This is a play on the Sentences of Peter Lombard; also on quart, the liquid measure, and the Quart, the Fourth Book of the Sentences. Again Rabelais replaces theologians by arts men and their place of assembly, which is not in the Sorbonne.
83. ‘Donkey-dice’ is a pun: baudets, donkeys, and beaulx dez, beautiful dice. ‘I-deny-Gosb’ will be one of Gargantua’s games (see Gargantua, Chapter 20).
84. ’42 omits: And Jesus Christ: was he not hanged in the air? But apropos.
85. ’42:… and sailed upon the great river Physon…
86. ’42:… texts of philosophy, geomancy and the cabbala…
87. ’42:… resolution of them, even in the depths of that inexhaustible well in which Heraclitus said that Truth lies hidden. I greatly approve… (Rabelais confuses Heraclitus with Democritus.)
88. Again the allusion to the Sorbonne disappears, being replaced by:… all those wily green-horned Sophists, will get but…
89. The château de Vauvert near the Latin Quarter was thought by some to be haunted by devils.
90. The words ‘Niborcisans’ and ‘Saniborsins’ suggest that the theologians of the Sorbonne are without bourses (without scholarships and scrotums).
91. ’42 omits: And that was spaced over a good quarter of an hour. At which.
92. ’42:… about insoluble problems concerning…The list of subjects to be discussed restores those cut out in Chapter 13 (later, Chapter 18).
93. The text was changed after the first edition. ’42 reads:… drank with unbuttoned bellies – in those days, you see, they used to fasten their bellies with buttons just as nowadays we fasten our neck-bands – until they were slurring…
The reference to Hallowe’en (le jour des morts) is cut out.
94. ’42:… enfold this woman in his arms, to kiss her and to rub his slice of bacon against her. That man… for already she loves me fully… let us thrust in-and-out-and-legs-astride!’ Panurge sought…
95. As usual Rabelais made several small stylistic changes in this episode to tighten up his text and eliminate awkwardness. They are not listed. One made after the original edition is worth noting: the change from ‘all the dogs in town’ to ‘all the dogs in the pays’ to avoid a clash with the next phrase, ‘the fairest in the town’.
96. ’42:… Epistemon, in the name of the Nine Muses, quickly prepared nine handsome wooden spits…
97. Matthew 19:12, cited in the Vulgate Latin, ‘Qui potest capere capiat’, which allows a play on words: ‘let him grasp’ (both intellectually and physically).
98. ’42:… drink it, Breton-fashion…
99. ’42:… compounded of a lithonrhriptic, a nephrocathartic, some canthandarized quince-jelly and other diuretic specifics…
100. ’42: omits: which is more frightening than that of Stentor when heard above all the din of the Trojans’ battle.
101. ’42:… But – there was the danger: the fire…
102. ’42: omits the second ‘Pantagruel!’.
103. ’42: omits: and I, who could knock down as many as a dozen such as David, for he was only a little shit of a fellow then, shall I not down a good dozen?(The allusion is to I Samuel 17.)
104. ’42:… killing the poor little chap. Whereupon he…
105. ’42:… struck more than nine hundred and six barrels of fire…
106. Immediately after the first edition Rabelais changed the name of the giant Moricault to Rifflandouille (Maulchiddling), a name borrowed from the mystery-plays and which he will use much later in the Fourth Book.
107. ’42:… powdered diashit – he always… put in fifteen or sixteen stitches round it to prevent…
108. All reference to the Douzepers (the twelve legendary Peers of France) is omitted after the original edition, presumably as offensive to touchy royal ears.
109. ’42:… best there are. Julius Caesar and Pompey…
110. 110. ’42:… a cooper; Pyrrhus, a scullion…
111. ’42:… Nerva was a stable lad… (This avoids mocking a royal French hero.)
112. ’42 omits: I am not sure whether he was a vignerons’ hodman.
113. A pun: Pape Tiers (the third pope), papetier (a paper-monger).
114. ’42:… King Tigranes was a tiler… (Again the change avoids mocking a king of France.)
115. ’42:… he was the nicest little chap there ever was…
116. ’42:… ‘True God!’ I Said…
117. ’42:… each with a spade over his shoulder…
118. ’42:… and thus they all tumbled over more than half a league down into a horrid stinking abyss, worse than Memphitis or the Camarine Marshes or the putrid lake of the Sorbona described by Strabo. And were it not for the fact that they had taken an antidotary for the heart, stomach and ‘wine-pot’ – their name for your noddle – they would have been suffocated and snuffed out by those ghastly vapours. Oh what a perfume, what a vaporative with which to manure the nose-veils of our Gallic ladies of easy virtuel Thereafter, groping and flairing their way, they drew near to the faecal matter and the corrupt humours. Finally they discovered…
119. ’42:… beautiful matters. Good evening…
120. ‘Pardon me’ is in Italian.
121. The French words leading on from ‘articulating’ (drawing up articles of accusation) are, in order, monorticulant (mumbling), torticulant (a verb based on a deformation of a standard word for hypocrite, torticol (wry-necked), here changed to ‘wry-arsed’), culletant (scratching one’s bum or arsing about), couilletant (bollocking about), diabliculant (acting like the devil), and callumniant (‘calumniating’ or telling lies).
122. The ‘folk who peer through a hole’ are presumably delators or the censors themselves.
123. The definitive end in ’42 reads:The end of the Chronicles of Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, restored to the original, together with his deeds and bold exploits compiled by the late Maïtre ALCOFRIBAS, ABSTRACTER of the Quintessence.
1. In ’42 the title reads: Pantagrueline Prognostication, /certain, true and infallible, for the year perpetual,/newly composed for the profit and counsel of natural blockheads and sluggards/ by Master Alcofribas, Ruler of the Feast of the said Pantagruel./ Of the Golden Number, nothing is said: / no matter what calculation I make I cannot find any at all this year. Let us pass Beyond.
For the Golden Number see the note at the end of the Almanac for 1535.
2. Jehan de Gravot is a spoof, but Caesar’s judgement (Gallic Wars, 4, 5) was well known.
3. Astropbiles: lovers of the stars; hypernephalists: those who are raised above the clouds; anemophylakoi cloud-watchers (a word forged, perhaps by Rabelais, from the Greek anemos (wind) and phulaks (watcher)), uranopetes: droppers-down from heaven; ombrophores: bringers of rain.
4. Reminiscence of a famous saying of Tiresias the ancient prophet, widely known through an adage of Erasmus (III, III, XXXV, ‘A sign good or bad’), where Erasmus cites a satire of Horace (2, 39) which Rabelais echoes here too.
5. From ’42:… will be most grievously punished! Little towsings sauced with bovine straps will not be spared on your shoulders, and you will slurp in air as much as you like as though air were oysters; for, confidently, some folk will be very hot unless the baker drops off. So now…
6. Romans 11:36.
7. ’35, ’37, ’38 only:… First Cause. And in this he is speaking the truth, even though elsewhere he raged beyond measure…
From ’42: that sentence is replaced by: The little chap’s telling the truth, isn’t he!
8. From ’42:… On this year’s eclipses.
9. From ’35:… This year there will be so many eclipses of the Sun and the Moon that I feel (not wrongly) that our purses will suffer from inanition and our senses from perturbation. Saturn will be retrograde…
10. From ’35:… they used to, at your behest. As a result…
11. From ’35 omit: and pillows be found at the foot of the bed. Replaced from ’37 by:… the spits on the andirons, and the bonnets on the head-g
ear…
12. From ’35:… game-bag; fleas, for the most part, will he black, and bacon will avoid peas in Lent; the belly…
13. From ’35:… flatter them, and the lucky throw you ask for often not come; and the beasts…
14. Quarëmeprenant (Mardi Gras or approaching Shrovetide) always loses his annual battle against Lent.
15. From ’35:… to fool the other and will run through the streets like men mad and out of their senses: never was there seen.
16. From ’35:… ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ Upon my faith, Nobody. For God is too good and too powerful. So here, in return, bless His holy name. (For a joke Nemo (Nobody) was treated as though it were a proper name, introducing many surprising jests into the Latin Vulgate.)
See Romans 8:31 for the quotation from Saint Paul.
17. This phrase was omitted (by mistake?) from one of the editions of 1533.
18. From ’42:… to the lower limbs; eye-infections will be strongly inimical to sight; ears will be – more than is usual – short and rare in Gascony and there will all but universally reign…
19. From ’35:… the philosopher’s stone and Midas’ ears. I quake with fear at the thought of it, for there will be an epidemic; Averroës…
20. From ’35:… scabs. At whose death there will be horrid sedition between cats and rats, hounds and hares, falcons and ducks, monks and eggs…
21. From ’42:… reasonably priced. Rue and sad herbs will thrive more than usual, together with choke-pears. Never shall you see…
My translation here is free: Rabelais plays untranslatably on souci (marigold, or care); ancholie, (columbine or melancholy); poires d’angoisse, (bitter, wild ‘choke-pears’ or pears of anguish).
22. Triboullet and Cailhette were real court fools.
23. ’35, ’37:… cobblers, tanners, debt-collectors, patchers-up of old boots and the melancholy… From ’38:… tanners, tillers, bell-founders, debt-collectors…
24. The Holy Crosses they hope to ‘invent’ (that is, find) are on the obverse of gold crown-pieces.
25. From ’35:… such as bigots, black-beetles, well-shod monks, indulgence-mongers, drawers-up of papal briefs, scribes, copy-clerks, drawers-up of papal bulls, apostolic dataries, pettifoggers, monks, hermits, hypocrites, purring pussies, pious dissemblers, velvet-pawed hypocrites, wrynecks, paper-scribblers, parchment-scrabblers, notaries and fat-cats, show-offs, sharp-eyes, registrars, image-mongers, medallion-pedlars, rosary-sellers, [’42: vendors of benefices,] registrars of precedence: they will live according to their incomes…
The term for fat-cat, raminagrobis, comes to the fore in the Third Book where it is challengingly used for the name of the good evangelical theologian.
26. From ’35:… or even more. Black-beetlery will jettison a great deal of its antique reputation, since the world has become a naughty boy and is no longer daft, as Abenragel states. Under Mars…
27. ’35, ’37, ’38:… bollock-cutters, barber-surgeons, cheap-jack physicians, Avicennists, renegade Jews, blasphemers…
From ’42:… bollock-cutters, barber-surgeons, butchers, coiners, cheap-jack physicians, almanac-touters, renegade Jews, blasphemers, tinder-match makers…
28. ’35, ’37, ’38, ’53:… such as tipplers, conk-shiners, trussed-back gutses, brewers, trussers-up of hay…
’42, ’53… porters, scythers, roofers, bearers, trussers-up, shepherds, cowmen, cowherds, swineherds, fowlers, gardeners, barn-men, farmers, beggars from hospices, penny-labourers…
29. From ’35:… such as whores, bawds, lechers, buggers, show-offs, sufferers from the malady of Naples, the scabby-arsed, the debauchees… terminating in -aids, such as linen-maids, [’42: soliciting-maids,] barmaids…
30. From ’35:… and very few virgins will produce milk in their breasts…
31. from ’35:… decretists, pack-bearers, trinket-pedlars, poetasters, jugglers, thimbleriggers, spell-binders, fiddlers, wafer-mongers, poets, scoriators of the Latin language, makers of rebuses, stationers, carters, scallywags, and scourges of the sea…
32. From ’35:… such as colporters, huntsmen, stalkers, hawk-trainers, falconers, despatch-riders, salt-sellers, lunatics… messenger-boys, lackeys, valets, glass-blowers, Italian mercenaries, rivermen, matelots, stable-riders, gleaners…
33. 1524 was, astrologically, an exceptionally frightening year. Many Swiss mercenaries had been won over to the early Reformation, especially that of Zwingli in Zurich.
34. From ’42:… Languedoc; so much sand at Olonne, so many fish…
35. From ’35:… angel-crowns, seraphs, royals, and long-fleeced Agnus-Dei…
36. A Quotation from Horace, Odes, 2, 16, 27, which appears in the Adages of Erasmus, III, I, LXXXVII.
37. From ’35: for the long additions made at this point and at the end, see the following Appendix.
38. From ’42:… etc. And no longer pray to God to guard her from the wolves, for they will not touch her this year. That I can promise you. Apropos…
39. From ’42:… reporter. In my days they dated spring from when the Sun entered Aries. If they now date it differently, I give way and say not a word…
40. From ’42, omit: what the weather will be or.
41. A scholastic axiom which was applied in most domains, especially in medicine.
42. From ’42:… himself. Men and women who have vowed to keep their fasts ‘until the stars are in the heavens’ can by my authority and dispensation have a good meal here and now. They are very late about it too, for those stars have been there for some sixteen thousand days plus I-know-not how many more. And very well fixed there, may I say. So no longer hope to catch larks when the heavens fall in, for that will not happen in your lifetime. Hypocrites…
43. From ’42:… bed. Oh. Oh, ye birds. Make ye your nests so high? – Finis. (Perhaps the refrain of a song, and doubtless suggestive of bird-droppings.)
1. There is a lapsus in the Le Roy’s transcription, wrongly reading the same for the glory.
2. A convenient way to understand and calculate the Sunday letter and the Golden Number is to consult the tables in the Book of Common Prayer. The Roman Indiction is the place of each year in the fifteen-year cycle which constitutes the fiscal period. It was used inter alia for dating papal documents. The Solar Cycle is the period of twenty-eight years, at the end of which the Sunday Letters correspond to the letters of the alphabet, beginning with A.
1. The poem is given here after the text of ’35. It is missing from the first edition as it stands.
2. From ’42:… not remains. – ‘Sheep’s courage,’ he said. ‘Finish with this one and we shall soon make another. – ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you men can talk at your ease. All right. For God’s sake I shall struggle through to please you. But I wish to God…
3. In ’42 all is cut out from ‘Does not Solomon’ to ‘no apparency’.
4. From ’35 Rabelais changed ‘nativity’ to ‘birth’.
5. Charity seeketh not her own.
6. A crescent life: that is, a growing, thriving one.
7. Non durabit means in Latin ‘it will not last’, but sounds in French like a non dur (not hard or durable) habit (robe).
8. The above translation is very free. Rendered literally, with explanations inside brackets): I could paint a pénier (that is, a panier; basket) to denote ‘to suffer peines’ (pains), or a pot è moutarde (a mustard-pot) to signify ‘My heart moult tarde’ (much languishes); I could paint a pot à pisser (a chamber-pot) for an ‘official’ (both a chamber pot and an ecclesiastical official); the seat of my breeches for a ‘vessel of farts’ (with the old pun between pets, farts and paix, peace); my codpiece, for a ‘greffe des arrëts’ (a written declaration of judicial sentences); un tronc de céans (a branch here within), ‘Wherein lies the love of my lady.’
9. From ’35:… each of them, if God saves the mould of my bonnet, that is, as my grandma used to say, my wine-pot.
In the first edition, despite the hyperbole, there
is probably not an allusion to the king (often called ‘Le Prince’ by humanists as a Latinism). Le Prince was also the nickname of two Lyonese printers who printed Pantagruel, Claude Nourry, who died in 1533, and Pierre de Sainte-Lucie, with whom Rabelais appears to have quarrelled precisely over his edition of Pantagruel.
10. From ’35:… an ample forest…
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 106