



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


[Illustration: He Did Cry Like a Cow--frontispiece]


[Illustration: titlepage]


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.


[Illustration: Rabelais Dissecting Society--portrait2]




CONTENTS.




[Illustration: Francois Rabelais--portrait]


Introduction.

Had Rabelais never written his strange and marvellous romance, no one would
ever have imagined the possibility of its production.  It stands outside
other things--a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of
childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of
popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of
baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the
comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar.  Throughout the
whole there is such a force of life and thought, such a power of good
sense, a kind of assurance so authoritative, that he takes rank with the
greatest; and his peers are not many.  You may like him or not, may attack
him or sing his praises, but you cannot ignore him.  He is of those that
die hard.  Be as fastidious as you will; make up your mind to recognize
only those who are, without any manner of doubt, beyond and above all
others; however few the names you keep, Rabelais' will always remain.

We may know his work, may know it well, and admire it more every time we
read it.  After being amused by it, after having enjoyed it, we may return
again to study it and to enter more fully into its meaning.  Yet there is
no possibility of knowing his own life in the same fashion.  In spite of
all the efforts, often successful, that have been made to throw light on
it, to bring forward a fresh document, or some obscure mention in a
forgotten book, to add some little fact, to fix a date more precisely, it
remains nevertheless full of uncertainty and of gaps.  Besides, it has been
burdened and sullied by all kinds of wearisome stories and foolish
anecdotes, so that really there is more to weed out than to add.

This injustice, at first wilful, had its rise in the sixteenth century, in
the furious attacks of a monk of Fontevrault, Gabriel de Puy-Herbault, who
seems to have drawn his conclusions concerning the author from the book,
and, more especially, in the regrettable satirical epitaph of Ronsard,
piqued, it is said, that the Guises had given him only a little pavillon in
the Forest of Meudon, whereas the presbytery was close to the chateau.
From that time legend has fastened on Rabelais, has completely travestied
him, till, bit by bit, it has made of him a buffoon, a veritable clown, a
vagrant, a glutton, and a drunkard.

The likeness of his person has undergone a similar metamorphosis.  He has
been credited with a full moon of a face, the rubicund nose of an
incorrigible toper, and thick coarse lips always apart because always
laughing.  The picture would have surprised his friends no less than
himself.  There have been portraits painted of Rabelais; I have seen many
such.  They are all of the seventeenth century, and the greater number are
conceived in this jovial and popular style.

As a matter of fact there is only one portrait of him that counts, that has
more than the merest chance of being authentic, the one in the Chronologie
collee or coupee.  Under this double name is known and cited a large sheet
divided by lines and cross lines into little squares, containing about a
hundred heads of illustrious Frenchmen.  This