For that one quality alone it would have been worthy to rank alongside the real pantagruelion – (all the more so since Pantagruel desired that every door of Thélème be made of it, as well as all the gates, windows, guttering, drip-ways and cladding, and since he similarly ordered all the poops, prows, galleys, decks, gangways and forecastles of his swift carracks, barques, galleys, galleons, brigantines, feluccas and other vessels in his arsenal at Thalassa to be clad with it) – were it not for the fact that when larix is engulfed in flames from other kinds of wood it eventually decomposes and disintegrates like stones in a lime-kiln, whereas pantagruelion asbestos is renewed and cleaned, not corrupted and degraded.
And so:
Indies, Sabia, Araby: take heed:
Myrrh, incense, ebony, cease ye to praise,
Accept our plant and bear away the seed,
Sow it at home, a gift for all your days
If in your fields ye luckily it raise,
Thanks give to Heaven, thanks by the million,
For France, wherein our happy plant doth breed:
Blessèd our realm for pantagruelion.46
The end of the Third Book
of the
Heroic deeds and sayings
of
the Good Giant Pantagruel.
PROLOGUE TO THE FOURTH BOOK OF PANTAGRUEL (1548)
Introduction to the Prologue to The Fourth Book of Pantagruel (1548)
The 1548 Fourth Book, often called the Partial Fourth Book, is certainly based on the author’s manuscripts, yet it appears under such strange circumstances that it seems unlikely that Rabelais authorized its publication. In 1546 he had obtained a most fulsome Royal privilège for both past and future works: there is no hint of it here, two years later. This partial Fourth Book ends in the middle of a sentence! The printer printed all that he had; he padded out the book with wood-cuts from his stock.
This Prologue to the Fourth Book is later abandoned, to be replaced by the superb Prologue of 1552. But the 1548 Prologue, too, is a fine piece of writing.
The Fourth Book of the Heroic deeds
and Sayings of noble Pantagruel.
Composed by Maître François Rabelais
Doctor of Medicine and Caloyer of
the Iles Hyères.
LYONS
The Year five-hundred and forty-eight.
Prologue
[Rabelais cites the ancient Roman legal formulas Do – Dico – Addico (I give – I say – I adjudicate) as though they were in the second person: ‘You give – You say – You adjudicate’. This makes nonsense of those august formulaic utterances by which the Praetor, on auspicious days, solemnly authorized judgement to be done: Do judicem (I appoint the judge) dico jus (I state the case of the plaintiff) and addico litem (I hand over the cause to the magistrate to judge). In Ancient Rome those venerable formulas had to be scrupulously adhered to.
Tales of battles between birds are found in several authors including Poggio and Fulgoso. There may be an element of legal fun in the story of the battle of the jays. Legists quarrelled over the sense of the word graculus in a text of Ulpian (Leg. 15 D. locati). Cujas (Observationes, 25, xv) denied that the graculi of Ulpian can be jays, since graculi are gregarious and jays are not. Cujas cites Julius Caesar Scaliger (Exercitatio, 232) in support of his contention.
There is a sustained play on pie meaning magpie and pie meaning booze: croquer pie can mean either to hook a magpie or to gulp down one’s booze. Commonly a croc-pie was a toss-pot. Croquer pie or croquer la pie and similar phrases are kept here in French to allow of the sustained play on words.
Wine-flasks disguised as Breviaries did indeed exist.
An important part of this Prologue, that concerned with the art of medicine, will be taken up again in the Preliminary Epistle to the 1552 Fourth Book.]
Most shining topers, and you most-becarbuncled sufferers from the pox, I have perceived, received, harkened unto and believed the Ambassador dispatched towards my Fatherhood by your Lordships’ lordships; and he seemed to me to be a very good and fluent orator. I can reduce the substance of his statement to three words of such great importance that, amongst the ancient Romans, the praetor replied with them to all petitions brought for judgement; with those three words he decided all controversies, all plaints, lawsuits and disputes. Any days on which the praetor did not pronounce those words were declared inauspicious and legally improper, and any days on which he did do so, legally proper and auspicious:
– You give –
– You say –
and
– You adjudicate.
Oh! good people, I cannot see you. May the precious might of God be eternally your helper, and mine too. And so may we never do anything before first praising his most holy name.
– You give me: what? A lovely capacious breviary. Golly, I thank you for it. That is the very least I ought to do. I never gave a thought to what sort of breviary it was, seeing as I did its die-stamps, rosettes, clasps and binding, not overlooking either the crocs – the hooks – and the pies – the magpies painted upon it and scattered over it in a most beautiful pattern, by which (as though they were hieroglyphic letters) you clearly convey that there is no piece like a masterpiece and no courage like that of croqueurs de pies. Now croquer pie means a certain kind of merriness by way of a metaphor distilled from a prodigious event which occurred in Brittany a little before the battle which was joined near Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier. Our forebears have related it to us: it is right that our successors should know of it. Wine was plentiful that year: they would trade you a quart of good delicious wine against a fly-cord with only one aglet!
From the Orient there came in flight on one side a host of jays and on the other a host of magpies, all heading towards the setting sun. So well did they fly side by side that towards evening the jays withdrew to the left (the auspicious side, you understand), and the magpies to the right, all very close to each other. Through whichever lands they passed, there was not one magpie which did not rally to the magpies, not one single jay which did not join the camp of the jays. They journeyed, they flew, so far that they passed over Angers, a town in France on the marches of Brittany; they had so grown in number that, as they flew, they shrouded the sun from the lands stretched out below.
In Angers there dwelt at that time an aged uncle called Frappin, the Seigneur de Saint-Georges. (He it was who composed and set to music those beautiful, merry noëls in the dialect of Poitou.) He delighted in a jay because of its chattering by which it invited everyone who came along to join in a drink. It never sang but of drink, and he called it his Old Goitre. That jay, moved by martial frenzy, shattered its cage and joined the passing jays. Now a neighbouring barber called Behuart had a tame magpie; she was most gallant. With her person she augmented the number of magpies and followed them into battle.
Now come things great and unexpected, true, though, veritably seen and verified. Note all this well. What happened? What was the end of it all, good folk?
Something amazing.
Near the cross of Malchara a battle so savage was joined that is horrifying merely to think of it. It ended with the magpies losing the battle: on the field were cruelly slain jays up to the number of 2589362109, not counting the women and children (that is, as you realize, not counting the female magpies and the little magpielets).1
The jays stood victorious, though not without the loss of many a fine soldier. Hence the distress was very great throughout all the land.
The Bretons are really quite human, you know, but if they had understood that prodigious event they would have quickly realized that misfortune would fall upon them, since the tail of the magpie has the form of their heraldic ermine, whilst the jay has some resemblance in its plumage to the arms of France.
Old Goitre got home three days later by the way, fagged out, fed up with fighting and nursing a black eye. Nevertheless, a few hours later it was in good spirits again, after its usual feed.
The fine people of Angers, town
sfolk and the students, came running up in droves to gaze at Old one-eyed Goitre in such a state. Old Goitre invited them to have a drink as was its custom, croaking after each invitation, Croquez pie! (that, I assume, was the watchword on the day of battle). All made it their duty to do so.
The female magpie of Behuart never returned. She had been crocked! Hence croquer la pie truly became a common saying, meaning to match drink for drink, taking great gollops.
Frappin had his servants’ hall and buttery decorated with paintings to serve as a perpetual memorial, as you can see in Angers on Saint-Laurence’s Mound.
Now the decoration on that breviary of yours made me think that it was somehow more than a breviary. And anyway, what reason could you have for making me the present of one! Thanks to you and to God I have breviaries ranging from the oldest to the newest. In such uncertainty I opened the said breviary and discovered that it was a breviary contrived with marvellous ingenuity, with most appropriate die-stamps and opportune inscriptions. So at Prime, Terce, Sext and Nones, you want me to drink some white wine, do you, and likewise some claret at Vespers and Compline? That is what you mean by croquer pie. No wicked magpie ever hatched you! I shall grant your request.
– You say: what? That I have in no wise perturbed you in any of the books I have so far had printed. You will be even less perturbed if I quote a relevant adage from an ancient Pantagruelist.
‘It is,’ he said, ‘no vulgar praise
To have pleased princes in our days.’2
You go on to say that the wine of my Third Book was good and to your taste. There was not much of it, that is true, and you do not approve of what men commonly say, ‘Little and good’; you prefer what that good fellow Evispande Verron used to say, ‘Plenty and good’. Moreover you invite me to continue my tale of Pantagruel, citing the utility and fruit gathered from the reading of it amongst all good folk, and apologizing for not having obeyed me when I begged you to reserve your laughter until my seventy-eighth book. With a very good heart I forgive you. I am not so fierce or as hard to please as you might think; but what I said to you was not bad for you, and I quote in return that judgement of Hector’s published by Naevius: ‘to be praised by the praiseworthy it is a beautiful thing’. Echoing that assertion, I say and maintain up to the stake (exclusively, you understand, judicially speaking) that you are fine, noble people, all descended from good fathers and good mothers; and I promise you (Foot-soldier’s Honour!) that if ever I come across you in Mesopotamia I will so work on that little Comte George of Lower Egypt that he will make each of you a present of a beautiful crocodile from the Nile and a chimera from the Euphrates.
– You adjudicate: what? And to whom? Well: all the odd quarters of the moon to black-beetles, cagots, matagots, booted monks, bacon-pappers, monkish drones, pussy-paws, pardon-pedlars and catamites: the mere sound of such names is terrifying. I saw your ambassador’s hair stand on end even as they were uttered. They are all Double-Dutch to me and I have no idea what sort of beasts you include under such names. After a diligent search in several countries I have found not one man who would accept them for himself or put up with being thus designated or labelled. I presume they were some monstrous species of barbarous beasts dating from the days when men’s bonnets were tall (a species now naturally extinct, since all things sublunary have their end and period, and we cannot know how those words were defined: as you realize, once an object has perished its name quickly perishes too).
If by such terms you mean the calumniators of my writings you could more aptly name them devils, the Greek for calumny being diabole. See how loathsome before God and the angels is that vice known as calumny (that is when a good deed is called into question and good things are ill-spoken of) since the devils in Hell are named and called after it, even though several other vices might appear more excessive. Those men are not strictly speaking devils from hell: they are their servants and ministers. I call them black devils, white devils, tame devils, familiar devils. Now if you let them they will do to all other books what they have done to mine. But it is none of their invention – which I say so that they may not in the future glory so much in the surname of old Cato the Censor.
Have you ever thought what is meant by To gob in the basin? Well, long ago, whenever those forerunners of such tame devils, those architects of voluptuousness and underminers of decency (like Philoxenus, Gnatho and others of the same kidney) were in the inns and taverns where they regularly held their classes, they would watch the guests being served with good dishes and tasty tidbits, and would vilely gob into the tureens to put them off the food set before them, nauseated by their filthy spittle and snot: then all was left for those nasty snot-dribbling gobbers.
An almost similar tale, albeit not so abominable, is told of a fresh-water physician3 (the nephew of the late Amer’s legal adviser): he would pronounce the wing of a fat capon to be bad for you and its rump dangerous (so that his patients should eat none of those things, all being set aside for him to put into his mouth) while its neck was very good provided all the skin was removed.
That is how those new be-cassocked devils have behaved: having noted that everybody enthusiastically desires to see and to read what I wrote in my previous books, they have gobbed in the basin: that is, every one of them has so handled my books as to beshit them all over, decrying and calumniating them with the intention that no one, apart from their Reverend Lazinesses, should heed them, no one read them. With my own eyes (not my own ears) I have seen them at it, going so far as to keep my books religiously with their night things, as breviaries for everyday use.
They have filched them from the sick, the sufferers from gout and those unfortunate persons for whose amusement I had written and composed them in their illnesses. If I could personally treat all those who are depressed and ill there would be no need to publish and print such books. Hippocrates wrote a work specifically entitled On the State of the Perfect Physician. (Galen threw light on it with his learned commentaries.) In it he lays down that there must be nothing in the physician which could offend his patient. He goes so far as to single out his finger-nails. Everything about the physician – gestures, mien, dress, words, look, touch – must please and delight his patient. That, in my awkward old way, is what I strive and struggle to do for those whom I take into my care. So on their part do my colleagues, which no doubt is why we are dubbed long-armed, big-elbowed charlatans by the absurdly expounded and tastelessly contrived opinion of a couple of dung-prodders.4
There is more to it than that. We have hectic arguments over a passage in the Sixth Book of the Epidemics of our venerated Hippocrates: not whether the gloomy, severe, rheubarbative,5 displeasing and dissatisfied expression of a physician depresses the patient while his happy, serene, pleasing, laughing and open expression cheers him up – that is proven and certain – but whether such depressing or cheering-up results from the perceptions of the patient as he contemplates those qualities, or rather from the pouring of the physician’s spirits (serene or gloomy, happy or sad) from him into the patient, as in the opinion of the Platonists and the Averroists.
Seeing that I cannot be called in by everybody who is ill nor take all the sick into my care, what meanness is it that would deprive the sick and the ailing (since I cannot be there myself) of the pleasure and happy pastimes they find, with no offence to God or the king or to anyone else, when my merry books are read out to them?
Well then, since by your verdict and decree such evil-speakers and calumniators are lunatics who have been seized and taken over by the old quarters of the moon, I forgive them; so now we shall not all be able simply to laugh at them when we see those raging lunatics – some lazars, some buggers, some lazars and buggers – dashing through the fields, gnashing their teeth, bashing up benches, smashing the cobbles, knocking about paving-stones, hanging themselves, drowning themselves, throwing themselves about and galloping away with their bridle loose to all the devils on account of the energy, qualities and virtues of the lunary quarter
s which they then will have within their noddles: quarters crescent, quarters new, quarters gibbous, full and waning.
I shall, however, in the face of their wickedness and deceit, repeat the offer which Timon the Misanthropist made to his ungrateful Athenians. Timon, angered by the ingratitude of the people of Athens where he was concerned, came one day into the public council of the city requesting that he be given a hearing about an affair touching the common weal.
At his request, silence fell: they expected to hear matters of importance since he, who had for so many years avoided all company and lived on his own, had now come to the council. Whereupon he said, ‘Outside my private garden, below the wall, there stands a spreading, fair and notable fig-tree; from it, Gentlemen of Athens, your men, women, youths and maidens are accustomed in their despair to slip away to hang and throttle themselves. I hereby advise you that I intend in a week’s time to chop that tree down in order to improve my house. Therefore whosoever amongst you (or anywhere else in your city) needs to hang himself should promptly get on with it. Once that period has elapsed they will find no place more apt, no tree so convenient.’
Following his example, I announce to those devilish calumniators that they must all be hanged within the final phase of the present moon. I will supply the nooses. The place I assign for the hangings is half-way between Mid-day and Faverolles. Come the new moon they will not get away so cheaply and will be obliged to supply the nooses at their own expense; and, in addition, to select a tree for their own hanging (as did Signora Leontium who calumniated the most-learned and eloquent Theophrastus).6
THE FOURTH BOOK OF PANTAGRUEL (1552)
Introduction to the Fourth Book of Pantagruel (1552)
The 1552 Fourth Book (referred to in the notes here as ‘52) greatly expands the Fourth Book of 1548 (referred to as ’48). The notes indicate where the text of ‘48 varies from that of ‘52; however, the ‘48 Prologue is not indicated, as this appears in full earlier in this volume. Square brackets show a selection of the additions made in ‘52. The variants cease in Chapter 25 at the point where the ‘48 text breaks off.