Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  How Pantagruel dozed off when near the isle of Chaneph, and the problems put forward once he awoke

  CHAPTER 63

  [The Brief Declaration explains ‘Chaneph’ as ‘Hebrew, Hypocrisy’.

  In this world, signs, gestures and actions speak louder than words.

  In sailors’ language, men becalmed ‘raise up good weather’ by having a good convivial drink.

  ‘Sympathy’ may extend from humans to Nature (and vice versa). ‘A hungry belly has no ears’ is in yet another adage of Erasmus (II, VIII, LXXXI. ‘The Belly has no ears’). Here and in the next chapter there is also a reminiscence of another adage: II, VII, XLIV, ‘Deliberation is better on a full belly’).]

  Next day we sailed on our way chatting together until we arrived off the isle of Chaneph, at which Pantagruel’s vessel could not dock because the wind had dropped and the sea was calm. We could budge only thanks to our trailing-bonnets, tacking from larboard to starboard and adjusting the sheets of the spritsails. There we stayed, all pensive, sifting through vain thoughts, off-pitch, bored and addressing no word to each other. Pantagruel, holding a Greek Heliodorus in his hand, was dozing away in a hammock hard by the booby-hatch: such was his custom, for he more readily dropped off by writ than by rote.

  Epistemon was checking the elevation of the pole-star with his astrolabe. Frère Jean, having betaken himself to the galley, was estimating what time it could be by the rising stars of the fricassees and the horoscopes of the roasting-spits.

  Panurge, his tongue in a stem of pantagruelion, was gurgling and blowing bubbles.

  Gymnaste was sharpening toothpicks of lentisk-wood.

  Ponocrates was dreaming mad dreams, tickling himself to make himself laugh and scratching his head with one finger.

  Carpalim was making a merry pretty little singing-windmill out of a hard walnut-shell, adding four sails from a sliver of elder-wood.

  Eusthenes was strumming his fingers along a culverin as though it were a one-stringed fiddle.

  Rhizotome was making a velvet-covered purse out of a piece of shell from a wild tortoise.

  Xenomanes was mending an old lantern with some hawk-straps.

  And our pilot was nose to nose with his sailors, worming out secrets, when Frère Jean came back from the galley-hatch and noticed that Pantagruel had reawakened. At which, with a loud voice, he broke the stubborn silence and in the best of spirits asked: ‘How can a man becalmed raise up good weather?’

  Panurge next followed suit and likewise asked: ‘A remedy for boredom?’

  Thirdly Epistemon laughingly asked, ‘How to pass urine without the urge?’

  Gymnaste rose to his feet and asked, ‘A remedy against the eye being dazzled?’

  Ponocrates, having rubbed his forehead a while and shaken his ears, asked, ‘How to avoid sleeping like a dog?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Pantagruel. ‘By the edict of those subtle philosophers the Peripatetics we are instructed that all problems, all questions and all doubts propounded must be unambiguous, clear and intelligible What do you understand by to sleep like a dog?’

  ‘It means,’ Ponocrates replied, ‘to sleep as dogs do, fasting and in full sun.’

  Rhizotome was squatting on the coursey. He raised his head and gave such a deep yawn that he caused his companions to do likewise from natural sympathy. He then asked: ‘A remedy against gasping and yawning?’

  Xenomanes, all languor from fixing his lantern, asked, ‘A way to keep the bagpipe of your stomach in a balanced equilibrium so that it never sags one way more than the other?’

  Carpalim, playing with his windmill, asked, ‘How many antecedent motions are there in Nature before a person can be said to feel hungry?’ Eusthenes, hearing their din, ran up on deck and cried out from near the capstan, ‘Why is a fasting man in greater peril from the bite of a fasting snake than when both man and snake have fed? And why is the saliva of a fasting man poisonous to all snakes and poison-bearing creatures?’ ‘My friends,’ Pantagruel replied, ‘to all the doubts and queries you propound there is only one proper solution; and for all such symptoms and effects only one proper medicine. The answer will be delivered to you promptly, without long confused tangles and verbal discoursings: “a hungry belly has no ears”. It hears nothing. It is by signs, gestures and actions that you shall be satisfied and have a solution which contents you, as once in Rome Tarquin the Proud, that last king of the Romans…’

  – at which point Pantagruel touched the bell-rope, and Frère Jean dashed off to the galley –

  ‘… replied by signs to his son, Sextus Tarquin who was in the city of the Gabini and had despatched a man expressly to inquire how he could thoroughly subdue the citizens and return them to perfect obedience. That king said nothing in reply, doubting the trustworthiness of the messenger. He simply led him into his private garden and, in his presence and in his sight, took his sword and sliced off the heads of the tallest poppies. Once the messenger had returned without an answer and told the son what he had seen his father do, it was easy to understand from such signs that he was advising him to cut off the heads of the most prominent citizens, the better to constrain the common folk to their duty and absolute obedience.’

  How no answer was given by Pantagruel to the questions put forward

  CHAPTER 64

  [Further play on the unreconciling Council of Trent – the Concile de Chésil – and to re-concile.

  It was on the authority of Aristotle’s History of Animals, 8, 29, that a fasting man’s saliva was held mortal to snakes.

  Since Rabelais has listed his snakes in alphabetical order so far as their initial letter is concerned, Latin or French names have been kept whenever necessary to retain that order. (Snake in the Renaissance embraced as here all animals which crept rather than walked, and even some others.)

  Gluttony is one thing: merry feasting is another. The joy of a happy feast can have ‘sympathetic’ effects on the weather.]

  Pantagruel then asked, ‘What people dwell in this fair bitch of an island?’

  ‘They,’ said Xenomanes, ‘are all Hypocriticals, Dropsicals, Bead-tellers, purring Counterfeits, Sanctimoniums, Black-beetles and Hermits: wretched folk, all of them, living on wayfarers’ alms, like the hermit at Lormont, between Blaye and Bordeaux.’

  ‘I’m not going there: I can promise you that!’ said Panurge. ‘If I do may the devil blow puffs up my bum! Hermits! By all the devils: Sanctimoniums, purring Counterfeits, Black-beetles and Hypocriticals! Avaunt! I can still remember those fat travellers of ours on their way to the Concile de Chésil: would that Beelzebub and Astaroth had re-conciled them with Proserpine, so great were the tempests and devilish deeds we suffered for having seen them. Listen to me please, Corporal Xenomanes, my little old fat-guts. These Hypocrites, Hermits and Pot-scrapers here: are they celibate or married? Are there any of the feminine sex? Could a man hypocritically pull out his hypocritical little shaft for them?’

  ‘Well, truly!’ said Pantagruel, ‘there’s a jolly fine question for you!’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ replied Xenomanes. ‘There you will find fair and joyful Hypocritesses, purring Counterfeitesses and Hermitesses: all women devoted to religious Orders. And there are plenty of young Hypocrites, purring young Counterfeits and young Hermits…’

  – ‘Avaunt!’ cried Frère Jean, interrupting him. ‘Young hermit: old devil. An authentic proverb. Note it down. –

  ‘… otherwise, without such multiplying, this isle of Chaneph would long since have been without inhabitants and quite desolate.’

  Pantagruel despatched Gymnaste in a skiff to take them his alms: seventy-eight thousand of those beautiful little half-crowns with a Lantern on them.

  He then asked, ‘What hour is it?’

  ‘Nine o’clock and more,’ replied Epistemon.

  ‘That,’ said Pantagruel, ‘is the right time for dinner. For the hallowed line approaches (made so famous by Aristophanes in his comedy The Ecclesiazousae) when the shadow falls on th
e tenth point of the sundial. Long ago in Persia a specific time to take his food was prescribed for the king alone: belly and appetite were everyone else’s clock. In fact a certain hanger-on in Plautus loathes and madly detests the inventors of timepieces and sundials, since it is notorious that there is no clock more accurate than the belly.71

  ‘Diogenes, when asked at what time a man should eat, replied: “The rich when hungry: the poor man when he can.”72 The physicians more correctly say that canonical rule is:

  Up at five: break fast at nine;

  Sup at five: to bed at nine.

  The sorcery of the famous King Petosiris was very different.’73

  Those words were hardly spoken when the Officers of the Maw set up the trestles and sideboards, spread perfumed cloths over them and laid out plates, napkins and salt-cellars; they brought out tankards, pitchers, flagons, cups, goblets, basins and jugs.

  Frère Jean, in association with the stewards, butlers, bakers, wine-waiters, squires-trenchant, cup-bearers and tasters, brought in four terrific bacon-pasties, so huge that they reminded me of the four bastions of Turin.

  God’s Truth! How they did drink and enjoy the feast! The dessert was still to come when a west-nor’wester began to swell out their main-, mizzen- and topsails. At which they all sang a variety of canticles in praise of Almighty God in his Heaven.

  When the fruit was served, Pantagruel asked, ‘Do you think your problems have been fully resolved, my friends?’

  ‘I am no longer yawning, thank God’ said Rhizotome.

  ‘I am no longer sleeping like a dog,’ said Ponocrates.

  ‘I am no longer dazzled,’ replied Gymnaste.

  ‘And I am no longer fasting,’ said Eusthenes.

  ‘And therefore, safe from my saliva today will be:

  asps,

  amphisbaenas,

  anerudites,

  abedissimons,

  alhartafz,

  ammobates,

  apimaos,

  alhatrabans,

  aractes,

  asterions,

  alcharates,

  arges,

  ariadnes,

  ascalabes,

  ascalabotes,

  aemorrhoїdes,

  basilisks,

  belettes ictides (Greek weazels),

  boas,

  buprestes,

  cantharides,

  caterpillars,

  crocodiles,

  crapaux (toads),

  catoblepes,

  cerastae,

  colotae,

  cauquemars (incubi),

  canes rabidi, (mad dogs),

  colotes,

  cycrides,

  caphezates,

  cauhares,

  coulevres (grass-snakes),

  cuharsces,

  chalhydres,

  chroniocolaptes,

  chersydri,

  conchydri,

  cockatrices,

  dipsades,

  domeses,

  dryinades,

  dragons,

  elopses,

  enhydrides,

  fanuises,

  galeotides,

  harmenes,

  handons,

  icles,

  ilicines,

  ichneumons,

  iarrares,

  kesudures,

  lepores (the Aplysia depilans),

  lizards from Chalcis,

  myopes,

  mantichores,

  molures,

  myagres,

  musirani (shrew-mice),

  miliares,

  megalauni,

  ptyades,

  porphyres,

  pareades,

  phalanges,

  penphredones,

  pityocampes,

  rutules,

  rhimories,

  rhagions,

  rhaganes,

  salamanders,

  scytalae,

  stellions,

  scorpaenae,

  scorpions,

  selsirs,

  scalabotins, solofuidars, surdi,

  sangsues (blood-suckers),

  solifugi,

  sepae,

  stinces,

  stufae,

  sabtins,

  sangles,

  sepedones,

  scolopenders,

  tarantulas,

  typholopes,

  tetragnates,

  teristales,

  vipers.’

  How Pantagruel, with his household, raises good weather

  CHAPTER 65

  [Rabelais had been accused in print of antifeminism. (By the standard of his extreme contemporaries he was a moderate but certainly no platonizing feminist.)

  Panurge appears pious and tranquil, but merely verbally so and not for long, as the next chapters convincingly show.

  The ‘Cenomanic Sausage’ is the Sausage of Le Mans, but ‘Cenomanic suggests being mad about one’s cena, one’s dinner.

  A joyful banquet raises men’s spirits and, by natural sympathy also raises good weather, for which the companions have sung (in chapter 64) canticles to God.

  Hercules’ awkward attempts to help Atlas hold up the sky come from Lucian’s Charon, iv. The Reverend Doctor Rabelais’ last words in print about wine before he died tell how wine brings spiritual powers to mankind. That was a Classical commonplace, supported by Plato, Plutarch and many others. It is summed up in the saying Vinum acuit ingenium (Wine sharpens the intellect). The spiritual powers of wine are represented mythologically by Bacchus psilax, the ‘Winged Bacchus’ of the Amyclaeans (taken from the Description of Greece of Pausanias). Thanks to Rabelais The Winged Bacchus was to become the subject of Renaissance emblems and their learned commentaries. See The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43 (1980), pp. 259–62. All the writers insist and assume that the much-praised wine is drunk in company and in moderation.]

  ‘In which sacred Order of poisonous creatures,’ asked Frère Jean, ‘do you place Panurge’s wife-to-be?’

  ‘Hey!’ Panurge retorted. ‘Speaking ill of women, you spruced up, scabby-arsed monk!’

  ‘By the Cenomanic Sausage!’ said Epistemon, ‘Euripides wrote (words said by Andromeda) that, by the inventiveness of mankind and the instruction of the gods, a useful remedy has been found against all venomous beasts: but no remedy has so far been found against a bad woman.’

  ‘That fop of a Euripides always spoke ill of women,’ said Panurge, ‘and therefore, by divine vengeance, was eaten by dogs. Aristophanes casts it in his teeth. Let us get on. If you have anything to say, say it.’

  ‘I shall urinate now as much as you like,’ said Epistemon.

  ‘Now,’ said Xenomanes, ‘my stomach is economically ballasted: never more will it sag one way more than the other.’

  ‘And I,’ said Carpalim, ‘need neither wine nor bread:

  A truce for wine and a truce for bread.’

  ‘I am no longer bored,’ said Panurge. ‘Thanks to God and to you, I’m as gay as a popinjay; as merry as a merlin; as bright as a butterfly. It is indeed written by that fine Euripides of yours, and it is recited by Silenus, that memorable toper:

  A man is insane: he cannot be right,

  Who drinks up his wine without any delight!

  ‘We should, without fail, praise God, our Good Creator, Servator and Conservator, who with this good bread, this good cool wine and these good viands cures us of all such perturbations of both body and soul, not to mention the pleasure and delight which we enjoy when eating and drinking.

  ‘But you are not answering the question of our blessèd and venerable Frère Jean, who asked us, How to raise good weather.’

  ‘Since,’ said Pantagruel, ‘you are happy with the ready solution I have provided to those problems, so am I. We shall have more to say about them if you like at some other time and place. There remains to resolve the problem posed by Frère Jean: How to raise good weather. But have we not done so already, just as you wanted? Look at the pennant by the crow’s
-nest. Look at the wind whistling through the sails. Look at the tautness of the guy-ropes, sheets and stays! While we were raising and emptying our cups, good weather was raised in parallel from an occult sympathy in Nature.

  ‘That, if you believe the wise mythologists, is how Atlas and Hercules raised it, but they raised it half a degree too high: Atlas, because of feasting Hercules, his guest, too convivially; Hercules, because of his preceding thirsts in the deserts of Libya…’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Frère Jean, interrupting the discourse. ‘I have heard from several venerable professors that Tirelupin, your good father’s wine-steward, saves over one thousand eight hundred pipes of wine a year by making both visitors and family drink before they feel thirsty.’

  ‘… for,’ continued Pantagruel, ‘just as the camels and dromedaries in the caravan drink for thirsts past, thirsts present and thirsts to come, so did Hercules, and through such excessive raising of the weather there was produced a new motion in the heavens, a titubation-cum trepidation, the subject of much controversy and debate between foolish astrologers.’

  ‘That,’ said Panurge, ‘is what is stated in a popular saying:

  Good weather is raised and the bad weather passes,

  Whilst round a big ham we all raise our glasses.’

  ‘And,’ said Pantagruel, ‘not only have we raised up good weather by eating and drinking but we have also greatly lightened our ship: not only lightening it as Aesop’s basket was lightened by consuming its contents but also by emancipating ourselves from fasting. For as the body is heavier dead than alive, so too the fasting man is more earthy and heavy than after eating and drinking. And those who, during a long journey, drink and break their fasts in the morning are not wrong to say, “Our horses will go all the better for it.”

  ‘Do you not know that the Amyclaeans of old, above all other gods, worshipped and adored noble Father Bacchus, dubbing him Psilax in a proper and appropriate act of naming? In the Doric tongue psila means wings. For, just as birds lightly fly high in the air by the help of their wings, so too, by the help of Bacchus – that is, of good wine, delicious and delightful – the minds of human beings are raised high, their bodies made manifestly merry, and what in them was earthy made supple.’