Gargantua and Pantagruel
remedies which they use are large clysters, whereby they void store of
windiness. They all die of dropsies and tympanies, the men farting and the
women fizzling; so that their soul takes her leave at the back-door.
Some time after, walking in the island, we met three hairbrained airy
fellows, who seemed mightily puffed up, and went to take their pastime and
view the plovers, who live on the same diet as themselves, and abound in
the island. I observed that, as your true topers when they travel carry
flasks, leathern bottles, and small runlets along with them, so each of
them had at his girdle a pretty little pair of bellows. If they happened
to want wind, by the help of those pretty bellows they immediately drew
some, fresh and cool, by attraction and reciprocal expulsion; for, as you
well know, wind essentially defined is nothing but fluctuating and agitated
air.
A while after, we were commanded, in the king’s name, not to receive for
three hours any man or woman of the country on board our ships; some having
stolen from him a rousing fart, of the very individual wind which old
goodman Aeolus the snorer gave Ulysses to conduct his ship whenever it
should happen to be becalmed. Which fart the king kept religiously, like
another sanc-greal, and performed a world of wonderful cures with it in
many dangerous diseases, letting loose and distributing to the patient only
as much of it as might frame a virginal fart; which is, if you must know,
what our sanctimonials, alias nuns, in their dialect call ringing
backwards.
Chapter 4.XLIV.
How small rain lays a high wind.
Pantagruel commended their government and way of living, and said to their
hypenemian mayor: If you approve Epicurus’s opinion, placing the summum
bonum in pleasure (I mean pleasure that’s easy and free from toil), I
esteem you happy; for your food being wind, costs you little or nothing,
since you need but blow. True, sir, returned the mayor; but, alas! nothing
is perfect here below; for too often when we are at table, feeding on some
good blessed wind of God as on celestial manna, merry as so many friars,
down drops on a sudden some small rain, which lays our wind, and so robs us
of it. Thus many a meal’s lost for want of meat.
Just so, quoth Panurge, Jenin Toss-pot of Quinquenais, evacuating some wine
of his own burning on his wife’s posteriors, laid the ill-fumed wind that
blowed out of their centre as out of some magisterial Aeolipile. Here is a
kind of a whim on that subject which I made formerly:
One evening when Toss-pot had been at his butts,
And Joan his fat spouse crammed with turnips her guts,
Together they pigged, nor did drink so besot him
But he did what was done when his daddy begot him.
Now when to recruit he’d fain have been snoring,
Joan’s back-door was filthily puffing and roaring;
So for spite he bepissed her, and quickly did find
That a very small rain lays a very high wind.
We are also plagued yearly with a very great calamity, cried the mayor; for
a giant called Wide-nostrils, who lives in the island of Tohu, comes hither
every spring to purge, by the advice of his physicians, and swallows us,
like so many pills, a great number of windmills, and of bellows also, at
which his mouth waters exceedingly.
Now this is a sad mortification to us here, who are fain to fast over three
or four whole Lents every year for this, besides certain petty Lents, ember
weeks, and other orison and starving tides. And have you no remedy for
this? asked Pantagruel. By the advice of our Mezarims, replied the mayor,
about the time that he uses to give us a visit, we garrison our windmills
with good store of cocks and hens. The first time that the greedy thief
swallowed them, they had like to have done his business at once; for they
crowed and cackled in his maw, and fluttered up and down athwart and along
in his stomach, which threw the glutton into a lipothymy cardiac passion
and dreadful and dangerous convulsions, as if some serpent, creeping in at
his mouth, had been frisking in his stomach.
Here is a comparative as altogether incongruous and impertinent, cried
Friar John, interrupting them; for I have formerly heard that if a serpent
chance to get into a man’s stomach it will not do him the least hurt, but
will immediately get out if you do but hang the patient by the heels and
lay a panful of warm milk near his mouth. You were told this, said
Pantagruel, and so were those who gave you this account; but none ever saw
or read of such a cure. On the contrary, Hippocrates, in his fifth book of
Epidem, writes that such a case happening in his time the patient presently
died of a spasm and convulsion.
Besides the cocks and hens, said the mayor, continuing his story, all the
foxes in the country whipped into Wide-nostril’s mouth, posting after the
poultry; which made such a stir with Reynard at their heels, that he
grievously fell into fits each minute of an hour.
At last, by the advice of a Baden enchanter, at the time of the paroxysm he
used to flay a fox by way of antidote and counter-poison. Since that he
took better advice, and eases himself with taking a clyster made with a
decoction of wheat and barley corns, and of livers of goslings; to the
first of which the poultry run, and the foxes to the latter. Besides, he
swallows some of your badgers or fox-dogs by the way of pills and boluses.
This is our misfortune.
Cease to fear, good people, cried Pantagruel; this huge Wide-nostrils, this
same swallower of windmills, is no more, I will assure you; he died, being
stifled and choked with a lump of fresh butter at the mouth of a hot oven,
by the advice of his physicians.
Chapter 4.XLV.
How Pantagruel went ashore in the island of Pope-Figland.
The next morning we arrived at the island of Pope-figs; formerly a rich and
free people, called the Gaillardets, but now, alas! miserably poor, and
under the yoke of the Papimen. The occasion of it was this:
On a certain yearly high holiday, the burgomaster, syndics, and topping
rabbies of the Gaillardets chanced to go into the neighbouring island
Papimany to see the festival and pass away the time. Now one of them
having espied the pope’s picture (with the sight of which, according to a
laudable custom, the people were blessed on high-offering holidays), made
mouths at it, and cried, A fig for it! as a sign of manifest contempt and
derision. To be revenged of this affront, the Papimen, some days after,
without giving the others the least warning, took arms, and surprised,
destroyed, and ruined the whole island of the Gaillardets; putting the men
to the sword, and sparing none but the women and children, and those too
only on condition to do what the inhabitants of Milan were condemned to by
the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.
These had rebelled against him in his absence, and ignominiously turned the
empress out of the city, mounting her a-horseback on a mule called Thacor,
with her breech foremost towards the old jaded mule’s head, and her face
turned towards the crupper. Now Frederick being returned, mastered them,
and caused so careful a search to be made that he found out and got the
famous mule Thacor. Then the hangman by his order clapped a fig into the
mule’s jimcrack, in the presence of the enslaved cits that were brought
into the middle of the great market-place, and proclaimed in the emperor’s
name, with trumpets, that whosoever of them would save his own life should
publicly pull the fig out with his teeth, and after that put it in again in
the very individual cranny whence he had draw’d it without using his hands,
and that whoever refused to do this should presently swing for it and die
in his shoes. Some sturdy fools, standing upon their punctilio, chose
honourably to be hanged rather than submit to so shameful and abominable a
disgrace; and others, less nice in point of ceremony, took heart of grace,
and even resolved to have at the fig, and a fig for’t, rather than make a
worse figure with a hempen collar, and die in the air at so short warning.
Accordingly, when they had neatly picked out the fig with their teeth from
old Thacor’s snatch-blatch, they plainly showed it the headsman, saying,
Ecco lo fico, Behold the fig!
By the same ignominy the rest of these poor distressed Gaillardets saved
their bacon, becoming tributaries and slaves, and the name of Pope-figs was
given them, because they said, A fig for the pope’s image. Since this, the
poor wretches never prospered, but every year the devil was at their doors,
and they were plagued with hail, storms, famine, and all manner of woes, as
an everlasting punishment for the sin of their ancestors and relations.
Perceiving the misery and calamity of that generation, we did not care to
go further up into the country, contenting ourselves with going into a
little chapel near the haven to take some holy water. It was dilapidated
and ruined, wanting also a cover--like Saint Peter at Rome. When we were
in, as we dipped our fingers in the sanctified cistern, we spied in the
middle of that holy pickle a fellow muffled up with stoles, all under
water, like a diving duck, except the tip of his snout to draw his breath.
About him stood three priests, true shavelings, clean shorn and polled, who
were muttering strange words to the devils out of a conjuring book.
Pantagruel was not a little amazed at this, and inquiring what kind of
sport these were at, was told that for three years last past the plague had
so dreadfully raged in the island that the better half of it had been
utterly depopulated, and the lands lay fallow and unoccupied. Now, the
mortality being over, this same fellow who had crept into the holy tub,
having a large piece of ground, chanced to be sowing it with white winter
wheat at the very minute of an hour that a kind of a silly sucking devil,
who could not yet write or read, or hail and thunder, unless it were on
parsley or coleworts, and got leave of his master Lucifer to go into this
island of Pope-figs, where the devils were very familiar with the men and
women, and often went to take their pastime.
This same devil being got thither, directed his discourse to the
husbandman, and asked him what he was doing. The poor man told him that he
was sowing the ground with corn to help him to subsist the next year. Ay,
but the ground is none of thine, Mr. Plough-jobber, cried the devil, but
mine; for since the time that you mocked the pope all this land has been
proscribed, adjudged, and abandoned to us. However, to sow corn is not my
province; therefore I will give thee leave to sow the field, that is to
say, provided we share the profit. I will, replied the farmer. I mean,
said the devil, that of what the land shall bear, two lots shall be made,
one of what shall grow above ground, the other of what shall be covered
with earth. The right of choosing belongs to me; for I am a devil of noble
and ancient race; thou art a base clown. I therefore choose what shall lie
under ground, take thou what shall be above. When dost thou reckon to
reap, hah? About the middle of July, quoth the farmer. Well, said the
devil, I’ll not fail thee then; in the meantime, slave as thou oughtest.
Work, clown, work. I am going to tempt to the pleasing sin of whoring the
nuns of Dryfart, the sham saints of the cowl, and the gluttonish crew. I
am more than sure of these. They need but meet, and the job is done; true
fire and tinder, touch and take; down falls nun, and up gets friar.
Chapter 4.XLVI.
How a junior devil was fooled by a husbandman of Pope-Figland.
In the middle of July the devil came to the place aforesaid with all his
crew at his heels, a whole choir of the younger fry of hell; and having met