PAN. The entrance? – FR. Fresh.
PAN. Deep down it is like a – FR. Pit.
PAN. I mean, what does it feel like inside? – FR. Hot.
PAN. What grows around it? – FR. Hair.
PAN. What sort? – FR. Red.
PAN. And the older ones? – FR. Grey.
PAN. HOW are they when it comes to the jump? – FR. Prompt.
PAN. The wriggling of the bottoms? – FR. Quick.
PAN. DO they all do much bumping? – FR. Much.
PAN. Your tools, now: what are they like? – FR. Large.
PAN. And of what shape is the shaft? – FR. Round.
PAN. What colour is the helmet? – FR. Bay.
PAN. When it’s over, what are they like? – FR. Limp.
PAN. And the testicles drooping? – FR. SO.
PAN. How are they trussed up? – FR. Tight.
PAN. When all is over, how are they? – FR. Drained.
PAN. Now, by the oath you have sworn, when you come to service those girls, how do you lay them? – FR. Back.
PAN. What do they say whilst they jig about? – FR. Nowt.
PAN. They’re giving you a good time, but meanwhile they’re thinking about their thingummies? – FR. True.
PAN. Have they borne you any children? – FR. None.
PAN. How do you lie together? – FR. Nude.
PAN. By the aforesaid oath you have sworn, how many times, carefully counted, do you normally manage it a day? – FR. Six.
PAN. And a night? – FR. Ten.
‘Damme,’ (said Frère Jean) ‘the lecher can never get beyond seize. He must be shy.’25
PAN. Could you really do as well, Frère Jean? Good God! He’s a bit of a green leper. Can all the others do as well? – FR. All.
PAN. Who is the greatest gallant amongst you? – FR. Me.
PAN. DO you ever serve a fault? – FR. NO.
PAN. I’m a bit confused at this point: having emptied and exhausted your spermatic tools the previous day, can there be any more left in them on the morrow? – FR. More.
PAN. Unless I am raving, they use that Indie herb made famous by Theophrastus. But if in the midst of such delights you experience any slackening off in your member from some natural impediment or otherwise, how do you feel? – FR. Bad.
PAN. And what do those maidens do then? – FR. Yell.
PAN. And if you dry up one day? – FR. Worse.
PAN. What do you give them then? – FR. Biffs.
PAN. What do they do then for you? – FR. Shit.
PAN. What do you mean? – FR. Farts.
PAN. Sounding like what? – FR. Quims.
PAN. How do you chastise them? – FR. Hard.
PAN. Until what flows? – FR. Blood.
PAN. What is their complexion like then? – FR. Dyed.
PAN. To make it better for you they need… ? – FR. Paint.
PAN. SO you remain for them an object of… ? – FR. Fear.
PAN. And then they think you are… ? – FR. Saints.
PAN. By the vine-leaf oaf that you swore, is August the season when you do it most flaccidly? – FR. Hmm.
PAN. And the one in which you do it most vigorously? – FR. March.
PAN. At other times you do it with… ? – FR. Glee. Panurge then said with a smile:
‘So that’s the poor old worldly Demisemiquaver! Did you hear how definite, peremptory and brief he was in his replies? He answered only in monosyllables. I reckon he would get three bites from one cherry.’
‘Golly,’ said Frère Jean, ‘he never speaks to his maidens like that! He’s polysyllabic with them! You were talking about three bites from one cherry: by Saint Grey, I swear that he could reduce a shoulder of mutton to two slices and down a quart of wine at one gulp. See how tired out he is!’
‘Such wretched monkish scrap-iron, avid for victuals, can be found all over the world,’ said Epistemon. ‘And then they tell us that they’ve nothing in this world but their lives. What the devil more do kings and great princes have?’26
How the Institution of Lent is displeasing to Epistemon
CHAPTER 28
[Lent is mocked on medical, moral, prudential and theological grounds.
Rabelais was for a while the titular, non-residing curé of Saint Christophe du Jambet.
There are some obvious echoes of the four books, including the quotation from Saint Paul (Romans 14:5) ‘Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind’, which was so vital for the philosophy and structure of the Third Book and cited there in Chapter 7.]
‘Did you note how that miserable, wretched Demisemiquaver mentioned March as the month for debauchery?’
‘Yes,’ replied Pantagruel; ‘yet March always falls in Lent, which was instituted for the maceration of the flesh, the disciplining of sensual appetites and the restraining of venereal frenzies.’
‘And,’ said Epistemon, ‘you can judge whether that pope who first instituted it showed any good sense or not: this peasant-like, lecherous Demisemiquaver confesses that he is never more bewrayed in debauchery than during Lent; and for that he gives the convincing reason advanced by all good and learned physicians who assert that there are no foods eaten during the whole course of a year which excite a man more to lubricity than those which are then in season: beans, peas, kidney-beans, chick-peas, onions, walnuts, oysters, herrings, salted fish and garum-sauce, together with salads wholly composed of aphrodisiac herbs such as rocket, garden-cress, tarragon, watercress, water-parsley, rampion, sea-poppy, hops, figs, rice and raisins.’
‘You might be surprised to learn,’ said Pantagruel, ‘that that good pope who instituted the holy time of Lent (noting that that was the season when natural heat, exuded from the central parts of the body to which it had confined itself during the winter chill, is dispersed like the sap in trees to the limbs at the circumference) prescribed the aforementioned foods so as to help the human race to multiply. What made me think so is the fact that the number of children born in October and November inscribed in the baptismal registers at Thouars is greater than those born in the other ten months of the year: those children, if you count backwards, were all forged, conceived and spawned in Lent.’
‘I,’ said Frère Jean, ‘am listening to your words and take no little pleasure in them, but the curé of Jambet attributed that copious impregnation of wives not to Lenten foods but rather to the bent little begging Friars, the little booted preachers and the little bedraggled confessors who, during the time of their imperium, damn all randy husbands three fathoms deep below the talons of Lucifer. Terrified, those husbands no longer dare to swive their chambermaids and so fall back on their wives.
‘I have spoken.’
‘Interpret the institution of Lent according to your own ideas,’ said Epistemon; ‘Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. The abolition of Lent seems to me to be imminent; but I know that the physicians are against it: I’ve heard them say so. For their Art would be held in contempt without Lent, they would earn nothing and nobody would ever fall ill. All maladies are sown in Lent. Lent is the true hot-bed, the natural seed-bed and dispenser of all maladies. And you’re still not taking it into account that whilst Lent rots the body it also drives the soul mad. Devils then get busy: black-beetles come out into the open, bigots hold their great assizes as well as their numerous sessions, stations-of-the-Cross, sales of pardons, confessions, flagellations and anathematizings. I do not mean to infer, though, that the Arimaspians are better off than we are in this matter, but I was speaking apropos.’
‘Now then,’ said Panurge, ‘my old bumkin of a demisemi-quavering bollock! What do you think of this one?
‘Is he not a heretic?’ – FR. Yea.
PAN. Should he be burnt? – FR. Should.
PAN. Soon as possible? – FR. Yes.
PAN. With no parboiling? – FR. None.
PAN. Quick or dead? – FR. Quick.
PAN. Until what follows? – FR. Death.
PAN. Did he make you cross?
– FR. Most.
PAN. What did you take him to be? – FR. Daft.
PAN. DO you mean daft or raging mad? – FR. Worse.
PAN. What do you want him to be? – FR. Burnt.
PAN. Have you burnt any others? – FR. Lots.
PAN. Were they heretics too? – FR. Less.
PAN. Will you burn any more? – FR. Heaps.
PAN. Would you redeem any of them? – FR. None.
PAN. They should all be burnt then? – FR. All.
‘I cannot tell,’ said Epistemon, ‘what pleasure you derive from reasoning with this nasty, scruffy old monk; if I didn’t know you already, you’d be spawning in my mind a dishonourable impression of yourself.’
‘Let’s be on our way, for God’s sake,’ said Panurge. ‘I’m so fond of him that, once I’m married, I’d like to bring him before Gargantua, as my wife’s fool; he’d be quite a cop –’
‘– ulator, yes,’ said Epistemon, employing the figure of speech called tmesis.’27
‘Now comes the time,’ said Frère Jean with a laugh, ‘when you’ll get your deserts, my poor old Panurge. You will never escape being cuckolded right up to your bum!’
How we called at the land of Satin
CHAPTER 29
[A Lucianesque tapestry-land with embroidered flora and fauna
Charles Marais succeeded Rabelais at the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyons
In French April fools are April fish.
The remora fish has a name which in Latin means ‘delay’ or ‘hindrance’. It was constantly mentioned for its ability to delay great ships, even stopping them in full sail.]
Happy for having seen the new religious order of the Demisemiquaver Friars, we sailed on for two days. On the third our pilot descried an island. It was of all isles the most beautiful and delightful. It was called the Isle of Frieze-cloth, for there the roads are made of such frieze. Upon it lies the land of Satin – so well known to pages about Court – upon which grow trees and plants which never lose flower or leaf and which are formed of damask and velvet with needle – work figures. Beast and bird were of tapestry – work.
Then we saw several beasts, birds and trees which are like ours at home in configuration, size, spread and colour, except that, unlike ours, they do not eat, do not sing and never bite. There were several others as well which we had not seen before; including elephants in various attitudes. Amongst them I noted six bull – elephants and seven cows which had been put on show by their trainer in the theatre at Rome during the time of Germanicus, a nephew of the Emperor Claudius. Those were talented elephants, elephants which were scholars, musicians, philosophers and dancers (such as could step out a stately pavane or a galliard). They were seated at table, elegantly ordered, eating and drinking in silence like caloyers in their refectory. They have trunks which are two cubits in length which we call proboscides; with them they suck up water and they pick up dates, plums and edibles of all sorts. They use them as fists for attack and defence. In the course of battle they toss men high into the air and make them split their sides with laughter as they fall. They have joints and articulations in their legs: those who have written the contrary have never seen any save in paintings. Amongst their teeth they have two great horns (as Juba calls them). Pausanias says that they are indeed horns, not teeth; Philostratus, that they are teeth, not horns. It’s all the same to me, provided you realize that they are pure ivory, three or four cubits long and set in the upper jaw – bone not the lower. Should you believe those who state the contrary – even Aelian who is a male hawk where lying is concerned – then you will find yourself in a fix. It was there, in tapestry – work and nowhere else, that Pliny had seen elephants with jingles dancing as funambulists on tight – ropes, walking high above the tables in the midst of a banquet without disturbing the eaters and drinkers.
I also saw a rhinoceros there, exactly like the one that Henry Clerberg showed me some time ago, and hardly differing from a boar which I once saw at Limoges, save that it had a horn on its snout, pointed and a cubit long. It would dare to take on an elephant with it, sticking it into its belly during the fight (the belly being the softest and weakest part of an elephant) and throw it to the ground, dead.
There I also saw thirty – two unicorns. It is a beast of wondrous ferocity, in form exactly like a beautiful steed, except that it has the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a wild boar and, on its forehead, a sharp, black horn, six or seven foot long, which normally droops down like the crest of a turkey – cock, but when it wants to fight or otherwise employ it, it erects it, straight and stiff. I saw one of them, accompanied by various wild animals, purifying a spring with its horn.
Panurge then told me that his own horn was like that, not in overall length but in its powers and capacities, for just as that unicorn cleansed the water in the ponds and springs from filth and poison so that the other species of animals could then safely drink of it, so too you could safely lark about after his horn without risk of canker, pox, clap, stippled pustules or other minor blessings, for if there were to be any infection in a hole of a Memphitic rankness he would clean it out with its sinewy horn.
‘Once you’re married,’ said Frère Jean, ‘we’ll try that out on your wife; and may God so will it, since you’ve given us such a lesson in hygiene.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Panurge; ‘and then you’ll quickly get that lovely little pill in your guts by which you graduate to God and which, like Julius Caesar’s, is compounded of twenty – two dagger blows.’
‘Far better,’ said Frère Jean, ‘would be a goblet of a good cool wine.’
I also saw there the Golden Fleece which Jason won (and those who maintain that it was not a fleece but a golden apple, since mêla in Greek means both apple and sheep, have a poor acquaintance with the land of Satin).
I also saw a chameleon just as Aristotle describes it and like the one I was once shown by Charles Marais, a famous physician in the noble city of Lyons on the Rhone: it lived on air alone.
I also saw three hydras such as I had previously seen elsewhere. They are snakes, each having seven distinct heads.
I also saw fourteen phoenixes there. I have read in various authors that there is never more than one phoenix in the whole world at any one epoch, but according to my humble opinion those who have described it never saw any except in tapestry – land, not even Lactantius Firmianus. I also saw the hide of the ass of Apuleius. And I saw: three hundred and nine pelicans; six thousand and sixteen seleucid birds (proceeding in ranks and gobbling up the grasshoppers in their wheat – fields; some cynamolges, argathiles, caprimulges and tinnunculi – why, even some great – throated pelican jawyers: I mean Vatican lawyers – some stymphalides (harpies), panthers, gazelles, cemades, cynocephali, satyrs, cartazoni, tarands, aurochs, monopes, pephages, cepi, neades, steres, cercopitheci, bisons, musmons, byturi, ophyri, screech – owls and gryphons.
I also saw Mid – Lent (mounted, her stirrups held by Mid – August and Mid – March) as well as werewolves, centaurs, tigers, leopards, hyenas, giraffes and oryxes.
I also saw a remora (a tiny ‘delay’ fish called echineis by the Greeks): it was close to a great ship which could not budge even though she was in full sail on the high seas. I can well believe it to be the ship of Periander, the tyrant, which just such a tiny fish brought to a halt despite the wind. It was here, in the land of Satin, that Mutianus saw it, and nowhere else. Frère Jean told us that two sorts of fish used to lord it over the Courts of Parlement, rotting the bodies of all the plaintiffs (noble and commoner, poor and rich, great and small) and driving their souls mad: the first were April fools – fishy false – witnesses – and the venomous delay-fish – an eternity of lawsuits never ending in a judgement.
I also saw sphinxes, raphia, lynxes, cephi (which have front feet like hands and rear legs like a man’s) crocutae, eali (which are as big as hippopotamuses, with tails like elephants, jaws like wild-boars and horns which are as mobile as the ears of an ass) and cucrotes (ver
y quick beasts as big as the donkeys in the countryside at Mirebeau): they have necks, tails and chests like those of lions, legs like a stag’s and a maw split up to their ears but with only two teeth, one upper and one lower; they speak with a human voice but there they uttered not a word. You tell me that no one has ever seen a saker’s eyrie: well I saw eleven of them. Note that well.
I also saw some left-hand halberds, something I had never seen elsewhere.
‘I also saw some manticors: very strange beasts, with the body of a lion, a red hide, a face and ears like a man’s, and three rows of teeth which intersected each other as when one interlaces the fingers of both hands; they have a sting in their tail with which they prick you as scorpions do; and their voices are most melodious.
I also saw some catoblepes: savage beasts with small bodies but heads disproportionately big: they can scarcely lift them off the ground. Their eyes are so poisonous that anyone who looks into them dies at once, as if he had seen a basilisk.
I also saw some beasts-with-two-backs who seemed to me to be marvellously merry; the motions of their buttocks being more lavish than a wagtail’s, with an everlasting stirring of cruppers.
I also saw some mammiferous cray-fish, which I had never seen anywheré else. They marched in excellent order: it did you good to see them.
How in the land of Satin we saw Hear-say, who kept a school for witnesses
CHAPTER 30
[A chapter dealing with false witnesses, including tellers of travellers’ tales and marvels.
‘Anacampserotes’ are fruit said by Pliny to reconcile lovers.
Pierre Gilles (Aegidius) was a friend of Erasmus. In 1533 he published a treatise, On the Latin and French Names of Mediterranean Fishes, which the Cardinal d’Armagnac persuaded him to dedicate to François I.