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Gargantua and Pantagruel · Rabelais, François

Section 3

Chapter 4.XXXVII.--How Pantagruel sent for Colonel Maul-chitterling and Colonel Cut-pudding; with a discourse well worth your hearing about the names of places and persons

Chapter 4.XXXVIII.--How Chitterlings are not to be slighted by men

Chapter 4.XXXIX.--How Friar John joined with the cooks to fight the Chitterlings

Chapter 4.XL.--How Friar John fitted up the sow; and of the valiant cooks that went into it

Chapter 4.XLI.--How Pantagruel broke the Chitterlings at the knees

Chapter 4.XLII.--How Pantagruel held a treaty with Niphleseth, Queen of the Chitterlings

Chapter 4.XLIII.--How Pantagruel went into the island of Ruach

Chapter 4.XLIV.--How small rain lays a high wind

Chapter 4.XLV.--How Pantagruel went ashore in the island of Pope-Figland

Chapter 4.XLVI.--How a junior devil was fooled by a husbandman of Pope- Figland

Chapter 4.XLVII.--How the devil was deceived by an old woman of Pope- Figland

Chapter 4.XLVIII.--How Pantagruel went ashore at the island of Papimany

Chapter 4.XLIX.--How Homenas, Bishop of Papimany, showed us the Uranopet decretals

Chapter 4.L.--How Homenas showed us the archetype, or representation of a pope

Chapter 4.LI.--Table-talk in praise of the decretals

Chapter 4.LII.--A continuation of the miracles caused by the decretals

Chapter 4.LIII.--How, by the virtue of the decretals, gold is subtilely drawn out of France to Rome

Chapter 4.LIV.--How Homenas gave Pantagruel some bon-Christian pears

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

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

Chapter 4.LVII.--How Pantagruel went ashore at the dwelling of Gaster, the first master of arts in the world

Chapter 4.LVIII.--How, at the court of the master of ingenuity, Pantagruel detested the Engastrimythes and the Gastrolaters

Chapter 4.LIX.--Of the ridiculous statue Manduce; and how and what the Gastrolaters sacrifice to their ventripotent god

Chapter 4.LX.--What the Gastrolaters sacrificed to their god on interlarded fish-days

Chapter 4.LXI.--How Gaster invented means to get and preserve corn

Chapter 4.LXII.--How Gaster invented an art to avoid being hurt or touched by cannon-balls

Chapter 4.LXIII.--How Pantagruel fell asleep near the island of Chaneph, and of the problems proposed to be solved when he waked

Chapter 4.LXIV.--How Pantagruel gave no answer to the problems

Chapter 4.LXV.--How Pantagruel passed the time with his servants

Chapter 4.LXVI.--How, by Pantagruel’s order, the Muses were saluted near the isle of Ganabim

Chapter 4.LXVII.--How Panurge berayed himself for fear; and of the huge cat Rodilardus, which he took for a puny devil

THE FIFTH BOOK.

The Author’s Prologue

Chapter 5.I.--How Pantagruel arrived at the Ringing Island, and of the noise that we heard

Chapter 5.II.--How the Ringing Island had been inhabited by the Siticines, who were become birds

Chapter 5.III.--How there is but one pope-hawk in the Ringing Island

Chapter 5.IV.--How the birds of the Ringing Island were all passengers

Chapter 5.V.--Of the dumb Knight-hawks of the Ringing Island

Chapter 5.VI.--How the birds are crammed in the Ringing Island

Chapter 5.VII.--How Panurge related to Master Aedituus the fable of the horse and the ass

Chapter 5.VIII.--How with much ado we got a sight of the pope-hawk

Chapter 5.IX.--How we arrived at the island of Tools

Chapter 5.X.--How Pantagruel arrived at the island of Sharping

Chapter 5.XI.--How we passed through the wicket inhabited by Gripe-men-all, Archduke of the Furred Law-cats

Chapter 5.XII.--How Gripe-men-all propounded a riddle to us

Chapter 5.XIII.--How Panurge solved Gripe-men-all’s riddle

Chapter 5.XIV.--How the Furred Law-cats live on corruption

Chapter 5.XV.--How Friar John talks of rooting out the Furred Law-cats

Chapter 5.XVI.--How Pantagruel came to the island of the Apedefers, or Ignoramuses, with long claws and crooked paws, and of terrible adventures and monsters there

Chapter 5.XVII.--How we went forwards, and how Panurge had like to have been killed

Chapter 5.XVIII.--How our ships were stranded, and we were relieved by some people that were subject to Queen Whims (qui tenoient de la Quinte)

Chapter 5.XIX.--How we arrived at the queendom of Whims or Entelechy

Chapter 5.XX.--How the Quintessence cured the sick with a song

Chapter 5.XXI.--How the Queen passed her time after dinner

Chapter 5.XXII.--How Queen Whims’ officers were employed; and how the said lady retained us among her abstractors

Chapter 5.XXIII.--How the Queen was served at dinner, and of her way of eating

Chapter 5.XXIV.--How there was a ball in the manner of a tournament, at which Queen Whims was present

Chapter 5.XXV.--How the thirty-two persons at the ball fought

Chapter 5.XXVI.--How we came to the island of Odes, where the ways go up and down

Chapter 5.XXVII.--How we came to the island of Sandals; and of the order of Semiquaver Friars

Chapter 5.XXVIII.--How Panurge asked a Semiquaver Friar many questions, and was only answered in monosyllables

Chapter 5.XXIX.--How Epistemon disliked the institution of Lent

Chapter 5.XXX.--How we came to the land of Satin

Chapter 5.XXXI.--How in the land of Satin we saw Hearsay, who kept a school of vouching

Chapter 5.XXXII.--How we came in sight of Lantern-land

Chapter 5.XXXIII.--How we landed at the port of the Lychnobii, and came to Lantern-land

Chapter 5.XXXIV.--How we arrived at the Oracle of the Bottle

Chapter 5.XXXV.--How we went underground to come to the Temple of the Holy Bottle, and how Chinon is the oldest city in the world

Chapter 5.XXXVI.--How we went down the tetradic steps, and of Panurge’s fear

Chapter 5.XXXVII.--How the temple gates in a wonderful manner opened of themselves

Chapter 5.XXXVIII.--Of the temple’s admirable pavement

Chapter 5.XXXIX.--How we saw Bacchus’s army drawn up in battalia in mosaic work

Chapter 5.XL.--How the battle in which the good Bacchus overthrew the Indians was represented in mosaic work

Chapter 5.XLI.--How the temple was illuminated with a wonderful lamp

Chapter 5.XLII.--How the Priestess Bacbuc showed us a fantastic fountain in the temple, and how the fountain-water had the taste of wine, according to the imagination of those who drank of it

Chapter 5.XLIII.--How the Priestess Bacbuc equipped Panurge in order to have the word of the Bottle

Chapter 5.XLIV.--How Bacbuc, the high-priestess, brought Panurge before the Holy Bottle

Chapter 5.XLV.--How Bacbuc explained the word of the Goddess-Bottle

Chapter 5.XLVI.--How Panurge and the rest rhymed with poetic fury

Chapter 5.XLVII.--How we took our leave of Bacbuc, and left the Oracle of the Holy Bottle

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.

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