5. Horace The Art of Poetry, 1. 343.
6. Rabelais made more changes and additions to Pantagruel than to the other three books put together: that is why the footnotes are so much more copious for Pantagruel than for the others.
7. Renaissance comparisons with Silent (including those of Guillaume Budé and Francis Bacon) owe virtually everything to the adage ‘The Sileni of Alcibiades’. (It is translated by Margaret Mann Phillips in The ‘Adages’ of Erasmus (Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 269ff.) For Pythagoras, see Adages, I, I, I, ‘Pythagorean Symbols’. Throughout his works Rabelais remains loyal to an Erasmian concept of Pythagorism.
8. In Pantagruel (following the Latin Vulgate) men must be ‘God’s helpers’. By the time of the Fourth Book, following the original Greek, men must be God’s co-operators. Much laughter is provoked again on this theme by the Frère Jean of the Fourth Book. The technical name for the doctrine of Rabelais is synergism (‘working together’). It can be made consonant with Classical wisdom. Cf. Erasmus Adages III, IX, LV. ‘God helps industriousness’.
9. The little book goes by various names including Le Disciple de Pantagruel and Les Navigations de Panurge, as well as La Navigation du Compagnon à la Bouteille.
10. That links Genesis I with Matthew 23:35.
11. See Chapter 46 of the Third Book and Chapter 48 with its list of fools.
12. Rabelais. The Five Books and Minor Writings Together with Letters and Documents illustrating His Life. A New Translation with Notes by W. F. Smith, Fellow of Saint John’s College, Cambridge, and Member of the Rabelais Club (2 vols., Alexander P. Watt, 1893).
13. The Toronto Adages are far too dear for most pockets but are in many libraries. (The translations given there may differ from those given here.) The Adages with the comments upon them remain one of the surest and richest ways of entering into aspects of the mind of Rabelais.
1. A New Rabelais Bibliography (Geneva: Droz, 1987).
2. Rabelais, Pantagruel, trans. V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1946, with later reprints).
3. Abel LeFranc et al. (eds.), Œuvres de Rabelais (Paris: Champion): Gargantua: 1913; Pantagruel: 1922; Le Tiers Livre: 1931; and continued for Le Quart Livre (up to Chapter 17) by Paul Delaunay, Antoinette Huon, Robert Marichal, Charles Perrat and V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, and Lille: Librairie Giard, 1955).
4. Rabelais; Œuvres complètes, éd. Mireille Huchon with the collaboration of François Moreau (Paris: Editions de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1994).
5. Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, éd. and trans. Guy Demerson (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995).
1. ’42:… in a few other tall-standing books…
2. The Latin legal adage really means ‘Doers and Abettors’ (are punished with the same punishments).
3. ’42:… which was untrue. I am speaking like a Pelican lawyer – I mean a Vatican lawyer – talking of martyred lovers: I mean, like a protonotary talking of love-affairs: ‘We bear witness of what we have seen’…
The quotation is from the first words of the First Epistle of John, who is identified with the author of the Apocalypse (the Book of Revelation).
4. ’42:… not only those of the Arabs, Barbarians and Latins but also the Greek Gentiles who were everlasting topers. You should note…
5. ’42:… bissextile days when the sun lurched like debitoribus somewhat to the left, and the moon wandered more than ten yards from her course. Then was clearly seen a libration in what is called the aplanic firmament: the central star of the Pleiades quitted her companions and declined towards the equinoctial, whilst the star named Pica abandoned Virgo and retrogressed towards Libra; which are most disturbing events and matters so hard and difficult that the astrologers cannot get their teeth into them. (They would need very long teeth anyway to reach that far!) Now note…
Even those without Latin knew debitoribus from the Lord’s Prayer, where it means ‘our debtors’ or, ‘hem that trespass against us’. It gives a comic solemnity to the word debtors.
6. ’42:… But many diverse mishaps befell them, for their bodies developed most horrible bulges…
7. Since i and j were the same letter, there is a play on jambe (leg) and iambic (a metre of verse).
8. Canon Panzoult’s name (which is also that of a village in Touraine) plays on panes, (paunch); Piedebois means Wooden-foot.
9. The Latin poet Ovid’s surname Naso means nose. A common jest treated ne (not) in the Latin Vulgate as though it meant nose, as nez does in French. The text reads ‘ne reminiscaris’, echoing Deuteronomy 8:14 and Tobit 3:3, but to convey some of the humour to readers of English the translation transposes the jest to Jeremiah 46:25.
10. ’42:… the Massoretes are those fine, well-hung and beautiful Hebrew windbags who affirm that Hurtaly was in truth never actually inside Noah’s Ark…
11. At the Battle of Marignano, 1515, one of the enemy’s horn-trumpeters stormed the French canons but was then killed astride one of them.
12. ’42:… But have a good swig before you go…
13. ’42:… corner-ium. What did he do, my Good People? What did he do? Listen. He tried to snap…
14. ‘’42:… birds. It is now called the Great Crossbow at Chantelle. He then sent him…
15. The description ‘more divine than human’ is applied in the first edition to the Pont du Garde, not to the Amphitheatre at Nïmes. In ’42 the phrase is plural, so applying to both.
16. The names of these five places of ill repute are omitted in ’42.
17. ’42:… what Octavian Augustus said: that we should avoid stray words…
18. ’42:… in Aurelians for the last two hundred and fourteen years. It was…
19. I Corinthians 15 is the chapter in which Saint Paul stresses the reality of the resurrection of the dead and immortality.
For the use of the Classical term period by theologians, cf. an adage of Erasmus: I, VI, LXVII, ‘He lives beyond his thread’; Theologians call ‘period’ that fated boundary of life beyond which it is wrong for anyone to run.
20. In German: ‘My Lord: God grant you happiness and good luck. First you must know, my good Lord, that what you are questioning me about is a sad and unfortunate matter which it would be nasty for you to hear and for me to relate, even though former poets and orators have said that recalling past poverty and misery is a great pleasure.’ There is an echo of a well-known part of Virgil said during a tempest: ‘One day perhaps we shall be pleased to recall this’ (Aeneid, 1, 203).
21. Panurge, in a kind of Hispano-Moorish, is apparently asking Pantagruel for Chinon cakes and stew: otherwise he will bugger him, Scottish-style.
22. In Italian: ‘You can recognize, Signor mio, that the bagpipe, for example, never sounds except when its belly is full. I likewise could never tell you of my fate unless my troubled belly be given its habitual food, for which my hands and teeth have lost their natural role and are reduced to nothing.’
23. In Scottish, with some guesses at the meaning: ‘My Lord, if you be as strong in intelligence as you are by nature supplied in the body, you should take pity on me, for Nature made us equal, but some Fortune has exalted and some depressed; nevertheless virtue is often despised and virtuous men depressed; for before the last End there is no one good.’
24. In a peasant form of Basque: ‘Great Sir, for all ills a remedy is needed; the difficulty is to act aright. I have so besought you! See that we can have some order in what we say. That will be without resentment if you make my satisfaction come. After that ask from me what you will. It will do you no harm to meet the expenses of both, God-willing.’ At least the word Genicoa (God willing) would have been recognized: it was the ‘typical’ Basque word.
25. Lanternese seems a vaguely Scandinavian-sounding tongue; here one can recognize some French proper names.
26. In Dutch: Panurge says, more or less: ‘Sir, I am speaking no tongue but a Christian tongue; but it seems to me that, without uttering one word, my rags are enough to show what I want. Be kind enou
gh to supply me the food I need.’
27. In Spanish: ‘Too much talking has tired me out. That is why I beseech your Reverence to think about the commandments of the Gospel so that you be brought to what your conscience requires of you, and if they are not enough to move your Reverence to pity, I beg you to think about natural pity, which I think will move you as you ought, and so I cease talking.’
‘42 reads ‘Seignor’ not ‘Señor’.
28. In Danish: ‘Sir, even if, like babies and beasts, I spoke no language, my clothes and the skinniness of my body should clearly show what I need, that is food and drink. Take pity on me then and have enough sent to me to overcome the barking of my stomach just as one places sops before Cerberus; thus you shall live long and contentedly.’
29. The hesitant Hebrew means: ‘Peace be with you, sir. If you wish to do some good to your servant, give him at once a hunk of bread, as it is written: “He that hath pity on the poor lendeth to the Lord.” ‘(The quotation is from Proverbs 19:17.)
30. In Classical Greek, transcribed in the modern form of which Lascaris approved but not Erasmus: ‘Excellent master, why do you not give me some bread? You see me pitiably perishing from hunger yet you show me no pity and ask me irrelevant questions. Yet all lovers of literature know that talk and words are superfluous when the facts are clear to everyone. Discussion is required only when the facts discussed are not evident.’
31. The third artifical tongue. It has not been deciphered assuming, that it can be. Sir Thomas More invented an alphabet for the language of Utopia.
32. In Classical Latin: ‘Several times I have already besought you by things holy and all the gods and goddesses to relieve my need if any pity can move you, but my wails and plaints have had no effect. Allow me, I beg you, allow me, you wicked men, to go whither the Fates call me, and weary me no longer with your vain greetings, mindful of that ancient adage which says a hungry belly had no ears.’ The texts read as printed: deos deasque omnis.
Erasmus, Adages, VI, II, XII, ‘A hungry man is not to be addressed’, is conflated with II, VIII, LXXXIV, ‘the belly has no ears’.
33. ’42:… begged him to net up the case, sieve it through and report to them…
34. ‘42 omits: and use them as a crucified uses a fife.
35. ’42:… up to a well-biased number to go to the New Year’s mistletoes…
36. ’42:… dispatch bulls by foot and bulls by horseback…
37. ’42:… great with a pot ful of cabbage, according…
38. ’42 omits: and thus walk about during divine service…
39. ‘42:… not sign oneself with ruffians: the rainbow freshly ground at Milan so as to hatch out the skylarks, he consented that the goodwife should dish up the sciatics through the protestation of the little fishes, which…
40. ’42:… of seconding the tumbled washing…
41. ’42:… employ when expounding the etymology of high-soled…
42. ’42:… or else make goblets. If some…
43. ’42:… by daylight folk. In the year…
44. ’42:… three hundred turnips and…
45. ’42:… triad at the big end, beware the ace… bed and lecher away hey, nonny, nonny, and drink to excess and drown the frog-ibuses in fine boots…
46. A play on the cry attributed to cowardly Swiss mercenaries, ‘Alies ist verloren bei Gott’, which allows of a Latino-German pun between ver-loren and frelorum (meaning ‘of the hornets’). The jest is omitted in ’42.
47. ’42:… buy the fleece for tuppence-ace: I mean… (Echoes of Pathelin, 252.)
48. ’42:… find in all good bagpipes that…
49. ’42:… time of Good Nelly sublimate the penury of his member…
50. ’42:… was groaning like an ass… (words cut out).
51. An echo of Acts 10:34: ‘God is no respecter of persons.’
52. ’42:… considered that the oppilation of the spleen-hat bravely declines from… provocations of the light-shunners… clime of a monkey on horseback…
53. ’42:… innocent of the privileged crime of turds which it was believed he had incurred since he could not comfortably defecate owing to the decision of a pair of gloves perfumed with a volley of farts, walnut-candle style, such as are used in his Mirabeau country…
Mirabeau was famous for its windmills. Reading fianter (defecate) for fianser (affiance), as in all other texts.
54. ’42:… innocent of the privileged crime of turds which it was believed he had incurred since he could not comfortably defecate owing to the decision of a pair of gloves perfumed with a volley of farts, walnut-candle style, such as are used in his Mirabeau country…Mirabeau was famous for its windmills. Reading fianter (defecate) for fianser (affiance), as in all other texts.
55. ’42:… where lay the palliasse of my Lord the Roaster. At once…
56. There is a schoolboy play on words between jambon (ham) and Iamblicus, made possible by i and j being then the same letter.
57. A jest is at the expense of Noël Béda, the hunchbacked syndic of the Sorbonne who was falling into disgrace: Hagios athanatos ho theos (Holy is God and immortal) is a Greek phrase embedded in the liturgy for Good Friday.
58. In ’42, it was a young Corinthian maiden who was concerned. Since Greek antiquity the women of Corinth were associated with sexual licence.
59. ’42 omits: like Sodom and Gomorrah.
60. ’42:… inspired me, telling me of a most opportune cure for tooth-ache. – ‘Tooth-ache!’ said Pantagruel, ‘Why were you afraid of that? I thought your rheumatics were cured. – ‘By Cod and his Easter,’ answered Pan-urge, ‘is there any tooth-ache worse than when dogs sink their teeth into your legs? But I suddenly…
61. ’42:… and with those many stiff tools which, throughout, dwell in claustral codpieces. What devil could…
The allusion in the first edition is to the State Entry into Paris of Queen Eléonore of Austria, the second wife of François I, in 1520: many prisoners, instead of being pardoned, were sent to the galleys. Some of them may have been castrated. (See Montaiglon, Anciennes Poésies Françoises, 21, n.55.) As often, Rabelais cuts out a joke which could offend his monarch.
62. ’42:… from befouling it. Meanwhile…
63. ’42 omits: God commands us to.
64. ’42 omits: Queen Maria and.
65. ’42:… bringing more moss than eighteen bales would hold, and began…
66. 42:… stuffed in sixteen-and-a-half bales when he cried…
67. ’42 omits: Ah, well. Since God so wishes.
68. ’42 omits: – women theologians, kissers of images –.
69. ’42 omits: and the Theologians.
70. ’42:… When they [i.e. the Masters of Arts] were assigned to assemble in the Rue du Fouarre, he prepared… (Arts lectures were held in the Rue du Fouarre.)
71. ’42:… very early in the morning, smeared and anointed with it all the pavement… (word cut out).
72. The jest is here transposed: the original equivocation is between femme folle à la messe (a woman foolish at Mass) and femme molle à la fesse (woman soft in the arse).
73. Petrus de Alliaco is a fourteenth-century theologian, cited for fun.
74. ’42:… poor blessed fathers…
The original phrase, ‘handsome fathers’, renders literally the Greek title caloyer (adopted also in English), which applied to the Orthodox clergy. Rabelais later uses it of himself.
75. ’42:… laundry-girl in the Palais de Justice while removing a louse…
76. Maître Mouche (Master Fly) was the nickname of an Italian who gave financial advice to Philippe le Bel. He was held to have devalued the coinage.
77. Grate vobis Dominos (for Grate vobis Domines) is, in ungrammatical Latin, a play on words, taking the Do of Dominos taken to mean ‘give’ and the nos to mean nous (‘us’).
78. In ’42 the scriptural texts are changed to: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord’ and ‘Love the Lord’. Originally the references are to Deuteronomy
6:13: ‘Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve’ conflated with Luke 4:8, and with ‘love thy neighbour’, part of Christ’s summary of the Law. ‘Thou shalt receive an hundredfold’ is adapted from Matthew 19:29.
79. In ’42 ‘stiffen up’ (aressoient) has been replaced by ‘play the buffalo’ (bubajalloient).
80. ’42:… in rut and on heat…
81. Master Pooh-pooh renders Maistre Fyfy, the nickname of the close-stool man who collected the night-soil.
82. Prudential changes made in ’42:… reading The Cask of Night-soil and the Quart of the Scentences, but only in the fair light of day and in the sight of the other Sophists with in the lecture halls of the Rue du Fouarre; for which I was condemned…
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