afflicted have, when they were read to them, beguiled their benighted sufferings, passed their time merrily and found fresh joy and consolation. To whom I normally reply that, as I wrote them for fun, I sought neither glory nor praise of any kind: my concern and intention were simply to provide such little relief as I could to the absent sick-and-suffering as I willingly provide to those who are present with me, seeking help from my Art and my care. Occasionally I explain to them at some length how Hippocrates (describing in several places, and especially in the Sixth Book of the Epidemics, the formation of his doctor-disciple) as well as Soranus of Ephesus, Oribasius, Claudius Galen and others, included in their concerns a physician’s gestures, deportment, look, touch, expression, grace and affability, as well as the cleanliness of his face, clothing, beard, hair and mouth, going so far as to single out the fingernails as though the physician were about to play the role of lover or suitor in some famous comedy or to go down into the tilt-yard to face a powerful opponent. Indeed, practising medicine is compared by Hippocrates to a combat and to a farce with three characters: the patient, the physician and the malady. Once, when reading that portrait of a physician, I was reminded of a remark of Julia to her father Octavian Augustus. On one occasion she presented herself before him in extravagant, immodest and provocative robes, which greatly displeased him though he uttered not a word. The following day she changed her wardrobe, dressing modestly in the style then customary amongst chaste Roman matrons. Thus attired, she appeared before him. He who, the day before, had never shown his displeasure by a single word when he had seen her in immodest robes, could not hide the pleasure which he took in seeing her thus changed; and he said to her, ‘O, how much more becoming and worthy are such robes to the daughter of Augustus!’ She had her excuse ready: ‘Today,’ she replied, ‘I dressed for the eyes of my father: yesterday I dressed to please my husband.’
So too a physician, dressed up with the right mien and attire – especially if he were clad as used to be the custom in the rich and pleasant double-sleeved gown called the philonium (as Petrus Alexandrinus wrote in his commentary on the Sixth Book of the Epidemics) – could reply to those who found his role-playing odd: ‘I have put on such accoutrements not to show off and be pompous but to please the patient on whom I am making a call, whom alone I seek entirely to please, avoiding all offence and irritation.’
There is more to it than that: we have hectic arguments over a passage in the Sixth Book of the Epidemics of our venerated Hippocrates: not whether the gloomy, severe, rhubarbative, Cato-like, displeasing, dissatisfied, glum and sullen expression of the physician depresses the patient whilst the happy, serene, pleasing, laughing, open expression cheers him up: that is proven and certain; but whether such depressing or cheering-up results from the perceptions of the patient as he contemplates those qualities in his doctor – assessing by means of them the outcome and final act of his illness: that is, by happy qualities a happy, desirable outcome: by gloomy qualities, an awful, gloomy one – or whether it results rather from the pouring of the doctor’s spirits, serene or gloomy, aerial or terrestrial, joyous or melancholic, from that doctor into the person of his patient (as in the opinion of Plato and Averroës). Above all else the aforementioned authorities gave a specific warning to the physician about the vocabulary, topics, discussions and conversations which he should employ with the patients on whose behalf he has been called in: everything must aim at one target and tend towards one end, namely to cheer him up without offence to God and never to depress him in any manner whatsoever.
Thus a certain Doctor Callianax is strongly condemned by Herophilus since, when a patient questioned him and asked, ‘Am I going to die?’ he callously replied,
A better man than you was overcome
When Patroclus to death had to succumb.
Another patient wanted to know the state of his illness and questioned him in the vein of our noble Pathelin:
… my micturition, now,
Tells it you not that I’m a dying man?
He idiotically answered: ‘No: not, that is, if you were born of Latona, the mother of those handsome children Phoebus and Diana.’
Similarly Claudius Galen (in Book Four of his Commentary on Book Six of the Epidemics) strongly condemned his medical teacher Quintus, who, when a certain distinguished patient of his in Rome said to him, ‘You’ve already had your dinner, Doctor: your breath smells to me of wine,’ arrogantly retorted, ‘And yours smells to me of fever: which has the more appetizing smell and bouquet, fever or wine?’
But the calumny of certain cannibals, misanthropists and agelasts had been so atrocious and unreasonable that it overcame my patience and I decided not to write another jot. For one of the least of the contumelies they used against me was that such books are all stuffed full of a variety of heresies, yet they could not produce a single example from any passage: merry jests, yes, in abundance, with no offence to God in them (that is the sole theme and subject of those books): heresies, no, not at all – unless by perversely inferring, against all rational and routine linguistic usage, things I would never have allowed to enter my mind even under threat of dying a thousand deaths, if so many were possible. It is as though one were to make bread mean a stone; fish, a serpent; egg, a scorpion.1
Once when I was complaining of this in your presence, I told you straight that if I did not consider myself a better Christian than they and their faction show themselves to be, and that if I were to recognize, in my life, writings, words or indeed my thoughts, one scintilla of any heresy, they would not be falling so detestably into the snares of the Calumniating Spirit – the Διáβολος’2 – who through them as his ministers impute such a crime to me: I would, following the example of the phoenix, collect the tinder myself and light the pyre so as to burn myself on it.
Then it was you told me that our late King François of eternal memory had been warned of such calumnies, and that, after carefully and attentively listening to a clear reading of my books from the eloquent voice of the most learned and faithful Anagnost in this Kingdom – of my books, I stress, since some false and infamous ones have wickedly been attributed to me – he never discovered one suspect passage in them and was horrified by some envious snake-gobbler who founded a mortal heresy on an Ν put for an M through the compositors’ misprint and carelessness.3
The same was done by his son (our so good, virtuous and Heaven-blessed King Henri – may God long preserve him for us – with the result that he granted you a privilège for me and individual protection against such calumniators.
Those good tidings you later graciously repeated to me in Paris, and again when you came to visit my Lord the Cardinal Du Bellay, who, to recover after a long and distressing illness, had withdrawn to Saint-Maur, a place – or to put it better and more appropriately – a paradise of healthiness, pleasantness, quietness, convenience and delight, and of all the noble joys of husbandry and the rustic life.
That, my Lord, is why, at this present time, I give a good wind to my quill, free from all intimidation, hoping that through your kindly favour you will be unto me a second Gallic Hercules in knowledge, wisdom and eloquence, and like him an Alexikakos in power, might and authority: of whom I can truly say what was said by Solomon the wise of Moses, the great prophet and Captain of Israel (Ecclesiasticus 45): a man fearing and loving God, a man of happy memory, a man agreeable to all mankind, beloved of God and o
f men; God in His praise likened him unto the valiant, and magnified him in the fear of his enemies. On his behalf He wrought marvellous and awesome things; He glorified him in the sight of kings; through him He declared his will to the people, and through him shed His light. He consecrated him in faith and graciousness, and chose him out of all men living. Through him God wished His voice to be heard, and the life-giving light of learning to be announced to those who were in darkness.
Further still, I promise you that those whom I shall find commending me for these joyful writings of mine I will adjure to be grateful entirely to you, to be thankful to you alone and to pray our Lord to preserve and increase your greatness, attributing nothing to me save humble submission and willing obedience to your commands. For through your exhortations which so honour me you have bestowed upon me both courage and inspiration. Without you my heart had given way and the fountain of my animal spirits run dry.
May our Lord keep you in His holy grace.
From Paris, this 28th of January, 1552.
Your most humble and most obedient
servant, Franç. Rabelais, physician.
The Royal privilège
[This privilège is every bit as fulsome as that given to Rabelais at the time of his Third Book. It repeats the highest praise of a literary work as defined by Horace: the works of Rabelais are again judged ‘no less useful than delightful’. No work of Rabelais in ‘Tuscan’ (Italian) is now extant or even known.]
Henry, by the grace of God King of France, to the Provost of Paris, the Bailiff of Rouen, the Seneschals of Lyons, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Dauphiné and Poitou, and to all other Our Justices and Officials, or to their Deputies, and to each of them severally as is due: greetings and affection.