Gargantua and Pantagruel
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.
Chapter 5.XXII.
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.
Chapter 5.XXIII.
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.
Chapter 5.XXIV.
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