Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  How, near the isle of the Ganabin, the Muses are saluted at the orders of Pantagruel

  CHAPTER 66

  [This is an isle of thieves: ‘Ganabin, thieves, Hebrew’ (Brief Declaration,). Gannab appears several times in the Old Testament. Great navigators discovered their own ‘Isle of Thieves’, Magellan before Rabelais and Drake after him.)

  This Isle of Thieves is like Poneropolis, that ‘City of the Wicked’ in Plutarch (On Curiosity, 520 B-D). These wicked islanders spy out defects in others, preferring the scandalous, the deformed and the ugly to the beautiful and the true. For Erasmus in his adage II, IX, XXII, ‘A city of slaves’, in Poneropolis were gathered as in a sink, ‘flatterers, false-witnesses, and “prevaricatores” – meaning criminal advocates secretly in collusion with their opponents. The end of the Fourth Book recalls the longer end of Pantagruel with its loathing of devilish calumniators, and the Third Book with its warnings about corrupt legal men through whom the devil can appear as an angel of light. This isle is the antithesis of Parnassus, the mountain of the Muses (and so no doubt associated with plagiarism). Yet it has its own fair stream (Hippocrene?) and there are Muses there too, perhaps the true Muses which the Ganabin steal and plagiarize.

  The Conciergerie was a gaol in Paris.

  With ‘Plus ultra’ Panurge recalls the device of the Emperor Charles V mocked in Gargantua.

  At the end of this last book the characters of the companions are consolidated. Panurge again talks of the devil and is the embodiment of servile fear. The force of the name of ‘Frère Jean des Entommeures’ is at last emphasized: he makes entommeures – mincemeat – of his enemies. As for Pantagruel, he is, following Plutarch (On the Daemon of Socrates), a new Socrates.

  In 1548 the inhabitants of the Bordeaux region rebelled against the salt-tax. The bells which called them together to resist were confiscated.]

  As the fair wind and that happy converse continued, Pantagruel scanned the distant horizon and descried a mountainous land. He pointed it out to Xenomanes and asked him, ‘Can you make out ahead to the larboard a high mountain with twin peaks closely resembling Mount Parnassus in Phocis?’

  ‘Very clearly,’ said Xenomanes. ‘It is the isle of the Ganabin. Do you wish to go ashore?’

  ‘No,’ said Pantagruel.

  ‘You are right,’ said Xenomanes. ‘There is nothing worth seeing! The inhabitants are all thieves and robbers. However, near that right-hand peak there is the most beautiful spring in the world, and around it stands a very large forest. Your seamen can take on wood and water.’

  ‘Well and learnedly spoken,’ said Panurge. ‘Ha, da, da! Never let us land on an isle of thieves and robbers. I can tell you that this present isle is like Sark and Herm, the isles I once saw between Brittany and England; such too was the Poneropolis of Philip of Thrace: isles full of criminals, thieves, brigands, murderers and assassins, all descended from their origins in the deep dungeons of the Conciergerie. Let’s not land there, I beg you. Trust, if not me, the advice of our good and wise Xenomanes. They are (by the death of the Wooden Ox!) worse than the cannibals. They’ll eat us alive. Go not ashore, I beseech you. It would be better for you to descend into Avernus. Hark! By God, either I can hear a horrifying tocsin such as the Gascons used to ring in the Bordelais to defy the commissioners and collectors of the salt-levy and the tax-officials, or else I’ve got a ringing in my ears.

  ‘Let us sail past. Hau! Plus ultra!’

  ‘Go ashore,’ said Frère Jean, ‘go ashore. Onwards, onwards, ever onwards! Never stay: then for lodging never pay! We’ll massacre the lot of them. Go ashore!’

  ‘The devil may have a part in this,’ said Panurge. ‘This devil of a monk here – this mad devil’s monk – is afraid of nothing! He’s as rash as all the devils put together and never bothers about anyone else. He thinks the whole world is a monk like he is!’

  ‘Go to all the millions of devils, you gangrened old leper,’ replied Frère Jean, ‘and may they anatomize your brain and make entommeures of it! This devilish old idiot here is so cowardly and nasty that he’s forever shitting himself out of a frenzy of funk. Since you’re thrown into consternation by such vain terrors, don’t go ashore: stay here with the baggage. Or else dash through all the millions of devils and hide away under Proserpine’s brave skirts!’

  At those words Panurge vanished from the company and hid below-decks in the pantry, amongst crusts, crumbs and scraps of bread.

  ‘I can feel in my soul an urge to withdraw,’ said Pantagruel, ‘as though it were a voice heard from afar telling me that we must not go ashore. Each and every time that I have felt such an impulse in my mind I have found myself fortunate when I rejected and abandoned the course it was withdrawing me away from, and, on the contrary, similarly fortunate whenever I followed whither it was urging me. And I have never had cause to repent of it.’

  ‘That,’ said Epistemon, ‘is like the daemon of Socrates so celebrated amongst the Academics.’

  ‘Listen, then,’ said Frère Jean. ‘While the crews are taking on water, Panurge is lying down below like a wolf in its straw. Would you like to have a good laugh? Then light the powder of the basilisk here, hard by the foc’s’le. (It will form a salute on our part to the Muses of this Mount Antiparnassus.) In any case the gunpowder inside it is spoiling.’

  ‘Well said,’ Pantagruel replied. ‘Summon the Master-gunner.’

  The Master-gunner promptly appeared. Pantagruel ordered him to fire the basilisk and then recharge it at once with fresh powder against every contingency. That was instantly done. At that first shot of the basilisk from aboard Pantagruel’s ship, the gunners on the other ships, row-barges, galleons and galleasses of the convoy each likewise fired off one of their large, loaded cannons. You may take it that there was a glorious din.

  How Panurge messed himself out of sheer funk; and how he mistook the mighty cat Rodilardus for a little devil

  CHAPTER 67

  [Rabelais returns to scatology – learned scatology – for the last time. In Chapter 52 he had already quoted scatological lines from Catullus. A knowledge of Italian is here simply supposed. Without it, contemporaries would have been lost. (Translations were later supplied by the publisher.) Here the original Italian is given with a translation.

  The giants, once coarse and concerned with faeces and grossness, are now ideals: Gargantua, the model king and father; Pantagruel, the model princely son and Socratic sage. It is Panurge now who replaces the young faeces-centred oaf that Gargantua was before being purged of his madness. Scatology provides both jests and a final judgement on Panurge. Panurge also breaks into patois like the Limousin scholar of Pantagruel.

  For the first time since Pantagruel, Pantagruel (the giant) bursts out laughing. He cannot help it. Pantagruel has been an agelast, a non-laugher, throughout the last two books: that too makes him like Socrates, who had a great sense of fun and laughed with his friends, yet was classed as an ‘agelast’ by Pliny. (Erasmus, Adages, II, V, LXII, ‘Unlaughing stone’).

  The tale about Villon in England dates from well before the time of Villon, let alone of Thomas Linacre.

  The lines attributed to Villon are authentic.

  At the battle of Inchkeith (the Isle of Horses) in 1548, some 400 English soldiers were slaughtered by the French.

  At the end, Pantagruel talks of God and of cleanliness: Panurge irrepressibly talks of the devil and dung.]

  Panurge came tumbling out of the bread-store like a giddy goat: he was in his shirt-sleeves, with his trunk-hose pulled on to only one leg and his beard all besprinkled with breadcrumbs; he was holding on to a large, sleek-haired cat clinging fast to his other stocking. Quivering his jowls like a monkey hunting for fleas in the head, trembling and clacking his teeth, he went over to Frère Jean (who was sitting on the starboard chains) and devoutly begged him to have compassion upon him and to keep him safe with his cutlass, insisting and swearing by his share in Papimania that he had that very hour seen all the devils raging loose
from their chains.

  ‘Look-ee ‘ere, me friend, me bruvvah, me ghostly Fahver,’ said Panurge; ‘today all the devils are having a wedding! You never saw such preparations for a diabolical banquet. Can you see that smoke rising from the kitchens of Hell?’ – So saying he was pointing at the gun-smoke hanging over all the ships. – ‘So many damned souls you never have seen! Look-ee ‘ere, me friend. Know what? Those souls are such dainty little things, so blond and so tender that you could rightly say they’re ambrosia for the Styx. God forgive me, but I took them for the souls of Englishmen, supposing that the Isle of Horses off Scotland had just been sacked this very morn by the Seigneurs de Thermes and d’Essé, and all the English who had surprised it hacked to pieces.’

  As he drew near, Frère Jean smelt an odour which was not that of gun-powder. So he tugged out Panurge and saw his shirt all covered with thin excrement and freshly beshitten. The retentive powers of the sinew which restrains the muscle called the sphincter (that is, the arsehole) had been relaxed by the vehemence of the fear which Panurge had felt during his phantasmagorical visions; to which add the thundering of the cannonades, which is more terrifying down below in the cabins than up on deck. For one of the symptoms and by-products of fear is that it usually unlocks the aperture of the pen within which the faeces are temporarily retained.

  Messere Pandolfo de la Cassina in Sienna is an example of that: he was travelling by post-horse through Chambéry when, dismounting at the home of that wise burgher Vinet, he grabbed a pitchfork from the stable and said to Vinet:

  ‘Da Roma in qua io non son andato del corpo. Di gratia piglia in mano.’

  (‘From Rome up till now I’ve never been once! Kindly grab hold of this pitchfork and give me a fright.’)

  Vinet did make several lunges with the pitchfork as if fencing, pretending to want to strike him in earnest. But the Siennese said to him:

  ‘Se tu non fai altramente, tu non fai nulla. Pero sforzati di adoperlarli più guagliardamente.’

  ‘If you can’t do it differently you’ll get nowhere. Do try to wield it more vigorously.’

  At which Vinet with that pitchfork landed him so great a blow between the neck and the collar-bone that he knocked him to the ground with his feet in the air. Then that Siennese, slobbering and laughing heartily, said to him: ‘By Bayard’s God’s Feast-day! That’s what I call

  Datum Camberiaci!’

  (Given by Our hand, at Chambéry!)

  And he lowered his breeches just in time, for he had begun to mute more copiously than nine buffaloes and fourteen arch-priests from Ostia. The Siennese ended by thanking Vinet most graciously:

  ‘Io ti ringratio, bel messere. Cosi facendo tu m’hai esparmiata la speza d’un servitiale.’

  (‘I thank you, kind sir. By so doing you have saved me the cost of an enema.’)

  Another example: Edward the Fifth, King of England.

  Maître François Villon, exiled from France, had gone over to him. The king admitted him to such great intimacy that he hid none of the little household secrets from him. One day, when the said king was doing his job on his jakes, he showed Villon a painting of the arms of France. ‘See in what reverence I hold your French kings! I have their arms nowhere but here in my privy, hard by my close-stool.’

  ‘Holy God!’ said Villon, ‘how wise, intelligent and well informed you are, and careful about your well-being. And how well you are served by your learned physician Thomas Linacre, who, noting that you have naturally grown constipated in your old age so that every day you have to stuff an apothecary up your bum – I mean a suppository – otherwise you never could mute, got you, with singular and laudable forethought, to have the arms of France aptly painted here and nowhere else; for the mere sight of them gives you such an horrific fear and fright that you immediately drop pats like eighteen wild oxen from Paeonia! Were they to be painted elsewhere in your palace – in your bed-chamber, your hall, your chapel, your galleries or, Holy God! anywhere else – you would be messing yourself all over the place the instant you saw them. And if you were to have a painting of the Great Oriflamme of France here as well, at the mere sight of it you would be voiding your innards, I believe, through your fundament. But hum, hum and again I say hum:

  Aren’t I a booby from Paree?

  From Pointoise near Paree, in sum:

  When from a rope I hang, that day

  Neck will know what Bum doth weigh.

  ‘I am a booby, I say: one ill advised, ill informed and slow on the uptake, for whenever I came here with you it astonished me that you should already have them unlace your breeches in your bed-chamber. I really did think your close-stool was there behind some arras or other, or in the space between your bed and the wall. Otherwise it seemed to me quite out of place to unlace yourself in your bed-chamber so far from your family seat. A truly boobyish thought, wasn’t it? The cause arises, by God, from some greater mystery. You do well to act as you do. I mean so well that you could never do better. Have them fully unlace your breeches far off, in plenty of time, for if you were to come in here still unlaced and saw that coat-of-arms, then, Holy God! – note all this well! – the seat of your breeches would do you the office of a lazanon, pot-de-chambre, jakes and privy.’

  Frère Jean, pinching his nose with his left hand, was, with the index-finger of his right, pointing out to Pantagruel the shirt-tails of Panurge.

  Pantagruel, on seeing Panurge so disturbed, transfixed, trembling, incoherent, beshitten and clawed by the talons of the celebrated cat Rodilardus, could not contain his laughter, saying, ‘And what are you going to do with that cat?’

  ‘Cat!!!’ replied Panurge. ‘The devil take me if I didn’t think it was that mangy little devilkin I once smartly and quietly nabbed in the great Hutch of Hell, using my stocking as a mitten. To the devil with this devil!

  ‘It’s lacerated my skin like the beard of a crayfish!’

  So saying, he threw the cat down.

  ‘Go,’ said Pantagruel, ‘in the name of God go; have a hot bath, cleanse yourself, calm down, put on a white shirt and clothe yourself anew.’

  ‘Are you saying that I’m afraid?’ Panurge replied, ‘Not a bit. I am, by God’s power, more valiant than if I’d swallowed as many flies as have been mixed into dough in Paris from the Feast of Saint John to All-Saints Day. Ha, ha, ha, Houay! What in the devil’s name is this? Do you call it squitters, pooh, crap, turds, shit, ordure, droppings, faeces, excrement, wolf-muck, scumber, mute, fumets, turds, scybala or spyrathia74 It is, I believe, saffron of Hibernia:

  Ho, ho, hee,

  Safran d’Hibernie.

  Selah! Let us drink!’75

  The end of the fourth book

  of the deeds and sayings

  of noble Pantagruel.

  THE FIFTH BOOK OF PANTAGRUEL

  Introduction to The Fifth Book of Pantagruel

  Ever since its publication some eleven years after the death of Rabelais, this book has regularly appeared (originally without warning) in almost all the editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was assumed to be by Rabelais. Currently, though some scholars think parts of the text are based on authentic papers left behind by Rabelais, others (myself included) judge it to be supposititious, but not without interest.

  The available texts are:

  the Isle Sonante of 1562, published without name or place, consisting of sixteen chapters;

  the first edition of the printed version, published in 1564 without name or place, consisting of forty-seven chapters which differ in detail from the Isle Sonante;

  a manuscript not in the hand of Rabelais, consisting of part of the Prologue and forty-six chapters (omitting Chapters 24 and 25 of the printed text, but adding one new chapter).

  Some think that the Isle Sonante has perhaps the best chance of being based on papers left by Rabelais, but the relationship of the texts is a complex one. Questions of authenticity demand recourse to the evidence of the French texts.

  Becaus
e of its complicated nature, the text given here is a simplified one: that of the first edition of 1564, with a strict selection of variants from the Isle Sonante of 1562 and from the undated manuscript, which could well date from before 1564. The shorter variants appear in the footnotes; the longer ones can be found in the appendices at the end.

  For the most part this translation is based upon the text of Guy Demerson in Rabelais: Œuvres completes; I have found the work of Guy Demerson particularly useful. As always, there is a debt, warmly acknowledged, to the Pléiade Rabelais of Mireille Huchon.1

  The Fifth

  and last book

  of the Heroic deeds and sayings

  of our good Pantagruel

  Composed by Maître François Rabelais

  Doctor of Medicine

  In which is contained the visit to the

  Oracle of the Dive Bacbuc and the

  Word of the Bottle, for which

  the whole of this long voyage

  was undertaken.

  Newly brought to light.

  1564.

  Contents

  Prologue of Maître François Rabelais for the Fifth Book of the heroic deeds and sayings of Pantagruel. To the kindly readers

  1 How Pantagruel landed on Ringing Island and of the din which we heard

  2 How Ringing Island had been inhabited by Siticines who had been transfigured into birds

  3 How there is but one Popinjay on Ringing Island

  4 How the Birds of Ringing Island were all Birds of Passage

  5 How the Gourmander-Birds on Ringing Island are mute

  6 How the Birds of Ringing Island are nourished

  7 How Panurge related to Maître Aedituus the fable of the war-horse and the ass

  8 How, with much difficulty, we were shown a Popinjay

  9 How we landed upon the Island of Ironmongery