On the third day the Aedituus (after a drink, of course) granted us our congee. We made him a present of a lovely little penknife from Perche: he was even more delighted with it than Artaxerxes was with the glass of water given him by a peasant. And he thanked us courteously. To our ships he despatched fresh supplies of all sorts of provisions; he wished us a pleasant journey and a safe return at the end of our enterprises, and made us promise by Jupiter Stone8 that our return journey would be via his territories. And in conclusion he said:
‘Friends, you should note that, in this world, there are more bollocks than men. Keep that in mind.’
How we landed upon the Island of Ironmongery
CHAPTER 9
[A chapter partly inspired by the Disciple de Pantagruel. There is also a debt to Plutarch’s Natural Questions, I, I.
Compare and contrast the plants with hair (roots) in the soil with the fable of Physis and Antiphysie in the Chapter 32 of the Fourth Book.]
Our stomachs once properly ballasted, we had the wind astern, and with the mizzen-mainsail hoisted we docked in less than two days at the Isle of Ironmongery: a desert isle, totally uninhabited. There we saw many trees bringing forth mattocks, pickaxes, hoes, scythes, sickles, spades, trowels, hatchets, pruning-hooks, saws, coopers’ adzes, pruning-shears, secateurs, pincers, shovels, bradawls, braces and bits.
Other trees bore short daggers, poniards, Venetian stilettos, pen-knives, awls, swords, rapiers, wood-knives, scimitars, tucks, quarrels and carving-knives.
Anyone who wanted any of them needed only to shake the tree and they would come tumbling down like plums. Moreover, as they fell to the ground, they encountered a species of grass called scabbard, into which they sheathed themselves.
But you had to look out to see that they did not drop on your head, feet or other parts of the body when they fell, for they dropped point downwards (so as to run straight into their sheathes) and could do you great harm.
Under some unknown trees I saw certain kinds of plants which grew into pikes, lances, javelins, halberds, boar-spears, partisans, claws, pitchforks and spears: grown tall, they touch against the trees and encounter blades (or sharp-edges), each according to its kind. The trees above them have blades ready for them once they grow tall enough to reach them, just as you have vests ready for little babes when you decide to take them out of their swaddling-clothes.
And so that you do not in future judge the opinions of Plato, Anaxagoras and Democritus abhorrent – were they minor philosophers? – those trees seemed to us to be earthly animals, not distinct from beasts in having no skin, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, sinews, cartilages, adenes, bones, marrow, humours, matrices, brain and recognized articulations, for they do indeed have them, as Theophrastus clearly demonstrates, but in that they have their heads – their trunks, that is – down in the soil with their hair (that is, their roots) while their feet (that is, their branches) are up above, as when a man stands on his head and plays the forked oak.
And just as you Syphilitics can feel well ahead the onset of rain, wind or calm and even change in the weather in your sciatic legs and shoulder-blades, so they too, in their roots, radicles, sap and marrow, have a presentiment of what sort of handles are growing beneath them and prepare the appropriate blades (or sharp-edges) for them. It is true that in every thing save God mistakes sometimes occur: Nature herself is not exempt, as when she brings forth monstrosities and deformed beasts. I noticed some mistakes made by those trees too:
– the bottom half of a pike growing high into the air beneath those ironmongery-trees, encountered, on reaching their branches, not a blade but a besom: still, it would do for sweeping chimneys;
– a partisan encountered shears: but it can be put to good use: it can help rid a garden of caterpillars;
– the staff of a halberd encountered the blade of a scythe and looked like an hermaphrodite: it will serve a turn as a sickle.
A fine thing it is to have faith in God.
As we were returning to our ships, I saw some people or other, behind some sort of bush, doing something or other, somehow sharpening some sort of weapons which they had managed to get hold of somehow, somewhere.
How Pantagruel arrived at an island called Cheating
CHAPTER 10
[The gambling is primarily that of swindlers at dice, a sport condemned by many Renaissance moralists, since lots were the domain of God. The numbers on dice attributed to deities by the ancient Greek sages including the Pythagoreans are known through Plutarch (Isis and Osiris, 354 D–355 A).
The text uses a form ‘Sang vréal’ for the Holy Grail, presumably a distortion of Rabelais’ ‘Cratylic’ form ‘sangréal’ met in the Fourth Book (Chapters 42 and 43), where the sangréal of the Chidlings is mustard, and of the Ruachites, wind. Here it is perhaps some sort of scraggy object of veneration appropriate to gamblers, treated with as much respect as the key manuscript of the Pandects treasured in Florence, or the Veronica (the cloth said to bear the imprint of the face of Jesus). Compare the antics here with those of Bishop Homenaz unveiling the portrait of the ‘Idea’ of a pope at the beginning of Chapter 50 of the Fourth Book.
‘Put-a-good-face-on-it’ renders Bonne-Mine, the wife of Mauvais-Jeu (Bad-throw).]
Leaving astern the Isle of Ironmongery, we sailed next day to an island called Cheating, the very Idea of Fontainebleau, for the soil there is so thin that its bones – its rocks that is – poke through its skin; it is sandy, sterile, unhealthy and nasty.
There our pilot pointed out to us two small cubic rocks with eight equal angles. From their appearance they seemed to me to be of alabaster or else covered with snow, but he assured us that they were of knuckle-bone. Within them, he said, was the dark, six-storeyed mansion of the Twenty Devils of Hazard so dreaded in our lands. Amongst which he called the greatest couple of twins, Double-Sixes; the smallest, Double-Ones; the other middling couples, Double-Fives, Double-Fours, Double-Threes and Double-Twos. He called the others Six-Five, Six-Four, Six-Three, Six-Two and Six-One; Five-Four, Five-Three, and so on, consecutively.
I observed at that point that in all the world few ever cast dice without invoking devils, for when they throw two dice on to the table they devoutly cry, ‘Darling Double-Six!’ – that’s the Great Devil – ‘Sweet Double-One!’ – that’s the Tiny Devil – ‘Dear little Four-Two’, and so on for all the others, invoking them by their personal and family names, indeed not simply invoking them but calling themselves their friends and familiar spirits. When summoned, they admittedly do not come at once, but they have an excuse: they were somewhere else already, having a prior engagement with those who had already invoked them. So you must never say that they have no ears or senses. They do have them: fine ones, I can tell you.
He then informed us that there had been more shipwrecks and disasters around and along those cube-shaped rocks, with greater loss of life and treasure, than around all the Syrtes, Charybdes, Sirens, Scyllas, Strophades and deeps of the sea. I readily believed him, recalling that, formerly amongst the sages of Egypt, Neptune was represented in their hieroglyphics by the prime cube, as was Apollo by the One, Diana by the Deuce, Minerva by the Seven, etc.
He added that there was also a flask of Sang vréal, a thing divine, known to but a few. Panurge, by his fine prayers, prevailed upon the local Sindics to show it to us, which was done however with thrice more ceremonial and solemnity than when they display the Pandects of Justinian in Florence or the Veronica in Rome: never had I seen so many pieces of sendal-cloth, so many torches, tapers and jiggery-pokeries. What we were eventually shown was the visage of a roasted rabbit! We saw nothing else worth remembering there except for Put-a-good-face-on-it, the wife of Bad-throw, and for the shells of two eggs laid of yore and hatched by Leda, from which sprung Castor and Pollux, the brothers of fair Helen. The Sindics swapped a small bit of those shells for some bread.
At our departure we purchased a barrel-load of swindlers’ caps and bonnets: I doubt that we shall mak
e much profit from their sale, and I believe that those who buy them will make even less when they wear them.
How we sailed by Wicket-Gate, where dwells Catty-claws, the Archduke of the Furry Scribble-cats
CHAPTER 11
[A particularly harsh satire of a whole system of justice, with its grasping legal officials and their corrupt values.
‘Catty-claws’ renders Grippe-minaud. ‘Furry Scribble-cats’ renders Chats-fourrés. There is play on words: Chats fourrés (Furry cats) and chaffourer (to scribble, scrabble up paper).
‘Wicket-gate’ suggests the prison gate.
The translation follows the text of Demerson. (Several variants, not noted here, between the Isle Sonante and the manuscript have the effect of suppressing any mention of the ‘Isle of Procuration’ and the ‘Chicanous’.
A ‘serargeant-at-law’ (a portmanteau word) is a grasping serjeant, a legal official who serre argent (clutches money).
The furs suggests rich ermine robes.
The satire here may be compared with that of Clément Marot in L’Enfer.]
From there we passed Condemnation, which is another completely desert island. Then we sailed to the Isle of Wicket-Gate, where Pantagruel refused go ashore. He did well, for we were arrested – taken prisoner by order of Catty-claws, the Archduke of the Furry Scribble-cats – because one of our band had tried to sell swindlers’ hats to a serargeant-at-law.
Those Furry Scribble-cats are the most horrifying and terrifying of animals. They eat little children and feed off slabs of marble. Don’t you think, Drinkers, that they deserve to have their noses put out? Their fur never grows out from their hides but lies hidden. Each and every one of them sports an open game-bag as his symbol and device, but not all in the same way. Some wear it slung scarf-wise from their necks; others, against their bums, across their guts or at their sides, all for sound professional reasons. They all have claws which are very long, strong and sharp so that nothing escapes them once they get it in their clutches. Some cover their heads with square-caps each with four gutters (or codpieces); others, with caps sporting turned-up brims; others, with square-cornered mortar-boards; others, with mortar-like caparisons. As we went into their lair a beggar from the hospice to whom we had given half-a-testoon, said to us:
‘God grant, Good Folk, that you get out of here safely. Consider well the facial expressions of those valiant pillaging-pillars, those flying buttresses of Catty clavian justice. And take note, that if you live for six Olympiads plus the age of two curs, you will find those Furry Scribble-cats have become lords of all Europe, calm possessors of all the goods and properties contained therein (unless all the goods and income unjustly acquired by them do not, by divine punishment, suddenly perish).
‘Take that from a beggar, and take it well.
‘Amongst them reigns the Sixth Essence, by means of which they grab everything, devour everything and beshit everything; they burn, batter, behead, slaughter, imprison, ruin and destroy everything before them without any distinction between good and evil. For amongst them vice is called virtue, and wickedness is dubbed goodness; treachery, fealty; and larceny, liberality. Pillaging is their watch-word, and, when done by them, pillaging is adjudged good by every human (except the heretics). And they do all the above by sovereign and unshakable authority.
‘As a sign witnessing to my prophecy you will notice that the mangers therein are set above the stable-racks. One of these days you may be recalling that. And, should there ever be plagues, famines, wars, floods, cataclysms, conflagrations or disasters in this world, do not attribute them – do not refer them – to the conjunctions of maleficent planets, to the abuses of the Roman curia, to the tyranny of the kings and princes of this world, to the deceits of the black-beetles and false prophets, to the iniquities of usurers, coiners, clippers of testoons, nor to the ignorance, imprudence and impudence of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, nor yet to the perverted deeds of adulterous, poisoning or infanticidal women: attribute the lot to a destructiveness which surpasses words and to an unbelievable, immeasurable wickedness which is ever being forged and effected in the workshop of those Furry Catty-claws; yet it is no more understood by the world than is the Jewish Cabbala; that is why it is not loathed nor set to rights and punished as by reason it should be. But if it is ever revealed one day to the people and made evident to them, then there has never been an orator so eloquent as by his art to prevent them – nor any law so rigorous and draconian as by fear of retribution to contain them, nor any magistrate so powerful as to restrain them – from grimly burning them alive in their burrows. Their very own children, the Furry Scribble-kittens and their other relatives hold them in revulsion and abomination.
‘That explains why, just as Hannibal received from Hamilcar his father the command, sealed by a binding religious oath, to fight the Romans as long as he lived, I too likewise received from my late father an injunction to abide here outside, waiting for Heaven’s thunderbolt to fall upon those within and reduce them to ashes (as new sacrilegious Titans fighting against the Divine) since human beings have bodies so inured that they cannot register, feel nor predict the harm that has been done, is being done, and will be done among them; or, if they do feel it, they either cannot or will not destroy them.’
‘What’s all this!’ said Panurge. ‘Ah! No! No! By God I’m not going in there. Let’s turn back. For God’s sake, I say, turn back.
That noble tramp caused me to fear and wonder,
Far more than when in autumn heavens thunder.’
On our return we found the gate closed; they told us that it was as easy to get in there as into Avernus: the hard thing was to get out again; we could in no wise do so without a permit and a discharge from those present, for this sole reason: It’s one thing to quit a fair and quite another a market, and in law we were pedepulverosi.9
The worst was to come when we passed through the wicket-gate: in order to obtain our permits and discharges we were brought before the most horrid monster ever described. He was called Catty-claws. I could best compare him to a chimera, a sphinx and a Cerberus, or else to that figure of Osiris as the Egyptians portrayed him, having three heads joined together, namely those of a roaring lion, a fawning dog and a yawning wolf, entwined about by a snake biting its own tail, with shimmering rays all round it.10
His hands were dripping with blood; his claws were those of a harpy; his snout, like the crow’s-bill lancet of a surgeon, his fangs, like a wild boar in its fourth year; his eyes, aflame like the mouth of Hell bedecked with mortars all criss-crossed by pestles. Nothing showed but lis claws. The bench on which he sat with the Feral Cats his assessors, consisted of a brand-new fodder-rack, above which, just as the beggar had told us, were set, back to front, beautiful and capacious mangers. Above the principal seat hung the portrait of an old crone wearing glasses on her nose and holding the sheath of a sickle in her right hand and a pair of scales in her left. The pans of those scales consisted of two velvet game-bags: one, weighed down, was full of coins; the other, empty, was raised high above the pivot. It was, in my opinion, the symbol of Cattyclavian justice, quite different from the practice of the ancient Thebans, who raised statues to their judges and Dicasts only once they were dead, statues made, according to their merits, of gold, silver and marble, but all without hands.11
When we were brought before them some people or other, all bedizened with game-bags and bundles full of big, ragged, old parchments, made us sit down on a low stool.
Panurge said, ‘Well now, my friends, you scabby vagabonds. I am much better standing: such stools are too low for a man wearing new breeches and a short doublet.’
‘You sit down there!’ they replied. ‘Let us not have to tell you again. If you fail to answer properly, the earth will gape open this instant and swallow you alive.’
How a riddle was propounded to us by Catty-claws
CHAPTER 12
[In the original much play is made here on the repeated ejaculation Orça (Now then!)
which is taken to be a lawyer’s cry actually meaning not so much ‘Now then!’ but ‘Gold here!’ (‘gold’ in French being or). In the translation that repeated play on words is rendered by ‘For Gold’s sake!’ (modelled on ‘For God’s sake!’). The reply, ‘Good Gold!’ has a similar force.
Maidens late abed on Holy Innocents’ Day were given a spanking.]
Once we had sat down, Catty-claws, amidst his Furry-cats, addressed us in an angry raucous voice: ‘For Gold’s sake! For Gold’s sake! For Gold’s sake!…’
– ‘For drink’s sake! For drink’s sake!’ Panurge muttered between his teeth –
‘A tender maiden, blonde and neat,
An Ethiop son, without a man,
Did drop: ’twas painless. Quite a feat:
Bit through her flank as vipers can.
O’er hill and dale he quickly ran
(Once pierced impatiently her side.)
Then confidently far and wide
He clove the air, he walked the earth.
A lover of wisdom, terrified,
Judged him a human being worth.
‘Now answer me, for Gold’s sake! And, for Gold’s sake solve that riddle at once!’
‘Good Gold!’ I replied, ‘if I had a sphinx at home, Good Gold! as one of your predecessors, Verres did, then, Good Gold! I could, Good Gold! resolve that riddle; but I have never even been there and am, Good Gold! quite innocent of the deed.’
‘For Gold’s sake!’ said Catty-claws; ‘if that is all you have to say, I shall demonstrate to you (for Gold’s sake! by the Styx, since you will say nothing else!) that it would have been better for you to have fallen into the paws of Lucifer and all his devils than into these talons of ours, for Gold’s sake! Don’t you, for Gold’s sake! realize that you wretched man? You plead your innocence, for Gold’s sake! as though that merits your escaping from our tortures, for Gold’s sake! Our laws are like spiders’ webs, for Gold’s sake! For silly flies and little butterflies are caught in them, for Gold’s sake! whilst the big, evil-doing horse-flies, break them and pass through them, for Gold’s sake! We, for Gold’s sake! likewise never go in search of important thieves and oppressors. They are too hard on our stomachs, for Gold’s sake! and would, for Gold’s sake! do us an injury. Now you nice little innocents will get an Innocents-day spanking for Gold’s sake! The great Devil himself, for Gold’s sake!, will chant you a Mass, for Gold’s sake!’
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 92