You should note therefore that, at the beginning of this world of ours – [I am talking of long ago: more than twice-score twice-score nights to count like the ancient Druids –] it befell, one particular year soon after Abel was slain by Cain his brother, that the earth, steeped in the blood of the righteous, was so prolific in all the fruits which are produced from her loins but above all in medlars, that from time immemorial it has been called the Year of the Fat Medlars, for it took but three to make a bushel.
[In that year Kalends were found in the Greek missals; March failed to fall within Lent, and mid-August fell within May.]
It was in the month of October it seems to me or else in the month of September – so as not to fall into error: [I want scrupulously to guard against that] – that there occurred the week so celebrated in the annals which is called the Week of the Three Thursdays. There were indeed three Thursdays when the moon wandered more than ten yards from her course because of the irregular bissextile days.5
Now note this carefully: everybody ate the aforesaid medlars with delight, since they were pleasant to the eyes and much to be desired by the taste. Now, even as Noah – that sainted man to whom we are all beholden and indebted since it was he who planted the vine from which comes to us that nectar-like, precious, heavenly, [joyful] and deifying liquor that we call piot – was deceived when he drank of it since he was ignorant of its great virtues and power: so likewise did the men and women of that time partake with great pleasure of that lovely plump fruit.
But many a mishap befell them, for their bodies developed very strange bulges, though not all in the same places.6
In some it was their bellies that swelled up, and those bellies grew as convex as fat barrels. Of them it is written, Almighty and Everlasting Guts. [They were all fine folk and good jesters.] From that stock were born Saint Paunch and Mardi Gras.
Others swelled up behind the shoulders, and were so hunchbacked that men called them montiferi (mountain-bearers, as it were). You can still see a few of them about, of different ranks and sexes.
From that race sprang Aesop: accounts of his fair words and deeds are still extant.
Others swelled in length along that member which we call Nature’s plough-share, so that theirs became marvellously long, big, plump, fat, verdant and cockscombed in the antique style, so much so that they used them as girdles, wrapping them five or six times round their middles. If it were just right with the wind in their poops, on seeing them you might have taken them for men with lances up at the ready for tilting at the quintain. That race, so the women tell us, has now died out, for they ceaselessly lament that
No more do we find those great big…
You know how the song goes on!
[Others swelled up so enormously in the substance of their bollocks that three of them easily filled a fifty-gallon cask. From them descend those Bollocks of Lorraine which never dwell in their codpieces but drop down to the base of their breeches.]
Others grew long in their legs. If you had seen them you would have said they were cranes [or flamingos] or else folk walking on stilts. Little school-boys in their grammar classes call them Iambus.7
[Still others grew so long in their noses that they looked like the beaks of alembics: noses bespeckled and bespangled with papules, all purple, pullulating and inflamed, and enamelled with pustules embroidered with gules. You’ve seen such men: namely Canon Panzoult, and Piedebois the physician of Angers.8 Few of that lineage liked barley-water: all were lovers of the liquid of September.
Naso and Ovid descend from them as well as all those of whom it is written, The great multitude of Nos.9]
Others swelled up so hugely in the ears that, from just one of them, they cut out a doublet, a pair of breeches and a long-skirted jacket, covering themselves with the other as with a Spanish cape. They say that’s still an inherited trait in the Bourbonnais – hence the expression ‘Bourbonnais ears’.
Others grew in length of body. From them came the giants and, through them, Pantagruel;
The first of whom was Chalbroth,
Who begat Sarabroth,
Who begat Faribroth,
Who begat Hurtaly, who was a good eater of sops and ruled from the time of the Flood,
Who begat Nembroth,
Who begat Atlas, who with his shoulders kept the sky from falling,
Who begat Goliath,
Who begat Eyrx [who invented the game of thimblerig],
Who begat Tityus,
Who begat Eryon,
Who begat Polyphemus,
Who begat Cacus,
Who begat Etion [who, as Bartachino attests, was the first to catch the pox through not having drunk his wine cool in summer],
Who begat Enceladus,
Who begat Ceus,
Who begat Typhoeus,
Who begat Aloeus,
Who begat Otus,
Who begat Aegeon,
Who begat Briareus, who had one hundred hands,
Who begat Porphirion,
Who begat Adamastor,
Who begat Antaeus,
Who begat Agathon,
Who begat Porus, against whom fought Alexander the Great,
Who begat Aranthus,
Who begat Gabbara [who first invented matching drink for drink],
Who begat Goliath of Secundilla,
Who begat Offot, who developed an awesomely fine nose from drinking straight from the wine-cask,
Who begat Artachaeus, Who begat Oromedon,
Who begat Gemmagog, who invented long-toed Crakow shoes,
Who begat Sisyphus,
Who begat the Titans, from whom sprang Hercules,
Who begat Enay [who was most expert in the matter of digging flesh-worms out of hands],
Who begat Fierabras, who was defeated by Oliver, Peer of France and the comrade of Roland,
Who begat Morgan [, who was the first in the world ever to play dice wearing glasses],
Who begat Fracassus, whom Merlin Coccaïe wrote about and of whom was born Ferragus,
Who begat Gob-fly [, who was the first to invent the smoking of ox-tongues in the chimney: before him they were salted like hams],
Who begat Bolivorax,
Who begat Longis,
Who begat Gayoffe [, whose bollocks were of poplar and whose cock was of mountain-ash],
Who begat Munch-straw,
Who begat Brûlefer,
Who begat Crested-fly-catcher,
Who begat Galahad [, who was the inventor of flagons],
Who begat Mirelangaut,
Who begat Galafre,
Who begat Falourdin,
Who begat Roboastre,
Who begat Sortibrant of Coïmbra,
Who begat Brushant of Monmiré,
Who begat Bruyer, who was vanquished by Ogier the Dane, Peer of France,
Who begat Mabrun,
Who begat Swive-donkey,
Who begat Hacquelebac,
Who begat Garnet-cock,
Who begat Grandgousier,
Who begat Gargantua,
Who begat the noble Pantagruel, my master.
I realize of course that you inwardly raised a most reasonable doubt during the reading of that passage and so ask how it is possible that such a thing could be, seeing that at the time of the Flood all mankind perished except Noah and the seven persons who were in the Ark with him: amongst that number the aforesaid Hurtaly is never placed. Without a doubt your query is well put and most understandable: yet [unless my wits are badly caulked] my reply will satisfy you.
I was not there at the time to tell you about it as I would like to, so I will cite the authority of the Massoretes, those interpreters of the Holy Hebrew Scriptures, who say that Hurtaly was never actually inside Noah’s Ark10 – he could never have got in: he was too big – but that he did sit astride it with a leg on either side like little children on their hobby-horses [or like that fat bull-horn-trumpeter of Berne who was killed at Marignano while riding astride a great, plump, stone-hurling ca
nnon:11 a fine beast indeed for a jolly amble]. In that way Hurtaly saved the aforesaid Ark from foundering, for he propelled it with his legs, turning it with his foot whichever way he would as one does with the rudder of a boat. Those inside sent him up ample food through a funnel, as folk fully acknowledging the good he was doing them. And sometimes they parleyed together as Icaromenippus did with Jupiter according to the account in Lucian.
[Did you understand all that? Then down a good swig without water! For if you believe it not, ‘Neither do I,’ said she.]
On the Nativity of the Most-Redoubtable Pantagruel
CHAPTER 2
[This is the first hint that Pantagruel, with its echoes of the Bible, especially but not only the Old Testament and its long-lived patriarchs, is also set in a comic version of More’s Utopia, still known only to those who could read Latin.
The great drought of Elijah is mentioned in James 5:17, referring back to I (III) Kings 17:1 and 18 and to Ecclesiasticus 48.
Dives is the rich man whose fate is contrasted with that of the poor man Lazarus in Luke 16.
For five years or more France had been suffering from a ruinous drought. With Fantagruel’s nativity the comedy draws upon the birth of John the Baptist and of Jesus in St Matthew and the synoptic Gospels generally.
‘Sage-woman’ is an old term for midwife and allows of easy puns.
Whenever ‘The Philosopher’ is mentioned, it refers to Aristotle. Here the allusion is to his Meteorologia, in which the ideas of Empe-docles are treated as myth.]
Gargantua, at the age of four hundred and four score four and forty, begat Pantagruel of his wife Badebec, the daughter to the King of the Amaurotes in Utopia. She died giving birth to him for he was so [wondrously] big and heavy that he could not see the light of day without suffocating his mother.
But fully to understand the occasion and reason for the name which was given him at baptism you should note that for the whole of that year there had been a great drought throughout all the land of Africa since it had gone without rain for thirty-six months [three weeks, four days and thirteen hours, plus a trifle more], with the heat of the sun so mind-blowing that the entire land lay parched.
It had not been more scorched then than in the days of Elijah. Not one tree in the land bore leaf or bloom; the plants were not green, the rivers had withered and the wells had run dry; the fish – abandoned, poor things, by their natural element – roamed squealing horribly over the land; birds tumbled out of the air for lack of dew; wolves, foxes, stags, boars, deer, hares, rabbits, weasels, ferrets, badgers and other creatures were found scattered dead across the fields with their mouths gaping wide.
As for men, it was most deplorable: you would have seen them lolling out their tongues like greyhounds after a six-hour course; many leapt into wells; others, whom Homer calls Alibantes, sought shade inside the bellies of cows. The whole land rode idly at anchor.
A pitiful thing it was to watch how those human beings strove to protect themselves from that horrifying thirst: it was a difficult enough matter to save the holy water from running out in the churches, but things were so arranged by order of their Graces the Cardinals and the Holy Father that nobody dared to have more than one go at it. When anyone entered a church you would have seen thirsty men by the score trailing behind whoever was offering it to anyone, their mouths open like that of wicked Dives to catch a little drop of it so that none of it should go to waste. Oh how blessed was he whose cellar was well stocked and cool that year!
The Philosopher, on moving the question of why the sea is salt, relates that, when Phoebus handed over the reins of his light-shedding chariot to Phaeton his son, he, unskilled in the art and not knowing how to follow the ecliptic between the two tropics of the sun’s sphere, wandered from his path and drew so close to the Earth that he desiccated all the subjacent lands, scorching that large segment of the heavens which philosophers call the Milky Way and the foolosophers Saint James’s Road [whereas the most tufted poets say that it is where Juno let her milk dribble down as she was giving suck to Hercules]. Whereupon the Earth grew so hot that she suffered a colossal muck-sweat ana exuded the entire sea, which is therefore salt: all sweat is salt. You will find that to be true if you would taste your own or – it’s all the same to me – that of syphilitics when they are made to sweat it out.
Virtually the same happened that year, for upon a certain Friday when all were at their devotions and conducting a handsome procession with ample litanies and fine sermons beseeching Almighty God to vouchsafe to look down upon them in their affliction with an eye of compassion, great drops of water were then clearly and visibly exuded from the Earth, just as when anyone copiously sweats. Those poor folk began to rejoice as though it were a thing beneficial to them, for some said that, since there was not a drop of moisture in the air from which they could hope for rain, Earth was making up for the deficiency.
Other – learned – persons maintained that it was rain from the Antipodes (– of which Seneca tells in the Fourth Book of his Natural Questions when treating of the source of the Nile).
But all were deceived: for when that procession was over, each one sought to scoop up the dew and drink beakerfuls of it, but they found it was only brine, worse and more salty than sea-water.
And because Pantagruel was born that very day, his father imposed that name on him (for panta in Greek means the same as ‘all’ and gruel in Hagarene means the same as ‘thirst’), wishing to signify that at the hour of his nativity all the world was athirst, and foreseeing in a spirit of prophecy that he would one day be Ruler of the Thirsty-ones.
That was revealed to him at that very same hour by another, more evident, sign. For when Pantagruel’s mother Badebec was giving birth to him, with her sage-women in attendance to welcome him, there first sallied forth from her belly sixty-eight muleteers, each leading by the halter a mule laden with salt; after which came nine dromedaries laden with smoked bacon and ox-tongues, seven camels with eels, and then five-and-twenty wagons with leeks, garlic, chibols and onions. Which terrified the aforesaid sage-women; but some of them said: ‘Good victuals there! [We shall drink a trifle remiss, not like Swiss.] It’s a good sign: those are spurs to wine-bibbing’.
And as they went cackling on about such light-hearted topics, out comes Pantagruel, all over hair like a bear. In a spirit of prophecy one of the sage-women declared: ‘Born hairy was he! Wondrous deeds will he do! If he goes on to live, then old shall he grow.’
Of Gargantua’s grief at the death of his wife Badebec
CHAPTER 3
[A rhetorical and dialectical dilemma. The tone is comic but deals with a real problem: so many children died at birth and so many women died in childbirth.
Traditional scholastic debates pro et contra were mocked by Renaissance humanists as scholastic exercises, not serious attempts to reach the truth.
Rabelais replaces ‘Jesus’ by ‘Lord God’. Elsewhere too the name of Jesus proved too hallowed for him to play with.]
Who was befuddled and perplexed when Pantagruel was born? Gargantua his father, for seeing on one side his wife dead and on the other his son Pantagruel born and so big and fair, he knew not what to say or do. The doubt which troubled his mind was namely this: ought he to weep out of grief for his wife or laugh out of joy for his son? He had good dialectical arguments for both sides. They choked him, for he could marshal them very well in syllogistic modes and figures but he could come to no conclusion. So he remained caught like [a mouse in pitch, or] a kite in the nets of a fowler:
‘Should I weep?’ he asked. ‘Yes. Why? Because my good wife is dead, who was the best this and [the best] that in all the world. Never shall I see her more! Never shall I see her again! Her loss to me is immeasurable. O God of mine! What have I done that you should punish me so? Why didn’t you send death to me rather than her? To live without her is for me but to languish. Alas, Badebec, my sweeting, my belovèd, my quim so little and lovely’ – hers covered three acres and two square
poles though – ‘my tenderling, my codpiece, my slippers, my slip-on: never again shall I see you! [Alas, my poor Pantagruel: you have lost a good mother, your gentle nurse, your most belovèd lady!] Ha, false Death, how malevolent, how cruel you are, to take from me her who, as of right, deserves immortality.’
And so saying he bellowed like a cow.
Then all of a sudden he remembered Pantagruel, and began to laugh like a calf:
‘O my little son,’ he said. ‘My little bollock, my imp, how pretty you are; how beholden I am to God for having given me so fine a son, one so happy, so laughing, so pretty. Ho, ho! Ho, ho! How joyful am I! Let us drink, ho! and banish all melancholy.
‘Bring out the best! Rinse the glasses! Spread the cloth! Get rid of those dogs! Put bellows to that fire! Light that candle! Shut that door! [Cut up bread for the soup!] Send those poor beggars away [but give them what they want]! Hold my gown: let me strip to my doublet to entertain those good women better!’
As he was saying that, he heard the litany and the dirges of the priests as they bore his wife to her grave. At which he gave over his happy talk and was caught away in ecstasy, saying:
‘Jesus! Must I go on being sad? That irks me. [I’m no longer young: I’m getting on.] The weather is treacherous: I could catch a fever and feel awful. Nobleman’s honour! ‘Tis better to weep less and drink more. My wife is dead. Well then, by God [– allow me that oath! –], I shall never resurrect her by my tears. She’s all right: in paradise at very least, if not better. She’s praying God for us. She’s most blessèd. She’s no longer troubled by our woes and calamities. We’ve all got it coming: God guard those who are left! It behoves me to think about finding another.
Now this is what you’ll do,’ he said to those sage-women [– but where are such sages to be found, good folk? I can’t see [– any! –] ‘You go off to her funeral, and meanwhile I’ll stay here cuddling my son since I feel very thirsty and could risk falling ill. But have a drink before you go.12 It’ll make you feel good. Believe me, on my honour.’