Gargantua and Pantagruel
Page 89
10 How Pantagruel arrived at an island called Cheating
11 How we sailed by Wicket Gate, where dwells Catty-claws, the Archduke of the Furry Scribble-cats
12 How a riddle was propounded to us by Catty-claws
13 How Panurge solved the riddle of Catty-claws
14 How the Furry-cats live by corruption
15 How Frère Jean des Entommeures plans to strip the Furry-cats
16 How we passed Over, and how Panurge nearly got killed there
17 How our ship ran aground; and how we were succoured by voyagers who were vassals of Quintessence
18 How we arrived at the Kingdom of Quintessence, called Entelechy
19 How Quintessence cured the sick by singing songs
20 How the queen passed her time after dinner
21 How the officers of Quintessence worked in a variety of ways, and how the dame appointed us retainers in her retinue with the rank of Abstractors
22 How the queen was served at supper, and of her manner of eating
23 How a joyful ball was staged under the form of a tournament in the presence of Quintessence
24 How the thirty-two personages at the ball joined in combat
25 How we landed on the Isle of the Roads, on which the roadways road on their ways
26 How we visited the Isle of Clogs; and of the Order of the Demisemiquaver Friars
27 How Panurge, when questioning a Demisemiquaver Friar, received from him no reply save in monosyllables
28 How the Institution of Lent is displeasing to Epistemon
29 How we called at the land of Satin
30 How in the land of Satin we saw Hear-say, who kept a school for witnesses
31 How we descried Lanternland
32 How we landed at the port of the Lychnobians and entered Lanternland
33 How we arrived at the oracle of La Bouteille
34 How we went below ground to enter into the temple of La Bouteille; and how Chinon is the first town in the world
35 How we went down the Tetradic Steps; and of the fright which Panurge had
36 How the doors of the Temple opened by themselves, wonderfully
37 How the floor of the Temple was paved with a wondrous mosaic
38 How the Battle of Bacchus against the Indians was portrayed on the mosaic-work of the Temple
39 How the assault and attack of our good Bacchus against the Indians were portrayed in the mosaic
40 How the Temple was illuminated by a wondrous lamp
41 How we were shown a phantastic fountain by the High-Priestess Bacbuc
42 How the waters of the Fountain tasted of whatever wine the drinkers fancied
43 How Bacbuc arrayed Panurge so as to receive the Word of La Bouteille
44 How the High Priestess Bacbuc brought Panurge before the Bouteille
45 How Bacbuc explains the Word of the Bottle
46 How Panurge and the others rhyme by poetic frenzy
47 How, having taken congee of Bacbuc, they quit the Oracle of La Bouteille
Epigram
Appendix 1: The Ending as Found in the Manuscript
Appendix 2: Chapter 16 bis as found in the Ile Sonante
Appendix 3: Chapter 32 bis
Prologue of Maître François Rabelais for the Fifth Book of the heroic deeds and sayings of Pantagruel. To the kindly readers
[The word ‘fat’ in the opening paragraph is not the English word for obese but a Provençal word for daft. It is appealing to a theme in the Pantagrueline Prognostication, Chapter 5.
The Bagpipes of Prelates is one of the comic titles from the Library of Saint-Victor in Pantagruel.
The reader will recognize echoes of the Prologue to the 1548 Fourth Book as well as several other echoes of the four Books. This version of the story of the ‘fresh-water physician’ taken from the 1548 Prologue is weaker and varies in detail. There are also echoes of Joachim Du Bellay’s Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549), with its savour of young aspirant Pléiade poets rather than of an author with the secure and outstanding place already earned by Rabelais.
For Pythagoras cf. Erasmus, within adage I, I, II, and for the obscurity of the numbers of Pythagoras see adage III, VI, XXXII, ‘More obscure than Platonic numbers’ (which is also important for Pythagoras). Pythagoras’ interdiction of beans was an absolute commonplace and much discussed. Horace mentions it in passing, Satires, 2, 7, 63. For other possible echoes of Erasmus, cf. adage I, V, XXV, ‘I am holding a wolf by the ears’.
The French queen eulogized is Marguerite de Navarre, to whom Rabelais dedicated the Third Book.
‘Rhyparographer’ is the surname of Pyreicus in Pliny, Natural History, 35, 10. It means a squalid painter of mean subjects.
‘To grate like a goose among swans’ echoes Virgil, Eclogue, 9, 36.]
‘Tireless Drinkers, and you, the most becarbuncled of Syphi-litics: while you are at ease and I have nothing more urgent to do, I ask you this, saying, why is it cited nowadays as a common proverb that ‘the world is no longer fat’?
Now fat is a term in Provençalo-Gothic which means unsalted, saltless, insipid and tasteless; metaphorically fat signifies daft, silly, bereft of sense and hare-brained. Would you say (as one may indeed logically infer) that the world was heretofore daft but now become wise? How many and what conditions were required to make it daft? And how many and wise to make it wise? And why was it daft? And why should it now be wise? By what qualities did you recognize its former folly? By what qualities, its present wisdom? Who made it daft? Who made it wise? Who form the greater number: those who liked it daft or those who like it wise? For how long was it daft? How long has it been wise? Whence proceeded its antecedent folly and whence its subsequent wisdom? Why did its antecedent folly end now and not later? Why did its present wisdom begin now and not earlier? What ill did that antecedent folly do to us? And what good, the subsequent wisdom? How could that old folly have been abolished? And how could the present wisdom be restored?
Answer, if you think it right to do so.
I shall not adjure your Reverences any further, fearing to parch your Paternities. Do not be shy: make your confession to Herr der Tyflet, the Enemy of Paradise, the Enemy of the truth. Be of good heart, my lads: for this first part of my sermon have three or five drinks if you’re men of mine: if you belong to the Other, then Get thee behind me, Satan! For otherwise I swear to you by my great Hurlyburly that if you are not helping me to resolve the aforesaid puzzle, then I for some time now regret having set it before you, even though I am in no less a quandary than if I held a wolf by the ears without hope of succour.
What did you say? I get you: you have not yet decided how to answer. By my beard, no more have I.
I shall merely quote you what a venerable Doctor of Theology – the author of the Bagpipes of Prelates – foretold in the spirit of prophecy. What does the scallywag say? Harken, ye old asses’ pricks! Hearken:
That Jubilee when the daft world was shorn
In figures now exceeds the thirtieth morn
Supernumerically. Scant respect!
Daft it appeared, all perseverance wrecked
Of lengthy bills; no longer avid he;
For the sweet fruit of grass shall shelled be,
Of which the flower in spring feared to be lorn.
You heard that. Did you understand it?
That Doctor is ancient; his words, laconic; his judgement Duns-Scottish and obscure.1
He was indeed treating a matter intrinsically deep and difficult, but the best of the exegetes of that good Father expound that Jubilee which exceeds the thirtieth morn as the years embraced within this current age until one thousand five hundred and fifty. The flower of it feared to be lorn. Come spring the world will no more be called daft. The fools – the number of which is infinite as Salomon testifies – will die insane. Then there shall cease all species of madness, which are similarly countless: The species of mania are infinite, as Avicenna states. Madness, which was d
riven back to the centre during the rigours of winter, now appears at the circumference and is, like the trees, in sap. Experience shows us that; you know it; you can see it. And it was long ago investigated by that great and good fellow Hippocrates in his Aphorisms, saying, ‘For manias, indeed, are…’ etc.
And so the world, growing wise, will no more fear the flower of beans in spring: that is (as you can piteously believe with a glass in your hand and a tear in your eye) in Lent it will feel no fear from piles of books which could seem to be flowering, florescent and florulent like fair butterflies but are in fact all boring, troubling, endangering, prickling and darkling like the numbers of Pythagoras, who, as Horace testifies, was the Monarch of the Bean.
Such books shall perish and be no more in men’s hands, no more be seen nor read. Such was their destiny, and there, their predestined end. In their place succeed shelléd beans, that is, those joyful and fruitful books of pantagruelism which rumour reports to be selling well nowadays in expectation of the end of the subsequent Jubilee: all the world is given over to studying them, and is therefore called wise. There is the solution and resolution of your problem. On the basis of which establish yourselves as worthy folk. Enjoy a good cough or two and steadily down nine good drinks, since the vines are good and the money-lenders are hanging themselves. If this good weather goes on they will cost me dear in ropes, which, I declare, I shall liberally provide gratis, any and every time they want them, thus saving them the expense of a hangman.
And in order that you may share in our future wisdom, freed from your former folly, erase this instant from your scrolls the credo of that ancient philosopher with the golden thigh who forbade you the use of beans as fodder: take it as true, and admitted as such amongst all good companions, that he forbade them to you with the same motives as the late Dr Amer – that fresh-water physician, the nephew of the Seigneur de Camelotiére, the lawyer – who used to order his patients to avoid the wing of a partridge, the rump of a chicken and the neck of a pigeon, saying in Latin: Wing bad; crupper doubtful; neck good after skin removed, setting the dainties aside for his own mouth and leaving the sick to gnaw at the bones.2
He was succeeded by certain of the becowléd brethren who forbade us beans – that is to say, pantagruelic books – thus imitating Philoxenus and Gnato, those ancient Sicilians who, as architects of their monastic and ventric voluptuousness, used to gob in the dishes during a banquet when the tasty morsels were being served, so that everyone else would thrust them away in disgust.3
Thus do those hideous, snot-dripping, mucose and decrepit hypocrites execrate such tasty books in public and private, basely gobbing all over them in their impudence. And though we can read in our Gallic tongue nowadays many excellent works in both prose and verse, with only a few relics from the Gothic age and black-beetlery, I have nevertheless chosen (as the proverb goes) to hiss and grate like a goose amongst swans rather than be judged quite dumb amongst so many fine poets and eloquent writers of prose; chosen also to play the role of some village yokel amongst such skilful actors in this noble drama rather than to be ranked with those who but serve as umber and number, merely yawning at the flies, pricking up my ears like an ass in Arcady at the song of the music-makers, and silently showing by signs that they approve of the dramatis personae.
Once I had decided and made my choice I thought that I would be doing no useless or boring task if I trundled my Diogenic barrel about so that you should not say that I live without a model.
I have in mind a great pile of authors like Colinet, Marot, Héroët, Saint-Gelais, Salel, Masuau and a good hundred or so other Gallic poets and writers of prose; and I see that, since they have long shown respect for the School of Apollo and drunk full goblets from the stream of Pegasus amidst the joyful Muses, they bring to the eternal construction of our vulgar tongue nothing less than Parian marble, alabaster, porphyry and fine goldsmiths’ solder; they treat nothing less than heroic deeds, great matters, difficult: themes both grave and arduous, all spun in crimson-silken rhetoric; by their writings they produce nothing less than heavenly nectar, than precious, laughing, quaffing wine, delicate, delightful and savouring of musk.
And that glory is not the prerogative of the males alone: ladies have shared in it, amongst whom one lady extracted from the blood of France whom you cannot mention without a profection of her notable honours: our whole century is amazed as much by her writings and her transcendent themes as by the elegance of her language and her miracle-working style.
Imitate them, if you know how. In my case I could never pull it off: it is not given to everyone to haunt and inhabit Corinth, no more than everyone was able open-handedly to contribute a golden shekel towards the building of the temple of Solomon. And since it is not within our capacity to achieve such artistic constructions, I am determined to do what Regnault de Mont-auban did: I will wait upon the masons, boil up the pot for the masons and, since I cannot be their comrade, they will have me as a listener – I mean an indefatigable listener – to their most-excellent writings. You Zoiluses, jealous and envious, will die of fear. Go and hang yourselves and choose a tree for yourself to do it on: you will never lack a rope: meanwhile I declare here, before my Helicon, within the hearing of the heavenly Muses, that if I yet live as long as a dog and three crows in such health and wholeness as did the saintly Jewish captain, as well as Xenophilus the musician and Demonax the philosopher, I shall prove (by not irrelevant arguments and by irrefutable reasons, in the very teeth of who-knows-which compilers of centons, trussers-up of topics treated hundreds and hundreds of times already, pickers-over of old Latin scrap-iron and dealers in second-hand old Latinate words all mouldy and vague) that our vulgar tongue is not so crass, inept, indigent and contemptible as they may reckon it to be. I also beg in all modesty that just as when, long ago, all the treasures were distributed by Phoebus to the great poets, Aesop still found a niche and role as a writer of fables, so too may I. And since I do not aspire to a higher place, may they by special grace not scorn to receive me as a minor rhyparographer, a follower of Pyreicus. They will do so, I am sure, for they are all so good, so human, so gracious and so debonair: none more so.
That is why, ye drinkers, and why, ye sufferers from the gout, those Zoiluses want to have the exclusive enjoyment of such books, for while they read them out loud in their conventicles and build up a cult for the high mysteries contained in them, they appropriate them and their unique reputation to themselves, as Alexander the Great, in similar circumstances, arrogated to himself the books of basic philosophy composed by Aristotle.
Guts to guts: what booze-ups; what scapegraces!
That is why, Drinkers, I counsel you to lay up a good stock of my books while the time is right; as soon as you come across them on the booksellers’ stalls you must not only shuck them but devour them like an opiatic cordial and incorporate them within you: it is then that you will discover the good they have in store for all noble bean-shuckers. I offer you now a lovely good basketful of them, harvested in the same garden as the previous ones, most reverently beseeching you to welcome the present volume, whilst hoping for better when the swallows next return.
END OF THE PROLOGUE.
How Pantagruel landed on Ringing Island and of the din which we heard
CHAPTER 1
[This chapter comes from the Ringing Island (the Isle Sonante), modified. There are echoes of Rabelaisian words and phrases, especially from the Fourth Book.
For the bees, see Virgil, Georgics, 4:63.
‘Fasts of the Four Times’ were three fasts a week occurring four times a year.
Cf. three adages of Erasmus: I, I, VII, ‘Dordonian bronze’, III, VII, XXXIX, ‘Corybantiari for to be mad’, and I, VIII, LXI, ‘Life in a barrel’.
The dock called ‘patience’ was used in treating leprosy.
The ‘times’ for verbs are normally called tenses, but ‘times’ need to be kept here. The aorist is an ‘uncertain’ tense.
‘Esurience’ is Hunger.]
We wondered whether it was Dordona with its cauldrons, or the portico in Olympia called Heptaphone, or the never-ending noise emanating from the colossus erected over the tomb of Memnon at Thebes in Egypt; or else the racket that used to be heard around a grave in Lipara, one of the Aeolian Isles: but geography was against it.
‘I am wondering,’ said Pantagruel, ‘whether some bees have attempted to swarm there and whether the neighbourhood has not raised this clanging of pans, cauldrons, basins and corybantic cymbals of Cybele, the great Mother of the Gods, in order to summon them back.
‘Hark!’
As we drew nearer still we thought we could hear the indefatigable chanting of the inhabitants of the place amidst the ceaseless pealing of the bells. That is why Pantagruel decided that, before docking at Ringing Island, we should land with our skiff on an eyot hard by a hermitage and a sort of tiny garden.
There we found a nice little hermit called Braguibus, a native of Glenay, who fully instructed us about all that jangling. He regaled us in a very odd fashion: he made us fast for the next four days, asserting that we would not otherwise be admitted on to Ringing Island, since it was then their Fast of the Four Times.
‘That is an enigma I don’t understand,’ said Panurge. ‘It would rather be the Season of the Four Winds, since whenever we fast we are stuffed full of flatulence. And anyway, do you have nothing else to do here but fast? It all seems very meagre to me: we could do without so many palatial feasts!’4
‘In my Donatus,’ said Frére Jean, ‘I can find but three “times” to verbs: preterite, present and future. That fourth “time” must have been thrown in as a tip for the valet!’