On the part of Our beloved and loyal Maître François Rabelais, Doctor of Medicine, it has been expounded to Us that the aforesaid suppliant, having heretofore delivered to be printed various books in Greek, Latin, French and Tuscan, especially certain volumes of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Pantagruel, no less useful than delightful, the printers have corrupted and perverted the said books in several places. They have moreover printed several other – offensive – books under the name of the above suppliant to his great displeasure, prejudice and shame, books totally disowned by him as false and supposititious, which he desires to be suppressed under Our good pleasure and will; further, other books of his, acknowledged as his but depraved and distorted as said above, he desires to review, correct and newly reprint; similarly to bring to light and to sell the sequel of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Pantagruel; humbly begging Us to vouchsafe him Our requisite and appropriate Documents.
And because We freely incline towards the supplication and request of the aforesaid Maître François Rabelais, and being desirous of treating him favourably in this matter:
To him, for those causes and other good considerations moving Us thereunto, We have accorded and vouchsafed to him permission, and by Our certain knowledge, plenary powers and Royal authority do now accord and vouchsafe by this present document, that he may licitly have printed by such printers as he shall decide, and newly put and expose on sale, all and each of the said books and the sequel to Pantagruel by him undertaken and composed, both those books which have already been printed, which will be to this end reviewed and corrected, as well as those also which he intends newly to bring to light; and similarly suppress those which have been falsely attributed to him.
And so that he may have the means to support the costs necessary to the undertaking of such printing, We by this present document most-expressly have prohibited and forbidden, and do prohibit and forbid, all other booksellers and printers of this Our Kingdom and other Our Lands and Lordships to print, have printed, put on sale or expose for sale any of the above-mentioned books, both old and new, during a period and term of ten years, consecutive and successive, beginning on the day and date of the printing of the said books, without the will and consent of the said suppliant, on pain of the confiscation of the books which shall be found to have been printed to the prejudice of this Our present permission, and of an arbitrary fine.
And We wish and order that each one of you in whatever concerns him and shall pertain to him shall keep, guard and observe these Our present congee, licence, permission, prohibition and interdict. And if any persons were found to have contravened them, then proceed and cause to proceed against them with the above-stated and other penalties. And see that the said suppliant enjoy and use the contents of the above privilège during the said period, to begin and to be in all respects as is stated above; ending, and causing to end, all troubles and obstacles contrary thereto: for such is Our pleasure, notwithstanding any so ever ordinances, restrictions, orders or prohibition thereunto opposed. And because appeal may be made to these present Documents in several different places, We wish that on the simple examination of notarial copies made under the Royal Seal, faith be placed in them as in this present original.
Given at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the Sixth day of August in the year of grace one thousand five hundred and fifty, and the fourth of Our reign. From the King:
the Cardinal De Châtillon in attendance.
Signed Du Thier.
Prologue of the Author Maître François Rabelais for the Fourth Book of the heroic deeds and sayings of Pantagruel
[Pantagmelism is further defined.
This, the longest of the Prologues, is a masterpiece of syncretism. Rabelais treats an episode in the Old Testament, another in the New and a fable of Aesop as ‘pedagogues’ leading to a fuller understanding of Christian faith – that is, of trust and hope in God. The objects of prayer should be governed by moderation. Many devoted Renaissance humanists thought the same. Erasmus in his Adages (I, VI, XCVI, ‘Nothing to excess’) holds that every single thing should be governed by the Mean, except our love of God. Calvin says much the same: even in matters ‘theological Man must remain within true moderation between extremes’. The key biblical references are to Luke 19:1–6 and to II (IV) Kings 6:1–7.
The fable of the woodcutter and the axe is related by Erasmus (Adages, IV, III, LVII, ‘A river does not always bear axes’,). Rabelais retells it in the style of Lucian. The name of the woodcutter, Couillatris, is here translated as Bollux.
We are shown the reality and limits of free-will. Even when our choices (like Bollux’s here) are not spotlessly pure, they are real and bring upon us their inevitable consequences. Christianity had long since taken over for God the Father the ancient title of Jupiter, God the Most-good and the Most-great (Optimus Maximus or D.O.M.). Rabelais strikingly and very unusually, applies it directly to God the Son. There is hardly any other term which would so completely emphasize the full divinity of Christ. He will do so again later where it appears among the most powerful of syncretistic elements in Chapter 28 apropos of the death of Pan.
Tiraqueau’s treatise The Quick Seizeth the Dead treats at length of the immediate cession of property on the death of the testator to the heirs and heirs presumptive.
The followers of Ramus and Galland were forming factions for and against the authority of Aristotle and a new concept of dialectics. They should be turned into gargoyles (since pierre means stone and both are called Fierre) and turned into an equilateral triangle, a Pythagorean form treated lightly here and perhaps in Chapter 34 – as in Lucians Philosophies for Sale – but destined, like the Platonic Ideas, which are similarly lightly treated at first, to become associated with revealed truth in Chapter 55.]
To the kindly readers:
Good people: may God save you and keep you. Where are you? I can’t see you: wait while I tug on my glasses. Ha, ha! Lent runs on, both fine and fair: I can see you now. Well then: I’m told that you’ve had a good vendange: I would be by no means saddened by that! You’ve found an infallible remedy against all thirsts and distempers? That’s worthily done. You, your wives, children, family and kinsfolk are all in the health you desire? Things are going well. That’s good. I’m pleased. God, our good God, be eternally praised for it and (if such be his holy will) may you long be maintained in it. As for me, by his holy loving-kindness I’m still here and pay you my respects. I am, by means of a little pantagruelism (that is, as you know, a certain merriness of mind pickled in contempt for things fortuitous) well and sprightly and ready for a drink if you are. Do you ask me why, good folk? An incontrovertible reply: such is the will of the Most-good, Most-great God in whom I find rest, whom I obey and of whom I revere the sacrosanct word of Good Tidings – the Gospel – in which it is said (Luke 4) with dreadful sarcasm and biting derision to the physician neglectful of his own health: ‘Physician, heal thyself!’
Claudius Galen kept himself in good health not out of respect for that saying (even though he did have some knowledge of Holy Writ and did know and frequent the saintly Christians of his time, as is clear from Book 2 of On the Uses of the Parts of the Body, and Book 2 of On the Differences of Pulses, Chapter 3, as well as, in the same work, Book 3, Chapter 2, and in On the Affections of the Kidneys, if it be by Galen), but out of fear of falling under this common and satirical mockery:
‘IητρOς Aλλων αυτOς ελκεσι βρYων.
To doctor others he is well affected,
And yet he is by ulcers dire infected.4
He brashly boasts that he does not want to be reckoned a physician if he fails to live in completely good health – apart from a few, short-lived ephemeral fevers – from his twenty-eighth year until an advanced old age, even though he was not naturally one of the heartiest and his stomach manifestly weak. “For,” he says (in Book 5 of On Maintaining Good Health), “a physician will hardly be trusted to take care of the health of others if he neglects his own.”
Even
more brashly did Asclepiades the physician boast of having made a pact with Fortune: he would not be thought of as a physician if ever he were ill from the time he began to practise his Art until his ultimate old age (which age he did reach, both vigorous in all his limbs and triumphant over Fortune). Finally, without any preceding illness, he exchanged life for death by accidentally tumbling down from the top of a decayed and badly mortised flight of stairs.
If, through some ill-stared event, the health of your Lordships has emancipated itself, then, wherever it may be – up or down, before or behind, right or left, within or without, far or near your domains – may you, with the help of our Blessèd Servator, quickly come across it. And once happily met, instantly reclaim it; let it be repossessed by you, seized and remancipated. The laws allow it; the king understands it; and I so counsel you, neither more nor less than do the Ancient law-givers who authorize a master to reclaim a runaway slave no matter where he might be found.
O ye gude men and Ye gude God! Is it not written and practised in the ancient customary law of this our so noble, so flourishing, so rich and triumphant kingdom of France that The Dead Seizeth the Quick? Read what has recently been expounded on this topic by the good, learned and wise André Tiraqueau, so debonair and just, a Counsellor to King Henri the Second of that name in his most-awesome Court of Parlement in Paris). Our health is our life, as was so well proclaimed by Ariphron of Sicyon. Without health, life is no life, life is not liveable, ‘AβIος βIος, βIος αβIωτος: without health, life is but languishing, life is but a pale image of death.5
And so, when you are deprived of health (that is, dead), Seize ye the Quick, seize hold of life (of health, that is).
My hope is in God that he will hearken to our prayers, seeing the firm faith in which we make them, and that he will grant us our wish because it lies within the Mean. By the sages of Antiquity the Mean was called Golden, that is to say, precious, praised by all, and everywhere delightful. Study the books of the Holy Bible and you will find that the prayers of those who asked with moderation have never been rejected. An example: that tiny man Zachaeus (whose body and relics the mullahs of Saint-Ayl near Orleans boast of possessing and whom they call Saint Sylvanus). He simply wanted to see our Blessèd Servator near Jerusalem. Nothing more. That lay within the Mean, open to anyone. But he was too short to do so from the midst of the multitude. He pranced and trotted about, he pushed, he drew apart, he climbed up a sycamore. Our Most-good God recognized the purity and moderation of his desire, presented himself to his sight – Zachaeus being not only seen but also heard by him – visited his home and blessed his family.
A son of a prophet in Israel was chopping up wood near the river Jordan when (as it is written in 4 Kings 6) the head of his axe flew off and fell into the river. He prayed God to give it him back – something within the Mean – and with firm hope and confidence he did not cast the head after the helve (as the devilish little Censors chant with an offensive solecism) but (as you so rightly say) cast the helve after the head. At once there appeared two miracles:
– the iron axe-head rose from the depths of the water;
– it fitted itself on to the helve.
If he had wanted to be borne up into the heavens in a fiery chariot like Elijah, multiply his seed like Abraham, be as rich as Job, as strong as Samson or as fair as Absalom, would that have come to pass? You may well ask!
Apropos of wishes within the Mean where axes are concerned – let me know when it’s time for a drink! – I’ll tell you a tale written in his fables by Aesop the Frenchman (I mean Phrygian and Trojan, as Maximus Planudes affirms. From their stock, according to the most veracious chroniclers, the noble French are descended. Aelian writes that he was a Thracian, and Agathias, following Herodotus, that he was a Samian. It’s all the same to me.)
There lived in his days a poor yokel, a native of the village of Gravot. His name was Bollux, a feller of timber and driver-in of wedges, earning a wretched living, jogging along in that lowly estate. And it befell that he lost his axe. Who was sorely troubled and saddened? He was: for his well-being and his very life depended upon that axe; through that axe he lived in honour and respect amidst all the wealthy woodmen: without his axe he would perish from hunger. Death, encountering him six days later without his axe, would have scythed and sickled him from this world. In such a predicament he began to yell and to implore, beseech and invoke Jupiter through many a fluent prayer (since, as you know, Necessity is the mother of Eloquence), lifting up his face to the heavens, with his knees to the ground, his head bare, his arms stretched out high and his fingers widely spread as, in a loud voice, he kept tirelessly chanting as a refrain to all his orisons: ‘My axe, Jupiter, my axe, my axe! Nothing more, O Jupiter, but my axe, or pennies to buy me another. Woe is me: my poor old axe!’
Now Jupiter was holding a council about certain urgent affairs. The aged Cybele was then opining or, if you prefer, the young and radiant Phoebus. But so great was the clamour of Bollux that it was heard as a great din in the full council and consistory of the gods.
‘Who the devil is it down there howling so horribly?’ asked Jupiter. ‘By the might of the Styx! were we not and are we not still sufficiently encumbered with decisions about controversial and weighty affairs? Have we not voided the dispute between Prester John, the king of the Persians, and Soliman the Sultan, the emperor of Constantinople? Have we not closed the gap between the Tartars and the Muscovites? Have we not answered the request of the Shereef, and done the same at the beseeching of Dragut Rays? The status of Parma has been dealt with and so has that of Magdeburg, Mirandola and Africa (as mortals name that place on the Mediterranean Sea that we call Aphrodisium). Tripoli, being badly guarded, has changed masters: its time had run out. Here are the Gascons, cursing and swearing and asking for their bells to be restored. Over in this corner are the Saxons, the Hanseatics and the Germans, folk once invincible but now aberkeits – ruined – and under the yoke of a little old cripple: they’re crying out for vengeance, succour and the restitution of their original rights and ancient freedom.
‘But what are we going to do about those fellows Ramus and Galland who, flanked by their flunkeys, henchmen and partisans, are sowing discord through the whole of the Parisian Academe? I am greatly perplexed by it. I have yet to determine which way to lean. Otherwise both seem good and well-bollocked fellows to me. One of them has golden Sun-crowns: I mean beautiful solid ones. The other would like to. One is quite learned. The other’s no fool. One likes fine folk: fine folk like the other. One is a cunning and crafty fox: the other speaks evil and writes evil, howling like a cur against the Ancient philosophers and authors. Tell me how it seems to you, Priapus, you old ass’s prick! Many a time I’ve found your counsel equitable and your advice pertinent: even your mentulate parts have mental capacities.’
‘King Jupiter,’ replied Priapus, baring his helmet, his head erect, red, radiant and firm, ‘since you compare one of them to a howling cur and the other to a fully freighted fox, I am of the opinion that, without worrying or disturbing yourself any further, you should do with them what you did with a cur and a fox long ago.’
‘Eh?’ asked Jupiter. ‘When? Who were they? When was it?’
‘What a fine memory!’ Priapus replied. ‘That venerable father Bacchus you can see here with his ruddy face wanted to avenge himself against the inhabitants of Thebes. He therefore kept an enchanted fox: no matter what harm or damage it caused no beast in the world could catch it or hurt it. Now this noble Vulcan here had forged a dog of Monesian brass and by dint of breathing into it had made it animate and alive. He gave it to you. You gave it to Europa, your sweeting. She gave it to Minos; Minos, to Proclis; Proclis finally to Cephalus. That dog too was similarly enchanted: it could nab any creature it came across and let nothing escape it (like lawyers today).
‘Now it happened that they came across each other! What could they do? The cur, by its fated destiny, must take the fox: the fox by its destiny must never be
taken.
‘The case was referred to your council. You professed never to go counter to Destiny. Their destinies were incompatible. The truth, the effecting and the accomplishment of two simultaneous incompatibilities was declared an impossibility within Nature. You sweated under the strain; it was from your sweat falling upon the Earth that round-headed cabbages were born. All this noble consistory of ours, in default of a categorical conclusion, developed a wonder-working thirst; and at that particular council more than seventy-eight barrels of nectar were drunk.
‘At my suggestion you turned them both into stones. Immediately you were freed from all perplexity; immediately a truce with drinking was declared throughout Olympus. It was the year of the flabby honing stones near Teumessa (between Thebes and Chalcis).
‘Following that example, I am of the opinion that you should literally petrify that cur and that fox. It is not an unprecedented metamorphosis. Both of them bear the name of Pierre – Stone – and since a proverb from Limoges says that it takes three stones to make the mouth of one oven, you will bring them together with Maître Pierre Du Coignet whom you once petrified for similar reasons. And those three dead pierres shall be placed in the form of an equilateral triangle6 upon the great Temple of Paris or in the middle of its parvis, where (as in the game of Fouquet’s puff) they will serve to snuff out lighted candles with their noses as well as torches, tapers, rush-lights and flambeaux (since, when they were alive, they bollocked up the fires of faction and dissention, of bollocking cliques and divisions amongst idle students) as an everlasting reminder that when such bollock-shaped, self-loving coteries came before you, they were not so much condemned as contemned.
‘I have spoken.’
‘As far as I can tell, fair Signor Priapus, you’re well disposed towards them,’ said Jupiter. ‘(You are not so well-disposed towards all men!) For seeing that they yearn to eternalize their name and reputation, the best thing that could happen to them is to be changed into hard marble pierres after death rather than to return to the earth and rot.
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 66