‘If some poor wretch goes to the stews and gules up his conk with a cow-pat or buys winter boots, and if the serjeants passing by, or the men of the Watch, receiving the decoction of an enema or the faecal matter of a privy on their clatterings, must they therefore clip testoons or make a fricassee in wooden cash-erolles!
‘At times we propose one thing but God does another, and once the sun has set, all beasts are in the dark. I do not want to be believed over this unless I prove it helter-skelterly by folk worthy of remembrance.43
‘In the year six and thirty I bought a horse – a German curtal, high and curtailed – well fleeced and, as the goldsmiths vouchsafed, dyed with red antimony. The lawyer however slipped in some etceteras!
‘I am not such a clerk as to seize the moon with my teeth, but at the pot of butter where they were affixing seals on the vulcanic impedimenta, it was rumoured that salted beef enabled you to discover wine at high midnight without a candle even if it were hidden away at the bottom of a coalman’s sack, booted and protected though he was by the greaves and leg-armour necessary to make a good rusterie (that is, a head-of-mutton fricassee).
‘Now, as the proverb says: “A fine thing it is, while enjoying your courting, to look at black cows in a burnt wood.” I obliged My Lords the Clercs to consult on this matter. By way of conclusion they resolved in the ninth mode of the first figure of syllogisms that there is nothing like doing your reaping in the heat of summer within a cellar well provided with ink and paper, pen and whore-pen (as in Lyons on the Rhone) tiddly-pom.
‘For as soon as armour starts stinking of garlic the rust attacks its liver; then you can merely peck back twist-neckedly, flirting with an after-dinner nap. And that is what makes salt so dear.
‘Never believe, my Lords, that when the aforesaid goodwife caught the female red-tail in birdlime in order the better to enfeoff the serjeant-at-law – and when the puddingly viscera tergiversated into the purses of the usurers – there was nothing better to guard against cannibals than to trade a wad of onions, bound by three hundred Ave Marias44 and a soupçon of calf’s mesentery of the best alloy possessed by the alchemists – and to well bedaub and calcinate one’s slippers, blah, blah, blah, with a fine hay-rake sauce, and to hide oneself away in some little mole-hole, always saving, of course, the bacon.
‘And if one of the dice never wants to show you anything but always a double ace, or a triad, six and three, beware the ace, and put the dame in the corner of the backgammon bed, hey nonny, nonny and live under sufferance and fish me plenty of frogs shod in fine boots.45 That will be for the little moulted goslings playing at snuff-me-the-candle while awaiting the beating of the metal and the heating of the wax for the quaffers of English good ale.
‘In very truth, the Four Beeves in question had rather short memories, yet, despite knowing the gamut, they had no fear of cormorant or Savoy drake, and the good folk on my lands held high hopes for them, saying, “Those boys will grow up good at Arabic mathematics, which will be as a legal rubric for us.”
‘Nor can we fail to catch the wolf, making as we do our hedges well above the windmills mentioned by the party opposite. But the devil was jealous and ordered the Germans to bring up the rear, who had a devil of a time slurping it down: “Trink, trink. Dass is goot; forlorn by God! a poor fight vass it.”46 And I am very strongly amazed how the astrologers bother so much about it with their astrolabes or almugantarats.
‘There is no likelihood whatsoever in crying “Free-range hens on Petit-Pont in Paris,” even if folk were as hoop-crested as a marshland hoopoe, unless they did indeed scarify the printers’ pumpet-balls with the freshly ground ink, of upper-case or cursive letters: it is all the same to me, provided that the head-band in the binding breeds no bookworms.
‘And, even supposing that at the coupling of the running-dogs the pugs had sounded the kill well before the lawyer had handed over his report by the cabbalistic art, it does not follow (deferring to the better judgement of the Court) that six acres of broad-cloth meadow-lands should amount to three barrels of fine anchor without forking out one’s share, considering that at the funeral of King Charles you could, in the open market, buy the fleece for six silver pence:47 I mean, by my oath, of wool.
‘I quite normally find in all good houses that,48 whenever men lure birds by their song, making three turns on a broomstick round their chimney-pieces and insinuating their nomination, one merely tenses one’s loins and (if it should be too hot) puffs at the bum: Then, skittle and ball!
Immediately the letter read,
They returned the cows to his own cow-shed.
And in ’17 a similar judgement was handed down on Saint Martingale’s Day touching Misrule in our hamlet of Loge-Fougereuse, to which may it please the Court to pay regard. In truth I do not assert that one may not in equity lawfully dispossess anyone who would drink holy water as one does with a weaver’s shuttle from which are made suppositories to impale those who have no wish to give up, except on the terms “Play well: pay well.”
‘[Ergo: My Lords, what is the law for minors?] For the precedent of the Salic Law is that the first fire-raiser to dishorn the cow which snuffs it out in musical plain-song without sol-fa-mi-doh-ing the cobbler’s points must, at the time of the plague, load his poor member by means of moss,49 gathered when you are starving with the cold at midnight Mass, so as to inflict the strappado on those white wines of Anjou which trip you up, neck for neck like Breton wrestlers.
‘Concluding as above, with expenses, costs and damages.’ After le Sieur de Slurp-ffart had concluded, Pantagruel said to le Sieur de Bumkis,
‘My friend, do you wish to make a rejoinder?’
To which Bumkis replied,
‘No, my Lord, for I have spoken nothing but the truth; and for God’s sake let us put an end to this controversy, for we cannot be here except at considerable outlay.’
*
[Another new later chapter begins here: How Pantagruel pronounced judgement on the controversy between the two Lords. Chapter 13.
The lawsuit concludes with Pantagruel outsmarting the litigants at their own game. The crowd is moved to ecstasy by such superhuman wisdom, as they were at times in the New Testament.
The difficult legal texts cited by Pantagruel (as usual by their incipits) were indeed recognized as hard to understand and to apply.
Rabelais later corrected ‘Exemptor’ to ‘Emptor’.]
Pantagruel then rose to his feet and brought together all the attendant Presidents, Counsellors and Doctors, saying,
‘Well, Gentlemen, you have heard viva voce from the oracle the controversy in question. How seems it to you?’
To which they replied:
‘We have indeed heard it, but – the devil! – we could not understand what the case is about. Therefore we unanimously beg and beseech you kindly to pronounce such judgement as you deem fit; then we will agree with it here and now and hereinafter, and ratify it with our full assent.’
‘Well then, Gentlemen,’ said Pantagruel, ‘since such is your wish I will do so, yet I do not find the case as hard as you do. Much harder in my opinion are:
– your paragraph Cato,
– the law Brother,
– the law Cock,
– the law Five feet,
– the law Wine,
– the law If the Master,
–the law Mother,
–the law The Good Wife,
–the law If a Man,
–the law Pomponius,
–the law Fundi,
–the law Exemptor,
–the law Lender,
–the law Vendor
and lots of others.’
Once he had finished speaking he took a turn or two about the courtroom, deep in thought as you can well realize, for he was groaning with anguish and farting under the strain like an ass50 when its straps are too tight, as he reflected that he had to be just to all men, without bias or respecting of persons.51
Then he resumed his sitting an
d began to pronounce his judgement as follows:
‘Having seen, heard and weighed the quarrel between the Lords Bumkis and Slurp-ffart, the Court says to them:
‘THAT, having considered that the sun bravely declines from its summer solstice in order to flirt with the little nonsenses checkmated by a pawn-slurp on account of the evil provocations of the night-crows, light-shunners which are lodgers under the trans-Roman clime of a crucifix on horseback bending a crossbow at its loins:52
‘THE PLAINTIFF was legally justified in caulking the galleon that the goodwife was sufflating, one foot bare, one foot shod, reimbursing him, low and stiff, in all conscience with as many scrotums as there are hairs on eighteen cows, with as many again for the sempster.
‘He is likewise pronounced innocent of the crime which it was believed he had incurred since he could not comfortably defecate, owing to the decision of a pair of gloves perfumed by walnut-candles such as are used in his Mirabeau country, slackening the bowline with the bronze bullets.53
‘At which the stable-lads mixed his vegetables, constable-fashion, interlarded the decoy with hawks’ tinkle-bells made out of Hungarian lace which his brother-in-law, as a souvenir, bore in a limitrophous pannier embroidered in gules with three chevrons exhausted by canvas-work at the angular hide from which one shoots at the worm-shaped popinjay with the feathered broom.
‘NEVERTHELESS: Insofar as he accuses the defendant of having been a cobbler, a cheese-eater and a smearer of tar on mummies, which has not been found [clangingly] true as the aforesaid defendant well deliberated:
‘THE COURT CONDEMNS him to three glass-dishfuls of junket, seasoned, jiggery-pokered and smoke-dried (as is the local custom): which sum is to be paid to the said defendant by mid-August in May. But the said defendant will be obliged to furnish hay and oakum to stop up the holes in the guttural booby-traps jiggled with slimy gobbets from well-sieved roundels.
‘And friends again as before.
‘No order for costs.
‘The Court rises.’
After the sentence was announced the two parties departed, both happy with the decree, which was all but unbelievable [for never since the Flood have two parties contending in an adversarial case ever been equally satisfied with a definitive judgement: nor will they be for thirteen Jubilees to come].
As for the counsellors and the other doctors of law there present, they remained [swooning] in ecstasy for three hours in a rapture of amazement before the superhuman wisdom of. Pantagruel which they had seen manifested in his decision of so hard and thorny a judgement. And they would still have been there, had not vinegar and rose-water been supplied to summon their accustomed senses and powers of perception back to them.
For which may God everywhere be praised.
Panurge tells how he escaped from the hands of the Turks
CHAPTER 10
[Becomes Chapter 14.
The Turks were a real threat and widely feared. One of the ways to reduce fear is to laugh at those who cause it. There is also some Lucianesque laughter at stories of prisoners escaping from the Turks. On the other hand Turks were being better understood thanks to Frenchmen such as Guillaume Postel; François I was actively seeking help from the Turk against the Papal States and the Holy Roman Empire.
As expected the trickster Panurge in this farce flouts all the normal rules of decency let alone taboos and pious superstitions. We are also being prepared to see Pantagruel, in the same spirit, as a comic Solomon, and later – in the spirit of Mardi Gras – even as a comic Jesus.
Any hint of a hunchbacked Sorbonagre is a gibe directed at Noël Béda, the Sorbonne theologian.
The wisdom of Solomon in I Kings 3 was legendary. Lof’s wife and Sodom and Gomorrah are known from Genesis 13 and 19.]
Pantagruel’s judgement was at once known and heard of by everyone; a great many copies were printed, and it was entered in the Archives of the Palais de Justice, so that folk began to say,
‘Solomon, who on a conjecture returned a child to its mother, never produced such a masterpiece of wisdom as this good Pantagruel has done. It is a blessing to have him in our land.’
Indeed they wanted to appoint him official Receiver of Petitions and President of the Court, but while thanking everyone most graciously, he absolutely refused:
‘For,’ he said, ‘there is much too great a slavery in such appointments and those who exercise them can be saved only with great difficulty given the corruption of men [; and unless the seats voided by the fallen angels are filled by people of a different sort, I believe that Nicholas of Cusa will be disappointed in his conjectures and that we shall not reach the Last Judgement for another thirty-seven Jubilees. I warn you now, in plenty of time.] But if you have any hogsheads of good wine I will be pleased to accept some as a present.’
They most willingly did so, sending him the best wine in their city, of which he drank quite a lot, but the wretched Panurge drank like a hero, since he was as emaciated as a smoked herring and crept along like a skinny cat. But someone reproved him, [semi-breathless from downing a great goblet of good red wine,] saying,
‘Whoa, there, comrade! You’re slurping it down like a lunatic!’
‘By Saint Thibault,’ he said, ‘you speak truly:54 if I upped as much as I downed I would already be above the lunar sphere with Empedocles! But I don’t know what the devil this means: the wine is very good and quite delicious, but the more I drink the thirstier I get! I believe that the shadow of my Lord Pantagruel breeds thirsts in men as the moon produces catarrhs.’
The bystanders began to laugh. When he saw it, Pantagruel said:
‘What are you laughing about, Panurge?’
‘My Lord,’ Panurge said, ‘I was telling them how wretched those poor devils of Turks are for never touching a drop of wine. If that were the only evil in the Alcoran of Mahomet I still would never submit to his religion!’
‘Yes. But tell me now,’ said Pantagruel, ‘how you escaped from their clutches.’
‘By God, my Lord,’ said Panurge, ‘I shall utter no word of a lie. Those bloody Turks had put me on a skewer, all basted up like a rabbit, [for I was very skinny, and otherwise my flesh would have made very poor eating. And at this point they were] roasting me alive. As they did so I commended myself to God’s grace and remembered that good saint, Saint Laurence; I ever hoped in God, that he would deliver me from such torment. Which most strangely came to pass. For, as I was commending myself heartily to God and crying, “Lord God, help me, Lord God, save me! Lord God, deliver me from this torment in which these treacherous dogs detain me in defence of their religion,” the turnspit fell asleep – because of the divine will or that of some good Mercury who cunningly put to sleep Argus, who had one hundred eyes. Now noticing that he is no longer turning me as I roasted, I look at him and see that he has dozed off. So I get my teeth into a brand – by the end which was not burning – and toss it into the lap of my roaster, tossing another as best as I can under a camp-bed near the chimney where there was plenty of straw.55
‘At once the fire took hold of the straw, spread from straw to bed, and from bed to ceiling (which was of fir-wood planking with pendant culs-de-lampe). The best of it was that the fire that I had tossed into the lap of my bloody turnspit burnt all his pubes, and it would have spread to his balls, but he did not pong enough himself not to smell it quicker than daylight. He leapt up like a giddy goat, yelling out of the window as well as he could “Dal baroth! Dal baroth!” – which is as much as to say, Fire! Fire!
‘He rushed at me, to cast me right into the flames. He had already cut the cords which bound my hands and was cutting the ropes which bound my feet, but the master of the house (hearing the cry of Fire! and already smelling the smoke even out in the road where he was strolling about with some other pashas and muftis) ran as fast as he could to give help and to save his valuables.
‘No sooner arrived, he pulled out the skewer on which I was spitted and killed my roaster stone dead: he died, I think, of l
ack of attention or something like that, for the skewer was thrust into his right flank a little above the navel, piercing the third lobe of his liver and, running upwards through his diaphragm, it then went through the capsule of his heart and came out at the top of his shoulders between his spondyls and the left scapula.
‘It is true that when he withdrew the skewer from my body I tumbled to the ground near the fire-dogs and hurt myself a bit in the fall: not much though, since the basting took the shock. Then when my pasha saw that he was in desperate straits, that his house was hopelessly on fire and all his valuables lost, he gave himself to the devil, nine times invoking Grill-goth, Astaroth [, Rapacious] and Rumbleguts. When I saw that, I experienced a good five-penny worth of fright, fearing that those devils might appear there and carry that idiot off. Were they the kind who would take me as well? Here I am, half roasted: my rashers may be the cause of my downfall, for those particular devils have a soft spot for jambon. (The philosopher Jamblicus provides authority for that, as does Murmaltius in his treatise On Hunchbacks and the Deformed: In Defence of the Magistri Nostri.)56 But I made the sign of the Cross and shouted in Greek, “Holy is God and immortal.”57 And not one devil came.
‘Realizing that, my villain of a Pasha tried to kill himself by running my skewer through his heart. He did indeed push it up against his chest, but as it was not sharp enough it would not go in. He was thrusting as hard as he could but all to no avail.
‘So I went up to him and said:
‘“You’re wasting your time, Signor Buggero. You’ll never kill yourself like that. You’ll certainly do yourself an injury and languish your whole life long in the hands of the barber-surgeons. But if you want me to, I will kill you frankly. You will feel nothing, for believe you me, I’ve killed many a man who felt much better for it afterwards.”