Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  As dinner was being cleared away there was melodiously chanted by them an epode in praise of the most-holy Decretals.

  When the dessert was brought in, Homenaz, merry and mirthful, addressed a word to one of the master butlers, saying, ‘Deacon! Be a Beacon!’ At those words one of the maidens promptly presented him with a large chalice full of Extravagant wine. He took it into his hands and sighing profoundly, said to Pantagruel: ‘To you, my Lord, and to all of you, my handsome friends, I drink this toast with all my heart. You are most welcome.’

  Homenaz, his drink downed at a bound, handed the chalice back to the charming young lady and exclaimed with a heavy sigh, ‘O Decretals divine! It is thanks to you that we know that good wine is good.’

  ‘It’s not the worst one in the hamper!’ said Panurge.

  ‘If they could turn bad wine into good,’ said Pantagruel, ‘that would be something!’

  ‘O Sextum seraphical!’ continued Homenaz. ‘How vital you are to the salvation of us poor humans. O Clementines cheru-bical! How within you is rightly included and propounded the perfect institution of the true Christian man. O Extravagantes angelical! Without you, how those poor souls would perish who, in their vile bodies, journey here below through this vale of tears!

  ‘Alas! When will that special gift of grace be vouchsafed to humankind that they may desist from all other studies and concerns in order to read you, hear you, know you, frequent, incorporate and transfuse you, placing you in the centre of the deepest ventricles of their brains, in the innermost marrow of their bones, in the labyrinthine mazes of their arteries. Then – not before and in no other way – shall this world be blessèd.’

  At those words Epistemon got to his feet and said quite bluntly to Panurge, ‘I’m in need of a privy: I must get away: this farce-meat has unbunged my arse-gut. I really can’t wait!’

  ‘Then, O then,’ continued Romenaz, ‘there will be no more hail, frost, fog, nor storms. Then, O then, there will be an abundance of all good things in earth. Then, O then! there will be stubborn, infringible peace in all the world: no more wars, no more pillagings, exactions, plunderings and assassinations, except of heretics and cursèd rebels. Then, O then! there will be joy, gladness, happiness, bliss and delight amongst the entire human race. But O! what great doctrine, what inestimable erudition, what God-made precepts there are, mortised together by the divinely inspired chapters of those everlasting Decretals. O! by reading one demi-canon, one tiny paragraph, one single phrase of them, you feel ablaze within your heart the furnace of God’s love and of charity towards your neighbour – provided he’s not a heretic – an assured contempt of all things earthy and fortuitous; an elevation of your minds in rapture, yea, unto the Third Heaven; and a sure satisfying of all your desires.’

  Miracles produced by the Decretals: continued

  CHAPTER 52

  [The last chapter ended with the Papimanes earnestly believing that their rival Scriptures, the Decretals, can bring them that very special privileged ecstasy by which Saint Paul was caught up to the Third Heaven (II Corinthians 12:2).

  Gullible superstition is added to the defects of the Papimanes and their religion. In demanding for the Decretals the adoration of ‘latria’ the Bishop wants the Decretals to be worshipped as God; ‘hyperdulia’ is that highest veneration that many (though not, it seems, Rabelais) believed owed to the Virgin Mary.

  Panormitanus was a famous commentator on the Clementines.

  The ‘decretalipotenf Scot was Professor Robert Ireland of Poitiers.

  Parisian students used ‘Clos Bruneau’, still the name of a little passage in the Latin Quarter, as slang for the anus (Brown Close).

  ‘Incagulating’ is a nonce-word based on the Spanish cagar, to shit.

  Herbault is famine and misery personified.

  With the lines translated from the much-admired poet Catullus (23, 20) Rabelais makes a literary defence of scatological humour. ‘To be in the yellow’ is to be legally bankrupt.]

  ‘Harmoniously piped,’ said Panurge, ‘but I believe as little of it as I can, because when I was in Poitiers one day at the home of their decretalipotent Scottish Doctor of Law, I happened to read a chapter of the Decretals and, may the devil take me if, as I read it, I didn’t become so constipated that I never voided more than one tiny turd for four – no, five – days. And do you know what kind? Such as Catullus said were those of his neighbour Furius:

  In one whole year of turds you void but ten;

  Rub them with fingers: crumble them again:

  No dirt upon those fingers will be seen;

  Those turds are hard as any stone or bean.’

  ‘Gna! Gna!’ said Homenaz. ‘Perhaps you were, by Sinjin! in a state of mortal sin, my friend.’

  ‘That’s wine from a different barrel,’ said Panurge.

  ‘One day,’ said Frère Jean, ‘I was at Seuillé when I wiped my bum with a leaf from some wretched old Clementines which Jean Guymard, our bursar, had chucked away in our cloister-meadows: I give myself to all the devils if fistulas and haemorrhoids did not so horribly come upon me that the poor old hole of my Clos Bruneau became all lacerated.’

  ‘By Sinjin!’ said Homenaz, ‘that was divine retribution, clearly avenging the sin which you committed by incagulating those sacred volumes which you ought to kiss and to adore with the adoration of latria, or at the very least of hyperdulia. On such matters the Panormitanus never uttered a word of a lie.’

  ‘In Montpellier,’ said Ponocrates, John Thomas had bought from the monks of Saint-Olary a lovely Decretals (written on Lamballe parchment, nice and wide) for its vellum to beat out gold-leaf. The extraordinary thing was that not one single piece thus beaten turned out well: all emerged tattered and torn.’

  ‘Retribution,’ said Homenaz, ‘and vengeance divine!’

  ‘At Le Mans,’ said Eudemon, ‘François Cornu, an apothecary, made cornets from a shabby old Extravagantes: I disavow the devil if all the items wrapped up in them were not immediately poisoned, spoilt and putrefied: incense, cloves, cinnamon, saffron, spices, cassia, rhubarb, tamarinds, indeed all his purgatives, sedatives and laxatives.’

  ‘Vengeance!’ cried Homenaz, ‘and retribution divine! Fancy putting sacred scriptures to such profane ends!’

  ‘In Paris,’ said Carpalim, Groignet the tailor cut up some old Clementines to cut out patterns and measures. O! strange event! All the materials cut to those patterns and made up from those measurements were ruined and spoiled: robes, capes, mantles, cassocks, skirts, overcoats, neck-bands, waistcoats, tunics, riding-hoods and farthingales. Intending to cut out a cape, Groignet would cut out the form of a codpiece; and instead of a cassock, a hat crinkled like plum-stones; from the design for an overcoat he would cut out an amice: from the pattern of a doublet he would cut out the form of a canopy – a canapé for frying chestnuts is what it looked like once his apprentices had put in the stitches and cut the deep slashes! Instead of a neck-band he would make up a buskin; from the pattern of a farthingale he would cut out a riding-hood; believing that he was making up a mantle, he produced a Switzer’s drum. Things went so far that the wretched man was condemned by law to pay for the cloth of every one of his clients; and now he’s in the yellow.’

  ‘Retribution!’ said Homenaz, ‘and vengeance divine.’

  ‘At Cahusac,’ said Gymnaste, ‘an archery match was arranged between the Seigneur d’Estissac and the Vicomte de Lauzun. As they were to shoot at a target, Pérotou dismembered a copy of the Decretals belonging to that good canon La Carte and cut out the white bull’s-eye from its leaves. I give myself, sell myself and send myself dashing to all the devils if ever one of the cross-bowmen in all that land (who are renowned throughout Guyenne) could lodge one arrow in it. All went wide. Nothing of that sacrosanct white was in any way besmirched, ravaged or deflowered. Better still: the elder Saint-Sernin, who was in charge of the bets, swore to us by his golden figgies – his great oath – that he had actually, clearly and incontrovertibly seen C
arquelin’s iron-tipped bolt homing straight for the bull’s-eye in the very middle of the white and on the very point of hitting it and sinking into it when it turned a good six feet aside in the direction of the bakery.’

  ‘Miracle!’ cried Homenaz. ‘Miracle! Miracle! Deacon! Beacon: Shine over here! I drink to you all. You seem true Christians to me.’

  At those words the girls began to giggle amongst themselves. Frère Jean was whinnying from the tip of his nose as though ready to leap them like a stallion, or at least cover them like an ass (as Herbault does the poor).

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Pantagruel, ‘that, inside those white targets, you would be safer from the risk of an arrow than ever was Diogenes long ago.’

  ‘Eh?’ asked Homenaz. ‘What do you mean? Was he a Decretalist?’

  ‘That,’ said Epistemon, returning after having done his job, ‘is very much to follow the wrong suit.’

  ‘Diogenes,’ said Pantagruel, ‘seeking amusement one day, visited the archers who were shooting down at the butts. One of them was so maladroit, unskilled and incompetent that whenever his turn to shoot came round all the spectators drew apart for fear of being struck. Diogenes watched him shoot an arrow so askew that it landed some six yards off target. At his second shot the spectators pulled far back to left and right but Diogenes ran up and stood by the white target, insisting that that was the safest spot of all and that the archer was more likely to strike anywhere else but there, the white alone being safe from his arrow.’

  ‘One of the pages of the Seigneur d’Estissac called Chamou-illac discovered the charm,’ said Gymnaste. ‘On his advice Péroton changed the whites, using instead documents from the Pouillac lawsuit.

  ‘Whereupon everyone on both sides shot very well.’

  ‘At Landerousse,’ said Rhizotome, ‘at the wedding of Jean Delife, there was a splendid and sumptuous nuptial feast as was then the local custom. After supper several farces, comedies and amusing sketches were put on; then there were danced several morris-dances with jingle and drum. After which various sorts of masques and mummers were brought in. My fellow pupils and I (to honour the revels to the best of our abilities, for we had been given that morning fine white-and-violet favours) made masks with false beards for a merry masquerade, using plenty of snail-shells and Saint-Michèle cockle-shells, but lacking leaves of colocasia, burdock and the personate bugloss as well as paper, we made our masks out of leaves from an old discarded Sextum, cutting out little slits for our eyes, noses and mouths. Then, O wonder! Having taken off our false faces once our little capers and childish shows were over, we appeared more hideous and villainous than the boy-devils in the passion-play at Doué: so marred were our faces wherever the said leaves had touched them. One of us had caught smallpox; another, the plague; another, syphilis; another, measles; and yet another, huge boils. In short, the least disfigured was the one whose teeth had dropped out.’

  ‘Miracle!’ cried Homenaz. Miracle!’

  ‘It’s no laughing matter,’ said Rhizotome. ‘My two sisters, Catherine and Renée, had placed their wimples, cuffs and newly laundered ruffs, all starched up and white, between the pages of a beautiful Sextum, using it as a press (for it was bound with thick boards studded with nails). Well, by the mighty power of God…’

  ‘Hang on!’ said Homenaz; ‘Which God do you mean?’

  ‘There is only one,’ replied Rhizotome.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Homenaz, ‘up in Heaven. We have another one on earth though, don’t we?’

  ‘Gee up little donkey!’ said Rhizotome. ‘Upon my soul I wasn’t thinking about him. By the mighty power, then, of Paper-God-Pope-on-Earth,62 their wimples, neck-bands, bibs, kerchiefs and all the rest of their linen turned blacker than a coalman’s sack.’

  ‘Miracle!’ cried Homenaz. ‘Deacon! Beacon! Shine over here and record these beautiful histories.’

  ‘How is it then,’ asked Frère Jean, ‘that folk say:

  Since men stuck tales on to decrees63

  And soldiers stuff bags as they please,

  Monks gave up sandals for riding-boots,

  Then evils everywhere send forth shoots?’

  ‘I get you,’ said Homenaz. ‘Those are quirky little taunts from the new heretics.’

  How gold is shrewdly abstracted from France by virtue of the Decretals

  CHAPTER 53

  [Royalist-Gallican indignation with a vengeance, expressing itself through laughter: papal superstition drains France of its wealth; the ‘appalling chapters’ of papalist law (cited as always by their opening words in Latin) all involve paying fees or fines or taxes, transferring riches from France to the Vatican.

  For the cruel and maudlin Bishop of the Papimanes the Decretals absolutely replace Holy Writ, which could never justify what are for Rabelais now the evils of the papalist system as well as its corrupt monastic institutions and skewed theology.

  Homenaz’s gaffe (‘Decretisf for ‘Decretalist’) is a real one: for Rabelais Gratian’s Decrees are never in question. What is in question is papal absolutism and the (for Rabelais and his patrons) corrupt system which it brings about.

  Rabelais is adapting to his laughter harsh Lutheran satire. Homenaz breaks Christ’s summary of the Law: he worships the wrong God; he does not love his neighbour as himself. And he venerates the wrong Scriptures.

  In the Latinate phrase, vivat’ means ‘Long live!’, while ‘fat’ and ‘bibat’ are the same word as pronounced by German-speakers. The Spanish pronunciation – ‘bibat’ – makes it sound like the Latin for ‘Let him drink!’]

  ‘I would willingly have paid half a pint of gut-ready tripe,’ said Epistemon, ‘if only we could have collated against that archetype those appalling chapters,

  Execrabilis,

  De multa,

  Si plures,

  De annatis (in its entirety)

  Nisi essent,

  Cum ad monasterium,

  Quod dilectio,

  Mandatum,

  and certain others as well by which over four hundred thousand ducats are extorted from France towards Rome every year.’

  ‘That’s not a mere nothing, is it?’ said Homenaz, ‘yet it seems little enough to me considering that France the Most-Christian is the unique Wet-Nurse of the court of Rome. But just you find me any books in the world – of philosophy, medicine, law, mathematics, the humanities or indeed (by that God of mine) Holy Writ – which could extract as much! No! Not a whit! Not a whit!: in them, I assure you, you will never find such a flow of gold-bearing energy. And yet the Decretals are neither willingly learnt nor acknowledged by those devils of heretics. So burn ‘em, claw ‘em, lop ‘em, drown ‘em, hang ‘em, skewer ‘em, bash ‘em, rip ‘em apart, gut ‘em, carve ‘em, fry ‘em, roast’em, chop’em, crucify ‘em, boil ‘em, broil ‘em, quarter ‘em, squash ‘em, tear ‘em limb from limb and grill ‘em: wicked heretics, decretalifugitives, decretalicides – worse than homicides, worse than parricides – the devil’s own decretali-slaughterers.

  ‘Now, good folk, if you wish to be called and reputed true Christians, then with clasped hands I beseech you never to believe anything, never to think, say, do or perform anything except what is contained in our sacred Decretals and their glosses: in that beautiful Sextum, those beautiful Clementines, those beautiful Extravagantes. O ye books made by God! Then you shall be in honour, glory, repute, riches, preferment and prelation in this world, revered by all, feared by all, advanced above all others, and above all others chosen and selected. For in no estate beneath the canopy of Heaven could you find folk more suited to doing everything and managing everything than such as have devoted themselves – by divine foreknowledge and eternal predestination – to the study of the holy Decretals.

  ‘Would you choose a brave general, a good captain, a worthy chief and leader of an army in time of war, who knows how to foresee all troubles, avoid all dangers, bring his men to attack and to fight with enthusiasm, yet risking nothing, ever victorious, not losing his men, and knowing
how to follow up his victory? Then choose me a Decretist – Oh! No, no! I mean a Decretalist!’

  ‘Quite a bloomer,’ said Epistemon.

  ‘Would you, in time of peace, find a man apt and able to govern properly the State affairs of a republic, kingdom, empire or monarchy; to maintain the Church, the nobility, the senate and the commonalty in wealth, amity, concord, obedience, virtue and decency? Then take me a Decretalist. Would you find a man who, by his exemplary life, fair speech and saintly admonitions shall in no time conquer the Holy Land, shedding no blood and converting those wrong-believing Turks, Jews, Tartars, Moscovites, Mamelukes and Sara-bovines to the true faith? Then take me a Decretalist.

  ‘What makes the people in many countries rebellious and unruly, the pages cheeky and naughty, the schoolboys stupid and asinine? Why! Their governors, squires and preceptors were not Decretalists. But, in all conscience, what is it that has established, supported and justified those beautiful religious Orders by which we can see Christendom everywhere graced, adorned and glittering as is the firmament with its stars?

  ‘Why! The holy Decretals.

  ‘What is it that has founded, buttressed, protected and now maintains, sustains and feeds those devout Religious in their convents, monasteries and abbeys, without whose diurnal, nocturnal and continual prayers our world were in danger of returning to its antique Chaos?

  ‘Why! The sacred Decretals.

  ‘What is it that, day after day makes the famous and renowned patrimony of Saint Peter increase in an abundance of all goods temporal, corporal and spiritual?

  ‘Why! The sainted Decretals.

  ‘What is it that makes the Holy and Apostolic See in Rome, from all times – and to this very day – so feared throughout the universal world that all kings, emperors, potentates and noble lords must willy-nilly be enfeoffed to it, crowned, buttressed and accredited by it, must come and prostrate themselves and kiss that wonder-working slipper which you have seen portrayed?