Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  Leaving behind the ravaged island of the Papefigues, we had most happily sailed for a day of calm weather when the blessèd isle of the Papimanes hove in sight. As soon as our anchors were dropped in the harbour and before we had made fast our cables, there came towards us a skiff with four persons each differently dressed.

  One was a monk, frocked, filthy and finely booted.

  Another, a falconer with a lure and a hawking-glove.

  Another, a solicitor holding a great bundle of examinations, summonses, chicaneries and postponements.

  The other was a vigneron from Orleans in handsome cloth gaiters, with a punnet and a sickle attached to his belt.

  The instant they drew alongside, they called out, asking us in a loud voice:

  ‘Have you seen Him, O travellers? Have you seen Him?’

  ‘Whom?’ asked Pantagruel.

  ‘The One who is yonder!’ they replied.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Frère Jean. ‘By the death of Beef, I’ll give him a good walloping.’ (He thought they were complaining about a thief, a murderer or a committer of sacrilege.)

  ‘Why! Foreign travellers, they said. ‘Know ye not the Unique?’

  ‘Sirs,’ said Epistemon, ‘we do not understand your terms. But do please explain to us whom you mean and then we shall tell you the truth without any dissembling.’

  ‘We mean,’ they said, ‘He who is. Have you ever seen Him?’

  ‘He who is,’ Pantagruel replied, ‘by the teachings of our theology, is God. With such words he revealed Himself to Moses. Certainly we have never seen him: he is not visible to fleshly eyes.’

  ‘We’re not talking about chat high God who reigns in the heavens. We’re talking of the god-on-earth. Have you ever seen Him?’

  ‘Upon my honour,’ said Carpalim, ‘they mean the Pope!’

  ‘Yes, gentlemen, yes,’ replied Panurge. ‘Yes indeed. Saw three of ’em. Never did me much good, though.’

  ‘What’s that?’ they said. ‘Our holy Decretals intone that there is never more than one alive.’

  ‘I mean,’ replied Panurge, ‘one after the other, in succession. Apart from that, I have only seen one at a time.’

  ‘O people, thrice and four times blessèd,’ they said. ‘Be ye welcome; most welcome.’

  Whereupon they went down on their knees before us and wished to kiss our feet. We would not let them do so, objecting that they could not do more for the Pope if he were to come there in person.

  ‘Yes. So we would!’ they replied. ‘That’s already been agreed between us. We shall kiss his bum – without the fig leaf – and his bollocks, too. For he does have bollocks, the Holy Father. We find that in our beautiful Decretals. Otherwise he could never be pope. So there follows this necessary consequence in the subtleties of Decretaline philosophy: “He is a pope: therefore he has bollocks.” When this world runs out of bollocks this world will run out of popes.’

  Meanwhile Pantagruel inquired of one of the seamen in their skiff who these persons were. The reply came that they were the Four Estates of the isle. He added that we would be well received and well treated since we had seen the Pope!

  Pantagruel explained it to Panurge, who said to him in confidence: ‘There you are then. I swear to God that everything comes in handy if only you wait. Seeing the Pope has never done us any good up till now, by all the devils, I can see today that it will.’

  We then disembarked, and there came out to meet us, as in a procession, the entire population of the country, men, women and little children. Our Four Estates cried to them in a loud voice: ‘They have seen Him. They have seen Him. They have seen Him.’ As that was proclaimed, all the people sank to their knees before us, clasped their hands together and raised them heavenwards crying, ‘O Blessèd Ones! O Blessèd Ones!’ And their cries lasted more than a quarter of an hour.

  Then the schoolmaster came running up with his pedagogues and the boys from the junior and senior forms and set about caning them magisterially, as one used to cane little boys in our country-towns wherever a criminal was hanged: ‘to impress it upon them’.

  Pantagruel was angry at this and said to them, ‘Messieurs, if you do not stop beating those children, I shall be off.’

  The people were struck dumb when they heard his stentorian voice, and I noticed a little, long-fingered hunchback who asked the schoolmaster: ‘By the might of the Extravagantes! Do people who see the Pope grow as tall as that one who is threatening us? O, how terribly keen I am to see Him and grow as tall that!’

  So great were their acclamations that Homenaz came bustling up. (Homenaz was the name given to their bishop.) He was riding on a bridle-less mule with a green caparison; he was accompanied by his subjects (and what he called his ‘Objects’ too). They were also carrying crosses, banners, gonfalons, canopies, torches and stocks for holy water. With all his might he too wanted to kiss our feet (as the good Christian Valfinier did to Pope Clement), saying that one of their hypophets, a glossator and de-greasator of their holy Decretals, had left a scripture saying that just as the Messiah so long awaited by the Jews eventually did appear, so too, one day, to their own isle would come the Pope. And while they were awaiting that happy day, should anyone land on their isle who, in Rome or elsewhere, had SEEN HIM they were to fête him and treat him with reverence.

  We, however, courteously declined.

  How Homenaz, the Bishop of the Papimanes, displayed to us the uranopetary Decretals

  CHAPTER 49

  [In the Brief Declaration the word ‘uranopetary’ is explained as ‘descended from the heavens’.

  Frère Jean alone is more or less at home with these Papimanes. The others are not. Bishop Homenaz has some superficial culture but no wisdom or understanding.

  There are references to the Ten Commandments written by the hand of God (Exodus 32) and to a treatise of Plutarch, The ‘Ei’ at Delphi.]

  Then Homenaz said to us,

  ‘We are enjoined and required by our holy Decretals to visit churches rather than taverns. And so, without derogating from that beautiful principle, let us first go to church, and afterwards go and have a banquet.’

  ‘Lead on, you worthy man,’ said Frère Jean, ‘and we will follow. You have spoken good words, like a Good Christian. It is a long time since we saw one. I find myself happy in my mind and believe that I shall feed all the better for it. Meeting worthy men is a pleasant thing.’

  As we approached the doorway of the church, we noticed a thick gilded tome, studded all over with rare and precious stones: balay rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls, all more valuable than the jewels which Octavian consecrated to Jupiter Capitolinus, or at least as valuable. It was up in the air, hanging suspended by two massy golden chains from the zoological frieze over the door. We contemplated it with wonder. Pantagruel twisted and turned it at will, for he could easily reach it. He insisted that as he touched those chains he experienced a pruritis in his finger-nails and pins and needles in his arms, accompanied by a violent temptation in his mind to beat up an officer or two of the law, provided they were not tonsured.

  Whereupon Homenaz said to us:

  ‘Long ago the Law of Moses was given to the Jews, inscribed by the very fingers of God. At Delphi, on the façade of the temple of Apollo, this maxim was discovered divinely inscribed, KNOW THYSELF.

  ‘Then after a certain lapse of time the word EI was found thus divinely inscribed and sent down from the heavens.

  ‘The image of Cybele was sent down from the heavens to a field in Phrygia called Pesinunt; so too (if you trust Euripides) was the image of Diana in Taurus.

  ‘The oriflamme was sent down from the heavens to the nobility and Most-Christian Kings of France for their fight against the Infidel. During the reign of Numa Pompilius, the second King of the Romans, ancile (the sharp-edged buckler) was seen coming down in Rome from the heavens.

  ‘Long ago the statue of Minerva fell down from heaven into the Acropolis at Athens.

  ‘And here, likewise, you ca
n see the holy Decretals written by the hand of an angel called Cherubim. You folk from beyond the sea won’t believe that…’

  ‘Hardly!’ said Panurge.

  ‘… and then it was miraculously sent down to us here from the Heaven of heavens, just as the river Nile is referred to as coming down from Jupiter by Homer, the Father of all Philosophy (always excepting the holy Decretals).

  ‘And since you have seen the Pope – the Evangelist and sempiternal Protector of those Decretals – you will be permitted by us, if you so wish, to go in to see them and kiss them. But (as is divinely chanted to us by those holy Decretals over there) you will first have to fast for three days and regularly make your confessions, meticulously listing all your sins and so shucking them one after the other that not one bean of circumstance is dropped on to the ground. That takes time.’

  ‘Worthy man,’ replied Panurge, ‘we have seen plenty of De-grease-alls – I mean, Decretals – on paper, vellum and glazed parchment, both manuscript and printed in moveable type. There is no need for you to bother to show us those. Your good intentions are quite enough. Thank you all the same.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Homenaz, ‘you certainly haven’t seen these which were written by an angel. Those in your lands are (as we find noted by one of our ancient decretaline scholiasts) but transump-tions of ours. Moreover, I beg you to spare me no trouble: simply tell me whether you are prepared to fast for those three, lovely little God-given days, to confess and be contrite.’

  ‘Cuntright!’ said Panurge. ‘We readily cuntsent to that. Only the fasting is not at all apropos: we have fasted so long, so very long, while at sea that spiders have spun cobwebs over our teeth. Just look at Frère Jean…’ – on hearing which name Homenaz courteously gave him a friendly monastic accolade – ‘… for want of using and exercising his chops and mandibula, moss has grown all over his gullet.’

  ‘He’s telling the truth,’ Frère Jean replied. ‘I’ve fasted so much, so very much, that I’ve turned into a hunchback.’

  ‘Let’s go into church, then,’ said Homenaz. ‘And do forgive us if we don’t sing you the lovely Mass of God: the noon-day hour is past, after which our holy Decretals forbid us to sing a Mass – I mean a high and lawful one – but I shall read you a low and dry one.’

  ‘I,’ said Panurge, ‘would prefer a Mass wetted by some good Angevine wine. Thrust ahead, then, low and stiff!’

  ‘Gosh!’ said Frère Jean, ‘it grieves me that my stomach is fasting still. For after I’d had an excellent breakfast and bloated myself monkish-style, if he’d chanced to sing us a Requiem I’d have contributed some bread and wine: draughts for the passed!61 Patience. Pull, push, and get on with it, but, I pray you, shorten its skirts lest they drag in the mud – and for some other reason too.’

  How we were shown by Homenaz the archetype of a pope

  CHAPTER 50

  [It is a fool who proverbially covers himself with a wet sack (to protect himself from the rain).

  Again we meet misused Platonic Ideas: the Papimanes make their ‘portrait’ into the ‘Idea’ of the Popel (‘Portrait’ is used with the sense of ‘Idea’ and in combination with it: see below, Chapter 55.)

  The whole ‘papist’ system is being turned to ridicule, contrasted unfavourably with the ‘heretics’ of Lutheran Germany and Anglican England.

  Two adages of Erasmus are drawn upon: III, I, LXXXVIII, ‘Give me a basin’ (to spew into); it represents the highest degree of disgust; and I, VIII, LXXXVIII, ‘Food for the gods’, applied by Nero to the poisoned mushrooms at his disposal.

  Raminagrobis was the good dying poet of Chapters 21-3 of the Third Book.]

  The Mass once over, Homenaz drew a great hotchpotch of keys from out of a chest by the high altar. With them he opened the thirty-two locks and the fourteen padlocks protecting an iron-framed, heavily barred grill set above the said altar; then, with great solemnity, he covered himself with a wet sack and, drawing back a crimson curtain, showed to us an image of a pope – pretty badly painted, in my opinion – touched it with the end of a longish pole and made us all kiss the end of it.

  He then asked us,

  ‘That image: what do you make of it?’

  ‘It is,’ said Pantagruel, ‘the portrait of a pope. I can tell it from his tiara, amice, rochet, and slipper.’

  ‘You put it well,’ said Homenaz. ‘It is the Idea of that good God-on-Earth, the arrival of whom we devoutly await and whom, one day, we hope to see in this our land. O blessèd, yearned-for, long-awaited day! And you, blessèd and most-blessèd, who have had the stars so favourable that you really have looked upon the living countenance of that good God-on-Earth, upon whose portrait we but simply look to earn plenary remission of all remembered sins, together with a third plus eighteen-fortieths of sins forgotten. And only during our great annual festivals can we ever see it.’

  At that point Pantagruel said it was a work such as Daedalus made. And even though it was distorted and badly executed, it nevertheless possessed some hidden and occult energy where pardons are concerned.

  ‘It is as when the vagrants at Seuilly,’ said Frère Jean, ‘were supping in their hospice during a feast-day: one was boasting of having collected six five-penny pieces; another, two ten-penny pieces; but a third could boast of three fine silver testoons. “Well yes,” his companions retorted, “but you’ve got a God-leg, you have!” (as though some divine qualities were lurking in a leg gangrened and decomposing).’

  ‘Whenever you tell such tales in the future,’ said Pantagruel, ‘remember to bring in a basin: I am close to vomiting. Using the name of God in matters so filthy and abominable! Appalling. Yes, appalling. If such vile language is current within that monkery of yours, then leave it there. Never bring it out of the cloister.’

  ‘So too the physicians claim,’ Epistemon added, ‘that there is some participation of the divine in certain maladies. Similarly Nero sang the praises of mushrooms, calling them (after a Greek saying) the food of the gods because he had used them to poison his predecessor Claudius, the Emperor of Rome.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Panurge, ‘that this portrait is all wrong where our recent popes are concerned, for I have seen them not with an amice on their heads but a helmet topped by a Persian tiara: the whole of Christendom was enjoying peace and quiet while they alone waged the most brutal and cruel wars.’

  ‘Then that,’ said Homenaz, ‘was against those rebels, heretics and hopeless Protestants who refuse to obey the Holiness of that good God-on-earth. That is not only permitted and legal, it is commended by the holy Decretals: emperors, kings, dukes, princes and republics must put them to the pyre the instant they transgress one iota of his commandments – and to the sword – and must despoil them of their goods, dispossess them of their kingdoms, proscribe them, anathematize them and damn their souls too in the depths of the hottest cauldron in Hell.’

  ‘By all the devils,’ said Panurge, ‘they’re not heretics here as Raminagrobis was nor as they are in Germany and England. Real hand-picked Christians you are.’

  ‘Golly, yes,’ said Homenaz. ‘That’s why we’re all going to be saved.

  ‘Let’s have a drop of holy water: and then to dinner!’

  Light conversation over dinner in praise of the Decretals

  CHAPTER 51

  [Christ’s summary of the Law is short and clear: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’ and ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’. The Papimanes infringe both commandments: they have a rival god, and their love of their neighbour is conditional. They replace the Scriptures by the Decretals and their papal-centred theology, which for Papimanes equals or supplants Saint Paul.

  Specific collections of Decretals are named, each with a mocking epithet in imitation of those given to great theologians (Doctor Angelical, and so on): Sextum seraphical; Clementines cherubical and Extravangantes angelical.

  When ordering new rounds of drink Homenaz repeat
s a Latin/ French pun: Clerice: éclaire ici: ‘Clerk! (or Cleric!) Shine light here’. To keep some of the savour, that play on words is transposed throughout to ‘Deacon! Be a beacon! Shine over here!’ But Clerice! can mean both ‘O male clerk!’ and ‘O female clerks!’ The ambiguity may be at least once intentional but is not reproduced here.

  There is again a deliberate ambiguity over ‘farce’, both a comic play and force-meat stuffing.]

  Take note of this, you Drinkers: during Homenaz’s dry Mass, three churchwardens went round the congregation each holding a large bason in his hand and crying aloud: ‘Forget not the blessèd folk who have seen His face.’

  When they left the chapel they brought Homenaz their basons, each full of papimaniacal coins. Homenaz informed us that it was to provide good cheer, and that one slice of this free-will offertory would be devoted to good drinking and the others to good eating, in accordance with a miracle-working gloss hidden away in a nook of their holy Decretals. That took place in a delightful inn somewhat resembling Guillot’s place in Amiens. The fodder, believe me, was ample and the rounds of drinks copious. I observed two memorable features during that dinner: one was that no viands were served – capons, kids or indeed porkers (of which there are plenty in Papimania) or pigeons, rabbits, hares, turkeys or other flesh – in which there was not an abundance of magisterial farce. The other, that all the dinner and the dessert was served by the local marriageable maidens, beautiful little things (I assure you), buxom little things, blonde little things, sweet little things, all very graceful. They were clad in long, loose, snowy albs and were girdled twice about their middles; their heads were uncovered; their hair crowned with little headbands and ribbons of violet silk strewn with roses, carnations, marjoram, dill-flowers, lemon-balm and other scented blooms; every so often they proffered us wine to drink with studied, engaging curtsies. Everyone there found them delightful to look at: Frère Jean watched them out of the corner of his eye like a dog making off with a morsel of goose-wing.