feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/gradesaver/Gargantua and Pantagruel/section_6_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Gargantua and Pantagruel.book 5.chapter 1-chapter 45
feat_summary_id: book 5
feat_summary: {"name": "Book 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180420203406/http://www.gradesaver.com/gargantua-and-pantagruel/study-guide/summary-book-5", "summary": "Pantagruel and his companions arrive at the Ringing Island where they meet an old hermit by the name of Braguibus. According to the hermit, it is written that anyone who wishes to enter the island must first fast for four days; otherwise, they will be burned as a heretic. Although all of Pantagruel's companions complain about fasting, they do so in order to gain access to the island. After completing their four-day fast, the hermit gives them a letter that recommends them to Albian Camar, Master Aedituus of the Ringing Island. After meeting Master Aedituus, Pantagruel and his entourage feast before they find out the history of the island. According to Master Aedituus, the past inhabitants of the island, the Siticines, became birds long ago. Now the island is covered in all manner of birds, and the caretakers, including Master Aedituus, have built giant cages to house the birds. The tops of the cages have bells, and ringing the bells makes different birds sing or cry out. There are many different species of birds, and some species have been named after the different orders within the church, including a pope-hawk. Apparently, just as the Pope rules over the Catholic religion by himself, there's only ever one pope-hawk at any one time. Master Aedituus explains that the only reported instance where there was more than one pope-hawk was a time of much chaos, for the birds did not know whom to follow. Master Aedituus points out that many birds have come to the island from other places, including birds from Africa. Master Aedituus suspects that a lot of the birds come to the island, because their families are too large, their families were poor, or because they felt it was their duty to visit the island. All of these reasons are identical to the reasons that people go into the church as a profession. Master Aedituus tells Pantagruel and his friends about the knight-hawks, making an allegory of how they act noble and try to fight larger birds, but more often than not, the nobility is an act, since they look and act like mongrel birds. Master Aedituus then explains how he will reward Pantagruel and his friends with a four-day feast, since they all fasted for four days to gain entrance into this place. During which time, everyone ate excessively well and wandered around the bird paradise. Panurge then told the fable of the horse and the ass to Master Aedituus. In short, a horse sees an ass in the field and starts to talk to him, expressing how sorry he is that the ass must work so hard and yet never receive the rewards of being kept in a stable and fed well. The horse then offers the ass a chance to come with him in his stables so that he may be fed well and groomed. The ass takes the horse's offer, and experiences the horse's luxurious way life. After being groomed and well fed, the ass asks the horse how often they are allowed to have sexual relations with the female horses. The horse explains that they never do such actions in the sanctity of the stables, to which the ass replies that he would rather live in squalor and be able to have sex as often as he pleases than to live in such luxury for the rest of his life. During the four days, Pantagruel requests to see the pope-hawk. Master Aedituus explains, however, that it would prove difficult to find him. Nevertheless, Master Aedituus promises to try and locate the pope-hawk. Upon doing so, Master Aedituus arranges a viewing of the bird. Upon seeing the bird, Panurge comments that the bird looks grizzly, which results in Master Aedituus chastising Panurge for his comment. While Pantagruel and the others continue to look at the pope-hawk, Panurge notices that there is an egg underneath the bird in his cage, implying that the supposed only pope-hawk was female, which Master Aedituus claims could not be so. Pantagruel and his companions leave the pope-hawk and go to listen to the other birds, which they find amusing. At one point they try to gain the attention of a particular bird, so Panurge picks up a stone as if he was going to throw it at the bird. Master Aedituus begs Panurge never to do such an action, for the birds in this location were holy and must be treated as such. Pantagruel and his friends then decide that it was time to leave, and so they bid farewell to their host. Master Aedituus gives them many gifts and makes them promise that they will come back and visit. As Pantagruel and his companions sail on, they find themselves at the island of Tools. Supposedly, this was an island where no people lived. Instead, all manner of tools for daily laboring and for war were just scattered all over the place, and some of the tools even grew out of the earth or fell from trees. The narrator implies that the tools were alive, similar to plants, and that these tool-plant hybrids would breed with one another to create strange looking tools. Sailing onward, Pantagruel and his companions arrive at the island of Sharping. On this island, the rocks break through the surface of the land and poke upward. There were even two large cube-shaped rocks that looked like giant dice. The surfaces of these cubes looked white, as if they were covered in snow, but the pilot of Pantagruel's ship assures everyone that they are covered in bones. He then explains how devils live on these rocks and are summoned whenever anyone plays gambling games. Supposedly, the island also houses a holy relic. The narrator explains how Pantagruel and his friends decide to brave the island and see the relic. Unfortunately, the relic itself isn't very impressive, although the keepers of the relic have done a marvelous job at decorating the holding place of the relic to make it appear grander. Pantagruel and the others claim to be thankful for seeing the relic, and they even purchase items from the keepers of the relic, including hats. On a barren island near the Sharpening Island, Pantagruel and his companions go through a wicket and are captured by the workers of Gripe-men-all, Archduke of the Furred Law-cats. They have captured Pantagruel and his companions, because one of Pantagruel's servants was wearing a hat purchased from the people of the Sharpening Island. Pantagruel and his companions are put on trial, and Gripe-men-all offers them a riddle that they must solve to prove their innocence. They do not know the answer to the actual riddle, and Friar John curses them for putting good men on trial for no reason and making a mockery out of the legal system. Panurge then realizes that the answer to the riddle is no answer at all, but a bride. He throws gold to Gripe-men-all and all the Furred Law-cats, and surely enough they decide that all of the prisoners not guilty, and thus they are allowed to leave the island. Prior to getting onto their boats, Pantagruel and his companions are warned by dockworkers that they had best leave gifts for not only the Furred Law-cats and Gripe-men-all, but also for the wives of all of these individuals. It becomes clear that the entire population of the island is corrupt, and that the legal system does not function on equality. These Furred Law-cats use the guise of justice to extort money out of their victims. Friar John and Panurge get into an argument about what to do with these Furred Law-cats. Friar John believes they are devils and sinners, and that all of the Pantagruelists, as they have come to call themselves, should cleanse the earth of such filth - that is, they should kill the Furred Law-cats. Panurge has no desire to fight these monsters. He is satisfied that he has paid them off with gold, and he wishes to have nothing else to do with them. Friar John pulls out his cutlass and walks off in a huff, angry that the others will not stand by his side and fight these sinful beasts. As he walks, he comes across a landlady complaining to a police officer about some of Pantagruel's crewmembers who did not pay for services rendered. Friar John starts waving his cutlass and throwing around angry words, which makes the police officer flee; but the landlady stands her ground. She explains that all she wants is payment for services rendered, and Friar John agrees to do so, but only after he sees the state of the rooms where the crewmen stayed. The landlady shows Friar John the rooms, and he agrees that the cost is fair, so he pays the woman her money. After he pays her, though, he starts ripping open the pillows and creating a storm of feathers. The landlady runs off screaming, and Friar John steals the remaining pillows and blankets and gives them to some of the men on the ship. Pantagruel and his companions quickly leave the island and immediately set sail for some other place. Unfortunately, a storm turns their ship around and makes them almost land back on the island of the Furred Law-cats. Panurge begs the pilot to turn the ship around, for he never wishes to see that island again. Somehow they manage to once again sail away from the island and make their way toward another place. The new place they find is the island of the Apedefers. On this strange island, Pantagruel and his companions find all manner of small and gigantic wine presses. The rulers of the wine presses judge everything through the act of pressing grapes, but they will also press any object that fits within their presses. Through this metaphor made real, they have transformed the wine press processes into a legal system. The people of the island find their methodology quite suitable, since the masters of the presses are all ignorant people, and therefore cannot be corrupted. Great monsters also live on the island, but they are chained up. The masters of the wine presses feed the juices of this strange vineyard-legal system to these monsters. Whereas Friar John was bent on destroying the Furred Law-cats, he and Panurge are far more supportive of this legal system, for not only does it create wine, but they claim that the ignorant people in charge are by far more intelligent for their use of such a fair and unbiased system. Next, they came to an island where the people would slit their skin to let the fat out, much like people slit their clothes to let the under layers of fabric show through. Pantagruel and his companions arrive in time for what they initially believe is a happy ceremony, the bursting of an older man, but they find out that the bursting is actually akin to death, and that everyone has gathered for a funeral-like scene. Panurge mourns the situation and begs that they find some other way to heal the man, but alas the man dies as Panurge laments. A storm hits, and they are caught aground. As they wait for the tides to swell and help them get off of the sandbanks, a passing ship spots them and calls out to them. The man calling out to them is a friend of the narrator. This friend goes by the name of Harry Cotiral, and he is described as a man who wears a greasy hat, who holds the stump of a cabbage in one hand, and who has attached a horse's penis to his belt. As Harry's ship gets closer, Harry and the narrator have a brief conversation, and the narrator learns that Harry's ship is sailing from the Queen of Whims' land and that it is making its way home to Pantagruel's country. The cargo on Harry's ship includes alchemy products, and the passengers traveling on the ship are all manner of people: \"Astrologers, fortune-tellers, alchemists, rhymers, poets, painters, projectors, mathematicians, watchmakers, sing-songs, musicians,\" . Panurge insists that the narrator and Harry quit chatting long enough so that they can negotiate a way for Harry's ship to help their ship get off the sandbank. Harry explains that he was steering his ship closer to them just for that purpose, and he orders his crewmen to start throwing over cables to assist in pulling the ship free. Pantagruel and all his companions give thanks to Harry and his ship for their assistance. Pantagruel also make certain that they are paid well for their aid. Although Pantagruel's ships are no longer stuck on the sandbanks, the storm still damaged the ships pretty significantly, so Pantagruel and his companions decide that the only way to find their way to the Queen of Whims' kingdom is to let the winds and currents push them toward their destination. Pantagruel and his companions finally arrive at the Queen of Whims' domain and are greeted by soldiers who make sure that Pantagruel and his friends are good and noble people. Upon proving so, they are admitted to see the Queen. Although she is nearly 2,000 years old, she looks young, beautiful, and regal. Within her castle are many sick people, but as soon as she plays a song on the organ, all those within the vicinity are healed completely. She then meets with Pantagruel and his friends and delivers the most beautiful and eloquent speech they have ever heard. All of them stand speechless as a result, for they are too afraid to answer her ladyship. She interprets their inability to speak to imply that they are grateful for her services. She then gives them full leisure to explore her kingdom. Upon their exploration, Pantagruel and his friends learn that the Queen's servants also have the ability to heal people, but each servant has only been trained to cure one type of ailment. Of the servants, Pantagruel and his friends find someone who can turn old women into young women, so that they can be married to young suitors. Pantagruel asks if there is a person who turns old men into young men. One of the Queen's servants replies that it is not necessary for anyone to perform that feat. The servant elaborates that the only thing to do to turn an old man young again is to place him with a young woman as his lover. As Pantagruel and his companions continue to explore, they soon discover that the people who serve the Queen perform miracles and impossible acts on a regular basis. These people also dedicate themselves to improving their skills through continuous studies. The Queen once again speaks to Pantagruel and his companions, and once again they find themselves speechless after hearing her words. She honors them by making them abstractors and tells them that her principal Tabachin, Geber, will provide them with guidance on their new callings. Next, the Queen, all of her court, Pantagruel, and his companions go to the main hall for a large feast. As they eat, they notice that the Queen never chews any food herself, and instead she has servants who chew her food for her, and those servants feed her through a golden funnel. The narrator also states that since the Queen does not chew her own food, she also does not use the bathroom on her own, and he comments that the Queen has someone else use the bathroom for her by proxy. After dinner, they are entertained by a tilting tournament, which in actuality is a live-action game of chess with dancers dressed up as the gold and silver chess pieces. Around the chessboard is an orchestra, and as the music plays, different chess pieces move in accordance with the music. By the end of the first bout, the silver king claims victory over the gold king. The silver king also wins the second bout, but the gold king claims the third bout's victory. Sometime during the chess matches, the Queen of Whims disappears. Pantagruel and his companions never see her again, for they too left shortly after the chess matches had completed. Sailing away from the Queen of Whims' country, the group arrives next at the island of Odes, which is where ways are created. Some ways are beautiful, some ways are treacherous, some ways are well traveled, and so forth. Pantagruel and the others discuss the different ways they get from place to place, but it is unclear if they are speaking metaphorically. They meet a local man who tells them that no matter which one of the ways they examine, all the ways start and end in the water. At the island of Sandals, the third king of the island, Benius, entertains Pantagruel and his companions. He brings them to see the order of Semiquaver Friars. Unlike other orders of friars, these monks wear cowls that cover their faces and expose the back of their heads, which are completely shaven. They also wear codpieces on both their fronts and their backs, and they walk backwards as normally as they walk forwards. They dress and act so strangely, because they wish to avoid fortune, for they believe fortune to be a horrible thing. Panurge, Friar John, and Epistemon get into a strange conversation with one of the friars. Panurge does most of the talking, and the friar answers his question with monosyllable answers. From the conversation, they learn that the friar and all the monks in the order regularly engage in sex. They also masturbate profusely and fornicate on a regular basis. This monk claims to be the most virile of the bunch, and states that he prefers to copulate in March. Epistemon comments that March is the same month as Lent. Epistemon discusses how Catholics are hypocritical with Lent, since it is the time when they are supposed to give up certain luxuries, yet it ends up being the time when Catholics give in to sin far more easily. After Epistemon criticizes Lent, Panurge questions the friar, who continues to give monosyllabic answers. Panurge asks the friar if he believes that Epistemon is a heretic and if he should be burned at the stake, to which the friar answers yes to both questions. Panurge then comments how he would like to take this friar home, after Panurge has found a wife, that is, so that the friar could be his wife's fool. Moving on, Pantagruel and his companions find themselves in the land of Satin. Within this land is the country of Tapestry. In this place, there are no living animals or plants, and instead tapestries hang everywhere. Pantagruel and his friends walk through and examine the images on the tapestries. The narrator makes a list of all the animals, creatures, beings, and scenes that he sees portrayed on these tapestries. The narrator also relays poignant information about some of the images. For instance, according to the tapestries, the horn of a unicorn is only erect when the unicorn was in battle or purifying toxic waters. Panurge makes the comparison between the unicorn's horn and his own penis, explaining that his penis has purified all the women he has slept with. Friar John jokes that Panurge's ability will prove quite useful to keep his wife clean, implying that she will no doubt cuckold him and bring home diseases. Panurge does not like the joke, but he does not start an argument over it, as he has done before. As they travel further into the country of tapestries, the narrator notes seeing all manner of different people walking amidst the tapestries. All these people are surrounding one particular figure, which is a monstrous-looking small man by the name of Hearsay. This small man smiles from ear to ear, and within his mouth he has seven tongues that each speak multiple languages all at once. His whole head is covered in ears, so he can hear everything, but his eyes are blind. Thus, all the great philosophers, artists, and professionals come to Hearsay and learn through him instead of learning the truth. After much travel, Pantagruel and his companions finally arrive in Lantern-land. They make port, explain their purpose for being there to the local authorities, and then they request to see the Queen of the land to ask permission to travel to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle. They visit with the Queen, and she gives them permission to travel. She also offers a Lantern to guide the way. By Lantern, the Queen implies a person with the designation of \"Lantern,\" and this person will guide travelers to any chosen destination within Lantern-land. Before they go, they have dinner with the Queen, and as they go to dinner they see all of the great lanterns of legends, myths, and antiquity.The following day, they have their Lantern guide them to the destination of the oracle. Before they reach the entrance to the oracle, though, they must pass through a vineyard, and the Lantern explains that the vineyard was planted by Bacchus himself. While passing through the vineyard, they are each instructed to eat three grapes, place grape leaves inside of their shoes, and each person must hold a vine branch in their left hand. Everyone does as the Lantern instructs, and so they make their way to the entrance of the oracle. The Lantern leads Pantagruel and his companions into the entrance of the temple, which is underground. There is some discussion between the narrator and Pantagruel about the paintings on the underground cellar walls, which remind them about the cellars in Chinon, or Cainon, which is supposedly the oldest city in the world, as Cain built it. As they move further underground, they take a spiral staircase down over 100 steps toward the place where Priestess Bacbuc resides. As they go down, Panurge begins to panic and fears that he is walking down into hell. He thinks that they should turn around and go back, but Pantagruel and Friar John do not let him run away. Instead, they urge him downward. At the bottom of the steps, the Lantern explains that she can go no further than the temple gates. She will be there to lead them back out, but she must leave them at the gates. Everyone seems to understand, so she unlocks the temple gates, and leaves them there. On the right temple gate is carved the following words: \"Fate leads the willing, and th' unwilling draws\" . On the left temple gate is carved these words: \"All things tend to their end\" . Inside the temple, Pantagruel and his companions find that it is adored and decorated in the most elegant fashion imaginable. Beautiful mosaics portray the tale of how Bacchus, followed by women warriors, drunken men, satyrs, centaurs, and all other manner of creatures, went to battle against the Indians and won the day. Although the temple is deep underground, in the center of the temple is an enormous golden lantern that provides ample light. Chains suspend this golden lantern, and it is adorned with four smaller lanterns made of precious stones. The light created from these lanterns illuminates the space to make it appear as bright as day. After they pass the golden lantern, Pantagruel and his companions meet the priestess Bacbuc and her handmaidens. The priestess leads Pantagruel and his followers into the central area of the temple to see the great fountain. The narrator describes the fountain as heptagonal with seven pillars that reach up to the ceiling and join in archways to form a cupola above the fountain. Each of the seven pillars is made of the most precious stones, and each pillar is assigned to one of the seven celestial bodies. In accordance with the seven celestial bodies, each pillar also has a corresponding metal attached to it. On the inside of the cupola is engraved astronomical symbols, including symbols from the zodiac. The priestess encourages Pantagruel and his followers to drink from the fountain, which they do. After their first taste of the fountain's waters, they claim they cannot taste anything special, so the priestess orders her handmaidens to bring in palate cleansers for the guests. After sufficiently eating enough foods to cleanse their pallets, the priestess invites them to drink again. This time each man swears that the water tastes like a different flavor of wine. With each taste of the fountain, they can let their imaginations change the flavors, which proves the power of these waters. Bacbuc prepares Panurge to hear the words of the Holy Bottle, known as the Goddess-Bottle. Before he can hear the words, though, she warns him that he can only hear the truth in one ear. She then dresses him in a strange manner of clothing, and then has him dance about the temple, twirling, jumping up and down, singing strange words, and then she finally leads him into an adjacent chamber known as the chapel. In this chapel there is a second heptagonal fountain, although all the pillars are made of the same alabaster material. The side of the fountain is where the Goddess-Bottle sits. Bacbuc places Panurge to where he would be able to place one ear to the bottle. Bacbuc then throws something into the fountain water to make it instantly boil. As it does so, a buzzing noise can be heard from the bottle, and then a voice comes out of it saying, \"Trinc.\" At first, Panurge worries that the oracle is fraudulent, but then Bacbuc explains that the meaning of the word can be found in the book of the oracle. She brings Panurge to where the book is kept, but unlike traditional books that are read, this book must be drunk in order for individuals to understand the true meaning behind the words spoken by the Goddess-Bottle. Panurge drinks the book, and he claims instantly to know the true meaning behind the message. He then begins to chant uncontrollably in rhyming verse. As he chants, he reveals that he will get married, he will drink and be happy, and he will keep his wife happy and satisfied. Pantagruel and Friar John also begin to chant in rhyme. Friar John reveals that nothing will ever make him get married, for he does not want to feel restricted. Panurge chastises Friar John, implying that he will go to hell for not getting married, whereas he, Panurge, will go to paradise. After a while, Pantagruel, Panurge, and Friar John stop talking in rhyme, and they are ready to leave. The priestess requests that they give her servants their names, so that they can be written on a roster. She then bids them farewell and hopes that they have been given the answers they sought. The priestess insists that many great answers can be found underground, for that is where the truth is often concealed.", "analysis": "One of the main points of contention for this fifth and final book is whether Rabelais wrote it. Arthur Augustus Tilley has thoroughly researched the publication of the multiple versions of the fifth book. He points out that the first version only contained the first 15 chapters of the book, but this version had no printer name on the publication, which is peculiar. Stranger still is the fact that the book came out nearly nine years after Rabelais had passed away. After this first publication appeared in 1562, the second publication appeared in 1564, and this version included 47 chapters, but Tilley notes that this version omitted the chapter about the island of the Apedefts. Additional versions and manuscripts surfaced thereafter, some with omitted portions, others with extended scenes that are not considered part of the original text. Tilley points out that the written manuscripts are \"written in the same hand throughout, which is certainly not Rabelais's,\" as he contests that the handwriting does not match previous known samples of Rabelais's writing . Other than handwriting samples, Tilley explains that several of Rabelais's contemporaries also argued that Rabelais could not have written the fifth book, at least not completely. According to Tilley's research, Rabelais's contemporaries posit that the excessive anti-Catholic sentiments presented in the fifth book is proof that Rabelais could not have been the author. With that point made, the anti-Catholic propaganda throughout the fifth book creates a much different tone compared to the previous four books. One of the most blatant anti-Catholic acts includes the dark satirical mockery of reliquary and idol worship. During the Renaissance, Reformists argued that the glorified worship of reliquaries, statues of saints, statues of Christ, and other idol-like images predominant in the Catholic religion were in clear violation of one of the 10 Commandments. Within this fifth book, Pantagruel and his companion's visit several sites that contain reliquaries or other holy items. More often than not, the narrator presents the items as being unimpressive or the narrator displays the caretakers as hypocrites and liars. For instance, on the Ringing Island, Master Aedituus claims that there is only ever one pope-hawk at any one time. When he arranges a viewing of the bird for Pantagruel and his companions, though, Panurge notices that the one and only pope-hawk has laid an egg, implying that it is female and not male, and that another pope-hawk impregnated it. Master Aedituus denies such allegations and refuses to see the factual evidence. Likewise, on the island of Sandals, Panurge, Epistemon, and Friar John interview one of the Semiquaver Friars. Through this discussion, they discover that all the friars in this order engage in sex, masturbation, and other acts unbecoming a member of the clergy. As the structure of the fifth book includes blatant anti-Catholic statements, it also includes a high amount of metaphors made real through allegory or personification. The fifth book starts off with an allegory designed primarily to set up the anti-Catholic structure. On the Ringing Island, Master Aedituus tells Pantagruel and his companions that many of the birds currently on the island were once humans who transformed. A large portion of the transformed birds has been named after different parts of the clergy. Thus, the allegory of the previous island dwellers' transformation implies both transmogrification and transcendence from human to bird, which could stand for transcendence from human to angel. In an allegorical presentation, it may represent the transformation a regular person undergoes when they take on the vows of the clergy. Beyond just members of the clergy, though, some of the birds have been named after social classes, which expands the allegory outside of just the ecclesiastical transmogrification. However, by including the other classes, such as the mongrel knight-hawk pointed out by Master Aedituus, the narrator makes his allegory less about the idea of transcendence. Instead, the allegory becomes more of a simple comparison between humans and birds. One of the most visual sustained allegories happens on the island of Satin in the country of Tapestry where all manner of people have come to learn from Hearsay. Much like the practice in medieval storytelling, the abstract concept of hearsay has been personified into the form of \"a diminutive, monstrous, misshapen old fellow\" whose \"mouth was slit up to his ears, and in it were seven tongues, each of them cleft into seven parts. However, he chattered, tattled, and prated with all the seven at once, of different matters, and in divers languages . . . He had as many ears all over his head and the rest of his body as Argus formerly had eyes, and was as blind as a beetle\" . The narrator explains how all manner of great people, including some of the greatest thinkers throughout history, were gathered around Hearsay for his infinite knowledge. Of course, through the sustained allegory, the narrator implies that people who only learn from Hearsay are blinded from the truth. At an attempt to maintain the satire, the narrator explains how Pantagruel and his companions mingled with the students of Hearsay, joked with them, ate their rich foods, and were \"scurvily entertained\" . By showing that Pantagruel and his companions found the entire episode amusing and nothing more, the narrator, therefore, expects the reader to believe that Pantagruel and his friends did not take the students of Hearsay seriously, which further underscores the concept of hearsay as something to be ignored. Moving away from subjects of authenticity, anti-Catholic sentiments, and allegorical representations, one cannot discuss this final book without examining the full cycle of development, or lack thereof, of the main characters. On their journey portrayed in the fifth book, Pantagruel almost disappears as a character for most of the story, allowing Panurge and Friar John to take center stage with Epistemon as their supporting character. The entire voyage from the start of the fourth book to the end of the fifth book shows Panurge going back and forth between absolute cowardice and absolute arrogance; the sea and the elements bring out his cowardice, but standing on dry land allows his arrogance to shine. Curious enough, when Panurge finally reaches the oracle and goes underground, getting ever closer to his answer, his cowardice returns temporarily. Friar John serves as little more than a pseudo-parental figure in these last two books. He chastises Panurge for his cowardice, and threatens to hurt him, but he never does more than verbally shame him. Epistemon lightens the mood between Panurge and Friar John, but his character serves as a mask for mocking the Catholic Church through a vaguely scholarly discourse. At the end of the fifth book, Pantagruel once again becomes more involved in the story, if only just. Of course, he only seems to get involved to push Panurge into following through with his search for answers. Thus, though the story is named after Pantagruel, his character neither grows nor changes much within the last three books. He serves as more of a presence or regal figurehead that provides the other characters, mainly Panurge, with the money and means to live out their adventures. In the end of this final book, it truly is all about Panurge's quest for answers. Unhappy with the answers he acquired in the third book, namely that he would be cuckolded, Panurge convinces Pantagruel, Epistemon, Friar John, and the other companions to go on an epic voyage to find the ultimate answer. Throughout this voyage that takes two books to complete, the whole purpose behind the quest seems an afterthought at best. Although Panurge occasionally gets mocked or mocks himself about the idea of becoming a cuckold, the characters involved in the last two books seem fairly unconcerned with Panurge's fate. Nevertheless, they do all keep moving toward Lantern Land in support of Panurge, so perhaps they are all merely enjoying the ride, since they know the end of their journey will be met with all seriousness as they encounter the oracle. However, the level of seriousness in the final chapters of the fifth book is questionable. While the characters go through various ceremonies and act solemnly, the non-Christian elements serve to make a mockery of the entire ordeal. For Panurge to get his answer, the priestess must dress him up in a fool's garb, and then she orders him to dance about the temple like a madman. After he finally hears the one word answer from the Goddess-Bottle, the word makes no sense to him until he drinks a magical elixir referred to as the book. Only then does he understand the meaning of the word, but he can only verbalize or translate the meaning by speaking through rhyme. With his newfound knowledge, Panurge's character transforms into a man confident that his marriage will end well, provided that he treats his wife well. Panurge then turns the tables and chastises Friar John, explaining to Friar John that he will never make it to Paradise, for as a member of the clergy he cannot get married, which serves as the final anti-Catholic remark. During these final scenes, Pantagruel uses rhymed verse to tell Friar John to let Panurge make a fool out of himself. Pantagruel's remarks on the matter make the ending of the story seem false and pointless, as if the entire voyage was nothing more than just a way to humor Panurge. While Pantagruel's statements may have been chosen to emphasize the satirical nature of the entire Gargantua and Pantagruel series, his comments feel out of place, given that the fifth book itself does not contain the clever type of satire that made Rabelais famous, but rather it contains a malicious type of satire used predominately as a propaganda machine against the Catholic Church."}
text: 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 noble play, than of
  herding among those mutes, who, like so many shadows and ciphers, only serve
  to fill up the house and make up a number, gaping and yawning at the flies,
  and pricking up their lugs, like so many Arcadian asses, at the striking up
  of the music; thus silently giving to understand that their fopships are
  tickled in the right place.
  
  Having taken this resolution, I thought it would not be amiss to move my
  Diogenical tub, that you might not accuse me of living without example.  I
  see a swarm of our modern poets and orators, your Colinets, Marots,
  Drouets, Saint Gelais, Salels, Masuels, and many more, who, having
  commenced masters in Apollo's academy on Mount Parnassus, and drunk
  brimmers at the Caballin fountain among the nine merry Muses, have raised
  our vulgar tongue, and made it a noble and everlasting structure.  Their
  works are all Parian marble, alabaster, porphyry, and royal cement; they
  treat of nothing but heroic deeds, mighty things, grave and difficult
  matters, and this in a crimson, alamode, rhetorical style.  Their writings
  are all divine nectar, rich, racy, sparkling, delicate, and luscious wine.
  Nor does our sex wholly engross this honour; ladies have had their share of
  the glory; one of them, of the royal blood of France, whom it were a
  profanation but to name here, surprises the age at once by the transcendent
  and inventive genius in her writings and the admirable graces of her style.
  Imitate those great examples if you can; for my part I cannot.  Everyone,
  you know, cannot go to Corinth.  When Solomon built the temple, all could
  not give gold by handfuls.
  
  Since then 'tis not in my power to improve our architecture as much as
  they, I am e'en resolved to do like Renault of Montauban:  I'll wait on the
  masons, set on the pot for the masons, cook for the stone-cutters; and
  since it was not my good luck to be cut out for one of them, I will live
  and die the admirer of their divine writings.
  
  As for you, little envious prigs, snarling bastards, puny critics, you'll
  soon have railed your last; go hang yourselves, and choose you out some
  well-spread oak, under whose shade you may swing in state, to the
  admiration of the gaping mob; you shall never want rope enough.  While I
  here solemnly protest before my Helicon, in the presence of my nine
  mistresses the Muses, that if I live yet the age of a dog, eked out with
  that of three crows, sound wind and limbs, like the old Hebrew captain
  Moses, Xenophilus the musician, and Demonax the philosopher, by arguments
  no ways impertinent, and reasons not to be disputed, I will prove, in the
  teeth of a parcel of brokers and retailers of ancient rhapsodies and such
  mouldy trash, that our vulgar tongue is not so mean, silly, inept, poor,
  barren, and contemptible as they pretend.  Nor ought I to be afraid of I
  know not what botchers of old threadbare stuff, a hundred and a hundred
  times clouted up and pieced together; wretched bunglers that can do nothing
  but new-vamp old rusty saws; beggarly scavengers that rake even the
  muddiest canals of antiquity for scraps and bits of Latin as insignificant
  as they are often uncertain.  Beseeching our grandees of Witland that, as
  when formerly Apollo had distributed all the treasures of his poetical
  exchequer to his favourites, little hulchbacked Aesop got for himself the
  office of apologue-monger; in the same manner, since I do not aspire
  higher, they would not deny me that of puny rhyparographer, or riffraff
  follower of the sect of Pyreicus.
  
  I dare swear they will grant me this; for they are all so kind, so
  good-natured, and so generous, that they'll ne'er boggle at so small a
  request. Therefore, both dry and hungry souls, pot and trenchermen, fully
  enjoying those books, perusing, quoting them in their merry conventicles,
  and observing the great mysteries of which they treat, shall gain a singular
  profit and fame; as in the like case was done by Alexander the Great with
  the books of prime philosophy composed by Aristotle.
  
  O rare! belly on belly! what swillers, what twisters will there be!
  
  Then be sure all you that take care not to die of the pip, be sure, I say,
  you take my advice, and stock yourselves with good store of such books as
  soon as you meet with them at the booksellers; and do not only shell those
  beans, but e'en swallow them down like an opiate cordial, and let them be
  in you; I say, let them be within you; then you shall find, my beloved,
  what good they do to all clever shellers of beans.
  
  Here is a good handsome basketful of them, which I here lay before your
  worships; they were gathered in the very individual garden whence the
  former came.  So I beseech you, reverend sirs, with as much respect as was
  ever paid by dedicating author, to accept of the gift, in hopes of somewhat
  better against next visit the swallows give us.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  How Pantagruel arrived at the Ringing Island, and of the noise that we
  heard.
  
  Pursuing our voyage, we sailed three days without discovering anything; on
  the fourth we made land.  Our pilot told us that it was the Ringing Island,
  and indeed we heard a kind of a confused and often repeated noise, that
  seemed to us at a great distance not unlike the sound of great,
  middle-sized, and little bells rung all at once, as 'tis customary at Paris,
  Tours, Gergeau, Nantes, and elsewhere on high holidays; and the nearer we
  came to the land the louder we heard that jangling.
  
  Some of us doubted that it was the Dodonian kettle, or the portico called
  Heptaphone in Olympia, or the eternal humming of the colossus raised on
  Memnon's tomb in Thebes of Egypt, or the horrid din that used formerly to
  be heard about a tomb at Lipara, one of the Aeolian islands.  But this did
  not square with chorography.
  
  I do not know, said Pantagruel, but that some swarms of bees hereabouts may
  be taking a ramble in the air, and so the neighbourhood make this
  dingle-dangle with pans, kettles, and basins, the corybantine cymbals of
  Cybele, grandmother of the gods, to call them back.  Let's hearken.  When we
  were nearer, among the everlasting ringing of these indefatigable bells we
  heard the singing, as we thought, of some men.  For this reason, before we
  offered to land on the Ringing Island, Pantagruel was of opinion that we
  should go in the pinnace to a small rock, near which we discovered an
  hermitage and a little garden.  There we found a diminutive old hermit,
  whose name was Braguibus, born at Glenay.  He gave us a full account of all
  the jangling, and regaled us after a strange sort of fashion--four livelong
  days did he make us fast, assuring us that we should not be admitted into
  the Ringing Island otherwise, because it was then one of the four fasting,
  or ember weeks.  As I love my belly, quoth Panurge, I by no means understand
  this riddle.  Methinks this should rather be one of the four windy weeks;
  for while we fast we are only puffed up with wind.  Pray now, good father
  hermit, have not you here some other pastime besides fasting? Methinks it is
  somewhat of the leanest; we might well enough be without so many palace
  holidays and those fasting times of yours.  In my Donatus, quoth Friar John,
  I could find yet but three times or tenses, the preterit, the present, and
  the future; doubtless here the fourth ought to be a work of supererogation.
  That time or tense, said Epistemon, is aorist, derived from the
  preter-imperfect tense of the Greeks, admitted in war (?) and odd cases.
  Patience perforce is a remedy for a mad dog.  Saith the hermit:  It is, as I
  told you, fatal to go against this; whosoever does it is a rank heretic, and
  wants nothing but fire and faggot, that's certain.  To deal plainly with
  you, my dear pater, cried Panurge, being at sea, I much more fear being wet
  than being warm, and being drowned than being burned.
  
  Well, however, let us fast, a God's name; yet I have fasted so long that it
  has quite undermined my flesh, and I fear that at last the bastions of this
  bodily fort of mine will fall to ruin.  Besides, I am much more afraid of
  vexing you in this same trade of fasting; for the devil a bit I understand
  anything in it, and it becomes me very scurvily, as several people have
  told me, and I am apt to believe them.  For my part, I have no great
  stomach to fasting; for alas! it is as easy as pissing a bed, and a trade
  of which anybody may set up; there needs no tools.  I am much more inclined
  not to fast for the future; for to do so there is some stock required, and
  some tools are set a-work.  No matter, since you are so steadfast, and
  would have us fast, let us fast as fast as we can, and then breakfast in
  the name of famine.  Now we are come to these esurial idle days.  I vow I
  had quite put them out of my head long ago.  If we must fast, said
  Pantagruel, I see no other remedy but to get rid of it as soon as we can,
  as we would out of a bad way.  I'll in that space of time somewhat look
  over my papers, and examine whether the marine study be as good as ours at
  land.  For Plato, to describe a silly, raw, ignorant fellow, compares him
  to those that are bred on shipboard, as we would do one bred up in a
  barrel, who never saw anything but through the bung-hole.
  
  To tell you the short and the long of the matter, our fasting was most
  hideous and terrible; for the first day we fasted on fisticuffs, the second
  at cudgels, the third at sharps, and the fourth at blood and wounds:  such
  was the order of the fairies.
  
  
  
  
  How the Ringing Island had been inhabited by the Siticines, who were become
  birds.
  
  Having fasted as aforesaid, the hermit gave us a letter for one whom he
  called Albian Camar, Master Aedituus of the Ringing Island; but Panurge
  greeting him called him Master Antitus.  He was a little queer old fellow,
  bald-pated, with a snout whereat you might easily have lighted a
  card-match, and a phiz as red as a cardinal's cap.  He made us all very
  welcome, upon the hermit's recommendation, hearing that we had fasted, as I
  have told you.
  
  When we had well stuffed our puddings, he gave us an account of what was
  remarkable in the island, affirming that it had been at first inhabited by
  the Siticines; but that, according to the course of nature--as all things,
  you know, are subject to change--they were become birds.
  
  There I had a full account of all that Atteius Capito, Paulus, Marcellus,
  A. Gellius, Athenaeus, Suidas, Ammonius, and others had writ of the
  Siticines and Sicinnists; and then we thought we might as easily believe
  the transmutations of Nectymene, Progne, Itys, Alcyone, Antigone, Tereus,
  and other birds.  Nor did we think it more reasonable to doubt of the
  transmogrification of the Macrobian children into swans, or that of the men
  of Pallene in Thrace into birds, as soon as they had bathed themselves in
  the Tritonic lake.  After this the devil a word could we get out of him but
  of birds and cages.
  
  The cages were spacious, costly, magnificent, and of an admirable
  architecture.  The birds were large, fine, and neat accordingly, looking as
  like the men in my country as one pea does like another; for they ate and
  drank like men, muted like men, endued or digested like men, farted like
  men, but stunk like devils; slept, billed, and trod their females like men,
  but somewhat oftener:  in short, had you seen and examined them from top to
  toe, you would have laid your head to a turnip that they had been mere men.
  However, they were nothing less, as Master Aedituus told us; assuring us,
  at the same time, that they were neither secular nor laic; and the truth
  is, the diversity of their feathers and plumes did not a little puzzle us.
  
  Some of them were all over as white as swans, others as black as crows,
  many as grey as owls, others black and white like magpies, some all red
  like red-birds, and others purple and white like some pigeons.  He called
  the males clerg-hawks, monk-hawks, priest-hawks, abbot-hawks, bish-hawks,
  cardin-hawks, and one pope-hawk, who is a species by himself.  He called
  the females clerg-kites, nun-kites, priest-kites, abbess-kites, bish-kites,
  cardin-kites, and pope-kites.
  
  However, said he, as hornets and drones will get among the bees, and there
  do nothing but buzz, eat, and spoil everything; so, for these last three
  hundred years, a vast swarm of bigottelloes flocked, I do not know how,
  among these goodly birds every fifth full moon, and have bemuted, berayed,
  and conskited the whole island.  They are so hard-favoured and monstrous
  that none can abide them.  For their wry necks make a figure like a crooked
  billet; their paws are hairy, like those of rough-footed pigeons; their
  claws and pounces, belly and breech, like those of the Stymphalid harpies.
  Nor is it possible to root them out, for if you get rid of one, straight
  four-and-twenty new ones fly thither.
  
  There had been need of another monster-hunter such as was Hercules; for
  Friar John had like to have run distracted about it, so much he was nettled
  and puzzled in the matter.  As for the good Pantagruel, he was even served
  as was Messer Priapus, contemplating the sacrifices of Ceres, for want of
  skin.
  
  
  
  
  How there is but one pope-hawk in the Ringing Island.
  
  We then asked Master Aedituus why there was but one pope-hawk among such
  venerable birds multiplied in all their species.  He answered that such was
  the first institution and fatal destiny of the stars that the clerg-hawks
  begot the priest-hawks and monk-hawks without carnal copulation, as some
  bees are born of a young bull; the priest-hawks begat the bish-hawks, the
  bish-hawks the stately cardin-hawks, and the stately cardin-hawks, if they
  live long enough, at last come to be pope-hawk.
  
  Of this last kind there never is more than one at a time, as in a beehive
  there is but one king, and in the world is but one sun.
  
  When the pope-hawk dies, another arises in his stead out of the whole brood
  of cardin-hawks, that is, as you must understand it all along, without
  carnal copulation.  So that there is in that species an individual unity,
  with a perpetuity of succession, neither more or less than in the Arabian
  phoenix.
  
  'Tis true that, about two thousand seven hundred and sixty moons ago, two
  pope-hawks were seen upon the face of the earth; but then you never saw in
  your lives such a woeful rout and hurly-burly as was all over this island.
  For all these same birds did so peck, clapperclaw, and maul one another all
  that time, that there was the devil and all to do, and the island was in a
  fair way of being left without inhabitants.  Some stood up for this
  pope-hawk, some for t'other.  Some, struck with a dumbness, were as mute as
  so many fishes; the devil a note was to be got out of them; part of the
  merry bells here were as silent as if they had lost their tongues, I mean
  their clappers.
  
  During these troublesome times they called to their assistance the
  emperors, kings, dukes, earls, barons, and commonwealths of the world that
  live on t'other side the water; nor was this schism and sedition at an end
  till one of them died, and the plurality was reduced to a unity.
  
  We then asked what moved those birds to be thus continually chanting and
  singing.  He answered that it was the bells that hung on the top of their
  cages.  Then he said to us, Will you have me make these monk-hawks whom you
  see bardocuculated with a bag such as you use to still brandy, sing like
  any woodlarks?  Pray do, said we.  He then gave half-a-dozen pulls to a
  little rope, which caused a diminutive bell to give so many ting-tangs; and
  presently a parcel of monk-hawks ran to him as if the devil had drove 'em,
  and fell a-singing like mad.
  
  Pray, master, cried Panurge, if I also rang this bell could I make those
  other birds yonder, with red-herring-coloured feathers, sing?  Ay, marry
  would you, returned Aedituus.  With this Panurge hanged himself (by the
  hands, I mean) at the bell-rope's end, and no sooner made it speak but
  those smoked birds hied them thither and began to lift up their voices and
  make a sort of untowardly hoarse noise, which I grudge to call singing.
  Aedituus indeed told us that they fed on nothing but fish, like the herns
  and cormorants of the world, and that they were a fifth kind of cucullati
  newly stamped.
  
  He added that he had been told by Robert Valbringue, who lately passed that
  way in his return from Africa, that a sixth kind was to fly hither out of
  hand, which he called capus-hawks, more grum, vinegar-faced, brain-sick,
  froward, and loathsome than any kind whatsoever in the whole island.
  Africa, said Pantagruel, still uses to produce some new and monstrous
  thing.
  
  
  
  
  How the birds of the Ringing Island were all passengers.
  
  Since you have told us, said Pantagruel, how the pope-hawk is begot by the
  cardin-hawks, the cardin-hawks by the bish-hawks, and the bish-hawks by the
  priest-hawks, and the priest-hawks by the clerg-hawks, I would gladly know
  whence you have these same clerg-hawks.  They are all of them passengers,
  or travelling birds, returned Aedituus, and come hither from t'other world;
  part out of a vast country called Want-o'-bread, the rest out of another
  toward the west, which they style Too-many-of-'em.  From these two
  countries flock hither, every year, whole legions of these clerg-hawks,
  leaving their fathers, mothers, friends, and relations.
  
  This happens when there are too many children, whether male or female, in
  some good family of the latter country; insomuch that the house would come
  to nothing if the paternal estate were shared among them all (as reason
  requires, nature directs, and God commands).  For this cause parents use to
  rid themselves of that inconveniency by packing off the younger fry, and
  forcing them to seek their fortune in this isle Bossart (Crooked Island).
  I suppose he means L'Isle Bouchart, near Chinon, cried Panurge.  No,
  replied t'other, I mean Bossart (Crooked), for there is not one in ten
  among them but is either crooked, crippled, blinking, limping,
  ill-favoured, deformed, or an unprofitable load to the earth.
  
  'Twas quite otherwise among the heathens, said Pantagruel, when they used
  to receive a maiden among the number of vestals; for Leo Antistius affirms
  that it was absolutely forbidden to admit a virgin into that order if she
  had any vice in her soul or defect in her body, though it were but the
  smallest spot on any part of it.  I can hardly believe, continued Aedituus,
  that their dams on t'other side the water go nine months with them; for
  they cannot endure them nine years, nay, scarce seven sometimes, in the
  house, but by putting only a shirt over the other clothes of the young
  urchins, and lopping off I don't well know how many hairs from their
  crowns, mumbling certain apostrophized and expiatory words, they visibly,
  openly, and plainly, by a Pythagorical metempsychosis, without the least
  hurt, transmogrify them into such birds as you now see; much after the
  fashion of the Egyptian heathens, who used to constitute their isiacs by
  shaving them and making them put on certain linostoles, or surplices.
  However, I don't know, my good friends, but that these she-things, whether
  clerg-kites, monk-kites, and abbess-kites, instead of singing pleasant
  verses and charisteres, such as used to be sung to Oromasis by Zoroaster's
  institution, may be bellowing out such catarates and scythropys (cursed
  lamentable and wretched imprecations) as were usually offered to the
  Arimanian demon; being thus in devotion for their kind friends and
  relations that transformed them into birds, whether when they were maids,
  or thornbacks, in their prime, or at their last prayers.
  
  But the greatest numbers of our birds came out of Want-o'-bread, which,
  though a barren country, where the days are of a most tedious lingering
  length, overstocks this whole island with the lower class of birds.  For
  hither fly the asapheis that inhabit that land, either when they are in
  danger of passing their time scurvily for want of belly-timber, being
  unable, or, what's more likely, unwilling to take heart of grace and follow
  some honest lawful calling, or too proud-hearted and lazy to go to service
  in some sober family.  The same is done by your frantic inamoradoes, who,
  when crossed in their wild desires, grow stark staring mad, and choose this
  life suggested to them by their despair, too cowardly to make them swing,
  like their brother Iphis of doleful memory.  There is another sort, that
  is, your gaol-birds, who, having done some rogue's trick or other heinous
  villainy, and being sought up and down to be trussed up and made to ride
  the two or three-legged mare that groans for them, warily scour off and
  come here to save their bacon; because all these sorts of birds are here
  provided for, and grow in an instant as fat as hogs, though they came as
  lean as rakes; for having the benefit of the clergy, they are as safe as
  thieves in a mill within this sanctuary.
  
  But, asked Pantagruel, do these birds never return to the world where they
  were hatched?  Some do, answered Aedituus; formerly very few, very seldom,
  very late, and very unwillingly; however, since some certain eclipses, by
  the virtue of the celestial constellations, a great crowd of them fled back
  to the world.  Nor do we fret or vex ourselves a jot about it; for those
  that stay wisely sing, The fewer the better cheer; and all those that fly
  away, first cast off their feathers here among these nettles and briars.
  
  Accordingly we found some thrown by there; and as we looked up and down, we
  chanced to light on what some people will hardly thank us for having
  discovered; and thereby hangs a tale.
  
  
  
  
  Of the dumb Knight-hawks of the Ringing Island.
  
  These words were scarce out of his mouth when some five-and-twenty or
  thirty birds flew towards us; they were of a hue and feather like which we
  had not seen anything in the whole island.  Their plumes were as changeable
  as the skin of the chameleon, and the flower of tripolion, or teucrion.
  They had all under the left wing a mark like two diameters dividing a
  circle into equal parts, or, if you had rather have it so, like a
  perpendicular line falling on a right line.  The marks which each of them
  bore were much of the same shape, but of different colours; for some were
  white, others green, some red, others purple, and some blue.  Who are
  those? asked Panurge; and how do you call them?  They are mongrels, quoth
  Aedituus.
  
  We call them knight-hawks, and they have a great number of rich
  commanderies (fat livings) in your world.  Good your worship, said I, make
  them give us a song, an't please you, that we may know how they sing.  They
  scorn your words, cried Aedituus; they are none of your singing-birds; but,
  to make amends, they feed as much as the best two of them all.  Pray where
  are their hens? where are their females? said I.  They have none, answered
  Aedituus.  How comes it to pass then, asked Panurge, that they are thus
  bescabbed, bescurfed, all embroidered o'er the phiz with carbuncles,
  pushes, and pock-royals, some of which undermine the handles of their
  faces?  This same fashionable and illustrious disease, quoth Aedituus, is
  common among that kind of birds, because they are pretty apt to be tossed
  on the salt deep.
  
  He then acquainted us with the occasion of their coming.  This next to us,
  said he, looks so wistfully upon you to see whether he may not find among
  your company a stately gaudy kind of huge dreadful birds of prey, which yet
  are so untoward that they ne'er could be brought to the lure nor to perch
  on the glove.  They tell us that there are such in your world, and that
  some of them have goodly garters below the knee with an inscription about
  them which condemns him (qui mal y pense) who shall think ill of it to be
  berayed and conskited.  Others are said to wear the devil in a string
  before their paunches; and others a ram's skin.  All that's true enough,
  good Master Aedituus, quoth Panurge; but we have not the honour to be
  acquainted with their knightships.
  
  Come on, cried Aedituus in a merry mood, we have had chat enough o'
  conscience! let's e'en go drink.  And eat, quoth Panurge.  Eat, replied
  Aedituus, and drink bravely, old boy; twist like plough-jobbers and swill
  like tinkers.  Pull away and save tide, for nothing is so dear and precious
  as time; therefore we will be sure to put it to a good use.
  
  He would fain have carried us first to bathe in the bagnios of the
  cardin-hawks, which are goodly delicious places, and have us licked over
  with precious ointments by the alyptes, alias rubbers, as soon as we should
  come out of the bath.  But Pantagruel told him that he could drink but too
  much without that.  He then led us into a spacious delicate refectory, or
  fratery-room, and told us:  Braguibus the hermit made you fast four days
  together; now, contrariwise, I'll make you eat and drink of the best four
  days through stitch before you budge from this place.  But hark ye me, cried
  Panurge, may not we take a nap in the mean time?  Ay, ay, answered Aedituus;
  that is as you shall think good; for he that sleeps, drinks. Good Lord! how
  we lived! what good bub! what dainty cheer!  O what a honest cod was this
  same Aedituus!
  
  
  
  
  How the birds are crammed in the Ringing Island.
  
  Pantagruel looked I don't know howish, and seemed not very well pleased
  with the four days' junketting which Aedituus enjoined us.  Aedituus, who
  soon found it out, said to him, You know, sir, that seven days before
  winter, and seven days after, there is no storm at sea; for then the
  elements are still out of respect for the halcyons, or king-fishers, birds
  sacred to Thetis, which then lay their eggs and hatch their young near the
  shore.  Now here the sea makes itself amends for this long calm; and
  whenever any foreigners come hither it grows boisterous and stormy for four
  days together.  We can give no other reason for it but that it is a piece
  of its civility, that those who come among us may stay whether they will or
  no, and be copiously feasted all the while with the incomes of the ringing.
  Therefore pray don't think your time lost; for, willing, nilling, you'll be
  forced to stay, unless you are resolved to encounter Juno, Neptune, Doris,
  Aeolus, and his fluster-busters, and, in short, all the pack of ill-natured
  left-handed godlings and vejoves.  Do but resolve to be cheery, and fall-to
  briskly.
  
  After we had pretty well stayed our stomachs with some tight snatches,
  Friar John said to Aedituus, For aught I see, you have none but a parcel of
  birds and cages in this island of yours, and the devil a bit of one of them
  all that sets his hand to the plough, or tills the land whose fat he
  devours; their whole business is to be frolic, to chirp it, to whistle it,
  to warble it, tossing it, and roar it merrily night and day.  Pray then, if
  I may be so bold, whence comes this plenty and overflowing of all dainty
  bits and good things which we see among you?  From all the other world,
  returned Aedituus, if you except some part of the northern regions, who of
  late years have stirred up the jakes.  Mum! they may chance ere long to rue
  the day they did so; their cows shall have porridge, and their dogs oats;
  there will be work made among them, that there will.  Come, a fig for't,
  let's drink.  But pray what countrymen are you?  Touraine is our country,
  answered Panurge.  Cod so, cried Aedituus, you were not then hatched of an
  ill bird, I will say that for you, since the blessed Touraine is your
  mother; for from thence there comes hither every year such a vast store of
  good things, that we were told by some folks of the place that happened to
  touch at this island, that your Duke of Touraine's income will not afford
  him to eat his bellyful of beans and bacon (a good dish spoiled between
  Moses and Pythagoras) because his predecessors have been more than liberal
  to these most holy birds of ours, that we might here munch it, twist it,
  cram it, gorge it, craw it, riot it, junket it, and tickle it off, stuffing
  our puddings with dainty pheasants, partridges, pullets with eggs, fat
  capons of Loudunois, and all sorts of venison and wild fowl.  Come, box it
  about; tope on, my friends.  Pray do you see yon jolly birds that are
  perched together, how fat, how plump, and in good case they look, with the
  income that Touraine yields us!  And in faith they sing rarely for their
  good founders, that is the truth on't.  You never saw any Arcadian birds
  mumble more fairly than they do over a dish when they see these two gilt
  batons, or when I ring for them those great bells that you see above their
  cages.  Drink on, sirs, whip it away.  Verily, friends, 'tis very fine
  drinking to-day, and so 'tis every day o' the week; then drink on, toss it
  about, here's to you with all my soul.  You are most heartily welcome;
  never spare it, I pray you; fear not we should ever want good bub and
  belly-timber; for, look here, though the sky were of brass, and the earth
  of iron, we should not want wherewithal to stuff the gut, though they were
  to continue so seven or eight years longer than the famine in Egypt.  Let
  us then, with brotherly love and charity, refresh ourselves here with the
  creature.
  
  Woons, man, cried Panurge, what a rare time you have on't in this world!
  Psha, returned Aedituus, this is nothing to what we shall have in t'other;
  the Elysian fields will be the least that can fall to our lot.  Come, in
  the meantime let us drink here; come, here's to thee, old fuddlecap.
  
  Your first Siticines, said I, were superlatively wise in devising thus a
  means for you to compass whatever all men naturally covet so much, and so
  few, or, to speak more properly, none can enjoy together--I mean, a
  paradise in this life, and another in the next.  Sure you were born wrapt
  in your mother's smickets!  O happy creatures!  O more than men!  Would I
  had the luck to fare like you!  (Motteux inserts Chapter XVI. after Chapter
  VI.)
  
  
  
  
  How Panurge related to Master Aedituus the fable of the horse and the ass.
  
  When we had crammed and crammed again, Aedituus took us into a chamber that
  was well furnished, hung with tapestry, and finely gilt.  Thither he caused
  to be brought store of mirobolans, cashou, green ginger preserved, with
  plenty of hippocras, and delicious wine.  With those antidotes, that were
  like a sweet Lethe, he invited us to forget the hardships of our voyage;
  and at the same time he sent plenty of provisions on board our ship that
  rid in the harbour.  After this, we e'en jogged to bed for that night; but
  the devil a bit poor pilgarlic could sleep one wink--the everlasting
  jingle-jangle of the bells kept me awake whether I would or no.
  
  About midnight Aedituus came to wake us that we might drink.  He himself
  showed us the way, saying:  You men of t'other world say that ignorance is
  the mother of all evil, and so far you are right; yet for all that you do
  not take the least care to get rid of it, but still plod on, and live in
  it, with it, and by it; for which a plaguy deal of mischief lights on you
  every day, and you are right enough served--you are perpetually ailing
  somewhat, making a moan, and never right.  It is what I was ruminating upon
  just now.  And, indeed, ignorance keeps you here fastened in bed, just as
  that bully-rock Mars was detained by Vulcan's art; for all the while you do
  not mind that you ought to spare some of your rest, and be as lavish as you
  can of the goods of this famous island.  Come, come, you should have eaten
  three breakfasts already; and take this from me for a certain truth, that
  if you would consume the mouth-ammunition of this island, you must rise
  betimes; eat them, they multiply; spare them, they diminish.
  
  For example, mow a field in due season, and the grass will grow thicker and
  better; don't mow it, and in a short time 'twill be floored with moss.
  Let's drink, and drink again, my friends; come, let's all carouse it.  The
  leanest of our birds are now singing to us all; we'll drink to them, if you
  please.  Let's take off one, two, three, nine bumpers.  Non zelus, sed
  caritas.
  
  When day, peeping in the east, made the sky turn from black to red like a
  boiling lobster, he waked us again to take a dish of monastical brewis.
  From that time we made but one meal, that only lasted the whole day; so
  that I cannot well tell how I may call it, whether dinner, supper,
  nunchion, or after-supper; only, to get a stomach, we took a turn or two in
  the island, to see and hear the blessed singing-birds.
  
  At night Panurge said to Aedituus:  Give me leave, sweet sir, to tell you a
  merry story of something that happened some three and twenty moons ago in
  the country of Chastelleraud.
  
  One day in April, a certain gentleman's groom, Roger by name, was walking
  his master's horses in some fallow ground.  There 'twas his good fortune to
  find a pretty shepherdess feeding her bleating sheep and harmless lambkins
  on the brow of a neighbouring mountain, in the shade of an adjacent grove;
  near her, some frisking kids tripped it over a green carpet of nature's own
  spreading, and, to complete the landscape, there stood an ass.  Roger, who
  was a wag, had a dish of chat with her, and after some ifs, ands, and buts,
  hems and heighs on her side, got her in the mind to get up behind him, to
  go and see his stable, and there take a bit by the bye in a civil way.
  While they were holding a parley, the horse, directing his discourse to the
  ass (for all brute beasts spoke that year in divers places), whispered
  these words in his ear:  Poor ass, how I pity thee! thou slavest like any
  hack, I read it on thy crupper.  Thou dost well, however, since God has
  created thee to serve mankind; thou art a very honest ass, but not to be
  better rubbed down, currycombed, trapped, and fed than thou art, seems to
  me indeed to be too hard a lot.  Alas! thou art all rough-coated, in ill
  plight, jaded, foundered, crestfallen, and drooping, like a mooting duck,
  and feedest here on nothing but coarse grass, or briars and thistles.
  Therefore do but pace it along with me, and thou shalt see how we noble
  steeds, made by nature for war, are treated.  Come, thou'lt lose nothing by
  coming; I'll get thee a taste of my fare.  I' troth, sir, I can but love
  you and thank you, returned the ass; I'll wait on you, good Mr. Steed.
  Methinks, gaffer ass, you might as well have said Sir Grandpaw Steed.  O!
  cry mercy, good Sir Grandpaw, returned the ass; we country clowns are
  somewhat gross, and apt to knock words out of joint.  However, an't please
  you, I will come after your worship at some distance, lest for taking this
  run my side should chance to be firked and curried with a vengeance, as it
  is but too often, the more is my sorrow.
  
  The shepherdess being got behind Roger, the ass followed, fully resolved to
  bait like a prince with Roger's steed; but when they got to the stable, the
  groom, who spied the grave animal, ordered one of his underlings to welcome
  him with a pitchfork and currycomb him with a cudgel.  The ass, who heard
  this, recommended himself mentally to the god Neptune, and was packing off,
  thinking and syllogizing within himself thus:  Had not I been an ass, I had
  not come here among great lords, when I must needs be sensible that I was
  only made for the use of the small vulgar.  Aesop had given me a fair
  warning of this in one of his fables.  Well, I must e'en scamper or take
  what follows.  With this he fell a-trotting, and wincing, and yerking, and
  calcitrating, alias kicking, and farting, and funking, and curvetting, and
  bounding, and springing, and galloping full drive, as if the devil had come
  for him in propria persona.
  
  The shepherdess, who saw her ass scour off, told Roger that it was her
  cattle, and desired he might be kindly used, or else she would not stir her
  foot over the threshold.  Friend Roger no sooner knew this but he ordered
  him to be fetched in, and that my master's horses should rather chop straw
  for a week together than my mistress's beast should want his bellyful of
  corn.
  
  The most difficult point was to get him back; for in vain the youngsters
  complimented and coaxed him to come.  I dare not, said the ass; I am
  bashful.  And the more they strove by fair means to bring him with them,
  the more the stubborn thing was untoward, and flew out at the heels;
  insomuch that they might have been there to this hour, had not his mistress
  advised them to toss oats in a sieve or in a blanket, and call him; which
  was done, and made him wheel about and say, Oats, with a witness! oats
  shall go to pot.  Adveniat; oats will do, there's evidence in the case; but
  none of the rubbing down, none of the firking.  Thus melodiously singing
  (for, as you know, that Arcadian bird's note is very harmonious) he came to
  the young gentleman of the horse, alias black garb, who brought him to the
  stable.
  
  When he was there, they placed him next to the great horse his friend,
  rubbed him down, currycombed him, laid clean straw under him up to the
  chin, and there he lay at rack and manger, the first stuffed with sweet
  hay, the latter with oats; which when the horse's valet-dear-chambre
  sifted, he clapped down his lugs, to tell them by signs that he could eat
  it but too well without sifting, and that he did not deserve so great an
  honour.
  
  When they had well fed, quoth the horse to the ass;  Well, poor ass, how is
  it with thee now?  How dost thou like this fare?  Thou wert so nice at
  first, a body had much ado to get thee hither.  By the fig, answered the
  ass, which, one of our ancestors eating, Philemon died laughing, this is
  all sheer ambrosia, good Sir Grandpaw; but what would you have an ass say?
  Methinks all this is yet but half cheer.  Don't your worships here now and
  then use to take a leap?  What leaping dost thou mean? asked the horse; the
  devil leap thee! dost thou take me for an ass?  In troth, Sir Grandpaw,
  quoth the ass, I am somewhat of a blockhead, you know, and cannot, for the
  heart's blood of me, learn so fast the court way of speaking of you
  gentlemen horses; I mean, don't you stallionize it sometimes here among
  your mettled fillies?  Tush, whispered the horse, speak lower; for, by
  Bucephalus, if the grooms but hear thee they will maul and belam thee
  thrice and threefold, so that thou wilt have but little stomach to a
  leaping bout.  Cod so, man, we dare not so much as grow stiff at the tip of
  the lowermost snout, though it were but to leak or so, for fear of being
  jerked and paid out of our lechery.  As for anything else, we are as happy
  as our master, and perhaps more.  By this packsaddle, my old acquaintance,
  quoth the ass, I have done with you; a fart for thy litter and hay, and a
  fart for thy oats; give me the thistles of our fields, since there we leap
  when we list.  Eat less, and leap more, I say; it is meat, drink, and cloth
  to us.  Ah! friend Grandpaw, it would do thy heart good to see us at a
  fair, when we hold our provincial chapter!  Oh! how we leap it, while our
  mistresses are selling their goslings and other poultry!  With this they
  parted.  Dixi; I have done.
  
  Panurge then held his peace.  Pantagruel would have had him to have gone on
  to the end of the chapter; but Aedituus said, A word to the wise is enough;
  I can pick out the meaning of that fable, and know who is that ass, and who
  the horse; but you are a bashful youth, I perceive.  Well, know that
  there's nothing for you here; scatter no words.  Yet, returned Panurge, I
  saw but even now a pretty kind of a cooing abbess-kite as white as a dove,
  and her I had rather ride than lead.  May I never stir if she is not a
  dainty bit, and very well worth a sin or two.  Heaven forgive me! I meant
  no more harm in it than you; may the harm I meant in it befall me
  presently.
  
  
  
  
  How with much ado we got a sight of the pope-hawk.
  
  Our junketting and banqueting held on at the same rate the third day as the
  two former.  Pantagruel then earnestly desired to see the pope-hawk; but
  Aedituus told him it was not such an easy matter to get a sight of him.
  How, asked Pantagruel, has he Plato's helmet on his crown, Gyges's ring on
  his pounces, or a chameleon on his breast, to make him invisible when he
  pleases?  No, sir, returned Aedituus; but he is naturally of pretty
  difficult access.  However, I'll see and take care that you may see him, if
  possible.  With this he left us piddling; then within a quarter of an hour
  came back, and told us the pope-hawk is now to be seen.  So he led us,
  without the least noise, directly to the cage wherein he sat drooping, with
  his feathers staring about him, attended by a brace of little cardin-hawks
  and six lusty fusty bish-hawks.
  
  Panurge stared at him like a dead pig, examining exactly his figure, size,
  and motions.  Then with a loud voice he said, A curse light on the hatcher
  of the ill bird; o' my word, this is a filthy whoop-hooper.  Tush, speak
  softly, said Aedituus; by G--, he has a pair of ears, as formerly Michael
  de Matiscones remarked.  What then? returned Panurge; so hath a whoopcat.
  So, said Aedituus; if he but hear you speak such another blasphemous word,
  you had as good be damned.  Do you see that basin yonder in his cage?  Out
  of it shall sally thunderbolts and lightnings, storms, bulls, and the devil
  and all, that will sink you down to Peg Trantum's, an hundred fathom under
  ground.  It were better to drink and be merry, quoth Friar John.
  
  Panurge was still feeding his eyes with the sight of the pope-hawk and his
  attendants, when somewhere under his cage he perceived a madge-howlet.
  With this he cried out, By the devil's maker, master, there's roguery in
  the case; they put tricks upon travellers here more than anywhere else, and
  would make us believe that a t--d's a sugarloaf.  What damned cozening,
  gulling, and coney-catching have we here!  Do you see this madge-howlet?
  By Minerva, we are all beshit.  Odsoons, said Aedituus, speak softly, I
  tell you.  It is no madge-howlet, no she-thing on my honest word; but a
  male, and a noble bird.
  
  May we not hear the pope-hawk sing? asked Pantagruel.  I dare not promise
  that, returned Aedituus; for he only sings and eats at his own hours.  So
  don't I, quoth Panurge; poor pilgarlic is fain to make everybody's time his
  own; if they have time, I find time.  Come, then, let us go drink, if you
  will.  Now this is something like a tansy, said Aedituus; you begin to talk
  somewhat like; still speak in that fashion, and I'll secure you from being
  thought a heretic.  Come on, I am of your mind.
  
  As we went back to have t'other fuddling bout, we spied an old green-headed
  bish-hawk, who sat moping with his mate and three jolly bittern attendants,
  all snoring under an arbour.  Near the old cuff stood a buxom abbess-kite
  that sung like any linnet; and we were so mightily tickled with her singing
  that I vow and swear we could have wished all our members but one turned
  into ears, to have had more of the melody.  Quoth Panurge, This pretty
  cherubim of cherubims is here breaking her head with chanting to this huge,
  fat, ugly face, who lies grunting all the while like a hog as he is.  I
  will make him change his note presently, in the devil's name.  With this he
  rang a bell that hung over the bish-hawk's head; but though he rang and
  rang again, the devil a bit bish-hawk would hear; the louder the sound, the
  louder his snoring.  There was no making him sing.  By G--, quoth Panurge,
  you old buzzard, if you won't sing by fair means, you shall by foul.
  Having said this, he took up one of St. Stephen's loaves, alias a stone,
  and was going to hit him with it about the middle.  But Aedituus cried to
  him, Hold, hold, honest friend! strike, wound, poison, kill, and murder all
  the kings and princes in the world, by treachery or how thou wilt, and as
  soon as thou wouldst unnestle the angels from their cockloft.  Pope-hawk
  will pardon thee all this.  But never be so mad as to meddle with these
  sacred birds, as much as thou lovest the profit, welfare, and life not only
  of thyself, and thy friends and relations alive or dead, but also of those
  that may be born hereafter to the thousandth generation; for so long thou
  wouldst entail misery upon them.  Do but look upon that basin.  Catso! let
  us rather drink, then, quoth Panurge.  He that spoke last, spoke well, Mr.
  Antitus, quoth Friar John; while we are looking on these devilish birds we
  do nothing but blaspheme; and while we are taking a cup we do nothing but
  praise God.  Come on, then, let's go drink; how well that word sounds!
  
  The third day (after we had drank, as you must understand) Aedituus
  dismissed us.  We made him a present of a pretty little Perguois knife,
  which he took more kindly than Artaxerxes did the cup of cold water that
  was given him by a clown.  He most courteously thanked us, and sent all
  sorts of provisions aboard our ships, wished us a prosperous voyage and
  success in our undertakings, and made us promise and swear by Jupiter of
  stone to come back by his territories.  Finally he said to us, Friends,
  pray note that there are many more stones in the world than men; take care
  you don't forget it.
  
  
  
  
  How we arrived at the island of Tools.
  
  
  Having well ballasted the holds of our human vessels, we weighed anchor,
  hoised up sail, stowed the boats, set the land, and stood for the offing
  with a fair loom gale, and for more haste unpareled the mizen-yard, and
  launched it and the sail over the lee-quarter, and fitted gyves to keep it
  steady, and boomed it out; so in three days we made the island of Tools,
  that is altogether uninhabited.  We saw there a great number of trees which
  bore mattocks, pickaxes, crows, weeding-hooks, scythes, sickles, spades,
  trowels, hatchets, hedging-bills, saws, adzes, bills, axes, shears,
  pincers, bolts, piercers, augers, and wimbles.
  
  Others bore dags, daggers, poniards, bayonets, square-bladed tucks,
  stilettoes, poniardoes, skeans, penknives, puncheons, bodkins, swords,
  rapiers, back-swords, cutlasses, scimitars, hangers, falchions, glaives,
  raillons, whittles, and whinyards.
  
  Whoever would have any of these needed but to shake the tree, and
  immediately they dropped down as thick as hops, like so many ripe plums;
  nay, what's more, they fell on a kind of grass called scabbard, and
  sheathed themselves in it cleverly.  But when they came down, there was
  need of taking care lest they happened to touch the head, feet, or other
  parts of the body.  For they fell with the point downwards, and in they
  stuck, or slit the continuum of some member, or lopped it off like a twig;
  either of which generally was enough to have killed a man, though he were a
  hundred years old, and worth as many thousand spankers, spur-royals, and
  rose-nobles.
  
  Under some other trees, whose names I cannot justly tell you, I saw some
  certain sorts of weeds that grew and sprouted like pikes, lances, javelins,
  javelots, darts, dartlets, halberds, boar-spears, eel-spears, partizans,
  tridents, prongs, trout-staves, spears, half-pikes, and hunting-staves.  As
  they sprouted up and chanced to touch the tree, straight they met with
  their heads, points, and blades, each suitable to its kind, made ready for
  them by the trees over them, as soon as every individual wood was grown up,
  fit for its steel; even like the children's coats, that are made for them
  as soon as they can wear them and you wean them of their swaddling clothes.
  Nor do you mutter, I pray you, at what Plato, Anaxagoras, and Democritus
  have said.  Ods-fish! they were none of your lower-form gimcracks, were
  they?
  
  Those trees seemed to us terrestrial animals, in no wise so different from
  brute beasts as not to have skin, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments,
  nerves, cartilages, kernels, bones, marrow, humours, matrices, brains, and
  articulations; for they certainly have some, since Theophrastus will have
  it so.  But in this point they differed from other animals, that their
  heads, that is, the part of their trunks next to the root, are downwards;
  their hair, that is, their roots, in the earth; and their feet, that is,
  their branches, upside down; as if a man should stand on his head with
  outstretched legs.  And as you, battered sinners, on whom Venus has
  bestowed something to remember her, feel the approach of rains, winds,
  cold, and every change of weather, at your ischiatic legs and your
  omoplates, by means of the perpetual almanack which she has fixed there; so
  these trees have notice given them, by certain sensations which they have
  at their roots, stocks, gums, paps, or marrow, of the growth of the staves
  under them, and accordingly they prepare suitable points and blades for
  them beforehand.  Yet as all things, except God, are sometimes subject to
  error, nature itself not free from it when it produceth monstrous things,
  likewise I observed something amiss in these trees.  For a half-pike that
  grew up high enough to reach the branches of one of these instrumentiferous
  trees, happened no sooner to touch them but, instead of being joined to an
  iron head, it impaled a stubbed broom at the fundament.  Well, no matter,
  'twill serve to sweep the chimney.  Thus a partizan met with a pair of
  garden shears.  Come, all's good for something; 'twill serve to nip off
  little twigs and destroy caterpillars.  The staff of a halberd got the
  blade of a scythe, which made it look like a hermaphrodite.
  Happy-be-lucky, 'tis all a case; 'twill serve for some mower.  Oh, 'tis a
  great blessing to put our trust in the Lord!  As we went back to our ships I
  spied behind I don't know what bush, I don't know what folks, doing I don't
  know what business, in I don't know what posture, scouring I don't know what
  tools, in I don't know what manner, and I don't know what place.
  
  
  
  
  How Pantagruel arrived at the island of Sharping.
  
  We left the island of Tools to pursue our voyage, and the next day stood in
  for the island of Sharping, the true image of Fontainebleau, for the land
  is so very lean that the bones, that is, the rocks, shoot through its skin.
  Besides, 'tis sandy, barren, unhealthy, and unpleasant.  Our pilot showed
  us there two little square rocks which had eight equal points in the shape
  of a cube.  They were so white that I might have mistaken them for
  alabaster or snow, had he not assured us they were made of bone.
  
  He told us that twenty chance devils very much feared in our country dwelt
  there in six different storeys, and that the biggest twins or braces of
  them were called sixes, and the smallest ambs-ace; the rest cinques,
  quatres, treys, and deuces.  When they were conjured up, otherwise coupled,
  they were called either sice cinque, sice quatre, sice trey, sice deuce,
  and sice ace; or cinque quatre, cinque trey, and so forth.  I made there a
  shrewd observation.  Would you know what 'tis, gamesters?  'Tis that there
  are very few of you in the world but what call upon and invoke the devils.
  For the dice are no sooner thrown on the board, and the greedy gazing
  sparks have hardly said, Two sixes, Frank; but Six devils damn it! cry as
  many of them.  If ambs-ace; then, A brace of devils broil me! will they
  say.  Quatre-deuce, Tom; The deuce take it! cries another.  And so on to
  the end of the chapter.  Nay, they don't forget sometimes to call the black
  cloven-footed gentlemen by their Christian names and surnames; and what is
  stranger yet, they use them as their greatest cronies, and make them so
  often the executors of their wills, not only giving themselves, but
  everybody and everything, to the devil, that there's no doubt but he takes
  care to seize, soon or late, what's so zealously bequeathed him.  Indeed,
  'tis true Lucifer does not always immediately appear by his lawful
  attorneys; but, alas! 'tis not for want of goodwill; he is really to be
  excused for his delay; for what the devil would you have a devil do?  He
  and his black guards are then at some other places, according to the
  priority of the persons that call on them; therefore, pray let none be so
  venturesome as to think that the devils are deaf and blind.
  
  He then told us that more wrecks had happened about those square rocks, and
  a greater loss of body and goods, than about all the Syrtes, Scyllas and
  Charybdes, Sirens, Strophades, and gulfs in the universe.  I had not much
  ado to believe it, remembering that formerly, among the wise Egyptians,
  Neptune was described in hieroglyphics for the first cube, Apollo by an
  ace, Diana by a deuce, Minerva by seven, and so forth.
  
  He also told us that there was a phial of sanc-greal, a most divine thing,
  and known to a few.  Panurge did so sweeten up the syndics of the place
  that they blessed us with the sight of 't; but it was with three times more
  pother and ado, with more formalities and antic tricks, than they show the
  pandects of Justinian at Florence, or the holy Veronica at Rome.  I never
  saw such a sight of flambeaux, torches, and hagios, sanctified tapers,
  rush-lights, and farthing candles in my whole life.  After all, that which
  was shown us was only the ill-faced countenance of a roasted coney.
  
  All that we saw there worth speaking of was a good face set upon an ill
  game, and the shells of the two eggs formerly laid up and hatched by Leda,
  out of which came Castor and Pollux, fair Helen's brothers.  These same
  syndics sold us a piece of 'em for a song, I mean, for a morsel of bread.
  Before we went we bought a parcel of hats and caps of the manufacture of
  the place, which, I fear, will turn to no very good account; nor are those
  who shall take 'em off our hands more likely to commend their wearing.
  
  
  
  
  How we passed through the wicket inhabited by Gripe-men-all, Archduke of
  the Furred Law-cats.
  
  From thence Condemnation was passed by us.  'Tis another damned barren
  island, whereat none for the world cared to touch.  Then we went through
  the wicket; but Pantagruel had no mind to bear us company, and 'twas well
  he did not, for we were nabbed there, and clapped into lob's-pound by order
  of Gripe-men-all, Archduke of the Furred Law-cats, because one of our
  company would ha' put upon a sergeant some hats of the Sharping Island.
  
  The Furred Law-cats are most terrible and dreadful monsters, they devour
  little children, and trample over marble stones.  Pray tell me, noble
  topers, do they not deserve to have their snouts slit?  The hair of their
  hides doesn't lie outward, but inwards, and every mother's son of 'em for
  his device wears a gaping pouch, but not all in the same manner; for some
  wear it tied to their neck scarfwise, others upon the breech, some on the
  paunch, others on the side, and all for a cause, with reason and mystery.
  They have claws so very strong, long, and sharp that nothing can get from
  'em that is once fast between their clutches.  Sometimes they cover their
  heads with mortar-like caps, at other times with mortified caparisons.
  
  As we entered their den, said a common mumper, to whom we had given half a
  teston, Worshipful culprits, God send you a good deliverance!  Examine
  well, said he, the countenance of these stout props and pillars of this
  catch-coin law and iniquity; and pray observe, that if you still live but
  six olympiads, and the age of two dogs more, you'll see these Furred
  Law-cats lords of all Europe, and in peaceful possession of all the estates
  and dominions belonging to it; unless, by divine providence, what's got over
  the devil's back is spent under his belly, or the goods which they unjustly
  get perish with their prodigal heirs.  Take this from an honest beggar.
  
  Among 'em reigns the sixth essence; by the means of which they gripe all,
  devour all, conskite all, burn all, draw all, hang all, quarter all, behead
  all, murder all, imprison all, waste all, and ruin all, without the least
  notice of right or wrong; for among them vice is called virtue; wickedness,
  piety; treason, loyalty; robbery, justice.  Plunder is their motto, and
  when acted by them is approved by all men, except the heretics; and all
  this they do because they dare; their authority is sovereign and
  irrefragable.  For a sign of the truth of what I tell you, you'll find that
  there the mangers are above the racks.  Remember hereafter that a fool told
  you this; and if ever plague, famine, war, fire, earthquakes, inundations,
  or other judgments befall the world, do not attribute 'em to the aspects
  and conjunctions of the malevolent planets; to the abuses of the court of
  Romania, or the tyranny of secular kings and princes; to the impostures of
  the false zealots of the cowl, heretical bigots, false prophets, and
  broachers of sects; to the villainy of griping usurers, clippers, and
  coiners; or to the ignorance, impudence, and imprudence of physicians,
  surgeons, and apothecaries; nor to the lewdness of adulteresses and
  destroyers of by-blows; but charge them all, wholly and solely, to the
  inexpressible, incredible, and inestimable wickedness and ruin which is
  continually hatched, brewed, and practised in the den or shop of those
  Furred Law-cats.  Yet 'tis no more known in the world than the cabala of
  the Jews, the more's the pity; and therefore 'tis not detested, chastised,
  and punished as 'tis fit it should be.  But should all their villainy be
  once displayed in its true colours and exposed to the people, there never
  was, is, nor will be any spokesman so sweet-mouthed, whose fine colloguing
  tongue could save 'em; nor any law so rigorous and draconic that could
  punish 'em as they deserve; nor yet any magistrate so powerful as to hinder
  their being burnt alive in their coneyburrows without mercy.  Even their
  own furred kittlings, friends, and relations would abominate 'em.
  
  For this reason, as Hannibal was solemnly sworn by his father Amilcar to
  pursue the Romans with the utmost hatred as long as ever he lived, so my
  late father has enjoined me to remain here without, till God Almighty's
  thunder reduce them there within to ashes, like other presumptuous Titans,
  profane wretches, and opposers of God; since mankind is so inured to their
  oppressions that they either do not remember, foresee, or have a sense of
  the woes and miseries which they have caused; or, if they have, either will
  not, dare not, or cannot root 'em out.
  
  How, said Panurge, say you so?  Catch me there and hang me!  Damme, let's
  march off!  This noble beggar has scared me worse than thunder in autumn
  (Motteux gives 'than the thunder would do them.').  Upon this we were
  filing off; but, alas! we found ourselves trapped--the door was
  double-locked and barricadoed.  Some messengers of ill news told us it was
  full as easy to get in there as into hell, and no less hard to get out.  Ay,
  there indeed lay the difficulty, for there is no getting loose without a
  pass and discharge in due course from the bench.  This for no other reason
  than because folks go easier out of a church than out of a sponging-house,
  and because they could not have our company when they would.  The worst on't
  was when we got through the wicket; for we were carried, to get out our pass
  or discharge, before a more dreadful monster than ever was read of in the
  legends of knight-errantry.  They called him Gripe-men-all.  I can't tell
  what to compare it to better than to a Chimaera, a Sphinx, a Cerberus; or to
  the image of Osiris, as the Egyptians represented him, with three heads, one
  of a roaring lion, t'other of a fawning cur, and the last of a howling,
  prowling wolf, twisted about with a dragon biting his tail, surrounded with
  fiery rays.  His hands were full of gore, his talons like those of the
  harpies, his snout like a hawk's bill, his fangs or tusks like those of an
  overgrown brindled wild boar; his eyes were flaming like the jaws of hell,
  all covered with mortars interlaced with pestles, and nothing of his arms
  was to be seen but his clutches.  His hutch, and that of the warren-cats his
  collaterals, was a long, spick-and-span new rack, a-top of which (as the
  mumper told us) some large stately mangers were fixed in the reverse.  Over
  the chief seat was the picture of an old woman holding the case or scabbard
  of a sickle in her right hand, a pair of scales in her left, with spectacles
  on her nose; the cups or scales of the balance were a pair of velvet
  pouches, the one full of bullion, which overpoised t'other, empty and long,
  hoisted higher than the middle of the beam.  I'm of opinion it was the true
  effigies of Justice Gripe-men-all; far different from the institution of the
  ancient Thebans, who set up the statues of their dicasts without hands, in
  marble, silver, or gold, according to their merit, even after their death.
  
  When we made our personal appearance before him, a sort of I don't know
  what men, all clothed with I don't know what bags and pouches, with long
  scrolls in their clutches, made us sit down upon a cricket (such as
  criminals sit on when tried in France).  Quoth Panurge to 'em, Good my
  lords, I'm very well as I am; I'd as lief stand, an't please you.  Besides,
  this same stool is somewhat of the lowest for a man that has new breeches
  and a short doublet.  Sit you down, said Gripe-men-all again, and look that
  you don't make the court bid you twice.  Now, continued he, the earth shall
  immediately open its jaws and swallow you up to quick damnation if you
  don't answer as you should.
  
  
  
  
  How Gripe-men-all propounded a riddle to us.
  
  When we were sat, Gripe-men-all, in the middle of his furred cats, called
  to us in a hoarse dreadful voice, Well, come on, give me presently--an
  answer.  Well, come on, muttered Panurge between his teeth, give, give me
  presently--a comforting dram.  Hearken to the court, continued
  Gripe-men-all.
  
                  An Enigma.
  
    A young tight thing, as fair as may be,
    Without a dad conceived a baby,
    And brought him forth without the pother
    In labour made by teeming mother.
    Yet the cursed brat feared not to gripe her,
    But gnawed, for haste, her sides like viper.
    Then the black upstart boldly sallies,
    And walks and flies o'er hills and valleys.
    Many fantastic sons of wisdom,
    Amazed, foresaw their own in his doom;
    And thought like an old Grecian noddy,
    A human spirit moved his body.
  
  Give, give me out of hand--an answer to this riddle, quoth Gripe-men-all.
  Give, give me--leave to tell you, good, good my lord, answered Panurge,
  that if I had but a sphinx at home, as Verres one of your precursors had, I
  might then solve your enigma presently.  But verily, good my lord, I was
  not there; and, as I hope to be saved, am as innocent in the matter as the
  child unborn.  Foh, give me--a better answer, cried Gripe-men-all; or, by
  gold, this shall not serve your turn.  I'll not be paid in such coin; if
  you have nothing better to offer, I'll let your rascalship know that it had
  been better for you to have fallen into Lucifer's own clutches than into
  ours.  Dost thou see 'em here, sirrah? hah? and dost thou prate here of thy
  being innocent, as if thou couldst be delivered from our racks and tortures
  for being so?  Give me--Patience! thou widgeon.  Our laws are like cobwebs;
  your silly little flies are stopped, caught, and destroyed therein, but
  your stronger ones break them, and force and carry them which way they
  please.  Likewise, don't think we are so mad as to set up our nets to snap
  up your great robbers and tyrants.  No, they are somewhat too hard for us,
  there's no meddling with them; for they would make no more of us than we
  make of the little ones.  But you paltry, silly, innocent wretches must
  make us amends; and, by gold, we will innocentize your fopship with a
  wannion, you never were so innocentized in your days; the devil shall sing
  mass among ye.
  
  Friar John, hearing him run on at that mad rate, had no longer the power to
  remain silent, but cried to him, Heigh-day!  Prithee, Mr. Devil in a coif,
  wouldst thou have a man tell thee more than he knows?  Hasn't the fellow
  told you he does not know a word of the business?  His name is Twyford.
  A plague rot you! won't truth serve your turns?  Why, how now,
  Mr. Prate-apace, cried Gripe-men-all, taking him short, marry come up, who
  made you so saucy as to open your lips before you were spoken to?  Give me
  --Patience!  By gold! this is the first time since I have reigned that
  anyone has had the impudence to speak before he was bidden.  How came this
  mad fellow to break loose?  (Villain, thou liest, said Friar John, without
  stirring his lips.)  Sirrah, sirrah, continued Gripe-men-all, I doubt thou
  wilt have business enough on thy hands when it comes to thy turn to answer.
  (Damme, thou liest, said Friar John, silently.)  Dost thou think, continued
  my lord, thou art in the wilderness of your foolish university, wrangling
  and bawling among the idle, wandering searchers and hunters after truth? By
  gold, we have here other fish to fry; we go another gate's-way to work, that
  we do.  By gold, people here must give categorical answers to what they
  don't know.  By gold, they must confess they have done those things which
  they have not nor ought to have done.  By gold, they must protest that they
  know what they never knew in their lives; and, after all, patience perforce
  must be their only remedy, as well as a mad dog's.  Here silly geese are
  plucked, yet cackle not.  Sirrah, give me--an account whether you had a
  letter of attorney, or whether you were feed or no, that you offered to bawl
  in another man's cause?  I see you had no authority to speak, and I may
  chance to have you wed to something you won't like.  Oh, you devils, cried
  Friar John, proto-devils, panto-devils, you would wed a monk, would you?  Ho
  hu! ho hu!  A heretic! a heretic!  I'll give thee out for a rank heretic.
  
  
  
  
  How Panurge solved Gripe-men-all's riddle.
  
  Gripe-men-all, as if he had not heard what Friar John said, directed his
  discourse to Panurge, saying to him, Well, what have you to say for
  yourself, Mr. Rogue-enough, hah?  Give, give me out of hand--an answer.
  Say? quoth Panurge; why, what would you have me say?  I say that we are
  damnably beshit, since you give no heed at all to the equity of the plea,
  and the devil sings among you.  Let this answer serve for all, I beseech
  you, and let us go out about our business; I am no longer able to hold out,
  as gad shall judge me.
  
  Go to, go to, cried Gripe-men-all; when did you ever hear that for these
  three hundred years last past anybody ever got out of this weel without
  leaving something of his behind him?  No, no, get out of the trap if you
  can without losing leather, life, or at least some hair, and you will have
  done more than ever was done yet.  For why, this would bring the wisdom of
  the court into question, as if we had took you up for nothing, and dealt
  wrongfully by you.  Well, by hook or by crook, we must have something out
  of you.  Look ye, it is a folly to make a rout for a fart and ado; one word
  is as good as twenty.  I have no more to say to thee, but that, as thou
  likest thy former entertainment, thou wilt tell me more of the next; for it
  will go ten times worse with thee unless, by gold, you give me--a solution
  to the riddle I propounded.  Give, give--it, without any more ado.
  
  By gold, quoth Panurge, 'tis a black mite or weevil which is born of a
  white bean, and sallies out at the hole which he makes gnawing it; the mite
  being turned into a kind of fly, sometimes walks and sometimes flies over
  hills and dales.  Now Pythagoras, the philosopher, and his sect, besides
  many others, wondering at its birth in such a place (which makes some argue
  for equivocal generation), thought that by a metempsychosis the body of
  that insect was the lodging of a human soul.  Now, were you men here, after
  your welcomed death, according to his opinion, your souls would most
  certainly enter into the body of mites or weevils; for in your present
  state of life you are good for nothing in the world but to gnaw, bite, eat,
  and devour all things, so in the next you'll e'en gnaw and devour your
  mother's very sides, as the vipers do.  Now, by gold, I think I have fairly
  solved and resolved your riddle.
  
  May my bauble be turned into a nutcracker, quoth Friar John, if I could not
  almost find in my heart to wish that what comes out at my bunghole were
  beans, that these evil weevils might feed as they deserve.
  
  Panurge then, without any more ado, threw a large leathern purse stuffed
  with gold crowns (ecus au soleil) among them.
  
  The Furred Law-cats no sooner heard the jingling of the chink but they all
  began to bestir their claws, like a parcel of fiddlers running a division;
  and then fell to't, squimble, squamble, catch that catch can.  They all
  said aloud, These are the fees, these are the gloves; now, this is somewhat
  like a tansy.  Oh! 'twas a pretty trial, a sweet trial, a dainty trial.  O'
  my word, they did not starve the cause.  These are none of your snivelling
  forma pauperis's; no, they are noble clients, gentlemen every inch of them.
  By gold, it is gold, quoth Panurge, good old gold, I'll assure you.
  
  Saith Gripe-men-all, The court, upon a full hearing (of the gold, quoth
  Panurge), and weighty reasons given, finds the prisoners not guilty, and
  accordingly orders them to be discharged out of custody, paying their fees.
  Now, gentlemen, proceed, go forwards, said he to us; we have not so much of
  the devil in us as we have of his hue; though we are stout, we are
  merciful.
  
  As we came out at the wicket, we were conducted to the port by a detachment
  of certain highland griffins, scribere cum dashoes, who advised us before
  we came to our ships not to offer to leave the place until we had made the
  usual presents, first to the Lady Gripe-men-all, then to all the Furred
  Law-pusses; otherwise we must return to the place from whence we came.
  Well, well, said Friar John, we'll fumble in our fobs, examine every one of
  us his concern, and e'en give the women their due; we'll ne'er boggle or
  stick out on that account; as we tickled the men in the palm, we'll tickle
  the women in the right place.  Pray, gentlemen, added they, don't forget to
  leave somewhat behind you for us poor devils to drink your healths.  O
  lawd! never fear, answered Friar John, I don't remember that I ever went
  anywhere yet where the poor devils are not remembered and encouraged.
  
  
  
  
  How the Furred Law-cats live on corruption.
  
  Friar John had hardly said those words ere he perceived seventy-eight
  galleys and frigates just arriving at the port.  So he hied him thither to
  learn some news; and as he asked what goods they had o' board, he soon
  found that their whole cargo was venison, hares, capons, turkeys, pigs,
  swine, bacon, kids, calves, hens, ducks, teals, geese, and other poultry
  and wildfowl.
  
  He also spied among these some pieces of velvet, satin, and damask.  This
  made him ask the new-comers whither and to whom they were going to carry
  those dainty goods.  They answered that they were for Gripe-men-all and the
  Furred Law-cats.
  
  Pray, asked he, what is the true name of all these things in your country
  language?  Corruption, they replied.  If they live on corruption, said the
  friar, they will perish with their generation.  May the devil be damned, I
  have it now:  their fathers devoured the good gentlemen who, according to
  their state of life, used to go much a-hunting and hawking, to be the
  better inured to toil in time of war; for hunting is an image of a martial
  life, and Xenophon was much in the right of it when he affirmed that
  hunting had yielded a great number of excellent warriors, as well as the
  Trojan horse.  For my part, I am no scholar; I have it but by hearsay, yet
  I believe it.  Now the souls of those brave fellows, according to
  Gripe-men-all's riddle, after their decease enter into wild boars, stags,
  roebucks, herns, and such other creatures which they loved, and in quest of
  which they went while they were men; and these Furred Law-cats, having
  first destroyed and devoured their castles, lands, demesnes, possessions,
  rents, and revenues, are still seeking to have their blood and soul in
  another life.  What an honest fellow was that same mumper who had
  forewarned us of all these things, and bid us take notice of the mangers
  above the racks!
  
  But, said Panurge to the new-comers, how do you come by all this venison?
  Methinks the great king has issued out a proclamation strictly inhibiting
  the destroying of stags, does, wild boars, roebucks, or other royal game,
  on pain of death.  All this is true enough, answered one for the rest, but
  the great king is so good and gracious, you must know, and these Furred
  Law-cats so curst and cruel, so mad, and thirsting after Christian blood,
  that we have less cause to fear in trespassing against that mighty
  sovereign's commands than reason to hope to live if we do not continually
  stop the mouths of these Furred Law-cats with such bribes and corruption.
  Besides, added he, to-morrow Gripe-men-all marries a furred law-puss of his
  to a high and mighty double-furred law-tybert.  Formerly we used to call
  them chop-hay; but alas! they are not such neat creatures now as to eat
  any, or chew the cud.  We call them chop-hares, chop-partridges,
  chop-woodcocks, chop-pheasants, chop-pullets, chop-venison, chop-coneys,
  chop-pigs, for they scorn to feed on coarser meat.  A t--d for their chops,
  cried Friar John, next year we'll have 'em called chop-dung, chop-stront,
  chop-filth.
  
  Would you take my advice? added he to the company.  What is it? answered
  we.  Let's do two things, returned he.  First, let us secure all this
  venison and wild fowl--I mean, paying well for them; for my part, I am but
  too much tired already with our salt meat, it heats my flanks so horribly.
  In the next place, let's go back to the wicket, and destroy all these
  devilish Furred Law-cats.  For my part, quoth Panurge, I know better
  things; catch me there, and hang me.  No, I am somewhat more inclined to be
  fearful than bold; I love to sleep in a whole skin.
  
  
  
  
  How Friar John talks of rooting out the Furred Law-cats.
  
  Virtue of the frock, quoth Friar John, what kind of voyage are we making?
  A shitten one, o' my word; the devil of anything we do but fizzling,
  farting, funking, squattering, dozing, raving, and doing nothing.
  Ods-belly, 'tisn't in my nature to lie idle; I mortally hate it.  Unless I
  am doing some heroic feat every foot, I can't sleep one wink o' nights.
  Damn it, did you then take me along with you for your chaplain, to sing mass
  and shrive you?  By Maundy Thursday, the first of ye all that comes to me on
  such an account shall be fitted; for the only penance I'll enjoin shall be,
  that he immediately throw himself headlong overboard into the sea like a
  base cowhearted son of ten fathers.  This in deduction of the pains of
  purgatory.
  
  What made Hercules such a famous fellow, d'ye think?  Nothing but that
  while he travelled he still made it his business to rid the world of
  tyrannies, errors, dangers, and drudgeries; he still put to death all
  robbers, all monsters, all venomous serpents and hurtful creatures.  Why
  then do we not follow his example, doing as he did in the countries through
  which we pass?  He destroyed the Stymphalides, the Lernaean hydra, Cacus,
  Antheus, the Centaurs, and what not; I am no clericus, those that are such
  tell me so.
  
  In imitation of that noble by-blow, let's destroy and root out these wicked
  Furred Law-cats, that are a kind of ravenous devils; thus we shall remove
  all manner of tyranny out of the land.  Mawmet's tutor swallow me body and
  soul, tripes and guts, if I would stay to ask your help or advice in the
  matter were I but as strong as he was.  Come, he that would be thought a
  gentleman, let him storm a town; well, then, shall we go?  I dare swear
  we'll do their business for them with a wet finger; they'll bear it, never
  fear; since they could swallow down more foul language that came from us
  than ten sows and their babies could swill hogwash.  Damn 'em, they don't
  value all the ill words or dishonour in the world at a rush, so they but
  get the coin into their purses, though they were to have it in a shitten
  clout.  Come, we may chance to kill 'em all, as Hercules would have done
  had they lived in his time.  We only want to be set to work by another
  Eurystheus, and nothing else for the present, unless it be what I heartily
  wish them, that Jupiter may give 'em a short visit, only some two or three
  hours long, and walk among their lordships in the same equipage that
  attended him when he came last to his Miss Semele, jolly Bacchus's mother.
  
  'Tis a very great mercy, quoth Panurge, that you have got out of their
  clutches.  For my part, I have no stomach to go there again; I'm hardly
  come to myself yet, so scared and appalled I was.  My hair still stands up
  an end when I think on't; and most damnably troubled I was there, for three
  very weighty reasons.  First, because I was troubled.  Secondly, because I
  was troubled.  Thirdly and lastly, because I was troubled.  Hearken to me a
  little on thy right side, Friar John, my left cod, since thou'lt not hear
  at the other.  Whenever the maggot bites thee to take a trip down to hell
  and visit the tribunal of Minos, Aeacus, Rhadamanthus, (and Dis,) do but
  tell me, and I'll be sure to bear thee company, and never leave thee as
  long as my name's Panurge, but will wade over Acheron, Styx, and Cocytus,
  drink whole bumpers of Lethe's water--though I mortally hate that element
  --and even pay thy passage to that bawling, cross-grained ferryman, Charon.
  But as for the damned wicket, if thou art so weary of thy life as to go
  thither again, thou mayst e'en look for somebody else to bear thee company,
  for I'll not move one step that way; e'en rest satisfied with this positive
  answer.  By my good will I'll not stir a foot to go thither as long as I
  live, any more than Calpe will come over to Abyla (Here Motteux adds the
  following note:  'Calpe is a mountain in Spain that faces another, called
  Abyla, in Mauritania, both said to have been severed by Hercules.').  Was
  Ulysses so mad as to go back into the Cyclop's cave to fetch his sword?
  No, marry was he not.  Now I have left nothing behind me at the wicket
  through forgetfulness; why then should I think of going thither?
  
  Well, quoth Friar John, as good sit still as rise up and fall; what cannot
  be cured must be endured.  But, prithee, let's hear one another speak.
  Come, wert thou not a wise doctor to fling away a whole purse of gold on
  those mangy scoundrels?  Ha!  A squinsy choke thee! we were too rich, were
  we?  Had it not been enough to have thrown the hell-hounds a few cropped
  pieces of white cash?
  
  How could I help it? returned Panurge.  Did you not see how Gripe-men-all
  held his gaping velvet pouch, and every moment roared and bellowed, By
  gold, give me out of hand; by gold, give, give, give me presently?  Now,
  thought I to myself, we shall never come off scot-free.  I'll e'en stop
  their mouths with gold, that the wicket may be opened, and we may get out;
  the sooner the better.  And I judged that lousy silver would not do the
  business; for, d'ye see, velvet pouches do not use to gape for little
  paltry clipt silver and small cash; no, they are made for gold, my friend
  John; that they are, my dainty cod.  Ah! when thou hast been larded,
  basted, and roasted, as I was, thou wilt hardly talk at this rate, I doubt.
  But now what is to be done?  We are enjoined by them to go forwards.
  
  The scabby slabberdegullions still waited for us at the port, expecting to
  be greased in the fist as well as their masters.  Now when they perceived
  that we were ready to put to sea, they came to Friar John and begged that
  we would not forget to gratify the apparitors before we went off, according
  to the assessment for the fees at our discharge.  Hell and damnation! cried
  Friar John; are ye here still, ye bloodhounds, ye citing, scribbling imps
  of Satan?  Rot you, am I not vexed enough already, but you must have the
  impudence to come and plague me, ye scurvy fly-catchers you?  By
  cob's-body, I'll gratify your ruffianships as you deserve; I'll apparitorize
  you presently with a wannion, that I will.  With this, he lugged out his
  slashing cutlass, and in a mighty heat came out of the ship to cut the
  cozening varlets into steaks, but they scampered away and got out of sight
  in a trice.
  
  However, there was somewhat more to do, for some of our sailors, having got
  leave of Pantagruel to go ashore while we were had before Gripe-men-all,
  had been at a tavern near the haven to make much of themselves, and roar
  it, as seamen will do when they come into some port.  Now I don't know
  whether they had paid their reckoning to the full or no, but, however it
  was, an old fat hostess, meeting Friar John on the quay, was making a
  woeful complaint before a sergeant, son-in-law to one of the furred
  law-cats, and a brace of bums, his assistants.
  
  The friar, who did not much care to be tired with their impertinent
  prating, said to them, Harkee me, ye lubberly gnat-snappers! do ye presume
  to say that our seamen are not honest men?  I'll maintain they are, ye
  dotterels, and will prove it to your brazen faces, by justice--I mean, this
  trusty piece of cold iron by my side.  With this he lugged it out and
  flourished with it.  The forlorn lobcocks soon showed him their backs,
  betaking themselves to their heels; but the old fusty landlady kept her
  ground, swearing like any butter-whore that the tarpaulins were very honest
  cods, but that they only forgot to pay for the bed on which they had lain
  after dinner, and she asked fivepence, French money, for the said bed.  May
  I never sup, said the friar, if it be not dog-cheap; they are sorry guests
  and unkind customers, that they are; they do not know when they have a
  pennyworth, and will not always meet with such bargains.  Come, I myself
  will pay you the money, but I would willingly see it first.
  
  The hostess immediately took him home with her, and showed him the bed, and
  having praised it for all its good qualifications, said that she thought as
  times went she was not out of the way in asking fivepence for it.  Friar
  John then gave her the fivepence; and she no sooner turned her back but he
  presently began to rip up the ticking of the feather-bed and bolster, and
  threw all the feathers out at the window.  In the meantime the old hag came
  down and roared out for help, crying out murder to set all the
  neighbourhood in an uproar.  Yet she also fell to gathering the feathers
  that flew up and down in the air, being scattered by the wind.  Friar John
  let her bawl on, and, without any further ado, marched off with the
  blanket, quilt, and both the sheets, which he brought aboard undiscovered,
  for the air was darkened with the feathers, as it uses sometimes to be with
  snow.  He gave them away to the sailors; then said to Pantagruel that beds
  were much cheaper at that place than in Chinnonois, though we have there
  the famous geese of Pautile; for the old beldam had asked him but fivepence
  for a bed which in Chinnonois had been worth about twelve francs.  (As soon
  as Friar John and the rest of the company were embarked, Pantagruel set
  sail.  But there arose a south-east wind, which blew so vehemently they
  lost their way, and in a manner going back to the country of the Furred
  Law-cats, they entered into a huge gulf, where the sea ran so high and
  terrible that the shipboy on the top of the mast cried out he again saw the
  habitation of Gripe-men-all; upon which Panurge, frightened almost out of
  his wits, roared out, Dear master, in spite of the wind and waves, change
  your course, and turn the ship's head about.  O my friend, let us come no
  more into that cursed country where I left my purse.  So the wind carried
  them near an island, where however they did not dare at first to land, but
  entered about a mile off.  (Motteux omitted this passage altogether in the
  edition of 1694.  It was restored by Ozell in the edition of 1738.))
  
  
  
  
  How Pantagruel came to the island of the Apedefers, or Ignoramuses, with
  long claws and crooked paws, and of terrible adventures and monsters there.
  
  As soon as we had cast anchor and had moored the ship, the pinnace was put
  over the ship's side and manned by the coxswain's crew.  When the good
  Pantagruel had prayed publicly, and given thanks to the Lord that had
  delivered him from so great a danger, he stepped into it with his whole
  company to go on shore, which was no ways difficult to do, for, as the sea
  was calm and the winds laid, they soon got to the cliffs.  When they were
  set on shore, Epistemon, who was admiring the situation of the place and
  the strange shape of the rocks, discovered some of the natives.  The first
  he met had on a short purple gown, a doublet cut in panes, like a Spanish
  leather jerkin, half sleeves of satin, and the upper part of them leather,
  a coif like a black pot tipped with tin.  He was a good likely sort of a
  body, and his name, as we heard afterwards, was Double-fee.  Epistemon
  asked him how they called those strange craggy rocks and deep valleys.  He
  told them it was a colony brought out of Attorneyland, and called Process,
  and that if we forded the river somewhat further beyond the rocks we should
  come into the island of the Apedefers.  By the memory of the decretals,
  said Friar John, tell us, I pray you, what you honest men here live on?
  Could not a man take a chirping bottle with you to taste your wine?  I can
  see nothing among you but parchment, ink-horns, and pens.  We live on
  nothing else, returned Double-fee; and all who live in this place must come
  through my hands.  How, quoth Panurge, are you a shaver, then?  Do you
  fleece 'em?  Ay, ay, their purse, answered Double-fee; nothing else.  By
  the foot of Pharaoh, cried Panurge, the devil a sou will you get of me.
  However, sweet sir, be so kind as to show an honest man the way to those
  Apedefers, or ignorant people, for I come from the land of the learned,
  where I did not learn over much.
  
  Still talking on, they got to the island of the Apedefers, for they were
  soon got over the ford.  Pantagruel was not a little taken up with admiring
  the structure and habitation of the people of the place.  For they live in
  a swingeing wine-press, fifty steps up to it.  You must know there are some
  of all sorts, little, great, private, middle-sized, and so forth.  You go
  through a large peristyle, alias a long entry set about with pillars, in
  which you see, in a kind of landscape, the ruins of almost the whole world,
  besides so many great robbers' gibbets, so many gallows and racks, that
  'tis enough to fright you out of your seven senses.  Double-fee perceiving
  that Pantagruel was taken up with contemplating those things, Let us go
  further, sir, said he to him; all this is nothing yet.  Nothing, quotha,
  cried Friar John; by the soul of my overheated codpiece, friend Panurge and
  I here shake and quiver for mere hunger.  I had rather be drinking than
  staring at these ruins.  Pray come along, sir, said Double-fee.  He then
  led us into a little wine-press that lay backwards in a blind corner, and
  was called Pithies in the language of the country.  You need not ask
  whether Master John and Panurge made much of their sweet selves there; it
  is enough that I tell you there was no want of Bolognia sausages, turkey
  poots, capons, bustards, malmsey, and all other sorts of good belly-timber,
  very well dressed.
  
  A pimping son of ten fathers, who, for want of a better, did the office of
  a butler, seeing that Friar John had cast a sheep's eye at a choice bottle
  that stood near a cupboard by itself, at some distance from the rest of the
  bottellic magazine, like a jack-in-an-office said to Pantagruel, Sir, I
  perceive that one of your men here is making love to this bottle.  He ogles
  it, and would fain caress it; but I beg that none offer to meddle with it;
  for it is reserved for their worships.  How, cried Panurge, there are some
  grandees here then, I see.  It is vintage time with you, I perceive.
  
  Then Double-fee led us up to a private staircase, and showed us into a
  room, whence, without being seen, out at a loophole we could see their
  worships in the great wine-press, where none could be admitted without
  their leave.  Their worships, as he called them, were about a score of
  fusty crack-ropes and gallow-clappers, or rather more, all posted before a
  bar, and staring at each other like so many dead pigs.  Their paws were as
  long as a crane's foot, and their claws four-and-twenty inches long at
  least; for you must know they are enjoined never to pare off the least chip
  of them, so that they grow as crooked as a Welsh hook or a hedging-bill.
  
  We saw a swingeing bunch of grapes that are gathered and squeezed in that
  country, brought in by them.  As soon as it was laid down, they clapped it
  into the press, and there was not a bit of it out of which each of them did
  not squeeze some oil of gold; insomuch that the poor grape was tried with a
  witness, and brought off so drained and picked, and so dry, that there was
  not the least moisture, juice, or substance left in it; for they had
  pressed out its very quintessence.
  
  Double-fee told us they had not often such huge bunches; but, let the worst
  come to the worst, they were sure never to be without others in their
  press.  But hark you me, master of mine, asked Panurge, have they not some
  of different growth?  Ay, marry have they, quoth Double-fee.  Do you see
  here this little bunch, to which they are going to give t'other wrench?  It
  is of tithe-growth, you must know; they crushed, wrung, squeezed and
  strained out the very heart's blood of it but the other day; but it did not
  bleed freely; the oil came hard, and smelt of the priest's chest; so that
  they found there was not much good to be got out of it.  Why then, said
  Pantagruel, do they put it again into the press?  Only, answered
  Double-fee, for fear there should still lurk some juice among the husks and
  hullings in the mother of the grape.  The devil be damned! cried Friar
  John; do you call these same folks illiterate lobcocks and duncical
  doddipolls?  May I be broiled like a red herring if I do not think they are
  wise enough to skin a flint and draw oil out of a brick wall.  So they are,
  said Double-fee; for they sometimes put castles, parks, and forests into
  the press, and out of them all extract aurum potabile.  You mean portabile,
  I suppose, cried Epistemon, such as may be borne.  I mean as I said,
  replied Double-fee, potabile, such as may be drunk; for it makes them drink
  many a good bottle more than otherwise they should.
  
  But I cannot better satisfy you as to the growth of the vine-tree sirup
  that is here squeezed out of grapes, than in desiring you to look yonder in
  that back-yard, where you will see above a thousand different growths that
  lie waiting to be squeezed every moment.  Here are some of the public and
  some of the private growth; some of the builders' fortifications, loans,
  gifts, and gratuities, escheats, forfeitures, fines, and recoveries, penal
  statutes, crown lands, and demesne, privy purse, post-offices, offerings,
  lordships of manors, and a world of other growths, for which we want names.
  Pray, quoth Epistemon, tell me of what growth is that great one, with all
  those little grapelings about it.  Oh, oh! returned Double-fee, that plump
  one is of the treasury, the very best growth in the whole country.
  Whenever anyone of that growth is squeezed, there is not one of their
  worships but gets juice enough of it to soak his nose six months together.
  When their worships were up, Pantagruel desired Double-fee to take us into
  that great wine-press, which he readily did.  As soon as we were in,
  Epistemon, who understood all sorts of tongues, began to show us many
  devices on the press, which was large and fine, and made of the wood of the
  cross--at least Double-fee told us so.  On each part of it were names of
  everything in the language of the country.  The spindle of the press was
  called receipt; the trough, cost and damages; the hole for the vice-pin,
  state; the side-boards, money paid into the office; the great beam, respite
  of homage; the branches, radietur; the side-beams, recuperetur; the fats,
  ignoramus; the two-handled basket, the rolls; the treading-place,
  acquittance; the dossers, validation; the panniers, authentic decrees; the
  pailes, potentials; the funnels, quietus est.
  
  By the Queen of the Chitterlings, quoth Panurge, all the hieroglyphics of
  Egypt are mine a-- to this jargon.  Why! here are a parcel of words full as
  analogous as chalk and cheese, or a cat and a cart-wheel!  But why,
  prithee, dear Double-fee, do they call these worshipful dons of yours
  ignorant fellows?  Only, said Double-fee, because they neither are, nor
  ought to be, clerks, and all must be ignorant as to what they transact
  here; nor is there to be any other reason given, but, The court hath said
  it; The court will have it so; The court has decreed it.  Cop's body, quoth
  Pantagruel, they might full as well have called 'em necessity; for
  necessity has no law.
  
  From thence, as he was leading us to see a thousand little puny presses, we
  spied another paltry bar, about which sat four are five ignorant waspish
  churls, of so testy, fuming a temper, (like an ass with squibs and crackers
  tied to its tail,) and so ready to take pepper in the nose for yea and nay,
  that a dog would not have lived with 'em.  They were hard at it with the
  lees and dregs of the grapes, which they gripped over and over again, might
  and main, with their clenched fists.  They were called contractors in the
  language of the country.  These are the ugliest, misshapen, grim-looking
  scrubs, said Friar John, that ever were beheld, with or without spectacles.
  Then we passed by an infinite number of little pimping wine-presses all
  full of vintage-mongers, who were picking, examining, and raking the grapes
  with some instruments called bills-of-charge.
  
  Finally we came into a hall downstairs, where we saw an overgrown cursed
  mangy cur with a pair of heads, a wolf's belly, and claws like the devil of
  hell.  The son of a bitch was fed with costs, for he lived on a
  multiplicity of fine amonds and amerciaments by order of their worships, to
  each of whom the monster was worth more than the best farm in the land.  In
  their tongue of ignorance they called him Twofold.  His dam lay by him, and
  her hair and shape was like her whelp's, only she had four heads, two male
  and two female, and her name was Fourfold.  She was certainly the most
  cursed and dangerous creature of the place, except her grandam, which we
  saw, and had been kept locked up in a dungeon time out of mind, and her
  name was Refusing-of-fees.
  
  Friar John, who had always twenty yards of gut ready empty to swallow a
  gallimaufry of lawyers, began to be somewhat out of humour, and desired
  Pantagruel to remember he had not dined, and bring Double-fee along with
  him.  So away we went, and as we marched out at the back-gate whom should
  we meet but an old piece of mortality in chains.  He was half ignorant and
  half learned, like an hermaphrodite of Satan.  The fellow was all
  caparisoned with spectacles as a tortoise is with shells, and lived on
  nothing but a sort of food which, in their gibberish, was called appeals.
  Pantagruel asked Double-fee of what breed was that prothonotary, and what
  name they gave him.  Double-fee told us that time out of mind he had been
  kept there in chains, to the great grief of their worships, who starved
  him, and his name was Review.  By the pope's sanctified two-pounders, cried
  Friar John, I do not much wonder at the meagre cheer which this old chuff
  finds among their worships.  Do but look a little on the weather-beaten
  scratch-toby, friend Panurge; by the sacred tip of my cowl, I'll lay five
  pounds to a hazel-nut the foul thief has the very looks of Gripe-me-now.
  These same fellows here, ignorant as they be, are as sharp and knowing as
  other folk.  But were it my case, I would send him packing with a squib in
  his breech like a rogue as he is.  By my oriental barnacles, quoth Panurge,
  honest friar, thou art in the right; for if we but examine that treacherous
  Review's ill-favoured phiz, we find that the filthy snudge is yet more
  mischievous and ignorant than these ignorant wretches here, since they
  (honest dunces) grapple and glean with as little harm and pother as they
  can, without any long fiddle-cum-farts or tantalizing in the case; nor do
  they dally and demur in your suit, but in two or three words, whip-stitch,
  in a trice, they finish the vintage of the close, bating you all these
  damned tedious interlocutories, examinations, and appointments which fret
  to the heart's blood your furred law-cats.
  
  
  
  
  How we went forwards, and how Panurge had like to have been killed.
  
  We put to sea that very moment, steering our course forwards, and gave
  Pantagruel a full account of our adventures, which so deeply struck him
  with compassion that he wrote some elegies on that subject to divert
  himself during the voyage.  When we were safe in the port we took some
  refreshment, and took in fresh water and wood.  The people of the place,
  who had the countenance of jolly fellows and boon companions, were all of
  them forward folks, bloated and puffed up with fat.  And we saw some who
  slashed and pinked their skins to open a passage to the fat, that it might
  swell out at the slits and gashes which they made; neither more nor less
  than the shit-breech fellows in our country bepink and cut open their
  breeches that the taffety on the inside may stand out and be puffed up.
  They said that what they did was not out of pride or ostentation, but
  because otherwise their skins would not hold them without much pain.
  Having thus slashed their skin, they used to grow much bigger, like the
  young trees on whose barks the gardeners make incisions that they may grow
  the better.
  
  Near the haven there was a tavern, which forwards seemed very fine and
  stately.  We repaired thither, and found it filled with people of the
  forward nation, of all ages, sexes, and conditions; so that we thought some
  notable feast or other was getting ready, but we were told that all that
  throng were invited to the bursting of mine host, which caused all his
  friends and relations to hasten thither.
  
  We did not understand that jargon, and therefore thought in that country by
  that bursting they meant some merry meeting or other, as we do in ours by
  betrothing, wedding, groaning, christening, churching (of women), shearing
  (of sheep), reaping (of corn, or harvest-home), and many other junketting
  bouts that end in -ing.  But we soon heard that there was no such matter in
  hand.
  
  The master of the house, you must know, had been a good fellow in his time,
  loved heartily to wind up his bottom, to bang the pitcher, and lick his
  dish.  He used to be a very fair swallower of gravy soup, a notable
  accountant in matter of hours, and his whole life was one continual dinner,
  like mine host at Rouillac (in Perigord).  But now, having farted out much
  fat for ten years together, according to the custom of the country, he was
  drawing towards his bursting hour; for neither the inner thin kell
  wherewith the entrails are covered, nor his skin that had been jagged and
  mangled so many years, were able to hold and enclose his guts any longer,
  or hinder them from forcing their way out.  Pray, quoth Panurge, is there
  no remedy, no help for the poor man, good people?  Why don't you swaddle
  him round with good tight girths, or secure his natural tub with a strong
  sorb-apple-tree hoop?  Nay, why don't you iron-bind him, if needs be?  This
  would keep the man from flying out and bursting.  The word was not yet out
  of his mouth when we heard something give a loud report, as if a huge
  sturdy oak had been split in two.  Then some of the neighbours told us that
  the bursting was over, and that the clap or crack which we heard was the
  last fart, and so there was an end of mine host.
  
  This made me call to mind a saying of the venerable abbot of Castilliers,
  the very same who never cared to hump his chambermaids but when he was in
  pontificalibus.  That pious person, being much dunned, teased, and
  importuned by his relations to resign his abbey in his old age, said and
  professed that he would not strip till he was ready to go to bed, and that
  the last fart which his reverend paternity was to utter should be the fart
  of an abbot.
  
  
  
  
  How our ships were stranded, and we were relieved by some people that were
  subject to Queen Whims (qui tenoient de la Quinte).
  
  We weighed and set sail with a merry westerly gale.  When about seven
  leagues off (twenty-two miles) some gusts or scuds of wind suddenly arose,
  and the wind veering and shifting from point to point, was, as they say,
  like an old woman's breech, at no certainty; so we first got our starboard
  tacks aboard, and hauled off our lee-sheets.  Then the gusts increased, and
  by fits blowed all at once from several quarters, yet we neither settled
  nor braided up close our sails, but only let fly the sheets, not to go
  against the master of the ship's direction; and thus having let go amain,
  lest we should spend our topsails, or the ship's quick-side should lie in
  the water and she be overset, we lay by and run adrift; that is, in a
  landloper's phrase, we temporized it.  For he assured us that, as these
  gusts and whirlwinds would not do us much good, so they could not do us
  much harm, considering their easiness and pleasant strife, as also the
  clearness of the sky and calmness of the current.  So that we were to
  observe the philosopher's rule, bear and forbear; that is, trim, or go
  according to the time.
  
  However, these whirlwinds and gusts lasted so long that we persuaded the
  master to let us go and lie at trie with our main course; that is, to haul
  the tack aboard, the sheet close aft, the bowline set up, and the helm tied
  close aboard; so, after a stormy gale of wind, we broke through the
  whirlwind.  But it was like falling into Scylla to avoid Charybdis (out of
  the frying-pan into the fire).  For we had not sailed a league ere our
  ships were stranded upon some sands such as are the flats of St. Maixent.
  
  All our company seemed mightily disturbed except Friar John, who was not a
  jot daunted, and with sweet sugar-plum words comforted now one and then
  another, giving them hopes of speedy assistance from above, and telling
  them that he had seen Castor at the main-yardarm.  Oh! that I were but now
  ashore, cried Panurge, that is all I wish for myself at present, and that
  you who like the sea so well had each man of you two hundred thousand
  crowns.  I would fairly let you set up shop on these sands, and would get a
  fat calf dressed and a hundred of faggots (i.e. bottles of wine) cooled for
  you against you come ashore.  I freely consent never to mount a wife, so
  you but set me ashore and mount me on a horse, that I may go home.  No
  matter for a servant, I will be contented to serve myself; I am never
  better treated than when I am without a man.  Faith, old Plautus was in the
  right on't when he said the more servants the more crosses; for such they
  are, even supposing they could want what they all have but too much of, a
  tongue, that most busy, dangerous, and pernicious member of servants.
  Accordingly, 'twas for their sakes alone that the racks and tortures for
  confession were invented, though some foreign civilians in our time have
  drawn alogical and unreasonable consequences from it.
  
  That very moment we spied a sail that made towards us.  When it was close
  by us, we soon knew what was the lading of the ship and who was aboard of
  her.  She was full freighted with drums.  I was acquainted with many of the
  passengers that came in her, who were most of 'em of good families; among
  the rest Harry Cotiral, an old toast, who had got a swinging ass's
  touch-tripe (penis) fastened to his waist, as the good women's beads are to their
  girdle.  In his left hand he held an old overgrown greasy foul cap, such as
  your scald-pated fellows wear, and in the right a huge cabbage-stump.
  
  As soon as he saw me he was overjoyed, and bawled out to me, What cheer,
  ho?  How dost like me now?  Behold the true Algamana (this he said showing
  me the ass's tickle-gizzard).  This doctor's cap is my true elixir; and
  this (continued he, shaking the cabbage-stump in his fist) is lunaria
  major, you old noddy.  I have 'em, old boy, I have 'em; we'll make 'em when
  thou'rt come back.  But pray, father, said I, whence come you?  Whither are
  you bound?  What's your lading?  Have you smelt the salt deep?  To these
  four questions he answered, From Queen Whims; for Touraine; alchemy; to the
  very bottom.
  
  Whom have you got o' board? said I.  Said he, Astrologers, fortune-tellers,
  alchemists, rhymers, poets, painters, projectors, mathematicians,
  watchmakers, sing-songs, musicianers, and the devil and all of others that
  are subject to Queen Whims (Motteux gives the following footnote:--'La
  Quinte, This means a fantastic Humour, Maggots, or a foolish Giddiness of
  Brains; and also, a fifth, or the Proportion of Five in music, &c.').  They
  have very fair legible patents to show for't, as anybody may see.  Panurge
  had no sooner heard this but he was upon the high-rope, and began to rail
  at them like mad.  What o' devil d'ye mean, cried he, to sit idly here like
  a pack of loitering sneaksbies, and see us stranded, while you may help us,
  and tow us off into the current?  A plague o' your whims! you can make all
  things whatsoever, they say, so much as good weather and little children;
  yet won't make haste to fasten some hawsers and cables, and get us off.  I
  was just coming to set you afloat, quoth Harry Cotiral; by Trismegistus,
  I'll clear you in a trice.  With this he caused 7,532,810 huge drums to be
  unheaded on one side, and set that open side so that it faced the end of
  the streamers and pendants; and having fastened them to good tacklings and
  our ship's head to the stern of theirs, with cables fastened to the bits
  abaft the manger in the ship's loof, they towed us off ground at one pull
  so easily and pleasantly that you'd have wondered at it had you been there.
  For the dub-a-dub rattling of the drums, with the soft noise of the gravel
  which murmuring disputed us our way, and the merry cheers and huzzas of the
  sailors, made an harmony almost as good as that of the heavenly bodies when
  they roll and are whirled round their spheres, which rattling of the
  celestial wheels Plato said he heard some nights in his sleep.
  
  We scorned to be behindhand with 'em in civility, and gratefully gave 'em
  store of our sausages and chitterlings, with which we filled their drums;
  and we were just a-hoisting two-and-sixty hogsheads of wine out of the
  hold, when two huge whirlpools with great fury made towards their ship,
  spouting more water than is in the river Vienne (Vigenne) from Chinon to
  Saumur; to make short, all their drums, all their sails, their concerns,
  and themselves were soused, and their very hose were watered by the collar.
  
  Panurge was so overjoyed, seeing this, and laughed so heartily, that he was
  forced to hold his sides, and it set him into a fit of the colic for two
  hours and more.  I had a mind, quoth he, to make the dogs drink, and those
  honest whirlpools, egad, have saved me that labour and that cost.  There's
  sauce for them; ariston men udor.  Water is good, saith a poet; let 'em
  Pindarize upon't.  They never cared for fresh water but to wash their hands
  or their glasses.  This good salt water will stand 'em in good stead for
  want of sal ammoniac and nitre in Geber's kitchen.
  
  We could not hold any further discourse with 'em; for the former whirlwind
  hindered our ship from feeling the helm.  The pilot advised us
  henceforwards to let her run adrift and follow the stream, not busying
  ourselves with anything, but making much of our carcasses.  For our only
  way to arrive safe at the queendom of Whims was to trust to the whirlwind
  and be led by the current.
  
  
  
  
  How we arrived at the queendom of Whims or Entelechy.
  
  We did as he directed us for about twelve hours, and on the third day the
  sky seemed to us somewhat clearer, and we happily arrived at the port of
  Mateotechny, not far distant from Queen Whims, alias the Quintessence.
  
  We met full butt on the quay a great number of guards and other military
  men that garrisoned the arsenal, and we were somewhat frighted at first
  because they made us all lay down our arms, and in a haughty manner asked
  us whence we came.
  
  Cousin, quoth Panurge to him that asked the question, we are of Touraine,
  and come from France, being ambitious of paying our respects to the Lady
  Quintessence and visit this famous realm of Entelechy.
  
  What do you say? cried they; do you call it Entelechy or Endelechy?  Truly,
  truly, sweet cousins, quoth Panurge, we are a silly sort of grout-headed
  lobcocks, an't please you; be so kind as to forgive us if we chance to
  knock words out of joint.  As for anything else, we are downright honest
  fellows and true hearts.
  
  We have not asked you this question without a cause, said they; for a great
  number of others who have passed this way from your country of Touraine
  seemed as mere jolt-headed doddipolls as ever were scored o'er the coxcomb,
  yet spoke as correct as other folks.  But there has been here from other
  countries a pack of I know not what overweening self-conceited prigs, as
  moody as so many mules and as stout as any Scotch lairds, and nothing would
  serve these, forsooth, but they must wilfully wrangle and stand out against
  us at their coming; and much they got by it after all.  Troth, we e'en
  fitted them and clawed 'em off with a vengeance, for all they looked so big
  and so grum.
  
  Pray tell me, does your time lie so heavy upon you in your world that you
  do not know how to bestow it better than in thus impudently talking,
  disputing, and writing of our sovereign lady?  There was much need that
  your Tully, the consul, should go and leave the care of his commonwealth to
  busy himself idly about her; and after him your Diogenes Laertius, the
  biographer, and your Theodorus Gaza, the philosopher, and your Argiropilus,
  the emperor, and your Bessario, the cardinal, and your Politian, the
  pedant, and your Budaeus, the judge, and your Lascaris, the ambassador, and
  the devil and all of those you call lovers of wisdom; whose number, it
  seems, was not thought great enough already, but lately your Scaliger,
  Bigot, Chambrier, Francis Fleury, and I cannot tell how many such other
  junior sneaking fly-blows must take upon 'em to increase it.
  
  A squinsy gripe the cod's-headed changelings at the swallow and eke at the
  cover-weasel; we shall make 'em--But the deuce take 'em!  (They flatter the
  devil here, and smoothify his name, quoth Panurge, between his teeth.)  You
  don't come here, continued the captain, to uphold 'em in their folly; you
  have no commission from 'em to this effect; well then, we will talk no more
  on't.
  
  Aristotle, that first of men and peerless pattern of all philosophy, was
  our sovereign lady's godfather, and wisely and properly gave her the name
  of Entelechy.  Her true name then is Entelechy, and may he be in tail
  beshit, and entail a shit-a-bed faculty and nothing else on his family, who
  dares call her by any other name; for whoever he is, he does her wrong, and
  is a very impudent person.  You are heartily welcome, gentlemen.  With
  this they colled and clipped us about the neck, which was no small comfort
  to us, I'll assure you.
  
  Panurge then whispered me, Fellow-traveller, quoth he, hast thou not been
  somewhat afraid this bout?  A little, said I.  To tell you the truth of it,
  quoth he, never were the Ephraimites in a greater fear and quandary when
  the Gileadites killed and drowned them for saying sibboleth instead of
  shibboleth; and among friends, let me tell you that perhaps there is not a
  man in the whole country of Beauce but might easily have stopped my
  bunghole with a cartload of hay.
  
  The captain afterwards took us to the queen's palace, leading us silently
  with great formality.  Pantagruel would have said something to him, but the
  other, not being able to come up to his height, wished for a ladder or a
  very long pair of stilts; then said, Patience, if it were our sovereign
  lady's will, we would be as tall as you; well, we shall when she pleases.
  
  In the first galleries we saw great numbers of sick persons, differently
  placed according to their maladies.  The leprous were apart; those that
  were poisoned on one side; those that had got the plague on another; those
  that had the pox in the first rank, and the rest accordingly.
  
  
  
  
  How the Quintessence cured the sick with a song.
  
  The captain showed us the queen, attended with her ladies and gentlemen, in
  the second gallery.  She looked young, though she was at least eighteen
  hundred years old, and was handsome, slender, and as fine as a queen, that
  is, as hands could make her.  He then said to us:  It is not yet a fit time
  to speak to the queen; be you but mindful of her doings in the meanwhile.
  
  You have kings in your world that fantastically pretend to cure some
  certain diseases, as, for example, scrofula or wens, swelled throats,
  nicknamed the king's evil, and quartan agues, only with a touch; now our
  queen cures all manner of diseases without so much as touching the sick,
  but barely with a song, according to the nature of the distemper.  He then
  showed us a set of organs, and said that when it was touched by her those
  miraculous cures were performed.  The organ was indeed the strangest that
  ever eyes beheld; for the pipes were of cassia fistula in the cod; the top
  and cornice of guiacum; the bellows of rhubarb; the pedas of turbith, and
  the clavier or keys of scammony.
  
  While we were examining this wonderful new make of an organ, the leprous
  were brought in by her abstractors, spodizators, masticators, pregustics,
  tabachins, chachanins, neemanins, rabrebans, nercins, rozuins, nebidins,
  tearins, segamions, perarons, chasinins, sarins, soteins, aboth, enilins,
  archasdarpenins, mebins, chabourins, and other officers, for whom I want
  names; so she played 'em I don't know what sort of a tune or song, and they
  were all immediately cured.
  
  Then those who were poisoned were had in, and she had no sooner given them
  a song but they began to find a use for their legs, and up they got.  Then
  came on the deaf, the blind, and the dumb, and they too were restored to
  their lost faculties and senses with the same remedy; which did so
  strangely amaze us (and not without reason, I think) that down we fell on
  our faces, remaining prostrate, like men ravished in ecstasy, and were not
  able to utter one word through the excess of our admiration, till she came,
  and having touched Pantagruel with a fine fragrant nosegay of white roses
  which she held in her hand, thus made us recover our senses and get up.
  Then she made us the following speech in byssin words, such as Parisatis
  desired should be spoken to her son Cyrus, or at least of crimson alamode:
  
  The probity that scintillizes in the superfices of your persons informs my
  ratiocinating faculty, in a most stupendous manner, of the radiant virtues
  latent within the precious caskets and ventricles of your minds.  For,
  contemplating the mellifluous suavity of your thrice discreet reverences,
  it is impossible not to be persuaded with facility that neither your
  affections nor your intellects are vitiated with any defect or privation of
  liberal and exalted sciences.  Far from it, all must judge that in you are
  lodged a cornucopia and encyclopaedia, an unmeasurable profundity of
  knowledge in the most peregrine and sublime disciplines, so frequently the
  admiration, and so rarely the concomitants of the imperite vulgar.  This
  gently compels me, who in preceding times indefatigably kept my private
  affections absolutely subjugated, to condescend to make my application to
  you in the trivial phrase of the plebeian world, and assure you that you
  are well, more than most heartily welcome.
  
  I have no hand at making of speeches, quoth Panurge to me privately;
  prithee, man, make answer to her for us, if thou canst.  This would not
  work with me, however; neither did Pantagruel return a word.  So that Queen
  Whims, or Queen Quintessence (which you please), perceiving that we stood
  as mute as fishes, said:  Your taciturnity speaks you not only disciples of
  Pythagoras, from whom the venerable antiquity of my progenitors in
  successive propagation was emaned and derives its original, but also
  discovers, that through the revolution of many retrograde moons, you have
  in Egypt pressed the extremities of your fingers with the hard tenants of
  your mouths, and scalptized your heads with frequent applications of your
  unguicules.  In the school of Pythagoras, taciturnity was the symbol of
  abstracted and superlative knowledge, and the silence of the Egyptians was
  agnited as an expressive manner of divine adoration; this caused the
  pontiffs of Hierapolis to sacrifice to the great deity in silence,
  impercussively, without any vociferous or obstreperous sound.  My design is
  not to enter into a privation of gratitude towards you, but by a vivacious
  formality, though matter were to abstract itself from me, excentricate to
  you my cogitations.
  
  Having spoken this, she only said to her officers, Tabachins, a panacea;
  and straight they desired us not to take it amiss if the queen did not
  invite us to dine with her; for she never ate anything at dinner but some
  categories, jecabots, emnins, dimions, abstractions, harborins, chelemins,
  second intentions, carradoths, antitheses, metempsychoses, transcendent
  prolepsies, and such other light food.
  
  Then they took us into a little closet lined through with alarums, where we
  were treated God knows how.  It is said that Jupiter writes whatever is
  transacted in the world on the dipthera or skin of the Amalthaean goat that
  suckled him in Crete, which pelt served him instead of a shield against the
  Titans, whence he was nicknamed Aegiochos.  Now, as I hate to drink water,
  brother topers, I protest it would be impossible to make eighteen goatskins
  hold the description of all the good meat they brought before us, though it
  were written in characters as small as those in which were penned Homer's
  Iliads, which Tully tells us he saw enclosed in a nutshell.
  
  For my part, had I one hundred mouths, as many tongues, a voice of iron, a
  heart of oak, and lungs of leather, together with the mellifluous abundance
  of Plato, yet I never could give you a full account of a third part of a
  second of the whole.
  
  Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the queen had given the symbolic
  word used among her subjects to denote sovereign good cheer, when she said
  to her tabachins, A panacea; just as Lucullus used to say, In Apollo, when
  he designed to give his friends a singular treat; though sometimes they
  took him at unawares, as, among the rest, Cicero and Hortensius sometimes
  used to do.
  
  
  
  
  How the Queen passed her time after dinner.
  
  When we had dined, a chachanin led us into the queen's hall, and there we
  saw how, after dinner, with the ladies and the princes of her court, she
  used to sift, searce, bolt, range, and pass away time with a fine large
  white and blue silk sieve.  We also perceived how they revived ancient
  sports, diverting themselves together at--
  
  1.  Cordax.      6.  Phrygia.        11.  Monogas.
  2.  Emmelia.     7.  Thracia.        12.  Terminalia.
  3.  Sicinnia.    8.  Calabrisme.     13.  Floralia.
  4.  Jambics.     9.  Molossia.       14.  Pyrrhice.
  5.  Persica.    10.  Cernophorum.    15.  (Nicatism.)
              And a thousand other dances.
  
  (Motteux has the following footnote:--'1. A sort of country-dance.  2. A
  still tragic dance.  3. Dancing and singing used at funerals.  4. Cutting
  sarcasms and lampoons.  5. The Persian dance.  6. Tunes, whose measure
  inspired men with a kind of divine fury.  7. The Thracian movement.  8.
  Smutty verses.  9. A measure to which the Molossi of Epirus danced a
  certain morrice.  10. A dance with bowls or pots in their hands.  11. A
  song where one sings alone.  12. Sports at the holidays of the god of
  bounds.  13. Dancing naked at Flora's holidays.  14. The Trojan dance in
  armour.')
  
  Afterwards she gave orders that they should show us the apartments and
  curiosities in her palace.  Accordingly we saw there such new, strange, and
  wonderful things, that I am still ravished in admiration every time I think
  of't.  However, nothing surprised us more than what was done by the
  gentlemen of her household, abstractors, parazons, nebidins, spodizators,
  and others, who freely and without the least dissembling told us that the
  queen their mistress did all impossible things, and cured men of incurable
  diseases; and they, her officers, used to do the rest.
  
  I saw there a young parazon cure many of the new consumption, I mean the
  pox, though they were never so peppered.  Had it been the rankest Roan ague
  (Anglice, the Covent-garden gout), 'twas all one to him; touching only
  their dentiform vertebrae thrice with a piece of a wooden shoe, he made
  them as wholesome as so many sucking-pigs.
  
  Another did thoroughly cure folks of dropsies, tympanies, ascites, and
  hyposarcides, striking them on the belly nine times with a Tenedian
  hatchet, without any solution of the continuum.
  
  Another cured all manner of fevers and agues on the spot, only with hanging
  a fox-tail on the left side of the patient's girdle.
  
  One removed the toothache only with washing thrice the root of the aching
  tooth with elder-vinegar, and letting it dry half-an-hour in the sun.
  
  Another the gout, whether hot or cold, natural or accidental, by barely
  making the gouty person shut his mouth and open his eyes.
  
  I saw another ease nine gentlemen of St. Francis's distemper ('A
  consumption in the pocket, or want of money; those of St. Francis's order
  must carry none about 'em.'--Motteux.) in a very short space of time,
  having clapped a rope about their necks, at the end of which hung a box
  with ten thousand gold crowns in't.
  
  One with a wonderful engine threw the houses out at the windows, by which
  means they were purged of all pestilential air.
  
  Another cured all the three kinds of hectics, the tabid, atrophes, and
  emaciated, without bathing, Tabian milk, dropax, alias depilatory, or other
  such medicaments, only turning the consumptive for three months into monks;
  and he assured me that if they did not grow fat and plump in a monastic way
  of living, they never would be fattened in this world, either by nature or
  by art.
  
  I saw another surrounded with a crowd of two sorts of women.  Some were
  young, quaint, clever, neat, pretty, juicy, tight, brisk, buxom, proper,
  kind-hearted, and as right as my leg, to any man's thinking.  The rest were
  old, weather-beaten, over-ridden, toothless, blear-eyed, tough, wrinkled,
  shrivelled, tawny, mouldy, phthisicky, decrepit hags, beldams, and walking
  carcasses.  We were told that his office was to cast anew those she-pieces
  of antiquity, and make them such as the pretty creatures whom we saw, who
  had been made young again that day, recovering at once the beauty, shape,
  size, and disposition which they enjoyed at sixteen; except their heels,
  that were now much shorter than in their former youth.
  
  This made them yet more apt to fall backwards whenever any man happened to
  touch 'em, than they had been before.  As for their counterparts, the old
  mother-scratch-tobies, they most devoutly waited for the blessed hour when
  the batch that was in the oven was to be drawn, that they might have their
  turns, and in a mighty haste they were pulling and hauling the man like
  mad, telling him that 'tis the most grievous and intolerable thing in
  nature for the tail to be on fire and the head to scare away those who
  should quench it.
  
  The officer had his hands full, never wanting patients; neither did his
  place bring him in little, you may swear.  Pantagruel asked him whether he
  could also make old men young again.  He said he could not.  But the way to
  make them new men was to get 'em to cohabit with a new-cast female; for
  this they caught that fifth kind of crinckams, which some call pellade, in
  Greek, ophiasis, that makes them cast off their old hair and skin, just as
  the serpents do, and thus their youth is renewed like the Arabian
  phoenix's.  This is the true fountain of youth, for there the old and
  decrepit become young, active, and lusty.
  
  Just so, as Euripides tells us, Iolaus was transmogrified; and thus Phaon,
  for whom kind-hearted Sappho run wild, grew young again, for Venus's use;
  so Tithon by Aurora's means; so Aeson by Medea, and Jason also, who, if
  you'll believe Pherecides and Simonides, was new-vamped and dyed by that
  witch; and so were the nurses of jolly Bacchus, and their husbands, as
  Aeschylus relates.
  
  
  
  
  How Queen Whims' officers were employed; and how the said lady retained us
  among her abstractors.
  
  I then saw a great number of the queen's officers, who made blackamoors
  white as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with the bottom of a
  pannier.
  
  Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy shore,
  and did not lose their seed.
  
  Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour.
  
  Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good while in a
  mortar, and changed their substance.
  
  Others sheared asses, and thus got long fleece wool.
  
  Others gathered barberries and figs off of thistles.
  
  Others stroked he-goats by the dugs, and saved their milk in a sieve; and
  much they got by it.
  
  (Others washed asses' heads without losing their soap.)
  
  Others taught cows to dance, and did not lose their fiddling.
  
  Others pitched nets to catch the wind, and took cock-lobsters in them.
  
  I saw a spodizator, who very artificially got farts out of a dead ass, and
  sold 'em for fivepence an ell.
  
  Another did putrefy beetles.  O the dainty food!
  
  Poor Panurge fairly cast up his accounts, and gave up his halfpenny (i.e.
  vomited), seeing an archasdarpenin who laid a huge plenty of chamber lye to
  putrefy in horsedung, mishmashed with abundance of Christian sir-reverence.
  Pugh, fie upon him, nasty dog!  However, he told us that with this sacred
  distillation he watered kings and princes, and made their sweet lives a
  fathom or two the longer.
  
  Others built churches to jump over the steeples.
  
  Others set carts before the horses, and began to flay eels at the tail;
  neither did the eels cry before they were hurt, like those of Melun.
  
  Others out of nothing made great things, and made great things return to
  nothing.
  
  Others cut fire into steaks with a knife, and drew water with a fish-net.
  
  Others made chalk of cheese, and honey of a dog's t--d.
  
  We saw a knot of others, about a baker's dozen in number, tippling under an
  arbour.  They toped out of jolly bottomless cups four sorts of cool,
  sparkling, pure, delicious, vine-tree sirup, which went down like mother's
  milk; and healths and bumpers flew about like lightning.  We were told that
  these true philosophers were fairly multiplying the stars by drinking till
  the seven were fourteen, as brawny Hercules did with Atlas.
  
  Others made a virtue of necessity, and the best of a bad market, which
  seemed to me a very good piece of work.
  
  Others made alchemy (i.e. sir-reverence) with their teeth, and clapping
  their hind retort to the recipient, made scurvy faces, and then squeezed.
  
  Others, in a large grass plot, exactly measured how far the fleas could go
  at a hop, a step, and jump; and told us that this was exceedingly useful
  for the ruling of kingdoms, the conduct of armies, and the administration
  of commonwealths; and that Socrates, who first got philosophy out of
  heaven, and from idling and trifling made it profitable and of moment, used
  to spend half his philosophizing time in measuring the leaps of fleas, as
  Aristophanes the quintessential affirms.
  
  I saw two gibroins by themselves keeping watch on the top of a tower, and
  we were told they guarded the moon from the wolves.
  
  In a blind corner I met four more very hot at it, and ready to go to
  loggerheads.  I asked what was the cause of the stir and ado, the mighty
  coil and pother they made.  And I heard that for four livelong days those
  overwise roisters had been at it ding-dong, disputing on three high, more
  than metaphysical propositions, promising themselves mountains of gold by
  solving them.  The first was concerning a he-ass's shadow; the second, of
  the smoke of a lantern; and the third of goat's hair, whether it were wool
  or no.  We heard that they did not think it a bit strange that two
  contradictions in mode, form, figure, and time should be true; though I
  will warrant the sophists of Paris had rather be unchristened than own so
  much.
  
  While we were admiring all those men's wonderful doings, the evening star
  already twinkling, the queen (God bless her!) appeared, attended with her
  court, and again amazed and dazzled us.  She perceived it, and said to us:
  
  What occasions the aberrations of human cogitations through the perplexing
  labyrinths and abysses of admiration, is not the source of the effects,
  which sagacious mortals visibly experience to be the consequential result
  of natural causes.  'Tis the novelty of the experiment which makes
  impressions on their conceptive, cogitative faculties; that do not previse
  the facility of the operation adequately, with a subact and sedate
  intellection, associated with diligent and congruous study.  Consequently
  let all manner of perturbation abdicate the ventricles of your brains, if
  anyone has invaded them while they were contemplating what is transacted by
  my domestic ministers.  Be spectators and auditors of every particular
  phenomenon and every individual proposition within the extent of my
  mansion; satiate yourselves with all that can fall here under the
  consideration of your visual or auscultating powers, and thus emancipate
  yourselves from the servitude of crassous ignorance.  And that you may be
  induced to apprehend how sincerely I desire this in consideration of the
  studious cupidity that so demonstratively emicates at your external organs,
  from this present particle of time I retain you as my abstractors.  Geber,
  my principal Tabachin, shall register and initiate you at your departing.
  
  We humbly thanked her queenship without saying a word, accepting of the
  noble office she conferred on us.
  
  
  
  
  How the Queen was served at dinner, and of her way of eating.
  
  Queen Whims after this said to her gentlemen:  The orifice of the
  ventricle, that ordinary embassador for the alimentation of all members,
  whether superior or inferior, importunes us to restore, by the apposition
  of idoneous sustenance, what was dissipated by the internal calidity's
  action on the radical humidity.  Therefore spodizators, gesinins, memains,
  and parazons, be not culpable of dilatory protractions in the apposition of
  every re-roborating species, but rather let them pullulate and superabound
  on the tables.  As for you, nobilissim praegustators, and my gentilissim
  masticators, your frequently experimented industry, internected with
  perdiligent sedulity and sedulous perdiligence, continually adjuvates you
  to perficiate all things in so expeditious a manner that there is no
  necessity of exciting in you a cupidity to consummate them.  Therefore I
  can only suggest to you still to operate as you are assuefacted
  indefatigably to operate.
  
  Having made this fine speech, she retired for a while with part of her
  women, and we were told that 'twas to bathe, as the ancients did more
  commonly than we use nowadays to wash our hands before we eat.  The tables
  were soon placed, the cloth spread, and then the queen sat down.  She ate
  nothing but celestial ambrosia, and drank nothing but divine nectar.  As
  for the lords and ladies that were there, they, as well as we, fared on as
  rare, costly, and dainty dishes as ever Apicius wot or dreamed of in his
  life.
  
  When we were as round as hoops, and as full as eggs, with stuffing the gut,
  an olla podrida ('Some call it an Olio.  Rabelais Pot-pourry.'--Motteux.)
  was set before us to force hunger to come to terms with us, in case it had
  not granted us a truce; and such a huge vast thing it was that the plate
  which Pythius Althius gave King Darius would hardly have covered it.  The
  olla consisted of several sorts of pottages, salads, fricassees,
  saugrenees, cabirotadoes, roast and boiled meat, carbonadoes, swingeing
  pieces of powdered beef, good old hams, dainty somates, cakes, tarts, a
  world of curds after the Moorish way, fresh cheese, jellies, and fruit of
  all sorts.  All this seemed to me good and dainty; however, the sight of it
  made me sigh; for alas! I could not taste a bit on't, so full I had filled
  my puddings before, and a bellyful is a bellyful you know.  Yet I must tell
  you what I saw that seemed to me odd enough o' conscience; 'twas some
  pasties in paste; and what should those pasties in paste be, d'ye think,
  but pasties in pots?  At the bottom I perceived store of dice, cards,
  tarots ('Great cards on which many different things are figured.'
  --Motteux.), luettes ('Pieces of ivory to play withal.'--Motteux.),
  chessmen, and chequers, besides full bowls of gold crowns, for those who had
  a mind to have a game or two and try their chance.  Under this I saw a jolly
  company of mules in stately trappings, with velvet footcloths, and a troop
  of ambling nags, some for men and some for women; besides I don't know how
  many litters all lined with velvet, and some coaches of Ferrara make; all
  this for those who had a mind to take the air.
  
  This did not seem strange to me; but if anything did 'twas certainly the
  queen's way of eating, and truly 'twas very new, and very odd; for she
  chewed nothing, the good lady; not but that she had good sound teeth, and
  her meat required to be masticated, but such was her highness's custom.
  When her praegustators had tasted the meat, her masticators took it and
  chewed it most nobly; for their dainty chops and gullets were lined through
  with crimson satin, with little welts and gold purls, and their teeth were
  of delicate white ivory.  Thus, when they had chewed the meat ready for her
  highness's maw, they poured it down her throat through a funnel of fine
  gold, and so on to her craw.  For that reason they told us she never
  visited a close-stool but by proxy.
  
  
  
  
  How there was a ball in the manner of a tournament, at which Queen Whims
  was present.
  
  After supper there was a ball in the form of a tilt or a tournament, not
  only worth seeing, but also never to be forgotten.  First, the floor of the
  hall was covered with a large piece of velveted white and yellow chequered
  tapestry, each chequer exactly square, and three full spans in breadth.
  
  Then thirty-two young persons came into the hall; sixteen of them arrayed
  in cloth of gold, and of these eight were young nymphs such as the ancients
  described Diana's attendants; the other eight were a king, a queen, two
  wardens of the castle, two knights, and two archers.  Those of the other
  band were clad in cloth of silver.
  
  They posted themselves on the tapestry in the following manner:  the kings
  on the last line on the fourth square; so that the golden king was on a
  white square, and the silvered king on a yellow square, and each queen by
  her king; the golden queen on a yellow square, and the silvered queen on a
  white one:  and on each side stood the archers to guide their kings and
  queens; by the archers the knights, and the wardens by them.  In the next
  row before 'em stood the eight nymphs; and between the two bands of nymphs
  four rows of squares stood empty.
  
  Each band had its musicians, eight on each side, dressed in its livery; the
  one with orange-coloured damask, the other with white; and all played on
  different instruments most melodiously and harmoniously, still varying in
  time and measure as the figure of the dance required.  This seemed to me an
  admirable thing, considering the numerous diversity of steps, back-steps,
  bounds, rebounds, jerks, paces, leaps, skips, turns, coupes, hops,
  leadings, risings, meetings, flights, ambuscadoes, moves, and removes.
  
  I was also at a loss when I strove to comprehend how the dancers could so
  suddenly know what every different note meant; for they no sooner heard
  this or that sound but they placed themselves in the place which was
  denoted by the music, though their motions were all different.  For the
  nymphs that stood in the first file, as if they designed to begin the
  fight, marched straight forwards to their enemies from square to square,
  unless it were the first step, at which they were free to move over two
  steps at once.  They alone never fall back (which is not very natural to
  other nymphs), and if any of them is so lucky as to advance to the opposite
  king's row, she is immediately crowned queen of her king, and after that
  moves with the same state and in the same manner as the queen; but till
  that happens they never strike their enemies but forwards, and obliquely in
  a diagonal line.  However, they make it not their chief business to take
  their foes; for, if they did, they would leave their queen exposed to the
  adverse parties, who then might take her.
  
  The kings move and take their enemies on all sides square-ways, and only
  step from a white square into a yellow one, and vice versa, except at their
  first step the rank should want other officers than the wardens; for then
  they can set 'em in their place, and retire by him.
  
  The queens take a greater liberty than any of the rest; for they move
  backwards and forwards all manner of ways, in a straight line as far as
  they please, provided the place be not filled with one of her own party,
  and diagonally also, keeping to the colour on which she stands.
  
  The archers move backwards or forwards, far and near, never changing the
  colour on which they stand.  The knights move and take in a lineal manner,
  stepping over one square, though a friend or foe stand upon it, posting
  themselves on the second square to the right or left, from one colour to
  another, which is very unwelcome to the adverse party, and ought to be
  carefully observed, for they take at unawares.
  
  The wardens move and take to the right or left, before or behind them, like
  the kings, and can advance as far as they find places empty; which liberty
  the kings take not.
  
  The law which both sides observe is, at the end of the fight, to besiege
  and enclose the king of either party, so that he may not be able to move;
  and being reduced to that extremity, the battle is over, and he loses the
  day.
  
  Now, to avoid this, there is none of either sex of each party but is
  willing to sacrifice his or her life, and they begin to take one another on
  all sides in time, as soon as the music strikes up.  When anyone takes a
  prisoner, he makes his honours, and striking him gently in the hand, puts
  him out of the field and combat, and encamps where he stood.
  
  If one of the kings chance to stand where he might be taken, it is not
  lawful for any of his adversaries that had discovered him to lay hold on
  him; far from it, they are strictly enjoined humbly to pay him their
  respects, and give him notice, saying, God preserve you, sir! that his
  officers may relieve and cover him, or he may remove, if unhappily he could
  not be relieved.  However, he is not to be taken, but greeted with a
  Good-morrow, the others bending the knee; and thus the tournament uses
  to end.
  
  
  
  
  How the thirty-two persons at the ball fought.
  
  The two companies having taken their stations, the music struck up, and
  with a martial sound, which had something of horrid in it, like a point of
  war, roused and alarmed both parties, who now began to shiver, and then
  soon were warmed with warlike rage; and having got in readiness to fight
  desperately, impatient of delay stood waiting for the charge.
  
  Then the music of the silvered band ceased playing, and the instruments of
  the golden side alone were heard, which denoted that the golden party
  attacked.  Accordingly, a new movement was played for the onset, and we saw
  the nymph who stood before the queen turn to the left towards her king, as
  it were to ask leave to fight; and thus saluting her company at the same
  time, she moved two squares forwards, and saluted the adverse party.
  
  Now the music of the golden brigade ceased playing, and their antagonists
  began again.  I ought to have told you that the nymph who began by saluting
  her company, had by that formality also given them to understand that they
  were to fall on.  She was saluted by them in the same manner, with a full
  turn to the left, except the queen, who went aside towards her king to the
  right; and the same manner of salutation was observed on both sides during
  the whole ball.
  
  The silvered nymph that stood before her queen likewise moved as soon as
  the music of her party sounded a charge; her salutations, and those of her
  side, were to the right, and her queen's to the left.  She moved in the
  second square forwards, and saluted her antagonists, facing the first
  golden nymph; so that there was not any distance between them, and you
  would have thought they two had been going to fight; but they only strike
  sideways.
  
  Their comrades, whether silvered or golden, followed 'em in an intercalary
  figure, and seemed to skirmish a while, till the golden nymph who had first
  entered the lists, striking a silvered nymph in the hand on the right, put
  her out of the field, and set herself in her place.  But soon the music
  playing a new measure, she was struck by a silvered archer, who after that
  was obliged himself to retire.  A silvered knight then sallied out, and the
  golden queen posted herself before her king.
  
  Then the silvered king, dreading the golden queen's fury, removed to the
  right, to the place where his warden stood, which seemed to him strong and
  well guarded.
  
  The two knights on the left, whether golden or silvered, marched up, and on
  either side took up many nymphs who could not retreat; principally the
  golden knight, who made this his whole business; but the silvered knight
  had greater designs, dissembling all along, and even sometimes not taking a
  nymph when he could have done it, still moving on till he was come up to
  the main body of the enemies in such a manner that he saluted their king
  with a God save you, sir!
  
  The whole golden brigade quaked for fear and anger, those words giving
  notice of their king's danger; not but that they could soon relieve him,
  but because their king being thus saluted they were to lose their warden on
  the right wing without any hopes of a recovery.  Then the golden king
  retired to the left, and the silvered knight took the golden warden, which
  was a mighty loss to that party.  However, they resolved to be revenged,
  and surrounded the knight that he might not escape.  He tried to get off,
  behaving himself with a great deal of gallantry, and his friends did what
  they could to save him; but at last he fell into the golden queen's hands,
  and was carried off.
  
  Her forces, not yet satisfied, having lost one of her best men, with more
  fury than conduct moved about, and did much mischief among their enemies.
  The silvered party warily dissembled, watching their opportunity to be even
  with them, and presented one of their nymphs to the golden queen, having
  laid an ambuscado; so that the nymph being taken, a golden archer had like
  to have seized the silvered queen.  Then the golden knight undertakes to
  take the silvered king and queen, and says, Good-morrow!  Then the silvered
  archer salutes them, and was taken by a golden nymph, and she herself by a
  silvered one.
  
  The fight was obstinate and sharp.  The wardens left their posts, and
  advanced to relieve their friends.  The battle was doubtful, and victory
  hovered over both armies.  Now the silvered host charge and break through
  their enemy's ranks as far as the golden king's tent, and now they are
  beaten back.  The golden queen distinguishes herself from the rest by her
  mighty achievements still more than by her garb and dignity; for at once
  she takes an archer, and, going sideways, seizes a silvered warden.  Which
  thing the silvered queen perceiving, she came forwards, and, rushing on
  with equal bravery, takes the last golden warden and some nymphs.  The two
  queens fought a long while hand to hand; now striving to take each other by
  surprise, then to save themselves, and sometimes to guard their kings.
  Finally, the golden queen took the silvered queen; but presently after she
  herself was taken by the silvered archer.
  
  Then the silvered king had only three nymphs, an archer, and a warden left,
  and the golden only three nymphs and the right knight, which made them
  fight more slowly and warily than before.  The two kings seemed to mourn
  for the loss of their loving queens, and only studied and endeavoured to
  get new ones out of all their nymphs to be raised to that dignity, and thus
  be married to them.  This made them excite those brave nymphs to strive to
  reach the farthest rank, where stood the king of the contrary party,
  promising them certainly to have them crowned if they could do this.  The
  golden nymphs were beforehand with the others, and out of their number was
  created a queen, who was dressed in royal robes, and had a crown set on her
  head.  You need not doubt the silvered nymphs made also what haste they
  could to be queens.  One of them was within a step of the coronation place,
  but there the golden knight lay ready to intercept her, so that she could
  go no further.
  
  The new golden queen, resolved to show herself valiant and worthy of her
  advancement to the crown, achieved great feats of arms.  But in the
  meantime the silvered knight takes the golden warden who guarded the camp;
  and thus there was a new silvered queen, who, like the other, strove to
  excel in heroic deeds at the beginning of her reign.  Thus the fight grew
  hotter than before.  A thousand stratagems, charges, rallyings, retreats,
  and attacks were tried on both sides; till at last the silvered queen,
  having by stealth advanced as far as the golden king's tent, cried, God
  save you, sir!  Now none but his new queen could relieve him; so she
  bravely came and exposed herself to the utmost extremity to deliver him out
  of it.  Then the silvered warden with his queen reduced the golden king to
  such a stress that, to save himself, he was forced to lose his queen; but
  the golden king took him at last.  However, the rest of the golden party
  were soon taken; and that king being left alone, the silvered party made
  him a low bow, crying, Good morrow, sir! which denoted that the silvered
  king had got the day.
  
  This being heard, the music of both parties loudly proclaimed the victory.
  And thus the first battle ended to the unspeakable joy of all the
  spectators.
  
  After this the two brigades took their former stations, and began to tilt a
  second time, much as they had done before, only the music played somewhat
  faster than at the first battle, and the motions were altogether different.
  I saw the golden queen sally out one of the first, with an archer and a
  knight, as it were angry at the former defeat, and she had like to have
  fallen upon the silvered king in his tent among his officers; but having
  been baulked in her attempt, she skirmished briskly, and overthrew so many
  silvered nymphs and officers that it was a most amazing sight.  You would
  have sworn she had been another Penthesilea; for she behaved herself with
  as much bravery as that Amazonian queen did at Troy.
  
  But this havoc did not last long; for the silvered party, exasperated by
  their loss, resolved to perish or stop her progress; and having posted an
  archer in ambuscado on a distant angle, together with a knight-errant, her
  highness fell into their hands and was carried out of the field.  The rest
  were soon routed after the taking of their queen, who, without doubt, from
  that time resolved to be more wary and keep near her king, without
  venturing so far amidst her enemies unless with more force to defend her.
  Thus the silvered brigade once more got the victory.
  
  This did not dishearten or deject the golden party; far from it.  They soon
  appeared again in the field to face their enemies; and being posted as
  before, both the armies seemed more resolute and cheerful than ever.  Now
  the martial concert began, and the music was above a hemiole the quicker,
  according to the warlike Phrygian mode, such as was invented by Marsyas.
  
  Then our combatants began to wheel about, and charge with such a swiftness
  that in an instant they made four moves, besides the usual salutations.  So
  that they were continually in action, flying, hovering, jumping, vaulting,
  curvetting, with petauristical turns and motions, and often intermingled.
  
  Seeing them then turn about on one foot after they had made their honours,
  we compared them to your tops or gigs, such as boys use to whip about,
  making them turn round so swiftly that they sleep, as they call it, and
  motion cannot be perceived, but resembles rest, its contrary; so that if
  you make a point or mark on some part of one of those gigs, 'twill be
  perceived not as a point, but a continual line, in a most divine manner, as
  Cusanus has wisely observed.
  
  While they were thus warmly engaged, we heard continually the claps and
  episemapsies which those of the two bands reiterated at the taking of their
  enemies; and this, joined to the variety of their motions and music, would
  have forced smiles out of the most severe Cato, the never-laughing Crassus,
  the Athenian man-hater, Timon; nay, even whining Heraclitus, though he
  abhorred laughing, the action that is most peculiar to man.  For who could
  have forborne? seeing those young warriors, with their nymphs and queens,
  so briskly and gracefully advance, retire, jump, leap, skip, spring, fly,
  vault, caper, move to the right, to the left, every way still in time, so
  swiftly, and yet so dexterously, that they never touched one another but
  methodically.
  
  As the number of the combatants lessened, the pleasure of the spectators
  increased; for the stratagems and motions of the remaining forces were more
  singular.  I shall only add that this pleasing entertainment charmed us to
  such a degree that our minds were ravished with admiration and delight, and
  the martial harmony moved our souls so powerfully that we easily believed
  what is said of Ismenias's having excited Alexander to rise from table and
  run to his arms, with such a warlike melody.  At last the golden king
  remained master of the field; and while we were minding those dances, Queen
  Whims vanished, so that we saw her no more from that day to this.
  
  Then Geber's michelots conducted us, and we were set down among her
  abstractors, as her queenship had commanded.  After that we returned to the
  port of Mateotechny, and thence straight aboard our ships; for the wind was
  fair, and had we not hoisted out of hand, we could hardly have got off in
  three quarters of a moon in the wane.
  
  
  
  
  How we came to the island of Odes, where the ways go up and down.
  
  We sailed before the wind, between a pair of courses, and in two days made
  the island of Odes, at which place we saw a very strange thing.  The ways
  there are animals; so true is Aristotle's saying, that all self-moving
  things are animals.  Now the ways walk there.  Ergo, they are then animals.
  Some of them are strange unknown ways, like those of the planets; others
  are highways, crossways, and byways.  I perceived that the travellers and
  inhabitants of that country asked, Whither does this way go?  Whither does
  that way go?  Some answered, Between Midy and Fevrolles, to the parish
  church, to the city, to the river, and so forth.  Being thus in their right
  way, they used to reach their journey's end without any further trouble,
  just like those who go by water from Lyons to Avignon or Arles.
  
  Now, as you know that nothing is perfect here below, we heard there was a
  sort of people whom they called highwaymen, waybeaters, and makers of
  inroads in roads; and that the poor ways were sadly afraid of them, and
  shunned them as you do robbers.  For these used to waylay them, as people
  lay trains for wolves, and set gins for woodcocks.  I saw one who was taken
  up with a lord chief justice's warrant for having unjustly, and in spite of
  Pallas, taken the schoolway, which is the longest.  Another boasted that he
  had fairly taken his shortest, and that doing so he first compassed his
  design.  Thus, Carpalin, meeting once Epistemon looking upon a wall with
  his fiddle-diddle, or live urinal, in his hand, to make a little maid's
  water, cried that he did not wonder now how the other came to be still the
  first at Pantagruel's levee, since he held his shortest and least used.
  
  I found Bourges highway among these.  It went with the deliberation of an
  abbot, but was made to scamper at the approach of some waggoners, who
  threatened to have it trampled under their horses' feet, and make their
  waggons run over it, as Tullia's chariot did over her father's body.
  
  I also espied there the old way between Peronne and St. Quentin, which
  seemed to me a very good, honest, plain way, as smooth as a carpet, and as
  good as ever was trod upon by shoe of leather.
  
  Among the rocks I knew again the good old way to La Ferrare, mounted on a
  huge bear.  This at a distance would have put me in mind of St. Jerome's
  picture, had but the bear been a lion; for the poor way was all mortified,
  and wore a long hoary beard uncombed and entangled, which looked like the
  picture of winter, or at least like a white-frosted bush.
  
  On that way were store of beads or rosaries, coarsely made of wild
  pine-tree; and it seemed kneeling, not standing, nor lying flat; but its
  sides and middle were beaten with huge stones, insomuch that it proved to us
  at once an object of fear and pity.
  
  While we were examining it, a runner, bachelor of the place, took us aside,
  and showing us a white smooth way, somewhat filled with straw, said,
  Henceforth, gentlemen, do not reject the opinion of Thales the Milesian,
  who said that water is the beginning of all things, nor that of Homer, who
  tells us that all things derive their original from the ocean; for this
  same way which you see here had its beginning from water, and is to return
  whence she came before two months come to an end; now carts are driven here
  where boats used to be rowed.
  
  Truly, said Pantagruel, you tell us no news; we see five hundred such
  changes, and more, every year, in our world.  Then reflecting on the
  different manner of going of those moving ways, he told us he believed that
  Philolaus and Aristarchus had philosophized in this island, and that
  Seleucus (Motteux reads--'that some, indeed, were of opinion.'), indeed,
  was of opinion the earth turns round about its poles, and not the heavens,
  whatever we may think to the contrary; as, when we are on the river Loire,
  we think the trees and the shore moves, though this is only an effect of
  our boat's motion.
  
  As we went back to our ships, we saw three waylayers, who, having been
  taken in ambuscado, were going to be broken on the wheel; and a huge
  fornicator was burned with a lingering fire for beating a way and breaking
  one of its sides; we were told it was the way of the banks of the Nile in
  Egypt.
  
  
  
  
  How we came to the island of Sandals; and of the order of Semiquaver
  Friars.
  
  Thence we went to the island of Sandals, whose inhabitants live on nothing
  but ling-broth.  However, we were very kindly received and entertained by
  Benius the Third, king of the island, who, after he had made us drink, took
  us with him to show us a spick-and-span new monastery which he had
  contrived for the Semiquaver Friars; so he called the religious men whom he
  had there.  For he said that on t'other side the water lived friars who
  styled themselves her sweet ladyship's most humble servants.  Item, the
  goodly Friar-minors, who are semibreves of bulls; the smoked-herring tribe
  of Minim Friars; then the Crotchet Friars.  So that these diminutives could
  be no more than Semiquavers.  By the statutes, bulls, and patents of Queen
  Whims, they were all dressed like so many house-burners, except that, as in
  Anjou your bricklayers use to quilt their knees when they tile houses, so
  these holy friars had usually quilted bellies, and thick quilted paunches
  were among them in much repute.  Their codpieces were cut slipper-fashion,
  and every monk among them wore two--one sewed before and another behind
  --reporting that some certain dreadful mysteries were duly represented by
  this duplicity of codpieces.
  
  They wore shoes as round as basins, in imitation of those who inhabit the
  sandy sea.  Their chins were close-shaved, and their feet iron-shod; and to
  show they did not value fortune, Benius made them shave and poll the hind
  part of their polls as bare as a bird's arse, from the crown to the
  shoulder-blades; but they had leave to let their hair grow before, from the
  two triangular bones in the upper part of the skull.
  
  Thus did they not value fortune a button, and cared no more for the goods
  of this world than you or I do for hanging.  And to show how much they
  defied that blind jilt, all of them wore, not in their hands like her, but
  at their waist, instead of beads, sharp razors, which they used to
  new-grind twice a day and set thrice a night.
  
  Each of them had a round ball on their feet, because Fortune is said to
  have one under hers.
  
  The flap of their cowls hanged forward, and not backwards, like those of
  others.  Thus none could see their noses, and they laughed without fear
  both at fortune and the fortunate; neither more nor less than our ladies
  laugh at barefaced trulls when they have those mufflers on which they call
  masks, and which were formerly much more properly called charity, because
  they cover a multitude of sins.
  
  The hind part of their faces were always uncovered, as are our faces, which
  made them either go with their belly or the arse foremost, which they
  pleased.  When their hind face went forwards, you would have sworn this had
  been their natural gait, as well on account of their round shoes as of the
  double codpiece, and their face behind, which was as bare as the back of my
  hand, and coarsely daubed over with two eyes and a mouth, such as you see
  on some Indian nuts.  Now, if they offered to waddle along with their
  bellies forwards, you would have thought they were then playing at
  blindman's buff.  May I never be hanged if 'twas not a comical sight.
  
  Their way of living was thus:  about owl-light they charitably began to
  boot and spur one another.  This being done, the least thing they did was
  to sleep and snore; and thus sleeping, they had barnacles on the handles of
  their faces, or spectacles at most.
  
  You may swear we did not a little wonder at this odd fancy; but they
  satisfied us presently, telling us that the day of judgment is to take
  mankind napping; therefore, to show they did not refuse to make their
  personal appearance as fortune's darlings use to do, they were always thus
  booted and spurred, ready to mount whenever the trumpet should sound.
  
  At noon, as soon as the clock struck, they used to awake.  You must know
  that their clock-bell, church-bells, and refectory-bells were all made
  according to the pontial device, that is, quilted with the finest down, and
  their clappers of fox-tails.
  
  Having then made shift to get up at noon, they pulled off their boots, and
  those that wanted to speak with a maid, alias piss, pissed; those that
  wanted to scumber, scumbered; and those that wanted to sneeze, sneezed.
  But all, whether they would or no (poor gentlemen!), were obliged largely
  and plentifully to yawn; and this was their first breakfast (O rigorous
  statute!).  Methought 'twas very comical to observe their transactions;
  for, having laid their boots and spurs on a rack, they went into the
  cloisters.  There they curiously washed their hands and mouths; then sat
  them down on a long bench, and picked their teeth till the provost gave the
  signal, whistling through his fingers; then every he stretched out his jaws
  as much as he could, and they gaped and yawned for about half-an-hour,
  sometimes more, sometimes less, according as the prior judged the breakfast
  to be suitable to the day.
  
  After that they went in procession, two banners being carried before them,
  in one of which was the picture of Virtue, and that of Fortune in the
  other.  The last went before, carried by a semi-quavering friar, at whose
  heels was another, with the shadow or image of Virtue in one hand and an
  holy-water sprinkle in the other--I mean of that holy mercurial water which
  Ovid describes in his Fasti.  And as the preceding Semiquaver rang a
  handbell, this shaked the sprinkle with his fist.  With that says
  Pantagruel, This order contradicts the rule which Tully and the academics
  prescribed, that Virtue ought to go before, and Fortune follow.  But they
  told us they did as they ought, seeing their design was to breech, lash,
  and bethwack Fortune.
  
  During the processions they trilled and quavered most melodiously betwixt
  their teeth I do not know what antiphones, or chantings, by turns.  For my
  part, 'twas all Hebrew-Greek to me, the devil a word I could pick out on't;
  at last, pricking up my ears, and intensely listening, I perceived they
  only sang with the tip of theirs.  Oh, what a rare harmony it was!  How
  well 'twas tuned to the sound of their bells!  You'll never find these to
  jar, that you won't.  Pantagruel made a notable observation upon the
  processions; for says he, Have you seen and observed the policy of these
  Semiquavers?  To make an end of their procession they went out at one of
  their church doors and came in at the other; they took a deal of care not
  to come in at the place whereat they went out.  On my honour, these are a
  subtle sort of people, quoth Panurge; they have as much wit as three folks,
  two fools and a madman; they are as wise as the calf that ran nine miles to
  suck a bull, and when he came there 'twas a steer.  This subtlety and
  wisdom of theirs, cried Friar John, is borrowed from the occult philosophy.
  May I be gutted like an oyster if I can tell what to make on't.  Then the
  more 'tis to be feared, said Pantagruel; for subtlety suspected, subtlety
  foreseen, subtlety found out, loses the essence and very name of subtlety,
  and only gains that of blockishness.  They are not such fools as you take
  them to be; they have more tricks than are good, I doubt.
  
  After the procession they went sluggingly into the fratery-room, by the way
  of walk and healthful exercise, and there kneeled under the tables, leaning
  their breasts on lanterns.  While they were in that posture, in came a huge
  Sandal, with a pitchfork in his hand, who used to baste, rib-roast,
  swaddle, and swinge them well-favouredly, as they said, and in truth
  treated them after a fashion.  They began their meal as you end yours, with
  cheese, and ended it with mustard and lettuce, as Martial tells us the
  ancients did.  Afterwards a platterful of mustard was brought before every
  one of them, and thus they made good the proverb, After meat comes mustard.
  
        Their diet was this:
  
  O' Sundays they stuffed their puddings with puddings, chitterlings, links,
  Bologna sausages, forced-meats, liverings, hogs' haslets, young quails, and
  teals.  You must also always add cheese for the first course, and mustard
  for the last.
  
  O' Mondays they were crammed with peas and pork, cum commento, and
  interlineary glosses.
  
  O' Tuesdays they used to twist store of holy-bread, cakes, buns, puffs,
  lenten loaves, jumbles, and biscuits.
  
  O' Wednesdays my gentlemen had fine sheep's heads, calves' heads, and
  brocks' heads, of which there's no want in that country.
  
  O' Thursdays they guzzled down seven sorts of porridge, not forgetting
  mustard.
  
  O' Fridays they munched nothing but services or sorb-apples; neither were
  these full ripe, as I guessed by their complexion.
  
  O' Saturdays they gnawed bones; not that they were poor or needy, for every
  mother's son of them had a very good fat belly-benefice.
  
  As for their drink, 'twas an antifortunal; thus they called I don't know
  what sort of a liquor of the place.
  
  When they wanted to eat or drink, they turned down the back-points or flaps
  of their cowls forwards below their chins, and that served 'em instead of
  gorgets or slabbering-bibs.
  
  When they had well dined, they prayed rarely all in quavers and shakes; and
  the rest of the day, expecting the day of judgment, they were taken up with
  acts of charity, and particularly--
  
  O' Sundays, rubbers at cuffs.
  
  O' Mondays, lending each other flirts and fillips on the nose.
  
  O' Tuesdays, clapperclawing one another.
  
  O' Wednesdays, sniting and fly-flapping.
  
  O' Thursdays, worming and pumping.
  
  O' Fridays, tickling.
  
  O' Saturdays, jerking and firking one another.
  
  Such was their diet when they resided in the convent, and if the prior of
  the monk-house sent any of them abroad, then they were strictly enjoined
  neither to touch nor eat any manner of fish as long as they were on sea or
  rivers, and to abstain from all manner of flesh whenever they were at land,
  that everyone might be convinced that, while they enjoyed the object, they
  denied themselves the power, and even the desire, and were no more moved
  with it than the Marpesian rock.
  
  All this was done with proper antiphones, still sung and chanted by ear, as
  we have already observed.
  
  When the sun went to bed, they fairly booted and spurred each other as
  before, and having clapped on their barnacles e'en jogged to bed too.  At
  midnight the Sandal came to them, and up they got, and having well whetted
  and set their razors, and been a-processioning, they clapped the tables
  over themselves, and like wire-drawers under their work fell to it as
  aforesaid.
  
  Friar John des Entoumeures, having shrewdly observed these jolly Semiquaver
  Friars, and had a full account of their statutes, lost all patience, and
  cried out aloud:  Bounce tail, and God ha' mercy guts; if every fool should
  wear a bauble, fuel would be dear.  A plague rot it, we must know how many
  farts go to an ounce.  Would Priapus were here, as he used to be at the
  nocturnal festivals in Crete, that I might see him play backwards, and
  wriggle and shake to the purpose.  Ay, ay, this is the world, and t'other
  is the country; may I never piss if this be not an antichthonian land, and
  our very antipodes.  In Germany they pull down monasteries and unfrockify
  the monks; here they go quite kam, and act clean contrary to others,
  setting new ones up, against the hair.
  
  
  
  
  How Panurge asked a Semiquaver Friar many questions, and was only answered
  in monosyllables.
  
  Panurge, who had since been wholly taken up with staring at these royal
  Semiquavers, at last pulled one of them by the sleeve, who was as lean as a
  rake, and asked him,--
  
  Hearkee me, Friar Quaver, Semiquaver, Demisemiquavering quaver, where is
  the punk?
  
  The Friar, pointing downwards, answered, There.
  
  Pan.  Pray, have you many?  Fri.  Few.
  
  Pan.  How many scores have you?  Fri.  One.
  
  Pan.  How many would you have?  Fri.  Five.
  
  Pan.  Where do you hide 'em?  Fri.  Here.
  
  Pan.  I suppose they are not all of one age; but, pray, how is their shape?
  Fri.  Straight.
  
  Pan.  Their complexion?  Fri.  Clear.
  
  Pan.  Their hair?  Fri.  Fair.
  
  Pan.  Their eyes?  Fri.  Black.
  
  Pan.  Their features?  Fri.  Good.
  
  Pan.  Their brows?  Fri.  Small.
  
  Pan.  Their graces?  Fri.  Ripe.
  
  Pan.  Their looks?  Fri.  Free.
  
  Pan.  Their feet?  Fri.  Flat.
  
  Pan.  Their heels?  Fri.  Short.
  
  Pan.  Their lower parts?  Fri.  Rare.
  
  Pan.  And their arms?  Fri.  Long.
  
  Pan.  What do they wear on their hands?  Fri.  Gloves.
  
  Pan.  What sort of rings on their fingers?  Fri.  Gold.
  
  Pan.  What rigging do you keep 'em in?  Fri.  Cloth.
  
  Pan.  What sort of cloth is it?  Fri.  New.
  
  Pan.  What colour?  Fri.  Sky.
  
  Pan.  What kind of cloth is it?  Fri.  Fine.
  
  Pan.  What caps do they wear?  Fri.  Blue.
  
  Pan.  What's the colour of their stockings?  Fri.  Red.
  
  Pan.  What wear they on their feet?  Fri.  Pumps.
  
  Pan.  How do they use to be?  Fri.  Foul.
  
  Pan.  How do they use to walk?  Fri.  Fast.
  
  Pan.  Now let us talk of the kitchen, I mean that of the harlots, and
  without going hand over head let's a little examine things by particulars.
  What is in their kitchens?  Fri.  Fire.
  
  Pan.  What fuel feeds it?  Fri.  Wood.
  
  Pan.  What sort of wood is't?  Fri.  Dry.
  
  Pan.  And of what kind of trees?  Fri.  Yews.
  
  Pan.  What are the faggots and brushes of?  Fri.  Holm.
  
  Pan.  What wood d'ye burn in your chambers?  Fri.  Pine.
  
  Pan.  And of what other trees?  Fri.  Lime.
  
  Pan.  Hearkee me; as for the buttocks, I'll go your halves.  Pray, how do
  you feed 'em?  Fri.  Well.
  
  Pan.  First, what do they eat?  Fri.  Bread.
  
  Pan.  Of what complexion?  Fri.  White.
  
  Pan.  And what else?  Fri.  Meat.
  
  Pan.  How do they love it dressed?  Fri.  Roast.
  
  Pan.  What sort of porridge?  Fri.  None.
  
  Pan.  Are they for pies and tarts?  Fri.  Much.
  
  Pan.  Then I'm their man.  Will fish go down with them?  Fri.  Well.
  
  Pan.  And what else?  Fri.  Eggs.
  
  Pan.  How do they like 'em?  Fri.  Boiled.
  
  Pan.  How must they be done?  Fri.  Hard.
  
  Pan.  Is this all they have?  Fri.  No.
  
  Pan.  What have they besides, then?  Fri.  Beef.
  
  Pan.  And what else?  Fri.  Pork.
  
  Pan.  And what more?  Fri.  Geese.
  
  Pan.  What then?  Fri.  Ducks.
  
  Pan.  And what besides?  Fri.  Cocks.
  
  Pan.  What do they season their meat with?  Fri.  Salt.
  
  Pan.  What sauce are they most dainty for?  Fri.  Must.
  
  Pan.  What's their last course?  Fri.  Rice.
  
  Pan.  And what else?  Fri.  Milk.
  
  Pan.  What besides?  Fri.  Peas.
  
  Pan.  What sort?  Fri.  Green.
  
  Pan.  What do they boil with 'em?  Fri.  Pork.
  
  Pan.  What fruit do they eat?  Fri.  Good.
  
  Pan.  How?  Fri.  Raw.
  
  Pan.  What do they end with?  Fri.  Nuts.
  
  Pan.  How do they drink?  Fri.  Neat.
  
  Pan.  What liquor?  Fri.  Wine.
  
  Pan.  What sort?  Fri.  White.
  
  Pan.  In winter?  Fri.  Strong.
  
  Pan.  In the spring.  Fri.  Brisk.
  
  Pan.  In summer?  Fri.  Cool.
  
  Pan.  In autumn?  Fri.  New.
  
  Buttock of a monk! cried Friar John; how plump these plaguy trulls, these
  arch Semiquavering strumpets, must be!  That damned cattle are so high fed
  that they must needs be high-mettled, and ready to wince and give two ups
  for one go-down when anyone offers to ride them below the crupper.
  
  Prithee, Friar John, quoth Panurge, hold thy prating tongue; stay till I
  have done.
  
  Till what time do the doxies sit up?  Fri.  Night.
  
  Pan.  When do they get up?  Fri.  Late.
  
  Pan.  May I ride on a horse that was foaled of an acorn, if this be not as
  honest a cod as ever the ground went upon, and as grave as an old gate-post
  into the bargain.  Would to the blessed St. Semiquaver, and the blessed
  worthy virgin St. Semiquavera, he were lord chief president (justice) of
  Paris!  Ods-bodikins, how he'd despatch!  With what expedition would he
  bring disputes to an upshot!  What an abbreviator and clawer off of
  lawsuits, reconciler of differences, examiner and fumbler of bags, peruser
  of bills, scribbler of rough drafts, and engrosser of deeds would he not
  make!  Well, friar, spare your breath to cool your porridge.  Come, let's
  now talk with deliberation, fairly and softly, as lawyers go to heaven.
  Let's know how you victual the venereal camp.  How is the snatchblatch?
  Fri.  Rough.
  
  Pan.  How is the gateway?  Fri.  Free.
  
  Pan.  And how is it within?  Fri.  Deep.
  
  Pan.  I mean, what weather is it there?  Fri.  Hot.
  
  Pan.  What shadows the brooks?  Fri.  Groves.
  
  Pan.  Of what's the colour of the twigs?  Fri.  Red.
  
  Pan.  And that of the old?  Fri.  Grey.
  
  Pan.  How are you when you shake?  Fri.  Brisk.
  
  Pan.  How is their motion?  Fri.  Quick.
  
  Pan.  Would you have them vault or wriggle more?  Fri.  Less.
  
  Pan.  What kind of tools are yours?  Fri.  Big.
  
  Pan.  And in their helves?  Fri.  Round.
  
  Pan.  Of what colour is the tip?  Fri.  Red.
  
  Pan.  When they've even used, how are they?  Fri.  Shrunk.
  
  Pan.  How much weighs each bag of tools?  Fri.  Pounds.
  
  Pan.  How hang your pouches?  Fri.  Tight.
  
  Pan.  How are they when you've done?  Fri.  Lank.
  
  Pan.  Now, by the oath you have taken, tell me, when you have a mind to
  cohabit, how you throw 'em?  Fri.  Down.
  
  Pan.  And what do they say then?  Fri.  Fie.
  
  Pan.  However, like maids, they say nay, and take it; and speak the less,
  but think the more, minding the work in hand; do they not?  Fri.  True.
  
  Pan.  Do they get you bairns?  Fri.  None.
  
  Pan.  How do you pig together?  Fri.  Bare.
  
  Pan.  Remember you're upon your oath, and tell me justly and bona fide how
  many times a day you monk it?  Fri.  Six.
  
  Pan.  How many bouts a-nights?  Fri.  Ten.
  
  Catso, quoth Friar John, the poor fornicating brother is bashful, and
  sticks at sixteen, as if that were his stint.  Right, quoth Panurge, but
  couldst thou keep pace with him, Friar John, my dainty cod?  May the
  devil's dam suck my teat if he does not look as if he had got a blow over
  the nose with a Naples cowl-staff.
  
  Pan.  Pray, Friar Shakewell, does your whole fraternity quaver and shake at
  that rate?  Fri.  All.
  
  Pan.  Who of them is the best cock o' the game?  Fri.  I.
  
  Pan.  Do you never commit dry-bobs or flashes in the pan?  Fri.  None.
  
  Pan.  I blush like any black dog, and could be as testy as an old cook when
  I think on all this; it passes my understanding.  But, pray, when you have
  been pumped dry one day, what have you got the next?  Fri.  More.
  
  Pan.  By Priapus, they have the Indian herb of which Theophrastus spoke, or
  I'm much out.  But, hearkee me, thou man of brevity, should some
  impediment, honestly or otherwise, impair your talents and cause your
  benevolence to lessen, how would it fare with you, then?  Fri.  Ill.
  
  Pan.  What would the wenches do?  Fri.  Rail.
  
  Pan.  What if you skipped, and let 'em fast a whole day?  Fri.  Worse.
  
  Pan.  What do you give 'em then?  Fri.  Thwacks.
  
  Pan.  What do they say to this?  Fri.  Bawl.
  
  Pan.  And what else?  Fri.  Curse.
  
  Pan.  How do you correct 'em?  Fri.  Hard.
  
  Pan.  What do you get out of 'em then?  Fri.  Blood.
  
  Pan.  How's their complexion then?  Fri.  Odd.
  
  Pan.  What do they mend it with?  Fri.  Paint.
  
  Pan.  Then what do they do?  Fri.  Fawn.
  
  Pan.  By the oath you have taken, tell me truly what time of the year do
  you do it least in?  Fri.  Now (August.).
  
  Pan.  What season do you do it best in?  Fri.  March.
  
  Pan.  How is your performance the rest of the year?  Fri.  Brisk.
  
  Then quoth Panurge, sneering, Of all, and of all, commend me to Ball; this
  is the friar of the world for my money.  You've heard how short, concise,
  and compendious he is in his answers.  Nothing is to be got out of him but
  monosyllables.  By jingo, I believe he would make three bites of a cherry.
  
  Damn him, cried Friar John, that's as true as I am his uncle.  The dog
  yelps at another gate's rate when he is among his bitches; there he is
  polysyllable enough, my life for yours.  You talk of making three bites of
  a cherry!  God send fools more wit and us more money!  May I be doomed to
  fast a whole day if I don't verily believe he would not make above two
  bites of a shoulder of mutton and one swoop of a whole pottle of wine.
  Zoons, do but see how down o' the mouth the cur looks!  He's nothing but
  skin and bones; he has pissed his tallow.
  
  Truly, truly, quoth Epistemon, this rascally monastical vermin all over the
  world mind nothing but their gut, and are as ravenous as any kites, and
  then, forsooth, they tell us they've nothing but food and raiment in this
  world.  'Sdeath, what more have kings and princes?
  
  
  
  
  How Epistemon disliked the institution of Lent.
  
  Pray did you observe, continued Epistemon, how this damned ill-favoured
  Semiquaver mentioned March as the best month for caterwauling?  True, said
  Pantagruel; yet Lent and March always go together, and the first was
  instituted to macerate and bring down our pampered flesh, to weaken and
  subdue its lusts, to curb and assuage the venereal rage.
  
  By this, said Epistemon, you may guess what kind of a pope it was who first
  enjoined it to be kept, since this filthy wooden-shoed Semiquaver owns that
  his spoon is never oftener nor deeper in the porringer of lechery than in
  Lent.  Add to this the evident reasons given by all good and learned
  physicians, affirming that throughout the whole year no food is eaten that
  can prompt mankind to lascivious acts more than at that time.
  
  As, for example, beans, peas, phasels, or long-peason, ciches, onions,
  nuts, oysters, herrings, salt-meats, garum (a kind of anchovy), and salads
  wholly made up of venereous herbs and fruits, as--
  
  Rocket,         Parsley,        Hop-buds,
  Nose-smart,     Rampions,       Figs,
  Taragon,        Poppy,          Rice,
  Cresses,        Celery,         Raisins, and others.
  
  It would not a little surprise you, said Pantagruel, should a man tell you
  that the good pope who first ordered the keeping of Lent, perceiving that
  at that time o' year the natural heat (from the centre of the body, whither
  it was retired during the winter's cold) diffuses itself, as the sap does
  in trees, through the circumference of the members, did therefore in a
  manner prescribe that sort of diet to forward the propagation of mankind.
  What makes me think so, is that by the registers of christenings at Touars
  it appears that more children are born in October and November than in the
  other ten months of the year, and reckoning backwards 'twill be easily
  found that they were all made, conceived, and begotten in Lent.
  
  I listen to you with both my ears, quoth Friar John, and that with no small
  pleasure, I'll assure you.  But I must tell you that the vicar of Jambert
  ascribed this copious prolification of the women, not to that sort of food
  that we chiefly eat in Lent, but to the little licensed stooping mumpers,
  your little booted Lent-preachers, your little draggle-tailed father
  confessors, who during all that time of their reign damn all husbands that
  run astray three fathom and a half below the very lowest pit of hell.  So
  the silly cod's-headed brothers of the noose dare not then stumble any more
  at the truckle-bed, to the no small discomfort of their maids, and are even
  forced, poor souls, to take up with their own bodily wives.  Dixi; I have
  done.
  
  You may descant on the institution of Lent as much as you please, cried
  Epistemon; so many men so many minds; but certainly all the physicians will
  be against its being suppressed, though I think that time is at hand.  I
  know they will, and have heard 'em say were it not for Lent their art would
  soon fall into contempt, and they'd get nothing, for hardly anybody would
  be sick.
  
  All distempers are sowed in lent; 'tis the true seminary and native bed of
  all diseases; nor does it only weaken and putrefy bodies, but it also makes
  souls mad and uneasy.  For then the devils do their best, and drive a
  subtle trade, and the tribe of canting dissemblers come out of their holes.
  'Tis then term-time with your cucullated pieces of formality that have one
  face to God and another to the devil; and a wretched clutter they make with
  their sessions, stations, pardons, syntereses, confessions, whippings,
  anathematizations, and much prayer with as little devotion.  However, I'll
  not offer to infer from this that the Arimaspians are better than we are in
  that point; yet I speak to the purpose.
  
  Well, quoth Panurge to the Semiquaver friar, who happened to be by, dear
  bumbasting, shaking, trilling, quavering cod, what thinkest thou of this
  fellow?  Is he a rank heretic?  Fri.  Much.
  
  Pan.  Ought he not to be singed?  Fri.  Well.
  
  Pan.  As soon as may be?  Fri.  Right.
  
  Pan.  Should not he be scalded first?  Fri.  No.
  
  Pan.  How then, should he be roasted?  Fri.  Quick.
  
  Pan.  Till at last he be?  Fri.  Dead.
  
  Pan.  What has he made you?  Fri.  Mad.
  
  Pan.  What d'ye take him to be?  Fri.  Damned.
  
  Pan.  What place is he to go to?  Fri.  Hell.
  
  Pan.  But, first, how would you have 'em served here?  Fri.  Burnt.
  
  Pan.  Some have been served so?  Fri.  Store.
  
  Pan.  That were heretics?  Fri.  Less.
  
  Pan.  And the number of those that are to be warmed thus hereafter is?
  Fri.  Great.
  
  Pan.  How many of 'em do you intend to save?  Fri.  None.
  
  Pan.  So you'd have them burned?  Fri.  All.
  
  I wonder, said Epistemon to Panurge, what pleasure you can find in talking
  thus with this lousy tatterdemalion of a monk.  I vow, did I not know you
  well, I might be ready to think you had no more wit in your head than he
  has in both his shoulders.  Come, come, scatter no words, returned Panurge;
  everyone as they like, as the woman said when she kissed her cow.  I wish I
  might carry him to Gargantua; when I'm married he might be my wife's fool.
  And make you one, cried Epistemon.  Well said, quoth Friar John.  Now, poor
  Panurge, take that along with thee, thou'rt e'en fitted; 'tis a plain case
  thou'lt never escape wearing the bull's feather; thy wife will be as common
  as the highway, that's certain.
  
  
  
  
  How we came to the land of Satin.
  
  Having pleased ourselves with observing that new order of Semiquaver
  Friars, we set sail, and in three days our skipper made the finest and most
  delightful island that ever was seen.  He called it the island of Frieze,
  for all the ways were of frieze.
  
  In that island is the land of Satin, so celebrated by our court pages.  Its
  trees and herbage never lose their leaves or flowers, and are all damask
  and flowered velvet.  As for the beasts and birds, they are all of tapestry
  work.  There we saw many beasts, birds on trees, of the same colour,
  bigness, and shape of those in our country; with this difference, however,
  that these did eat nothing, and never sung or bit like ours; and we also
  saw there many sorts of creatures which we never had seen before.
  
  Among the rest, several elephants in various postures; twelve of which were
  the six males and six females that were brought to Rome by their governor
  in the time of Germanicus, Tiberius's nephew.  Some of them were learned
  elephants, some musicians, others philosophers, dancers, and showers of
  tricks; and all sat down at table in good order, silently eating and
  drinking like so many fathers in a fratery-room.
  
  With their snouts or proboscises, some two cubits long, they draw up water
  for their own drinking, and take hold of palm leaves, plums, and all manner
  of edibles, using them offensively or defensively as we do our fists; with
  them tossing men high into the air in fight, and making them burst with
  laughing when they come to the ground.
  
  They have joints (in their legs), whatever some men, who doubtless never
  saw any but painted, may have written to the contrary.  Between their teeth
  they have two huge horns; thus Juba called 'em, and Pausanias tells us they
  are not teeth, but horns; however, Philostratus will have 'em to be teeth,
  and not horns.  'Tis all one to me, provided you will be pleased to own
  them to be true ivory.  These are some three or four cubits long, and are
  fixed in the upper jawbone, and consequently not in the lowermost.  If you
  hearken to those who will tell you to the contrary, you will find yourself
  damnably mistaken, for that's a lie with a latchet; though 'twere Aelian,
  that long-bow man, that told you so, never believe him, for he lies as fast
  as a dog can trot.  'Twas in this very island that Pliny, his brother
  tell-truth, had seen some elephants dance on the rope with bells, and whip
  over the tables, presto, begone, while people were at feasts, without so
  much as touching the toping topers or the topers toping.
  
  I saw a rhinoceros there, just such a one as Harry Clerberg had formerly
  showed me.  Methought it was not much unlike a certain boar which I had
  formerly seen at Limoges, except the sharp horn on its snout, that was
  about a cubit long; by the means of which that animal dares encounter with
  an elephant, that is sometimes killed with its point thrust into its belly,
  which is its most tender and defenceless part.
  
  I saw there two and thirty unicorns.  They are a curst sort of creatures,
  much resembling a fine horse, unless it be that their heads are like a
  stag's, their feet like an elephant's, their tails like a wild boar's, and
  out of each of their foreheads sprouts out a sharp black horn, some six or
  seven feet long; commonly it dangles down like a turkey-cock's comb.  When
  a unicorn has a mind to fight, or put it to any other use, what does it do
  but make it stand, and then 'tis as straight as an arrow.
  
  I saw one of them, which was attended with a throng of other wild beasts,
  purify a fountain with its horn.  With that Panurge told me that his
  prancer, alias his nimble-wimble, was like the unicorn, not altogether in
  length indeed, but in virtue and propriety; for as the unicorn purified
  pools and fountains from filth and venom, so that other animals came and
  drank securely there afterwards, in the like manner others might water
  their nags, and dabble after him without fear of shankers, carnosities,
  gonorrhoeas, buboes, crinkams, and such other plagues caught by those who
  venture to quench their amorous thirst in a common puddle; for with his
  nervous horn he removed all the infection that might be lurking in some
  blind cranny of the mephitic sweet-scented hole.
  
  Well, quoth Friar John, when you are sped, that is, when you are married,
  we will make a trial of this on thy spouse, merely for charity sake, since
  you are pleased to give us so beneficial an instruction.
  
  Ay, ay, returned Panurge, and then immediately I'll give you a pretty
  gentle aggregative pill of God, made up of two and twenty kind stabs with a
  dagger, after the Caesarian way.  Catso, cried Friar John, I had rather
  take off a bumper of good cool wine.
  
  I saw there the golden fleece formerly conquered by Jason, and can assure
  you, on the word of an honest man, that those who have said it was not a
  fleece but a golden pippin, because melon signifies both an apple and a
  sheep, were utterly mistaken.
  
  I saw also a chameleon, such as Aristotle describes it, and like that which
  had been formerly shown me by Charles Maris, a famous physician of the
  noble city of Lyons on the Rhone; and the said chameleon lived on air just
  as the other did.
  
  I saw three hydras, like those I had formerly seen.  They are a kind of
  serpent, with seven different heads.
  
  I saw also fourteen phoenixes.  I had read in many authors that there was
  but one in the whole world in every century; but, if I may presume to speak
  my mind, I declare that those who said this had never seen any, unless it
  were in the land of Tapestry; though 'twere vouched by Claudian or
  Lactantius Firmianus.
  
  I saw the skin of Apuleius's golden ass.
  
  I saw three hundred and nine pelicans.
  
  Item, six thousand and sixteen Seleucid birds marching in battalia, and
  picking up straggling grasshoppers in cornfields.
  
  Item, some cynamologi, argatiles, caprimulgi, thynnunculs, onocrotals, or
  bitterns, with their wide swallows, stymphalides, harpies, panthers,
  dorcasses, or bucks, cemades, cynocephalises, satyrs, cartasans, tarands,
  uri, monopses, or bonasi, neades, steras, marmosets, or monkeys, bugles,
  musimons, byturoses, ophyri, screech-owls, goblins, fairies, and griffins.
  
  I saw Mid-Lent o' horseback, with Mid-August and Mid-March holding its
  stirrups.
  
  I saw some mankind wolves, centaurs, tigers, leopards, hyenas,
  camelopardals, and orixes, or huge wild goats with sharp horns.
  
  I saw a remora, a little fish called echineis by the Greeks, and near it a
  tall ship that did not get ahead an inch, though she was in the offing with
  top and top-gallants spread before the wind.  I am somewhat inclined to
  believe that 'twas the very numerical ship in which Periander the tyrant
  happened to be when it was stopped by such a little fish in spite of wind
  and tide.  It was in this land of Satin, and in no other, that Mutianus had
  seen one of them.
  
  Friar John told us that in the days of yore two sorts of fishes used to
  abound in our courts of judicature, and rotted the bodies and tormented the
  souls of those who were at law, whether noble or of mean descent, high or
  low, rich or poor:  the first were your April fish or mackerel (pimps,
  panders, and bawds); the others your beneficial remoras, that is, the
  eternity of lawsuits, the needless lets that keep 'em undecided.
  
  I saw some sphynges, some raphes, some ounces, and some cepphi, whose
  fore-feet are like hands and their hind-feet like man's.
  
  Also some crocutas and some eali as big as sea-horses, with elephants'
  tails, boars' jaws and tusks, and horns as pliant as an ass's ears.
  
  The crocutas, most fleet animals, as big as our asses of Mirebalais, have
  necks, tails, and breasts like a lion's, legs like a stag's, have mouths up
  to the ears, and but two teeth, one above and one below; they speak with
  human voices, but when they do they say nothing.
  
  Some people say that none e'er saw an eyrie, or nest of sakers; if you'll
  believe me, I saw no less than eleven, and I'm sure I reckoned right.
  
  I saw some left-handed halberds, which were the first that I had ever seen.
  
  I saw some manticores, a most strange sort of creatures, which have the
  body of a lion, red hair, a face and ears like a man's, three rows of teeth
  which close together as if you joined your hands with your fingers between
  each other; they have a sting in their tails like a scorpion's, and a very
  melodious voice.
  
  I saw some catablepases, a sort of serpents, whose bodies are small, but
  their heads large, without any proportion, so that they've much ado to lift
  them up; and their eyes are so infectious that whoever sees 'em dies upon
  the spot, as if he had seen a basilisk.
  
  I saw some beasts with two backs, and those seemed to me the merriest
  creatures in the world.  They were most nimble at wriggling the buttocks,
  and more diligent in tail-wagging than any water-wagtails, perpetually
  jogging and shaking their double rumps.
  
  I saw there some milched crawfish, creatures that I never had heard of
  before in my life.  These moved in very good order, and 'twould have done
  your heart good to have seen 'em.
  
  
  
  
  How in the land of Satin we saw Hearsay, who kept a school of vouching.
  
  We went a little higher up into the country of Tapestry, and saw the
  Mediterranean Sea open to the right and left down to the very bottom; just
  as the Red Sea very fairly left its bed at the Arabian Gulf to make a lane
  for the Jews when they left Egypt.
  
  There I found Triton winding his silver shell instead of a horn, and also
  Glaucus, Proteus, Nereus, and a thousand other godlings and sea monsters.
  
  I also saw an infinite number of fish of all kinds, dancing, flying,
  vaulting, fighting, eating, breathing, billing, shoving, milting, spawning,
  hunting, fishing, skirmishing, lying in ambuscado, making truces,
  cheapening, bargaining, swearing, and sporting.
  
  In a blind corner we saw Aristotle holding a lantern in the posture in
  which the hermit uses to be drawn near St. Christopher, watching, prying,
  thinking, and setting everything down.
  
  Behind him stood a pack of other philosophers, like so many bums by a
  head-bailiff, as Appian, Heliodorus, Athenaeus, Porphyrius, Pancrates,
  Arcadian, Numenius, Possidonius, Ovidius, Oppianus, Olympius, Seleucus,
  Leonides, Agathocles, Theophrastus, Damostratus, Mutianus, Nymphodorus,
  Aelian, and five hundred other such plodding dons, who were full of
  business, yet had little to do; like Chrysippus or Aristarchus of Soli, who
  for eight-and-fifty years together did nothing in the world but examine the
  state and concerns of bees.
  
  I spied Peter Gilles among these, with a urinal in his hand, narrowly
  watching the water of those goodly fishes.
  
  When we had long beheld everything in this land of Satin, Pantagruel said,
  I have sufficiently fed my eyes, but my belly is empty all this while, and
  chimes to let me know 'tis time to go to dinner.  Let's take care of the
  body lest the soul abdicate it; and to this effect let's taste some of
  these anacampserotes ('An herb, the touching of which is said to reconcile
  lovers.'--Motteux.) that hang over our heads.  Psha, cried one, they are
  mere trash, stark naught, o' my word; they're good for nothing.
  
  I then went to pluck some mirobolans off of a piece of tapestry whereon
  they hung, but the devil a bit I could chew or swallow 'em; and had you had
  them betwixt your teeth you would have sworn they had been thrown silk;
  there was no manner of savour in 'em.
  
  One might be apt to think Heliogabalus had taken a hint from thence, to
  feast those whom he had caused to fast a long time, promising them a
  sumptuous, plentiful, and imperial feast after it; for all the treat used
  to amount to no more than several sorts of meat in wax, marble,
  earthenware, painted and figured tablecloths.
  
  While we were looking up and down to find some more substantial food, we
  heard a loud various noise, like that of paper-mills (or women bucking of
  linen); so with all speed we went to the place whence the noise came, where
  we found a diminutive, monstrous, misshapen old fellow, called Hearsay.
  His mouth was slit up to his ears, and in it were seven tongues, each of
  them cleft into seven parts.  However, he chattered, tattled, and prated
  with all the seven at once, of different matters, and in divers languages.
  
  He had as many ears all over his head and the rest of his body as Argus
  formerly had eyes, and was as blind as a beetle, and had the palsy in his
  legs.
  
  About him stood an innumerable number of men and women, gaping, listening,
  and hearing very intensely.  Among 'em I observed some who strutted like
  crows in a gutter, and principally a very handsome bodied man in the face,
  who held then a map of the world, and with little aphorisms compendiously
  explained everything to 'em; so that those men of happy memories grew
  learned in a trice, and would most fluently talk with you of a world of
  prodigious things, the hundredth part of which would take up a man's whole
  life to be fully known.
  
  Among the rest they descanted with great prolixity on the pyramids and
  hieroglyphics of Egypt, of the Nile, of Babylon, of the Troglodytes, the
  Hymantopodes, or crump-footed nation, the Blemiae, people that wear their
  heads in the middle of their breasts, the Pigmies, the Cannibals, the
  Hyperborei and their mountains, the Egypanes with their goat's feet, and
  the devil and all of others; every individual word of it by hearsay.
  
  I am much mistaken if I did not see among them Herodotus, Pliny, Solinus,
  Berosus, Philostratus, Pomponius Mela, Strabo, and God knows how many other
  antiquaries.
  
  Then Albert, the great Jacobin friar, Peter Tesmoin, alias Witness, Pope
  Pius the Second, Volaterranus, Paulus Jovius the valiant, Jemmy Cartier,
  Chaton the Armenian, Marco Polo the Venetian, Ludovico Romano, Pedro
  Aliares, and forty cartloads of other modern historians, lurking behind a
  piece of tapestry, where they were at it ding-dong, privately scribbling
  the Lord knows what, and making rare work of it; and all by hearsay.
  
  Behind another piece of tapestry (on which Naboth and Susanna's accusers
  were fairly represented), I saw close by Hearsay, good store of men of the
  country of Perce and Maine, notable students, and young enough.
  
  I asked what sort of study they applied themselves to; and was told that
  from their youth they learned to be evidences, affidavit-men, and vouchers,
  and were instructed in the art of swearing; in which they soon became such
  proficients, that when they left that country, and went back into their
  own, they set up for themselves and very honestly lived by their trade of
  evidencing, positively giving their testimony of all things whatsoever to
  those who feed them most roundly to do a job of journey-work for them; and
  all this by hearsay.
  
  You may think what you will of it; but I can assure you they gave some of
  us corners of their cakes, and we merrily helped to empty their hogsheads.
  Then, in a friendly manner, they advised us to be as sparing of truth as
  possibly we could if ever we had a mind to get court preferment.
  
  
  
  
  How we came in sight of Lantern-land.
  
  Having been but scurvily entertained in the land of Satin, we went o'
  board, and having set sail, in four days came near the coast of
  Lantern-land.  We then saw certain little hovering fires on the sea.
  
  For my part, I did not take them to be lanterns, but rather thought they
  were fishes which lolled their flaming tongues on the surface of the sea,
  or lampyrides, which some call cicindelas, or glowworms, shining there as
  ripe barley does o' nights in my country.
  
  But the skipper satisfied us that they were the lanterns of the watch, or,
  more properly, lighthouses, set up in many places round the precinct of the
  place to discover the land, and for the safe piloting in of some outlandish
  lanterns, which, like good Franciscan and Jacobin friars, were coming to
  make their personal appearance at the provincial chapter.
  
  However, some of us were somewhat suspicious that these fires were the
  forerunners of some storm, but the skipper assured us again they were not.
  
  
  
  
  How we landed at the port of the Lychnobii, and came to Lantern-land.
  
  
  Soon after we arrived at the port of Lantern-land, where Pantagruel
  discovered on a high tower the lantern of Rochelle, that stood us in good
  stead, for it cast a great light.  We also saw the lantern of Pharos, that
  of Nauplion, and that of Acropolis at Athens, sacred to Pallas.
  
  Near the port there's a little hamlet inhabited by the Lychnobii, that live
  by lanterns, as the gulligutted friars in our country live by nuns; they
  are studious people, and as honest men as ever shit in a trumpet.
  Demosthenes had formerly lanternized there.
  
  We were conducted from that place to the palace by three obeliscolichnys
  ('A kind of beacons.'--Motteux.), military guards of the port, with
  high-crowned hats, whom we acquainted with the cause of our voyage, and our
  design, which was to desire the queen of the country to grant us a lantern
  to light and conduct us during our voyage to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle.
  
  They promised to assist us in this, and added that we could never have come
  in a better time, for then the lanterns held their provincial chapter.
  
  When we came to the royal palace we had audience of her highness the Queen
  of Lantern-land, being introduced by two lanterns of honour, that of
  Aristophanes and that of Cleanthes (Motteux adds here--'Mistresses of the
  ceremonies.').  Panurge in a few words acquainted her with the causes of
  our voyage, and she received us with great demonstrations of friendship,
  desiring us to come to her at supper-time that we might more easily make
  choice of one to be our guide; which pleased us extremely.  We did not fail
  to observe intensely everything we could see, as the garbs, motions, and
  deportment of the queen's subjects, principally the manner after which she
  was served.
  
  The bright queen was dressed in virgin crystal of Tutia wrought damaskwise,
  and beset with large diamonds.
  
  The lanterns of the royal blood were clad partly with bastard-diamonds,
  partly with diaphanous stones; the rest with horn, paper, and oiled cloth.
  
  The cresset-lights took place according to the antiquity and lustre of
  their families.
  
  An earthen dark-lantern, shaped like a pot, notwithstanding this took place
  of some of the first quality; at which I wondered much, till I was told it
  was that of Epictetus, for which three thousand drachmas had been formerly
  refused.
  
  Martial's polymix lantern (Motteux gives a footnote:--'A lamp with many
  wicks, or a branch'd candlestick with many springs coming out of it, that
  supply all the branches with oil.') made a very good figure there.  I took
  particular notice of its dress, and more yet of the lychnosimity formerly
  consecrated by Canopa, the daughter of Tisias.
  
  I saw the lantern pensile formerly taken out of the temple of Apollo
  Palatinus at Thebes, and afterwards by Alexander the Great (carried to the
  town of Cymos).  (The words in brackets have been omitted by Motteux.)
  
  I saw another that distinguished itself from the rest by a bushy tuft of
  crimson silk on its head.  I was told 'twas that of Bartolus, the lantern
  of the civilians.
  
  Two others were very remarkable for glister-pouches that dangled at their
  waist.  We were told that one was the greater light and the other the
  lesser light of the apothecaries.
  
  When 'twas supper-time, the queen's highness first sat down, and then the
  lady lanterns, according to their rank and dignity.  For the first course
  they were all served with large Christmas candles, except the queen, who
  was served with a hugeous, thick, stiff, flaming taper of white wax,
  somewhat red towards the tip; and the royal family, as also the provincial
  lantern of Mirebalais, who were served with nutlights; and the provincial
  of Lower Poitou, with an armed candle.
  
  After that, God wot, what a glorious light they gave with their wicks!  I
  do not say all, for you must except a parcel of junior lanterns, under the
  government of a high and mighty one.  These did not cast a light like the
  rest, but seemed to me dimmer than any long-snuff farthing candle whose
  tallow has been half melted away in a hothouse.
  
  After supper we withdrew to take some rest, and the next day the queen made
  us choose one of the most illustrious lanterns to guide us; after which we
  took our leave.
  
  
  
  
  How we arrived at the Oracle of the Bottle.
  
  Our glorious lantern lighting and directing us to heart's content, we at
  last arrived at the desired island where was the Oracle of the Bottle.  As
  soon as friend Panurge landed, he nimbly cut a caper with one leg for joy,
  and cried to Pantagruel, Now we are where we have wished ourselves long
  ago.  This is the place we've been seeking with such toil and labour.  He
  then made a compliment to our lantern, who desired us to be of good cheer,
  and not be daunted or dismayed whatever we might chance to see.
  
  To come to the Temple of the Holy Bottle we were to go through a large
  vineyard, in which were all sorts of vines, as the Falernian, Malvoisian,
  the Muscadine, those of Taige, Beaune, Mirevaux, Orleans, Picardent,
  Arbois, Coussi, Anjou, Grave, Corsica, Vierron, Nerac, and others.  This
  vineyard was formerly planted by the good Bacchus, with so great a blessing
  that it yields leaves, flowers, and fruit all the year round, like the
  orange trees at Suraine.
  
  Our magnificent lantern ordered every one of us to eat three grapes, to put
  some vine-leaves in his shoes, and take a vine-branch in his left hand.
  
  At the end of the close we went under an arch built after the manner of
  those of the ancients.  The trophies of a toper were curiously carved on
  it.
  
  First, on one side was to be seen a long train of flagons, leathern
  bottles, flasks, cans, glass bottles, barrels, nipperkins, pint pots, quart
  pots, pottles, gallons, and old-fashioned semaises (swingeing wooden pots,
  such as those out of which the Germans fill their glasses); these hung on a
  shady arbour.
  
  On another side was store of garlic, onions, shallots, hams, botargos,
  caviare, biscuits, neat's tongues, old cheese, and such like comfits, very
  artificially interwoven, and packed together with vine-stocks.
  
  On another were a hundred sorts of drinking glasses, cups, cisterns, ewers,
  false cups, tumblers, bowls, mazers, mugs, jugs, goblets, talboys, and such
  other Bacchic artillery.
  
  On the frontispiece of the triumphal arch, under the zoophore, was the
  following couplet:
  
    You who presume to move this way,
    Get a good lantern, lest you stray.
  
  We took special care of that, cried Pantagruel when he had read them; for
  there is not a better or a more divine lantern than ours in all
  Lantern-land.
  
  This arch ended at a fine large round alley covered over with the interlaid
  branches of vines, loaded and adorned with clusters of five hundred
  different colours, and of as many various shapes, not natural, but due to
  the skill of agriculture; some were golden, others bluish, tawny, azure,
  white, black, green, purple, streaked with many colours, long, round,
  triangular, cod-like, hairy, great-headed, and grassy.  That pleasant alley
  ended at three old ivy-trees, verdant, and all loaden with rings.  Our
  enlightened lantern directed us to make ourselves hats with some of their
  leaves, and cover our heads wholly with them, which was immediately done.
  
  Jupiter's priestess, said Pantagruel, in former days would not like us have
  walked under this arbour.  There was a mystical reason, answered our most
  perspicuous lantern, that would have hindered her; for had she gone under
  it, the wine, or the grapes of which 'tis made, that's the same thing, had
  been over her head, and then she would have seemed overtopped and mastered
  by wine.  Which implies that priests, and all persons who devote themselves
  to the contemplation of divine things, ought to keep their minds sedate and
  calm, and avoid whatever might disturb and discompose their tranquillity,
  which nothing is more apt to do than drunkenness.
  
  You also, continued our lantern, could not come into the Holy Bottle's
  presence, after you have gone through this arch, did not that noble
  priestess Bacbuc first see your shoes full of vine-leaves; which action is
  diametrically opposite to the other, and signifies that you despise wine,
  and having mastered it, as it were, tread it under foot.
  
  I am no scholar, quoth Friar John, for which I'm heartily sorry, yet I find
  by my breviary that in the Revelation a woman was seen with the moon under
  her feet, which was a most wonderful sight.  Now, as Bigot explained it to
  me, this was to signify that she was not of the nature of other women; for
  they have all the moon at their heads, and consequently their brains are
  always troubled with a lunacy.  This makes me willing to believe what you
  said, dear Madam Lantern.
  
  
  
  
  How we went underground to come to the Temple of the Holy Bottle, and how
  Chinon is the oldest city in the world.
  
  We went underground through a plastered vault, on which was coarsely
  painted a dance of women and satyrs waiting on old Silenus, who was
  grinning o' horseback on his ass.  This made me say to Pantagruel, that
  this entry put me in mind of the painted cellar in the oldest city in the
  world, where such paintings are to be seen, and in as cool a place.
  
  Which is the oldest city in the world? asked Pantagruel.  'Tis Chinon, sir,
  or Cainon in Touraine, said I.  I know, returned Pantagruel, where Chinon
  lies, and the painted cellar also, having myself drunk there many a glass
  of cool wine; neither do I doubt but that Chinon is an ancient town
  --witness its blazon.  I own 'tis said twice or thrice:
  
        Chinon,
      Little town,
      Great renown,
      On old stone
      Long has stood;
    There's the Vienne, if you look down;
    If you look up, there's the wood.
  
  But how, continued he, can you make it out that 'tis the oldest city in the
  world?  Where did you find this written?  I have found it in the sacred
  writ, said I, that Cain was the first that built a town; we may then
  reasonably conjecture that from his name he gave it that of Cainon.  Thus,
  after his example, most other founders of towns have given them their
  names:  Athena, that's Minerva in Greek, to Athens; Alexander to
  Alexandria; Constantine to Constantinople; Pompey to Pompeiopolis in
  Cilicia; Adrian to Adrianople; Canaan, to the Canaanites; Saba, to the
  Sabaeans; Assur, to the Assyrians; and so Ptolemais, Caesarea, Tiberias,
  and Herodium in Judaea got their names.
  
  While we were thus talking, there came to us the great flask whom our
  lantern called the philosopher, her holiness the Bottle's governor.  He was
  attended with a troop of the temple-guards, all French bottles in wicker
  armour; and seeing us with our javelins wrapped with ivy, with our
  illustrious lantern, whom he knew, he desired us to come in with all manner
  of safety, and ordered we should be immediately conducted to the Princess
  Bacbuc, the Bottle's lady of honour, and priestess of all the mysteries;
  which was done.
  
  
  
  
  How we went down the tetradic steps, and of Panurge's fear.
  
  We went down one marble step under ground, where there was a resting, or,
  as our workmen call it, a landing-place; then, turning to the left, we went
  down two other steps, where there was another resting-place; after that we
  came to three other steps, turning about, and met a third; and the like at
  four steps which we met afterwards.  There quoth Panurge, Is it here?  How
  many steps have you told? asked our magnificent lantern.  One, two, three,
  four, answered Pantagruel.  How much is that? asked she.  Ten, returned he.
  Multiply that, said she, according to the same Pythagorical tetrad.  That
  is, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, cried Pantagruel.  How much is the whole?
  said she.  One hundred, answered Pantagruel.  Add, continued she, the first
  cube--that's eight.  At the end of that fatal number you'll find the temple
  gate; and pray observe, this is the true psychogony of Plato, so celebrated
  by the Academics, yet so little understood; one moiety of which consists of
  the unity of the two first numbers full of two square and two cubic
  numbers.  We then went down those numerical stairs, all under ground, and I
  can assure you, in the first place, that our legs stood us in good stead;
  for had it not been for 'em, we had rolled just like so many hogsheads into
  a vault.  Secondly, our radiant lantern gave us just so much light as is in
  St. Patrick's hole in Ireland, or Trophonius's pit in Boeotia; which caused
  Panurge to say to her, after we had got down some seventy-eight steps:
  
  Dear madam, with a sorrowful, aching heart, I most humbly beseech your
  lanternship to lead us back.  May I be led to hell if I be not half dead
  with fear; my heart is sunk down into my hose; I am afraid I shall make
  buttered eggs in my breeches.  I freely consent never to marry.  You have
  given yourself too much trouble on my account.  The Lord shall reward you
  in his great rewarder; neither will I be ungrateful when I come out of this
  cave of Troglodytes.  Let's go back, I pray you.  I'm very much afraid this
  is Taenarus, the low way to hell, and methinks I already hear Cerberus
  bark.  Hark! I hear the cur, or my ears tingle.  I have no manner of
  kindness for the dog, for there never is a greater toothache than when dogs
  bite us by the shins.  And if this be only Trophonius's pit, the lemures,
  hobthrushes, and goblins will certainly swallow us alive, just as they
  devoured formerly one of Demetrius's halberdiers for want of bridles.  Art
  thou here, Friar John?  Prithee, dear, dear cod, stay by me; I'm almost
  dead with fear.  Hast thou got thy bilbo?  Alas! poor pilgarlic's
  defenceless.  I'm a naked man, thou knowest; let's go back.  Zoons, fear
  nothing, cried Friar John; I'm by thee, and have thee fast by the collar;
  eighteen devils shan't get thee out of my clutches, though I were unarmed.
  Never did a man yet want weapons who had a good arm with as stout a heart.
  Heaven would sooner send down a shower of them; even as in Provence, in the
  fields of La Crau, near Mariannes, there rained stones (they are there to
  this day) to help Hercules, who otherwise wanted wherewithal to fight
  Neptune's two bastards.  But whither are we bound?  Are we a-going to the
  little children's limbo?  By Pluto, they'll bepaw and conskite us all.  Or
  are we going to hell for orders?  By cob's body, I'll hamper, bethwack, and
  belabour all the devils, now I have some vine-leaves in my shoes.  Thou
  shalt see me lay about me like mad, old boy.  Which way? where the devil
  are they?  I fear nothing but their damned horns; but cuckoldy Panurge's
  bull-feather will altogether secure me from 'em.  Lo! in a prophetic spirit
  I already see him, like another Actaeon, horned, horny, hornified.
  Prithee, quoth Panurge, take heed thyself, dear frater, lest, till monks
  have leave to marry, thou weddest something thou dostn't like, as some
  cat-o'-nine-tails or the quartan ague; if thou dost, may I never come safe
  and sound out of this hypogeum, this subterranean cave, if I don't tup and
  ram that disease merely for the sake of making thee a cornuted, corniferous
  property; otherwise I fancy the quartan ague is but an indifferent
  bedfellow.  I remember Gripe-men-all threatened to wed thee to some such
  thing; for which thou calledest him heretic.
  
  Here our splendid lantern interrupted them, letting us know this was the
  place where we were to have a taste of the creature, and be silent; bidding
  us not despair of having the word of the Bottle before we went back, since
  we had lined our shoes with vine-leaves.
  
  Come on then, cried Panurge, let's charge through and through all the
  devils of hell; we can but perish, and that's soon done.  However, I
  thought to have reserved my life for some mighty battle.  Move, move, move
  forwards; I am as stout as Hercules, my breeches are full of courage; my
  heart trembles a little, I own, but that's only an effect of the coldness
  and dampness of this vault; 'tis neither fear nor ague.  Come on, move on,
  piss, pish, push on.  My name's William Dreadnought.
  
  
  
  
  How the temple gates in a wonderful manner opened of themselves.
  
  After we were got down the steps, we came to a portal of fine jasper, of
  Doric order, on whose front we read this sentence in the finest gold,
  EN OINO ALETHEIA--that is, In wine truth.  The gates were of
  Corinthian-like brass, massy, wrought with little vine-branches, finely
  embossed and engraven, and were equally joined and closed together in their
  mortise without padlock, key-chain, or tie whatsoever.  Where they joined,
  there hanged an Indian loadstone as big as an Egyptian bean, set in gold,
  having two points, hexagonal, in a right line; and on each side, towards the
  wall, hung a handful of scordium (garlic germander).
  
  There our noble lantern desired us not to take it amiss that she went no
  farther with us, leaving us wholly to the conduct of the priestess Bacbuc;
  for she herself was not allowed to go in, for certain causes rather to be
  concealed than revealed to mortals.  However, she advised us to be resolute
  and secure, and to trust to her for the return.  She then pulled the
  loadstone that hung at the folding of the gates, and threw it into a silver
  box fixed for that purpose; which done, from the threshold of each gate she
  drew a twine of crimson silk about nine feet long, by which the scordium
  hung, and having fastened it to two gold buckles that hung at the sides,
  she withdrew.
  
  Immediately the gates flew open without being touched; not with a creaking
  or loud harsh noise like that made by heavy brazen gates, but with a soft
  pleasing murmur that resounded through the arches of the temple.
  
  Pantagruel soon knew the cause of it, having discovered a small cylinder or
  roller that joined the gates over the threshold, and, turning like them
  towards the wall on a hard well-polished ophites stone, with rubbing and
  rolling caused that harmonious murmur.
  
  I wondered how the gates thus opened of themselves to the right and left,
  and after we were all got in, I cast my eye between the gates and the wall
  to endeavour to know how this happened; for one would have thought our kind
  lantern had put between the gates the herb aethiopis, which they say opens
  some things that are shut.  But I perceived that the parts of the gates
  that joined on the inside were covered with steel, and just where the said
  gates touched when they were opened I saw two square Indian loadstones of a
  bluish hue, well polished, and half a span broad, mortised in the temple
  wall.  Now, by the hidden and admirable power of the loadstones, the steel
  plates were put into motion, and consequently the gates were slowly drawn;
  however, not always, but when the said loadstone on the outside was
  removed, after which the steel was freed from its power, the two bunches of
  scordium being at the same time put at some distance, because it deadens
  the magnes and robs it of its attractive virtue.
  
  On the loadstone that was placed on the right side the following iambic
  verse was curiously engraven in ancient Roman characters:
  
    Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.
  
    Fate leads the willing, and th' unwilling draws.
  
  The following sentence was neatly cut in the loadstone that was on the
  left:
  
      ALL THINGS TEND TO THEIR END.
  
  
  
  
  Of the Temple's admirable pavement.
  
  When I had read those inscriptions, I admired the beauty of the temple, and
  particularly the disposition of its pavement, with which no work that is
  now, or has been under the cope of heaven, can justly be compared; not that
  of the Temple of Fortune at Praeneste in Sylla's time, or the pavement of
  the Greeks, called asarotum, laid by Sosistratus at Pergamus.  For this
  here was wholly in compartments of precious stones, all in their natural
  colours: one of red jasper, most charmingly spotted; another of ophites; a
  third of porphyry; a fourth of lycophthalmy, a stone of four different
  colours, powdered with sparks of gold as small as atoms; a fifth of agate,
  streaked here and there with small milk-coloured waves; a sixth of costly
  chalcedony or onyx-stone; and another of green jasper, with certain red and
  yellowish veins.  And all these were disposed in a diagonal line.
  
  At the portico some small stones were inlaid and evenly joined on the
  floor, all in their native colours, to embellish the design of the figures;
  and they were ordered in such a manner that you would have thought some
  vine-leaves and branches had been carelessly strewed on the pavement; for
  in some places they were thick, and thin in others.  That inlaying was very
  wonderful everywhere.  Here were seen, as it were in the shade, some snails
  crawling on the grapes; there, little lizards running on the branches.  On
  this side were grapes that seemed yet greenish; on another, some clusters
  that seemed full ripe, so like the true that they could as easily have
  deceived starlings and other birds as those which Zeuxis drew.
  
  Nay, we ourselves were deceived; for where the artist seemed to have
  strewed the vine-branches thickest, we could not forbear walking with great
  strides lest we should entangle our feet, just as people go over an unequal
  stony place.
  
  I then cast my eyes on the roof and walls of the temple, that were all
  pargetted with porphyry and mosaic work, which from the left side at the
  coming in most admirably represented the battle in which the good Bacchus
  overthrew the Indians; as followeth.
  
  
  
  
  How we saw Bacchus's army drawn up in battalia in mosaic work.
  
  At the beginning, divers towns, hamlets, castles, fortresses, and forests
  were seen in flames; and several mad and loose women, who furiously ripped
  up and tore live calves, sheep, and lambs limb from limb, and devoured
  their flesh.  There we learned how Bacchus, at his coming into India,
  destroyed all things with fire and sword.
  
  Notwithstanding this, he was so despised by the Indians that they did not
  think it worth their while to stop his progress, having been certainly
  informed by their spies that his camp was destitute of warriors, and that
  he had only with him a crew of drunken females, a low-built, old,
  effeminate, sottish fellow, continually addled, and as drunk as a
  wheelbarrow, with a pack of young clownish doddipolls, stark naked, always
  skipping and frisking up and down, with tails and horns like those of young
  kids.
  
  For this reason the Indians had resolved to let them go through their
  country without the least opposition, esteeming a victory over such enemies
  more dishonourable than glorious.
  
  In the meantime Bacchus marched on, burning everything; for, as you know,
  fire and thunder are his paternal arms, Jupiter having saluted his mother
  Semele with his thunder, so that his maternal house was ruined by fire.
  Bacchus also caused a great deal of blood to be spilt; which, when he is
  roused and angered, principally in war, is as natural to him as to make
  some in time of peace.
  
  Thus the plains of the island of Samos are called Panema, which signifies
  bloody, because Bacchus there overtook the Amazons, who fled from the
  country of Ephesus, and there let 'em blood, so that they all died of
  phlebotomy.  This may give you a better insight into the meaning of an
  ancient proverb than Aristotle has done in his problems, viz., Why 'twas
  formerly said, Neither eat nor sow any mint in time of war.  The reason is,
  that blows are given then without any distinction of parts or persons, and
  if a man that's wounded has that day handled or eaten any mint, 'tis
  impossible, or at least very hard, to stanch his blood.
  
  After this, Bacchus was seen marching in battalia, riding in a stately
  chariot drawn by six young leopards.  He looked as young as a child, to
  show that all good topers never grow old.  He was as red as a cherry, or a
  cherub, which you please, and had no more hair on his chin than there's in
  the inside of my hand.  His forehead was graced with pointed horns, above
  which he wore a fine crown or garland of vine-leaves and grapes, and a
  mitre of crimson velvet, having also gilt buskins on.
  
  He had not one man with him that looked like a man; his guards and all his
  forces consisted wholly of Bassarides, Evantes, Euhyades, Edonides,
  Trietherides, Ogygiae, Mimallonides, Maenades, Thyades, and Bacchae,
  frantic, raving, raging, furious, mad women, begirt with live snakes and
  serpents instead of girdles, dishevelled, their hair flowing about their
  shoulders, with garlands of vine-branches instead of forehead-cloths, clad
  with stag's or goat's skins, and armed with torches, javelins, spears, and
  halberds whose ends were like pineapples.  Besides, they had certain small
  light bucklers that gave a loud sound if you touched 'em never so little,
  and these served them instead of drums.  They were just seventy-nine
  thousand two hundred and twenty-seven.
  
  Silenus, who led the van, was one on whom Bacchus relied very much, having
  formerly had many proofs of his valour and conduct.  He was a diminutive,
  stooping, palsied, plump, gorbellied old fellow, with a swingeing pair of
  stiff-standing lugs of his own, a sharp Roman nose, large rough eyebrows,
  mounted on a well-hung ass.  In his fist he held a staff to lean upon, and
  also bravely to fight whenever he had occasion to alight; and he was
  dressed in a woman's yellow gown.  His followers were all young, wild,
  clownish people, as hornified as so many kids and as fell as so many
  tigers, naked, and perpetually singing and dancing country-dances.  They
  were called tityri and satyrs, and were in all eighty-five thousand one
  hundred and thirty-three.
  
  Pan, who brought up the rear, was a monstrous sort of a thing; for his
  lower parts were like a goat's, his thighs hairy, and his horns bolt
  upright; a crimson fiery phiz, and a beard that was none of the shortest.
  He was a bold, stout, daring, desperate fellow, very apt to take pepper in
  the nose for yea and nay.
  
  In his left hand he held a pipe, and a crooked stick in his right.  His
  forces consisted also wholly of satyrs, aegipanes, agripanes, sylvans,
  fauns, lemures, lares, elves, and hobgoblins, and their number was
  seventy-eight thousand one hundred and fourteen.  The signal or word
  common to all the army was Evohe.
  
  
  
  
  How the battle in which the good Bacchus overthrew the Indians was
  represented in mosaic work.
  
  In the next place we saw the representation of the good Bacchus's
  engagement with the Indians.  Silenus, who led the van, was sweating,
  puffing, and blowing, belabouring his ass most grievously.  The ass
  dreadfully opened its wide jaws, drove away the flies that plagued it,
  winced, flounced, went back, and bestirred itself in a most terrible
  manner, as if some damned gad-bee had stung it at the breech.
  
  The satyrs, captains, sergeants, and corporals of companies, sounding the
  orgies with cornets, in a furious manner went round the army, skipping,
  capering, bounding, jerking, farting, flying out at heels, kicking and
  prancing like mad, encouraging their companions to fight bravely; and all
  the delineated army cried out Evohe!
  
  First, the Maenades charged the Indians with dreadful shouts, and a horrid
  din of their brazen drums and bucklers; the air rung again all around, as
  the mosaic work well expressed it.  And pray for the future don't so much
  admire Apelles, Aristides the Theban, and others who drew claps of thunder,
  lightnings, winds, words, manners, and spirits.
  
  We then saw the Indian army, who had at last taken the field to prevent the
  devastation of the rest of their country.  In the front were the elephants,
  with castles well garrisoned on their backs.  But the army and themselves
  were put into disorder; the dreadful cries of the Bacchae having filled
  them with consternation, and those huge animals turned tail and trampled on
  the men of their party.
  
  There you might have seen gaffer Silenus on his ass, putting on as hard as
  he could, striking athwart and alongst, and laying about him lustily with
  his staff after the old fashion of fencing.  His ass was prancing and
  making after the elephants, gaping and martially braying, as it were to
  sound a charge, as he did when formerly in the Bacchanalian feasts he waked
  the nymph Lottis, when Priapus, full of priapism, had a mind to priapize
  while the pretty creature was taking a nap.
  
  There you might have seen Pan frisk it with his goatish shanks about the
  Maenades, and with his rustic pipe excite them to behave themselves like
  Maenades.
  
  A little further you might have blessed your eyes with the sight of a young
  satyr who led seventeen kings his prisoners; and a Bacchis, who with her
  snakes hauled along no less than two and forty captains; a little faun, who
  carried a whole dozen of standards taken from the enemy; and goodman
  Bacchus on his chariot, riding to and fro fearless of danger, making much
  of his dear carcass, and cheerfully toping to all his merry friends.
  
  Finally, we saw the representation of his triumph, which was thus:  first,
  his chariot was wholly lined with ivy gathered on the mountain Meros; this
  for its scarcity, which you know raises the price of everything, and
  principally of those leaves in India.  In this Alexander the Great followed
  his example at his Indian triumph.  The chariot was drawn by elephants
  joined together, wherein he was imitated by Pompey the Great at Rome in his
  African triumph.  The good Bacchus was seen drinking out of a mighty urn,
  which action Marius aped after his victory over the Cimbri near Aix in
  Provence.  All his army were crowned with ivy; their javelins, bucklers,
  and drums were also wholly covered with it; there was not so much as
  Silenus's ass but was betrapped with it.
  
  The Indian kings were fastened with chains of gold close by the wheels of
  the chariot.  All the company marched in pomp with unspeakable joy, loaded
  with an infinite number of trophies, pageants, and spoils, playing and
  singing merry epiniciums, songs of triumph, and also rural lays and
  dithyrambs.
  
  At the farthest end was a prospect of the land of Egypt; the Nile with its
  crocodiles, marmosets, ibides, monkeys, trochiloses, or wrens, ichneumons,
  or Pharoah's mice, hippopotami, or sea-horses, and other creatures, its
  guests and neighbours.  Bacchus was moving towards that country under the
  conduct of a couple of horned beasts, on one of which was written in gold,
  Apis, and Osiris on the other; because no ox or cow had been seen in Egypt
  till Bacchus came thither.
  
  
  
  
  How the temple was illuminated with a wonderful lamp.
  
  Before I proceed to the description of the Bottle, I'll give you that of an
  admirable lamp that dispensed so large a light over all the temple that,
  though it lay underground, we could distinguish every object as clearly as
  above it at noonday.
  
  In the middle of the roof was fixed a ring of massive gold, as thick as my
  clenched fist.  Three chains somewhat less, most curiously wrought, hung
  about two feet and a half below it, and in a triangle supported a round
  plate of fine gold whose diameter or breadth did not exceed two cubits and
  half a span.  There were four holes in it, in each of which an empty ball
  was fastened, hollow within, and open o' top, like a little lamp; its
  circumference about two hands' breadth.  Each ball was of precious stone;
  one an amethyst, another an African carbuncle, the third an opal, and the
  fourth an anthracites.  They were full of burning water five times
  distilled in a serpentine limbec, and inconsumptible, like the oil formerly
  put into Pallas' golden lamp at Acropolis of Athens by Callimachus.  In
  each of them was a flaming wick, partly of asbestine flax, as of old in the
  temple of Jupiter Ammon, such as those which Cleombrotus, a most studious
  philosopher, saw, and partly of Carpasian flax (Ozell's correction.
  Motteux reads, 'which Cleombrotus, a most studious philosopher, and
  Pandelinus of Carpasium had, which were,' &c.), which were rather renewed
  than consumed by the fire.
  
  About two foot and a half below that gold plate, the three chains were
  fastened to three handles that were fixed to a large round lamp of most
  pure crystal, whose diameter was a cubit and a half, and opened about two
  hands' breadths o' top; by which open place a vessel of the same crystal,
  shaped somewhat like the lower part of a gourd-like limbec, or an urinal,
  was put at the bottom of the great lamp, with such a quantity of the
  afore-mentioned burning water, that the flame of the asbestine wick reached
  the centre of the great lamp.  This made all its spherical body seem to burn
  and be in a flame, because the fire was just at the centre and middle point,
  so that it was not more easy to fix the eye on it than on the disc of the
  sun, the matter being wonderfully bright and shining, and the work most
  transparent and dazzling by the reflection of the various colours of the
  precious stones whereof the four small lamps above the main lamp were made,
  and their lustre was still variously glittering all over the temple. Then
  this wandering light being darted on the polished marble and agate with
  which all the inside of the temple was pargetted, our eyes were entertained
  with a sight of all the admirable colours which the rainbow can boast when
  the sun darts his fiery rays on some dropping clouds.
  
  The design of the lamp was admirable in itself, but, in my opinion, what
  added much to the beauty of the whole, was that round the body of the
  crystal lamp there was carved in cataglyphic work a lively and pleasant
  battle of naked boys, mounted on little hobby-horses, with little whirligig
  lances and shields that seemed made of vine-branches with grapes on them;
  their postures generally were very different, and their childish strife and
  motions were so ingeniously expressed that art equalled nature in every
  proportion and action.  Neither did this seem engraved, but rather hewed
  out and embossed in relief, or at least like grotesque, which, by the
  artist's skill, has the appearance of the roundness of the object it
  represents.  This was partly the effect of the various and most charming
  light, which, flowing out of the lamp, filled the carved places with its
  glorious rays.
  
  
  
  
  ('This and the next chapter make really but one, tho' Mr.
  Motteux has made two of them; the first of which contains but eight lines,
  according to him, and ends at the words fantastic fountain.'--Ozell.).
  
  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.
  
  While we were admiring this incomparable lamp and the stupendous structure
  of the temple, the venerable priestess Bacbuc and her attendants came to us
  with jolly smiling looks, and seeing us duly accoutred, without the least
  difficulty took us into the middle of the temple, where, just under the
  aforesaid lamp, was the fine fantastic fountain.  She then ordered some
  cups, goblets, and talboys of gold, silver, and crystal to be brought, and
  kindly invited us to drink of the liquor that sprung there, which we
  readily did; for, to say the truth, this fantastic fountain was very
  inviting, and its materials and workmanship more precious, rare, and
  admirable than anything Plato ever dreamt of in limbo.
  
  Its basis or groundwork was of most pure and limpid alabaster, and its
  height somewhat more than three spans, being a regular heptagon on the
  outside, with its stylobates or footsteps, arulets, cymasults or blunt
  tops, and Doric undulations about it.  It was exactly round within.  On the
  middle point of each angle brink stood a pillar orbiculated in form of
  ivory or alabaster solid rings.  These were seven in number, according to
  the number of the angles (This sentence, restored by Ozell, is omitted by
  Motteux.).
  
  Each pillar's length from the basis to the architraves was near seven
  hands, taking an exact dimension of its diameter through the centre of its
  circumference and inward roundness; and it was so disposed that, casting
  our eyes behind one of them, whatever its cube might be, to view its
  opposite, we found that the pyramidal cone of our visual line ended at the
  said centre, and there, by the two opposites, formed an equilateral
  triangle whose two lines divided the pillar into two equal parts.
  
  That which we had a mind to measure, going from one side to another, two
  pillars over, at the first third part of the distance between them, was met
  by their lowermost and fundamental line, which, in a consult line drawn as
  far as the universal centre, equally divided, gave, in a just partition,
  the distance of the seven opposite pillars in a right line, beginning at
  the obtuse angle on the brink, as you know that an angle is always found
  placed between two others in all angular figures odd in number.
  
  This tacitly gave us to understand that seven semidiameters are in
  geometrical proportion, compass, and distance somewhat less than the
  circumference of a circle, from the figure of which they are extracted;
  that is to say, three whole parts, with an eighth and a half, a little
  more, or a seventh and a half, a little less, according to the instructions
  given us of old by Euclid, Aristotle, Archimedes, and others.
  
  The first pillar, I mean that which faced the temple gate, was of azure,
  sky-coloured sapphire.
  
  The second, of hyacinth, a precious stone exactly of the colour of the
  flower into which Ajax's choleric blood was transformed; the Greek letters
  A I being seen on it in many places.
  
  The third, an anachite diamond, as bright and glittering as lightning.
  
  The fourth, a masculine ruby balas (peach-coloured) amethystizing, its
  flame and lustre ending in violet or purple like an amethyst.
  
  The fifth, an emerald, above five hundred and fifty times more precious
  than that of Serapis in the labyrinth of the Egyptians, and more verdant
  and shining than those that were fixed, instead of eyes, in the marble
  lion's head near King Hermias's tomb.
  
  The sixth, of agate, more admirable and various in the distinctions of its
  veins, clouds, and colours than that which Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, so
  mightily esteemed.
  
  The seventh, of syenites, transparent, of the colour of a beryl and the
  clear hue of Hymetian honey; and within it the moon was seen, such as we
  see it in the sky, silent, full, new, and in the wane.
  
  These stones were assigned to the seven heavenly planets by the ancient
  Chaldaeans; and that the meanest capacities might be informed of this, just
  at the central perpendicular line, on the chapter of the first pillar,
  which was of sapphire, stood the image of Saturn in elutian (Motteux reads
  'Eliacim.') lead, with his scythe in his hand, and at his feet a crane of
  gold, very artfully enamelled, according to the native hue of the saturnine
  bird.
  
  On the second, which was of hyacinth, towards the left, Jupiter was seen in
  jovetian brass, and on his breast an eagle of gold enamelled to the life.
  
  On the third was Phoebus of the purest gold, and a white cock in his right
  hand.
  
  On the fourth was Mars in Corinthian brass, and a lion at his feet.
  
  On the fifth was Venus in copper, the metal of which Aristonides made
  Athamas's statue, that expressed in a blushing whiteness his confusion at
  the sight of his son Learchus, who died at his feet of a fall.
  
  On the sixth was Mercury in hydrargyre.  I would have said quicksilver, had
  it not been fixed, malleable, and unmovable.  That nimble deity had a stork
  at his feet.
  
  On the seventh was the Moon in silver, with a greyhound at her feet.
  
  The size of these statues was somewhat more than a third part of the
  pillars on which they stood, and they were so admirably wrought according
  to mathematical proportion that Polycletus's canon could hardly have stood
  in competition with them.
  
  The bases of the pillars, the chapters, the architraves, zoophores, and
  cornices were Phrygian work of massive gold, purer and finer than any that
  is found in the rivers Leede near Montpellier, Ganges in India, Po in
  Italy, Hebrus in Thrace, Tagus in Spain, and Pactolus in Lydia.
  
  The small arches between the pillars were of the same precious stone of
  which the pillars next to them were.  Thus, that arch was of sapphire which
  ended at the hyacinth pillar, and that was of hyacinth which went towards
  the diamond, and so on.
  
  Above the arches and chapters of the pillars, on the inward front, a cupola
  was raised to cover the fountain.  It was surrounded by the planetary
  statues, heptagonal at the bottom, and spherical o' top, and of crystal so
  pure, transparent, well-polished, whole and uniform in all its parts,
  without veins, clouds, flaws, or streaks, that Xenocrates never saw such a
  one in his life.
  
  Within it were seen the twelve signs of the zodiac, the twelve months of
  the year, with their properties, the two equinoxes, the ecliptic line, with
  some of the most remarkable fixed stars about the antartic pole and
  elsewhere, so curiously engraven that I fancied them to be the workmanship
  of King Necepsus, or Petosiris, the ancient mathematician.
  
  On the top of the cupola, just over the centre of the fountain, were three
  noble long pearls, all of one size, pear fashion, perfectly imitating a
  tear, and so joined together as to represent a flower-de-luce or lily, each
  of the flowers seeming above a hand's breadth.  A carbuncle jetted out of
  its calyx or cup as big as an ostrich's egg, cut seven square (that number
  so beloved of nature), and so prodigiously glorious that the sight of it
  had like to have made us blind, for the fiery sun or the pointed lightning
  are not more dazzling and unsufferably bright.
  
  Now, were some judicious appraisers to judge of the value of this
  incomparable fountain, and the lamp of which we have spoke, they would
  undoubtedly affirm it exceeds that of all the treasures and curiosities in
  Europe, Asia, and Africa put together.  For that carbuncle alone would have
  darkened the pantarbe of Iarchus (Motteux reads 'Joachas.') the Indian
  magician, with as much ease as the sun outshines and dims the stars with
  his meridian rays.
  
  Nor let Cleopatra, that Egyptian queen, boast of her pair of pendants,
  those two pearls, one of which she caused to be dissolved in vinegar, in
  the presence of Antony the Triumvir, her gallant.
  
  Or let Pompeia Plautina be proud of her dress covered all over with
  emeralds and pearls curiously intermixed, she who attracted the eyes of all
  Rome, and was said to be the pit and magazine of the conquering robbers of
  the universe.
  
  The fountain had three tubes or channels of right pearl, seated in three
  equilateral angles already mentioned, extended on the margin, and those
  channels proceeded in a snail-like line, winding equally on both sides.
  
  We looked on them a while, and had cast our eyes on another side, when
  Bacbuc directed us to watch the water.  We then heard a most harmonious
  sound, yet somewhat stopped by starts, far distant, and subterranean, by
  which means it was still more pleasing than if it had been free,
  uninterrupted, and near us, so that our minds were as agreeably entertained
  through our ears with that charming melody as they were through the windows
  of our eyes with those delightful objects.
  
  Bacbuc then said, Your philosophers will not allow that motion is begot by
  the power of figures; look here, and see the contrary.  By that single
  snail-like motion, equally divided as you see, and a fivefold infoliature,
  movable at every inward meeting, such as is the vena cava where it enters
  into the right ventricle of the heart; just so is the flowing of this
  fountain, and by it a harmony ascends as high as your world's ocean.
  
  She then ordered her attendants to make us drink; and, to tell you the
  truth of the matter as near as possible, we are not, heaven be praised! of
  the nature of a drove of calf-lollies, who (as your sparrows can't feed
  unless you bob them on the tail) must be rib-roasted with tough crabtree
  and firked into a stomach, or at least into an humour to eat or drink.  No,
  we know better things, and scorn to scorn any man's civility who civilly
  invites us to a drinking bout.  Bacbuc asked us then how we liked our tiff.
  We answered that it seemed to us good harmless sober Adam's liquor, fit to
  keep a man in the right way, and, in a word, mere element; more cool and
  clear than Argyrontes in Aetolia, Peneus in Thessaly, Axius in Mygdonia, or
  Cydnus in Cilicia, a tempting sight of whose cool silver stream caused
  Alexander to prefer the short-lived pleasure of bathing himself in it to
  the inconveniences which he could not but foresee would attend so
  ill-termed an action.
  
  This, said Bacbuc, comes of not considering with ourselves, or
  understanding the motions of the musculous tongue, when the drink glides on
  it in its way to the stomach.  Tell me, noble strangers, are your throats
  lined, paved, or enamelled, as formerly was that of Pithyllus, nicknamed
  Theutes, that you can have missed the taste, relish, and flavour of this
  divine liquor?  Here, said she, turning towards her gentlewomen, bring my
  scrubbing-brushes, you know which, to scrape, rake, and clear their
  palates.
  
  They brought immediately some stately, swingeing, jolly hams, fine
  substantial neat's tongues, good hung-beef, pure and delicate botargos,
  venison, sausages, and such other gullet-sweepers.  And, to comply with her
  invitation, we crammed and twisted till we owned ourselves thoroughly cured
  of thirst, which before did damnably plague us.
  
  We are told, continued she, that formerly a learned and valiant Hebrew
  chief, leading his people through the deserts, where they were in danger of
  being famished, obtained of God some manna, whose taste was to them, by
  imagination, such as that of meat was to them before in reality; thus,
  drinking of this miraculous liquor, you'll find it taste like any wine that
  you shall fancy you drink.  Come, then, fancy and drink.  We did so, and
  Panurge had no sooner whipped off his brimmer but he cried, By Noah's open
  shop, 'tis vin de Beaune, better than ever was yet tipped over tongue, or
  may ninety-six devils swallow me.  Oh! that to keep its taste the longer,
  we gentlemen topers had but necks some three cubits long or so, as
  Philoxenus desired to have, or, at least, like a crane's, as Melanthius
  wished his.
  
  On the faith of true lanterners, quoth Friar John, 'tis gallant, sparkling
  Greek wine.  Now, for God's sake, sweetheart, do but teach me how the devil
  you make it.  It seems to me Mirevaux wine, said Pantagruel; for before I
  drank I supposed it to be such.  Nothing can be misliked in it, but that
  'tis cold; colder, I say, than the very ice; colder than the Nonacrian and
  Dercean (Motteux reads 'Deraen.') water, or the Conthoporian (Motteux,
  'Conthopian.') spring at Corinth, that froze up the stomach and nutritive
  parts of those that drank of it.
  
  Drink once, twice, or thrice more, said Bacbuc, still changing your
  imagination, and you shall find its taste and flavour to be exactly that on
  which you shall have pitched.  Then never presume to say that anything is
  impossible to God.  We never offered to say such a thing, said I; far from
  it, we maintain he is omnipotent.
  
  
  
  
  How the Priestess Bacbuc equipped Panurge in order to have the word of the
  Bottle.
  
  When we had thus chatted and tippled, Bacbuc asked, Who of you here would
  have the word of the Bottle?  I, your most humble little funnel, an't
  please you, quoth Panurge.  Friend, saith she, I have but one thing to tell
  you, which is, that when you come to the Oracle, you take care to hearken
  and hear the word only with one ear.  This, cried Friar John, is wine of
  one ear, as Frenchmen call it.
  
  She then wrapped him up in a gaberdine, bound his noddle with a goodly
  clean biggin, clapped over it a felt such as those through which hippocras
  is distilled, at the bottom of which, instead of a cowl, she put three
  obelisks, made him draw on a pair of old-fashioned codpieces instead of
  mittens, girded him about with three bagpipes bound together, bathed his
  jobbernowl thrice in the fountain; then threw a handful of meal on his
  phiz, fixed three cock's feathers on the right side of the hippocratical
  felt, made him take a jaunt nine times round the fountain, caused him to
  take three little leaps and to bump his a-- seven times against the ground,
  repeating I don't know what kind of conjurations all the while in the
  Tuscan tongue, and ever and anon reading in a ritual or book of ceremonies,
  carried after her by one of her mystagogues.
  
  For my part, may I never stir if I don't really believe that neither Numa
  Pompilius, the second King of the Romans, nor the Cerites of Tuscia, and
  the old Hebrew captain ever instituted so many ceremonies as I then saw
  performed; nor were ever half so many religious forms used by the
  soothsayers of Memphis in Egypt to Apis, or by the Euboeans, at Rhamnus
  (Motteux gives 'or by the Embrians, or at Rhamnus.'), to Rhamnusia, or to
  Jupiter Ammon, or to Feronia.
  
  When she had thus accoutred my gentleman, she took him out of our company,
  and led him out of the temple, through a golden gate on the right, into a
  round chapel made of transparent speculary stones, by whose solid clearness
  the sun's light shined there through the precipice of the rock without any
  windows or other entrance, and so easily and fully dispersed itself through
  the greater temple that the light seemed rather to spring out of it than to
  flow into it.
  
  The workmanship was not less rare than that of the sacred temple at
  Ravenna, or that in the island of Chemnis in Egypt.  Nor must I forget to
  tell you that the work of that round chapel was contrived with such a
  symmetry that its diameter was just the height of the vault.
  
  In the middle of it was an heptagonal fountain of fine alabaster most
  artfully wrought, full of water, which was so clear that it might have
  passed for element in its purity and singleness.  The sacred Bottle was in
  it to the middle, clad in pure fine crystal of an oval shape, except its
  muzzle, which was somewhat wider than was consistent with that figure.
  
  
  
  
  How Bacbuc, the high-priestess, brought Panurge before the Holy Bottle.
  
  There the noble priestess Bacbuc made Panurge stoop and kiss the brink of
  the fountain; then bade him rise and dance three ithymbi ('Dances in the
  honour of Bacchus.'--Motteux.).  Which done, she ordered him to sit down
  between two stools placed there for that purpose, his arse upon the ground.
  Then she opened her ceremonial book, and, whispering in his left ear, made
  him sing an epileny, inserted here in the figure of the bottle.
  
      Bottle, whose Mysterious Deep
    Do's ten thousand Secrets keep,
    With attentive Ear I wait;
    Ease my Mind, and speak my Fate.
    Soul of Joy!  Like Bacchus, we
    More than India gain by thee.
    Truths unborn thy Juice reveals,
    Which Futurity conceals.
    Antidote to Frauds and Lies,
    Wine, that mounts us to the Skies,
    May thy Father Noah's Brood
    Like him drown, but in thy Flood.
    Speak, so may the Liquid Mine
    Of Rubies, or of Diamonds shine.
      Bottle, whose Mysterious Deep
    Do's ten thousand Secrets keep,
    With attentive Ear I wait;
    Ease my Mind, and speak my Fate.
  
  When Panurge had sung, Bacbuc threw I don't know what into the fountain,
  and straight its water began to boil in good earnest, just for the world as
  doth the great monastical pot at Bourgueil when 'tis high holiday there.
  Friend Panurge was listening with one ear, and Bacbuc kneeled by him, when
  such a kind of humming was heard out of the Bottle as is made by a swarm of
  bees bred in the flesh of a young bull killed and dressed according to
  Aristaeus's art, or such as is made when a bolt flies out of a crossbow, or
  when a shower falls on a sudden in summer.  Immediately after this was
  heard the word Trinc.  By cob's body, cried Panurge, 'tis broken, or
  cracked at least, not to tell a lie for the matter; for even so do crystal
  bottles speak in our country when they burst near the fire.
  
  Bacbuc arose, and gently taking Panurge under the arms, said, Friend, offer
  your thanks to indulgent heaven, as reason requires.  You have soon had the
  word of the Goddess-Bottle; and the kindest, most favourable, and certain
  word of answer that I ever yet heard her give since I officiated here at
  her most sacred oracle.  Rise, let us go to the chapter, in whose gloss
  that fine word is explained.  With all my heart, quoth Panurge; by jingo, I
  am just as wise as I was last year.  Light, where's the book?  Turn it
  over, where's the chapter?  Let's see this merry gloss.
  
  
  
  
  How Bacbuc explained the word of the Goddess-Bottle.
  
  Bacbuc having thrown I don't know what into the fountain, straight the
  water ceased to boil; and then she took Panurge into the greater temple, in
  the central place, where there was the enlivening fountain.
  
  There she took out a hugeous silver book, in the shape of a half-tierce, or
  hogshead, of sentences, and, having filled it at the fountain, said to him,
  The philosophers, preachers, and doctors of your world feed you up with
  fine words and cant at the ears; now, here we really incorporate our
  precepts at the mouth.  Therefore I'll not say to you, read this chapter,
  see this gloss; no, I say to you, taste me this fine chapter, swallow me
  this rare gloss.  Formerly an ancient prophet of the Jewish nation ate a
  book and became a clerk even to the very teeth!  Now will I have you drink
  one, that you may be a clerk to your very liver.  Here, open your
  mandibules.
  
  Panurge gaping as wide as his jaws would stretch, Bacbuc took the silver
  book--at least we took it for a real book, for it looked just for the world
  like a breviary--but in truth it was a breviary, a flask of right Falernian
  wine as it came from the grape, which she made him swallow every drop.
  
  By Bacchus, quoth Panurge, this was a notable chapter, a most authentic
  gloss, o' my word.  Is this all that the trismegistian Bottle's word means?
  I' troth, I like it extremely; it went down like mother's milk.  Nothing
  more, returned Bacbuc; for Trinc is a panomphean word, that is, a word
  understood, used and celebrated by all nations, and signifies drink.
  
  Some say in your world that sack is a word used in all tongues, and justly
  admitted in the same sense among all nations; for, as Aesop's fable hath
  it, all men are born with a sack at the neck, naturally needy and begging
  of each other; neither can the most powerful king be without the help of
  other men, or can anyone that's poor subsist without the rich, though he be
  never so proud and insolent; as, for example, Hippias the philosopher, who
  boasted he could do everything.  Much less can anyone make shift without
  drink than without a sack.  Therefore here we hold not that laughing, but
  that drinking is the distinguishing character of man.  I don't say
  drinking, taking that word singly and absolutely in the strictest sense;
  no, beasts then might put in for a share; I mean drinking cool delicious
  wine.  For you must know, my beloved, that by wine we become divine;
  neither can there be a surer argument or a less deceitful divination.  Your
  ('Varro.'--Motteux) academics assert the same when they make the etymology
  of wine, which the Greeks call OINOS, to be from vis, strength, virtue,
  and power; for 'tis in its power to fill the soul with all truth, learning,
  and philosophy.
  
  If you observe what is written in Ionic letters on the temple gate, you may
  have understood that truth is in wine.  The Goddess-Bottle therefore
  directs you to that divine liquor; be yourself the expounder of your
  undertaking.
  
  It is impossible, said Pantagruel to Panurge, to speak more to the purpose
  than does this true priestess; you may remember I told you as much when you
  first spoke to me about it.
  
  Trinc then:  what says your heart, elevated by Bacchic enthusiasm?
  
  With this quoth Panurge:
  
    Trinc, trinc; by Bacchus, let us tope,
    And tope again; for, now I hope
    To see some brawny, juicy rump
    Well tickled with my carnal stump.
    Ere long, my friends, I shall be wedded,
    Sure as my trap-stick has a red-head;
    And my sweet wife shall hold the combat
    Long as my baws can on her bum beat.
    O what a battle of a-- fighting
    Will there be, which I much delight in!
    What pleasing pains then shall I take
    To keep myself and spouse awake!
    All heart and juice, I'll up and ride,
    And make a duchess of my bride.
    Sing Io paean! loudly sing
    To Hymen, who all joys will bring.
    Well, Friar John, I'll take my oath,
    This oracle is full of troth;
    Intelligible truth it bears,
    More certain than the sieve and shears.
  
  
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Book 5
target: Pantagruel and his companions arrive at the Ringing Island where they meet an old hermit by the name of Braguibus. According to the hermit, it is written that anyone who wishes to enter the island must first fast for four days; otherwise, they will be burned as a heretic. Although all of Pantagruel's companions complain about fasting, they do so in order to gain access to the island. After completing their four-day fast, the hermit gives them a letter that recommends them to Albian Camar, Master Aedituus of the Ringing Island. After meeting Master Aedituus, Pantagruel and his entourage feast before they find out the history of the island. According to Master Aedituus, the past inhabitants of the island, the Siticines, became birds long ago. Now the island is covered in all manner of birds, and the caretakers, including Master Aedituus, have built giant cages to house the birds. The tops of the cages have bells, and ringing the bells makes different birds sing or cry out. There are many different species of birds, and some species have been named after the different orders within the church, including a pope-hawk. Apparently, just as the Pope rules over the Catholic religion by himself, there's only ever one pope-hawk at any one time. Master Aedituus explains that the only reported instance where there was more than one pope-hawk was a time of much chaos, for the birds did not know whom to follow. Master Aedituus points out that many birds have come to the island from other places, including birds from Africa. Master Aedituus suspects that a lot of the birds come to the island, because their families are too large, their families were poor, or because they felt it was their duty to visit the island. All of these reasons are identical to the reasons that people go into the church as a profession. Master Aedituus tells Pantagruel and his friends about the knight-hawks, making an allegory of how they act noble and try to fight larger birds, but more often than not, the nobility is an act, since they look and act like mongrel birds. Master Aedituus then explains how he will reward Pantagruel and his friends with a four-day feast, since they all fasted for four days to gain entrance into this place. During which time, everyone ate excessively well and wandered around the bird paradise. Panurge then told the fable of the horse and the ass to Master Aedituus. In short, a horse sees an ass in the field and starts to talk to him, expressing how sorry he is that the ass must work so hard and yet never receive the rewards of being kept in a stable and fed well. The horse then offers the ass a chance to come with him in his stables so that he may be fed well and groomed. The ass takes the horse's offer, and experiences the horse's luxurious way life. After being groomed and well fed, the ass asks the horse how often they are allowed to have sexual relations with the female horses. The horse explains that they never do such actions in the sanctity of the stables, to which the ass replies that he would rather live in squalor and be able to have sex as often as he pleases than to live in such luxury for the rest of his life. During the four days, Pantagruel requests to see the pope-hawk. Master Aedituus explains, however, that it would prove difficult to find him. Nevertheless, Master Aedituus promises to try and locate the pope-hawk. Upon doing so, Master Aedituus arranges a viewing of the bird. Upon seeing the bird, Panurge comments that the bird looks grizzly, which results in Master Aedituus chastising Panurge for his comment. While Pantagruel and the others continue to look at the pope-hawk, Panurge notices that there is an egg underneath the bird in his cage, implying that the supposed only pope-hawk was female, which Master Aedituus claims could not be so. Pantagruel and his companions leave the pope-hawk and go to listen to the other birds, which they find amusing. At one point they try to gain the attention of a particular bird, so Panurge picks up a stone as if he was going to throw it at the bird. Master Aedituus begs Panurge never to do such an action, for the birds in this location were holy and must be treated as such. Pantagruel and his friends then decide that it was time to leave, and so they bid farewell to their host. Master Aedituus gives them many gifts and makes them promise that they will come back and visit. As Pantagruel and his companions sail on, they find themselves at the island of Tools. Supposedly, this was an island where no people lived. Instead, all manner of tools for daily laboring and for war were just scattered all over the place, and some of the tools even grew out of the earth or fell from trees. The narrator implies that the tools were alive, similar to plants, and that these tool-plant hybrids would breed with one another to create strange looking tools. Sailing onward, Pantagruel and his companions arrive at the island of Sharping. On this island, the rocks break through the surface of the land and poke upward. There were even two large cube-shaped rocks that looked like giant dice. The surfaces of these cubes looked white, as if they were covered in snow, but the pilot of Pantagruel's ship assures everyone that they are covered in bones. He then explains how devils live on these rocks and are summoned whenever anyone plays gambling games. Supposedly, the island also houses a holy relic. The narrator explains how Pantagruel and his friends decide to brave the island and see the relic. Unfortunately, the relic itself isn't very impressive, although the keepers of the relic have done a marvelous job at decorating the holding place of the relic to make it appear grander. Pantagruel and the others claim to be thankful for seeing the relic, and they even purchase items from the keepers of the relic, including hats. On a barren island near the Sharpening Island, Pantagruel and his companions go through a wicket and are captured by the workers of Gripe-men-all, Archduke of the Furred Law-cats. They have captured Pantagruel and his companions, because one of Pantagruel's servants was wearing a hat purchased from the people of the Sharpening Island. Pantagruel and his companions are put on trial, and Gripe-men-all offers them a riddle that they must solve to prove their innocence. They do not know the answer to the actual riddle, and Friar John curses them for putting good men on trial for no reason and making a mockery out of the legal system. Panurge then realizes that the answer to the riddle is no answer at all, but a bride. He throws gold to Gripe-men-all and all the Furred Law-cats, and surely enough they decide that all of the prisoners not guilty, and thus they are allowed to leave the island. Prior to getting onto their boats, Pantagruel and his companions are warned by dockworkers that they had best leave gifts for not only the Furred Law-cats and Gripe-men-all, but also for the wives of all of these individuals. It becomes clear that the entire population of the island is corrupt, and that the legal system does not function on equality. These Furred Law-cats use the guise of justice to extort money out of their victims. Friar John and Panurge get into an argument about what to do with these Furred Law-cats. Friar John believes they are devils and sinners, and that all of the Pantagruelists, as they have come to call themselves, should cleanse the earth of such filth - that is, they should kill the Furred Law-cats. Panurge has no desire to fight these monsters. He is satisfied that he has paid them off with gold, and he wishes to have nothing else to do with them. Friar John pulls out his cutlass and walks off in a huff, angry that the others will not stand by his side and fight these sinful beasts. As he walks, he comes across a landlady complaining to a police officer about some of Pantagruel's crewmembers who did not pay for services rendered. Friar John starts waving his cutlass and throwing around angry words, which makes the police officer flee; but the landlady stands her ground. She explains that all she wants is payment for services rendered, and Friar John agrees to do so, but only after he sees the state of the rooms where the crewmen stayed. The landlady shows Friar John the rooms, and he agrees that the cost is fair, so he pays the woman her money. After he pays her, though, he starts ripping open the pillows and creating a storm of feathers. The landlady runs off screaming, and Friar John steals the remaining pillows and blankets and gives them to some of the men on the ship. Pantagruel and his companions quickly leave the island and immediately set sail for some other place. Unfortunately, a storm turns their ship around and makes them almost land back on the island of the Furred Law-cats. Panurge begs the pilot to turn the ship around, for he never wishes to see that island again. Somehow they manage to once again sail away from the island and make their way toward another place. The new place they find is the island of the Apedefers. On this strange island, Pantagruel and his companions find all manner of small and gigantic wine presses. The rulers of the wine presses judge everything through the act of pressing grapes, but they will also press any object that fits within their presses. Through this metaphor made real, they have transformed the wine press processes into a legal system. The people of the island find their methodology quite suitable, since the masters of the presses are all ignorant people, and therefore cannot be corrupted. Great monsters also live on the island, but they are chained up. The masters of the wine presses feed the juices of this strange vineyard-legal system to these monsters. Whereas Friar John was bent on destroying the Furred Law-cats, he and Panurge are far more supportive of this legal system, for not only does it create wine, but they claim that the ignorant people in charge are by far more intelligent for their use of such a fair and unbiased system. Next, they came to an island where the people would slit their skin to let the fat out, much like people slit their clothes to let the under layers of fabric show through. Pantagruel and his companions arrive in time for what they initially believe is a happy ceremony, the bursting of an older man, but they find out that the bursting is actually akin to death, and that everyone has gathered for a funeral-like scene. Panurge mourns the situation and begs that they find some other way to heal the man, but alas the man dies as Panurge laments. A storm hits, and they are caught aground. As they wait for the tides to swell and help them get off of the sandbanks, a passing ship spots them and calls out to them. The man calling out to them is a friend of the narrator. This friend goes by the name of Harry Cotiral, and he is described as a man who wears a greasy hat, who holds the stump of a cabbage in one hand, and who has attached a horse's penis to his belt. As Harry's ship gets closer, Harry and the narrator have a brief conversation, and the narrator learns that Harry's ship is sailing from the Queen of Whims' land and that it is making its way home to Pantagruel's country. The cargo on Harry's ship includes alchemy products, and the passengers traveling on the ship are all manner of people: "Astrologers, fortune-tellers, alchemists, rhymers, poets, painters, projectors, mathematicians, watchmakers, sing-songs, musicians," . Panurge insists that the narrator and Harry quit chatting long enough so that they can negotiate a way for Harry's ship to help their ship get off the sandbank. Harry explains that he was steering his ship closer to them just for that purpose, and he orders his crewmen to start throwing over cables to assist in pulling the ship free. Pantagruel and all his companions give thanks to Harry and his ship for their assistance. Pantagruel also make certain that they are paid well for their aid. Although Pantagruel's ships are no longer stuck on the sandbanks, the storm still damaged the ships pretty significantly, so Pantagruel and his companions decide that the only way to find their way to the Queen of Whims' kingdom is to let the winds and currents push them toward their destination. Pantagruel and his companions finally arrive at the Queen of Whims' domain and are greeted by soldiers who make sure that Pantagruel and his friends are good and noble people. Upon proving so, they are admitted to see the Queen. Although she is nearly 2,000 years old, she looks young, beautiful, and regal. Within her castle are many sick people, but as soon as she plays a song on the organ, all those within the vicinity are healed completely. She then meets with Pantagruel and his friends and delivers the most beautiful and eloquent speech they have ever heard. All of them stand speechless as a result, for they are too afraid to answer her ladyship. She interprets their inability to speak to imply that they are grateful for her services. She then gives them full leisure to explore her kingdom. Upon their exploration, Pantagruel and his friends learn that the Queen's servants also have the ability to heal people, but each servant has only been trained to cure one type of ailment. Of the servants, Pantagruel and his friends find someone who can turn old women into young women, so that they can be married to young suitors. Pantagruel asks if there is a person who turns old men into young men. One of the Queen's servants replies that it is not necessary for anyone to perform that feat. The servant elaborates that the only thing to do to turn an old man young again is to place him with a young woman as his lover. As Pantagruel and his companions continue to explore, they soon discover that the people who serve the Queen perform miracles and impossible acts on a regular basis. These people also dedicate themselves to improving their skills through continuous studies. The Queen once again speaks to Pantagruel and his companions, and once again they find themselves speechless after hearing her words. She honors them by making them abstractors and tells them that her principal Tabachin, Geber, will provide them with guidance on their new callings. Next, the Queen, all of her court, Pantagruel, and his companions go to the main hall for a large feast. As they eat, they notice that the Queen never chews any food herself, and instead she has servants who chew her food for her, and those servants feed her through a golden funnel. The narrator also states that since the Queen does not chew her own food, she also does not use the bathroom on her own, and he comments that the Queen has someone else use the bathroom for her by proxy. After dinner, they are entertained by a tilting tournament, which in actuality is a live-action game of chess with dancers dressed up as the gold and silver chess pieces. Around the chessboard is an orchestra, and as the music plays, different chess pieces move in accordance with the music. By the end of the first bout, the silver king claims victory over the gold king. The silver king also wins the second bout, but the gold king claims the third bout's victory. Sometime during the chess matches, the Queen of Whims disappears. Pantagruel and his companions never see her again, for they too left shortly after the chess matches had completed. Sailing away from the Queen of Whims' country, the group arrives next at the island of Odes, which is where ways are created. Some ways are beautiful, some ways are treacherous, some ways are well traveled, and so forth. Pantagruel and the others discuss the different ways they get from place to place, but it is unclear if they are speaking metaphorically. They meet a local man who tells them that no matter which one of the ways they examine, all the ways start and end in the water. At the island of Sandals, the third king of the island, Benius, entertains Pantagruel and his companions. He brings them to see the order of Semiquaver Friars. Unlike other orders of friars, these monks wear cowls that cover their faces and expose the back of their heads, which are completely shaven. They also wear codpieces on both their fronts and their backs, and they walk backwards as normally as they walk forwards. They dress and act so strangely, because they wish to avoid fortune, for they believe fortune to be a horrible thing. Panurge, Friar John, and Epistemon get into a strange conversation with one of the friars. Panurge does most of the talking, and the friar answers his question with monosyllable answers. From the conversation, they learn that the friar and all the monks in the order regularly engage in sex. They also masturbate profusely and fornicate on a regular basis. This monk claims to be the most virile of the bunch, and states that he prefers to copulate in March. Epistemon comments that March is the same month as Lent. Epistemon discusses how Catholics are hypocritical with Lent, since it is the time when they are supposed to give up certain luxuries, yet it ends up being the time when Catholics give in to sin far more easily. After Epistemon criticizes Lent, Panurge questions the friar, who continues to give monosyllabic answers. Panurge asks the friar if he believes that Epistemon is a heretic and if he should be burned at the stake, to which the friar answers yes to both questions. Panurge then comments how he would like to take this friar home, after Panurge has found a wife, that is, so that the friar could be his wife's fool. Moving on, Pantagruel and his companions find themselves in the land of Satin. Within this land is the country of Tapestry. In this place, there are no living animals or plants, and instead tapestries hang everywhere. Pantagruel and his friends walk through and examine the images on the tapestries. The narrator makes a list of all the animals, creatures, beings, and scenes that he sees portrayed on these tapestries. The narrator also relays poignant information about some of the images. For instance, according to the tapestries, the horn of a unicorn is only erect when the unicorn was in battle or purifying toxic waters. Panurge makes the comparison between the unicorn's horn and his own penis, explaining that his penis has purified all the women he has slept with. Friar John jokes that Panurge's ability will prove quite useful to keep his wife clean, implying that she will no doubt cuckold him and bring home diseases. Panurge does not like the joke, but he does not start an argument over it, as he has done before. As they travel further into the country of tapestries, the narrator notes seeing all manner of different people walking amidst the tapestries. All these people are surrounding one particular figure, which is a monstrous-looking small man by the name of Hearsay. This small man smiles from ear to ear, and within his mouth he has seven tongues that each speak multiple languages all at once. His whole head is covered in ears, so he can hear everything, but his eyes are blind. Thus, all the great philosophers, artists, and professionals come to Hearsay and learn through him instead of learning the truth. After much travel, Pantagruel and his companions finally arrive in Lantern-land. They make port, explain their purpose for being there to the local authorities, and then they request to see the Queen of the land to ask permission to travel to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle. They visit with the Queen, and she gives them permission to travel. She also offers a Lantern to guide the way. By Lantern, the Queen implies a person with the designation of "Lantern," and this person will guide travelers to any chosen destination within Lantern-land. Before they go, they have dinner with the Queen, and as they go to dinner they see all of the great lanterns of legends, myths, and antiquity.The following day, they have their Lantern guide them to the destination of the oracle. Before they reach the entrance to the oracle, though, they must pass through a vineyard, and the Lantern explains that the vineyard was planted by Bacchus himself. While passing through the vineyard, they are each instructed to eat three grapes, place grape leaves inside of their shoes, and each person must hold a vine branch in their left hand. Everyone does as the Lantern instructs, and so they make their way to the entrance of the oracle. The Lantern leads Pantagruel and his companions into the entrance of the temple, which is underground. There is some discussion between the narrator and Pantagruel about the paintings on the underground cellar walls, which remind them about the cellars in Chinon, or Cainon, which is supposedly the oldest city in the world, as Cain built it. As they move further underground, they take a spiral staircase down over 100 steps toward the place where Priestess Bacbuc resides. As they go down, Panurge begins to panic and fears that he is walking down into hell. He thinks that they should turn around and go back, but Pantagruel and Friar John do not let him run away. Instead, they urge him downward. At the bottom of the steps, the Lantern explains that she can go no further than the temple gates. She will be there to lead them back out, but she must leave them at the gates. Everyone seems to understand, so she unlocks the temple gates, and leaves them there. On the right temple gate is carved the following words: "Fate leads the willing, and th' unwilling draws" . On the left temple gate is carved these words: "All things tend to their end" . Inside the temple, Pantagruel and his companions find that it is adored and decorated in the most elegant fashion imaginable. Beautiful mosaics portray the tale of how Bacchus, followed by women warriors, drunken men, satyrs, centaurs, and all other manner of creatures, went to battle against the Indians and won the day. Although the temple is deep underground, in the center of the temple is an enormous golden lantern that provides ample light. Chains suspend this golden lantern, and it is adorned with four smaller lanterns made of precious stones. The light created from these lanterns illuminates the space to make it appear as bright as day. After they pass the golden lantern, Pantagruel and his companions meet the priestess Bacbuc and her handmaidens. The priestess leads Pantagruel and his followers into the central area of the temple to see the great fountain. The narrator describes the fountain as heptagonal with seven pillars that reach up to the ceiling and join in archways to form a cupola above the fountain. Each of the seven pillars is made of the most precious stones, and each pillar is assigned to one of the seven celestial bodies. In accordance with the seven celestial bodies, each pillar also has a corresponding metal attached to it. On the inside of the cupola is engraved astronomical symbols, including symbols from the zodiac. The priestess encourages Pantagruel and his followers to drink from the fountain, which they do. After their first taste of the fountain's waters, they claim they cannot taste anything special, so the priestess orders her handmaidens to bring in palate cleansers for the guests. After sufficiently eating enough foods to cleanse their pallets, the priestess invites them to drink again. This time each man swears that the water tastes like a different flavor of wine. With each taste of the fountain, they can let their imaginations change the flavors, which proves the power of these waters. Bacbuc prepares Panurge to hear the words of the Holy Bottle, known as the Goddess-Bottle. Before he can hear the words, though, she warns him that he can only hear the truth in one ear. She then dresses him in a strange manner of clothing, and then has him dance about the temple, twirling, jumping up and down, singing strange words, and then she finally leads him into an adjacent chamber known as the chapel. In this chapel there is a second heptagonal fountain, although all the pillars are made of the same alabaster material. The side of the fountain is where the Goddess-Bottle sits. Bacbuc places Panurge to where he would be able to place one ear to the bottle. Bacbuc then throws something into the fountain water to make it instantly boil. As it does so, a buzzing noise can be heard from the bottle, and then a voice comes out of it saying, "Trinc." At first, Panurge worries that the oracle is fraudulent, but then Bacbuc explains that the meaning of the word can be found in the book of the oracle. She brings Panurge to where the book is kept, but unlike traditional books that are read, this book must be drunk in order for individuals to understand the true meaning behind the words spoken by the Goddess-Bottle. Panurge drinks the book, and he claims instantly to know the true meaning behind the message. He then begins to chant uncontrollably in rhyming verse. As he chants, he reveals that he will get married, he will drink and be happy, and he will keep his wife happy and satisfied. Pantagruel and Friar John also begin to chant in rhyme. Friar John reveals that nothing will ever make him get married, for he does not want to feel restricted. Panurge chastises Friar John, implying that he will go to hell for not getting married, whereas he, Panurge, will go to paradise. After a while, Pantagruel, Panurge, and Friar John stop talking in rhyme, and they are ready to leave. The priestess requests that they give her servants their names, so that they can be written on a roster. She then bids them farewell and hopes that they have been given the answers they sought. The priestess insists that many great answers can be found underground, for that is where the truth is often concealed.
feat_summary_analysis: One of the main points of contention for this fifth and final book is whether Rabelais wrote it. Arthur Augustus Tilley has thoroughly researched the publication of the multiple versions of the fifth book. He points out that the first version only contained the first 15 chapters of the book, but this version had no printer name on the publication, which is peculiar. Stranger still is the fact that the book came out nearly nine years after Rabelais had passed away. After this first publication appeared in 1562, the second publication appeared in 1564, and this version included 47 chapters, but Tilley notes that this version omitted the chapter about the island of the Apedefts. Additional versions and manuscripts surfaced thereafter, some with omitted portions, others with extended scenes that are not considered part of the original text. Tilley points out that the written manuscripts are "written in the same hand throughout, which is certainly not Rabelais's," as he contests that the handwriting does not match previous known samples of Rabelais's writing . Other than handwriting samples, Tilley explains that several of Rabelais's contemporaries also argued that Rabelais could not have written the fifth book, at least not completely. According to Tilley's research, Rabelais's contemporaries posit that the excessive anti-Catholic sentiments presented in the fifth book is proof that Rabelais could not have been the author. With that point made, the anti-Catholic propaganda throughout the fifth book creates a much different tone compared to the previous four books. One of the most blatant anti-Catholic acts includes the dark satirical mockery of reliquary and idol worship. During the Renaissance, Reformists argued that the glorified worship of reliquaries, statues of saints, statues of Christ, and other idol-like images predominant in the Catholic religion were in clear violation of one of the 10 Commandments. Within this fifth book, Pantagruel and his companion's visit several sites that contain reliquaries or other holy items. More often than not, the narrator presents the items as being unimpressive or the narrator displays the caretakers as hypocrites and liars. For instance, on the Ringing Island, Master Aedituus claims that there is only ever one pope-hawk at any one time. When he arranges a viewing of the bird for Pantagruel and his companions, though, Panurge notices that the one and only pope-hawk has laid an egg, implying that it is female and not male, and that another pope-hawk impregnated it. Master Aedituus denies such allegations and refuses to see the factual evidence. Likewise, on the island of Sandals, Panurge, Epistemon, and Friar John interview one of the Semiquaver Friars. Through this discussion, they discover that all the friars in this order engage in sex, masturbation, and other acts unbecoming a member of the clergy. As the structure of the fifth book includes blatant anti-Catholic statements, it also includes a high amount of metaphors made real through allegory or personification. The fifth book starts off with an allegory designed primarily to set up the anti-Catholic structure. On the Ringing Island, Master Aedituus tells Pantagruel and his companions that many of the birds currently on the island were once humans who transformed. A large portion of the transformed birds has been named after different parts of the clergy. Thus, the allegory of the previous island dwellers' transformation implies both transmogrification and transcendence from human to bird, which could stand for transcendence from human to angel. In an allegorical presentation, it may represent the transformation a regular person undergoes when they take on the vows of the clergy. Beyond just members of the clergy, though, some of the birds have been named after social classes, which expands the allegory outside of just the ecclesiastical transmogrification. However, by including the other classes, such as the mongrel knight-hawk pointed out by Master Aedituus, the narrator makes his allegory less about the idea of transcendence. Instead, the allegory becomes more of a simple comparison between humans and birds. One of the most visual sustained allegories happens on the island of Satin in the country of Tapestry where all manner of people have come to learn from Hearsay. Much like the practice in medieval storytelling, the abstract concept of hearsay has been personified into the form of "a diminutive, monstrous, misshapen old fellow" whose "mouth was slit up to his ears, and in it were seven tongues, each of them cleft into seven parts. However, he chattered, tattled, and prated with all the seven at once, of different matters, and in divers languages . . . He had as many ears all over his head and the rest of his body as Argus formerly had eyes, and was as blind as a beetle" . The narrator explains how all manner of great people, including some of the greatest thinkers throughout history, were gathered around Hearsay for his infinite knowledge. Of course, through the sustained allegory, the narrator implies that people who only learn from Hearsay are blinded from the truth. At an attempt to maintain the satire, the narrator explains how Pantagruel and his companions mingled with the students of Hearsay, joked with them, ate their rich foods, and were "scurvily entertained" . By showing that Pantagruel and his companions found the entire episode amusing and nothing more, the narrator, therefore, expects the reader to believe that Pantagruel and his friends did not take the students of Hearsay seriously, which further underscores the concept of hearsay as something to be ignored. Moving away from subjects of authenticity, anti-Catholic sentiments, and allegorical representations, one cannot discuss this final book without examining the full cycle of development, or lack thereof, of the main characters. On their journey portrayed in the fifth book, Pantagruel almost disappears as a character for most of the story, allowing Panurge and Friar John to take center stage with Epistemon as their supporting character. The entire voyage from the start of the fourth book to the end of the fifth book shows Panurge going back and forth between absolute cowardice and absolute arrogance; the sea and the elements bring out his cowardice, but standing on dry land allows his arrogance to shine. Curious enough, when Panurge finally reaches the oracle and goes underground, getting ever closer to his answer, his cowardice returns temporarily. Friar John serves as little more than a pseudo-parental figure in these last two books. He chastises Panurge for his cowardice, and threatens to hurt him, but he never does more than verbally shame him. Epistemon lightens the mood between Panurge and Friar John, but his character serves as a mask for mocking the Catholic Church through a vaguely scholarly discourse. At the end of the fifth book, Pantagruel once again becomes more involved in the story, if only just. Of course, he only seems to get involved to push Panurge into following through with his search for answers. Thus, though the story is named after Pantagruel, his character neither grows nor changes much within the last three books. He serves as more of a presence or regal figurehead that provides the other characters, mainly Panurge, with the money and means to live out their adventures. In the end of this final book, it truly is all about Panurge's quest for answers. Unhappy with the answers he acquired in the third book, namely that he would be cuckolded, Panurge convinces Pantagruel, Epistemon, Friar John, and the other companions to go on an epic voyage to find the ultimate answer. Throughout this voyage that takes two books to complete, the whole purpose behind the quest seems an afterthought at best. Although Panurge occasionally gets mocked or mocks himself about the idea of becoming a cuckold, the characters involved in the last two books seem fairly unconcerned with Panurge's fate. Nevertheless, they do all keep moving toward Lantern Land in support of Panurge, so perhaps they are all merely enjoying the ride, since they know the end of their journey will be met with all seriousness as they encounter the oracle. However, the level of seriousness in the final chapters of the fifth book is questionable. While the characters go through various ceremonies and act solemnly, the non-Christian elements serve to make a mockery of the entire ordeal. For Panurge to get his answer, the priestess must dress him up in a fool's garb, and then she orders him to dance about the temple like a madman. After he finally hears the one word answer from the Goddess-Bottle, the word makes no sense to him until he drinks a magical elixir referred to as the book. Only then does he understand the meaning of the word, but he can only verbalize or translate the meaning by speaking through rhyme. With his newfound knowledge, Panurge's character transforms into a man confident that his marriage will end well, provided that he treats his wife well. Panurge then turns the tables and chastises Friar John, explaining to Friar John that he will never make it to Paradise, for as a member of the clergy he cannot get married, which serves as the final anti-Catholic remark. During these final scenes, Pantagruel uses rhymed verse to tell Friar John to let Panurge make a fool out of himself. Pantagruel's remarks on the matter make the ending of the story seem false and pointless, as if the entire voyage was nothing more than just a way to humor Panurge. While Pantagruel's statements may have been chosen to emphasize the satirical nature of the entire Gargantua and Pantagruel series, his comments feel out of place, given that the fifth book itself does not contain the clever type of satire that made Rabelais famous, but rather it contains a malicious type of satire used predominately as a propaganda machine against the Catholic Church.