73. Petosiris was an ancient Egyptian astrologer. The woman satirized in Juvenal (6, 580) would not do anything, not even eat, except when the almanac of Petosiris showed the hours to be propitious.
74Rabelais could have taken the word scybala from Philippians 3:8. Erasmus defines σχύβαλον as the dung of dogs. As for spyrathia (σπυQαθια) it is a medical term, applied to ball-dung, the round excrement of sheep and goats. The Brief Declaration defines them respectively as ‘hardened turds’ and the ‘droppings of goats and sheep.’
75Selah is the Hebrew word (a musical notation?) that comes at the end of some seventy-one of the psalms. Its sense is not clear, but it does suggest ‘The End’ “ not least for a former monk who had chanted the psalms day after day throughout the year. The Brief Declaration defines it as meaning ‘certainly’.
1. For publication details, see the Introduction to Pantagruel.
1. Plays on Duns Scotus’ name and skotinos (obscure) have already been met in the Third Book, Chapter 17. See also for laconic speech Erasmus; Adages, II, I, XCII, ‘Battologia, Laconismus’.
2. Cf. a jest in the Prologue to the 1548 Fourth Book, one of the sources of this Prologue.
3. For Philoxenus and Gnatho and their gobbing again see the Prologue to the 1548 Fourth Book.
4. A pun: palais means both ‘palace’ and ‘palate’.
5. Cf. Erasmus, Adages, I, VII, XXXV, ‘Ficulnus (fig-tree wood)’, citing Horace, Satires, 1, 7. Priapus, carved from fig-wood, laughed so much at the sacrifices he witnesses that he split his arse (but when laughing at Hecate not Ceres). It must be supposed that Pantagruel too risked splitting the skin of his backside through laughing.
6‘To uncover a (or the) pot of roses’ meant to uncover a secret or some hidden piece of knavery; more or less, ‘To let the cat out of the bag’.
7. The original saying is, ‘He who sleeps, eats’, that is, being asleep, he can forego a meal even when hungry.
8. By Jupiter-stone was a Latin oath. But pierre (stone, rock) plays on the name of Peter, whose successor the pope claims to be. At all events the papal Peter thunders like Jove, but since it is from a basin, ineffectually, as in Erasmus’s adage, ‘To thunder in a basin’.
9. Pedepulverosi, the ‘Dusty-footed’, were in law a class of travellers subject to summary jurisdiction. Just above there is an echo of Virgil, Aeneid, 6, 126, ‘facilis discensus Averno’ (the descent to Avernus – the underworld, ‘Hell’ – is easy).
10. Cf. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 12013. (The snake biting its tail was an Egyptian hieroglyph for eternity.)
11. This is a borrowing from Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris, 10, 355 A.
12. This chapter in the Isle Sonante continues and ends as follows:… As soon as Frère Jean and the rest of the company were aboard ship, Pantagruel set sail, but there arose a sirocco so violent that they could not maintain their course and almost strayed into the land of the Furry-cats; but they were swept into a swirling deep, the seas being so high and terrifying. A lad who was above the top-gallant shouted that he could again make out the dread domain of Catty-claws. At which Panurge, mad with fear, yelled: ‘Despite the wind and the waves, tug on the bridle! Don’t let’s go back to that wicked land where I left my purse!’ The wind then drove them close to an island at which they dared not land at first but did enter about a mile from there close to some big rocks.
13. For the music of the spheres and Plato, see Chapter 4 of the Third Book.
14. The scholars named are real people who published works touching on the subject, Scaliger doing so after Rabelais was dead. (The presumed misprint Brigot for Bigot has been corrected.).
15. Judges 12:56.
16. Ophiasis in Galen is a bald place on the head, of snake-like or winding form. A relevant adage – not in Erasmus – is ‘To live again like the Phoenix’.
17. The development from here on in this chapter is absent from the manuscript. See Mireille Huchon’s Pléiade Rabelais, p. 1646. There is a clear echo of the Fourth Book (Chapter 65) in what follows.
18. They did alchemy… close-stools: that is, they picked their teeth fasting and ‘extracted’ little enough matter to eat and then to excrete.
19. The manuscript adds: A penalty is attached by Nature, my Queen, if we do not achieve the resolution of spirits.
20. was Celio Calcagnini in his posthumous works who widely spread the opinion that the sun remains still whilst the earth moves. It was Lucretius who wrote that the land seems to move when you follow the shore in a boat.
21. Here the manuscript adds: There we were told moreover that Panigon had retired to a monastery on that isle in his later years and was living in great holiness in the true Catholic faith, without concupiscence, without emotion and without vice, in innocence, loving his neighbour as himself, and God above all things; wherefore he performed many fine miracles. On our leaving Chothu, I saw a mirific portrait of a valet seeking a master, painted some time ago by Charles Charmoy of Aurleans. (Cf. the Fourth Book, Chapter 10 for Panigon, and Chapter 2 for the Charmoy portrait of the valet.).
22. A monastic joke to which Erasmus took exception: charity is like a monastic robe – or as here like a face-mask for ugly ladies – because it covers a multitude of sins. (Cf. I Peter 4:8.).
23. There is a triple pun: rat means the rodent, a blunder and shaven (the last suggesting a shaven-pate monk).
24. Contrepéterie really means a kind of Spoonerism but can be seen as deriving from contre + pet (meaning a ‘counter-fart’ or something similar).
25. The next number after seize (sixteen) is the unmonosyllabic dix-sept.
26. The manuscript adds: ‘Moreover I am in faith very bored here,’ said Panurge. ‘Let us all act each according to his affection. But once I’m married as I wish I shall found a new monkery, I do not mean of monked monks: they are monking monks. I shall nourish Frère Tens or else Frère Narjorie. But they won’t go as fast as Demisemiquavers – (The end is incomprehensible.).
27. Tmesis in rhetoric is the cutting of a word in two. In the original the tmesis produces fou (fool) + teur (-tor) making fouteur, fucker. The jest is here transposed.
28. The name is corrected after the manuscript. It was the daughter of Critias who dedicated a twenty-wick lamp to Serapis.
29. The medieval legal authority Bartolus was surnamed ‘the Light of the Law’. Two late medieval books for chemists were The Luminary of the Apothecaries and The Great Luminary of the Apothecaries.MS:… fat one. Then I recalled Matheline, who allowed neither oil nor candle to be put in her body; nor did she shine like the others, but emitted…
30. The number is as in Plutarch 1017 DF: half of 108. That is: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 9 + 8 + 27, in other words: the first simple number, 1, plus the next two simple numbers, 2 and 3, plus the squares of 2 and of 3, plus the cubes of 2 and of 3.
31. The manuscript does not give Panurge ‘two horns’ but an ‘Idea of horns’.
32. Cf. the end of Chapter 23 of the Fourth Book.
33.A senarian line of verse consists of six feet, each of which is an iambus or a permitted variant. The line, which is attributed to Cleanthes, is quoted in Latin by Seneca (Epistle 107). It is cited twice by Erasmus (Adages, II, III, XLI, ‘Against necessity even the gods cannot resist’, and V, I, XC, ‘There is no fighting against fate’. But most powerful of all is the specific endorsing of this line by Saint Augustine, City of God, 5, 8.
34. This line is given in Greek capitals in the manuscript: ΠΡΟΣ ΤΕΛΟΣ ΑΥΤΩΝ ΠΑΝΤΑ ΚΙΝΕΙΤΑΙ. It is presented as adonic verse (of which it is an imperfect example). I do not know its author, but the idea is consonant with that of Gargantua in his letter to his son (Pantagruel, Chapter 8) referring to the end of the age ‘when all things are brought to their End and period’.
35. Cf. what Plutarch writes of Pythagorean mathematical mysticism (OnIsis and Osiris, 367 E-F).
36. The manuscript adds: at his feet was a stork.
37. The canon of Polycletus is subje
ct to a long commentary in the Sylloge of Gilbert Cognatus. As sculptor and writer Polycletus was held to represent absolute perfection in both his art and in morals. His canon is mentioned by Galen and Saint Jerome amongst many others. Pliny Natural History, 34, 8, 19, praises him for having ‘created art itself by means of art’.
38. The pantarbe is a fabulous precious stone of terrifying brilliance, fabled to act as a magnet to gold.
39. It is in the Apocrypha (Wisdom 26:20–23) that we are told that the manna provided to the children of Israel under Moses ‘tempered itself according to every man’s choice’.
40. See two adages of Adrian Junius Basle, 1558: ‘Collaria cadavera (Bodies all-neck)’ and ‘Delicatior Melanthio (More delicate that Melanthius)’ as well as, for Philoxenus, an adage of Junius, ‘Cubitis adolescere (To grow up by cubits)’.
41. Cf. Pantagruel, (near the end of Chapter 11) and the Third Book (end of Chapter 15).
42. The extraordinary spread of variations of the word sack to many languages including Hebrew, Greek, Latin, the Germanic tongues, Welsh, Russian and so on is confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary.
43. See Plato, Cratylus, 406; W. F. Smith, Rabelais. The Five Books and Minor Writings together with Letters and Documents Illustrating His Life (London: Alexander Watt, 1896) also cites Calepinus as writing: ‘vinum (wine) derives from vi (strength) because it brings strength to the mind, or else from the Greek oinois.’
44. See Chapters 9 and 29 of the Third Book, where the context is quite different.
45. A strange error to attribute the first miracle of Jesus, in Cana in Galilee, to the Father, not the Son.
46. Perhaps from the Greek pithos, barrel.
47. There is a pun in the original, sarment meaning both ‘vine-branch’ and an ‘oath’.
48. Another pun: Courrecteurs is a portmanteau word combining courroux(anger) and Corrector (Corrector, Auditor).
49. ‘Our lamps have gone out’ – cited in the text from the Latin Vulgate – is the cry of the foolish virgins in Matthew 25:8.
50. Falots, whom we have met already, are male Lanterns; their name allows a pun on the English word fellow, which was known to the French.
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
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