Snotty,
Trout-slayer,
Topsy-turvy,
Worricow,
Cock-face,
Gazing-hoyden,
Veal-calf,
Elegantius.
Into that Sow now entered those noble cooks, gay, gallant, full of life and ready for the fight. The last to go in was Frère Jean (with his great scimitar), closing the doors behind him from the inside.
How Pantagruel broke Chidlings across his knee
CHAPTER 41
[The tale adopts, in mock-heroic style, the tone of the medieval tales of chivalry. All the various types of meaty sausages are enemies of fishy, Lenten fare.
‘To break chidlings over your knee’ means to do things the hard way, to go round the parish to find the church.
Phoenicopters are flamingos, called flamants in Languegoth (that is in the Languedoc tongue which Rabelais again assimilates to a kind of Gothic).
In the Disciple de Pantagruel which partly inspired Rabelais, these Chidlings and their allies are slaughtered and sliced up. In Rabelais their god appears and cures them with mustard, which goes well with sausages and the like.
For these anti-Lenten Chidlings to dare to oppose the Pantagruelists is a case of Ignorance opposing Wisdom. Rabelais exploits two adages of Erasmus: ‘YΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΝ (Hys Athenan), A Pig [teaching] Minerva’. That adage (I, I, XL) is to be read together with the one which follows it (I, I, XL, ‘A pig undertakes to fight Minerva’). Both were well known, meaning To teach your grandmother how to suck eggs’.
The ‘Bull of Berne’ is the soldier who fought at Marignano in 1515 against troops led for the first time by François I. He is mentioned towards the end of the first chapter of Pantagruel, in the variants.
‘La Reine Pédauque’, the Goose-footed Queen, is above all associated with Toulouse (as in the tale of Anatole France). Her toes were webbed.]
Those Chidlings drew so close that Pantagruel could see them flexing their muscles and already lowering their lances. He at once despatched Gymnaste to hear what they had to say and on what grounds, without any formal challenge, they sought to make war against their ancient friends who had done them no wrong in word or deed. Gymnaste, facing their front ranks, made a long, deep bow and shouted out as loudly as he could, ‘Yours, are we, yours, all yours to command. We all hold to your ancient confederate Mardi Gras.’
Some have since told me that he said Gradi Mars not Mardi Gras.
Be that as it may, at that word a fat and podgy woodland brain-meat Saveloy ran ahead in front of their battalion and tried to seize him by the throat. ‘By God,’ said Gymnaste, ‘you’ll get in there only in slices.’ And so he pulled out his two-handed sword yclept Kiss-me-arse and sliced that Saveloy in twain. Good God, how fat was he! It reminded me of that fat fellow the Bull of Berne, who was slain at Marignan at the defeat of the Switzers. He, believe you me, had no less than four fingers of fat on his guts.
That Saveloy loyally savaged, the Chidlings rushed upon Gymnaste and threw him viciously to the ground just as Pantagruel and his men came running up to help at the double.
Then pell-mell was that martial combat joined.
Poke-Banger poked Bangers: Spoilchidling spoilt Chidlings. Pantagruel broke Chidlings over his knees. Frère Jean was lying doggo within his Sow, seeing all and taking it all in, when, with a great hullabaloo, the Force-meat Pasties who were lying in ambush rushed out together against Pantagruel.
Then Frère Jean, witnessing the disarray and the uproar, opened the doors of the Sow and came out with his fine soldiers, some bearing iron spits, others holding andirons, fire-dogs, pans, scoops, grills, pokers, tongs, dripping-pans, brooms, casseroles, mortars and pestles, all in good order like a mob of arsonists, yelling together and most terrifyingly shouting: Nebuzardan! Nebuzardan! Nebuzardan!
With such shouts and commotion they charged the Forcemeat Pasties and right through the Sausages. The Chidlings, suddenly aware of those fresh reinforcements, fled off at the gallop as if they had seen all the devils. Frère Jean, with his big-bellied stone-shot, swatted them as thick as flies; his men too never spared themselves. Pitiful was it to behold. That field was strewn all over with dead or wounded Chidlings. And the book says that if God had not intervened the whole race of Chidlings would have been exterminated by those culinary warriors.
But a marvel then befell.
You shall believe of it what you will.
From the direction of the polar star there came flying a great, gross and grey pig with wings long and ample like the sails of a windmill. Its plumage was crimson-red like that of a phoenicopter (called a flamant in Languegoth). Its eyes were red and inflamed with fire like a carbuncle; its ears, green like an emerald prasine-stone; its teeth, yellow like a topaz; its tail, long and black like Lucullian marble; its trotters, white, diaphanous and translucent like a diamond; and it had broadly webbed feet like those of geese, and, once upon a time, like La Reine Pédauque in Toulouse.
It wore a golden collar about its neck, on which was inscribed some Ionic letters from which I could read two words only, ΥΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΝ, ‘A pig teaching Minerva’.
The weather was bright and clear, but it thundered to our left, so strongly that, as this monster appeared, we all stood there amazed. As soon as they saw it, the Chidlings threw down their weapons and arms and sank to their knees, wordlessly raising high their clasped hands as though they were worshipping it.
Frère Jean and his men still went on poking and skewering the Chidlings, but the retreat was sounded by the command of Pantagruel and all combat ceased.
The monster, having flown back and forth several times between the two armies, dropped seven and twenty pipes of mustard on to the ground; whereupon it disappeared, flying through the air and ceaselessly crying: Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras.
How Pantagruel parleyed with Niphleseth, the Queen of the Chidlings
CHAPTER 42
[The name of the fair Niphleseth, the Queen of the Sausages, derives from a Hebrew word for an ‘object of shame’ (a dildo).
‘La Rue Paveé d’Andouilles’ in Paris means ‘The Paved street of the-Chidlings’, but it can be taken in fun to mean ‘The street paved with Chidlings’. In the Disciple de Pantagruel, which Rabelais drew on here, the Chidlings do not become semi-human and so end up sliced and ready to eat.
The sow is called a ‘monster’, a word which still retained its suggestion of a more or less miraculous ‘sign’, though here in a comic context.
‘Sangréal’, normally spelt Saint Graal, is the Holy Grail. In the spirit of the Cratylus the spelling sangréai suggests Royal Blood. (In older French réal means royal, as in Montréal.) The sense Rabelais gives it is supplied by his letter to Antoine Hulot (see Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris, Gallimard, 1994), p. 1018): ‘also the good wines, especially one… which we are keeping here for your arrival as a sang gréai and as a second – or rather a fifth – essence.’ Here this quintessential draught is not the best of wines: it is mustard. Mustard is the sangréal of the Chidlings: it is a wondrous restorative, a balm, an aromatic ointment which cures their wounds and brings them back to life.
The Chidlings have their (Platonic) Idea of Mardi Gras just as the Papimanes will have their (Platonic but earthy) Idea of God: the Pope.
The inhabitants of the next island have their own sangréal too, one appropriate to them.]
The monster aforesaid no longer appearing and the two armies staying rooted in silence, Pantagruel asked to parley with Lady Niphleseth (for that was the name of the Queen of the Chidlings), who was in her chariot near her standard-bearers. That was readily granted.
The Queen alighted and greeted Pantagruel graciously and courteously received him. Pantagruel protested about the war. She honourably apologized to him, alleging that her error arose from a false report: her scouts had informed her that Quarêmeprenant their inveterate foe had landed and was spending his time examining the physeter’s urine. She begged him kin
dly to pardon her offence, asserting that one was more likely to find shit than gall in Chidlings, and proposed the following terms:
– that she and all her successive Niphleseths would for ever hold all their lands on that island from him in faithful homage;
– that they would obey his commands in all things everywhere;
– that they would be female friends of all his friends, and female enemies of all his enemies;
– that every year, in acknowledgement of such fealty, they would despatch to him seventy-eight thousand Royal Chidlings to serve at the first course of his table for six months a year.
Having done which, the very next day she conveyed that number of Royal Chidlings to Gargantua in six great brigantines. They were in the charge of Niphleseth the Younger, the Infanta of the island. Our noble Gargantua generously despatched them as a present to the Great King in Paris, but they nearly all perished from the change of air as well as from lack of mustard (which is Nature’s balm and restorative for Chidlings). By the grace and favour of that Great King they were piled up and buried in a place in Paris which to this very day is called La Rue Paveé d’Andouilles, The road paved with Chidlings.
At the entreaty of the ladies in the Royal Court, Niphleseth the Younger was saved and honourably treated. She has since married into a good and rich family and given birth to several lovely children. For which God be praised.
Pantagruel graciously thanked the Queen, forgave her her offence, refused her offer of fealty and bestowed on her a pretty little penknife from Prague. He then carefully questioned her about the monster which had previously appeared. She replied that it was the Idea of Mardi Gras, their tutelary god in times of war, the first Founder and the source of the Chidling race. That is why it looked like a Pig, for Chidlings are of porcine extraction.
Pantagruel inquired for what reason, and following what curative prescription, it had scattered such a quantity of mustard over the land. The queen replied that mustard was their sangréal, their celestial balm: by putting a little of it on the wounds of the stricken Chidlings the wounded recovered in next to no time and the dead were resuscitated. Pantagruel had no further conversation with the queen and withdrew aboard ship. So too did all those good comrades with their weapons and their Sow.
How Pantagruel landed on the Island of Ruach
CHAPTER 43
[Some learned banter: in Hebrew ruach means both ‘spirit’ and ‘wind’; anemos, the Greek for wind, has given us the name of anemone (the flower); plovers were thought to live on a diet of air (or wind); the name Oedipus means ‘Swollen leg’ – hence ‘oedipodic’, applied to the gout.
Professor Schyron was Rabelais’ professor at Montpellier.
The inhabitants of Ruach have their own sangréal, a restorative balm appropriate to their grossness: a choice wind.]
Two days later we reached the Island of Ruach, and I swear to you by the Pleiades that I found the way of life of the people there stranger than I can sav. They live on nothing but wind. Nothing do they eat, nothing do they drink, save wind. Their only habitations are weather-vanes.
They sow nothing in their gardens save three varieties of anemone. They carefully weed away any rue and other herbs which absorb or expel flatulence. To produce food, the common folk use fans made of feathers, paper or cloth according to their powers and resources, but the rich use windmills. When they hold a feast or a banquet, trestle-tables are set up under a windmill or two. There they feed, as happy as at a wedding. And during their meals they discuss the quality, excellence, rarity and health-giving properties of their winds just as you, good Drinkers, philosophize about your wines in your symposiums. One praises the Sirocco; another, the Libeccio; another, the Garbin; another, the Bise; another, the Zephyr; another, the Galerne; and so on for other winds. One favours smock-winds for lovers and gallants.
Where we prescribe draughts of thin broth for invalids, they prescribe draughts of thin air.
‘O,’ said one inflated little Ruachite, ‘if only one could get a bladder-bag full of that good Languegoth wind called Cyerce. When travelling through our land, Schyron, the noble physician, told us one day that it is strong enough to topple laden wagons. O what great good it would do for my oedipodic leg! The biggest are not the best.’
‘Maybe,’ said Panurge, ‘but how about a big barrel of that good Languegoth wine which is produced at Mireval, Canteper-drix and Frontignon!’
I saw a man of fine appearance, closely resembling a windbag, who was bitterly angry with one of his big, fat valets and with a little page-boy, giving them the devil of a beating with a slipper. Being ignorant of the cause of his anger I supposed it was his doctors’ orders, it being wholesome for a master to whack and get cross and wholesome for valets to be whacked. But I heard that he was reproving his valets for having stolen half a leathern-bottleful of Garbin, a wind which he was saving up for late in the season.
In that island they never spit, piss nor leave droppings. To make up for which they copiously break wind, fizzle and fart. They suffer from maladies of every sort and every kind: every malady is indeed brought forth and produced by wind as is deduced by Hippocrates in his book On Flatulence. But the most infectious is the windy colic. To remedy it they employ huge cupping-glasses and so evacuate powerful ventosities. They all die of hydropic gaseous extension of the abdomen, the men, farting, the women gently breaking wind, so that their souls leave via their bums. A little later, when strolling through the island, we came across three fat windy-heads who were out watching certain plovers which abound there and which follow the same diet as they do.
I noticed that just as you topers carry flasks, bottles and flagons about with you, so too each one of them carries a pretty little bellows on his belt: if winds chance to fail them, they forge themselves fresh ones with those jolly little bellows by alternate attraction and expulsion (wind being in its essential definition, as you realize, neither more nor less than air flowing and undulating).
Just then we received an order in their king’s name forbidding us, for three hours, to bring any man or woman of that country aboard our ships, since someone had stolen from him a bag full of the very wind that Aeolus, that good snorer, gave long ago to Ulysses to direct the coarse of his ship in a calm. And he religiously guarded it like another sangréal, curing several abnormal illnesses with it merely by releasing and delivering just enough for the patients to produce a virginal fart (the kind which nuns call a son net).59
How little rains abate great winds
CHAPTER 44
[‘Little rains abate great winds was a current French saying.
Rabelais takes as his starting-point the windmill-eating giant of the Disciple de Pantagruel.
Hypenemian (‘containing wind’) was applied in Latin to wind-eggs (unproductive eggs laid with soft shells).
The medical specialists of Ruach are called Mezarims, which possibly makes a Hebrew pun on north wind.
‘To skin the fox’ means to vomit after excessive drinking.
Rabelais discreetly alludes tο an adage of Erasmus: IV, IX, III,
‘Vento vivere, to live on wind’. He also cites from Horace (Odes, II, xvi, 27–8) an expression which had become proverbial: ‘Nothing is in all things happy’.
To take one’s ‘ease like Fathers’ is to live well, like well-fed, idle monks.]
Pantagruel praised their polity and way of life and said to their hypenemian Podestat, ‘If you accept the opinion of Epicurus when he said that the sovereign good consists in pleasure (I mean, easy not toilsome pleasure) then I repute you most happy. For you live on wind, which costs you very little or nothing; you need but to puff.’
‘True,’ said the Podestat. ‘Yet in this mortal life nothing is in all things happy. Often, just when we are at table, feeding ourselves on a God-sent wind as on manna from Heaven and at our ease like Fathers, there appears some tiny shower which abstracts it from us and abates it. And thus many a repast is lost for want of victuals.’
‘
That,’ said Panurge, ‘is like Jenin de Quinquenais, who, by piddling over the bum of Quelot, his wife, abated a stinking breeze which was issuing from there as from some magisterial aeolian pot. I once wrote a pretty little ten-line poem about it:
Jenin, on tasting his new wine
(Cloudy, fermenting on its lees),
Said, ‘Turnips, Quelot, would be fine:
Boil some for us for supper, please:
Of melancholy ne’er a tweeze!’
Then off to bed, to swive and sleep.
But Jenin’s eyes ne’er closed would keep:
Quelot broke wind at rapid rate.
He pee’d upon her. A bit steep?
But little showers great winds abate.
‘There is more to come,’ said the Podestat. ‘We suffer from an annual disaster; great and destructive: there is a giant called Bringuenarilles, who dwells on the island of Tohu. Following the orders of his physicians he resorts here every year in the spring for a purgation, swallowing like pills a great many of our windmills’ bellows, of which he is very fond. That brings great suffering upon us, and so we have three or four Lents a year, without the special rogations and intercessions.’
‘And have you no way of countering it?’ asked Pantagruel.
‘On the advice of our specialists, the Mezarims,’ said the Podestat, ‘at the season when he normally appears we concealed a great many cocks and hens inside the windmills. The first time that he swallowed them he all but died, for they went on cackling inside him and fidgeted about in his stomach, at which he fell into a lipothymic fit with heart pains and horrific and dangerous convulsions as though snakes had slipped into his stomach via his mouth.’
‘That as though is most inappropriate and out of place,’ said Frère Jean, ‘for I heard tell some time ago that if a snake gets into your stomach it causes no discomfort whatsoever and will come out at once if you hang the patient up by his feet and place a bowl full of warm milk close to his mouth.’
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