Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

  ‘Well now, good folk,’ said Panurge, ‘could you not ring his guts well round with good, strong bands or great hoops (of sorb-apple wood, or if needs be of iron)? Bound thus, he wouldn’t so readily cast out his intestines and so readily burst.’

  Those words were not uttered before we heard a sound in the air, loud and rasping as though a great oak had been split in two. His neighbours then said that his bursting was over: that splitting sound had been his dying fart.

  Which made me think of that venerable abbot of Castilliers, who deigned to lie with his chamber-maids only when clad in full canonicals. As he was getting old he was badgered by his family and friends to resign his Abbey; he stated and declared that he would never give up before he was laid out, and that the last fart as his Paternity would be the fart of an abbot.

  How our ship ran aground; and how we were succoured by voyagers who were vassals of Quintessence

  CHAPTER 17

  [There is a break in subject here. This and the following chapters show a concern with alchemy.

  The philosopher whose wisdom was summed up with the saying ‘Bear and forbear’ was the Cynic Epictetus. Erasmus (in Adages, II, VII, XIII, ‘Sustine et abstine’ (that is ‘Bear and forebear’) explains that we should ‘abstain’ from illicit things fab illicitis temperemus). The author here thinks temperemus means we should temporize (not, abstain). A real gaffe.

  ‘So many valets: so many enemies’ figures amongst the Adages of Erasmus (I, III, XXXI) where there is no word of Plautus but much about Seneca, who said it, and Plato.

  ‘To avoid Scylla and fall into Charybdis’ is a commonplace, but also an adage of Erasmus (I, V, IV).

  ‘Castor and Pollux above the sails’ was what the Ancients called Saint Elmo’s fire.

  ‘Done well, haven’t I?’ is a saying of Pathelin already met in the Prologue to the Fourth Book.

  Geber was an eighth-century alchemist.]

  Having weighed our anchors and slipped our cables, we set sail, blown by the gentle Zephyr. Some twenty-two miles further on there arose a boisterous whirlwind with a variety of gusts; we skirted it, temporizing by setting our top-gallants and our topsails, with the sole aim of not being accused of going against the instructions of the pilot, who personally assured us that we had no great good to hope for, and no great harm to fear given the lightness of those breezes, their pleasant skirmishes and the calmness of the air. The philosopher’s adage was therefore relevant to us, which tells us to Bear and forbear, that is, to temporize.

  That whirlwind went on for so long, however, that, at our importuning, the pilot tried forcing a way through it, sticking to our original route. And indeed, after hoisting the mizzen and setting the helm strictly by the needle of the compass, we did force our way through that whirlwind thanks to a stiff gale which was blowing. But we were as discomfited as though we had struck Scylla by avoiding Charybdis: some two miles on our ships were stranded amidst shoals similar to the shallows at Saint-Maixent. All our crew were deeply distressed. A strong wind came whistling through our mizzen; Frère Jean never once gave way to melancholy but consoled this man and heartened that one by gentle words, assuring them that we would soon receive help from Heaven and that he had glimpsed Castor shining atop the lateen-yards.

  ‘Would to God,’ said Panurge, ‘that I was at this hour upon land. Nothing more. And that every man-jack of you who loves the briny had two hundred thousand crowns apiece. I would set a calf aside for you and get a hundred bundles of firewood ready against your return. All right then: I agree never to get married: just see that I’m set ashore with a horse to carry me back. I shall manage well enough without a valet. Plautus was telling no lie when he said that the number of our crosses – that is to say of our afflictions, torments and vexations – is in proportion to the number of our valets, yes, even were they to lack the most dangerous and evil part of a valet, his tongue, on account of which alone the torturing, racking and questioning of valets was instituted; there were no other reasons, although in those days and outside this kingdom glossators of the law drew from it an a-logical (i.e., an unreasonable) conclusion.’

  Just then there came a ship alongside laden with drums; on it I recognized a few voyagers of good family. Amongst others was Henry Cotiral, an old comrade, who bore a huge ass’s prick dangling from his belt in the manner that women carry their rosaries, whilst in his left hand he held a dirty, great, gross, scabby old hat, and in his right hand a big cabbage-stump. He recognized me at sight and cried out with joy and said to me, ‘Done well, haven’t I! Look upon this’ – displaying his ass’s prick – ‘it is the true alchemical Amalgam; and this bonnet is our one and only Elixir; and this – here he pointed to his cabbage-stump – is moonwort. When you return we shall make it do its work.’

  ‘But,’ said I, ‘where do you come from? Where are you going to? What goods are you bringing? Have you smelt the sea-breeze?’

  He replied, ‘From Quintessence. To Touraine. Alchemy. Arse-deep in it.’

  ‘And who are those people up on deck with you?’ I said.

  ‘Songsters,’ he replied, ‘musicians, poets, astrologers, rhymesters, geomancers, alchymists, horologists. They are all vassals of Quintessence. They all hold beautiful and ample letters of credence from her.’

  Those words were hardly out of his mouth when Panurge spoke, annoyed and indignant: ‘You lot can do anything; you can beget fine weather and little children! Why don’t you stand out to sea and tow us straightway out into the main stream?’

  ‘I was about to do so,’ said Henry Cotiral. ‘At this very hour, this very moment, immediately now, you will be off the sea-bottom.’

  He then set about staving in one side of his 7532810 big drums. He placed them with their stove-in sides facing towards the foc’s’le, and then tightly affixed all the cables to their housings. He then shackled our bow to his stern by their bollards. To our jubilation he easily tugged us off the sands with the very first heave; for the sound of the drums combined with the soft grating of the gravel and the shanties of the crew produced a harmony for us not less than the harmony of the stars in their courses, which Plato said he had sometimes heard whilst he slept at night.13

  We were loathe to appear ungrateful for that good deed, so we shared our chidlings with them, piled sausages into their drums and were hauling sixty-two leathern bottles of wine on to the deck when two huge physeters impulsively approached their ship and spouted more water into it than the river Vienne contains between Chinon and Saumur; those physeters spouted their drums full of water, soused all their sail-yards, and swamped their nether-breeches through the top ribbing. On seeing which, Panurge entered into so excessive a joy and was so merry that he had a stitch in his side for two hours or more.

  ‘I intended to tip them with wine,’ he said, ‘but their water was served most apropos! They never bother with fresh water except for washing their hands: this lovely salt water will serve them as borax, nitre and sal ammoniac in Geber’s pantry.’

  We were not able to have further discussions with them, principally because the whirlwind had deprived us of free control of the rudder. The pilot begged us to allow the seas to guide us from now on, not bothering about anything save having a good time. If we wanted to reach the kingdom of Quintessence without danger, the right thing was to yield a while to the current and be borne round this whirlwind.

  How we arrived at the Kingdom of Quintessence, called Entelechy

  CHAPTER 18

  [A chapter echoing a scholarly quarrel and a learned jest. In Greek entelechy (coming into actuality) and endelechy (duration) are two quite independent words confused even in Antiquity. The confusion is a cause of amusement in Lucian’s Consonants at Law, 10, where the letter D complains to the jury that T ‘has robbed her of entelechy, wanting it to be called endelechy against all the laws’. Guillaume Budé discusses the true meaning of both words in De Asse (1515). All the discussion flows from Aristotle (On the Soul, 2, 12); he calls the soul the entelechia of t
he body (that by which it actually is). Cicero made the subject evergreen by his mistake over the word (Tusculan Epistles, 1, 10).

  Mataeotechny is a Greek word defined by Quintilian (2, 10, 2–3) as ‘an unprofitable imitation of art which is neither good nor bad but involves a useless expenditure of labour’. Here that art is alchemy.

  In a jest already met in Rabelais’ preliminary epistle to Odet de Châtillon for the Fourth Book, the portmanteau word rhubarbative again links rebarbative (crabbed, unattractive) with rhubarb.]

  Having skilfully skirted round the whirlwind for half a day, on the next day (the third) it seemed to us that the air was serener than usual; we came ashore safe and sound in the harbour of Mataeotechny, a short distance from the palace of Quintessence.

  Once disembarked in that port we found ourselves beard-to-beard with a large number of bowmen and men-at-arms who were guarding the arsenal. They all but frightened us at first since they obliged us all to disarm and then interrogated us roughly, saying, ‘What country do you come from, shipmates?’

  ‘Cousins,’ said Panurge, ‘we hale from Touraine. We are coming now from France, keen to pay our respects to the Dame of Quintessence and to visit this famous kingdom of Entelechy.’

  ‘Do you say Entelechy or Endelechy?’ they asked.

  Panurge replied, ‘Fair Cousins, we are simple, ignorant folk. Please allow for the boorishness of our way of speaking, for our hearts are nevertheless frank and loyal.’

  ‘It is not without cause,’ they said, ‘that we have questioned you about that variant. A great many of other folk who have passed through here from Touraine appear to be good solid fellows who spoke correctly, but there have come here men from other lands, overweening men, as fierce as Scotsmen, men who, as soon as they arrived, stubbornly wanted to argue the point. They got a good dressing-down despite their putting on rhubarbative faces. Have you such a great superfluity of leisure time in that world of yours that you have no idea how to spend it except by impudently talking, arguing and writing thus about our Sovereign Lady? To meddle in this matter Cicero felt obliged to abandon his Respublica; similarly Diogenes Laertius, Theodore Gaza, both Argyropolous and Bessarion, as well as Politian, and Budé and Lascaris and all those wise-foolish devils, the number of whom would not have been large enough without Scaliger, Bigot, Chambrier, François Fleury and Lord knows how many other prinked-out wretches.14

  ‘May a nasty quinsy get them by the throat and the epiglottis! We’ll…’

  ‘What the divel,’ said Panurge between his teeth, ‘they’re flattering the devils.’

  ‘You have not come here to support them in their madness and you have no power of proxy. So we shall say no more about them. Aristotle, the first amongst men and the very model of all philosophy, was godfather to our Sovereign Lady. He very well and appropriately named her Entelechy. That is her true name: Entelechy. Whoever would call her otherwise may go for a shit. Whoever calls her anything else is heavens-wide of the mark. You are most welcome.’

  They then embraced us, and we were all very happy.

  Panurge said in my ear: ‘Were you not, fellow traveller, just a little bit scared by that first clash?’

  ‘A little,’ I replied.

  ‘I was,’ he said, ‘more indeed than the soldiers of Ephraim when they were slaughtered and drowned by the Gileadites for saying Sibboleth not Shibboleth.15 And (that’s enough!) there is not a man in all Beauce who could have stopped up the hole in my bum with a cart-load of hay.’

  The Captain, with great ceremonial, subsequently conveyed us in silence to the palace of the queen. Pantagruel wanted to say a word to him, but since the Captain could not reach up to his height, he expressed a desire for a ladder or for very tall stilts. He then said, ‘Be that as it may: if our Sovereign Lady so wished we would be as tall as you are. So we shall, when it so pleases her.’

  In the first galleries we came across a great multitude of the sick, who were variously segregated according to the variety of their maladies: the lepers were apart; the sufferers from poison here; the sufferers from the plague there; the syphilitics in the front row, and so on.

  How Quintessence cured the sick by singing songs

  CHAPTER 19

  [The first list of Hebrew words would not of course have been understood except by at most a handful of readers. The meanings of the second series of Hebrew words could have been partly inferred from their context.

  See Lucian’s Philosophies for Sale, and also Erasmus (Adages, IV, III, LXXII, ‘More taciturn that Pythagoreans’, and III, VII, XCVI, ‘To scratch one’s head; bite one’s nails’.

  For the importance of silence for the Egyptians, see Adages I, VI, LII, ‘He made him Harpocrates’ (that is, he made him mute like Harpocrates, the Egyptian god of silence portrayed with his finger over his lips). He is mentioned by Catullus, 74. The ‘king’s touch’ is the special power of the kings of England and France to cure scrofula simply by their touch.

  For the ‘diphthera’, the goat-skin on which Jupiter records all of our deeds, cf. Erasmus, Adages, II, V, XXIV, ‘You are speaking of things older than the diphthera’ (that is, fabulous nonsense from the distant past), and I, VIII, XXIV, ‘A witness from Jove’s tables’ (citing the indirect evidence of Lucian).

  The word ‘eginchus’ applied to it must be an error for aigiochos (aegis-bearing), the title of Zeus (Jupiter) and also of Athena, the aegis being both the flashing shield of the god and (by a false etymology) the goat-skin of Zeus and of Athena.

  The speech of the queen, pompous, obscure, and deliberately obscure, is apparently meant to be taken seriously as saying something deep.]

  In the second gallery, by the Captain, we were shown the dame, young (despite being eighteen centuries old) beautiful, refined and gorgeously arrayed, surrounded by her ladies and noblemen.

  The Captain said to us, ‘Now is not the time to speak to her: simply be attentive spectators of what she does. In your realm you have some kings who, by the power of imagination, merely by the touch of their hands, cure certain maladies such as the king’s evil, epilepsy and quartan fevers: our queen cures all maladies without even touching, simply by singing a song appropriate to each illness.’

  He then showed us the organ by her playing of which she works her miraculous cures. It was of a strange construction, for its pipes were made of sticks of cassia; its sounding-board, of lignum vitae; its stops, of rhubarb; its pedals, of turpeth; its keyboard, of scammony. While we were contemplating the wonderful and novel way in which that organ was built, there were brought to her (by her abstractors, spodizators, malax-ators, tasters, tabachins, chachanins, neemanins, rabrebans, nereins, rozuins, nedibins, nearins, segamions, perazons, chesi-nins, sarins, sotrins, aboth, enilins, archasdarpenins, mebins, giborins and other of her officers) the lepers. She played them I-know-not-what song and they were all at once perfectly cured. Then there were brought in those who had been poisoned: she sang them a different song: and they were on their feet! Then came the blind, the deaf and the mute who were similarly treated. We were astounded, and rightly so; we fell to the ground, prostrating ourselves as men caught up in ecstasy, as men enraptured in mind-departing contemplation and wonder at the powers which we had seen proceeding from that dame. We found it impossible to utter a word, so we remained thus on the floor until she, touching Pantagruel with a bouquet of species-roses held in her hand, restored us to our senses and set us back on our feet. She then addressed us in words of fine linen such as Parysitis desired to be uttered when addressing Cyrus her son, or at the very least in words of armozean taffeta.

  ‘The candour which scintillates from the circumference of your minds fully convinces me of the virtue hidden within their ventricles; and, having noted the mellifluous suavity of your eloquent courtesies, I am readily persuaded that your heart suffers no vitiation nor any paucity of deep and liberal learning but abounds rather in several peregrine and rare disciplines which nowadays (because of the common practices of the imperite mob) are m
ore easily sought than caught.

  ‘That explains why I, who have in the past overmastered any private emotions, cannot now restrain myself from uttering to you the most trite words in the world, namely: Be ye welcome, most welcome, most utterly welcome.’

  Panurge said discreetly to me, ‘I am no scholar: you can answer her if you like.’ But I made no reply; nor did Pantagruel. We kept mute. Whereupon the queen said:

  ‘From this your silence I realize that not only are you sprung from the School of Pythagoras (in which the antiquity of my progenitors set down roots in successive propagations) but also have, for many a moon, bitten your nails and scratched your head with one finger in Egypt, that celebrated forge of high philosophy. In the School of Pythagoras taciturnity was the symbol of knowledge, and amongst the Egyptians silence was recognized as deifying praise. In Hieropolis the pontiffs sacrificed to their great god in silence, making no noise, uttering no word. My design is not to enter into any privation of gratitude towards you but rather, by living forms (even though their matter strove to abstract itself from me) to eccentricate my thoughts to you.’