Gargantua and Pantagruel
and a long siege, they shall have stormed and taken it by a violent and
impetuous assault? May not these fathers and mothers, think you, be
sorrowful and heavy-hearted when they see an unknown fellow, a vagabond
stranger, a barbarous lout, a rude cur, rotten, fleshless, putrified,
scraggy, boily, botchy, poor, a forlorn caitiff and miserable sneak, by an
open rapt snatch away before their own eyes their so fair, delicate, neat,
well-behavioured, richly-provided-for and healthful daughters, on whose
breeding and education they had spared no cost nor charges, by bringing
them up in an honest discipline to all the honourable and virtuous
employments becoming one of their sex descended of a noble parentage,
hoping by those commendable and industrious means in an opportune and
convenient time to bestow them on the worthy sons of their well-deserving
neighbours and ancient friends, who had nourished, entertained, taught,
instructed, and schooled their children with the same care and solicitude,
to make them matches fit to attain to the felicity of a so happy marriage,
that from them might issue an offspring and progeny no less heirs to the
laudable endowments and exquisite qualifications of their parents, whom
they every way resemble, than to their personal and real estates, movables,
and inheritances? How doleful, trist, and plangorous would such a sight
and pageantry prove unto them? You shall not need to think that the
collachrymation of the Romans and their confederates at the decease of
Germanicus Drusus was comparable to this lamentation of theirs? Neither
would I have you to believe that the discomfort and anxiety of the
Lacedaemonians, when the Greek Helen, by the perfidiousness of the
adulterous Trojan, Paris, was privily stolen away out of their country, was
greater or more pitiful than this ruthful and deplorable collugency of
theirs? You may very well imagine that Ceres at the ravishment of her
daughter Proserpina was not more attristed, sad, nor mournful than they.
Trust me, and your own reason, that the loss of Osiris was not so
regrettable to Isis, nor did Venus so deplore the death of Adonis, nor yet
did Hercules so bewail the straying of Hylas, nor was the rapt of Polyxena
more throbbingly resented and condoled by Priamus and Hecuba, than this
aforesaid accident would be sympathetically bemoaned, grievous, ruthful,
and anxious to the woefully desolate and disconsolate parents.
Notwithstanding all this, the greater part of so vilely abused parents are
so timorous and afraid of devils and hobgoblins, and so deeply plunged in
superstition, that they dare not gainsay nor contradict, much less oppose
and resist those unnatural and impious actions, when the mole-catcher hath
been present at the perpetrating of the fact, and a party contractor and
covenanter in that detestable bargain. What do they do then? They
wretchedly stay at their own miserable homes, destitute of their
well-beloved daughters, the fathers cursing the days and the hours wherein
they were married, and the mothers howling and crying that it was not their
fortune to have brought forth abortive issues when they happened to be
delivered of such unfortunate girls, and in this pitiful plight spend at
best the remainder of their time with tears and weeping for those their
children, of and from whom they expected, (and, with good reason, should
have obtained and reaped,) in these latter days of theirs, joy and comfort.
Other parents there have been, so impatient of that affront and indignity
put upon them and their families, that, transported with the extremity of
passion, in a mad and frantic mood, through the vehemency of a grievous
fury and raging sorrow, have drowned, hanged, killed, and otherwise put
violent hands on themselves. Others, again, of that parental relation
have, upon the reception of the like injury, been of a more magnanimous and
heroic spirit, who, in imitation and at the example of the children of
Jacob revenging upon the Sichemites the rapt of their sister Dinah, having
found the rascally ruffian in the association of his mystical mole-catcher
closely and in hugger-mugger conferring, parleying, and coming with their
daughters, for the suborning, corrupting, depraving, perverting, and
enticing these innocent unexperienced maids unto filthy lewdnesses, have,
without any further advisement on the matter, cut them instantly into
pieces, and thereupon forthwith thrown out upon the fields their so
dismembered bodies, to serve for food unto the wolves and ravens. Upon the
chivalrous, bold, and courageous achievement of a so valiant, stout, and
manlike act, the other mole-catching symmysts have been so highly incensed,
and have so chafed, fretted, and fumed thereat, that, bills of complaint
and accusations having been in a most odious and detestable manner put in
before the competent judges, the arm of secular authority hath with much
importunity and impetuosity been by them implored and required, they
proudly contending that the servants of God would become contemptible if
exemplary punishment were not speedily taken upon the persons of the
perpetrators of such an enormous, horrid, sacrilegious, crying, heinous,
and execrable crime.
Yet neither by natural equity, by the law of nations, nor by any imperial
law whatsoever, hath there been found so much as one rubric, paragraph,
point, or tittle, by the which any kind of chastisement or correction hath
been adjudged due to be inflicted upon any for their delinquency in that
kind. Reason opposeth, and nature is repugnant. For there is no virtuous
man in the world who both naturally and with good reason will not be more
hugely troubled in mind, hearing of the news of the rapt, disgrace,
ignominy, and dishonour of his daughter, than of her death. Now any man,
finding in hot blood one who with a forethought felony hath murdered his
daughter, may, without tying himself to the formalities and circumstances
of a legal proceeding, kill him on a sudden and out of hand without
incurring any hazard of being attainted and apprehended by the officers of
justice for so doing. What wonder is it then? Or how little strange
should it appear to any rational man, if a lechering rogue, together with
his mole-catching abettor, be entrapped in the flagrant act of suborning
his daughter, and stealing her out of his house, though herself consent
thereto, that the father in such a case of stain and infamy by them brought
upon his family, should put them both to a shameful death, and cast their
carcasses upon dunghills to be devoured and eaten up by dogs and swine, or
otherwise fling them a little further off to the direption, tearing, and
rending asunder of their joints and members by the wild beasts of the field
(as unworthy to receive the gentle, the desired, the last kind embraces of
the great Alma Mater, the earth, commonly called burial).
Dearly beloved son, have an especial care that after my decease none of
these laws be received in any of your kingdoms; for whilst I breathe, by
the grace and assistance of God, I shall give good order. Seeing,
therefore, you have totally referred unto my discretion the disposure of
you in marriage, I am fully of an opinion that I shall provide sufficiently
well for you in that point. Make ready and prepare yourself for Panurge’s
voyage. Take along with you Epistemon, Friar John, and such others as you
will choose. Do with my treasures what unto yourself shall seem most
expedient. None of your actions, I promise you, can in any manner of way
displease me. Take out of my arsenal Thalasse whatsoever equipage,
furniture, or provision you please, together with such pilots, mariners,
and truchmen as you have a mind to, and with the first fair and favourable
wind set sail and make out to sea in the name of God our Saviour. In the
meanwhile, during your absence, I shall not be neglective of providing a
wife for you, nor of those preparations which are requisite to be made for
the more sumptuous solemnizing of your nuptials with a most splendid feast,
if ever there was any in the world, since the days of Ahasuerus.
Chapter 3.XLIX.
How Pantagruel did put himself in a readiness to go to sea; and of the herb
named Pantagruelion.
Within very few days after that Pantagruel had taken his leave of the good
Gargantua, who devoutly prayed for his son’s happy voyage, he arrived at
the seaport, near to Sammalo, accompanied with Panurge, Epistemon, Friar
John of the Funnels, Abbot of Theleme, and others of the royal house,
especially with Xenomanes the great traveller and thwarter of dangerous
ways, who was come at the bidding and appointment of Panurge, of whose
castlewick of Salmigondin he did hold some petty inheritance by the tenure
of a mesne fee. Pantagruel, being come thither, prepared and made ready
for launching a fleet of ships, to the number of those which Ajax of
Salamine had of old equipped in convoy of the Grecian soldiery against the
Trojan state. He likewise picked out for his use so many mariners, pilots,
sailors, interpreters, artificers, officers, and soldiers, as he thought
fitting, and therewithal made provision of so much victuals of all sorts,
artillery, munition of divers kinds, clothes, moneys, and other such
luggage, stuff, baggage, chaffer, and furniture, as he deemed needful for
carrying on the design of a so tedious, long, and perilous voyage. Amongst
other things, it was observed how he caused some of his vessels to be
fraught and loaded with a great quantity of an herb of his called
Pantagruelion, not only of the green and raw sort of it, but of the
confected also, and of that which was notably well befitted for present use
after the fashion of conserves. The herb Pantagruelion hath a little root
somewhat hard and rough, roundish, terminating in an obtuse and very blunt
point, and having some of its veins, strings, or filaments coloured with
some spots of white, never fixeth itself into the ground above the
profoundness almost of a cubit, or foot and a half. From the root thereof
proceedeth the only stalk, orbicular, cane-like, green without, whitish
within, and hollow like the stem of smyrnium, olus atrum, beans, and
gentian, full of long threads, straight, easy to be broken, jagged,
snipped, nicked, and notched a little after the manner of pillars and
columns, slightly furrowed, chamfered, guttered, and channelled, and full
of fibres, or hairs like strings, in which consisteth the chief value and
dignity of the herb, especially in that part thereof which is termed mesa,
as he would say the mean, and in that other, which hath got the
denomination of milasea. Its height is commonly of five or six foot. Yet
sometimes it is of such a tall growth as doth surpass the length of a
lance, but that is only when it meeteth with a sweet, easy, warm, wet, and
well-soaked soil--as is the ground of the territory of Olone, and that of
Rasea, near to Preneste in Sabinia--and that it want not for rain enough
about the season of the fishers’ holidays and the estival solstice. There
are many trees whose height is by it very far exceeded, and you might call
it dendromalache by the authority of Theophrastus. The plant every year
perisheth,--the tree neither in the trunk, root, bark, or boughs being
durable.
From the stalk of this Pantagruelian plant there issue forth several large
and great branches, whose leaves have thrice as much length as breadth,
always green, roughish, and rugged like the orcanet, or Spanish bugloss,
hardish, slit round about like unto a sickle, or as the saxifragum, betony,
and finally ending as it were in the points of a Macedonian spear, or of
such a lancet as surgeons commonly make use of in their phlebotomizing
tiltings. The figure and shape of the leaves thereof is not much different