Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  ‘[But supposing we were to eat some kind of cabirotade at this very moment, would we be safe from this storm? I’ve read somewhere that, at sea during a tempest, those men had nothing to fear and were ever safe who ministered to the Cabiri (gods so celebrated by Orpheus, Apollonius, Pherecydes, Strabo, Pausanias – and Hérodote.)’

  ‘He radotes!’ said Frère Jean. ‘Poor old devil.] May a thousand million and hundreds of millions of devils seize hold of that diabolically hornèd cuckold! Hey! Come and help us here, tiger-boy! Is he ever going to come?49

  ‘Here, to larboard. God’s head stuffed with relics! What chattering monkeyish paternoster are you mumbling over there? That devil of a maritime fool has brought on this storm yet he’s the only one not helping the crew. By God, if I get over there, I shall whip you like a foul-weather fiend!50

  ‘Cabin-boy! Here, my darling! Hold your thumb here, lad, while I tie a Greek knot. Oh, what a good cabin-boy you are. Would to God that you were now the abbot of Talemousse and the present abbot were the warden of Le Croullay.

  ‘Ponocrates! You’ll be doing yourself an injury, brother.

  ‘Epistemon! Watch out for those bulwarks: I saw a thunderbolt strike them just now.’

  ‘Heave!’

  ‘Well said. Heave; heave; heave. Let the pinnace ride. Heave. Good God! What’s that? Our prow’s been knocked to smithereens. [Thunder away, devils! Fart, let off and dump your droppings.] A shit on that wave! Good God! it all but swept me away in its under-tow. All the devils in their millions are holding their provincial chapter-meeting, I think [, or bickering over the election of a new Rector].’

  ‘Larboard!’

  ‘Well said. Hey, cabin-boy: in the devil’s name watch out for that pulley. Larboard! Larboard!’

  ‘Bebebebous, bous, bous,’ said Panurge, ‘[bous, bous, bebe, be, bou, bous. I’m drowning.] I can see neither sky nor Earth. [Zalas, zalas! Of the four elements, all that’s left to us here are fire and water. Bouboubous, bous, bous.] Would to God in his condign power that at this present hour I were in the abbey-close at Seuilly, or else at Innocent the pastry-cook’s opposite the Cave Peinte in Chinon, stripped to my doublet if needs be and baking little fancy-cakes. My man! I wonder if would you mind just casting me ashore? [I’ve been told that you know a great many clever tricks.] If by your skill I find myself once and for all on terra-firma, I’ll give you all the estate of Salmagundi as well as my great snail-farm. Zalas, zalas! I’m drowning.51

  ‘Dear friends, since we can’t make a good harbour, let us ride this one out somewhere in some roads or other. Drop all your anchors. Let us get out of this danger, I beg you. Good friend, please, please, swing the lead and drop the weight. Let us know the height of the Deep! Take soundings, my dear fellow and friend, for Our Lord’s sake. Let’s find out whether we could drink standing up without stooping down. I have my own idea about that!’

  [‘See to the ties,’ bawled the master-pilot, ‘see to the ties! Hands to the jeer-lines. Bring those ties about! Cut down the topping-lifts! Look to those ties. See we don’t gybe over! Ho, there! That clew-line. Pay out that clew-line. Ho there! Those ties. Bows to the sea. Unyoke the rudder. Run before the wind.’

  ‘So we have come to that, have we?’ said Pantagruel: ‘Then may God our good Servator come to our aid!’

  ‘Ho! Let her run before the wind,’ bawled Jamet Brahier, the master-pilot. ‘Let her run before the wind. Let each man think on his soul and turn to his devotions, without any hope of aid except for a miracle from Heaven.’

  ‘Let’s make some good and lovely vow,’ said Panurge. ‘Zalas, zalas, zalas! Bou, bou; bebebebous, bous, bous. Zalas, zalas. Let’s have a whip-round and send off a pilgrim! Come on! Let everyone fork out some lovely nice pence! Come on.’]

  ‘Over here!’ said Frère Jean, ‘In the name of all the devils, over here, to starboard. [In the name of God, let her run before the wind. Unyoke that rudder, ho! Let her run before the wind! Run before the wind, ho! Let’s have a drink: I mean of what’s best for the taste and the stomach. Hey! Chief steward, up there! Can you hear me? Produce and display! All this is on its way to millions of devils too. Ho, page-boy! Bring me my thirst-raiser,’ – his name for his breviary.] ‘Hang on! A swig, my friend, a swig! God almighty, now this truly is hail and thunder! Hold on tight up there, I beg you. [When is the Feast of All-Saints? It’s a beast of a Feast today: for All the Millions of Devils, I believe!’]

  ‘Zalas!’ said Panurge; ‘Frère Jean is damning himself on the cheap! O, what a good friend I’m losing in him. Zalas, zalas! Here comes worse than before! We are leaping from Scylla to Charybdis. Oh, oh! I’m drowning! Unto Thee I confess… Just one little word to make my will, Frère Jean, my Father; and you too Monsieur Abstractor, my friend, my Achates; and Xenomanes, my All. Zalas, I’m drowning!

  ‘Two words for my will and testament. Hold on to companion way.’

  The storm: continued. And a short discussion about wills drawn up at sea

  CHAPTER 21

  [In ‘48 this is Chapter 10, with the title The Storm: continued. And of the talk of Frère Jean and Panurge about wills drawn up at sea.

  The talk of wills may be seen in the light of Tiraqueau’s commentary, The Dead seizeth the Quick mentioned in the Prologue.

  Jarus’ is again avoided.

  ‘The Broken-lancers’ are the unseated cavalrymen fighting on foot mentioned in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, I, 39.

  The ‘52 interpolations at the climax of the storm greatly increase both the tragic and the Evangelical elements. Panurge again puts the Blessed Virgin on a par with God, while Pantagruel quotes the apostles during the storm in Matthew 8:25 as well as ‘Thy will be done’ from the Lord’s Frayer. Frère Jean, too, prays in his grubby way, welcoming his Breviary as his ‘thirst-raiser’ – his mouth gets dry when chanting from it – and starting off with the first Psalm.

  Towards the end of the chapter, an adaptation of a line of Horace, ‘Horrida tempestas caelum contraxit’ (‘The horrid tempest contracts the sky’) is turned into a satire of Professor Tempête, the flogging principal of the hated Collège de Montaigu in Paris.]

  ‘To draw up a will now’ said Epistemon, ‘when it behoves us to exert ourselves and help the crew on pain of shipwreck, seems to me to be an action as inappropriate and ill-timed as that of those Broken-lancers and friends of Caesar’s who, when invading Gaul, wasted their time drawing up wills and codicils, lamenting their fortune and weeping for their absent wives and friends in Rome, whereas they ought, of necessity, to have been rushing to arms and exerting themselves against Ariovistus their foe.

  ‘It is silliness like that of the carter who, when he got stuck in a furrow, implored on his knees the help of Hercules without even putting the goad to his oxen or lending a hand to raise up the wheels. What use can it be to you to make a will? Either we shall escape this danger or else we shall be drowned. Your will, if we escape, is of no use to you. Wills are authorized and validated only by the deaths of their testators. And if we do drown, that will of yours goes down with us. Right? And who will bring it to the executors?’

  ‘Some fair wave,’ said Panurge, ‘will cast it up on to the shore as it did to Ulysses; and some king’s daughter, taking a pleasant stroll in the cool of the evening will happen upon it, have it carefully executed and erect a magnificent cenotaph to me hard by the shore, as:

  – Dido erected one to her husband Sichaeus;

  – Aeneas, to Deiphobus on the Trojan shore near Rhaete;

  – Andromache, to Hector in the city of Bathrotum;

  – Aristotle, to Hermias and Eubulus;

  [– the men of Athens, to the poet Euripides;]

  – the men of Rome, to Drusus in Germany and to their emperor, Alexander Severus in Gaul;

  [– Argentier, to Callaeschrus;

  – Xenocrites, to Lysidice;

  – Timares, to his son, Teleutagoras;

  – Eupolis and Aristodice to their son, Theotimus;

  – On
estes to Timocles;

  – Callimachus, to Sopolis, the son of Diocleides;]

  – Catulus, to his brother;

  – Statius, to his father;

  and Germain de Brie, to Hervé, the Breton seaman.’

  ‘Are you raving mad?’ said Frère Jean. ‘Help us over here, in the name of five hundred thousand millions of wagon-loads of devils! Help us! May you get canker of the moustache with three lengths of sores (enough to make you a new pair of breeches and a new codpiece too).

  ‘Has our ship struck a reef? God almighty, how shall we tow it off? What a devil of a sea is running! We shall never get out of this, or I’ll give myself to all the devils.’

  [Then was heard a devout call from Pantagruel, who cried, ‘Lord save us. We perish. Yet may it not be according to our affections, but Thy holy will be done.’]

  ‘God,’ said Panurge, ‘and the Blessed Virgin be with us! O – o – o. O – o – o. I’m drowning. Bebebebous, bebebous, bous. Into Thy hands, O Lord… True God, send me some dolphin to bear me safely ashore like some [nice] little Arion: I shall sound my harp well if it’s not out of tune.’

  ‘I give myself to all the devils’ said Frère Jean, – ‘God be with us,’ muttered Panurge through his teeth – ‘if I come down below I shall prove to you that those balls of yours are hanging from the arse of a horny, hornèd, dehorned, cuckolded calf. Mgna, mgna, mgna. Come over here and help us, you great blubbering calf, in the name of thirty million devils: and may they leap on your body! Are you going to come, you sea-calf? Ugh! How ugly he is, the great cry-baby.’

  ‘Can’t you say anything else?’

  ‘Come to the fore then, my jolly old thirst-raiser. Let me pluck you against the grain: Blessed is the man that hath not walked – I know this off by heart! – Let’s see the pericope for Monsignor of Saint Nicholas:

  Horrida tempestas montem turbavit acutum.

  (Horrid old Tempête troubled the Collège de Montaigu.)

  ‘Tempête was a great flogger of undergraduates at Montaigu. If for flogging wretched little boys and innocent undergraduates pedagogues are damned, then, upon my honour, he’s on Ixion’s wheel, flogging the lop-tailed cur which makes it turn. If by flogging innocent boys pedagogues are saved, he must now be way above the…’52

  The end of the storm

  CHAPTER 22

  [The last word of the previous chapter would have been cieux (skies), but once the heroes have done all they can, God quietly works his miracle and so the next word – the first word of this chapter – is terre! (earth!, or land!) Even Frère Jean thanks God. Panurge does not: he goes back on his vows.

  Death is discussed in Classical terms.

  The learned Epistemon employs two rare words from the Greek; he may be the only one to ever use them in French: celeusma (a term Rabelais would have met in Lucian, Proverbs and in Thessalonians 4:15) and obelischolichnia. Celeusma, means shouts of encouragement such as might be given to oarsmen in a galley; obeliscolychny means strictly a light on a pole, ana may do so here, or else by extension a lighthouse. He also prefers to give Castor his Greek name, Mixarchagevas.

  It is Pantagruel who evokes Homer’s Ucalegon, a Trojan who avoided battle while the others were fighting.]

  ‘Land! Land ahoy!’ cried Pantagruel. ‘A spurt of sheep’s courage now, lads! We’re not far from a haven. I can see the sky begin to clear towards the polar star. Watch out for that sea-wind.’

  ‘Courage, lads,’ said the master pilot; ‘the surge has abated. Up, now, to the yards of the maintop. Heave. Heave. Now for the spankers of the after-mizzenmast.

  [‘Cable to capstan! Heave away, heave away, heave away. Hands to the jeer-lines. Heave, heave, heave. Yoke the rudder. Steady the sheets. Ready the rigging. Ready the ties. Ready the bow-lines. Set the starboard cables. Bring the helm to leeward. Tighten the sheets to starboard, you son of a whore!’

  – ‘News of your mother, good fellow. How nice for you!’ said Frère Jean to the matelot. –

  ‘Luff. Close to, face to the wind. Right the helm.’

  ‘Right it is sir,’ answered the sailors.

  ‘Cut straight ahead. Bows to the harbour-roads. Clear space to tack on the studding-sail. Ho.]

  ‘Heave; heave.’

  ‘Well said and well thought,’ said Frère Jean. ‘Up you go, lads; up, up; hard to it. Good. Haul away. Haul.’

  ‘To starboard.’

  ‘Well put and right masterly. Happily the storm seems to have passed its climax and to be coming to an end. [May God be praised for it.] Our devils are beginning to scamper away!’

  [‘Slacken the line.’

  ‘Well and knowledgeably spoken. Slacken the line. Slacken the line. Over here, for God’s sake, noble Ponocrates, you powerful old lecher. (He’ll beget nothing but boy-children, the lusty old codger.) Eusthenes, my brave fellow, spread the foretop-sail.’

  ‘Heave, heave.’

  ‘That’s well said. Heave, for God’s sake; heave, heave.’

  ‘I wouldn’t deign to fear anything,

  For today’s a holy-day, they tell.

  Noel, noel, noel!’

  ‘That celeusma is not at all out of place,’ said Epistemon, ‘and it pleases me,

  For today’s a holy-day, they tell.’

  ‘Heave; heave. Right you are.’]

  ‘Oh!’ cried Epistemon, ‘I require you all to be full of good hope: I can see Castor over there to the right.’

  ‘Be, be, bous, bous, bous,’ said Panurge: ‘I very much fear it may be [that bitch of a] Helen.’

  ‘Truly,’ said Epistemon, ‘it is Mixarchagevas (if, that is, you prefer the denomination of the Argives). Ahoy! Ahoy! I can see land; I can see a port; I can see a great throng of people on the quayside. I can see flares on an obeliscolychny.’

  [‘Ahoy, ahoy there,’ said the pilot; ‘round the cape. And avoid those sandbanks.’

  ‘Rounded it is, sir,’ the matelots replied.

  ‘Away she goes,’ said the pilot. ‘And so do all the others in the convoy. Splice the main brace to help on the weather.’

  ‘By Saint John,’ said Panurge, ‘that’s talking, that is! O what a beautiful saying.’

  ‘Mgna, mgna, mgna,’ said Frère Jean; ‘if you touch one drop may the devil touch me! Do you understand me, you ballsed-up devil? Here, good friend, is a tankard full of the finest and best! Bring out the drinking-pots, ho, Gymnaste! And that hunking great pasty. Is it iambic or jambonic? It’s all one to me.]

  ‘Mind we don’t slew round.’

  ‘Good heart,’ cried Pantagruel, ‘good heart, my lads. And let us be chivalrous: hard by our vessel you can see two bumboats [, three sloops, five ships, eight flyboats, four gondolas] and six frigates sent out to help us from the good people of that nearby island.

  ‘But who is that Ucalegon weeping and blubbering down below? Was I not holding the mainmast in my hands more surely than a hundred cables?’

  ‘It’s that wretched devil of a Panurge,’ Frère Jean replied. ‘He’s caught the calf-shivers. He trembles with fear whenever he’s drunk!’

  ‘If,’ said Pantagruel, ‘he felt fear during that horrifying hurricane and menacing storm, I do not value him one tiny hair less: provided that he had bestirred himself. For just as it is a sign of a coarse and cowardly heart to feel fear at every shock (as Agamemnon did: for which reason Achilles shamefully reproached him with having the keen sight of a dog and the faint heart of a deer), so, too, for a man not to be afraid when the situation is manifestly formidable is a sign of want or lack of intelligence. Now, if next to offending God there is anything to fear in this life, I will not say it is death – I do not want to get involved in the contention of Socrates and the Academics, that death is not bad in itself and so not in itself to be feared – I do say that either death by shipwreck is to be feared, or nothing is; for as Homer puts it, it is a grievous, ghastly and disnatured thing to perish at sea.53 Aeneas, indeed, during the tempest which surprised his convoy of boats off Sicily, re
gretted that he had not died at the strong hand of Diomedes; he declared those to be thrice and four times blessèd who had died in the conflagration of Troy.54

  ‘Here, not one man has died. For which may God our Servator be for ever praised. But this is all a bit of a mess. Right! We must repair the damage. And see we don’t run aground.’

  How Panurge acted the brave companion once the storm was over

  CHAPTER 23

  [Rabelais turns a fable or parable into a comic sermon with a tragic dimension: men must ‘cooperate’ with God. The lesson is a more theologically precise version of the same lesson in Pantagruel’s prayer before the battle in Pantagruel, Chapter 19 and the parable of Frère Jean’s fighting during the attack on Seuilly (Gargantua, Chapter 25ff.) though there it was ‘helping’ God that was mentioned or implied not, ‘cooperating’ or ‘working together’ with him. The basic authority is I Corinthians 3:9: ‘We are workers together with the Lord’. In the Vulgate Latin we are God’s ‘helpers’ (adjutores); Erasmus and others insisted that ‘synergism’ entails ‘cooperators’, or ‘workers together’ not ‘helpers’. (God, being almighty, needs no help but by allowing human beings to cooperate with him he bestows on them the dignity of causality.) Such synergism forms the very stuff of the moral laughter in Rabelais.

  Panurge cites a saying well known as an Erasmian adage: I, II, XCI, ‘The most delightful sailing follows the land, the most delightful walking follows the shore’.

  Rabelais has taken over here and rewritten matter from the end of Chapter 21.

  Frère Jean retains his role as a symbol of active virtue.]

  ‘Ho, ho!’ cried Panurge; ‘everything’s going well. The storm is over. I beg you, I pray you, do let me be the first to go below. I really would rather like to attend to a few things. Shall I help you again over there? Permit me to coil up that rope. Indeed: plenty of courage I have: of fear, very little. Give it to me, my friend. No, not a ha’porth of fear. It’s true that that decuman billow which swamped us from prow to poop did rather desiccate my arteries.’