Gargantua and Pantagruel
Page 86
artichokes,
puff-pastry cakes,
white-beets,
rich cream cracknels,
fritters,
sixteen varieties of raised pies,
waffles,
pancakes,
quince pâté,
curds and whey,
eggs in whipped cream,
pickled myrobalans,
jellies,
hippocras: red and white,
fancy-cakes,
macaroons,
tarts (twenty varieties),
creams,
seventy-eight kinds of preserved fruits, both dry and in various liqueurs, sweetmeats of one hundred different colours,
junkets, wafers drenched in refined sugar.
For fear of the quinsy, wine was continuously served throughout.
Additional item: toasted tidbits.
How the Gastrolaters sacrificed to their god during their interlarded fast-days
CHAPTER 60
[Once more there is the pun, with farce meaning the play, force-meat stuffing and by extension stuffing oneself.
Fasting as an unreformed Church discipline entailed abstaining from flesh, not abstaining from gluttony. Fish, eggs and so much else remained available as sacrifices to Gaster. Pantagruel’s anger is a pointer leading beyond the surface fun.
For the Erasmian climax of this chapter see the footnote at the end. Gaster is a creature not a creator God.]
When Pantagruel saw that riff-raff of sacrificers and the multiplicity of their sacrifices he was angry and would have stalked off if Epistemon had not begged him to witness the issue of such a farce.
‘And what do these scoundrels sacrifice to their ventripotent god,’ asked Pantagruel, ‘during their interlarded fast-days?’
That I shall tell you,’ said the pilot.
‘For their entrées they offer him:
caviar,
pickled mullet-caviar,
fresh butter,
pease-pudding,
spinach,
fresh herrings,
soused herrings,
sardines,
anchovies,
marinated tuna,
cabbage in olive-oil,
buttered beans,
hundreds of kinds of salads: of cress, hops, bishop’s-bollocks, rampion, Judas-ears (a variety of fungus growing out from ancient elder-trees), asparagus, woodbine and many others,
salted salmon,
salted eels,
oysters in the shell.
‘Now drink is a must, or the devil will get you! Good arrangements having been made, nothing was lacking. And they then offer unto him:
lampreys in Hippocras sauce,
barbels,
friture of barbels,
grey mullet,
striped mullet,
rays,
cuttlefish,
sturgeons,
guernet,
whales,
mackerel,
shad,
plaice,
fried oysters,
periwinkles,
crayfish,
smelts,
red gurnets,
trout,
perch from the lakes,
cod,
octopus,
dabs,
carrelets,
meagers,
sea-bream,
gudgeons,
brill,
sprats,
carp,
pike,
Mediterranean palamides,
spotted dog-fish,
sea-urchins,
poules-de-mer,
sea-nettles,
crepidules,
sea-owls,
swordfish,
angel-fish squali,
lamprels,
snook,
carp small-fry,
salmon,
samlets,
dolphins,
porpoises,
turbot,
white skate,
soles,
limander
soles,
mussels,
lobsters,
shrimps,
dace,
ablen,
tench,
grayling,
fresh hake,
sepia,
prickle-back,
tuna,
gudgeon,
miller’s-thumbs,
cray-fish,
cockles,
spiny-lobsters,
sea-lampreys,
congers,
dorados,
bass,
shad,
morays,
charlings,
small dare-fish,
eels,
pickled-eels,
turtles,
serpens (that is, bush-eels),
sea-bream,
sea-ducks,
ruff,
royal-sturgeon,
loach,
crabs,
sea-snails,
frogs.
‘Once those viands had been devoured, Death lurks but two steps away if you weren’t then drinking. That was excellently provided for.
‘They next sacrificed:
salted haddock,
dried haddock,
eggs – fried, buttered, poached, smothered, braised, roasted-in-the-ashes, smoked-up-the-chimney, scrambled, whipped in verjuice, etc.,
salted cod,
thornbacks,
bergylts,
small marinated sea-pike.
‘To assist their proper concoction and digestion, the wine was redoubled. As the end drew nigh they offered up:
rice,
millet,
porridge,
almond butter,
whipped butter,
pistachio-butter,
pistachio-nuts,
salted ditto,
figs,
grapes,
caraway-seeds,
maize (powdered),
frumenty,
dates,
walnuts,
filberts,
buttered parsnips,
and
artichokes,
amidst perennial potations.
‘Believe you me: if Gaster their god was not more sumptuously, richly and appropriately served in his sacrifices than the idol of Heliogabalus – indeed, than the idol of Baal in Babylon under King Belshazzar – that was no fault of theirs: yet Gaster admitted that he was not God but a poor, paltry, wretched created thing. And just as King Antigonus, the First of that name, replied to a certain Hermodotus (who addressed him in his verses as a god and Son of the Solar Deity) by saying to him: “My Bearer of the Lasanon says no to that – lasanon being an earthenware chamber-pot devoted to receiving the belly’s excreta – so too Gaster referred those apish hypocrites to the seat of his privy, there to ponder, meditate and reflect upon what godhead they found in his faeces.”’70
How Gaster invented means of gathering and conserving grain
CHAPTER 61
[Throughout there is play between ‘Master of Arts’ (the university degree) and Gaster, the ‘Master’ of the arts, sciences and skills of mankind.
‘Apanages’ allows of a play on panus, (bread).]
Once those devilish Gastrolaters had withdrawn, Pantagruel attended to the study of Gaster, the noble Master of Arts.
You are aware that, by a basic institution of Nature, bread and its apanages were adjudicated to Gaster as provender and nutriment; to which was attached this blessing from Heaven: that he would never lack means of getting and keeping his bread.
From the outset he invented the art of the blacksmith, and husbandry to cultivate the land and make it bring forth grain.
He invented weapons and the military arts to protect the grain, and the arts of medicine and astrology (with the necessary mathematics) to safeguard it over the centuries, so putting it beyond the reach of climatic disasters, thieving by brute beasts and stealing by brigands.
He invented watermills, w
indmills and hand-mills and hundreds of other ingenious devices for grinding the grain and turning it into flour; yeast to leaven the dough and salt to give it its savour – for he knew as a fact that nothing in this world would make human beings more subject to illness than unleavened and unsalted bread – fire to bake it; clocks and sundials to regulate the time of the baking of that which grain produces: bread.
When the harvest chanced to fail in one country, he invented the art of hauling grain from one country to another; with great ingenuity he crossed two kinds of animals (the ass and the mare) to give birth to a third kind, which we term mules: beasts tougher, less sensitive and more able to sustain hard toil than other animals. He invented carts and wagons to transport it more conveniently.
When seas or rivers obstructed the haulage he invented boats, galleys and sailing-ships – something which astonished the very Elements – so as to sail the seas, cross estuaries and navigate rivers in order to haul the grain and ship it from unknown, foreign lands afar.
And then some years it chanced that, having tilled the soil, Gaster lacked rain in due season, for want of which the grain remained dead and wasted in the soil; some years it rained too much and the grain was sodden; some other years the hail battered it down, the winds beat the grain from the ears, and the tempests flattened it. Before we came on the scene, Gaster had invented a method and art of calling down rain from the heavens merely by chopping up a particular herb, which he showed us, one frequently found in meadows yet known to but a few. (I reckoned that it was the same herb by which the pontiff of Jove, by placing a single sprig of it in the Agrian Spring on Mount Lycaeus in Arcady during a period of drought, once brought forth mists: from them heavy clouds were formed which broke up into rain, watering at will the entire region.) He invented an art and method of keeping rain suspended in the air and making it fall over the sea.
He invented an art and method of eliminating hail, suppressing the winds and turning away a storm, by the means employed by the Methanensians of Troezinia.
A further setback occurred: thieves and bandits pillaged the grain and so the bread in the fields: he invented the art of building towns, fortresses and castles to store it in and keep it safe.
Then it chanced that the countryside lacked bread, and he realized that once it was brought within the towns, fortresses and castles, it was more fiercely defended and guarded by their inhabitants than the golden apples of the Hesperides were ever guarded by the dragons. He therefore invented the art and method of reducing or slighting fortresses and castles by machines and contrivances such as battering-rams and catapults for slinging stones or arrows, the design of which he showed us, though it was badly understood by those architectural engineers who were disciples of Vitruvius (as was admitted to us by Messer Philibert de L’Orme the great architect of the Mighty King).
And when they could no longer be profitably used against the malicious cunning and the cunning malice of the builders of fortifications, he recently invented canons, serpentines, culverins, bombards and basilisks which, by means of an horrific compound of powder, can project cannon-balls of iron, bronze and lead weighing more than great anvils, at which Nature herself was aghast, confessing herself beaten by Art, despising as she does the practice of the Oxydracians, who, in the midst of the field, vanquished their enemies and caused them sudden death by exploiting thunder, lightning, hail, great flashes of light and storms: for one shot from a basilisk is more horrifying, more dreadful, more diabolical than a hundred thunderbolts: it maims, injures, shatters and kills more people; it leaves men more shocked and it razes more walls.
How Gaster invented the art by means of which one can remain untouched and unwounded by cannon-balls
CHAPTER 62
[Rabelais again draws very heavily on one of his principal authorities, Celio Calcagnini. He plays – how seriously? – with the fact that opposing poles of the magnet do not attract but repel.
‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ was a tenet of physics until the seventeenth century.
All the alleged facts, exempla, arguments and mystical truths (from the herb called aethiopis which opens all the locks placed against it right to the end of the chapter have the learned Calcagnini behind them. The reader is left to question or accept them, but is brought to accept the higher, Pythagorean meaning of the elder-wood, guided by a detailed borrowing from Calcagnini and yet again by an adage of Erasmus: II, V, XLVI, ‘Mercury – as a graven image – is not to be made from just any piece of wood’.]
Now it befell that Gaster, having stored his grain in his fortresses, found himself assailed by enemies, his fortresses demolished by such thrice-dreaded, hellish devices, whilst his grain and his bread were seized and pillaged by great force such as that of the Titans. He therefore invented the art and method, not so much of protecting his ramparts, bastions, walls and defence-works against damage from such cannonades, but of causing the pieces of shot not to strike them at all but to hover short of them motionless, or else of so striking them as to harm neither the defences nor the defending citizens.
Against such mischief he had already made an excellent arrangement, and showed us a trial of it – a device subsequently employed by Fronton and currently figuring amongst the honourable pastimes and sports of the Thelemites.
The trial was as follows (and from now on be more ready to believe what Plutarch assures us that he tried out himself: if, when a tribe of nanny-goats are running away at full pelt, you push a twig of eryngo down the throat of the last straggler, they will all stop dead).
Within a bronze falconet (raster placed on top of the gunpowder (which had been compounded with care, cleansed of sulphur and balanced by the right amount of refined camphor) a cartridge of iron of the appropriate calibre together with twenty-four pellets of iron-filings, some spherical, others tear-shaped. He trained his sights on one of his young pages as though intending to shoot him through the stomach; then, at some sixty paces, strictly midway between that page and the falconet, he suspended from a post a very large block of siderite (iron-stone, that is, otherwise called Herculanea, discovered long ago by a man called Magnes at Ida in Phrygia, as Nicander attests. We normally call it aimant, magnet-stone). He then touched off the powder through the vent in the falconet. The powder was consumed. And thus, to avoid a vacuum (which Nature so abhors that the entire structure of the Universe, the heavens, the earth, the sea and the land would sooner be returned to ancient Chaos than any vacuum be admitted anywhere in the world), the cartridge and the pellets were precipitously expelled through the mouth of the falconet to allow air to get through to the gun-chamber, which would otherwise have remained in the vacuum caused by the rapid consumption of the powder by the flame. The cartridge and the pellets thus violently fired seemed bound to strike that page-boy, but at the point where they approached the above-mentioned stone, they all lost their momentum and stayed hovering in the air, circling about the stone: not one of them – no matter how violently propelled – got through to the page, however violent the force.
Gaster also invented the art and method of making bullets return against the enemy, as furious and dangerous as when they had been fired and following the same trajectory.
He did not find that at all difficult:
– seeing that the herb called aethiopis opens all the locks placed against it; that the echineis (a puny fish) can stay the most powerful ships that sail the seas, countering gales and raging tempests; and that the flesh of that fish, preserved in salt, can draw gold out of the deepest wells that one can sound; and seeing that Democritus writes (and Theophrastus both believed it and proved it experimentally) that there is a certain herb at the mere touch of which an iron wedge, driven with great force deep into a great, hard block of wood, will suddenly pop out; it is used by woodpeckers (those pics Mars which you call pivars) whenever anyone has used an iron wedge to stop up the entrance-hole to their nests, which they are accustomed to build by hollowing out the trunks of mighty trees;
– and seeing tha
t if stags and does that have suffered deep wounds from strikes by darts or arrows or bolts from the cross-bow come across the herb called dittany (which flourishes in Candia) and eat a little of it, the projectiles at once drop out and the beasts suffer no harm; (by its means Venus cured her dear son Aeneas when wounded in the right thigh with an arrow shot by Juturna, the sister of Turnus);
– seeing that thunderbolts are deflected by the mere scent emanating from laurels, fig-trees and sea-calves, and never strike them;
– seeing that at the simple sight of a ram, mad elephants are restored to their senses, mad bulls on the rampage are tamed if they come near to that wild fig-tree called caprificus, remaining fixed and unable to budge; and the viper’s rage is calmed by the touch of a branch of the beech-tree;
– seeing also that Euphorion writes that on the island of Samos, before the temple of Juno was erected there, he saw beasts called Neades at whose sole cry the earth toppled down into chasms to the abyss;
– seeing, similarly, that the elder grows more sonorous and more suited to making a set of pipes in places when the voice of the cock is never heard; so wrote the ancient sages, according to the account in Theophrastus, as though the crow of the cock weakened, softened and troubled the woody matter of the elder-tree, just as, upon hearing such crowing, the lion, a beast of such might and constancy, becomes utterly dazed and bewildered.
I know that others have taken that opinion to apply to the wild elder growing in places so far from towns and villages that the crow of the cock could never be heard there. Doubtless its wood should indeed be chosen to make pipes and other musical instruments and be preferred to the domestic variety which grows close to rural slums and ruined cottages.
Others have taken it in a more elevated sense, not literally but allegorically, following the practice of the Pythagoreans, who interpret the saying that A statue of Mercury should not be carved from just any wood to mean that God should not be worshipped in an uncouth fashion but in an elect, religious manner. With that judgement they likewise tell us that wise and scholarly people should not devote themselves to trivial, vulgar music but to music which is celestial, angelic, marked by divinity, more recondite and borne from afar, namely from a region where no crowing cocks are heard. For when we wish to characterize a place which is isolated and little frequented, we say it is one where no cock-crow has ever been heard.