gargantua dissertation

Commentaire et dissertation

Gargantua dissertation.

Nous proposons ici une dissertation sur Gargantua ( résumé chapitre par chapitre ICI ) de l’auteur humaniste Rabelais qui porte sur la question posée par le parcours associé «  rire et savoir » . Ci-après, la problématique et le plan détaillé de la dissertation.

GARGANTUA DISSER TATION: SUJET

Sujet: Gargantua de Rabelais a-t-il pour fonction de nous amuser ou bien de nous instruire?

Problématique: Gargantua peut-il être réduit à une oeuvre légère?

1. Une oeuvre pour rire

A. gargantua: une oeuvre comique.

D’abord, l’oeuvre s’ouvre sur une formule qui annonce un programme comique: « Mieux est de ris que de larmes écrire, pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme ». Il s’agit donc bien de divertir le lecteur.

B. Rire et gauloiserie

Effectivement, Rabelais recourt au rire grossier à plusieurs reprises. Il est souvent provoqué par des moments épiques. Ainsi, nous pouvons citer le nombre de vaches servant à l’allaitement « dix sept mille neuf cent treize vaches » ou le nombre d’hommes abattus par Frère Jean « treize mille six cent vingt deux ». C’est l’ hyperbole qui crée un effet comique.

C. Le carnavalesque

En effet, Rabelais s’inscrit dans une tradition du rire. Ainsi, comme au théâtre, l’oeuvre relate des destructions et autres métamorphoses. Par exemple, l’ennemi de Gargantua, Picrochole, finit piteusement, après avoir livré une bataille sans merci à ses adversaires.

2. Un rire satirique

Dans Gargantua , Rabelais emploie également le rire à des fins de dénonciation.

A .L’église

D’abord, Rabelais dénonce l’indifférence du clergé face aux guerres qui apportent angoisse et désolation.

B. Dénonciation des croyances

Ensuite, Rabelais dénonce dans Gargantua des superstitions s’opposent fondamentalement aux valeurs de l’Eglise auxquelles adhère Rabelais. (Voir sa biographie)

C. Pour davantage de compassion

Enfin, Rabelais dénonce l’indifférence face à la souffrance individuelle et invite à davantage de compassion.

3. Gargantua : une oeuvre profonde

A. rire et satire.

Or, le rire vise également les professeurs sophistes, Rabelais les caricature. Ainsi, ces hommes se trouvent noyés dans l’urine de Gargantua.

B. Rire et épicurisme

Les héros sont des géants. Ils ont un gros appétit ce qui devient prétexte au détournement de certains préceptes tels que « la nature a horreur du vide » ( prétexte à faire bonne chère et à profiter des bonnes choses.)

C. Des valeurs humanistes

Dans Gargantua , Rabelais se fait le fer de lance de l’ Humanisme . Il y défend, notamment dans l’épisode de l ‘abbaye de Thélème , une nouvelle vision de l’éducation. En effet, il souhaiterait que davantage de place soit accordée à la réflexion et à l’épanouissement de l’élève plutôt que d’apprendre par coeur des phrases toutes faites.

GARGANTUA DISSERTATION: LA CONCLUSION

L’oeuvre de Rabelais est plus riche et complexe qu’il n’y paraît. Elle ne peut être réduite à un rire grossier car elle propose une satire mordante de l’époque et définit même une vision plus humaine pour l’avenir.

Nous espérons que cette fiche « GARGANTUA DISSERTATION » a pu t’aider. D’autres cours peuvent t’intéresser:

– Biographie de Rabelais

– Explication de texte (épisode de l’Abbaye de Thélème)

– Fiche sur l’Humanisme

2 réflexions sur « GARGANTUA DISSERTATION »

Le sujet invite à choisir un plan dialectique, ce que vous n’avez pourtant pas choisit faire : pourrait-on imaginer un plan du type: I) De toute évidence, Gargantua est une œuvre comique II) Toutefois, le sujet de l’éducation et de l’apprentissage est au cœur de la « chronique » III) Au-delà de cette opposition, ce livre d’Alcofribas Nasier invite le lecteur à se demander comment allier le rire et l’apprentissage. D’après Rabelais, il faut savoir rire et rire du savoir : les deux sont liés

Bonjour Pierre, Merci de cette réflexion. Le plan est tout à fait intéressant, il n’y a, heureusement, pas de plan ou de corrigé unique. Le vôtre est très pertinent.

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Gargantua, Rabelais : résumé et fiche de lecture

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François Rabelais a publié Gargantua en 1534 sous le pseudonyme Alcofribas Nasier (anagramme de François Rabelais !) déjà utilisé pour Pantagruel en 1532.

Ces deux œuvres comiques et satiriques relatent les aventures de deux géants et leurs amis.

Gargantua est une œuvre comique qui marque une rupture avec le Moyen-Âge et peut être considérée comme un manifeste humaniste.

Dans un monde où les méthodes médiévales règnent encore en maître dans les universités, Rabelais propose un ouvrage d’une richesse extraordinaire dans lequel il expose une conception humaniste de l’éducation, de la politique et de la religion.

Analyses d’extraits de Gargantua :

• Prologue de Gargantua
• Gargantua, chapitre 14
• Gargantua, chapitre 17
• Gargantua, chapitre 21
• Gargantua, chapitre 33
• L’abbaye de Thélème, chapitre 57
• Lettre de Pantagruel à Gargantua, Pantagruel , chapitre 8

Dissertation sur Gargantua :

• Dissertation sur Gargantua (sujet d’annales)

Analyse de Gargantua en vidéo

Qui est Rabelais ?

Né à la fin du XVème siècle, moine puis médecin réputé, Rabelais a effectué de nombreux déplacements et plusieurs séjours en Italie. C’est un érudit passionné de culture antique .

Il est connu notamment pour Pantagruel (1532) et Gargantua (1534), des œuvres comiques et satiriques relatant les aventures d’une famille de géants et leurs amis.  Mais derrière l’exubérance et le rire de ces œuvres se cache une réflexion humaniste sur l’homme.

Comment résumer Gargantua ?

Gargantua s’ouvre par un prologue qui livre une clé de lecture : derrière le comique et le burlesque, Rabelais nous invite à extraire la « substantifique moelle » de l’oeuvre, c’est à dire à découvrir son sens profond .

L’histoire débute par l’ enfance et l’éducation du géant Gargantua : sa naissance extraordinaire, ses vêtements, son goût démesuré pour la nourriture et les boissons.

Gargantua bénéficie d’abord d’une éducation traditionnelle dispensée par des théologiens qui lui font apprendre les choses par cœur .

Mais cette méthode pédagogique est un échec : Gargantua devient « tout rêveur et assoti » (chapitre 15).

Son éducation est alors confiée à Ponocrates , un professeur humaniste qui lui fait suivre un programme où l’exercice intellectuel, physique et l’hygiène du corps sont importants.

Grâce à cette éducation humaniste, Gargantua est transformé.

Rabelais narre ensuite les guerres picrocholines qui opposent le roi Picrochole à Grandgousier (le père de Gargantua).

Le pacifique Grandgousier tente par tous les moyens d’éviter la guerre, mais face à la furie belliqueuse de Picrochole, il est contraint de mener une guerre défensive pour restaurer la paix.

La troupe de Gargantua , aidée par l’énergique Frère Jean des Entommeures, remporte la victoire .

La guerre finie, Gargantua offre en récompense à son ami Frère Jean des Entommeures l’étonnante abbaye de Thélème .

Cette abbaye s’oppose en tout point aux abbayes de l’époque dans lesquelles règnaient l’ordre, la pauvreté, la chasteté et l’enfermement.

A l’inverse, la devise de l’Abbaye de Thélème est «  Fais ce que tu voudras ».

Cette liberté, loin de mener au chaos, permet aux jeunes gens bien éduqués de vivre dans l’ harmonie et l’ abondance .

Quels sont les thèmes importants dans Gargantua ?

L’éducation.

Les premiers chapitres de Gargantua répondent à la question : «  Qu’est-ce qu’une bonne éducation ?  » .

Cette interrogation est fondamentale car, pour les humanistes comme Rabelais, c’est l’ éducation qui permet à l’homme d’ exprimer le meilleur de sa nature .

L’éducation de Gargantua n’a pas été de tout repos !

Il a d’abord subi l’enseignement selon les méthodes médiévales fondées sur le par cœur , l’abstraction et le mépris du corps.

Les conséquences sont désastreuses . Grandgousier, le père de Gargantua, s’aperçoit que son fils « étudiait très bien et y mettait tout son temps, toutefois qu’en rien il ne profitait, et, qui pis est, en devenait fou, niais, tout rêveur et assoti. » (chapitre 15)

Grandgousier choisit alors pour son fils l’ éducation humaniste de Ponocrates, fondée sur la curiosité scientifique, la lecture des textes Anciens, la réflexion, la pratique, et l’hygiène du corps . Cette éducation est une réussite.

Gargantua évoque les fonctions naturelles du corps sans tabou : l’accouchement, le fait d’uriner, la défécation…

Ces allusions ne sont pas seulement comiques. Rabelais montre le corps comme une source de réjouissance .

Quelles sont les vertus d’un bon souverain ? Existe-t-il une guerre juste?

A travers les guerres picrocholines, qui font écho aux rivalités entre François Ier et Charles Quint pour la domination de l’Europe, Rabelais mène une réflexion sur ces questions politiques.

Il entend montrer l’ absurdité de la guerre et ses ravages.

Pour l’auteur humaniste, seule la guerre défensive se justifie . Ce n’est qu’après avoir tenté en vain la diplomatie et la conciliation que Grandgousier fait la guerre à Picrochole pour restaurer la paix.

La liberté et la société idéale

La liberté est un thème important dans Gargantua , au coeur des chapitres 52 à 58 sur l’Abbaye de Thélème .

Dans cette abbaye utopique, où sont accueillis les hommes et les femmes bien nés et bien éduqués, les murailles sont inexistantes et les jeunes gens n’ont qu’ une seule règle : «  Fais ce que tu voudras . »

Loin de créer des conflits, cette liberté individuelle mène à une société épanouie et fraternelle .

Quelles sont les particularités de l’écriture de Rabelais dans Gargantua ?

L’ écriture de Rabelais est d’une variété et d’une richesse extraordinaires .

L’auteur use de différents niveaux de langue , mêlant termes techniques et savants, dialectes régionaux, expressions latines, mots vulgaires et mots inventés.

Cette exubérance lexicale s’exprime particulièrement dans les nombreuses énumérations qui étourdissent le lecteur.

Rabelais multiplie aussi les tonalités (satirique, épique, comique, lyrique…) et ne recule devant aucune forme du comique (calembours, situations farcesques, allusions obscènes et scatologiques…).

Que signifie le parcours « Rire et savoir »?

Gargantua de Rabelais est un point de rencontre entre le rire et le savoir.

En effet, derrière le rire, la farce et l’imagination exubérante, l’œuvre de Rabelais témoigne d’une soif de connaissance et de savoir typiquement humaniste.

Dès le prologue, Rabelais invite d’ailleurs le lecteur à ne pas se fier au comique apparent de l’œuvre afin d’en « sucer la substantifique moelle ». Le lecteur doit « interpréter » le sens profond derrière la plaisanterie.

(Pour aller plus loin, regarde ma vidéo sur l’humanisme dans laquelle tu verras que cette approche joyeuse du savoir incarne l’humanisme naissant )

Une œuvre placée sous le signe du rire

Gargantua est une œuvre placée sous le signe du rire .

Dès l’adresse aux lecteurs, le rire est présenté comme une consolation au chagrin et aux difficultés de la vie  :

« Quand je vois la peine qui vous mine et consume, Il vaut mieux traiter du rire que des larmes Parce que le rire est le propre de l’homme. »

C’est donc par le rire que Rabelais nous invite à entrer dans son œuvre.

Une soif de connaissance

Mais le rire n’empêche ni l’érudition, ni l’étude et la réflexion.

Ainsi, Rabelais qui connaît le latin, le grec et admire la culture antique, nourrit son texte de références à Platon, Socrate, Aristote, Plutarque … Le prologue s’ouvre d’ailleurs sur une référence au Banquet de Platon et un éloge de Socrate, « prince des philosophes. »

La soif de connaissance transparaît également dans le programme éducatif de Gargantua puisqu’aucun domaine n’échappe à l’étude : la terre, la mer, les végétaux, les pierres, les métiers, les techniques humaines, les mathématiques, l’astronomie, la musique…

Rabelais se plaît à employer dans son œuvre un vocabulaire technique qui témoigne d’une érudition dans des domaines variés  : lexique religieux, médical, juridique, universitaire. Ainsi, dans le chapitre 13 où Gargantua évoque l’invention d’un torchecul, l’humour scatologique côtoie un vocabulaire médical spécialisé : « le périnée », « la dysenterie », « matière fécale », « intestins ».

Le savoir est l’occasion d’un plaisir intellectuel intense

Le message est clair : le savoir et le sérieux ne font pas bon ménage.

Au contraire, le savoir doit être l’occasion d’un plaisir intellectuel intense , proche de l’ivresse .

L’écriture dionysiaque et l’inventivité lexicale de Gargantua désaltèrent et enivrent le lecteur comme un bon vin.

L’accès au savoir n’est plus caractérisé par la privation ou la pénitence mais par une vie festive .

Tu dois bien sûr comprendre que cette approche du savoir est originale !

Rabelais écrit en effet au début du XVIème siècle, à une époque où l’éducation est dominée par les austères méthodes médiévales , dites méthodes scolastiques, qui privilégient l’apprentissage par cœur, l’abstraction, et méprisent le corps.

Cette nouvelle approche du savoir par le rire marque une rupture avec le Moyen-âge et témoigne de la naissance de l’humanisme .

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13 commentaires

Bonjour, Serait-il possible que vous rajoutiez des fiches de lectures sur les lectures cursives de la littérature d’idée ?

Bonjour Marie, Il n’existe pas de programme officiel de lectures cursives : il s’agit d’œuvres librement choisies par vos enseignants, dans le cadre des parcours. En revanche, tu peux m’indiquer les ouvrages qui te sont proposés : je prends en compte vos suggestions pour mon choix de futures fiches de lecture.

Serait-il possible que vous rajoutiez une dizaine de citations clés pour les oeuvres dont vous faites les fiches ? Cela me serait très utile en vue de la dissertation.

J’ai acheté votre livre qui m’aide énormément et je le conseille à tout le monde !

Bonjour Mme, Merci pour vos aides. Si possible pourriez-vous rajouter aux fiches de lecture de Gargantua, Le Malade imaginaire, Manon Lescaut et Les Contemplations une liste avec une vingtaine de citations à retenir. Cela me serait très utile pour la dissertation. Merci encore.

Ça m’a beaucoup aidé, merci.

Bonjour, Quel travail ! Quelle pédagogie ! Merci beaucoup

Merciii beaucoup pour ces fiches.

Ça m’a beaucoup aidé surtout que je n’ai pas eu le temps de lire gargantua j’espère que ça passera pour mon interrogation de demain

alors c’est passé ?

Je vous remercie beaucoup pour cette fiche. Je prépare le CRPE 2022 et j’ai commencé la lecture de Gargantua. Une aide pour analyser le texte s’imposait.

Merci beaucoup Mme, je suis en terminale depuis le Sénégal mais je vous suis et grâce à vous je comprends très vite mes sujets. Encore une fois MERCI

J’ai tellement aimé votre faramineux travail que vous faites pour nous…. Merci infiniment….

Il est dommage que vous ne proposez pas une fiche de Rabelais.

Laisse un commentaire ! X

Merci de laisser un commentaire ! Pour des raisons pédagogiques et pour m'aider à mieux comprendre ton message, il est important de soigner la rédaction de ton commentaire. Vérifie notamment l'orthographe, la syntaxe, les accents, la ponctuation, les majuscules ! Les commentaires qui ne sont pas soignés ne sont pas publiés.

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Rire et farce dans Gargantua

Polynésie française 2022 • Dissertation

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Polynésie française, juin 2022 • Dissertation

4 heures

Intérêt du sujet • Le sujet vous invite à réfléchir aux différents aspects du comique rabelaisien et à montrer comment celui-ci s’avère porteur d’une vision du monde.

Dans le roman de Rabelais, Gargantua , pensez-vous que le rire ne soit que de l’ordre de la farce ?

Vous répondrez à cette question dans un développement organisé en vous appuyant sur Gargantua , sur les textes que vous avez étudiés dans le cadre du parcours associé et sur votre culture personnelle.

Les clés du sujet

Analyser le sujet.

Formuler la problématique

Le génie comique de Rabelais se limite-t-il au seul déclenchement d’un rire farcesque, reposant sur un comique bas et grossier ?

Construire le plan

Les titres en couleur ou entre crochets ne doivent pas figurer sur la copie.

Introduction

[Accroche] « Le grand rire de Rabelais est un phénomène unique dans la littérature de tous les temps et à côté de lui, Aristophane, Boccace, Molière font figure de croque-morts » : ces mots de Marcel Aymé saluent la singularité de l’auteur de Gargantua . Dès l’« Avis aux lecteurs », le ton est effectivement donné : Rabelais place Gargantua sous le signe du rire. [Explication du sujet] Cependant, la question posée par le sujet semble suggérer que ce rire est plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît. [Problématique] Le génie comique de Rabelais se limite-t-il au seul déclenchement d’un rire farcesque, reposant sur un comique bas et grossier ? [Annonce du plan] Si l’œuvre joue en effet sur un comique farcesque [I] , elle fait aussi du rire un outil de réflexion critique [II] , pour en définitive le mettre au service de la philosophie humaniste [III] .

I. Un rire farcesque

1. des personnages et des situations hauts en couleur.

Les personnages de la farce sont dénués de complexité. C’est le cas des personnages de Gargantua  : des géants , issus du folklore populaire, qui se prêtent à tous les excès. Le comique naît de leur démesure , perceptible par exemple dans l’évocation de la quantité de nourriture ou de boisson avalée… ou évacuée – il faut ainsi 17 900 vaches pour allaiter dignement Gargantua qui, à peine né, hurle : « À boire, à boire ! »

La farce se caractérise également par une intrigue schématique, jouant essentiellement sur l’ opposition entre la bêtise et la ruse , laquelle finit par triompher. Certains chapitres de Gargantua s’inscrivent délibérément dans cette veine farcesque , tels ceux relatant le vol des cloches de l’église Notre-Dame par Gargantua et les manœuvres plaisantes de Janotus de Bragmardo pour les récupérer. Ivre, le théologien cherche maladroitement à reprendre possession des cloches que le géant compte accrocher au cou de sa jument, « grande comme six éléphants ».

Rabelais s’inspire ici d’une farce du xv e  siècle, La Farce de Maître Pathelin, où la ruse triomphe au détriment des benêts qui sont dupés.

D’autres épisodes reposent sur un comique de situation efficace : ainsi, l’ingestion impromptue par Gargantua de pèlerins cachés dans une salade interrompt avec humour la guerre picrocholine.

2. Grossièretés et obscénités

Le roman s’inspire du registre de la farce par ses nombreuses allusions grivoises qui ont valu à Rabelais une réputation d’obscénité et de paillardise. Le «  bas corporel   » est omniprésent : c’est en faisant « la bête à deux dos » que les parents de Gargantua le conçoivent. Une orgie de tripes précipite – diarrhée et astringent puissant aidant ! – la naissance du géant, narrée avec force détails peu ragoûtants.

Rabelais pousse la grossièreté jusqu’à l’outrance . L’épisode du « torchecul » repose ainsi sur l’énumération malicieuse et fantaisiste des expériences de Gargantua pour trouver le meilleur moyen de se nettoyer les fesses. Plus loin, un déluge d’insultes grossières, listées avec une jubilation manifeste, contribue au déclenchement de la guerre contre Picrochole.

II. Un rire subtil

1. une langue créative.

Cependant, au-delà du foisonnement des grossièretés farcesques, la langue de Rabelais frappe par sa créativité et le travail dont elle est l’objet , source de multiples effets comiques.

Les litanies fantaisistes, les galimatias, les jeux de mots témoignent d’une érudition de l’auteur dans des domaines variés . L’obscénité scatologique de l’invention du torche-cul, par exemple, se mêle au lexique médical spécialisé : « rectum », « périnée », « consoude ».

Gargantua atteste également de la grande curio sité linguistique de Rabelais, qu’il utilise à des fins comiques. L’auteur mélange ainsi à l’envi les différentes langues (français, grec, hébreu, latin, italien…) et invente de nouveaux mots, tel le terme «  agélaste  ». Sa maîtrise linguistique lui permet de désacraliser ces langues : Janotus écorche le latin lors d’une harangue qui se devait d’être solennelle, et qui, au lieu de cela, fait sourire.

Composé du préfixe privatif a et du grec « gelos » ( rire ), le néologisme «  agélaste  » désigne celui qui ne sait pas rire, et que fustige Rabelais.

Les noms des personnages eux-mêmes portent souvent un sens caché qui signale la culture de l’auteur et ridiculise leurs porteurs : il en est ainsi de Thubal Holopherne, « grand sophiste », précepteur de Gargantua, qui lui apprend à réciter les textes « par cœur et à l’envers ». Thubal signifie « confusion » en hébreu, tandis que Holopherne évoque le général de Nabuchodonosor II, cruel persécuteur des Juifs.

2. Un comique parodique et critique

Rabelais intègre de fait dans Gargantua de multiples références, qu’il parodie volontiers de manière à susciter une réflexion critique. Ainsi en est-il de l’épisode de la guerre picrocholine qui revisite, sur un ton burlesque, les romans de chevalerie. À travers le récit de ce conflit déclenché par une vulgaire querelle à propos de fouaces, le lecteur est invité à méditer sur ce qui peut légitimer la guerre ; le personnage de Picrochole, dangereux mais risible, lui permet de s’interroger sur l’attitude du bon souverain .

La création de personnages caricaturaux , simplifiés à l’extrême, permet à Rabelais d’épingler les vices et impostures de son époque. Ainsi le narrateur ironise-t-il sur les errances pédagogiques de Thubal Holopherne, piètre précepteur aux méthodes surannées, qui ne parvient qu’à abrutir son élève.

Le rire est donc porteur d’une intention critique et contestataire . Les mauvais religieux tombent ainsi sous le coup de la satire , depuis les théologiens incompétents, « vieux tousseux », jusqu’aux pèlerins abreuvés de superstitions, en passant par les moines inutiles qui ne sont que des « mâche-merdes », des fardeaux pour la société.

Au xviii e  siècle, Voltaire met également le rire au service de la satire , dans des contes philosophiques tels que Zadig (1748) et Candide (1759).

III. Un rire humaniste

1. le rire : une voie d’accès à la pensée.

Dès le prologue, le facétieux Maître Alcofribas invite le lecteur à ne pas se fier aux apparences légères de son livre ; mais à les dépasser pour accéder au sens caché, à « la substantifique moëlle  ». Rabelais agit ici en humaniste : il sait son lecteur capable d’interpréter le comique farcesque de son récit.

Amené, grâce au rire, à penser par lui-même , le lecteur forge sa propre vision du monde, se méfiant des préjugés et des savoirs imposés. L’épisode du torchecul, au-delà de la farce, peut aussi se lire comme la démonstration de l’ingéniosité d’un enfant qui expérimente et trouve par lui-même le moyen de s’humaniser, de se départir d’une part d’animalité.

2. Le rire au service d’une nouvelle vision de l’homme

Instrument qui aiguise l’intelligence du lecteur, le rire rabelaisien s’inscrit aussi dans une éthique de vie . À rebours des préjugés du Moyen Âge, Rabelais réhabilite le rire, car il croit en ses vertus thérapeutiques et l’associe à la santé physique et mentale. Au Moyen Âge, le rire est frappé de suspicion et souvent condamné par la religion : associé aux désordres corporels, voire au diable, il éloignerait de Dieu et serait signe de déchéance.

Le roman d’Umberto Eco Le Nom de la rose (1980) évoque ce rejet du rire : au xiv e  siècle, un moine bibliothécaire cache le second tome de la Poétique (335 av. J.-C.) d’Aristote sur la comédie, afin que nul n’en prenne jamais connaissance.

S’inspirant d’Aristote, Rabelais précise dans son « Avis aux lecteurs » que « Mieux est de rire que de larmes écrire, / Parce que rire est le propre de l’homme ». Le rire, y compris dans sa forme farcesque, permet donc au lecteur de se délivrer de ses peines et de ses peurs. Le rire apaise, prépare l’homme à la réflexion et, in fine , à devenir un humaniste accompli .

Le roman invite finalement à cultiver une foi joyeuse en la vie  : il se clôt sur l’invitation de Frère Jean à faire « grand chère », en écho à l’injonction qui termine l’« Avis aux lecteurs » : « Vivez joyeux ».

[Synthèse] Farcesque, mais riche de sens, le rire rabelaisien s’affiche comme un parti pris aux multiples vertus. Divertissant, il n’en est pas moins élaboré. Il recèle un « plus haut sens » et s’insère dans un jeu critique qui invite le lecteur à penser par lui-même, au-delà des apparences trompeuses. [Ouverture] Admiratif de « l’éclat de rire énorme » de Rabelais, Victor Hugo y voit, au xix e   siècle, « un des gouffres de l’esprit » ( Les Contemplations, 1856).

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Metaphor, Lexicography, and Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua

• First Online: 28 December 2017

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• Kathryn Banks 5  

Part of the book series: Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance ((CSLP))

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Marshalling history and contemporary science, Banks investigates what happens when writers revive the embodied content of “dead metaphors” or Latin etymons. Analysing Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua and Dolet’s Commentaries on the Latin Language , Banks shows that both fiction and lexicography highlighted semantic continuities between the abstract and the embodied by moving between the two, reflecting humanism’s “language turn.” However, Rabelais’s switches between embodied and abstract are more striking, and often found in discussions of cognition. Drawing on neuroscientific research into how language affects sensorimotor response, Banks argues that Rabelais thereby makes extensive calls on readers’ embodied cognition, which may come to the level of conscious reflection. Further light is shed on this by contrast with Charles de Bovelles’ treatment of the proverbs underlying Rabelais’s Prologue.

I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, which is funding the research to which my work for this book belongs. This particular essay has been a long time in the making and has incurred a number of debts. I am deeply grateful to Terence Cave, who invited me to be a Research Lecturer in his project “Thinking with Literature,” leading me to present research on “kinesic Rabelais” and the Gargantua prologue in Durham in 2012 and Oslo in 2013. I am indebted to Ann Moss and to Marc Schachter, who both commented insightfully on drafts of this essay. Finally, thanks are due to participants at our 2014 Kinesis workshop, especially Guillemette Bolens, Neil Kenny and Raphael Lyne.

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A different take on kinesis in Rabelais, in particular on friendship, is provided by Michel Jeanneret, another participant in the “Thinking with Literature” project and the Kinesis workshop. “Quand le sens passe par les sens: Rabelais et l’intelligence des corps,” Poétique 178 (2015): 157–62. See also Timothy Chesters, “Social Cognition: A Literary Perspective,” Paragraph 37 (2014): 63–71.

The expression “seamless web” is borrowed from Ann Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49. The notion of a “web” of language is recurrent in Part I (“Words”) of Moss’s book.

Two vols, Lyon: Sebastian Gryphius, 1536 and 1538.

Les Images dans l’œuvre de Rabelais . Vol. 3: Un Aspect de l’Imagination créatrice chez Rabelais: l’emploi des images (Paris: Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1982), 143–8.

“What is most important here for a more general consideration of how literature constructs nationhood are the curious slippages from metaphorical to literal language.” For example “[t]hese metaphors may be dead metaphors, but Rabelais brings them to life again, for they are the terms that generate the narrative […] Panurge’s metaphorical description of the Turks as ‘treacherous dogs’ is neatly literalized.” Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 25, 51. Cf Neil Kenny’s suggestion that the Turkish episode discussed by Hampton brings together lambish leanness and other meanings of curiosus , demonstrating interestingly that embodied and abstract meanings may be associated because of not only the etymological or metaphorical derivation of abstract meanings from embodied ones but also the gathering together of disparate items under commonplace headings such as curiosus . “Plautus, Panurge, and ‘les aventures des gens curieux’,” in (Re)Inventing the Past: Essays in honour of Ann Moss , ed. Gary Ferguson and Catherine Hampton (Durham: University of Durham, 2003), 51–68. Movement between the figurative and the literal in Rabelais has also featured in my own previous research. “‘I speak like John about the Apocalypse’: Rabelais, Prophecy and Fiction,” Literature and Theology 26 (2012): 417–38. “Apocalypse and Literature in the Sixteenth Century: The Case of Rabelais and the Frozen Words,” in Visions of Apocalypse: Representations of the End in French Literature and Culture , ed. Leona Archer and Alex Stuart (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), 83–98.

According to Aristotle’s seminal definition, “metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else” Poetics , 1457b. See also Cicero, De Oratore , book III 155–69; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria , book VIII, ch. 6: 1–18. Furthermore, for Aristotle and the rhetoricians, metaphorical status was determined on the level of the individual word, whereas in Rabelais’s writing it is on the level of a broader context—a sentence or sequence of sentences—that the degree of prominence of the embodied content is determined.

Rabelais, Œuvres complètes , ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 6–7. My translation, based on that of M. A. Screech, Gargantua and Pantagruel (London: Penguin, 2006), 207.

Screech, transl., Gargantua and Pantagruel , 207. Urquhart and Motteux, transl., Gargantua and Pantagruel , ed. Terence Cave (London: David Campbell, 1994), 20.

For crocheter , Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 English-French dictionary gives “to open, picke open, with a hooke, &c; also, to hang on a hooke,” while Jean Nicot’s 1606 Thresor de la langue française offers “resignare, Unco aperire” and, for “crocheter une serrure,” “Unco seram aperire.” For taster , Cotgrave offers “to tast; or take an eßay of; also, to handle, feele, touch, or grope for,” while for taster, tastonner , Nicot gives “attrectare, contrectare” but also translates some set expressions ( taster du vin, and taster et gouster petit à petit) in which taster refers to tasting, particularly in the context of wine.

“These results support a gradual abstraction process whereby the reliance on sensory-motor systems is reduced as the abstractness of meaning as well as conventionalization is increased, highlighting the context sensitive nature of semantic processing.” Rutvik H. Desai et al., “A piece of the action: Modulation of sensory-motor regions by action idioms and metaphors,” NeuroImage 83 (2013): 862. On simulation more generally, see the Introduction to this volume.

Desai et al., 868. For a fuller account of this view, see Jeffrey R. Binder and Rutvik H. Desai, “The neurobiology of semantic memory,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15 (2011): 527–36.

Leo Spitzer, Die Wortbildung also stilistiches Mittel exemplifiziert an Rabelais (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1910).

On neologism and kinesic intelligence, see also Timothy Chesters in this volume.

The French word contenance referred, then as now, to the bearing of the body as a whole (rather than primarily to facial expression, as its English cognate does). See, for example, the Dictionnaire du moyen français, http://www.atilf.fr/dmf/definition/contenance . Cotgrave’s translation of contenance (presumably under the influence of English) emphasises the face but also makes clear that the word can mean the bearing or movement of the body: “the countenance, looke, cheere, visage, favor; gesture, posture, behaviour, carriage; presence, or composition of the whole bodie.”

Thanks are due to Marc Schachter for this observation.

http://www.atilf.fr/dmf/definition/contenance

See Introduction to this volume, pp. 4–5.

Des Mets et des mots: banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Paris: José Corti, 1987), 119–23.

See pp. 96–7 in the later section in this essay, “Thinking with Fiction: Rabelais’s ‘Modality Switches’.”

“A piece of the action,” 862, 867–8. See also Rutvik H. Desai et al., “The Neural Career of Sensory-motor Metaphors,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23 (2011): 2376–86.

On syntax and kinesis, see Terence Cave’s essay in this volume.

Bovelles, Charles de, Proverbiorum Vulgarium Libri tres ([Paris]: M.P. Vidouaeo, 1531), vol. II, f. lxxiii v . In transcribing Latin quotations I have, where relevant, changed ā to an or to am ; æ to ae ; ĕ to em ; i to j ; ῑ to in ; j to i ; q to que ; ß to ss ; u to v ; ŭ to um ; & to et . In the case of this quotation I have also corrected faciuntum to facientium , and solidam to solida . All translations from Latin are my own.

Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979), 129.

Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980).

Binder and Desai, “The neurobiology of semantic memory.”

“Sage, Sapiens . Semble qu’il vienne de Sagax” (Nicot, 1606). The etymon of sage is now thought to be sapidus. Oscar Bloch and Walther von Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), first published 1932, 568.

“Sagax, sagacis, Cic. Qui ha grand flairement. Et per translationem, Qui conjecture et prevoit bien les choses advenir, Sage, Prudent, Bien advisé.[…] Sagaces canes. Cic. Qui sentent incontinent la trace de la beste, comme font les chiens qu’on appelle espagnols, et autres appelez pendants.” Lewis and Short’s modern dictionary also notes that the primary meaning of sagax , “of quick perception, whose senses are acute, sagacious,” is “chiefly of the acute sense of smelling in dogs.” The notion that the reader would actually be sagax like the dog, rather than merely saige , may possibly also be suggested by the presentation of the dog as an “example” rather than a simile, however Erasmus employed “example” with a broad Aristotelian sense that encompassed similitudes, analogies, and so on. Cf for Quintilian, example was the figure of comparison in which the things compared were most similar, hence example was unlike simile when simile compared animals to people ( Institutio Oratoria , bk 5, ch. 11.22), and sixteenth-century poetic theorists usually gave example a limited sense, attributing to it the function of providing models of conduct or models for writing. John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 6–20.

The Dictionnaire du moyen français gives A. “Répandre une odeur agréable”; B. “Répandre une odeur désagréable, puer”; C. “Percevoir, sentir une odeur.” http://www.atilf.fr/dmf

Cotgrave gives “to feele; also, to sent, smell, vent, wind; also, to tast or savor; also, to heere; also, to yeeld a sent, savor, or tast; or to sent, savor, or tast, of; to have a smacke, touch, or spice, of.”

Lewis and Short.

http://www.atilf.fr/dmf

Cotgrave gives “to esteeme; think, deeme, trowe, suppose, repute, hold; weigh, consider; judge; prise, value; regard, respect, hold deere, set by, make much account of.”

I do not render “translatus” or “translatio” using terms such as “figurative” or “metaphor” because—as I will discuss— Dolet considers the translatus as a matter of degree. “LOCIS multis (id quod tamen maximè in tertio Tomo nostro demonstrabimus, cùm de phrasi Linguae Latinae scribemus) tum in hoc, tum in primo Tomo nostro à nobis traditum est, linguae cuiusvis et usum, et venustatem non in vocum tantùm proprietate, sed in translatis potissimum dictionibus consistere (id quod, inquam, quanta maxima fieri poterit diligentia, et judicio, tertio Tomo nostro docebimus) dignitatemque praecipuam ex vocum translatione linguas omnes nancisci.” [“In many places both in this volume and in my first volume (and most of all I will show this in my third volume, when I write about expressions of the Latin language) I have passed on that the use and charm of any language consists not only in the proper meaning of words but most of all in transferred uses of words (that which, I say, I will show in my third volume with the greatest care which is possible, and judgement) and that all languages acquire their particular value from the ‘transferral’ of words.”] (Lyon: Sebastian Gryphius, 1538), vol. II, col. 883.

“COMMENTARIORUM meorum ratio tibi ut liquidius, faciliusque constet, quo in his utar ordine, scire te quidem velim. Principio propositae vocis significationem tum propriam, tum translatam ostendimus. Deinde usus varietatem distinguimus. Postremo exempla cumulamus: sed ea separatim. Nempe ut sua proprietati assignentur: translationi deinceps sua. Quod verò ad usus varietatem pertinet, sic nos quoque exempla secernimus, ut statim post dictionis proprietatem, translationemque (si quam fortè translationem habet) quanta possum diligentia, diligenter ostensam simplicia exempla sine intervallo sequantur.” [“So that you may more clearly and easily understand the method in my Commentaries, I want you to know the arrangement that I am using in them. First of all I show the meaning of the word under discussion, both its proper and transferred meaning. Then I distinguish its variety of uses. Last of all I pile up examples, but each of these things separately. So that examples are assigned to the proper meaning and then to the transferred meaning. But in setting forth the variety of uses, I also divide the examples in such a way that immediately after I have carefully shown with as much care as I am able the proper meaning and the transferred meaning of the word (if it has a transferred meaning), simple examples follow without a pause.”] “De Commentariorum ratione, et ordine” (Lyon: Sebastian Gryphius, 1536), vol. I, prefatory material, unpaginated.

For example, vol. II, cols. 884–5.

Meaning more usually moves from concrete to abstract than the reverse. For a discussion of this in relation to Indo-European perception verbs, see Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 23–48.

Institutio oratoria , book VIII, ch. 2.

Vol. I, col. 171.

“INDAGARE est venatorum more inquirere, qui loca, ubi ferae latibula habent, investigant: dicimus autem indago rem, vel, de re” (Vol. I, col. 170).

The verbs immediately following odoror in this citation—“sentiant […] existiment”—also mean that it bears an interesting similarity to Rabelais’s sequence “fleurer, sentir, estimer,” although the latter two verbs are not presented as synonyms or equivalents for odoror in the Cicero citation and one would not wish to draw firm conclusions from this (almost certainly coincidental) similarity.

Renaissance Truth , 27–8.

As Dolet puts it in the preface to the first volume (“De Commentariorum ratione, et ordine,” unpaginated), “Vocabuli verò primò positi proprietate, translatione, usus, constructionisque varietate et verbis nostris, et Ciceronis exemplis satis multis demonstrata, voces alias significationis cognatione superioribus affines actutum subjungo: rem deinde, quantum licet, perpetuo” [“After I have demonstrated both with my own words and with sufficiently many examples from Cicero the proper meaning and transferred meaning and the diversity of use and of arrangement of the word under discussion, I immediately join other words which are connected by kinship to earlier words then I continue this affair for as long as possible.”] Dolet draws attention to this practice relatively often, for example, Vol. II. Prefatory “De Secundi tomi ordine,” unpaginated; vol. II, cols. 1034, 1085, 1583. In the epitomes of the Commentarii produced by a Basle publisher (1537, 1539, 1540), the word entries in the first volume were rearranged alphabetically, although the original order was reproduced in tabular form after the lexicon proper; the second volume retained the arrangement by subject groups. The number of examples was also reduced. See Moss, 31–2. Dolet himself was proud of the order of his Commentarii , expressing this pride not only on a number of occasions in this work but also in others: see Michel Magnien, “La Philologie selon Dolet,” in La Philologie humaniste et ses représentations dans la théorie et dans la fiction , ed. Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Fernand Hallyn, and Gilbert Tournoy (Geneva: Droz, 2005), vol. II, 449, n. 30.

Vol. I, cols. 168–72.

The sudden rupture in their friendship did not occur until 1542. Mireille Huchon, “Dolet et Rabelais,” in Étienne Dolet 1509–2009 , ed. Michèle Clément (Geneva: Droz, 2012), 345–59. Richard Copley Christie, Étienne Dolet, The Martyr of the Renaissance 1508–1546: A Biography (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899), first published in 1880, 371–86.

Copley Christie, 229–40.

Gargantua may have been published in 1534 but Huchon speculates that it is most likely to have been in the first third of 1535. Œuvres completes , 1054–55.

On literary affordances, see Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 46–62.

“Literature is powerful because, more than any other type of discourse, it triggers the activation of unpredicted sensorimotor configurations.” The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 17.

Ana Raposo et al., “Modulation of motor and premotor cortices by actions, action words and action sentences,” Neuropsychologia 47 (2009): 388–96.

Nicole K. Speer et al., “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science 20 (2009): 989–99.

Kuzmičová, “Presence in the reading of literary narrative: a case for motor enactment,” Semiotica 189 (2012): 23–48. Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

Drawing attention to this, Judith Anderson argues that we should “free Renaissance meaning from narrow, anachronistic lexicalisation.” Anderson also observes that Robert Estienne’s 1532 Thesaurus linguae latine draws attention to the principle of translatio . It does so in a less explicit and nuanced way than Dolet’s Commentaries . “Translating Investments: The Metaphoricity of Language, 2 Henry IV, and Hamlet,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40 (1998): 231, 235; reproduced in Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 8–35.

Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 80–134. “Lectio in cortice, meditatio in adipe” (Guigo II, Scala claustralium, 3.43–7; cited by Carruthers, 131, n. 49).

Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 73. See Terence Cave in this volume.

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Banks, K. (2018). Metaphor, Lexicography, and Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua . In: Banks, K., Chesters, T. (eds) Movement in Renaissance Literature. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5_5

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9 Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais

Introduction.

Francois Rabelais lived an interesting and rather intriguing life that, in many ways, was reflected in his writing. Rabelais began his adult life as a Franciscan friar, but left the Franciscans to become a Benedictine. He ultimately left religion altogether to pursue life as doctor (for a better understanding of what it means to be Benedictine rather than a Franciscan, visit this site on Active and Contemplative orders of monks and friars ). He possessed what might be considered a contentious attitude and enjoyed satirizing just about everything, including religion, scholastic education, the power elite, and new scientific and geographical discoveries. His irreverence includes hurling insults at his very own readers. Rabelais’s impertinence led to his writings being repeatedly condemned not only by religious leaders, but also with academics at the prestigious French university, the Sorbonne, who felt Gargantua and Pantagruel was in poor taste—even though we recognize it to be his masterpiece.

Bawdiness and satire aside, Rabelais and his writing very much embody the Renaissance’s humanist spirit. He advocates for a healthy lifestyle because a healthy body leads to a healthy mind (later rearticulated in the inverse as “Sick Body, Sick Mind” by the ska band Operation Ivy ). Rabelais’s training as a doctor (completed in 1537) allowed him to make the connection between the body and the mind and promote a lifestyle (and style of education) that flew in the face of more traditional approaches to understanding the world. This untraditional approach leads Rabelais to foist ownership of the text onto the reader. In “The Author’s Prologue” of Gargantua , Rabelais at once name drops every classical philosopher and author he can in a short space, tells the reader be like a dog and smell out the best of a book, and ends with “But listen to me, you dunderheads—God rot you!—do not forget to drink my health for the favour, and I’ll return you the toast post-haste.” Rabelais has a sense that once the text leaves his hands, it is the reader’s and only the reader can control what the text means. Think about how you (re)create a text not only in your own mind, but in the way you relate it to others, the way you write about it, the way it penetrates other parts of your day and thinking. Good writing, but particularly good satire and social commentary, stays with you and reshapes the way you see the world. The text features two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, and their adventures. There is ample word play and crudeness, but I want you to focus, as famous literary critic Mikail Bakhtin did, on the intersection of social and the literary (or the carnivalesque and the grotesque , as Bakhtin puts it). Also consider how Rabelais’s past experience as a monk inform, if at all, this text?

The Author’s Prologue to the First Book.

Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings), Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato’s, which is entitled The Banquet, whilst he was setting forth the praises of his schoolmaster Socrates (without all question the prince of philosophers), amongst other discourses to that purpose, said that he resembled the Silenes. Silenes of old were little boxes, like those we now may see in the shops of apothecaries, painted on the outside with wanton toyish figures, as harpies, satyrs, bridled geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, thiller harts, and other such-like counterfeited pictures at discretion, to excite people unto laughter, as Silenus himself, who was the foster-father of good Bacchus, was wont to do; but within those capricious caskets were carefully preserved and kept many rich jewels and fine drugs, such as balm, ambergris, amomon, musk, civet, with several kinds of precious stones, and other things of great price. Just such another thing was Socrates. For to have eyed his outside, and esteemed of him by his exterior appearance, you would not have given the peel of an onion for him, so deformed he was in body, and ridiculous in his gesture. He had a sharp pointed nose, with the look of a bull, and countenance of a fool: he was in his carriage simple, boorish in his apparel, in fortune poor, unhappy in his wives, unfit for all offices in the commonwealth, always laughing, tippling, and merrily carousing to everyone, with continual gibes and jeers, the better by those means to conceal his divine knowledge. Now, opening this box you would have found within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than human understanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning, invincible courage, unimitable sobriety, certain contentment of mind, perfect assurance, and an incredible misregard of all that for which men commonly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel, toil and turmoil themselves.

Whereunto (in your opinion) doth this little flourish of a preamble tend? For so much as you, my good disciples, and some other jolly fools of ease and leisure, reading the pleasant titles of some books of our invention, as Gargantua, Pantagruel, Whippot (Fessepinte.), the Dignity of Codpieces, of Pease and Bacon with a Commentary, &c., are too ready to judge that there is nothing in them but jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and recreative lies; because the outside (which is the title) is usually, without any farther inquiry, entertained with scoffing and derision. But truly it is very unbeseeming to make so slight account of the works of men, seeing yourselves avouch that it is not the habit makes the monk, many being monasterially accoutred, who inwardly are nothing less than monachal, and that there are of those that wear Spanish capes, who have but little of the valour of Spaniards in them. Therefore is it, that you must open the book, and seriously consider of the matter treated in it. Then shall you find that it containeth things of far higher value than the box did promise; that is to say, that the subject thereof is not so foolish as by the title at the first sight it would appear to be.

And put the case, that in the literal sense you meet with purposes merry and solacious enough, and consequently very correspondent to their inscriptions, yet must not you stop there as at the melody of the charming syrens, but endeavour to interpret that in a sublimer sense which possibly you intended to have spoken in the jollity of your heart. Did you ever pick the lock of a cupboard to steal a bottle of wine out of it? Tell me truly, and, if you did, call to mind the countenance which then you had. Or, did you ever see a dog with a marrowbone in his mouth,—the beast of all other, says Plato, lib. 2, de Republica, the most philosophical? If you have seen him, you might have remarked with what devotion and circumspectness he wards and watcheth it: with what care he keeps it: how fervently he holds it: how prudently he gobbets it: with what affection he breaks it: and with what diligence he sucks it. To what end all this? What moveth him to take all these pains? What are the hopes of his labour? What doth he expect to reap thereby? Nothing but a little marrow. True it is, that this little is more savoury and delicious than the great quantities of other sorts of meat, because the marrow (as Galen testifieth, 5. facult. nat. & 11. de usu partium) is a nourishment most perfectly elaboured by nature.

In imitation of this dog, it becomes you to be wise, to smell, feel and have in estimation these fair goodly books, stuffed with high conceptions, which, though seemingly easy in the pursuit, are in the cope and encounter somewhat difficult. And then, like him, you must, by a sedulous lecture, and frequent meditation, break the bone, and suck out the marrow,—that is, my allegorical sense, or the things I to myself propose to be signified by these Pythagorical symbols, with assured hope, that in so doing you will at last attain to be both well-advised and valiant by the reading of them: for in the perusal of this treatise you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most glorious sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth your religion, as matters of the public state, and life economical.

Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was a-couching his Iliads and Odysses, had any thought upon those allegories, which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Cornutus squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again from them? If you trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer, as the Gospel sacraments were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, though a certain gulligut friar (Frere Lubin croquelardon.) and true bacon-picker would have undertaken to prove it, if perhaps he had met with as very fools as himself, (and as the proverb says) a lid worthy of such a kettle.

If you give no credit thereto, why do not you the same in these jovial new chronicles of mine? Albeit when I did dictate them, I thought upon no more than you, who possibly were drinking the whilst as I was. For in the composing of this lordly book, I never lost nor bestowed any more, nor any other time than what was appointed to serve me for taking of my bodily refection, that is, whilst I was eating and drinking. And indeed that is the fittest and most proper hour wherein to write these high matters and deep sciences: as Homer knew very well, the paragon of all philologues, and Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Horace calls him, although a certain sneaking jobernol alleged that his verses smelled more of the wine than oil.

So saith a turlupin or a new start-up grub of my books, but a turd for him. The fragrant odour of the wine, O how much more dainty, pleasant, laughing (Riant, priant, friant.), celestial and delicious it is, than that smell of oil! And I will glory as much when it is said of me, that I have spent more on wine than oil, as did Demosthenes, when it was told him, that his expense on oil was greater than on wine. I truly hold it for an honour and praise to be called and reputed a Frolic Gualter and a Robin Goodfellow; for under this name am I welcome in all choice companies of Pantagruelists. It was upbraided to Demosthenes by an envious surly knave, that his Orations did smell like the sarpler or wrapper of a foul and filthy oil-vessel. For this cause interpret you all my deeds and sayings in the perfectest sense; reverence the cheese-like brain that feeds you with these fair billevezees and trifling jollities, and do what lies in you to keep me always merry. Be frolic now, my lads, cheer up your hearts, and joyfully read the rest, with all the ease of your body and profit of your reins. But hearken, joltheads, you viedazes, or dickens take ye, remember to drink a health to me for the like favour again, and I will pledge you instantly, Tout ares-metys.

Rabelais to the Reader.

Good friends, my Readers, who peruse this Book, Be not offended, whilst on it you look: Denude yourselves of all depraved affection, For it contains no badness, nor infection: ‘Tis true that it brings forth to you no birth Of any value, but in point of mirth; Thinking therefore how sorrow might your mind Consume, I could no apter subject find; One inch of joy surmounts of grief a span; Because to laugh is proper to the man.

Chapter 1.III.—How Gargantua was carried eleven months in his mother’s belly.

Grangousier was a good fellow in his time, and notable jester; he loved to drink neat, as much as any man that then was in the world, and would willingly eat salt meat. To this intent he was ordinarily well furnished with gammons of bacon, both of Westphalia, Mayence and Bayonne, with store of dried neat’s tongues, plenty of links, chitterlings and puddings in their season; together with salt beef and mustard, a good deal of hard roes of powdered mullet called botargos, great provision of sausages, not of Bolonia (for he feared the Lombard Boccone), but of Bigorre, Longaulnay, Brene, and Rouargue. In the vigour of his age he married Gargamelle, daughter to the King of the Parpaillons, a jolly pug, and well-mouthed wench. These two did oftentimes do the two-backed beast together, joyfully rubbing and frotting their bacon ‘gainst one another, in so far, that at last she became great with child of a fair son, and went with him unto the eleventh month; for so long, yea longer, may a woman carry her great belly, especially when it is some masterpiece of nature, and a person predestinated to the performance, in his due time, of great exploits. As Homer says, that the child, which Neptune begot upon the nymph, was born a whole year after the conception, that is, in the twelfth month. For, as Aulus Gellius saith, lib. 3, this long time was suitable to the majesty of Neptune, that in it the child might receive his perfect form. For the like reason Jupiter made the night, wherein he lay with Alcmena, last forty-eight hours, a shorter time not being sufficient for the forging of Hercules, who cleansed the world of the monsters and tyrants wherewith it was suppressed. My masters, the ancient Pantagruelists, have confirmed that which I say, and withal declared it to be not only possible, but also maintained the lawful birth and legitimation of the infant born of a woman in the eleventh month after the decease of her husband. Hypocrates, lib. de alimento. Plinius, lib. 7, cap. 5. Plautus, in his Cistelleria. Marcus Varro, in his satire inscribed The Testament, alleging to this purpose the authority of Aristotle. Censorinus, lib. de die natali. Arist. lib. 7, cap. 3 & 4, de natura animalium. Gellius, lib. 3, cap. 16. Servius, in his exposition upon this verse of Virgil’s eclogues, Matri longa decem, &c., and a thousand other fools, whose number hath been increased by the lawyers ff. de suis, et legit l. intestato. paragrapho. fin. and in Auth. de restitut. et ea quae parit in xi mense. Moreover upon these grounds they have foisted in their Robidilardic, or Lapiturolive law. Gallus ff. de lib. et posth. l. sept. ff. de stat. hom., and some other laws, which at this time I dare not name. By means whereof the honest widows may without danger play at the close buttock game with might and main, and as hard as they can, for the space of the first two months after the decease of their husbands. I pray you, my good lusty springal lads, if you find any of these females, that are worth the pains of untying the codpiece-point, get up, ride upon them, and bring them to me; for, if they happen within the third month to conceive, the child should be heir to the deceased, if, before he died, he had no other children, and the mother shall pass for an honest woman.

When she is known to have conceived, thrust forward boldly, spare her not, whatever betide you, seeing the paunch is full. As Julia, the daughter of the Emperor Octavian, never prostituted herself to her belly-bumpers, but when she found herself with child, after the manner of ships, that receive not their steersman till they have their ballast and lading. And if any blame them for this their rataconniculation, and reiterated lechery upon their pregnancy and big-belliedness, seeing beasts, in the like exigent of their fulness, will never suffer the male-masculant to encroach them, their answer will be, that those are beasts, but they are women, very well skilled in the pretty vales and small fees of the pleasant trade and mysteries of superfetation: as Populia heretofore answered, according to the relation of Macrobius, lib. 2. Saturnal. If the devil will not have them to bag, he must wring hard the spigot, and stop the bung-hole.

Chapter 1.IV.—-How Gargamelle, being great with Gargantua, did eat a huge deal of tripes.

The occasion and manner how Gargamelle was brought to bed, and delivered of her child, was thus: and, if you do not believe it, I wish your bum-gut fall out and make an escapade. Her bum-gut, indeed, or fundament escaped her in an afternoon, on the third day of February, with having eaten at dinner too many godebillios. Godebillios are the fat tripes of coiros. Coiros are beeves fattened at the cratch in ox-stalls, or in the fresh guimo meadows. Guimo meadows are those that for their fruitfulness may be mowed twice a year. Of those fat beeves they had killed three hundred sixty-seven thousand and fourteen, to be salted at Shrovetide, that in the entering of the spring they might have plenty of powdered beef, wherewith to season their mouths at the beginning of their meals, and to taste their wine the better.

They had abundance of tripes, as you have heard, and they were so delicious, that everyone licked his fingers. But the mischief was this, that, for all men could do, there was no possibility to keep them long in that relish; for in a very short while they would have stunk, which had been an undecent thing. It was therefore concluded, that they should be all of them gulched up, without losing anything. To this effect they invited all the burghers of Sainais, of Suille, of the Roche-Clermaud, of Vaugaudry, without omitting the Coudray, Monpensier, the Gue de Vede, and other their neighbours, all stiff drinkers, brave fellows, and good players at the kyles. The good man Grangousier took great pleasure in their company, and commanded there should be no want nor pinching for anything. Nevertheless he bade his wife eat sparingly, because she was near her time, and that these tripes were no very commendable meat. They would fain, said he, be at the chewing of ordure, that would eat the case wherein it was. Notwithstanding these admonitions, she did eat sixteen quarters, two bushels, three pecks and a pipkin full. O the fair fecality wherewith she swelled, by the ingrediency of such shitten stuff!

After dinner they all went out in a hurl to the grove of the willows, where, on the green grass, to the sound of the merry flutes and pleasant bagpipes, they danced so gallantly, that it was a sweet and heavenly sport to see them so frolic.

Chapter 1.VI.—How Gargantua was born in a strange manner.

Whilst they were on this discourse and pleasant tattle of drinking, Gargamelle began to be a little unwell in her lower parts; whereupon Grangousier arose from off the grass, and fell to comfort her very honestly and kindly, suspecting that she was in travail, and told her that it was best for her to sit down upon the grass under the willows, because she was like very shortly to see young feet, and that therefore it was convenient she should pluck up her spirits, and take a good heart of new at the fresh arrival of her baby; saying to her withal, that although the pain was somewhat grievous to her, it would be but of short continuance, and that the succeeding joy would quickly remove that sorrow, in such sort that she should not so much as remember it. On, with a sheep’s courage! quoth he. Despatch this boy, and we will speedily fall to work for the making of another. Ha! said she, so well as you speak at your own ease, you that are men! Well, then, in the name of God, I’ll do my best, seeing that you will have it so, but would to God that it were cut off from you! What? said Grangousier. Ha, said she, you are a good man indeed, you understand it well enough. What, my member? said he. By the goat’s blood, if it please you, that shall be done instantly; cause bring hither a knife. Alas, said she, the Lord forbid, and pray Jesus to forgive me! I did not say it from my heart, therefore let it alone, and do not do it neither more nor less any kind of harm for my speaking so to you. But I am like to have work enough to do to-day and all for your member, yet God bless you and it.

Courage, courage, said he, take you no care of the matter, let the four foremost oxen do the work. I will yet go drink one whiff more, and if in the mean time anything befall you that may require my presence, I will be so near to you, that, at the first whistling in your fist, I shall be with you forthwith. A little while after she began to groan, lament and cry. Then suddenly came the midwives from all quarters, who groping her below, found some peloderies, which was a certain filthy stuff, and of a taste truly bad enough. This they thought had been the child, but it was her fundament, that was slipped out with the mollification of her straight entrail, which you call the bum-gut, and that merely by eating of too many tripes, as we have showed you before. Whereupon an old ugly trot in the company, who had the repute of an expert she-physician, and was come from Brisepaille, near to Saint Genou, three score years before, made her so horrible a restrictive and binding medicine, and whereby all her larris, arse-pipes, and conduits were so oppilated, stopped, obstructed, and contracted, that you could hardly have opened and enlarged them with your teeth, which is a terrible thing to think upon; seeing the Devil at the mass at Saint Martin’s was puzzled with the like task, when with his teeth he had lengthened out the parchment whereon he wrote the tittle-tattle of two young mangy whores. By this inconvenient the cotyledons of her matrix were presently loosed, through which the child sprang up and leaped, and so, entering into the hollow vein, did climb by the diaphragm even above her shoulders, where the vein divides itself into two, and from thence taking his way towards the left side, issued forth at her left ear. As soon as he was born, he cried not as other babes use to do, Miez, miez, miez, miez, but with a high, sturdy, and big voice shouted about, Some drink, some drink, some drink, as inviting all the world to drink with him. The noise hereof was so extremely great, that it was heard in both the countries at once of Beauce and Bibarois. I doubt me, that you do not thoroughly believe the truth of this strange nativity. Though you believe it not, I care not much: but an honest man, and of good judgment, believeth still what is told him, and that which he finds written.

Is this beyond our law or our faith—against reason or the holy Scripture? For my part, I find nothing in the sacred Bible that is against it. But tell me, if it had been the will of God, would you say that he could not do it? Ha, for favour sake, I beseech you, never emberlucock or inpulregafize your spirits with these vain thoughts and idle conceits; for I tell you, it is not impossible with God, and, if he pleased, all women henceforth should bring forth their children at the ear. Was not Bacchus engendered out of the very thigh of Jupiter? Did not Roquetaillade come out at his mother’s heel, and Crocmoush from the slipper of his nurse? Was not Minerva born of the brain, even through the ear of Jove? Adonis, of the bark of a myrrh tree; and Castor and Pollux of the doupe of that egg which was laid and hatched by Leda? But you would wonder more, and with far greater amazement, if I should now present you with that chapter of Plinius, wherein he treateth of strange births, and contrary to nature, and yet am not I so impudent a liar as he was. Read the seventh book of his Natural History, chap.3, and trouble not my head any more about this.

Chapter 1.VII.—After what manner Gargantua had his name given him, and how he tippled, bibbed, and curried the can.

The good man Grangousier, drinking and making merry with the rest, heard the horrible noise which his son had made as he entered into the light of this world, when he cried out, Some drink, some drink, some drink; whereupon he said in French, Que grand tu as et souple le gousier! that is to say, How great and nimble a throat thou hast. Which the company hearing, said that verily the child ought to be called Gargantua; because it was the first word that after his birth his father had spoke, in imitation, and at the example of the ancient Hebrews; whereunto he condescended, and his mother was very well pleased therewith. In the meanwhile, to quiet the child, they gave him to drink a tirelaregot, that is, till his throat was like to crack with it; then was he carried to the font, and there baptized, according to the manner of good Christians.

Immediately thereafter were appointed for him seventeen thousand, nine hundred, and thirteen cows of the towns of Pautille and Brehemond, to furnish him with milk in ordinary, for it was impossible to find a nurse sufficient for him in all the country, considering the great quantity of milk that was requisite for his nourishment; although there were not wanting some doctors of the opinion of Scotus, who affirmed that his own mother gave him suck, and that she could draw out of her breasts one thousand, four hundred, two pipes, and nine pails of milk at every time.

Which indeed is not probable, and this point hath been found duggishly scandalous and offensive to tender ears, for that it savoured a little of heresy. Thus was he handled for one year and ten months; after which time, by the advice of physicians, they began to carry him, and then was made for him a fine little cart drawn with oxen, of the invention of Jan Denio, wherein they led him hither and thither with great joy; and he was worth the seeing, for he was a fine boy, had a burly physiognomy, and almost ten chins. He cried very little, but beshit himself every hour: for, to speak truly of him, he was wonderfully phlegmatic in his posteriors, both by reason of his natural complexion and the accidental disposition which had befallen him by his too much quaffing of the Septembral juice. Yet without a cause did not he sup one drop; for if he happened to be vexed, angry, displeased, or sorry, if he did fret, if he did weep, if he did cry, and what grievous quarter soever he kept, in bringing him some drink, he would be instantly pacified, reseated in his own temper, in a good humour again, and as still and quiet as ever. One of his governesses told me (swearing by her fig), how he was so accustomed to this kind of way, that, at the sound of pints and flagons, he would on a sudden fall into an ecstasy, as if he had then tasted of the joys of paradise; so that they, upon consideration of this, his divine complexion, would every morning, to cheer him up, play with a knife upon the glasses, on the bottles with their stopples, and on the pottle-pots with their lids and covers, at the sound whereof he became gay, did leap for joy, would loll and rock himself in the cradle, then nod with his head, monochordizing with his fingers, and barytonizing with his tail.

Chapter 1.XI.—Of the youthful age of Gargantua.

Gargantua, from three years upwards unto five, was brought up and instructed in all convenient discipline by the commandment of his father; and spent that time like the other little children of the country, that is, in drinking, eating, and sleeping: in eating, sleeping, and drinking: and in sleeping, drinking, and eating. Still he wallowed and rolled up and down himself in the mire and dirt—he blurred and sullied his nose with filth—he blotted and smutched his face with any kind of scurvy stuff—he trod down his shoes in the heel—at the flies he did oftentimes yawn, and ran very heartily after the butterflies, the empire whereof belonged to his father. He pissed in his shoes, shit in his shirt, and wiped his nose on his sleeve—he did let his snot and snivel fall in his pottage, and dabbled, paddled, and slobbered everywhere—he would drink in his slipper, and ordinarily rub his belly against a pannier. He sharpened his teeth with a top, washed his hands with his broth, and combed his head with a bowl. He would sit down betwixt two stools, and his arse to the ground —would cover himself with a wet sack, and drink in eating of his soup. He did eat his cake sometimes without bread, would bite in laughing, and laugh in biting. Oftentimes did he spit in the basin, and fart for fatness, piss against the sun, and hide himself in the water for fear of rain. He would strike out of the cold iron, be often in the dumps, and frig and wriggle it. He would flay the fox, say the ape’s paternoster, return to his sheep, and turn the hogs to the hay. He would beat the dogs before the lion, put the plough before the oxen, and claw where it did not itch. He would pump one to draw somewhat out of him, by griping all would hold fast nothing, and always eat his white bread first. He shoed the geese, kept a self-tickling to make himself laugh, and was very steadable in the kitchen: made a mock at the gods, would cause sing Magnificat at matins, and found it very convenient so to do. He would eat cabbage, and shite beets,—knew flies in a dish of milk, and would make them lose their feet. He would scrape paper, blur parchment, then run away as hard as he could. He would pull at the kid’s leather, or vomit up his dinner, then reckon without his host. He would beat the bushes without catching the birds, thought the moon was made of green cheese, and that bladders are lanterns. Out of one sack he would take two moultures or fees for grinding; would act the ass’s part to get some bran, and of his fist would make a mallet. He took the cranes at the first leap, and would have the mail-coats to be made link after link. He always looked a given horse in the mouth, leaped from the cock to the ass, and put one ripe between two green. By robbing Peter he paid Paul, he kept the moon from the wolves, and hoped to catch larks if ever the heavens should fall. He did make of necessity virtue, of such bread such pottage, and cared as little for the peeled as for the shaven. Every morning he did cast up his gorge, and his father’s little dogs eat out of the dish with him, and he with them. He would bite their ears, and they would scratch his nose—he would blow in their arses, and they would lick his chaps.

But hearken, good fellows, the spigot ill betake you, and whirl round your brains, if you do not give ear! This little lecher was always groping his nurses and governesses, upside down, arsiversy, topsyturvy, harri bourriquet, with a Yacco haick, hyck gio! handling them very rudely in jumbling and tumbling them to keep them going; for he had already begun to exercise the tools, and put his codpiece in practice. Which codpiece, or braguette, his governesses did every day deck up and adorn with fair nosegays, curious rubies, sweet flowers, and fine silken tufts, and very pleasantly would pass their time in taking you know what between their fingers, and dandling it, till it did revive and creep up to the bulk and stiffness of a suppository, or street magdaleon, which is a hard rolled-up salve spread upon leather. Then did they burst out in laughing, when they saw it lift up its ears, as if the sport had liked them. One of them would call it her little dille, her staff of love, her quillety, her faucetin, her dandilolly. Another, her peen, her jolly kyle, her bableret, her membretoon, her quickset imp: another again, her branch of coral, her female adamant, her placket-racket, her Cyprian sceptre, her jewel for ladies. And some of the other women would give it these names,—my bunguetee, my stopple too, my bush-rusher, my gallant wimble, my pretty borer, my coney-burrow-ferret, my little piercer, my augretine, my dangling hangers, down right to it, stiff and stout, in and to, my pusher, dresser, pouting stick, my honey pipe, my pretty pillicock, linky pinky, futilletie, my lusty andouille, and crimson chitterling, my little couille bredouille, my pretty rogue, and so forth. It belongs to me, said one. It is mine, said the other. What, quoth a third, shall I have no share in it? By my faith, I will cut it then. Ha, to cut it, said the other, would hurt him. Madam, do you cut little children’s things? Were his cut off, he would be then Monsieur sans queue, the curtailed master. And that he might play and sport himself after the manner of the other little children of the country, they made him a fair weather whirl-jack of the wings of the windmill of Myrebalais.

Chapter 1.XVI.—How Gargantua was sent to Paris, and of the huge great mare that he rode on; how she destroyed the oxflies of the Beauce.

In the same season Fayoles, the fourth King of Numidia, sent out of the country of Africa to Grangousier the most hideously great mare that ever was seen, and of the strangest form, for you know well enough how it is said that Africa always is productive of some new thing. She was as big as six elephants, and had her feet cloven into fingers, like Julius Caesar’s horse, with slouch-hanging ears, like the goats in Languedoc, and a little horn on her buttock. She was of a burnt sorrel hue, with a little mixture of dapple-grey spots, but above all she had a horrible tail; for it was little more or less than every whit as great as the steeple-pillar of St. Mark beside Langes: and squared as that is, with tuffs and ennicroches or hair-plaits wrought within one another, no otherwise than as the beards are upon the ears of corn.

If you wonder at this, wonder rather at the tails of the Scythian rams, which weighed above thirty pounds each; and of the Surian sheep, who need, if Tenaud say true, a little cart at their heels to bear up their tail, it is so long and heavy. You female lechers in the plain countries have no such tails. And she was brought by sea in three carricks and a brigantine unto the harbour of Olone in Thalmondois. When Grangousier saw her, Here is, said he, what is fit to carry my son to Paris. So now, in the name of God, all will be well. He will in times coming be a great scholar. If it were not, my masters, for the beasts, we should live like clerks. The next morning—after they had drunk, you must understand—they took their journey; Gargantua, his pedagogue Ponocrates, and his train, and with them Eudemon, the young page. And because the weather was fair and temperate, his father caused to be made for him a pair of dun boots,—Babin calls them buskins. Thus did they merrily pass their time in travelling on their high way, always making good cheer, and were very pleasant till they came a little above Orleans, in which place there was a forest of five-and-thirty leagues long, and seventeen in breadth, or thereabouts. This forest was most horribly fertile and copious in dorflies, hornets, and wasps, so that it was a very purgatory for the poor mares, asses, and horses. But Gargantua’s mare did avenge herself handsomely of all the outrages therein committed upon beasts of her kind, and that by a trick whereof they had no suspicion. For as soon as ever they were entered into the said forest, and that the wasps had given the assault, she drew out and unsheathed her tail, and therewith skirmishing, did so sweep them that she overthrew all the wood alongst and athwart, here and there, this way and that way, longwise and sidewise, over and under, and felled everywhere the wood with as much ease as a mower doth the grass, in such sort that never since hath there been there neither wood nor dorflies: for all the country was thereby reduced to a plain champaign field. Which Gargantua took great pleasure to behold, and said to his company no more but this: Je trouve beau ce (I find this pretty); whereupon that country hath been ever since that time called Beauce. But all the breakfast the mare got that day was but a little yawning and gaping, in memory whereof the gentlemen of Beauce do as yet to this day break their fast with gaping, which they find to be very good, and do spit the better for it. At last they came to Paris, where Gargantua refreshed himself two or three days, making very merry with his folks, and inquiring what men of learning there were then in the city, and what wine they drunk there.

Chapter 1.XVII.—How Gargantua paid his welcome to the Parisians, and how he took away the great bells of Our Lady’s Church.

Some few days after that they had refreshed themselves, he went to see the city, and was beheld of everybody there with great admiration; for the people of Paris are so sottish, so badot, so foolish and fond by nature, that a juggler, a carrier of indulgences, a sumpter-horse, or mule with cymbals or tinkling bells, a blind fiddler in the middle of a cross lane, shall draw a greater confluence of people together than an evangelical preacher. And they pressed so hard upon him that he was constrained to rest himself upon the towers of Our Lady’s Church. At which place, seeing so many about him, he said with a loud voice, I believe that these buzzards will have me to pay them here my welcome hither, and my Proficiat. It is but good reason. I will now give them their wine, but it shall be only in sport. Then smiling, he untied his fair braguette, and drawing out his mentul into the open air, he so bitterly all-to-bepissed them, that he drowned two hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and eighteen, besides the women and little children. Some, nevertheless, of the company escaped this piss-flood by mere speed of foot, who, when they were at the higher end of the university, sweating, coughing, spitting, and out of breath, they began to swear and curse, some in good hot earnest, and others in jest. Carimari, carimara: golynoly, golynolo. By my sweet Sanctess, we are washed in sport, a sport truly to laugh at;—in French, Par ris, for which that city hath been ever since called Paris; whose name formerly was Leucotia, as Strabo testifieth, lib. quarto, from the Greek word leukotes, whiteness,—because of the white thighs of the ladies of that place. And forasmuch as, at this imposition of a new name, all the people that were there swore everyone by the Sancts of his parish, the Parisians, which are patched up of all nations and all pieces of countries, are by nature both good jurors and good jurists, and somewhat overweening; whereupon Joanninus de Barrauco, libro de copiositate reverentiarum, thinks that they are called Parisians from the Greek word parresia, which signifies boldness and liberty in speech. This done, he considered the great bells, which were in the said towers, and made them sound very harmoniously. Which whilst he was doing, it came into his mind that they would serve very well for tingling tantans and ringing campanels to hang about his mare’s neck when she should be sent back to his father, as he intended to do, loaded with Brie cheese and fresh herring. And indeed he forthwith carried them to his lodging. In the meanwhile there came a master beggar of the friars of St. Anthony to demand in his canting way the usual benevolence of some hoggish stuff, who, that he might be heard afar off, and to make the bacon he was in quest of shake in the very chimneys, made account to filch them away privily. Nevertheless, he left them behind very honestly, not for that they were too hot, but that they were somewhat too heavy for his carriage. This was not he of Bourg, for he was too good a friend of mine. All the city was risen up in sedition, they being, as you know, upon any slight occasion, so ready to uproars and insurrections, that foreign nations wonder at the patience of the kings of France, who do not by good justice restrain them from such tumultuous courses, seeing the manifold inconveniences which thence arise from day to day. Would to God I knew the shop wherein are forged these divisions and factious combinations, that I might bring them to light in the confraternities of my parish! Believe for a truth, that the place wherein the people gathered together, were thus sulphured, hopurymated, moiled, and bepissed, was called Nesle, where then was, but now is no more, the oracle of Leucotia. There was the case proposed, and the inconvenience showed of the transporting of the bells. After they had well ergoted pro and con, they concluded in baralipton, that they should send the oldest and most sufficient of the faculty unto Gargantua, to signify unto him the great and horrible prejudice they sustain by the want of those bells. And notwithstanding the good reasons given in by some of the university why this charge was fitter for an orator than a sophister, there was chosen for this purpose our Master Janotus de Bragmardo.

Chapter 1.XXI.—The study of Gargantua, according to the discipline of his schoolmasters the Sophisters.

The first day being thus spent, and the bells put up again in their own place, the citizens of Paris, in acknowledgment of this courtesy, offered to maintain and feed his mare as long as he pleased, which Gargantua took in good part, and they sent her to graze in the forest of Biere. I think she is not there now. This done, he with all his heart submitted his study to the discretion of Ponocrates; who for the beginning appointed that he should do as he was accustomed, to the end he might understand by what means, in so long time, his old masters had made him so sottish and ignorant. He disposed therefore of his time in such fashion, that ordinarily he did awake betwixt eight and nine o’clock, whether it was day or not, for so had his ancient governors ordained, alleging that which David saith, Vanum est vobis ante lucem surgere. Then did he tumble and toss, wag his legs, and wallow in the bed some time, the better to stir up and rouse his vital spirits, and apparelled himself according to the season: but willingly he would wear a great long gown of thick frieze, furred with fox-skins. Afterwards he combed his head with an Almain comb, which is the four fingers and the thumb. For his preceptor said that to comb himself otherwise, to wash and make himself neat, was to lose time in this world. Then he dunged, pissed, spewed, belched, cracked, yawned, spitted, coughed, yexed, sneezed and snotted himself like an archdeacon, and, to suppress the dew and bad air, went to breakfast, having some good fried tripes, fair rashers on the coals, excellent gammons of bacon, store of fine minced meat, and a great deal of sippet brewis, made up of the fat of the beef-pot, laid upon bread, cheese, and chopped parsley strewed together. Ponocrates showed him that he ought not to eat so soon after rising out of his bed, unless he had performed some exercise beforehand.

Gargantua answered, “What! have not I sufficiently well exercised myself? I have wallowed and rolled myself six or seven turns in my bed before I rose. Is not that enough? Pope Alexander did so, by the advice of a Jew his physician, and lived till his dying day in despite of his enemies. My first masters have used me to it, saying that to breakfast made a good memory, and therefore they drank first. I am very well after it, and dine but the better. And Master Tubal, who was the first licenciate at Paris, told me that it was not enough to run apace, but to set forth betimes: so doth not the total welfare of our humanity depend upon perpetual drinking in a ribble rabble, like ducks, but on drinking early in the morning; unde versus,

To rise betimes is no good hour, To drink betimes is better sure.”

After that he had thoroughly broke his fast, he went to church, and they carried to him, in a great basket, a huge impantoufled or thick-covered breviary, weighing, what in grease, clasps, parchment and cover, little more or less than eleven hundred and six pounds. There he heard six-and-twenty or thirty masses. This while, to the same place came his orison-mutterer impaletocked, or lapped up about the chin like a tufted whoop, and his breath pretty well antidoted with store of the vine-tree-syrup. With him he mumbled all his kiriels and dunsical breborions, which he so curiously thumbed and fingered, that there fell not so much as one grain to the ground. As he went from the church, they brought him, upon a dray drawn with oxen, a confused heap of paternosters and aves of St. Claude, every one of them being of the bigness of a hat-block; and thus walking through the cloisters, galleries, or garden, he said more in turning them over than sixteen hermits would have done. Then did he study some paltry half-hour with his eyes fixed upon his book; but, as the comic saith, his mind was in the kitchen. Pissing then a full urinal, he sat down at table; and because he was naturally phlegmatic, he began his meal with some dozens of gammons, dried neat’s tongues, hard roes of mullet, called botargos, andouilles or sausages, and such other forerunners of wine. In the meanwhile, four of his folks did cast into his mouth one after another continually mustard by whole shovelfuls. Immediately after that, he drank a horrible draught of white wine for the ease of his kidneys. When that was done, he ate according to the season meat agreeable to his appetite, and then left off eating when his belly began to strout, and was like to crack for fulness. As for his drinking, he had in that neither end nor rule. For he was wont to say, That the limits and bounds of drinking were, when the cork of the shoes of him that drinketh swelleth up half a foot high.

Chapter 1.XXIII.—How Gargantua was instructed by Ponocrates, and in such sort disciplinated, that he lost not one hour of the day.

When Ponocrates knew Gargantua’s vicious manner of living, he resolved to bring him up in another kind; but for a while he bore with him, considering that nature cannot endure a sudden change, without great violence. Therefore, to begin his work the better, he requested a learned physician of that time, called Master Theodorus, seriously to perpend, if it were possible, how to bring Gargantua into a better course. The said physician purged him canonically with Anticyrian hellebore, by which medicine he cleansed all the alteration and perverse habitude of his brain. By this means also Ponocrates made him forget all that he had learned under his ancient preceptors, as Timotheus did to his disciples, who had been instructed under other musicians. To do this the better, they brought him into the company of learned men, which were there, in whose imitation he had a great desire and affection to study otherwise, and to improve his parts. Afterwards he put himself into such a road and way of studying, that he lost not any one hour in the day, but employed all his time in learning and honest knowledge. Gargantua awaked, then, about four o’clock in the morning. Whilst they were in rubbing of him, there was read unto him some chapter of the holy Scripture aloud and clearly, with a pronunciation fit for the matter, and hereunto was appointed a young page born in Basche, named Anagnostes. According to the purpose and argument of that lesson, he oftentimes gave himself to worship, adore, pray, and send up his supplications to that good God, whose Word did show his majesty and marvellous judgment. Then went he unto the secret places to make excretion of his natural digestions. There his master repeated what had been read, expounding unto him the most obscure and difficult points. In returning, they considered the face of the sky, if it was such as they had observed it the night before, and into what signs the sun was entering, as also the moon for that day. This done, he was apparelled, combed, curled, trimmed, and perfumed, during which time they repeated to him the lessons of the day before. He himself said them by heart, and upon them would ground some practical cases concerning the estate of man, which he would prosecute sometimes two or three hours, but ordinarily they ceased as soon as he was fully clothed. Then for three good hours he had a lecture read unto him. This done they went forth, still conferring of the substance of the lecture, either unto a field near the university called the Brack, or unto the meadows, where they played at the ball, the long-tennis, and at the piletrigone (which is a play wherein we throw a triangular piece of iron at a ring, to pass it), most gallantly exercising their bodies, as formerly they had done their minds. All their play was but in liberty, for they left off when they pleased, and that was commonly when they did sweat over all their body, or were otherwise weary. Then were they very well wiped and rubbed, shifted their shirts, and, walking soberly, went to see if dinner was ready. Whilst they stayed for that, they did clearly and eloquently pronounce some sentences that they had retained of the lecture. In the meantime Master Appetite came, and then very orderly sat they down at table. At the beginning of the meal there was read some pleasant history of the warlike actions of former times, until he had taken a glass of wine. Then, if they thought good, they continued reading, or began to discourse merrily together; speaking first of the virtue, propriety, efficacy, and nature of all that was served in at the table; of bread, of wine, of water, of salt, of fleshes, fishes, fruits, herbs, roots, and of their dressing. By means whereof he learned in a little time all the passages competent for this that were to be found in Pliny, Athenaeus, Dioscorides, Julius Pollux, Galen, Porphyry, Oppian, Polybius, Heliodore, Aristotle, Aelian, and others. Whilst they talked of these things, many times, to be the more certain, they caused the very books to be brought to the table, and so well and perfectly did he in his memory retain the things above said, that in that time there was not a physician that knew half so much as he did. Afterwards they conferred of the lessons read in the morning, and, ending their repast with some conserve or marmalade of quinces, he picked his teeth with mastic tooth-pickers, washed his hands and eyes with fair fresh water, and gave thanks unto God in some fine cantiques, made in praise of the divine bounty and munificence. This done, they brought in cards, not to play, but to learn a thousand pretty tricks and new inventions, which were all grounded upon arithmetic. By this means he fell in love with that numerical science, and every day after dinner and supper he passed his time in it as pleasantly as he was wont to do at cards and dice; so that at last he understood so well both the theory and practical part thereof, that Tunstall the Englishman, who had written very largely of that purpose, confessed that verily in comparison of him he had no skill at all. And not only in that, but in the other mathematical sciences, as geometry, astronomy, music, &c. For in waiting on the concoction and attending the digestion of his food, they made a thousand pretty instruments and geometrical figures, and did in some measure practise the astronomical canons.

After this they recreated themselves with singing musically, in four or five parts, or upon a set theme or ground at random, as it best pleased them. In matter of musical instruments, he learned to play upon the lute, the virginals, the harp, the Almain flute with nine holes, the viol, and the sackbut. This hour thus spent, and digestion finished, he did purge his body of natural excrements, then betook himself to his principal study for three hours together, or more, as well to repeat his matutinal lectures as to proceed in the book wherein he was, as also to write handsomely, to draw and form the antique and Roman letters. This being done, they went out of their house, and with them a young gentleman of Touraine, named the Esquire Gymnast, who taught him the art of riding. Changing then his clothes, he rode a Naples courser, a Dutch roussin, a Spanish jennet, a barded or trapped steed, then a light fleet horse, unto whom he gave a hundred carieres, made him go the high saults, bounding in the air, free the ditch with a skip, leap over a stile or pale, turn short in a ring both to the right and left hand. There he broke not his lance; for it is the greatest foolery in the world to say, I have broken ten lances at tilts or in fight. A carpenter can do even as much. But it is a glorious and praise-worthy action with one lance to break and overthrow ten enemies. Therefore, with a sharp, stiff, strong, and well-steeled lance would he usually force up a door, pierce a harness, beat down a tree, carry away the ring, lift up a cuirassier saddle, with the mail-coat and gauntlet. All this he did in complete arms from head to foot. As for the prancing flourishes and smacking popisms for the better cherishing of the horse, commonly used in riding, none did them better than he. The cavallerize of Ferrara was but as an ape compared to him. He was singularly skilful in leaping nimbly from one horse to another without putting foot to ground, and these horses were called desultories. He could likewise from either side, with a lance in his hand, leap on horseback without stirrups, and rule the horse at his pleasure without a bridle, for such things are useful in military engagements. Another day he exercised the battle-axe, which he so dexterously wielded, both in the nimble, strong, and smooth management of that weapon, and that in all the feats practicable by it, that he passed knight of arms in the field, and at all essays.

Then tossed he the pike, played with the two-handed sword, with the backsword, with the Spanish tuck, the dagger, poniard, armed, unarmed, with a buckler, with a cloak, with a target. Then would he hunt the hart, the roebuck, the bear, the fallow deer, the wild boar, the hare, the pheasant, the partridge, and the bustard. He played at the balloon, and made it bound in the air, both with fist and foot. He wrestled, ran, jumped—not at three steps and a leap, called the hops, nor at clochepied, called the hare’s leap, nor yet at the Almains; for, said Gymnast, these jumps are for the wars altogether unprofitable, and of no use—but at one leap he would skip over a ditch, spring over a hedge, mount six paces upon a wall, ramp and grapple after this fashion up against a window of the full height of a lance. He did swim in deep waters on his belly, on his back, sideways, with all his body, with his feet only, with one hand in the air, wherein he held a book, crossing thus the breadth of the river of Seine without wetting it, and dragged along his cloak with his teeth, as did Julius Caesar; then with the help of one hand he entered forcibly into a boat, from whence he cast himself again headlong into the water, sounded the depths, hollowed the rocks, and plunged into the pits and gulfs. Then turned he the boat about, governed it, led it swiftly or slowly with the stream and against the stream, stopped it in his course, guided it with one hand, and with the other laid hard about him with a huge great oar, hoisted the sail, hied up along the mast by the shrouds, ran upon the edge of the decks, set the compass in order, tackled the bowlines, and steered the helm. Coming out of the water, he ran furiously up against a hill, and with the same alacrity and swiftness ran down again. He climbed up at trees like a cat, and leaped from the one to the other like a squirrel. He did pull down the great boughs and branches like another Milo; then with two sharp well-steeled daggers and two tried bodkins would he run up by the wall to the very top of a house like a rat; then suddenly came down from the top to the bottom, with such an even composition of members that by the fall he would catch no harm.

He did cast the dart, throw the bar, put the stone, practise the javelin, the boar-spear or partisan, and the halbert. He broke the strongest bows in drawing, bended against his breast the greatest crossbows of steel, took his aim by the eye with the hand-gun, and shot well, traversed and planted the cannon, shot at butt-marks, at the papgay from below upwards, or to a height from above downwards, or to a descent; then before him, sideways, and behind him, like the Parthians. They tied a cable-rope to the top of a high tower, by one end whereof hanging near the ground he wrought himself with his hands to the very top; then upon the same track came down so sturdily and firm that you could not on a plain meadow have run with more assurance. They set up a great pole fixed upon two trees. There would he hang by his hands, and with them alone, his feet touching at nothing, would go back and fore along the foresaid rope with so great swiftness that hardly could one overtake him with running; and then, to exercise his breast and lungs, he would shout like all the devils in hell. I heard him once call Eudemon from St. Victor’s gate to Montmartre. Stentor had never such a voice at the siege of Troy. Then for the strengthening of his nerves or sinews they made him two great sows of lead, each of them weighing eight thousand and seven hundred quintals, which they called alteres. Those he took up from the ground, in each hand one, then lifted them up over his head, and held them so without stirring three quarters of an hour and more, which was an inimitable force. He fought at barriers with the stoutest and most vigorous champions; and when it came to the cope, he stood so sturdily on his feet that he abandoned himself unto the strongest, in case they could remove him from his place, as Milo was wont to do of old. In whose imitation, likewise, he held a pomegranate in his hand, to give it unto him that could take it from him. The time being thus bestowed, and himself rubbed, cleansed, wiped, and refreshed with other clothes, he returned fair and softly; and passing through certain meadows, or other grassy places, beheld the trees and plants, comparing them with what is written of them in the books of the ancients, such as Theophrast, Dioscorides, Marinus, Pliny, Nicander, Macer, and Galen, and carried home to the house great handfuls of them, whereof a young page called Rizotomos had charge; together with little mattocks, pickaxes, grubbing-hooks, cabbies, pruning-knives, and other instruments requisite for herborizing. Being come to their lodging, whilst supper was making ready, they repeated certain passages of that which hath been read, and sat down to table. Here remark, that his dinner was sober and thrifty, for he did then eat only to prevent the gnawings of his stomach, but his supper was copious and large, for he took then as much as was fit to maintain and nourish him; which, indeed, is the true diet prescribed by the art of good and sound physic, although a rabble of loggerheaded physicians, nuzzeled in the brabbling shop of sophisters, counsel the contrary. During that repast was continued the lesson read at dinner as long as they thought good; the rest was spent in good discourse, learned and profitable. After that they had given thanks, he set himself to sing vocally, and play upon harmonious instruments, or otherwise passed his time at some pretty sports, made with cards or dice, or in practicing the feats of legerdemain with cups and balls. There they stayed some nights in frolicking thus, and making themselves merry till it was time to go to bed; and on other nights they would go make visits unto learned men, or to such as had been travellers in strange and remote countries. When it was full night before they retired themselves, they went unto the most open place of the house to see the face of the sky, and there beheld the comets, if any were, as likewise the figures, situations, aspects, oppositions, and conjunctions of both the fixed stars and planets.

Then with his master did he briefly recapitulate, after the manner of the Pythagoreans, that which he had read, seen, learned, done, and understood in the whole course of that day.

Then prayed they unto God the Creator, in falling down before him, and strengthening their faith towards him, and glorifying him for his boundless bounty; and, giving thanks unto him for the time that was past, they recommended themselves to his divine clemency for the future. Which being done, they went to bed, and betook themselves to their repose and rest.

Chapter 1.XXV.—How there was great strife and debate raised betwixt the cake-bakers of Lerne, and those of Gargantua’s country, whereupon were waged great wars.

At that time, which was the season of vintage, in the beginning of harvest, when the country shepherds were set to keep the vines, and hinder the starlings from eating up the grapes, as some cake-bakers of Lerne happened to pass along in the broad highway, driving into the city ten or twelve horses loaded with cakes, the said shepherds courteously entreated them to give them some for their money, as the price then ruled in the market. For here it is to be remarked, that it is a celestial food to eat for breakfast hot fresh cakes with grapes, especially the frail clusters, the great red grapes, the muscadine, the verjuice grape, and the laskard, for those that are costive in their belly, because it will make them gush out, and squirt the length of a hunter’s staff, like the very tap of a barrel; and oftentimes, thinking to let a squib, they did all-to-besquatter and conskite themselves, whereupon they are commonly called the vintage thinkers. The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them most outrageously, calling them prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown household loaf. To which provoking words, one amongst them, called Forgier, an honest fellow of his person and a notable springal, made answer very calmly thus: How long is it since you have got horns, that you are become so proud? Indeed formerly you were wont to give us some freely, and will you not now let us have any for our money? This is not the part of good neighbours, neither do we serve you thus when you come hither to buy our good corn, whereof you make your cakes and buns. Besides that, we would have given you to the bargain some of our grapes, but, by his zounds, you may chance to repent it, and possibly have need of us at another time, when we shall use you after the like manner, and therefore remember it. Then Marquet, a prime man in the confraternity of the cake-bakers, said unto him, Yea, sir, thou art pretty well crest-risen this morning, thou didst eat yesternight too much millet and bolymong. Come hither, sirrah, come hither, I will give thee some cakes. Whereupon Forgier, dreading no harm, in all simplicity went towards him, and drew a sixpence out of his leather satchel, thinking that Marquet would have sold him some of his cakes. But, instead of cakes, he gave him with his whip such a rude lash overthwart the legs, that the marks of the whipcord knots were apparent in them, then would have fled away; but Forgier cried out as loud as he could, O, murder, murder, help, help, help! and in the meantime threw a great cudgel after him, which he carried under his arm, wherewith he hit him in the coronal joint of his head, upon the crotaphic artery of the right side thereof, so forcibly, that Marquet fell down from his mare more like a dead than living man. Meanwhile the farmers and country swains, that were watching their walnuts near to that place, came running with their great poles and long staves, and laid such load on these cake-bakers, as if they had been to thresh upon green rye. The other shepherds and shepherdesses, hearing the lamentable shout of Forgier, came with their slings and slackies following them, and throwing great stones at them, as thick as if it had been hail. At last they overtook them, and took from them about four or five dozen of their cakes. Nevertheless they paid for them the ordinary price, and gave them over and above one hundred eggs and three baskets full of mulberries. Then did the cake-bakers help to get up to his mare Marquet, who was most shrewdly wounded, and forthwith returned to Lerne, changing the resolution they had to go to Pareille, threatening very sharp and boisterously the cowherds, shepherds, and farmers of Seville and Sinays. This done, the shepherds and shepherdesses made merry with these cakes and fine grapes, and sported themselves together at the sound of the pretty small pipe, scoffing and laughing at those vainglorious cake-bakers, who had that day met with a mischief for want of crossing themselves with a good hand in the morning. Nor did they forget to apply to Forgier’s leg some fair great red medicinal grapes, and so handsomely dressed it and bound it up that he was quickly cured.

Chapter 1.XXVI.—How the inhabitants of Lerne, by the commandment of Picrochole their king, assaulted the shepherds of Gargantua unexpectedly and on a sudden.

The cake-bakers, being returned to Lerne, went presently, before they did either eat or drink, to the Capitol, and there before their king, called Picrochole, the third of that name, made their complaint, showing their panniers broken, their caps all crumpled, their coats torn, their cakes taken away, but, above all, Marquet most enormously wounded, saying that all that mischief was done by the shepherds and herdsmen of Grangousier, near the broad highway beyond Seville. Picrochole incontinent grew angry and furious; and, without asking any further what, how, why, or wherefore, commanded the ban and arriere ban to be sounded throughout all his country, that all his vassals of what condition soever should, upon pain of the halter, come, in the best arms they could, unto the great place before the castle, at the hour of noon, and, the better to strengthen his design, he caused the drum to be beat about the town. Himself, whilst his dinner was making ready, went to see his artillery mounted upon the carriage, to display his colours, and set up the great royal standard, and loaded wains with store of ammunition both for the field and the belly, arms and victuals. At dinner he despatched his commissions, and by his express edict my Lord Shagrag was appointed to command the vanguard, wherein were numbered sixteen thousand and fourteen arquebusiers or firelocks, together with thirty thousand and eleven volunteer adventurers. The great Touquedillon, master of the horse, had the charge of the ordnance, wherein were reckoned nine hundred and fourteen brazen pieces, in cannons, double cannons, basilisks, serpentines, culverins, bombards or murderers, falcons, bases or passevolins, spirols, and other sorts of great guns. The rearguard was committed to the Duke of Scrapegood. In the main battle was the king and the princes of his kingdom. Thus being hastily furnished, before they would set forward, they sent three hundred light horsemen, under the conduct of Captain Swillwind, to discover the country, clear the avenues, and see whether there was any ambush laid for them. But, after they had made diligent search, they found all the land round about in peace and quiet, without any meeting or convention at all; which Picrochole understanding, commanded that everyone should march speedily under his colours. Then immediately in all disorder, without keeping either rank or file, they took the fields one amongst another, wasting, spoiling, destroying, and making havoc of all wherever they went, not sparing poor nor rich, privileged or unprivileged places, church nor laity, drove away oxen and cows, bulls, calves, heifers, wethers, ewes, lambs, goats, kids, hens, capons, chickens, geese, ganders, goslings, hogs, swine, pigs, and such like; beating down the walnuts, plucking the grapes, tearing the hedges, shaking the fruit-trees, and committing such incomparable abuses, that the like abomination was never heard of. Nevertheless, they met with none to resist them, for everyone submitted to their mercy, beseeching them that they might be dealt with courteously in regard that they had always carried themselves as became good and loving neighbours, and that they had never been guilty of any wrong or outrage done upon them, to be thus suddenly surprised, troubled, and disquieted, and that, if they would not desist, God would punish them very shortly. To which expostulations and remonstrances no other answer was made, but that they would teach them to eat cakes.

Chapter 1.XXVII.—How a monk of Seville saved the close of the abbey from being ransacked by the enemy.

So much they did, and so far they went pillaging and stealing, that at last they came to Seville, where they robbed both men and women, and took all they could catch: nothing was either too hot or too heavy for them. Although the plague was there in the most part of all the houses, they nevertheless entered everywhere, then plundered and carried away all that was within, and yet for all this not one of them took any hurt, which is a most wonderful case. For the curates, vicars, preachers, physicians, chirurgeons, and apothecaries, who went to visit, to dress, to cure, to heal, to preach unto and admonish those that were sick, were all dead of the infection, and these devilish robbers and murderers caught never any harm at all. Whence comes this to pass, my masters? I beseech you think upon it. The town being thus pillaged, they went unto the abbey with a horrible noise and tumult, but they found it shut and made fast against them. Whereupon the body of the army marched forward towards a pass or ford called the Gue de Vede, except seven companies of foot and two hundred lancers, who, staying there, broke down the walls of the close, to waste, spoil, and make havoc of all the vines and vintage within that place. The monks (poor devils) knew not in that extremity to which of all their sancts they should vow themselves. Nevertheless, at all adventures they rang the bells ad capitulum capitulantes. There it was decreed that they should make a fair procession, stuffed with good lectures, prayers, and litanies contra hostium insidias, and jolly responses pro pace.

There was then in the abbey a claustral monk, called Friar John of the funnels and gobbets, in French des entoumeures, young, gallant, frisk, lusty, nimble, quick, active, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, lean, wide-mouthed, long-nosed, a fair despatcher of morning prayers, unbridler of masses, and runner over of vigils; and, to conclude summarily in a word, a right monk, if ever there was any, since the monking world monked a monkery: for the rest, a clerk even to the teeth in matter of breviary. This monk, hearing the noise that the enemy made within the enclosure of the vineyard, went out to see what they were doing; and perceiving that they were cutting and gathering the grapes, whereon was grounded the foundation of all their next year’s wine, returned unto the choir of the church where the other monks were, all amazed and astonished like so many bell-melters. Whom when he heard sing, im, nim, pe, ne, ne, ne, ne, nene, tum, ne, num, num, ini, i mi, co, o, no, o, o, neno, ne, no, no, no, rum, nenum, num.

“It is well shit, well sung,” said he. “By the virtue of God, why do not you sing, Panniers, farewell, vintage is done? The devil snatch me, if they be not already within the middle of our close, and cut so well both vines and grapes, that, by Cod’s body, there will not be found for these four years to come so much as a gleaning in it. By the belly of Sanct James, what shall we poor devils drink the while? Lord God! da mihi potum.”

Then said the prior of the convent: “What should this drunken fellow do here? let him be carried to prison for troubling the divine service.”

“Nay,” said the monk, “the wine service, let us behave ourselves so that it be not troubled; for you yourself, my lord prior, love to drink of the best, and so doth every honest man. Never yet did a man of worth dislike good wine, it is a monastical apophthegm. But these responses that you chant here, by G—, are not in season. Wherefore is it, that our devotions were instituted to be short in the time of harvest and vintage, and long in the advent, and all the winter? The late friar, Massepelosse, of good memory, a true zealous man, or else I give myself to the devil, of our religion, told me, and I remember it well, how the reason was, that in this season we might press and make the wine, and in winter whiff it up. Hark you, my masters, you that love the wine, Cop’s body, follow me; for Sanct Anthony burn me as freely as a faggot, if they get leave to taste one drop of the liquor that will not now come and fight for relief of the vine. Hog’s belly, the goods of the church! Ha, no, no. What the devil, Sanct Thomas of England was well content to die for them; if I died in the same cause, should not I be a sanct likewise? Yes. Yet shall not I die there for all this, for it is I that must do it to others and send them a-packing.”

As he spake this he threw off his great monk’s habit, and laid hold upon the staff of the cross, which was made of the heart of a sorbapple-tree, it being of the length of a lance, round, of a full grip, and a little powdered with lilies called flower de luce, the workmanship whereof was almost all defaced and worn out. Thus went he out in a fair long-skirted jacket, putting his frock scarfwise athwart his breast, and in this equipage, with his staff, shaft or truncheon of the cross, laid on so lustily, brisk, and fiercely upon his enemies, who, without any order, or ensign, or trumpet, or drum, were busied in gathering the grapes of the vineyard. For the cornets, guidons, and ensign-bearers had laid down their standards, banners, and colours by the wall sides: the drummers had knocked out the heads of their drums on one end to fill them with grapes: the trumpeters were loaded with great bundles of bunches and huge knots of clusters: in sum, everyone of them was out of array, and all in disorder. He hurried, therefore, upon them so rudely, without crying gare or beware, that he overthrew them like hogs, tumbled them over like swine, striking athwart and alongst, and by one means or other laid so about him, after the old fashion of fencing, that to some he beat out their brains, to others he crushed their arms, battered their legs, and bethwacked their sides till their ribs cracked with it. To others again he unjointed the spondyles or knuckles of the neck, disfigured their chaps, gashed their faces, made their cheeks hang flapping on their chin, and so swinged and balammed them that they fell down before him like hay before a mower. To some others he spoiled the frame of their kidneys, marred their backs, broke their thigh-bones, pashed in their noses, poached out their eyes, cleft their mandibles, tore their jaws, dung in their teeth into their throat, shook asunder their omoplates or shoulder-blades, sphacelated their shins, mortified their shanks, inflamed their ankles, heaved off of the hinges their ishies, their sciatica or hip-gout, dislocated the joints of their knees, squattered into pieces the boughts or pestles of their thighs, and so thumped, mauled and belaboured them everywhere, that never was corn so thick and threefold threshed upon by ploughmen’s flails as were the pitifully disjointed members of their mangled bodies under the merciless baton of the cross. If any offered to hide himself amongst the thickest of the vines, he laid him squat as a flounder, bruised the ridge of his back, and dashed his reins like a dog. If any thought by flight to escape, he made his head to fly in pieces by the lamboidal commissure, which is a seam in the hinder part of the skull. If anyone did scramble up into a tree, thinking there to be safe, he rent up his perinee, and impaled him in at the fundament. If any of his old acquaintance happened to cry out, Ha, Friar John, my friend Friar John, quarter, quarter, I yield myself to you, to you I render myself! So thou shalt, said he, and must, whether thou wouldst or no, and withal render and yield up thy soul to all the devils in hell; then suddenly gave them dronos, that is, so many knocks, thumps, raps, dints, thwacks, and bangs, as sufficed to warn Pluto of their coming and despatch them a-going.

If any was so rash and full of temerity as to resist him to his face, then was it he did show the strength of his muscles, for without more ado he did transpierce him, by running him in at the breast, through the mediastine and the heart. Others, again, he so quashed and bebumped, that, with a sound bounce under the hollow of their short ribs, he overturned their stomachs so that they died immediately. To some, with a smart souse on the epigaster, he would make their midriff swag, then, redoubling the blow, gave them such a homepush on the navel that he made their puddings to gush out. To others through their ballocks he pierced their bumgut, and left not bowel, tripe, nor entrail in their body that had not felt the impetuosity, fierceness, and fury of his violence. Believe, that it was the most horrible spectacle that ever one saw. Some cried unto Sanct Barbe, others to St. George. O the holy Lady Nytouch, said one, the good Sanctess; O our Lady of Succours, said another, help, help! Others cried, Our Lady of Cunaut, of Loretto, of Good Tidings, on the other side of the water St. Mary Over. Some vowed a pilgrimage to St. James, and others to the holy handkerchief at Chamberry, which three months after that burnt so well in the fire that they could not get one thread of it saved. Others sent up their vows to St. Cadouin, others to St. John d’Angely, and to St. Eutropius of Xaintes. Others again invoked St. Mesmes of Chinon, St. Martin of Candes, St. Clouaud of Sinays, the holy relics of Laurezay, with a thousand other jolly little sancts and santrels. Some died without speaking, others spoke without dying; some died in speaking, others spoke in dying. Others shouted as loud as they could Confession, Confession, Confiteor, Miserere, In manus! So great was the cry of the wounded, that the prior of the abbey with all his monks came forth, who, when they saw these poor wretches so slain amongst the vines, and wounded to death, confessed some of them. But whilst the priests were busied in confessing them, the little monkies ran all to the place where Friar John was, and asked him wherein he would be pleased to require their assistance. To which he answered that they should cut the throats of those he had thrown down upon the ground. They presently, leaving their outer habits and cowls upon the rails, began to throttle and make an end of those whom he had already crushed. Can you tell with what instruments they did it? With fair gullies, which are little hulchbacked demi-knives, the iron tool whereof is two inches long, and the wooden handle one inch thick, and three inches in length, wherewith the little boys in our country cut ripe walnuts in two while they are yet in the shell, and pick out the kernel, and they found them very fit for the expediting of that weasand-slitting exploit. In the meantime Friar John, with his formidable baton of the cross, got to the breach which the enemies had made, and there stood to snatch up those that endeavoured to escape. Some of the monkitos carried the standards, banners, ensigns, guidons, and colours into their cells and chambers to make garters of them. But when those that had been shriven would have gone out at the gap of the said breach, the sturdy monk quashed and felled them down with blows, saying, These men have had confession and are penitent souls; they have got their absolution and gained the pardons; they go into paradise as straight as a sickle, or as the way is to Faye (like Crooked-Lane at Eastcheap). Thus by his prowess and valour were discomfited all those of the army that entered into the close of the abbey, unto the number of thirteen thousand, six hundred, twenty and two, besides the women and little children, which is always to be understood. Never did Maugis the Hermit bear himself more valiantly with his bourdon or pilgrim’s staff against the Saracens, of whom is written in the Acts of the four sons of Aymon, than did this monk against his enemies with the staff of the cross.

Chapter 1.XXXVIII.—How Gargantua did eat up six pilgrims in a salad.

The story requireth that we relate that which happened unto six pilgrims who came from Sebastian near to Nantes, and who for shelter that night, being afraid of the enemy, had hid themselves in the garden upon the chichling peas, among the cabbages and lettuces. Gargantua finding himself somewhat dry, asked whether they could get any lettuce to make him a salad; and hearing that there were the greatest and fairest in the country, for they were as great as plum-trees or as walnut-trees, he would go thither himself, and brought thence in his hand what he thought good, and withal carried away the six pilgrims, who were in so great fear that they did not dare to speak nor cough.

Washing them, therefore, first at the fountain, the pilgrims said one to another softly, “What shall we do? We are almost drowned here amongst these lettuce, shall we speak? But if we speak, he will kill us for spies.” And, as they were thus deliberating what to do, Gargantua put them with the lettuce into a platter of the house, as large as the huge tun of the White Friars of the Cistercian order; which done, with oil, vinegar, and salt, he ate them up, to refresh himself a little before supper, and had already swallowed up five of the pilgrims, the sixth being in the platter, totally hid under a lettuce, except his bourdon or staff that appeared, and nothing else. Which Grangousier seeing, said to Gargantua, I think that is the horn of a shell-snail, do not eat it. Why not? said Gargantua, they are good all this month: which he no sooner said, but, drawing up the staff, and therewith taking up the pilgrim, he ate him very well, then drank a terrible draught of excellent white wine. The pilgrims, thus devoured, made shift to save themselves as well as they could, by withdrawing their bodies out of the reach of the grinders of his teeth, but could not escape from thinking they had been put in the lowest dungeon of a prison. And when Gargantua whiffed the great draught, they thought to have been drowned in his mouth, and the flood of wine had almost carried them away into the gulf of his stomach. Nevertheless, skipping with their bourdons, as St. Michael’s palmers use to do, they sheltered themselves from the danger of that inundation under the banks of his teeth. But one of them by chance, groping or sounding the country with his staff, to try whether they were in safety or no, struck hard against the cleft of a hollow tooth, and hit the mandibulary sinew or nerve of the jaw, which put Gargantua to very great pain, so that he began to cry for the rage that he felt. To ease himself therefore of his smarting ache, he called for his toothpicker, and rubbing towards a young walnut-tree, where they lay skulking, unnestled you my gentlemen pilgrims.

For he caught one by the legs, another by the scrip, another by the pocket, another by the scarf, another by the band of the breeches, and the poor fellow that had hurt him with the bourdon, him he hooked to him by the codpiece, which snatch nevertheless did him a great deal of good, for it pierced unto him a pocky botch he had in the groin, which grievously tormented him ever since they were past Ancenis. The pilgrims, thus dislodged, ran away athwart the plain a pretty fast pace, and the pain ceased, even just at the time when by Eudemon he was called to supper, for all was ready. I will go then, said he, and piss away my misfortune; which he did do in such a copious measure, that the urine taking away the feet from the pilgrims, they were carried along with the stream unto the bank of a tuft of trees. Upon which, as soon as they had taken footing, and that for their self-preservation they had run a little out of the road, they on a sudden fell all six, except Fourniller, into a trap that had been made to take wolves by a train, out of which, nevertheless, they escaped by the industry of the said Fourniller, who broke all the snares and ropes. Being gone from thence, they lay all the rest of that night in a lodge near unto Coudray, where they were comforted in their miseries by the gracious words of one of their company, called Sweer-to-go, who showed them that this adventure had been foretold by the prophet David, Psalm. Quum exsurgerent homines in nos, forte vivos deglutissent nos; when we were eaten in the salad, with salt, oil, and vinegar. Quum irasceretur furor eorum in nos, forsitan aqua absorbuisset nos; when he drank the great draught. Torrentem pertransivit anima nostra; when the stream of his water carried us to the thicket. Forsitan pertransisset anima nostra aquam intolerabilem; that is, the water of his urine, the flood whereof, cutting our way, took our feet from us. Benedictus Dominus qui non dedit nos in captionem dentibus eorum. Anima nostra sicut passer erepta est de laqueo venantium; when we fell in the trap. Laqueus contritus est, by Fourniller, et nos liberati sumus. Adjutorium nostrum, &c.

Chapter 1.XXXIX.—How the Monk was feasted by Gargantua, and of the jovial discourse they had at supper.

When Gargantua was set down at table, after all of them had somewhat stayed their stomachs by a snatch or two of the first bits eaten heartily, Grangousier began to relate the source and cause of the war raised between him and Picrochole; and came to tell how Friar John of the Funnels had triumphed at the defence of the close of the abbey, and extolled him for his valour above Camillus, Scipio, Pompey, Caesar, and Themistocles. Then Gargantua desired that he might be presently sent for, to the end that with him they might consult of what was to be done. Whereupon, by a joint consent, his steward went for him, and brought him along merrily, with his staff of the cross, upon Grangousier’s mule. When he was come, a thousand huggings, a thousand embracements, a thousand good days were given. “Ha, Friar John, my friend Friar John, my brave cousin Friar John from the devil! Let me clip thee, my heart, about the neck; to me an armful. I must grip thee, my ballock, till thy back crack with it. Come, my cod, let me coll thee till I kill thee.” And Friar John, the gladdest man in the world, never was man made welcomer, never was any more courteously and graciously received than Friar John.

“Come, come,” said Gargantua, “a stool here close by me at this end.”

“I am content,” said the monk, “seeing you will have it so. Some water, page; fill, my boy, fill; it is to refresh my liver. Give me some, child, to gargle my throat withal.”

“Deposita cappa,” said Gymnast, “let us pull off this frock.”

“Ho, by G—, gentlemen,” said the monk, “there is a chapter in Statutis Ordinis which opposeth my laying of it down.”

“Pish!” said Gymnast, “a fig for your chapter! This frock breaks both your shoulders, put it off.”

“My friend,” said the monk, “let me alone with it; for, by G—, I’ll drink the better that it is on. It makes all my body jocund. If I should lay it aside, the waggish pages would cut to themselves garters out of it, as I was once served at Coulaines. And, which is worse, I shall lose my appetite. But if in this habit I sit down at table, I will drink, by G—, both to thee and to thy horse, and so courage, frolic, God save the company! I have already supped, yet will I eat never a whit the less for that; for I have a paved stomach, as hollow as a butt of malvoisie or St. Benedictus’ boot (butt), and always open like a lawyer’s pouch. Of all fishes but the tench take the wing of a partridge or the thigh of a nun. Doth not he die like a good fellow that dies with a stiff catso? Our prior loves exceedingly the white of a capon.”

“In that,” said Gymnast, “he doth not resemble the foxes; for of the capons, hens, and pullets which they carry away they never eat the white.”

“Why?” said the monk.

“Because,” said Gymnast, “they have no cooks to dress them; and, if they be not competently made ready, they remain red and not white; the redness of meats being a token that they have not got enough of the fire, whether by boiling, roasting, or otherwise, except the shrimps, lobsters, crabs, and crayfishes, which are cardinalized with boiling.”

“By God’s feast-gazers,” said the monk, “the porter of our abbey then hath not his head well boiled, for his eyes are as red as a mazer made of an alder-tree. The thigh of this leveret is good for those that have the gout. To the purpose of the truel,—what is the reason that the thighs of a gentlewoman are always fresh and cool?”

“This problem,” said Gargantua, “is neither in Aristotle, in Alexander Aphrodiseus, nor in Plutarch. There are three causes, said the monk, by which that place is naturally refreshed. Primo, because the water runs all along by it. Secundo, because it is a shady place, obscure and dark, upon which the sun never shines. And thirdly, because it is continually flabbelled, blown upon, and aired by the north winds of the hole arstick, the fan of the smock, and flipflap of the codpiece. And lusty, my lads. Some bousing liquor, page! So! crack, crack, crack. O how good is God, that gives us of this excellent juice! I call him to witness, if I had been in the time of Jesus Christ, I would have kept him from being taken by the Jews in the garden of Olivet. And the devil fail me, if I should have failed to cut off the hams of these gentlemen apostles who ran away so basely after they had well supped, and left their good master in the lurch. I hate that man worse than poison that offers to run away when he should fight and lay stoutly about him. Oh that I were but King of France for fourscore or a hundred years! By G—, I should whip like curtail-dogs these runaways of Pavia. A plague take them; why did they not choose rather to die there than to leave their good prince in that pinch and necessity? Is it not better and more honourable to perish in fighting valiantly than to live in disgrace by a cowardly running away? We are like to eat no great store of goslings this year; therefore, friend, reach me some of that roasted pig there.”

“Diavolo, is there no more must? No more sweet wine? Germinavit radix Jesse. Je renie ma vie, je meurs de soif; I renounce my life, I rage for thirst. This wine is none of the worst. What wine drink you at Paris? I give myself to the devil, if I did not once keep open house at Paris for all comers six months together. Do you know Friar Claude of the high kilderkins? Oh the good fellow that he is! But I do not know what fly hath stung him of late, he is become so hard a student. For my part, I study not at all. In our abbey we never study for fear of the mumps, which disease in horses is called the mourning in the chine. Our late abbot was wont to say that it is a monstrous thing to see a learned monk. By G—, master, my friend, Magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes. You never saw so many hares as there are this year. I could not anywhere come by a goshawk nor tassel of falcon. My Lord Belloniere promised me a lanner, but he wrote to me not long ago that he was become pursy. The partridges will so multiply henceforth, that they will go near to eat up our ears. I take no delight in the stalking-horse, for I catch such cold that I am like to founder myself at that sport. If I do not run, toil, travel, and trot about, I am not well at ease. True it is that in leaping over the hedges and bushes my frock leaves always some of its wool behind it. I have recovered a dainty greyhound; I give him to the devil, if he suffer a hare to escape him. A groom was leading him to my Lord Huntlittle, and I robbed him of him. Did I ill?”

“No, Friar John,” said Gymnast, “no, by all the devils that are, no!”

“So,” said the monk, “do I attest these same devils so long as they last, or rather, virtue (of) G—, what could that gouty limpard have done with so fine a dog? By the body of G—, he is better pleased when one presents him with a good yoke of oxen.”

“How now,” said Ponocrates, “you swear, Friar John.”

“It is only,” said the monk, “but to grace and adorn my speech. They are colours of a Ciceronian rhetoric.”

Chapter 1.XL.—Why monks are the outcasts of the world; and wherefore some have bigger noses than others.

By the faith of a Christian, said Eudemon, I do wonderfully dote and enter in a great ecstasy when I consider the honesty and good fellowship of this monk, for he makes us here all merry. How is it, then, that they exclude the monks from all good companies, calling them feast-troublers, marrers of mirth, and disturbers of all civil conversation, as the bees drive away the drones from their hives? Ignavum fucos pecus, said Maro, a praesepibus arcent. Hereunto, answered Gargantua, there is nothing so true as that the frock and cowl draw unto itself the opprobries, injuries, and maledictions of the world, just as the wind called Cecias attracts the clouds. The peremptory reason is, because they eat the ordure and excrements of the world, that is to say, the sins of the people, and, like dung-chewers and excrementitious eaters, they are cast into the privies and secessive places, that is, the convents and abbeys, separated from political conversation, as the jakes and retreats of a house are. But if you conceive how an ape in a family is always mocked and provokingly incensed, you shall easily apprehend how monks are shunned of all men, both young and old. The ape keeps not the house as a dog doth, he draws not in the plough as the ox, he yields neither milk nor wool as the sheep, he carrieth no burden as a horse doth. That which he doth, is only to conskite, spoil, and defile all, which is the cause wherefore he hath of all men mocks, frumperies, and bastinadoes.

After the same manner a monk—I mean those lither, idle, lazy monks—doth not labour and work, as do the peasant and artificer; doth not ward and defend the country, as doth the man of war; cureth not the sick and diseased, as the physician doth; doth neither preach nor teach, as do the evangelical doctors and schoolmasters; doth not import commodities and things necessary for the commonwealth, as the merchant doth. Therefore is it that by and of all men they are hooted at, hated, and abhorred. Yea, but, said Grangousier, they pray to God for us. Nothing less, answered Gargantua. True it is, that with a tingle tangle jangling of bells they trouble and disquiet all their neighbours about them. Right, said the monk; a mass, a matin, a vesper well rung, are half said. They mumble out great store of legends and psalms, by them not at all understood; they say many paternosters interlarded with Ave-Maries, without thinking upon or apprehending the meaning of what it is they say, which truly I call mocking of God, and not prayers. But so help them God, as they pray for us, and not for being afraid to lose their victuals, their manchots, and good fat pottage. All true Christians, of all estates and conditions, in all places and at all times, send up their prayers to God, and the Mediator prayeth and intercedeth for them, and God is gracious to them. Now such a one is our good Friar John; therefore every man desireth to have him in his company. He is no bigot or hypocrite; he is not torn and divided betwixt reality and appearance; no wretch of a rugged and peevish disposition, but honest, jovial, resolute, and a good fellow. He travels, he labours, he defends the oppressed, comforts the afflicted, helps the needy, and keeps the close of the abbey. Nay, said the monk, I do a great deal more than that; for whilst we are in despatching our matins and anniversaries in the choir, I make withal some crossbow-strings, polish glass bottles and bolts, I twist lines and weave purse nets wherein to catch coneys. I am never idle. But now, hither come, some drink, some drink here! Bring the fruit. These chestnuts are of the wood of Estrox, and with good new wine are able to make you a fine cracker and composer of bum-sonnets. You are not as yet, it seems, well moistened in this house with the sweet wine and must. By G—, I drink to all men freely, and at all fords, like a proctor or promoter’s horse. Friar John, said Gymnast, take away the snot that hangs at your nose. Ha, ha, said the monk, am not I in danger of drowning, seeing I am in water even to the nose? No, no, Quare? Quia, though some water come out from thence, there never goes in any; for it is well antidoted with pot-proof armour and syrup of the vine-leaf.

Oh, my friend, he that hath winter-boots made of such leather may boldly fish for oysters, for they will never take water. What is the cause, said Gargantua, that Friar John hath such a fair nose? Because, said Grangousier, that God would have it so, who frameth us in such form and for such end as is most agreeable with his divine will, even as a potter fashioneth his vessels. Because, said Ponocrates, he came with the first to the fair of noses, and therefore made choice of the fairest and the greatest. Pish, said the monk, that is not the reason of it, but, according to the true monastical philosophy, it is because my nurse had soft teats, by virtue whereof, whilst she gave me suck, my nose did sink in as in so much butter. The hard breasts of nurses make children short-nosed. But hey, gay, Ad formam nasi cognoscitur ad te levavi. I never eat any confections, page, whilst I am at the bibbery. Item, bring me rather some toasts.

Chapter 1.XLI.—How the Monk made Gargantua sleep, and of his hours and breviaries.

Supper being ended, they consulted of the business in hand, and concluded that about midnight they should fall unawares upon the enemy, to know what manner of watch and ward they kept, and that in the meanwhile they should take a little rest the better to refresh themselves. But Gargantua could not sleep by any means, on which side soever he turned himself.

Whereupon the monk said to him, “I never sleep soundly but when I am at sermon or prayers. Let us therefore begin, you and I, the seven penitential psalms, to try whether you shall not quickly fall asleep.”

The conceit pleased Gargantua very well, and, beginning the first of these psalms, as soon as they came to the words Beati quorum they fell asleep, both the one and the other. But the monk, for his being formerly accustomed to the hour of claustral matins, failed not to awake a little before midnight, and, being up himself, awaked all the rest, in singing aloud, and with a full clear voice, the song:

Awake, O Reinian, ho, awake! Awake, O Reinian, ho! Get up, you no more sleep must take; Get up, for we must go.

When they were all roused and up, he said, “My masters, it is a usual saying, that we begin matins with coughing and supper with drinking. Let us now, in doing clean contrarily, begin our matins with drinking, and at night before supper we shall cough as hard as we can.”

“What,” said Gargantua, “to drink so soon after sleep? This is not to live according to the diet and prescript rule of the physicians, for you ought first to scour and cleanse your stomach of all its superfluities and excrements.”

“Oh, well physicked,” said the monk; “a hundred devils leap into my body, if there be not more old drunkards than old physicians! I have made this paction and covenant with my appetite, that it always lieth down and goes to bed with myself, for to that I every day give very good order; then the next morning it also riseth with me and gets up when I am awake. Mind you your charges, gentlemen, or tend your cures as much as you will. I will get me to my drawer; in terms of falconry, my tiring.”

“What drawer or tiring do you mean?” said Gargantua.

“My breviary,” said the monk, “for just as the falconers, before they feed their hawks, do make them draw at a hen’s leg to purge their brains of phlegm and sharpen them to a good appetite, so, by taking this merry little breviary in the morning, I scour all my lungs and am presently ready to drink.”

“After what manner,” said Gargantua, “do you say these fair hours and prayers of yours?”

“After the manner of Whipfield (Fessecamp, and corruptly Fecan.),” said the monk, “by three psalms and three lessons, or nothing at all, he that will. I never tie myself to hours, prayers, and sacraments; for they are made for the man and not the man for them. Therefore is it that I make my prayers in fashion of stirrup-leathers; I shorten or lengthen them when I think good. Brevis oratio penetrat caelos et longa potatio evacuat scyphos. Where is that written?”

“By my faith,” said Ponocrates, “I cannot tell, my pillicock, but thou art more worth than gold.”

“Therein,” said the monk, “I am like you; but, venite, apotemus.”

Then made they ready store of carbonadoes, or rashers on the coals, and good fat soups, or brewis with sippets; and the monk drank what he pleased. Some kept him company, and the rest did forbear, for their stomachs were not as yet opened. Afterwards every man began to arm and befit himself for the field. And they armed the monk against his will; for he desired no other armour for back and breast but his frock, nor any other weapon in his hand but the staff of the cross. Yet at their pleasure was he completely armed cap-a-pie, and mounted upon one of the best horses in the kingdom, with a good slashing shable by his side, together with Gargantua, Ponocrates, Gymnast, Eudemon, and five-and-twenty more of the most resolute and adventurous of Grangousier’s house, all armed at proof with their lances in their hands, mounted like St. George, and everyone of them having an arquebusier behind him.

Chapter 1.XLII.—How the Monk encouraged his fellow-champions, and how he hanged upon a tree.

Thus went out those valiant champions on their adventure, in full resolution to know what enterprise they should undertake, and what to take heed of and look well to in the day of the great and horrible battle. And the monk encouraged them, saying, “My children, do not fear nor doubt, I will conduct you safely. God and Sanct Benedict be with us! If I had strength answerable to my courage, by’s death, I would plume them for you like ducks. I fear nothing but the great ordnance; yet I know of a charm by way of prayer, which the subsexton of our abbey taught me, that will preserve a man from the violence of guns and all manner of fire-weapons and engines; but it will do me no good, because I do not believe it. Nevertheless, I hope my staff of the cross shall this day play devilish pranks amongst them. By G—, whoever of our party shall offer to play the duck, and shrink when blows are a-dealing, I give myself to the devil, if I do not make a monk of him in my stead, and hamper him within my frock, which is a sovereign cure against cowardice. Did you never hear of my Lord Meurles his greyhound, which was not worth a straw in the fields? He put a frock about his neck: by the body of G—, there was neither hare nor fox that could escape him, and, which is more, he lined all the bitches in the country, though before that he was feeble-reined and ex frigidis et maleficiatis.”

The monk uttering these words in choler, as he passed under a walnut-tree, in his way towards the causey, he broached the vizor of his helmet on the stump of a great branch of the said tree. Nevertheless, he set his spurs so fiercely to the horse, who was full of mettle and quick on the spur, that he bounded forwards, and the monk going about to ungrapple his vizor, let go his hold of the bridle, and so hanged by his hand upon the bough, whilst his horse stole away from under him. By this means was the monk left hanging on the walnut-tree, and crying for help, murder, murder, swearing also that he was betrayed.

Eudemon perceived him first, and calling Gargantua said, “Sir, come and see Absalom hanging.”

Gargantua, being come, considered the countenance of the monk, and in what posture he hanged; wherefore he said to Eudemon, “You were mistaken in comparing him to Absalom; for Absalom hung by his hair, but this shaveling monk hangeth by the ears.”

“Help me,” said the monk, “in the devil’s name; is this a time for you to prate? You seem to me to be like the decretalist preachers, who say that whosoever shall see his neighbour in the danger of death, ought, upon pain of trisulk excommunication, rather choose to admonish him to make his confession to a priest, and put his conscience in the state of peace, than otherwise to help and relieve him. And therefore when I shall see them fallen into a river, and ready to be drowned, I shall make them a fair long sermon de contemptu mundi, et fuga seculi; and when they are stark dead, shall then go to their aid and succour in fishing after them.”

“Be quiet,” said Gymnast, “and stir not, my minion. I am now coming to unhang thee and to set thee at freedom, for thou art a pretty little gentle monachus. Monachus in claustro non valet ova duo; sed quando est extra, bene valet triginta. I have seen above five hundred hanged, but I never saw any have a better countenance in his dangling and pendilatory swagging. Truly, if I had so good a one, I would willingly hang thus all my lifetime.”

“What,” said the monk, “have you almost done preaching? Help me, in the name of God, seeing you will not in the name of the other spirit, or, by the habit which I wear, you shall repent it, tempore et loco praelibatis.”

Then Gymnast alighted from his horse, and, climbing up the walnut-tree, lifted up the monk with one hand by the gussets of his armour under the armpits, and with the other undid his vizor from the stump of the broken branch; which done, he let him fall to the ground and himself after. As soon as the monk was down, he put off all his armour, and threw away one piece after another about the field, and, taking to him again his staff of the cross, remounted up to his horse, which Eudemon had caught in his running away. Then went they on merrily, riding along on the highway.

Chapter 1.LII.—How Gargantua caused to be built for the Monk the Abbey of Theleme.

There was left only the monk to provide for, whom Gargantua would have made Abbot of Seville, but he refused it. He would have given him the Abbey of Bourgueil, or of Sanct Florent, which was better, or both, if it pleased him; but the monk gave him a very peremptory answer, that he would never take upon him the charge nor government of monks. “For how shall I be able,” said he, “to rule over others, that have not full power and command of myself? If you think I have done you, or may hereafter do any acceptable service, give me leave to found an abbey after my own mind and fancy.”

The motion pleased Gargantua very well, who thereupon offered him all the country of Theleme by the river of Loire till within two leagues of the great forest of Port-Huaulx. The monk then requested Gargantua to institute his religious order contrary to all others.

“First, then,” said Gargantua, “you must not build a wall about your convent, for all other abbeys are strongly walled and mured about.”

“See,” said the monk, “and not without cause (seeing wall and mur signify but one and the same thing); where there is mur before and mur behind, there is store of murmur, envy, and mutual conspiracy. Moreover, seeing there are certain convents in the world whereof the custom is, if any woman come in, I mean chaste and honest women, they immediately sweep the ground which they have trod upon; therefore was it ordained, that if any man or woman entered into religious orders should by chance come within this new abbey, all the rooms should be thoroughly washed and cleansed through which they had passed.”

And because in all other monasteries and nunneries all is compassed, limited, and regulated by hours, it was decreed that in this new structure there should be neither clock nor dial, but that according to the opportunities and incident occasions all their hours should be disposed of; for, said Gargantua, the greatest loss of time that I know is to count the hours. What good comes of it? Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment and discretion.

Item, Because at that time they put no women into nunneries but such as were either purblind, blinkards, lame, crooked, ill-favoured, misshapen, fools, senseless, spoiled, or corrupt; nor encloistered any men but those that were either sickly, subject to defluxions, ill-bred louts, simple sots, or peevish trouble-houses.

“But to the purpose, said the monk. A woman that is neither fair nor good, to what use serves she?”

“To make a nun of,” said Gargantua.

“Yea,” said the monk, “and to make shirts and smocks.”

Therefore was it ordained that into this religious order should be admitted no women that were not fair, well-featured, and of a sweet disposition; nor men that were not comely, personable, and well conditioned.

Item, Because in the convents of women men come not but underhand, privily, and by stealth, it was therefore enacted that in this house there shall be no women in case there be not men, nor men in case there be not women.

Item, Because both men and women that are received into religious orders after the expiring of their noviciate or probation year were constrained and forced perpetually to stay there all the days of their life, it was therefore ordered that all whatever, men or women, admitted within this abbey, should have full leave to depart with peace and contentment whensoever it should seem good to them so to do.

Item, for that the religious men and women did ordinarily make three vows, to wit, those of chastity, poverty, and obedience, it was therefore constituted and appointed that in this convent they might be honourably married, that they might be rich, and live at liberty. In regard of the legitimate time of the persons to be initiated, and years under and above which they were not capable of reception, the women were to be admitted from ten till fifteen, and the men from twelve till eighteen.

Chapter 1.LVII.—How the Thelemites were governed, and of their manner of living.

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,

Do What Thou Wilt;

because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.

By this liberty they entered into a very laudable emulation to do all of them what they saw did please one. If any of the gallants or ladies should say, Let us drink, they would all drink. If any one of them said, Let us play, they all played. If one said, Let us go a-walking into the fields they went all. If it were to go a-hawking or a-hunting, the ladies mounted upon dainty well-paced nags, seated in a stately palfrey saddle, carried on their lovely fists, miniardly begloved every one of them, either a sparrowhawk or a laneret or a marlin, and the young gallants carried the other kinds of hawks. So nobly were they taught, that there was neither he nor she amongst them but could read, write, sing, play upon several musical instruments, speak five or six several languages, and compose in them all very quaintly, both in verse and prose. Never were seen so valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so dexterous and skilful both on foot and a-horse-back, more brisk and lively, more nimble and quick, or better handling all manner of weapons than were there. Never were seen ladies so proper and handsome, so miniard and dainty, less froward, or more ready with their hand and with their needle in every honest and free action belonging to that sex, than were there. For this reason, when the time came that any man of the said abbey, either at the request of his parents, or for some other cause, had a mind to go out of it, he carried along with him one of the ladies, namely, her whom he had before that chosen for his mistress, and (they) were married together. And if they had formerly in Theleme lived in good devotion and amity, they did continue therein and increase it to a greater height in their state of matrimony; and did entertain that mutual love till the very last day of their life, in no less vigour and fervency than at the very day of their wedding. Here must not I forget to set down unto you a riddle which was found under the ground as they were laying the foundation of the abbey, engraven in a copper plate, and it was thus as followeth.

Chapter 2.VIII.—How Pantagruel, being at Paris, received letters from his father Gargantua, and the copy of them.

Pantagruel studied very hard, as you may well conceive, and profited accordingly; for he had an excellent understanding and notable wit, together with a capacity in memory equal to the measure of twelve oil budgets or butts of olives. And, as he was there abiding one day, he received a letter from his father in manner as followeth.

Most dear Son,—Amongst the gifts, graces, and prerogatives, with which the sovereign plasmator God Almighty hath endowed and adorned human nature at the beginning, that seems to me most singular and excellent by which we may in a mortal state attain to a kind of immortality, and in the course of this transitory life perpetuate our name and seed, which is done by a progeny issued from us in the lawful bonds of matrimony. Whereby that in some measure is restored unto us which was taken from us by the sin of our first parents, to whom it was said that, because they had not obeyed the commandment of God their Creator, they should die, and by death should be brought to nought that so stately frame and plasmature wherein the man at first had been created. But by this means of seminal propagation there (“Which continueth” in the old copy.) continueth in the children what was lost in the parents, and in the grandchildren that which perished in their fathers, and so successively until the day of the last judgment, when Jesus Christ shall have rendered up to God the Father his kingdom in a peaceable condition, out of all danger and contamination of sin; for then shall cease all generations and corruptions, and the elements leave off their continual transmutations, seeing the so much desired peace shall be attained unto and enjoyed, and that all things shall be brought to their end and period. And, therefore, not without just and reasonable cause do I give thanks to God my Saviour and Preserver, for that he hath enabled me to see my bald old age reflourish in thy youth; for when, at his good pleasure, who rules and governs all things, my soul shall leave this mortal habitation, I shall not account myself wholly to die, but to pass from one place unto another, considering that, in and by that, I continue in my visible image living in the world, visiting and conversing with people of honour, and other my good friends, as I was wont to do. Which conversation of mine, although it was not without sin, because we are all of us trespassers, and therefore ought continually to beseech his divine majesty to blot our transgressions out of his memory, yet was it, by the help and grace of God, without all manner of reproach before men. Wherefore, if those qualities of the mind but shine in thee wherewith I am endowed, as in thee remaineth the perfect image of my body, thou wilt be esteemed by all men to be the perfect guardian and treasure of the immortality of our name. But, if otherwise, I shall truly take but small pleasure to see it, considering that the lesser part of me, which is the body, would abide in thee, and the best, to wit, that which is the soul, and by which our name continues blessed amongst men, would be degenerate and abastardized. This I do not speak out of any distrust that I have of thy virtue, which I have heretofore already tried, but to encourage thee yet more earnestly to proceed from good to better. And that which I now write unto thee is not so much that thou shouldst live in this virtuous course, as that thou shouldst rejoice in so living and having lived, and cheer up thyself with the like resolution in time to come; to the prosecution and accomplishment of which enterprise and generous undertaking thou mayst easily remember how that I have spared nothing, but have so helped thee, as if I had had no other treasure in this world but to see thee once in my life completely well-bred and accomplished, as well in virtue, honesty, and valour, as in all liberal knowledge and civility, and so to leave thee after my death as a mirror representing the person of me thy father, and if not so excellent, and such in deed as I do wish thee, yet such in my desire. But although my deceased father of happy memory, Grangousier, had bent his best endeavours to make me profit in all perfection and political knowledge, and that my labour and study was fully correspondent to, yea, went beyond his desire, nevertheless, as thou mayest well understand, the time then was not so proper and fit for learning as it is at present, neither had I plenty of such good masters as thou hast had. For that time was darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance, and savouring a little of the infelicity and calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the divine goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity, and that with such amendment and increase of the knowledge, that now hardly should I be admitted unto the first form of the little grammar-schoolboys—I say, I, who in my youthful days was, and that justly, reputed the most learned of that age. Which I do not speak in vain boasting, although I might lawfully do it in writing unto thee—in verification whereof thou hast the authority of Marcus Tullius in his book of old age, and the sentence of Plutarch in the book entitled How a man may praise himself without envy—but to give thee an emulous encouragement to strive yet further. Now is it that the minds of men are qualified with all manner of discipline, and the old sciences revived which for many ages were extinct. Now it is that the learned languages are to their pristine purity restored, viz., Greek, without which a man may be ashamed to account himself a scholar, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldaean, and Latin. Printing likewise is now in use, so elegant and so correct that better cannot be imagined, although it was found out but in my time by divine inspiration, as by a diabolical suggestion on the other side was the invention of ordnance. All the world is full of knowing men, of most learned schoolmasters, and vast libraries; and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying as we see at this day there is. Nor must any adventure henceforward to come in public, or present himself in company, that hath not been pretty well polished in the shop of Minerva. I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now than the doctors and preachers were in my time. What shall I say? The very women and children have aspired to this praise and celestial manner of good learning. Yet so it is that, in the age I am now of, I have been constrained to learn the Greek tongue—which I contemned not like Cato, but had not the leisure in my younger years to attend the study of it—and take much delight in the reading of Plutarch’s Morals, the pleasant Dialogues of Plato, the Monuments of Pausanias, and the Antiquities of Athenaeus, in waiting on the hour wherein God my Creator shall call me and command me to depart from this earth and transitory pilgrimage. Wherefore, my son, I admonish thee to employ thy youth to profit as well as thou canst, both in thy studies and in virtue. Thou art at Paris, where the laudable examples of many brave men may stir up thy mind to gallant actions, and hast likewise for thy tutor and pedagogue the learned Epistemon, who by his lively and vocal documents may instruct thee in the arts and sciences. I intend, and will have it so, that thou learn the languages perfectly; first of all the Greek, as Quintilian will have it; secondly, the Latin; and then the Hebrew, for the Holy Scripture sake; and then the Chaldee and Arabic likewise, and that thou frame thy style in Greek in imitation of Plato, and for the Latin after Cicero. Let there be no history which thou shalt not have ready in thy memory; unto the prosecuting of which design, books of cosmography will be very conducible and help thee much. Of the liberal arts of geometry, arithmetic, and music, I gave thee some taste when thou wert yet little, and not above five or six years old. Proceed further in them, and learn the remainder if thou canst. As for astronomy, study all the rules thereof. Let pass, nevertheless, the divining and judicial astrology, and the art of Lullius, as being nothing else but plain abuses and vanities. As for the civil law, of that I would have thee to know the texts by heart, and then to confer them with philosophy. Now, in matter of the knowledge of the works of nature, I would have thee to study that exactly, and that so there be no sea, river, nor fountain, of which thou dost not know the fishes; all the fowls of the air; all the several kinds of shrubs and trees, whether in forests or orchards; all the sorts of herbs and flowers that grow upon the ground; all the various metals that are hid within the bowels of the earth; together with all the diversity of precious stones that are to be seen in the orient and south parts of the world. Let nothing of all these be hidden from thee. Then fail not most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian, and Latin physicians, not despising the Talmudists and Cabalists; and by frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of the other world, called the microcosm, which is man. And at some hours of the day apply thy mind to the study of the Holy Scriptures; first in Greek, the New Testament, with the Epistles of the Apostles; and then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In brief, let me see thee an abyss and bottomless pit of knowledge; for from henceforward, as thou growest great and becomest a man, thou must part from this tranquillity and rest of study, thou must learn chivalry, warfare, and the exercises of the field, the better thereby to defend my house and our friends, and to succour and protect them at all their needs against the invasion and assaults of evildoers. Furthermore, I will that very shortly thou try how much thou hast profited, which thou canst not better do than by maintaining publicly theses and conclusions in all arts against all persons whatsoever, and by haunting the company of learned men, both at Paris and otherwhere. But because, as the wise man Solomon saith, Wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and that knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul, it behoveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and by faith formed in charity to cleave unto him, so that thou mayst never be separated from him by thy sins. Suspect the abuses of the world. Set not thy heart upon vanity, for this life is transitory, but the Word of the Lord endureth for ever. Be serviceable to all thy neighbours, and love them as thyself. Reverence thy preceptors: shun the conversation of those whom thou desirest not to resemble, and receive not in vain the graces which God hath bestowed upon thee. And, when thou shalt see that thou hast attained to all the knowledge that is to be acquired in that part, return unto me, that I may see thee and give thee my blessing before I die. My son, the peace and grace of our Lord be with thee. Amen. Thy father Gargantua. From Utopia the 17th day of the month of March.

These letters being received and read, Pantagruel plucked up his heart, took a fresh courage to him, and was inflamed with a desire to profit in his studies more than ever, so that if you had seen him, how he took pains, and how he advanced in learning, you would have said that the vivacity of his spirit amidst the books was like a great fire amongst dry wood, so active it was, vigorous and indefatigable.

Chapter 2.IX.—How Pantagruel found Panurge, whom he loved all his lifetime.

One day, as Pantagruel was taking a walk without the city, towards St. Anthony’s abbey, discoursing and philosophating with his own servants and some other scholars, (he) met with a young man of very comely stature and surpassing handsome in all the lineaments of his body, but in several parts thereof most pitifully wounded; in such bad equipage in matter of his apparel, which was but tatters and rags, and every way so far out of order that he seemed to have been a-fighting with mastiff-dogs, from whose fury he had made an escape; or to say better, he looked, in the condition wherein he then was, like an apple-gatherer of the country of Perche.

As far off as Pantagruel saw him, he said to those that stood by, “Do you see that man there, who is a-coming hither upon the road from Charenton bridge? By my faith, he is only poor in fortune; for I may assure you that by his physiognomy it appeareth that nature hath extracted him from some rich and noble race, and that too much curiosity hath thrown him upon adventures which possibly have reduced him to this indigence, want, and penury.”

Now as he [the man] was just amongst them, Pantagruel said unto him, “Let me entreat you, friend, that you may be pleased to stop here a little and answer me to that which I shall ask you, and I am confident you will not think your time ill bestowed; for I have an extreme desire, according to my ability, to give you some supply in this distress wherein I see you are; because I do very much commiserate your case, which truly moves me to great pity. Therefore, my friend, tell me who you are; whence you come; whither you go; what you desire; and what your name is.”

The companion answered him in the German (The first edition reads “Dutch.”) tongue, thus:

“Junker, Gott geb euch gluck und heil. Furwahr, lieber Junker, ich lasz euch wissen, das da ihr mich von fragt, ist ein arm und erbarmlich Ding, und wer viel darvon zu sagen, welches euch verdrussig zu horen, und mir zu erzelen wer, wiewol die Poeten und Oratorn vorzeiten haben gesagt in ihren Spruchen und Sentenzen, dasz die gedechtniss des Elends und Armuth vorlangst erlitten ist eine grosse Lust.”

“My friend,” said Pantagruel, “I have no skill in that gibberish of yours; therefore, if you would have us to understand you, speak to us in some other language.”

Then did the droll answer him thus:

“Albarildim gotfano dechmin brin alabo dordio falbroth ringuam albaras. Nin portzadikin almucatin milko prin alelmin en thoth dalheben ensouim; kuthim al dum alkatim nim broth dechoth porth min michais im endoth, pruch dalmaisoulum hol moth danfrihim lupaldas in voldemoth. Nin hur diavosth mnarbotim dalgousch palfrapin duch im scoth pruch galeth dal chinon, min foulchrich al conin brutathen doth dal prin.”

“Do you understand none of this?” said Pantagruel to the company.

“I believe,” said Epistemon, “that this is the language of the Antipodes, and such a hard one that the devil himself knows not what to make of it.”

Then said Pantagruel, “Gossip, I know not if the walls do comprehend the meaning of your words, but none of us here doth so much as understand one syllable of them.”

Then said my blade again:

“Signor mio, voi vedete per essempio, che la cornamusa non suona mai, s’ella non ha il ventre pieno. Cosi io parimente non vi saprei contare le mie fortune, se prima il tribulato ventre non ha la solita refettione. Al quale e adviso che le mani et li denti habbiano perso il loro ordine naturale et del tutto annichilati.”

To which Epistemon answered, “As much of the one as of the other, and nothing of either.”

Then said Panurge [the man]:

“Lord, if you be so virtuous of intelligence as you be naturally relieved to the body, you should have pity of me. For nature hath made us equal, but fortune hath some exalted and others deprived; nevertheless is virtue often deprived and the virtuous men despised; for before the last end none is good.”

“Yet less,” said Pantagruel. Then said my jolly Panurge:

“Heere, ik en spreeke anders geen taele dan kersten taele: my dunkt noghtans, al en seg ik u niet een wordt, mynen noot verklaert genoegh wat ik begeere: geeft my uyt bermhertigheit yets waar van ik gevoet magh zyn.”

To which answered Pantagruel, “As much of that.” Then said Panurge:

“Sennor, de tanto hablar yo soy cansado, porque yo suplico a vuestra reverentia que mire a los preceptos evangelicos, para que ellos movan vuestra reverentia a lo que es de conscientia; y si ellos non bastaren, para mouer vuestra reverentia a piedad, yo suplico que mire a la piedad natural, la qual yo creo que le movera como es de razon: y con esso non digo mas.”

“Truly, my friend,” said Pantagruel, “I doubt not but you can speak diverse languages; but tell us that which you would have us to do for you in some tongue which you conceive we may understand.” Then said the companion:

“Min Herre, endog ieg med ingen tunge talede, ligesom baern, oc uskellige creatuure: Mine klaedebon oc mit legoms magerhed uduiser alligeuel klarlig huad ting mig best behof gioris, som er sandelig mad oc dricke: Huorfor forbarme dig ofuer mig, oc befal at giue mig noguet, af huilcket ieg kand slyre min giaeendis mage, ligeruiis som mand Cerbero en suppe forsetter: Saa skalt du lefue laenge oc lycksalig.”

“I think really,” said Eusthenes, “that the Goths spoke thus of old, and that, if it pleased God, we would all of us speak so with our tails.” Then again said Panurge:

“Adon, scalom lecha: im ischar harob hal hebdeca bimeherah thithen li kikar lehem: chanchat ub laah al Adonai cho nen ral.”

To which answered Epistemon, “At this time have I understood him very well; for it is the Hebrew tongue most rhetorically pronounced.”

Then again said the gallant:

“Despota tinyn panagathe, diati sy mi ouk artodotis? horas gar limo analiscomenon eme athlion, ke en to metaxy me ouk eleis oudamos, zetis de par emou ha ou chre. Ke homos philologi pantes homologousi tote logous te ke remata peritta hyparchin, hopote pragma afto pasi delon esti. Entha gar anankei monon logi isin, hina pragmata (hon peri amphisbetoumen), me prosphoros epiphenete.”

“What?” said Carpalim, Pantagruel’s footman. “It is Greek, I have understood him. And how? hast thou dwelt any while in Greece?”

Then said the droll again:

“Agonou dont oussys vous desdagnez algorou: nou den farou zamist vous mariston ulbrou, fousques voubrol tant bredaguez moupreton dengoulhoust, daguez daguez non cropys fost pardonnoflist nougrou. Agou paston tol nalprissys hourtou los echatonous, prou dhouquys brol pany gou den bascrou noudous caguons goulfren goul oustaroppassou.”

“Methinks I understand him,” said Pantagruel; “for either it is the language of my country of Utopia, or sounds very like it.”

And, as he was about to have begun some purpose, the companion said:

“Jam toties vos per sacra, perque deos deasque omnes obtestatus sum, ut si quae vos pietas permovet, egestatem meam solaremini, nec hilum proficio clamans et ejulans. Sinite, quaeso, sinite, viri impii, quo me fata vocant abire; nec ultra vanis vestris interpellationibus obtundatis, memores veteris illius adagii, quo venter famelicus auriculis carere dicitur.”

“Well, my friend,” said Pantagruel, “but cannot you speak French?”

“That I can do, sir, very well,” said the companion, “God be thanked. It is my natural language and mother tongue, for I was born and bred in my younger years in the garden of France, to wit, Touraine.”

“Then,” said Pantagruel, “tell us what is your name, and from whence you are come; for, by my faith, I have already stamped in my mind such a deep impression of love towards you, that, if you will condescend unto my will, you shall not depart out of my company, and you and I shall make up another couple of friends such as Aeneas and Achates were.”

“Sir,” said the companion, “my true and proper Christian name is Panurge, and now I come out of Turkey, to which country I was carried away prisoner at that time when they went to Metelin with a mischief. And willingly would I relate unto you my fortunes, which are more wonderful than those of Ulysses were; but, seeing that it pleaseth you to retain me with you, I most heartily accept of the offer, protesting never to leave you should you go to all the devils in hell. We shall have therefore more leisure at another time, and a fitter opportunity wherein to report them; for at this present I am in a very urgent necessity to feed; my teeth are sharp, my belly empty, my throat dry, and my stomach fierce and burning, all is ready. If you will but set me to work, it will be as good as a balsamum for sore eyes to see me gulch and raven it. For God’s sake, give order for it.”

Then Pantagruel commanded that they should carry him home and provide him good store of victuals; which being done, he ate very well that evening, and, capon-like, went early to bed; then slept until dinner-time the next day, so that he made but three steps and one leap from the bed to the board.

Chapter 4.LV.—How Pantagruel, being at sea, heard various unfrozen words.

When we were at sea, junketting, tippling, discoursing, and telling stories, Pantagruel rose and stood up to look out; then asked us, “Do you hear nothing, gentlemen? Methinks I hear some people talking in the air, yet I can see nobody. Hark!”

According to his command we listened, and with full ears sucked in the air as some of you suck oysters, to find if we could hear some sound scattered through the sky; and to lose none of it, like the Emperor Antoninus some of us laid their hands hollow next to their ears; but all this would not do, nor could we hear any voice. Yet Pantagruel continued to assure us he heard various voices in the air, some of men, and some of women.

At last we began to fancy that we also heard something, or at least that our ears tingled; and the more we listened, the plainer we discerned the voices, so as to distinguish articulate sounds. This mightily frightened us, and not without cause; since we could see nothing, yet heard such various sounds and voices of men, women, children, horses, &c., insomuch that Panurge cried out, “Cods-belly, there is no fooling with the devil; we are all beshit, let’s fly. There is some ambuscado hereabouts. Friar John, art thou here my love? I pray thee, stay by me, old boy. Hast thou got thy swindging tool? See that it do not stick in thy scabbard; thou never scourest it half as it should be. We are undone. Hark! They are guns, gad judge me. Let’s fly, I do not say with hands and feet, as Brutus said at the battle of Pharsalia; I say, with sails and oars. Let’s whip it away. I never find myself to have a bit of courage at sea; in cellars and elsewhere I have more than enough. Let’s fly and save our bacon. I do not say this for any fear that I have; for I dread nothing but danger, that I don’t; I always say it that shouldn’t. The free archer of Baignolet said as much. Let us hazard nothing, therefore, I say, lest we come off bluely. Tack about, helm a-lee, thou son of a bachelor. Would I were now well in Quinquenais, though I were never to marry. Haste away, let’s make all the sail we can. They’ll be too hard for us; we are not able to cope with them; they are ten to our one, I’ll warrant you. Nay, and they are on their dunghill, while we do not know the country. They will be the death of us. We’ll lose no honour by flying. Demosthenes saith that the man that runs away may fight another day. At least let us retreat to the leeward. Helm a-lee; bring the main-tack aboard, haul the bowlines, hoist the top-gallants. We are all dead men; get off, in the devil’s name, get off.”

Pantagruel, hearing the sad outcry which Panurge made, said, “Who talks of flying? Let’s first see who they are; perhaps they may be friends. I can discover nobody yet, though I can see a hundred miles round me. But let’s consider a little. I have read that a philosopher named Petron was of opinion that there were several worlds that touched each other in an equilateral triangle; in whose centre, he said, was the dwelling of truth; and that the words, ideas, copies, and images of all things past and to come resided there; round which was the age; and that with success of time part of them used to fall on mankind like rheums and mildews, just as the dew fell on Gideon’s fleece, till the age was fulfilled.”

“I also remember,” continued he, “that Aristotle affirms Homer’s words to be flying, moving, and consequently animated. Besides, Antiphanes said that Plato’s philosophy was like words which, being spoken in some country during a hard winter, are immediately congealed, frozen up, and not heard; for what Plato taught young lads could hardly be understood by them when they were grown old. Now,” continued he, “we should philosophize and search whether this be not the place where those words are thawed.”

You would wonder very much should this be the head and lyre of Orpheus. When the Thracian women had torn him to pieces they threw his head and lyre into the river Hebrus, down which they floated to the Euxine sea as far as the island of Lesbos; the head continually uttering a doleful song, as it were lamenting the death of Orpheus, and the lyre, with the wind’s impulse moving its strings and harmoniously accompanying the voice. Let’s see if we cannot discover them hereabouts.

Chapter 4.LVI.—How among the frozen words Pantagruel found some odd ones.

The skipper made answer: “Be not afraid, my lord; we are on the confines of the Frozen Sea, on which, about the beginning of last winter, happened a great and bloody fight between the Arimaspians and the Nephelibates. Then the words and cries of men and women, the hacking, slashing, and hewing of battle-axes, the shocking, knocking, and jolting of armours and harnesses, the neighing of horses, and all other martial din and noise, froze in the air; and now, the rigour of the winter being over, by the succeeding serenity and warmth of the weather they melt and are heard.”

“By jingo,” quoth Panurge, “the man talks somewhat like. I believe him. But couldn’t we see some of ’em? I think I have read that, on the edge of the mountain on which Moses received the Judaic law, the people saw the voices sensibly.”

“Here, here,” said Pantagruel, “here are some that are not yet thawed.”

He then threw us on the deck whole handfuls of frozen words, which seemed to us like your rough sugar-plums, of many colours, like those used in heraldry; some words gules (this means also jests and merry sayings), some vert, some azure, some black, some or (this means also fair words); and when we had somewhat warmed them between our hands, they melted like snow, and we really heard them, but could not understand them, for it was a barbarous gibberish. One of them only, that was pretty big, having been warmed between Friar John’s hands, gave a sound much like that of chestnuts when they are thrown into the fire without being first cut, which made us all start.

“This was the report of a field-piece in its time,” cried Friar John.

Panurge prayed Pantagruel to give him some more; but Pantagruel told him that to give words was the part of a lover.

“Sell me some then, I pray you,” cried Panurge.

“That’s the part of a lawyer,” returned Pantagruel. “I would sooner sell you silence, though at a dearer rate; as Demosthenes formerly sold it by the means of his argentangina, or silver squinsy.”

However, he threw three or four handfuls of them on the deck; among which I perceived some very sharp words, and some bloody words, which the pilot said used sometimes to go back and recoil to the place whence they came, but it was with a slit weasand. We also saw some terrible words, and some others not very pleasant to the eye.

When they had been all melted together, we heard a strange noise, hin, hin, hin, hin, his, tick, tock, taack, bredelinbrededack, frr, frr, frr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, track, track, trr, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrrr, on, on, on, on, on, on, ououououon, gog, magog, and I do not know what other barbarous words, which the pilot said were the noise made by the charging squadrons, the shock and neighing of horses.

Then we heard some large ones go off like drums and fifes, and others like clarions and trumpets. Believe me, we had very good sport with them. I would fain have saved some merry odd words, and have preserved them in oil, as ice and snow are kept, and between clean straw. But Pantagruel would not let me, saying that ’tis a folly to hoard up what we are never like to want or have always at hand, odd, quaint, merry, and fat words of gules never being scarce among all good and jovial Pantagruelists.

Panurge somewhat vexed Friar John, and put him in the pouts; for he took him at his word while he dreamed of nothing less. This caused the friar to threaten him with such a piece of revenge as was put upon G. Jousseaume, who having taken the merry Patelin at his word when he had overbid himself in some cloth, was afterwards fairly taken by the horns like a bullock by his jovial chapman, whom he took at his word like a man. Panurge, well knowing that threatened folks live long, bobbed and made mouths at him in token of derision, then cried, “Would I had here the word of the Holy Bottle, without being thus obliged to go further in pilgrimage to her.”

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book I , Book II , and Book I V is produced by Project Gutenberg and released under a public domain license.

Introduction to World Literature Anthology Copyright © 2021 by Farrah Cato is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Introduction à la Dissertation sur Gargantua : Un Guide Complet

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=== La dissertation sur un sujet littéraire nécessite une compréhension approfondie de l’œuvre et une analyse claire de ses thèmes et de son style. Parmi les œuvres littéraires les plus étudiées figure ‘Gargantua’, écrit par François Rabelais, un écrivain français de la Renaissance. Cet article sert de guide détaillé pour comprendre le contexte de ‘Gargantua’ et propose des techniques de rédaction pour la dissertation sur cette œuvre.

Chapitre 1: Comprendre le contexte de ‘Gargantua’

‘Gargantua’ est l’une des œuvres les plus célèbres de François Rabelais, qui appartient à un ensemble de romans comiques connus sous le nom de ‘La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel’. Écrit pendant la Renaissance, le roman est un récit satirique et humoristique qui critique les institutions et les idées de l’époque, notamment l’Église et l’éducation. Le personnage principal, Gargantua, est un géant dont les exploits et les aventures sont racontés tout au long de l’œuvre.

Dans le contexte de la Renaissance, ‘Gargantua’ se distingue par sa critique de l’orthodoxie et son appel à la liberté d’expression et à la pensée critique. Rabelais utilise le personnage de Gargantua pour parodier et satiriser les coutumes et les idées de son époque, notamment les excès de l’église et de l’éducation. Pour comprendre ‘Gargantua’, il est essentiel de comprendre la satire de Rabelais et son utilisation du rire comme moyen d’exposer les absurdités de son temps.

Rabelais utilise également l’œuvre pour explorer des thèmes philosophiques et existentiels, tels que la nature humaine et le sens de la vie. Gargantua est présenté comme une figure complexe, à la fois héros et anti-héros, qui incarne les contradictions et les tensions de la condition humaine. Les exploits de Gargantua servent de miroir pour examiner les vices et les vertus de l’homme, et le roman est une méditation sur la nature du bien et du mal, de la liberté et de la servitude.

Chapitre 2: Techniques de rédaction pour la dissertation sur ‘Gargantua’

La rédaction d’une dissertation sur ‘Gargantua’ implique une analyse détaillée du roman et une interprétation de ses thèmes et de son style. Le premier pas vers une bonne dissertation est la lecture attentive de l’œuvre. Il faut accorder une attention particulière à la structure du roman, à la caractérisation de Gargantua, aux thèmes principaux, au style de Rabelais et aux éléments satiriques et humoristiques. Il est également utile de prendre des notes détaillées pour faciliter l’analyse.

Deuxième étape, l’organisation des idées. Un plan clair peut aider

Enfin, la rédaction de la dissertation nécessite une attention particulière au style et à la grammaire. Il est essentiel d’écrire de manière claire et précise, d’éviter les généralisations et les clichés, et d’employer un vocabulaire approprié. Il est également important de relire le texte pour corriger les erreurs et améliorer la fluidité du texte. Une bonne dissertation sur ‘Gargantua’ doit être à la fois analytique et critique, et démontrer une compréhension profonde de l’œuvre.

=== La dissertation sur ‘Gargantua’ offre une occasion de se plonger dans l’univers satirique et philosophique de François Rabelais. Comprendre le contexte de l’œuvre et appliquer des techniques de rédaction efficaces sont des étapes cruciales pour réussir une analyse littéraire approfondie de ce roman. En fin de compte, la clé est de chercher à comprendre non seulement l’œuvre elle-même, mais aussi l’époque et la société dans lesquelles elle a été écrite, révélant ainsi la richesse et la complexité de ‘Gargantua’.

Rabelais – Gargantua

A propos de l'auteur.

Gargantua est un roman publié par François Rabelais en 1534. Mais avant de nous intéresser à l’œuvre, concentrons-nous sur l’auteur…

Il publie l’œuvre sous un autre nom : Alcofribas Nasier (anagramme de François Rabelais). C’est un auteur de XVIe siècle, donc de la Renaissance : nous sommes en plein mouvement de l’humanisme.

L’enfance et l’adolescence de Rabelais sont très intéressantes.

En effet, il a eu une expérience en tant que moine : il a été novice chez les Franciscains. Cela veut dire qu’il a intégré le monastère sans prononcer les vœux. Cela a eu une grande influence sur ses écrits, comme nous allons le voir. D’autant plus qu’il éprouve un attachement particulier aux textes originels : il se méfie des traductions de la Bible, parce qu’il craint qu’elles ne soient faussées et trop éloignées des écrits originels.

On ne sait pas si Rabelais était athée, ou simplement chrétien en faveur des textes originels, d’où le rejet des traductions contemporaines. Ce qui est sûr, c’est que son approche de la religion telle qu’elle est pratiquée à son époque est très critique !

Rabelais est un savant, un érudit : il est passionné par la littérature et la culture antique (il est notamment un fervent lecteur d’Erasme, et commence le Prologue de Gargantua en faisant référence à Platon !). C’est aussi un grand scientifique, qui a accompli des études de médecine, ce qui se ressent à la lecture de ses ouvrages. 

Rabelais publie Gargantua en 1534. C’est son second roman : le premier est Pantagruel , ouvrage publié en 1532 narrant l’histoire du fils de Gargantua .

L’œuvre est d’abord interdite par la Sorbonne : on est dans une période religieuse de répression par les catholiques, qui vont voir en cet ouvrage une provocation, une critique de la religion.

Mais rapidement, on va arrêter la censure et classer le livre parmi les romans comiques, grotesques, et ne se concentrer que sur son aspect amusant et divertissant.

Ensuite, on va tenter de trouver des clefs de lecture en cherchant les personnes ayant pu inspirer les personnages inventés : on parvient à la conclusion que Gargantua est inspiré de François Ier, et Picrochole de Charles Quint, par exemple.

Enfin, ce n’est qu’au siècle dernier que l’on se décide à étudier l’aspect philosophique et didactique du roman !

Résumé de l'œuvre

Le Prologue annonce déjà le registre comique : « Buveurs très illustres » est une manière amusante de s’adresser aux lecteurs, comme s’ils étaient alcooliques, et que ce trait était valorisé par la formulation élogieuse « très illustres » ! Mais ce Prologue annonce aussi qu’il faut prendre en compte le caractère sérieux et didactique de l’œuvre. En effet, l’auteur insiste sur le fait qu’il y a un vrai message caché, à ne pas oublier : 

« Et en admettant que le sens littéral vous procure des matières assez joyeuses et correspondant bien au titre, il ne faut pourtant pas s’y arrêter, comme au chant des sirènes, mais interpréter à plus haut ce que hasard vous croyiez dit de gaieté de cœur. »

Le roman commence par décrire le personnage de Gargantua : sa naissance hors du commun (sa mère reste enceinte pendant 11 mois, il sort de son oreille pour venir au monde…)

Son éducation occupe une part importante du roman. En effet, 

• Il est d’abord éduqué par les sophistes qui en font un idiot. Il va simplement les écouter, apprendre par cœur ce qu’ils lui enseignent, sans réfléchir par lui-même. Les sophistes sont les prétendus scientifiques, les faux savants qui savent manier la langue et utilisent leur habileté langagière pour prouver tout et son contraire.
• Son père va s’affliger de voir son fils devenir de plus en plus idiot. Il va alors confier son éducation à Ponocrates, un humaniste, qui va en faire un érudit, lui apprenant à penser par lui-même, et lui apprenant à maîtriser aussi bien les disciplines intellectuelles, que manuelles et physiques, afin de lui donner une éducation complète.

Juste avant de rencontrer Ponocrates dont il sera l’élève, Gargantua fera un voyage à Paris, durant lequel il sera en décalage avec les habitants qui le prennent pour un divertissement et un objet de curiosité. Il montera d’ailleurs sur les toits pour leur uriner dessus afin de se défendre, ce qui les noiera.

S’ensuivent ensuite les guerres picrocholines : Picrochole va provoquer le père de Gargantua, Grandgousier, jusqu’à l’affrontement. Ce dernier voulait éviter la guerre, mais suite à un incident (les boulangers de Picrochole ne veulent pas vendre de brioches au royaume de Gargantua), le conflit éclate. La troupe de Gargantua remporte la victoire.

Gargantua construira l’abbaye de Thélème, lieu idyllique et utopique dont la seule règle est « fais ce que voudras ». Ce lieu va prôner les valeurs humanistes.

Thèmes abordés

L’éducation : à travers l’opposition entre les sophistes/la scolastique et les humanistes.

• les sophistes sont des hommes capables de très bien parler, et de prouver tout et son contraire. Ils font donc un très mauvais usage de la parole. Ils considèrent la science comme un exercice d’argumentation, ce qui en fait des faux savants. Ils sont très critiqués par Rabelais. Ce dernier en fait des représentants de la scolastique, éducation prônée au Moyen-âge, qu’il critique également puisqu’elle consiste à recourir aux arguments d’autorité, à faire apprendre par cœur, sans permettre la réflexion personnelle.

Texte complémentaire : Voltaire, Candide, extrait du chapitre 1. 

« Pangloss enseignait la métaphysico-théologo-cosmolo-nigologie. Il prouvait admirablement qu’il n’y a point d’effet sans cause, et que, dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles, le château de monseigneur le baron était le plus beau des châteaux, et madame la meilleure des baronnes possibles. « Il est démontré, disait-il, que les choses ne peuvent être autrement : car tout étant fait pour une fin, tout est nécessairement pour la meilleure fin. Remarquez bien que les nez ont été faits pour porter des lunettes, aussi avons-nous des lunettes. Les jambes sont visiblement instituées pour être chaussées, aussi avons-nous des chausses […] »

Dans ce texte, Voltaire fait preuve de beaucoup d’ironie vis-à-vis de Pangloss, un faux savant. Cela se voit à travers la discipline qu’il enseigne : « nigologie » est un mot inventé venant du terme « nigaud » (= imbécile). L’ironie se retrouve aussi dans l’adverbe « admirablement » et dans le vocabulaire argumentatif (« il est démontré », « il prouvait », « nécessairement », « remarquez bien »…), puisque sa démarche est faussement scientifique, il inverse le processus de cause à effet : par exemple, en avançant que les nez sont faits pour porter des lunettes, comme si l’objet lunettes existait avant les nez et que cette partie du corps avait été créée pour cet instrument ! Voltaire vient ici critiquer les sophistes, aux prétendus raisonnements scientifiques, mais qui, en réalité, rendent plus idiots ceux qui les écoutent.

• Grandgousier, le père de Gargantua, est très mécontent : à cause des sophistes, son fils a une intelligence très limitée. Il choisit alors Ponocrates comme nouvel enseignant, et cet homme sera important puisqu’il va incarner les valeurs humanistes (l’importance du savoir, de penser par soi-même, de s’éduquer dans des disciplines aussi bien intellectuelles que physiques et manuelles…). Gargantua deviendra un érudit suite à cette éducation, signe que le modèle humaniste est valorisé par Rabelais, qui en fait un idéal.

Le corps : on parle du bas corporel, des parties du corps les moins nobles, mais aussi des pratiques les plus triviales : uriner, déféquer, accoucher… Rabelais se sert de ses connaissances en médecine pour approfondir les notions d’anatomie et du fonctionnement du corps humain dans ce roman. La dimension triviale, grotesque, voire vulgaire, est donc assortie d’une intention didactique, d’une transmission du savoir.

L’humanisme valorisé : ce modèle de pensée est mis en valeur par Rabelais, et cela se voit notamment dans l’opposition éducation des sophistes – éducation par Ponocrates. Mais on peut aussi retrouver cet éloge à d’autres passages : par exemple, l’abbaye de Thélème est un lieu considéré comme parfait, utopique, puisque hommes et femmes sont égaux, pratiquent les mêmes activités, et qu’ils se gouvernent d’après le principe « Fais ce que voudras », règle contradictoire puisque la seule obligation consiste justement à ce qu’il n’y en ait pas et que chacun vive comme il le souhaite.

Remise en question de la religion : est-ce par athéisme ou par attachement aux textes originels, contre les textes traduits ? On ne sait pas. En tout cas, les travers religieux sont dénoncés par Rabelais : par exemple, l’abbaye de Thélème ne respecte pas les voeux de pauvreté/chasteté/obéissance, puisque les Thélémites sont riches, sortent de l’abbaye pour se marier, et qu’ils n’ont pas de règles à respecter. Or c’est le comble, puisqu’on se trouve justement dans un lieu religieux ! De plus, frère Jean est un moine, pourtant il fait preuve d’une extrême violence dans les combats (on repère un vocabulaire extrêmement cruel, le champ lexical du massacre…), et il entre en conflit au nom du vin et des vignes…

La guerre : pour Rabelais, la guerre est absurde et injustifiable. Le seul moment où elle est tolérable, c’est lorsqu’il s’agit d’une guerre défensive : Grandgousier n’avait pas d’autre choix que de mener ce combat, puisque les discussions pacifiques avec Picrochole n’ont pas abouti. Ces évènements sont directement inspirés par la situation contemporaine : François Ier et Charles Quint s’affrontent.

Rire et savoir

Le parcours « rire et savoir » implique que l’on étudie la dimension comique mêlée à la dimension didactique.

Pour Rabelais, le rire est très important : il écrira que « le rire est le propre de l’homme ». Il veut faire de son oeuvre une oeuvre de divertissement, une distraction face aux réalités tristes. Le rire ici est exacerbé, parce que le comique est présenté sous toutes ses formes : satire, ironie, scatologie, vulgaire, grotesque…

Apporter un savoir se fait aussi par le rire. En effet, l’auteur va employer un vocabulaire très spécialisé, très scientifique, technique, médical : il mélange le rire et le savoir. Par exemple, la scène du torche-cul est particulièrement intéressante à ce niveau, puisque Rabelais va montrer ses connaissances très développées en anatomie humaine, ainsi que ses raisonnements scientifiques prônant l’expérience, à partir d’une approche triviale et vulgaire. 

Transmettre le savoir par le rire est une pratique originale et nouvelle pour l’époque : cela marque le renouveau de la période, la sortie de la scolastique austère et l’entrée dans l’humanisme, modèle de pensée revalorisant l’homme.

Dissertations type bac corrigées

Le rire excessif dans Gargantua est-il nécessaire à l’idéal philosophique ?

Gargantua a-t-il quelque chose à voir avec la réalité ?

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Gargantua, Rabelais : analyse et résumé de l’œuvre

• Ariane Thévenet
• 11 Oct 2023

À lire dans cet article :

Bac français 2024. Dans cet article, nous te proposons un résumé et une analyse de l’œuvre emblématique de François Rabelais, Gargantua , au programme du bac de français 2024.

Célèbre pour avoir donné naissance à l’adjectif « gargantuesque », qui qualifie quelque chose de démesuré, le roman de François Rabelais, Gargantua , est une œuvre unique par bien des aspects. Humour, satire sociale, politique, etc. Autant de caractéristiques qui font de Gargantua  un classique à lire absolument !

Pour optimiser tes révisions, nous te recommandons également de jeter un œil à la vidéo ci-dessous.

Pour rappel : l’épreuve écrite du bac de français aura lieu le 14 juin 2024. L’oral de français, quant à lui, se déroulera quant à lui entre la fin du mois de juin et le début du mois de juillet prochain.

Qui a écrit Gargantua ?

Gargantua est le deuxième ouvrage de François Rabelais, qui propose au lecteur de suivre l’ éducation du personnage éponyme (se dit d’un ouvrage qui prend le nom de son personnage principal), ses aventures et son développement. Gargantua , publié pour la première fois en 1535, raconte ainsi l’histoire du père de Pantagruel, en décrivant la naissance extraordinaire du géant, sorti par l’oreille gauche de sa mère après onze mois de grossesse. Il s’agit du deuxième livre de la série que Rabelais a écrite «  La vie très horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel » , après Pantagruel, publié en 1532.

Rabelais a publié Gargantua sous le même pseudonyme que Pantagruel  : Alcofribas Nasier ( anagramme de François Rabelais), « abstracteur de quinte essence ».

François Rabelais (1494-1553) est un des auteurs majeurs de la littérature d’idées et de l’humanisme du XVIe siècle. Rabelais avant d’être écrivaine est d’abord moine. Il fréquente des écrivains et humanistes qui incarnent ce courant de pensée apparu à la Renaissance . Sa principale caractéristique ? Il fait la synthèse de l’héritage gréco-romain et chrétien en insistant sur les capacités intellectuelles humaines et non plus sur l’observation du monde compris comme création divine. En effet, cette époque se traduit par la redécouverte de la culture antique, notamment par le biais de l’imprimerie qui permet de diffuser plus facilement des textes.

Rabelais commence des études de médecine à l’université de Montpellier. Vieille de 800 ans, elle est déjà très renommée à l’époque où Rabelais la fréquente, en 1530. Il est nommé médecin à Lyon deux ans après, avant de suivre l’évêque de Paris, Jean du Bellay (grand-oncle du poète Joachim du Bellay) auprès du pape à Rome. C’est à cette époque qu’il entame la rédaction de son autre œuvre phare,  Pantagruel,  avant de se lancer dans la rédaction de Gargantua. 

Lire aussi : La liste des œuvres au programme du baccalauréat de français 2023

Les personnages dans Gargantua

Avant de rentrer dans le vif du sujet, un petit tour d’horizon des personnages principaux de Gargantua s’impose ! Nous avons donc listé ci-dessous les personnages récurrents du roman, histoire de ne pas être trop perdu(e) pour le reste de ta lecture et tes révisions.

• Gargantua : le personnage principal du roman, Gargantua est un géant incroyablement grand et fort, fils de Grandgousier et de Gargamelle. Il est éduqué par Ponocrates et devient un sage et un chef juste.
• Grandgousier : le père de Gargantua, Grandgousier est un seigneur de la région de Touraine. Il est connu pour sa générosité, sa bonté et sa sagesse
• Gargamelle : la mère de Gargantua, Gargamelle est une femme très grande qui meurt en accouchant de son fils notamment à cause de sa taille.
• Pantagruel : le fils de Gargantua, Pantagruel est également un géant. Il est éduqué par son père et devient un héros et un leader militaire.
• Panurge : l’un des amis les plus proches de Pantagruel, Panurge est un personnage comique et rusé qui est souvent impliqué dans des intrigues et des aventures loufoques.
• Frère Jean des Entommeures : un moine franciscain, Frère Jean est connu pour son appétit insatiable et sa force physique incroyable.
• Epistémon : l’un des conseillers de Gargantua, Epistémon est un sage et un philosophe.
• Ponocrates : l’éducateur de Gargantua, Ponocrates est un humaniste qui enseigne à Gargantua les arts et les sciences.
• Hélène de Tournon : la femme de Pantagruel, Hélène est une belle et vertueuse dame.
• Xenomanes : un voyageur grec, Xenomanes est un personnage comique qui raconte des histoires étranges et exotiques.
• King Anarchus : un roi tyrannique, Anarchus est un ennemi de Pantagruel qui est finalement vaincu par le héros géant.

À savoir : Rabelais a réalisé un grand travail autour des noms pour son roman (ce qu’on appelle l’onomastique ). Ils n’ont pas été choisis au hasard ! Chacun a sa petite signification, bien souvent comique. Notons par exemple celui de Grandgousier, qui évoque un Grand Gosier, soit l’appétit de la vie au sens large, du personnage.

Le résumé de Gargantua

Le livre suit les aventures du géant Gargantua, de son fils Pantagruel et de leurs amis alors qu’ils naviguent à travers un monde fantastique rempli d’humour , de satire et de critique sociale .

Le livre commence par le récit de la naissance de Gargantua, fils du seigneur Grandgousier et de sa femme Gargamelle. Il naît dans des conditions exceptionnelles puisqu’ il sort de l’oreille de sa mère , après neuf mois de grossesse. Gargantua vient au monde en réclamant à boire, ce qui lui vaut son prénom (quel (gosier) grand tu as).

Gargantua est un géant qui grandit rapidement et développe une grande soif de connaissances . Il est confié à l’éducateur humaniste Ponocrates, qui lui enseigne les arts et les sciences.

Après avoir terminé son éducation, Gargantua retourne chez son père et règne sur le pays avec sagesse et justice. Cependant, il est bientôt impliqué dans des guerres avec les ennemis de son père et est capturé par les ennemis de son pays.

Gargantua parvient à s’échapper et rencontre son fils, Pantagruel, qui est également un géant. Ensemble, ils naviguent à travers des mers dangereuses, combattent des ennemis féroces et rencontrent des personnages étranges et comiques.

Au cours de leurs aventures, ils rencontrent des philosophes, des moines, des voyageurs, des rois tyranniques et des gens ordinaires qui ont tous quelque chose à dire sur la vie, la mort, la religion, la politique et la société.

Le livre se termine par une série de conseils et de maximes sages qui résument les idées principales de l’auteur sur la nature humaine et la société.

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Quelles sont les caractéristiques de Gargantua ?

L’éducation de gargantua.

Le roman retrace trois étapes de la construction de Gargantua . Tout d’abord, celui-ci reçoit dans son enfance plusieurs formations qui ont pour objectif de l’éduquer, de l’élever. Cela commence par une éducation au sens physique du terme , c’est-à-dire l’apprentissage de la manière dont on se nourrit, dont on se vêt, etc. Puis ce dernier reçoit une instruction plus large , notamment pendant l’adolescence. Enfin, Gargantua suit une formation guerrière , qui le présente tout à la fois comme un prince défenseur et protecteur.

Le roman se développe en suivant un dynamisme ascensionnel : au début, les descriptions partent du bas (du vulgaire, du cru) pour s’élever progressivement jusqu’à l’affirmation du libre arbitre du personnage principal qui se matérialise par la phrase « fais ce que tu voudras » à la fin du livre.

Les jeux de mots

La première remarque que l’on peut émettre à propos de Gargantua , en lien avec la thématique du rire, est que Rabelais est aussi connu pour son goût pour la langue française . Il a ainsi inventé de nombreux mots qui permettent d’illustrer sa pensée, dont certains participent de l’humour rabelaisien .

Dans cette perspective, on peut évoquer une technique employée dans Gargantua  qui illustre cet appétit des mots : il s’agit de l’onomastique, qui se penche sur l’étude des noms propres. La construction des noms propres dans le roman est en effet essentielle, car elle constitue une étape capitale dans la construction du personnage, premier facteur d’identification grâce auquel le lecteur va pouvoir reconnaître le personnage.

La richesse littéraire de l’œuvre

Le roman de Rabelais est connu autant pour le fond que pour la forme.

En effet, Rabelais a écrit tout son roman dans un style très particulier. Écriture flamboyante, langage inventif, jeux de mots, néologismes, etc. La multiplication des procédés littéraires utilisés fait la caractéristique de l’œuvre. Rabelais fait également appel à différents genres littéraires : poésie, éloge, pamphlet, parodie ou encore dialogue philosophique.

Les procédés qui suscitent le rire

Dans cette perspective, tout lecteur aura remarqué que le texte de Rabelais est empreint de procédés divers qui déclenchent le rire. Ainsi, le prologue de cet ouvrage regorge d’illustrations de motifs qui entraînent le rire ; parmi eux, on peut noter le lexique ordurier , qui consiste à énoncer un grand nombre de mots vulgaires et scatologiques (qui ont rapport aux excréments). De la même manière, on peut évoquer le processus par lequel Rabelais ramène sans cesse l’homme à ses envies primaires et réduit le corps à ses fonctions physiologiques (manger, boire, dormir et se soulager).

Le thème de l’ivresse, de la boisson , du vin ainsi que les nombreuses images régressives et parodies font également partie des éléments qui invitent le lecteur à rire. En outre, les premiers mots que prononce Gargantua sont « À boire ! », ce qui ne manque pas de faire sourire le lecteur. Ces registres sont à mettre en relation avec toutes les formes d’excès qui sont mentionnées, souvent traduites par des hyperboles (figure de style qui consiste à exagérer, grossir les traits de quelque chose).

Par ailleurs, Rabelais entend se moquer de la scolastique , une école médiévale au service du religieux uniquement, en se moquant des discours dogmatiques prononcés par l’Église , interprétations souvent hasardeuses et bancales dont la vérité reste discutable. Il se moque ainsi des « glossateurs », ceux qui utilisent par exemple des expressions latines inventées qui ne veulent rien dire (comme dans le chapitre XIX). Il y caricature ainsi ceux qui proclament détenir le savoir, incarnés par Janotus, un faux savant .

Lire aussi : Alcools, Apollinaire : analyse de l’œuvre

La transmission du savoir par le rire : « Rire est le propre de l’homme »

Dans cette œuvre très imagée, Rabelais utilise le rire afin d’éduquer le lecteur . Les personnages du livre eux-mêmes sont joyeux : Grandgousier est décrit comme « bon raillard », c’est-à-dire grand rieur. L’auteur tourne en dérision les pseudo-savants, qui utilisent souvent leur savoir pour avoir de l’autorité et ainsi obtenir ce qu’ils veulent. Rabelais présente ici une éducation princière, mais qui vaut pour tout le monde, en proposant de bâtir une société vertueuse.

Rabelais tourne en dérision ses héros en les mettant dans des situations risibles (qui provoquent le rire) et burlesques par leur caractère comique . Dès lors, on peut évoquer dans le chapitre XXI le moment où il lui est demandé de faire du sport dans son lit, ce qui apparaît comme complètement contre-productif et inutile, ainsi que l’absence de réflexion à propos de l’adaptation des vêtements à la saison.

Néanmoins, un tournant s’opère au chapitre XXIII, dans lequel Gargantua prend progressivement connaissance de la notion de pudeur, d’une certaine hygiène de vie , avec la mise en place d’une diète et d’activités physiques qui contrebalancent la première partie du roman dans laquelle tous les excès semblaient être permis. Ce changement de cap peut se traduire par la locution grecque « meden agan  » qui signifie : « rien de trop », et valorise dès lors le sens de la mesure.

De plus, il occupe désormais son temps d’une façon rationalisée avec l’aménagement d’un emploi du temps dévolu à certaines activités de l’esprit notamment. Rabelais couche ici sur papier les principes issus des observations médicales de l’époque, qui associent la santé du corps à celle de l’esprit et dont il se réclame.

Quelle est la morale de Gargantua ?

On l’a dit, Rabelais utilise le rire pour faire passer des messages à ceux qui lisent le roman. Celui que l’on peut retenir avant tout est bien de chercher à comprendre le monde qui nous entoure , respecter certains principes afin que celui-ci ne verse pas dans le chaos. L’auteur mêle dans son écriture plusieurs registres de lecture , qui oscillent entre plaisant et sérieux.

À l’issue du chapitre XXI par exemple, le roi est représenté de façon burlesque transporté par une charrette à bœufs, afin de rappeler que les rois sont des organismes parasites qui ne sont au pouvoir que parce qu’ils sont nés et non parce qu’ils ont les compétences pour gouverner. Par cette image, Rabelais alerte le lecteur sur la nécessité de réformer à la fois l’éducation ainsi que le système politique.

Enfin, les nombreuses hyperboles, employées en particulier dans l’évocation de l’éducation, invitent le lecteur à réfléchir sur l’enseignement du vide, c’est-à-dire la présentation d’un inventaire de connaissances qui fait de la conception de l’éducation une mesure quantitative, une accumulation sans sens de savoirs. Cette idée est formulée par la formule « science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme » dans Pantagruel .

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La portée de Gargantua

En plus de son style littéraire unique, Rabelais a fait de Gargantua  une œuvre majeure, profondément critique de la société et du pouvoir politique du XVIe siècle. Le personnage de Gargantua est utilisé pour se moquer autant des travers de la noblesse, que ceux du clergé, de l’éducation non humaniste ou encore de la bêtise de la guerre. Excès, corruption, abus de pouvoir font face à la vision alternative et utopiste de la société que dresse Rabelais.

Par sa spécificité, cette œuvre a eu une influence durable sur la littérature occidentale. Que ce soit sur le fond, grâce à une satire sociale audacieuse, ou sur la forme, grâce à un mélange des genres littéraires surprenant, l’œuvre de Rabelais a inspiré de nombreux intellectuels et écrivains.

Roman audacieux à la fois humoristique et satirique, Gargantua met en avant l’aventure d’un personnage rocambolesque au service de la critique de l’époque. Il s’agit d’un plaidoyer pour le développement de la culture humaniste en réponse à l’enseignement religieux figé en vigueur.

Un quiz pour réviser Gargantua

Teste tes connaissances sur Gargantua .

Les œuvres au programme du bac de français 2024

Pour terminer cet article, laisse-nous te rafraîchir la mémoire sur les œuvres au programme du bac de français 2024. Cette année, comme les années précédentes, 12 œuvres seront étudiées :

• Les Fausses confidences , Marivaux ;
• Le Malade imaginaire , Molière ;
• Juste la fin du monde , Lagarce ;
• Gargantua , Rabelais ;
• Les Caractères , La Bruyère ;
• La déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne , Olympe de Gouges ;
• Manon Lescaut , Abbé Prévost ;
• La Peau de chagrin , Balzac ;
• Sido suivi des Vrilles de la vigne , Colette ;
• Mes forêts , Hélène Dorion ;
• La Rage de l’expression , Ponge ;
• Cahier de Douai , Rimbaud.

Bonne nouvelle pour toi, nous te proposons une fiche de lecture pour chacune des œuvres que nous venons de citer. De quoi te permettre d’avancer bien vite dans tes révisions. Alors, n’attends plus et consulte sans plus tarder notre site internet .

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Gargantua, Rabelais : résumé de l’œuvre

Quels sont les débouchés de sciences po , déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, olympe de gouges : résumé, service civique : les secrets d’une bonne lettre de motivation, la rage de l’expression, francis ponge : résumé de l’œuvre, quels sont les débouchés du bts ndrc , quels sont les débouchés du pass , les caractères, la bruyère : résumé de l’œuvre, grand oral : 40 questions et sujets pour la spécialité si, grand oral : 40 questions et sujets pour la spécialité arts.

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Figures de style : définition, exemples et listes

Gargantua de Rabelais | Fiche de lecture 📚

Tu es en première et tu étudies Rabelais ? Tu as besoin d’un éclairage simple sur cette œuvre riche du XVIè siècle ? Voici justement un récap intitulé : Gargantua fiche bac  ! Découvre les secrets de fabrication de ce roman, la présentation de ses personnages , le décryptage de ses grands thèmes et du parcours : « rire et savoir » .  🤩 🤩 🤩

SOMMAIRE CLIQUABLE

👉 Carte d’identité du roman

👉 Les personnages de Gargantua

👉 Les thèmes de Gargantua

👉 Rire et savoir, le parcours associé

👉 Citations de Gargantua

Gargantua fiche bac | Carte d'identité

Courte bio de rabelais.

💡 Naissance : 1483 ou 1494. 💡 Éducation religieuse : il entre dans l’ordre des Franciscains puis des Bénédictins (moines plus ouverts à la culture). Il se forme aux lettres classiques grecques et latines. 💡 Carrière de médecin : il quitte l’univers religieux, s’inscrit à l’université en 1530 et obtient son diplôme de médecin. 💡 Carrière d’écrivain : Rabelais écrit des ouvrages de médecine. Mais il est principalement connu p our avoir écrit cinq œuvres qui forment la série des aventures de Gargantua et de Pantagruel. 💡 Fin de vie : Rabelais décède à Paris en 1553. C’est un auteur qui symbolise l’esprit critique et la liberté d’expression.

Mouvement littéraire de Rabelais

Rabelais appartient au courant littéraire l’humanisme qui place l’homme au centre des réflexions. Ce mouvement né à la suite : ✨ de grandes explorations géographiques au XVè siècle ; ✨ de réformes religieuses qui remettent en question les pratiques de l’église catholique ; ✨ d’avancées scientifiques majeures ; ✨ de l’invention de l’imprimerie (diffusion des livres).

Publication de Gargantua

Publié  en 1534 sous le pseudonyme d’ Alcofribas Nasier (si tu remets les lettres de l’ordre, cela donne François Rabelais ). Gargantua est le second roman d’une série de 5 livres.

Genre littéraire de Gargantua

Gargantua est un roman .

Structure de Gargantua

 ✨ Ce récit est composé de 5 parties et de 58 chapitres. ✨ Il suit une succession chronologique de péripéties de la généalogie (son origine) + naissance de Gargantua jusqu’à l’édification de l’abbaye de Thélème. ✨ Certains épisodes rompent le rythme et perturbent la progression du récit. D’autres chapitres  se répondent ou s’opposent. 

Résumé court

💡 Il s’agit de l ‘histoire d’un géant du même nom, de sa naissance prodigieuse jusqu’à sa maturité. Le roman aborde son éducation, ses aventures, et surtout sa guerre contre Picrochole.

Révise les registres littéraires en un éclair ! ⚡️⚡️

Les personnages clés de Gargantua dévoilés

Le cercle familial.

✨ Qui est-il ? Un géant d’origine noble. En tant que fils d’un roi, il est prince, n é dans des circonstances extraordinaires (il sort de l’oreille de sa mère). ✨ Portrait moral : il est intelligent, curieux, sympathique et sage. À travers ce roman, il passe de l’ignorance à la connaissance et la sagesse. ✨ Ce que tu dois retenir : il représente l’humaniste idéal selon Rabelais : il est érudit / éduqué et bon.

✨ Qui est-elle ? La fille du roi des Parpaillons, la femme de Grandgousier et la mère de Gargantua.

Grandgousier

✨ Qui est-il ? C’est le roi d’un royaume fictif (inventé). ✨ Portrait moral : Grandgousier = grand gosier. Il est un bon vivant (= il aime les plaisirs et le bon vin). C’est également un roi indulgent, bienveillant, doté d’un esprit de justice. ✨ Ce que tu dois retenir : il représente le roi sage et raisonnable. Il considère que la guerre n’est pas toujours une solution et qu’elle peut être évitée. Il est tout l’opposé de Picrochole.

Les professeurs de Gargantua

Thubal holoferne.

✨ Qui est-il ? C’est le premier précepteur (= professeur) de Gargantua. ✨ Portrait moral : il use de pratiques dépassées, se montre rigide et demande à Gargantua d’apprendre par cœur des ouvrages entiers. ✨ Ce que tu dois retenir : il symbolise l’opposé de l’éducation humaniste. D’ailleurs, son nom signifie « confusion » en hébreu.

Jobelin Bridé

✨ Qui est-il ? Le second professeur de Gargantua. ✨ Ce que tu dois retenir : il symbolise l’opposé de l’éducation humaniste.

✨ Qui est-il ? Il est le professeur d’équitation de Gargantua. Il sera aussi son compagnon d’arme pendant la guerre.

✨ Qui est-il ? C’est le dernier précepteur (= professeur) de Gargantua. Plus tard, il sera son capitaine des armées. ✨ Ce que tu dois retenir : Ponocratès symbolise l’éducation humaniste (complète et efficace). En mêlant des exercices physiques, intellectuels et artisanaux, il permet à Gargantua de s’épanouir. Il croit à un modèle d’éducation opposé à celui de Thubal.

Les opposants de Gargantua

✨ Qui est-il ? C’est le roi de Lerné et le principal opposant de Grandgousier et de Gargantua. ✨ Portrait moral : il est mauvais, agressif, belliqueux (autrement dit, il aime faire la guerre pour de mauvaises raisons). ✨ Ce que tu dois retenir : il incarne tout l’opposé des valeurs humanistes : c’est un roi injuste et déraisonné. Son nom signifie « la bile amère » (= quelqu’un de colérique). Ce personnage permet d’explorer les thèmes de la guerre et de la paix.

Le vicomte Morpiaille | Menuaille | Merdaille

✨ Ce sont des conseillers de Picrocole. ✨ Le vicomte Morpiaille signifie « morpion ». C’est un protagoniste qui profite de son roi.

Toucquedillon

✨ Aide de camp de Picrocole. Il est fait prisonnier puis est libéré. Picrochole, le considérant comme un traître, le tue.

Les adjuvants (complices) de Gargantua

✨ Qui est-il ? L’un des compagnons de Gargantua. ✨ Portrait moral : il est érudit (cultivé) et mène une vie vertueuse. ✨ Ce que tu dois retenir : Eudémon permet de montrer qu’une éducation humaniste est essentielle pour devenir une personne accomplie et vertueuse. Le nom de ce personnage nom signifie « l’heureux ».

Frère Jean des Entommeures

✨ Qui est-il ? Un moine atypique de l’abbaye Seuillé, ancien soldat devenu religieux. ✨ Portrait moral : il est vigoureux, franc, aimant le bon vin et la bonne chère. Il est également courageux et loyal. D’ailleurs, il défend son abbaye contre des pillards de l’armée de Picrochole. ✨ Ce que tu dois retenir : i l critique ouvertement l’hypocrisie de l’Église et représente une approche plus humaniste de la religion.

✍️ Fiche de lecture sur les Cahiers de Drouai d’Arthur Rimbaud

Les thèmes de Gargantua | Voyage au cœur de l'Humanisme

Choc des savoirs : l'éducation 🎓.

2 visions s’opposent dans Gargantua.

Critique de l'éducation médiévale

Elle privilégie la quantité plutôt que la qualité . Concrètement, un homme doit acquérir un immense savoir en lisant et en mémorisant de nombreux livres.

Elle met de côté la raison . Il n’est pas question de développer l’esprit critique de celui qui se forme.

Elle se concentre uniquement sur l’esprit et délaisse le corps.

Elle est incarnée par 2 personnages : Thubal Holoperne et Jodelin Bridé.

Elle est symbolisée par un objet qui met en avant la lourdeur de cet enseignement : l’imposant écritoire de Gargantua (coffre contenant ce qu’il faut pour écrire).

Éloge de l'éducation humaniste

Elle permet d’offrir un apprentissage global et de varier les plaisirs . Les matières étudiées sont intellectuelles (littérature, histoire, philosophie, astronomie, sciences, etc.), artistiques, artisanales (pour se former aux activités humaines) ou physiques (exercices et hygiène alimentaire).

Elle met en avant la régularité . Chaque moment de la journée de Gargantua, qui se lève à 4 heures du matin, est consacrée à un cours ou une leçon de vie.

Elle développe l’esprit critique . L’objectif est de permettre à l’élève de réfléchir, de se forger une opinion et d’interpréter les textes (plutôt que les apprendre par cœur ).

Elle offre un apprentissage ludique (le jeu y a une grande place). Plus qu’humaniste, cette vision de l’éducation est surtout rabelaisienne (inspirée des valeurs de Rabelais). En multipliant les références intellectuelles et littéraires dans Gargantua , cet auteur nous divertit beaucoup.

Elle est représentée par 1 personnage : Ponocrates.

Duels de géants : la guerre 💣

Là aussi, 2 modèles s’affrontent…

La guerre de conquête

La guerre est absurde . Elle est déclenchée pour un oui ou pour un non, pour des raisons ridicules (querelle des fouaciers).

La guerre est d’une violence terrible . Certains combats sont décrits avec réalisme pour dénoncer l’horreur des combats. 

Elle est représentée par Picrochole (référence possible à Charles Quint, très belliqueux et conquérant).

La guerre de défense

La guerre n’est pas un objectif ni une fin en soi . Il est nécessaire de négocier, d’envoyer un émissaire pour créer le dialogue. Un gouvernant se doit donc de mettre en place des ruses ou différentes tactiques afin d’éviter le conflit.

La guerre est la dernière solution , lorsque le dialogue est rompu et qu’aucune stratégie n’a fonctionné.

La guerre de défense est représentée par Grandgousier et Gargantua (référence possible à François 1er, un roi mesuré et juste).

Rire sacré : critique de la religion 🙏

La religion est trop formelle, rigide . Elle manque de souplesse.

Les rites religieux sont dénués de sens . Certains représentants et pratiquants font preuve d’hypocrisie.

La religion peut correspondre à un modèle humaniste . L’abbaye de Thélème est plus libre et agréable que le cadre inflexible d’un monastère.

Ce modèle humaniste est représenté par Frère Jean.

Ce roman reflète une vision humaniste de la religion , cherchant à réconcilier la foi avec la raison, la tolérance.

Le parcours associé rire et savoir : quand l'humour rencontre la connaissance

Gargantua, un véritable divertissement 🥳.

Impossible de faire une fiche bac sur Gargantua sans aborder le parcours associé « rire et savoir ». Le rire, tout d’abord, procure du plaisir à la découverte de ces aventures rabelaisiennes. Tu seras d’accord avec moi, l’auteur nous invite à une joyeuse lecture !

Le gigantisme

✨ La taille de Gargantua ou Grandgousier crée un effet comique en raison du décalage entre leur dimension et celle du monde qui les entoure. ✨ Exemple : quand Gargantua naît, il a un appétit gigantesque : « Ensuite on lui apporta, pour l’allaiter, dix-sept mille neuf cents vaches de Pautille et Bréhémond, car il n’y eut nul moyen de trouver dans tout le pays une nourrice capable de lui donner la grande quantité de lait qui était nécessaire pour l’alimenter ». ✨ Figures de l’exagération (hyperboles) et de l’insistance (accumulations).

Le ton héroï-comique

✨ La guerre a tendance à être traitée sur le mode comique , avec la parodie de l’épopée. ✨ Exemple : la défense du clos de l’abbaye par frère Jean.

Le comique de farce et les obscénités

✨ Dans Gargantua, les grossièretés ne manquent pas ! ✨ Exemples : la naissance de Gargantua après que sa mère a mangé des trippes : « le boyau culier s’était ramolli. » Ou le torchecul, chapitre 12, qui nous plonge dans un humour très… scatologique !

Le carnaval verbal

✨ N’oublie pas la dimension verbale comique de ce roman ! Jeux sur les mots, effets de sonorités, noms propres comiques : Merdaille, Morpiaille. 😂 😂 😂

Derrière le rire, une réflexion profonde 🤓

Gargantua alterne anecdotes amusantes et passages plus sérieux. Mais, parfois, les deux se mêlent. Ce drôle de cocktail est représenté, à la fin du roman, par l’abbaye de Thélème : un lieu dans lequel on se concentre sur le savoir (apprentissage et pratique de la religion) et sur les plaisirs !

Éducation réinventée

✨  Opposition entre l’éducation des « vieux tousseux » qui est abrutissante et l’éducation de Ponocrates, qui permet à Gargantua de s’accomplir. L’utopie de Thélème prolonge cette réflexion avec la place accordée aux soins du corps et de l’esprit. ✨ R eporte-toi à la section consacrée aux grands thèmes de Gargantua !

Politique et religion à la loupe

✨ C’est sûr ! Sous le masque du tyran Picrochole, Rabelais prône la modération et le pacifisme (paix) dans les relations entre nations. ✌️ ✨ Reporte-toi à la section consacrée aux grands thèmes de Gargantua !

Réflexion sur un monde idéal

✨ Pour remercier le père Jean, Gargantua décide de faire bâtir l’abbaye de Thélème. À travers la peinture d’un monde idéalisé, Rabelais nous fait réfléchir aux défauts du monde réel, de la société de son temps.

Le rire, une arme de réflexion massive ?

Le rire rabelaisien symbolise une forme de résistance.

C’est que ce défend Mikhaïl Bakhtine (retiens bien ce nom) 🤓. Rire est une façon de résister aux supertistions du Moyen Âge qui ont longtemps paralysé la pensée : peur de la mort, du péché, du châtiment, etc.

Le rire est donc libérateur

Il renverse les préjugés, les interdits.

Citations de Gargantua | Un pas de géant pour tes disserts ! 😉

Les citations sur l'éducation, la mauvaise éducation.

« On lui recommanda un grand sophiste, nommé maître Thubal Holoferne, qui lui apprit si bien son alphabet qu’il le récitait par cœur et à l’envers. Cela l’occupa cinq ans et trois mois ». Chapitre 14 de Gargantua

« Son père s’aperçut qu’il étudiait vraiment très bien, et qu’il y consacrait tout son temps, mais qu’il ne progressait en rien. » Chapitre 15 de Gargantua

La bonne éducation

« Ainsi fut éduqué Gargantua. Jour après jour, il progressait comme vous imaginez que peut le faire un homme jeune, intelligent et sensé ». Chapitre 24 de Gargantua

« Le savoir hydrate et nourrit ». Prologue de l’auteur

Les citations sur la guerre

« Picrochole entra dans une furieuse colère. Sans davantage s’interroger sur le pourquoi ni le comment, il fit lever son armée » . Chapitre 26 de Gargantua

Picrochole fait la guerre « sans cause ni raison » . Chapitre 29 (lettre de Grandgousier)

« Toute ma vie, je n’ai dispensé que la paix « . « Je n’entrerai pas en guerre sans avoir essayé tous les moyens et toutes les mesures pour restaurer la paix, telle est ma résolution. » Chapitre 28 de Gargantua (Paroles prononcées par Grandgousier)

« Ma décision n’est pas de répondre à la provocation, mais de l’apaiser, non pas d’attaquer mais de défendre » Chapitre 29 (lettre de Grandgousier)

Les citations sur rire et savoir

« Réjouissez-vous, mes amours, lisez gaiement le reste pour l’agrément du corps et le profit des reins ! » Prologue

« Mieux est de rire que de larmes écrire, Parce que rire est le propre de l’homme. » Avis aux lecteurs

Va plus loin

J’espère que ce petit dossier Gargantua fiche bac t’a plu ! 😊 Pour aller plus loin, découvre ma chaîne Youtube !

Rabelais, Gargantua  : dissertation

Introduction, le rire comme déguisement, un « livre-silène », un livre qui développe de sérieuses critiques, un rire de pur divertissement, amuser par le récit de « bons tours », le « bon mot » ou le plaisir de jongler avec les mots, un rire de subversion, tourner en dérision et réhabiliter, l'abbaye de thélème : l'utopie comme pied de nez final .