



Produced by Sue Asscher and David Widger





MASTER FRANCIS RABELAIS


FIVE BOOKS OF THE LIVES, HEROIC DEEDS AND SAYINGS OF

GARGANTUA AND HIS SON PANTAGRUEL


Book V.


Translated into English by

Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty

and

Peter Antony Motteux




The text of the first Two Books of Rabelais has been reprinted from the
first edition (1653) of Urquhart's translation.  Footnotes initialled 'M.'
are drawn from the Maitland Club edition (1838); other footnotes are by the
translator.  Urquhart's translation of Book III. appeared posthumously in
1693, with a new edition of Books I. and II., under Motteux's editorship.
Motteux's rendering of Books IV. and V. followed in 1708.  Occasionally (as
the footnotes indicate) passages omitted by Motteux have been restored from
the 1738 copy edited by Ozell.




THE FIFTH BOOK


The Author's Prologue.

Indefatigable topers, and you, thrice precious martyrs of the smock, give
me leave to put a serious question to your worships while you are idly
striking your codpieces, and I myself not much better employed.  Pray, why
is it that people say that men are not such sots nowadays as they were in
the days of yore?  Sot is an old word that signifies a dunce, dullard,
jolthead, gull, wittol, or noddy, one without guts in his brains, whose
cockloft is unfurnished, and, in short, a fool.  Now would I know whether
you would have us understand by this same saying, as indeed you logically
may, that formerly men were fools and in this generation are grown wise?
How many and what dispositions made them fools?  How many and what
dispositions were wanting to make 'em wise?  Why were they fools?  How
should they be wise?  Pray, how came you to know that men were formerly
fools?  How did you find that they are now wise?  Who the devil made 'em
fools?  Who a God's name made 'em wise?  Who d'ye think are most, those
that loved mankind foolish, or those that love it wise?  How long has it
been wise?  How long otherwise?  Whence proceeded the foregoing folly?
Whence the following wisdom?  Why did the old folly end now, and no later?
Why did the modern wisdom begin now, and no sooner?  What were we the worse
for the former folly?  What the better for the succeeding wisdom?  How
should the ancient folly be come to nothing?  How should this same new
wisdom be started up and established?

Now answer me, an't please you.  I dare not adjure you in stronger terms,
reverend sirs, lest I make your pious fatherly worships in the least
uneasy.  Come, pluck up a good heart; speak the truth and shame the devil.
Be cheery, my lads; and if you are for me, take me off three or five
bumpers of the best, while I make a halt at the first part of the sermon;
then answer my question.  If you are not for me, avaunt! avoid, Satan!  For
I swear by my great-grandmother's placket (and that's a horrid oath), that
if you don't help me to solve that puzzling problem, I will, nay, I already
do repent having proposed it; for still I must remain nettled and
gravelled, and a devil a bit I know how to get off.  Well, what say you?
I'faith, I begin to smell you out.  You are not yet disposed to give me an
answer; nor I neither, by these whiskers.  Yet to give some light into the
business, I'll e'en tell you what had been anciently foretold in the matter
by a venerable doctor, who, being moved by the spirit in a prophetic vein,
wrote a book ycleped the Prelatical Bagpipe.  What d'ye think the old
fornicator saith?  Hearken, you old noddies, hearken now or never.

  The jubilee's year, when all like fools were shorn,
  Is about thirty supernumerary.
  O want of veneration! fools they seemed,
  But, persevering, with long breves, at last
  No more they shall be gaping greedy fools.
  For they shall shell the shrub's delicious fruit,
  Whose flower they in the spring so much had feared.

Now you have it, what do you make on't?  The seer is ancient, the style
laconic, the sentences dark like those of Scotus, though they treat of
matters dark enough in themselves.  The best commentators on that good
father take the jubilee after the thirtieth to be the years that are
included in this present age till 1550 (there being but one jubilee every
fifty years).  Men shall no longer be thought fools next green peas season.

The fools, whose number, as Solomon certifies, is infinite, shall go to pot
like a parcel of mad bedlamites as they are; and all manner of folly shall
have an end, that being also numberless, according to Avicenna, maniae
infinitae sunt species.  Having been driven back and hidden towards the
centre during the rigour of the winter, 'tis now to be seen on the surface,
and buds out like the trees.  This is as plain as a nose in a man's face;
you know it by experience; you see it.  And it was formerly found out by
that great good man Hippocrates, Aphorism Verae etenim maniae, &c.  This
world therefore wisifying itself, shall no longer dread the flower and
blossoms of every coming spring, that is, as you may piously believe,
bumper in hand and tears in eyes, in the woeful time of Lent, which used to
keep them company.

Whole cartloads of books that seemed florid, flourishing, and flowery, gay,
and gaudy as so many butterflies, but in the main were tiresome, dull,
soporiferous, irksome, mischievous, crabbed, knotty, puzzling, and dark as
those of whining Heraclitus, as unintelligible as the numbers of
Pythagoras, that king of the bean, according to Horace; those books, I say,
have seen their best days and shall soon come to nothing, being delivered
to the executing worms and merciless petty chandlers; such was their
destiny, and to this they were predestinated.

In their stead beans in cod are started up; that is, these merry and
fructifying Pantagruelian books, so much sought nowadays in expectation of
the following jubilee's period; to the study of which writings all people
have given their minds, and accordingly have gained the name of wise.

Now I think I have fairly solved and resolved your problem; then reform,
and be the better for it.  Hem once or twice like hearts of oak; stand to
your pan-puddings, and take me off your bumpers, nine go-downs, and huzza!
since we are like to have a good vintage, and misers hang themselves.  Oh!
they will cost me an estate in hempen collars if fair weather hold.  For I
hereby promise to furnish them with twice as much as will do their business
on free cost, as often as they will take the pains to dance at a rope's end
providently to save charges, to the no small disappointment of the finisher
of the law.

Now, my friends, that you may put in for a share of this new wisdom, and
shake off the antiquated folly this very moment, scratch me out of your
scrolls and quite discard the symbol of the old philosopher with the golden
thigh, by which he has forbidden you to eat beans; for you may take it for
a truth granted among all professors in the science of good eating, that he
enjoined you not to taste of them only with the same kind intent that a
certain fresh-water physician had when he did forbid to Amer, late Lord of
Camelotiere, kinsman to the lawyer of that name, the wing of the partridge,
the rump of the chicken, and the neck of the pigeon, saying, Ala mala,
rumpum dubium, collum bonum, pelle remota.  For the duncical dog-leech was
so selfish as to reserve them for his own dainty chops, and allowed his
poor patients little more than the bare bones to pick, lest they should
overload their squeamish stomachs.

To the heathen philosopher succeeded a pack of Capuchins, monks who forbid
us the use of beans, that is, Pantagruelian books.  They seem to follow the
example of Philoxenus and Gnatho, one of whom was a Sicilian of fulsome
memory, the ancient master-builders of their monastic cram-gut
voluptuousness, who, when some dainty bit was served up at a feast,
filthily used to spit on it, that none but their nasty selves might have
the stomach to eat of it, though their liquorish chops watered never so
much after it.

So those hideous, snotty, phthisicky, eaves-dropping, musty, moving forms
of mortification, both in public and private, curse those dainty books, and
like toads spit their venom upon them.

Now, though we have in our mother-tongue several excellent works in verse
and prose, and, heaven be praised! but little left of the trash and
trumpery stuff of those duncical mumblers of ave-maries and the barbarous
foregoing Gothic age, I have made bold to choose to chirrup and warble my
plain ditty, or, as they say, to whistle like a goose among the swans,
rather than be thought deaf among so many pretty poets and eloquent
orators.  And thus I am prouder of acting the clown, or any other
under-part, among the many ingenious actors in that