Gargantua and Pantagruel

  Now in those very days a grandissimo scholar called Thaumaste, hearing of Pantagruel’s reputation and of his fame for unmatched erudition, came out of the land of England with one sole intention: to see the said Pantagruel, to meet him and to test whether his erudition corresponded to its renown. And, indeed, when he arrived in Paris he at once proceeded to the lodgings of the said Pantagruel in the Residence of Saint Denis, where Pantagruel was strolling in the garden discussing philosophy in the manner of the Peripatetics. When Thaumaste came in he first started with awe at seeing him so big and tall; then, as is the fashion, he courteously made his salutation, saying to him,

  ‘What Plato, the Prince of philosophers, states is quite true: if the figure of knowledge-and-wisdom were to assume a body visible to human eyes she would excite the whole world to wonder: for if the mere rumour of her spreads through the air and strikes the ears of her studious lovers whom we call philosophers, it allows them neither to sleep nor to rest at their ease, so much does it spur them on and inflame them to run to the place and see the person in whom learning is said to have builded her temple and promulgated her oracles.

  ‘That was made manifest to us:

  – by the Queen of Sheba, who came from the uttermost parts of the East and the Persian Sea to see the order of the house of Solomon the Wise and to hear his wisdom;

  – by Anarchasis, who journeyed from Scythia as far as Athens to see Solon;

  – by Pythagoras, who visited the prophets of Memphis;

  – by Plato, who visited the Magi of Egypt and Archytas of Tarentum; and

  – by Apollonius of Tyana, who journeyed as far as Mount Caucasus, passed through the lands of the Scythians, the Massagetes and the Indians, and traversed the vast river Physon85 as far as the Brahmans to see Hiarchas; and through Babylon, Chaldaea and the lands of Media, Assyria, Parthia, Syria, Phoenicia, Arabia, Palestine and Alexandria as far as Ethiopia, to see the Gymnosophists.

  ‘We have a similar example in the case of Livy: several scholars came to Rome from the remotest parts of France and Spain to see him and hear him.

  ‘I dare not include myself amongst the number and ranks of folk so perfect, but I do wish to be called a scholar and a lover not only of learning but of the learnèd. Indeed on hearing tell of your boundless erudition, I left my kin, my home and my country, and brought myself here, discounting the length of the journey, the dreariness of the seas and the novelty of the lands, merely to see you and discuss with you certain texts of philosophy, magic, alchemy and the cabbala86 over which I am in doubt and unable 1:0 satisfy my mind: if you can solve them for me I will forthwith become your slave – I and all my posterity – for I have no other gift which I deem a sufficient recompense. I will set them down in writing, and tomorrow will bring them to the attention of all the learned men of Paris so that we may hold a public disputation before them.

  ‘But this is how I conceive of our dispute: I have no wish to debate pro et contra as do the silly sophists of this town and elsewhere. Similarly I do not want to dispute in the manner of the Academics by declamations, nor by numbers like Pythagoras and as Pico della Mirandola wished to do in Rome: I want to dispute by signs alone with no talking, for the matters are so arduous that no words of Man would be adequate to settle them to my satisfaction. So may it please your Magnificence to be present in the Great Hall of the Collège de Navarre at seven o’clock in the morning.’

  After those words were spoken Pantagruel honourably addressed him:

  ‘My Lord, insofar as it lies in my power, I would not deny anyone to share in the gifts of grace which God has vouchsafed me, for every good thing comes from him above, and his will is that it be multiplied when one finds oneself amongst people worthy and able to receive that Heaven-sent manna of sound learning, amongst the numbers of whom, as I well perceive, you now occupy the foremost rank, so I assure you that you will find me ready at any time to comply with each one of your requests, according to my modest power, even though it is I who should be learning more from you rather than you from me; but as you have publicly announced, we will confer about your doubts together and seek that resolution of them which you and I must find.87

  ‘I greatly approve of the manner of disputing which you propose, that is by signs not words; for, by so doing, you and I will understand each other and be free from the handclappings of those [silly] Sophists just when we reach the very nub of the matter in our disputation. And so I shall not fail to appear tomorrow at the place and time which you have fixed for me, but, I beseech you, let there be no [discord nor] uproar amongst us and may we seek truth alone, not the honour and plaudits of men.’

  To which Thaumaste replied:

  ‘May God, my Lord, keep you in his grace; while I thank you that your High Magnificence has vouchsafed to condescend to my petty lowliness. And so, God’s speed till tomorrow.’

  ‘God’s speed,’ said Pantagruel.

  You Gentlemen who read these present writings must not imagine that there have ever been folk more caught away and enraptured in thought than were Thaumaste and Pantagruel throughout that night. Indeed the said Thaumaste told the concierge at the Hôtel de Cluny, where he had taken up lodgings, that never in his life had he ever felt so thirsty as he did that night. ‘I am convinced,’ he said, ‘that Pantagruel has got me by the throat. Do please give orders for some drinks [and make arrangements for us to have fresh water for me to rinse my palate].’

  Pantagruel, on the other hand, had run to the top of the musical scale and had spent all that evening wildly leafing through:

  – the book of Bede, On Numbers and Signs;

  – the book of Plotinus, On Things Which Cannot be Told;

  – the book of Proclus, On Magic; and

  – those of Artemidorus, On the Meanings of Dreams;

  – of Anaxagoras, On Signs;

  – of Ynarius, On Things Which Cannot Be Uttered;

  – the books of Philistion, of Hipponax, On Things Not to Be Spoken, and a whole lot more.

  So much so, that Panurge was moved to say to him,

  ‘Leave aside all such thoughts, my Lord, and go to bed, for I sense that you are so agitated in your mind from such an excess of thinking that you risk soon succumbing to a chronic fever.

  ‘But first have a good twenty-five or thirty drinks and then retire and sleep at your ease, for tomorrow morning I shall answer the English Sire and dispute with him; and if I do not bring him to the point of no reply then speak ill of me!’

  To which Pantagruel said:

  ‘Yes, but Panurge, my friend, he is in truth marvellously learned; how will you satisfy him?’

  ‘Very well!’ said Panurge. ‘Say no more about it, I pray, and let me deal with it. Is there any man as learned as the devils are?’

  ‘Indeed not,’ said Pantagruel, ‘except by the special grace of God.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Panurge, ‘many a time have I disputed with devils and landed them all befuddled on their bottoms. So where this [bumptious] Englishman is concerned, rest assured that tomorrow, before all the world, I shall make him shit vinegar.’

  And so Panurge spent the night tippling with the page-boys and gambling the very cords of his flies at Rods and at Come first, come second.

  And so when the time for the meeting arrived, he escorted Pantagruel his Master to the appointed place. Surely there was nobody in Paris, great or small, who was not to be found there thinking, ‘This devil Pantagruel, who defeated all those Sorbonicoles, will get but a pourboire this time!88 That Englishman is a devil from Vauvert.89 We shall see who wins now!

  So, with all the world assembled, Thaumaste was awaiting them. And when Pantagruel and Panurge arrived in the hall the undergraduates, dons and delegates all began to clap their hands as is their stupid custom. But Pantagruel cried out in a loud voice like a double cannonade:

  ‘Quiet! In the devil’s name, quiet! By God, if you beggars go on bellowing at me, I will cut off the heads of every one of you.’

  At whic
h words they stopped like thunder-stricken ducks. Even if they had swallowed fifteen pounds’ weight of feathers they would not have dared merely to cough. They were driven so thirsty by that voice alone that they lolled their tongues half-a-foot out of their mouths as though Pantagruel had salted their throats.

  Then Panurge began to speak, saying to the Englishman:

  ‘Sir, have you come here to dispute contentiously over the propositions by you advanced, or to learn, and to find out the truth about them?’

  To which Thaumaste replied:

  ‘Sir, nothing brings me here but a right desire to learn and to know about things which I have been uncertain of my whole life long; I have found neither book nor man able to satisfy me by resolving the doubts which I have set forth. As for disputing contentiously, I have no desire to do that: it is moreover a thing most vile: I leave that to those stupid scoundrels the Sophists, *Sorbillans, Sorbonagres, Sorbonigenes, Sorbonicoles, Sorboniseques, Niborcisans, Saniborsans*90 [, who in their disputations seek not the truth but wrangling and controversy].’

  ‘Well then,’ said Panurge, ‘I am but a petty disciple of Lord Pantagruel, my master: so if I can set your mind at ease and absolutely and completely satisfy you myself, it would not be worth troubling my said master any further. For which reason it would be better if he were to take the chair, judging what we say and going on to satisfy you if I seem to you not to have fulfilled your studious desire.

  ‘That, in truth, is very well put,’ said Thaumaste. ‘So let us begin.’

  You should note that Panurge had already attached to his ample codpiece a fair tassel of red, white, green and blue ribbons, while inside it he had placed a beautiful orange.

  *

  [Becomes: How Panurge made an ape of the Englishman who argued by signs. Chapter 19.

  After the first few words, a long interpolation was made at this point in ‘42. It is given here between asterisks. The original text resumes with ‘Panurge, without uttering a word, raised his hands’. The long interpolation shifts the comedy to the theme of the revealed wisdom of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus (also known as Mercury), who was considered an impostor by Erasmus but deeply venerated by Marguerite de Navarre as an ancient source of revealed spiritual truth dating back to the times of Moses. Rabelais in other contexts may have taken Hermes Trismegistus seriously: Shrovetide laughter by no means necessarily implies condemnation.

  The felicity of the leper is perhaps an allusion to Lazarus.]

  Then with everyone present and looking on in absolute silence, *the Englishman, raised both his hands high in the air separately and, knotting the tips of the fingers of each hand together so as to form what the people of Chinon call a hen’s bottom, he struck the nails of both hands together four times, opened his hands and slapped one palm against the other with a resounding smack. Once again bringing them together as before, he clapped his hands twice, then four times, with open palms. He next put them together, stretched and conjoined, as though devoutly praying to God.

  Panurge at once raised his right hand in the air, and stuck its thumb up his right nostril, holding his four fingers stretched put and squeezed together in due order in a line parallel to the bridge of his nose; he shut his left eye tight, meanwhile squinting with his right under a deeply lowered lid and eyebrow. He then raised high his left hand, strongly squeezing together and stretching forth its four fingers and, elevating the thumb, held it in a line directly corresponding to the position of his right, about a forearm-and-a-half apart. That done, keeping the same shape, he lowered both hands towards the ground; finally he raised them midway up as though aiming straight at the Englishman’s nose.

  ‘And if Mercury…’, said the Englishman.

  At which Panurge interrupted him:

  ‘You spoke: you’re unmasked!’

  The Englishman now made this sign: he raised his left hand high in the air wide open; he then closed the four fingers into a fist and placed his extended thumb on the bridge of his nose. Immediately afterwards he raised his right hand, wide open, and wide open lowered it, placing the thumb in the bend of the little finger of the left hand, slowly wagging its four fingers in the air.

  Then he switched round, doing with the left what he had done with the right, and with the right what he had done with the left.

  Panurge, not at all surprised, lifted his trismegistical codpiece up into the air with his left hand and with his right drew forth from it a white splinter of bone taken from the rib of an ox, and then two identically shaped pieces of wood, one of black ebony and the other of scarlet brazil-wood, arranging them most symmetrically between the fingers of that same hand and clacking them together with the sound the lepers of Brittany make with their clappers – more resonant, though, and more harmonious – meanwhile, retracting his tongue into his mouth, he joyfully produced a buzzing noise, keeping his eyes still fixed on the Englishman.

  The theologians, physicians and surgeons who were present thought that he was inferring by that sign that the Englishman was a leper: the counsellors, jurists and canon lawyers believed that by so doing he intended to conclude that some kind of human felicity consists in the leprous state, as our Lord maintained long ago.

  The Englishman did not panic at that; he raised high both his hands, so holding them that in each case their three main fingers were bent right over, tightly squeezing each thumb between the index and middle fingers, while the little fingers remained extended. He then showed his hands to Panurge, bringing them together in such a way that the right thumb touched the left and the little finger on the left touched the one on the right.]*

  Panurge, without a word, raised his hands and made a sign like this: he brought together the nails of his left-hand index finger and thumb, so making a space in the middle like a ring; he then squeezed all the fingers of his right hand into a fist, except for the index finger which he thrust repeatedly in and out of the finger and thumb of his left hand. Then he stretched forth his index and middle fingers, keeping them as wide apart as possible and pointing them towards Thaumaste. He placed his left thumb in the corner of his own left eye, fully extending the rest of his hand in the shape of the wing of a bird or the fin of a fish. He then waggled it most delicately to and fro.

  He then did the same, with his right hand in the corner of his right eye. And that was spaced over a good quarter of an hour.91

  At which Thaumaste started to blanch and to tremble, making him the following sign: he struck the middle-finger of his right hand against the muscle at the base of his thumb; he then made his right index finger into a ring, as he had done with the one of his left, but he placed it below not above, as Panurge had done.

  Panurge thereupon clapped his hands together and whistled through his palms. That done, he once more placed the index-finger of his right hand into the ring made with his left, repeatedly pulling it out and pushing it in; then while gazing intently at Thaumaste, he thrust forth his chin.

  Whereupon the crowd, who had understood none of the signs, now did get the sense: ‘What can you say to that!’

  And indeed Thaumaste began to sweat great globules and appeared like a man who was caught away in deep contemplation. He then came to, and placed all the nails of his left hand against all those of the right, opening his fingers to make semi-circles, as it were, raising his hands aloft as far as he could while maintaining that sign.

  At which Panurge at once placed the thumb of his right hand under his jaw-bone, and its little-finger into the ring made by his left, and in that position melodiously clacked his lower teeth against the upper.

  Thaumaste struggled up painfully, but in so doing let off a baker’s fart – for the bran came afterwards – [and copiously pissed vinegar,] making a hell of a stink. Those present began to hold their noses, for he was messing himself in anxiety. He then raised his right hand, closing it in such a way as to bring the tips of all the fingers together, and the left he placed flat against his breast.

  Whereupon Panurge pulled on his lo
ng codpiece with the tassel attached and stretched it out for a good arm-and-a-half’s length, holding it up in the air with his left hand, and with his right he took out his orange, tossing it seven times into the air; on the eighth he hid it in the palm of his right which he quietly held up high. He then began waggling his beautiful codpiece about, exposing it to Thaumaste.

  After that Thaumaste started to puff out his cheeks like a man playing the bagpipes and blew as though he were inflating a pig’s bladder. At which Panurge stuck one finger of his left hand against his bum and drew air into his mouth as you do when slurping soup or gulping down oysters in their shells.

  That done, he opened his mouth a little and struck the flat of his right hand against it, producing a sound which was both loud and deep, coming it seemed from the surface of his diaphragm via his trachea.

  He did that sixteen times. But Thaumaste was still hissing like a goose.

  So Panurge put his right index-finger into his mouth, squeezing it tight with his bucal muscles and then withdrawing it; by so doing he produced a loud plop such as little boys make when they blow lovely turnip-pellets through an elder-wood pipe.

  And that he did nine times.

  At which Thaumaste cried out, ‘Oh! My Lords! The Great Secret! [He’s elbow deep in it!]’

  And then he drew out a dagger which he had, holding it downwards by the point. Panurge thereupon took hold of his long codpiece and shook it against his thighs as hard as he could. He then linked both his hands together like a comb and placed them on his head, poking his tongue out as far as he could and rolling his eyes like a nanny-goat dying.

  ‘Ha! I understand you! But ugh… ?’ said Thaumaste, making the following sign: he placed the handle of his dagger against his breast, pressing the flat of his hand against its point and bending his fingers lightly inwards.

  Thereupon Panurge inclined his head to the left and put his middle finger into his right ear while sticking his thumb up high. He then crossed both his arms over his bosom, coughed five times and at the fifth stamped his foot on the ground. He then raised his left arm, closing his fingers into a fist and holding the thumb against his forehead, striking his breast six times with his right hand.