



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 sheet was stuck on pasteboard
for hanging on the wall, and was cut in little pieces, so that the
portraits might be sold separately.  The majority of the portraits are of
known persons and can therefore be verified.  Now it can be seen that these
have been selected with care, and taken from the most authentic sources;
from statues, busts, medals, even stained glass, for the persons of most
distinction, from earlier engravings for the others.  Moreover, those of
which no other copies exist, and which are therefore the most valuable,
have each an individuality very distinct, in the features, the hair, the
beard, as well as in the costume.  Not one of them is like another.  There
has been no tampering with them, no forgery.  On the contrary, there is in
each a difference, a very marked personality.  Leonard Gaultier, who
published this engraving towards the end of the sixteenth century,
reproduced a great many portraits besides from chalk drawings, in the style
of his master, Thomas de Leu.  It must have been such drawings that were
the originals of those portraits which he alone has issued, and which may
therefore be as authentic and reliable as the others whose correctness we
are in a position to verify.

Now Rabelais has here nothing of the Roger Bontemps of low degree about
him.  His features are strong, vigorously cut, and furrowed with deep
wrinkles; his beard is short and scanty; his cheeks are thin and already
worn-looking.  On his head he wears the square cap of the doctors and the
clerks, and his dominant expression, somewhat rigid and severe, is that of
a physician and a scholar.  And this is the only portrait to which we need
attach any importance.

This is not the place for a detailed biography, nor for an exhaustive
study.  At most this introduction will serve as a framework on which to fix
a few certain dates, to hang some general observations.  The date of
Rabelais' birth is very doubtful.  For long it was placed as far back as
1483:  now scholars are disposed to put it forward to about 1495.  The
reason, a good one, is that all those whom he has mentioned as his friends,
or in any real sense his contemporaries, were born at the very end of the
fifteenth century.  And, indeed, it is in the references in his romance to
names, persons, and places, that the most certain and valuable evidence is
to be found of his intercourse, his patrons, his friendships, his
sojournings, and his travels:  his own work is the best and richest mine in
which to search for the details of his life.

Like Descartes and Balzac, he was a native of Touraine, and Tours and
Chinon have only done their duty in each of them erecting in recent years a
statue to his honour, a twofold homage reflecting credit both on the
province and on the town.  But the precise facts about his birth are
nevertheless vague.  Huet speaks of the village of Benais, near Bourgeuil,
of whose vineyards Rabelais makes mention.  As the little vineyard of La
Deviniere, near Chinon, and familiar to all his readers, is supposed to
have belonged to his father, Thomas Rabelais, some would have him born
there.  It is better to hold to the earlier general opinion that Chinon was
his native town; Chinon, whose praises he sang with such heartiness and
affection.  There he might well have been born in the Lamproie house, which
belonged to his father, who, to judge from this circumstance, must have
been in easy circumstances, with the position of a well-to-do citizen.  As
La Lamproie in the seventeenth century was a hostelry, the father of
Rabelais has been set down as an innkeeper.  More probably he was an
apothecary, which would fit in with the medical profession adopted by his
son in after years.  Rabelais had brothers, all older than himself.
Perhaps because he was the youngest, his father destined him for the
Church.

The time he spent while a child with the Benedictine monks at Seuille is
uncertain.  There he might have made the acquaintance of the prototype of
his Friar John, a brother of the name of Buinart, afterwards Prior of
Sermaize.  He was longer at the Abbey of the Cordeliers at La Baumette,
half a mile from Angers, where he became a novice.  As the brothers Du
Bellay, who were later his Maecenases, were then studying at the University
of Angers, where it is certain he was not a student, it is doubtless from
this youthful period that his acquaintance and alliance with them should
date.  Voluntarily, or induced by his family, Rabelais now embraced the
ecclesiastical profession, and entered the monastery of the Franciscan
Cordeliers at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Lower Poitou, which was honoured by his
long sojourn at the vital period of his life when his powers were ripening.
There it was he began to study and to think, and there also began his
troubles.

In spite of the wide-spread ignorance among the monks of that age, the
encyclopaedic movement of the Renaissance was attracting all the lofty
minds.  Rabelais threw himself into it with enthusiasm, and Latin antiquity
was not enough for him.  Greek, a study discountenanced by the Church,
which looked on it as dangerous and tending to freethought and heresy, took
possession of him.  To it he owed the warm friendship of Pierre Amy and of
the celebrated Guillaume Bude.  In fact, the Greek letters of the latter
are the best source of information concerning this period of Rabelais'
life.  It was at Fontenay-le-Comte also that he became acquainted with the
Brissons and the great jurist Andre Tiraqueau, whom he never mentions but
with admiration and deep affection.  Tiraqueau's treatise, De legibus
connubialibus, published for the first time in 1513, has an important
bearing on the life of Rabelais.  There we learn that, dissatisfied with
the incomplete translation of Herodotus by Laurent Valla, Rabelais had
retranslated into Latin the first book of the History.  That translation
unfortunately is lost, as so many other of his scattered works.  It is
probably in this direction that the hazard of fortune has most discoveries
and surprises in store for the lucky searcher.  Moreover, as in this law
treatise Tiraqueau attacked women in a merciless fashion, President Amaury
Bouchard published in 1522 a book in their defence, and Rabelais, who was a
friend of both the antagonists, took the side of Tiraqueau.  It should be
observed also in passing, that there are several pages of such audacious
plain-speaking, that Rabelais, though he did not copy these in his Marriage
of Panurge, has there been, in his own fashion, as out spoken as Tiraqueau.
If such freedom of language could be permitted in a grave treatise of law,
similar liberties were certainly, in the same century, more natural in a
book which was meant to amuse.

The great reproach always brought against Rabelais is not the want of
reserve of his language merely, but his occasional studied coarseness,
which is enough to spoil his whole work, and which lowers its value.  La
Bruyere, in the chapter Des ouvrages de l'esprit, not in the first edition
of the Caracteres, but in the fifth, that is to say in 1690, at the end of
the great century, gives us on this subject his own opinion and that of his
age:

'Marot and Rabelais are inexcusable in their habit of scattering filth
about their writings.  Both of them had genius enough and wit enough to do
without any such expedient, even for the amusement of those persons who
look more to the laugh to be got out of a book than to what is admirable in
it.  Rabelais especially is incomprehensible.  His book is an enigma,--one
may say inexplicable.  It is a Chimera; it is like the face of a lovely
woman with the feet and the tail of a reptile, or of some creature still
more loathsome.  It is a monstrous confusion of fine and rare morality with
filthy corruption.  Where it is bad, it goes beyond the worst; it is the
delight of the basest of men.  Where it is good, it reaches the exquisite,
the very best; it ministers to the most delicate tastes.'

Putting aside the rather slight connection established between two men of
whom one is of very little importance compared with the other, this is
otherwise very admirably said, and the judgment is a very just one, except
with regard to one point--the misunderstanding of the atmosphere in which
the book was created, and the ignoring of the examples of a similar
tendency furnished by literature as well as by the popular taste.  Was it
not the Ancients that began it?  Aristophanes, Catullus, Petronius,
Martial, flew in the face of decency in their ideas as well as in the words
they used, and they dragged after them in this direction not a few of the
Latin poets of the Renaissance, who believed themselves bound to imitate
them.  Is Italy without fault in this respect?  Her story-tellers in prose
lie open to easy accusation.  Her Capitoli in verse go to incredible
lengths; and the astonishing success of Aretino must not be forgotten, nor
the licence of the whole Italian comic theatre of the sixteenth century.
The Calandra of Bibbiena, who was afterwards a Cardinal, and the Mandragola
of Machiavelli, are evidence enough, and these were played before Popes,
who were not a whit embarrassed.  Even in England the drama went very far
for a time, and the comic authors of the reign of Charles II., evidently
from a reaction, and to shake off the excess and the wearisomeness of
Puritan prudery and affectation, which sent them to the opposite extreme,
are not exactly noted for their reserve.  But we need not go beyond France.
Slight indications, very easily verified, are all that may be set down
here; a formal and detailed proof would be altogether too dangerous.

Thus, for instance, the old Fabliaux--the Farces of the fifteenth century,
the story-tellers of the sixteenth--reveal one of the sides, one of the
veins, so to speak, of our literature.  The art that addresses itself to
the eye had likewise its share of this coarseness.  Think of the sculptures
on the capitals and the modillions of churches, and the crude frankness of
certain painted windows of the fifteenth century.  Queen Anne was, without
any doubt, one of the most virtuous women in the world.  Yet she used to go
up the staircase of her chateau at Blois, and her eyes were not offended at
seeing at the foot of a bracket a not very decent carving of a monk and a
nun.  Neither did she tear out of her book of Hours the large miniature of
the winter month, in which, careless of her neighbours' eyes, the mistress
of the house, sitting before her great fireplace, warms herself in a
fashion which it is not advisable that dames of our age should imitate.
The statue of Cybele by the Tribolo, executed for Francis I., and placed,
not against a wall, but in the middle of Queen Claude's chamber at
Fontainebleau, has behind it an attribute which would have been more in
place on a statue of Priapus, and which was the symbol of generativeness.
The tone of the conversations was ordinarily of a surprising coarseness,
and the Precieuses, in spite of their absurdities, did a very good work in
setting themselves in opposition to it.  The worthy Chevalier de
La-Tour-Landry, in his Instructions to his own daughters, without a thought
of harm, gives examples which are singular indeed, and in Caxton's
translation these are not omitted.  The Adevineaux Amoureux, printed at
Bruges by Colard