Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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ladies of Paris worth a Mass, abjured. The King gave him a house and
garden, and Clement tried to be a bourgeois gentilhomme.
Francois Vatable, who was teaching Hebrew in the College Royale,
asked him to translate the Psalms into French verse, and expounded
them to him word for word. Marot put thirty of them into melodious
poetry, and published them with a judicious dedication to the King.
Francis liked them so much that he gave a special copy to Charles V,
who was momentarily his friend; Charles sent the poet 200 crowns
($5,000?). Marot translated more of the Psalms, and issued them in
1543 with a dedication to his first love, "the ladies of France."
Goudimel put them to music, as we have seen, and half of France
began to sing them. But as Luther and Calvin also liked them, the
Sorbonne suspected them of Protestantism; or perhaps in the ordeal
of success Marot had remumbled his heresies. The campaign against
him was renewed. He fled to Geneva, but found the theological
climate there too severe for his health. He slipped into Italy, and
died in Turin (1544) at the age of forty-nine, leaving an illegitimate
daughter to the care of the Queen of Navarre.
V. RABELAIS
1. Himself
-
The unique, inexhaustible, skeptical, hilarious, learned, and
obscene author of "the most diverting and most profitable stories
which have ever been told" `063523 burst into the world in 1495, son
of a prosperous notary at Chinon. He was entered at too early an age
into a Franciscan monastery; he complained later that women who "carry
children nine months beneath their hearts... cannot bear to suffer
them nine years... and by simply adding an ell to their dress, and
cutting I know not how many hairs from the top of their head, by means
of certain words they turn them into birds"- i.e., they tonsure them
and make them monks. The boy accepted his fate because he was inclined
to study, and probably, like Erasmus, he was drawn to the books in the
monastic library. He found there two or three other monks who wished
to study Greek, and who were excited by the vast ancient world that
scholarship was revealing. Francois made such progress that he
received a letter of praise from Bude himself. Matters seemed to be
going well, and in 1520 the future doubter was ordained a priest.
But some older monks scented heresy in philology; they accused the
young Hellenists of buying books with the fees they received for
preaching, instead of handing the money over to the common treasury.
Rabelais and another monk were put in solitary confinement and were
deprived of books, which were to them half of life. Bude, apprised
of this contretemps, appealed to Francis I, who ordered the scholars
reinstated in freedom and privileges. Some further intercession
brought a papal rescript permitting Rabelais to change his monastic
allegiance and residence; he left the Franciscans, and entered a
Benedictine house at Maillezais (1524). There the bishop, Geoffroy
d'Estissac, took such a fancy to him that he arranged with the abbot
that Rabelais should be allowed to go wherever he wished for his
studies. Rabelais went, and forgot to return.
After sampling several universities he entered the School of
Medicine at Montpellier (1530). He must have had some prior
instruction, for he received the degree of bachelor of medicine in
1531. For reasons unknown he did not proceed to earn the doctorate,
but resumed his wandering until, in 1532, he settled down in Lyons.
Like Servetus, he combined the practice of medicine with scholarly
pursuits. He served as editorial aide to the printer Sebastian
Gryphius, edited several Greek texts, translated the Aphorisms of
Hippocrates into Latin, and was willingly caught in the humanistic
stream then in full flow at Lyons. On November 30, 1532, he dispatched
a copy of Josephus to Erasmus with a letter of adulation strange in
a man of thirty-seven, but savoring of that enthusiastic age:
-
George d'Armagnac... recently sent me Flavius Josephus' History ...
and asked me... to send it to you.... I have eagerly seized this
opportunity, O humanest of fathers, to prove to you by grateful homage
my profound respect for you and my filial piety. My father, did I say?
I should call you mother did your indulgence allow it. All that we
know of mothers, who nourish the fruit of their wombs before seeing
it, before knowing even what it will be, who protect it, who shelter
it against the inclemency of the air- that you have done for me, for
me whose face was not known to you, and whose obscure name could not
impress you. You have brought me up, you have fed me at the chaste
breasts of your divine knowledge; all that I am, all that I am
worth, I owe to you alone. If I did not publish it aloud I should be
the most ungrateful of men. Salutations once more, beloved father,
honor of your country, support of letters, unconquerable champion of
truth. `063524
-
In that same November 1532 we find Rabelais a physician in the
Hotel-Dieu, or city hospital, of Lyons, with a salary of forty
livres ($1,000?) a year. But we must not think of him as a typical
scholar or physician. It is true that his learning was varied and
immense. Like Shakespeare, he seems to have had professional knowledge
in a dozen fields- law, medicine, literature, theology, cookery,
history, botany, astronomy, mythology. He refers to a hundred
classic legends, quotes half a hundred classic authors; sometimes he
parades his erudition amateurishly. He was so busy living that he
had no time to achieve meticulous accuracy in his scholarship; the
editions that he prepared were not models of careful detail. It was
not in his character to be a dedicated humanist like Erasmus or
Bude; he loved life more than books. He is pictured for us as a man of
distinguished presence, tall and handsome, a well of learning, a light
and fire of conversation. `063525 He was not a toper, as an old
tradition wrongly inferred from his salutes to drinkers and his paeans
to wine; on the contrary, except for one little bastard- `063526 who
lived so briefly as to be only a venial sin- he led a reasonably
decent life, and was honored by the finest spirits of his time,
including several dignitaries of the Church. At the same time he had
in him many qualities of the French peasant. He relished the bluff and
hearty types that he met in the fields and streets; he enjoyed their
jokes and laughter, their tall tales and boastful ribaldry; and
unwittingly he made Erasmus' fame pale before his own because he
collected and connected these stories, improved and expanded them,
dignified them with classic lore, lifted them into constructive
satire, and carefully included their obscenity.
One story, then current in many rural areas, told of a kindly
giant named Gargantua, his cavernous appetite, his feats of love and
strength; here and there were hills and boulders which, said local
traditions, had dropped from Gargantua's basket as he passed. Such
legends were still told, as late as 1860, in French hamlets that had
never heard of Rabelais. An unknown writer, perhaps Rabelais himself
as a tour de rire, jotted some of the fables down, and had them
printed in Lyons as The Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Great
and Enormous Giant Gargantua (1532). The book sold so readily that
Rabelais conceived the idea of writing a sequel to it about
Gargantua's son. So, at the Lyons fair of October 1532, there
appeared, anonymously, the Horribles et espouvantables faictz et
prouesses du tres renomme Pantagruel ( The Horrible and Dreadful
Deeds and Prowesses of the Most Renowned Pantagruel ). This name had
been used in some popular dramas, but Rabelais gave the character
new content and depth. The Sorbonne and the monks condemned the book
as obscene, and it sold well; Francis I enjoyed it, some of the clergy
relished it. Not till fourteen years later did Rabelais admit his
authorship; he feared to endanger, if not his life, his reputation
as a scholar.
He was still so wedded to scholarship that he neglected his duties
at the hospital, and was dismissed. He might have had trouble
buttering his bread had not Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris and
co-founder of the College de France, taken Rabelais with him as
physician on a mission to Italy (January 1534). Returning to Lyons
in April, Rabelais published there in October La vie tres
horrifique du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel ( The Very Horrible
Life of the Great Gargantua, father of Pantagruel ). This second
volume, which was later to form Book One of the full work, contained
such rollicking satires of the clergy that it won another Sorbonnian
condemnation. Soon the two stories, published together, outsold
every publication in France except the Bible and The Imitation of
Christ. `063527 Again, we are told, King Francis laughed and
applauded.
But on the night of October 17-18, 1534, the posting of insulting
Protestant placards on Paris buildings and the King's own doors
changed him from a protector of humanists into a persecutor of
heretics. Rabelais had again concealed his authorship, but it was
widely suspected, and he had good reason to fear that the Sorbonne,
carrying the King in its train, would demand the scandalous writer's
head. Again Jean du Bellay came to his rescue. Now a cardinal, the
genial churchman snatched the endangered
scholar-physician-pornographer out of his Lyons den and took him to
Rome (1535). It was Rabelais' luck to find there an enlightened
pope. Paul III forgave him his neglect of his monastic and priestly
duties, and gave him permission to practice medicine. As amende
honorable Rabelais expunged from future editions of his now
"double-backed" book the passages most offensive to orthodox taste;
and when Etienne Dolet played a trick on him by publishing, without
permission, an unexpurgated edition, he crossed him from the roster of
his friends. Under the protection of the Cardinal he studied again
at Montpellier, received the doctorate in medicine, lectured to
large audiences there, and then returned to Lyons to resume his life
as physician and scholar. In June 1537, Dolet described him as
conducting an anatomy lesson by dissecting an executed criminal before
an assemblage of students.
Thereafter we know only snatches of his undulant career. He was in
the suite of the King at the historic meeting of Francis I and Charles
V in Aiguesmortes (July 1538). Two years later we find him at Turin as
physician to Guillaume du Bellay, brother to the Cardinal, and now
French ambassador to Savoy. About this time spies found in Rabelais'
correspondence some items that raised a flurry in Paris. He hurried to
the capital, faced the matter out bravely, and was exonerated by the
King (1541). Despite renewed condemnations of Gargantua and
Pantagruel by the Sorbonne, Francis gave the harassed author a minor
post in the government as maitre des requetes (commissioner of
petitions), and official permission to publish Book Two of
Pantagruel, which Rabelais gratefully dedicated to Marguerite of
Navarre. The volume aroused such commotion among the theologians
that Rabelais judged it discreet to take refuge in Metz, then part
of the Empire. There he served for a year as physician in the city
hospital (1546-47). In 1548 he thought it safe to return to Lyons, and
in 1549 to Paris. Finally his ecclesiastical protectors secured his
appointment (1551) as parish priest of Meudon, just southwest of the
capital, and the hunted, aging gadfly resumed his sacerdotal robes.
Apparently he delegated the duties of his benefice to subordinates,
and confined himself to using the income. `063528 So far as we know he
was still cure of Meudon when, a bit anomalously, he published what is
now Book Four of his work (1552). This was dedicated to Odet, Cardinal
de Chatillon, presumably with permission; evidently there were then in
France high churchmen of the learning and lenience of the Italian
Renaissance cardinals. Nevertheless the book was denounced by the
Sorbonne, and its sale was forbidden by the Parlement. Francis I and
Marguerite were now dead, and Rabelais found no favor with the
somber Henry II. He absented himself for a while from Paris, but
soon returned. There, after a long illness, he died (April 9, 1553).
An old story tells how, when he was asked on his deathbed where he
expected to go, he answered, Je vais chercher un grand peut-etre - "I
go to seek a great perhaps." `063529 Alas, it is a legend.
2. Gargantua
-
The Prologue to Book One (originally Book Two) gives at once the
taste and smell of the whole:
-
Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious
pockified blades (for to you and none else do I dedicate my
writings).... To have eyed the outside of Socrates and esteemed of him
by his external appearance, you would not have given the peel of an
onion for him.... You, my good disciples, and some other jolly fools
of ease and leisure, reading the pleasant titles of some books of
our invention... are too ready to judge that there is nothing in
them but jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and recreative
lies.... But... in the perusal of this treatise you shall find... a
doctrine of a more profound and abstract consideration... as well in
what concerneth our religion, as matters of public state, and life
economical.... A certain addle-headed coxcomb saith [ill] of my books,
but a bren for him.... Frolic now, my lads, cheer up your hearts,
and joyfully read.... Pull away, Supernaculum!
-
This is Urquhart's famed translation, which sometimes overdoes the
original, but is here quite faithful to it, even with pithy words
now no longer permitted in learned discourse. In these two
paragraphs we have Rabelais' spirit and aim: serious satire clothed in
neck-saving buffoonery, and sometimes smeared with unfumigated smut.
We proceed at our own risk, thankful that the printed word does not
smell, and trusting to find some diamonds in the dunghill.
Gargantua begins with a peerless genealogy Scriptural in form. The
father of the giant was Grangousier, King of Utopia; the mother was
Gargamelle. She bore him for eleven months, and when her pains began
their friends gathered for a merry bout of wine, alleging that
nature abhors a vacuum. "On with a sheep's courage!" the proud
father tells his wife painlessly; "dispatch this boy, and we will
speedily fall to work... making another." For a moment she wishes
him the fate of Abelard; he proposes to accomplish this forthwith, but
she changes her mind. The unborn Gargantua, finding the usual outlet
of maternity blocked by an untimely astringent, "entered the vena
cava" of Gargamelle, climbed through her diaphragm and neck, and
"issued forth by the left ear." As soon as he was born he cried out,
so loudly that two counties heard him, A boire! a boire! a boire! -
"Drink! drink! drink!" 17,913 cans of milk were set aside for his
nourishment. but he early showed a preference for wine.
When it came time to educate the young giant, and make him fit to
succeed to the throne, he received as tutor Maitre Jobelin, who made a
dolt of him by stuffing his memory with dead facts and befuddling
his reason with Scholastic argument. Driven to a desperate
expedient, Gargantua turned the boy over to the humanist Ponocrates.
Teacher and pupil went off to Paris to get the latest education.
Gargantua rode on a tremendous mare, whose swishing tail cut down vast
forests as she proceeded; hence part of France is a plain. Arrived
in Paris, Gargantua alighted on a tower of Notre Dame; he took a fancy
to the bells, and purloined them to hang them about his horse's
neck. Ponocrates began the re-education of the spoiled giant by giving
him an enormous purgative to cleanse the bowels and the brain, which
are near allied. So purified, Gargantua became enamored of
education; he began zealously to train at once his body, his mind, and
his character; he studied the Bible, the classics, and the arts; he
learned to play the lute and the virginal and to enjoy music; he
ran, jumped, wrestled, climbed, and swam; he practiced riding,
jousting, and the skills needed in war; he hunted to develop his
courage; and to develop his lungs he shouted so that all Paris heard
him. He visited metalworkers, stonecutters, goldsmiths, alchemists,
weavers, watchmakers, printers, dyers, and "giving them somewhat to
drink," studied their crafts; he took part every day in some useful
physical work; and sometimes he went to a lecture, or a trial, or to
"the sermons of evangelical preachers" (a Protestant touch).
Amid all this education Gargantua was suddenly called back to his
father's realm, for another king, Picrochole, had declared war on
Grangousier. Why? Rabelais steals a story from Plutarch's Life of
Pyrrhus, and tells how Picrochole's generals boasted of the lands
they would conquer under his leadership: France, Spain, Portugal,
Algeria, Italy, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Greece, Jerusalem....
Picrochole rejoices and swells. But an old philosopher asks him: "What
shall be the end of so many labors and crosses?" "When we return,"
answers Picrochole, "we shall sit down, rest, and be merry." "But,"
suggests the philosopher, "if by chance you should never come back,
for the voyage is long and dangerous, were it not better for us to
take our rest now?" "Enough," cried Picrochole; "go forward; I fear
nothing.... He that loves me, follow me" (I, xxxiii). Gargantua's
horse almost wins the war against Picrochole by drowning thousands
of the enemy with one simple easement.
But the real hero of the war was Friar John, a monk who loved
fighting more than praying, and who let his philosophical curiosity
venture into the most dangerous alleys. "What is the reason," he asks,
"that the thighs of a gentlewoman are always fresh and cool?"- and
though he finds nothing about this engaging problem in Aristotle or
Plutarch, he himself gives answers rich in femoral erudition. All
the King's men like him, feed and wine him to his paunch's content;
they invite him to take off his monastic robe to allow more eating,
but he fears that without it he will not have so good an appetite. All
the faults that the Protestant reformers alleged against the monks are
satirized through this jolly member of their tribe: their idleness,
gluttony, guzzling, prayer-mumbling, and hostility to all but a
narrowing range of study and ideas. "In our abbey," says Friar John,
"we never study, for fear of the mumps" (I, xxxix).
Gargantua proposed to reward the Friar's good fighting by making him
abbot of an existing monastery, but John begged instead to be given
the means of establishing a new abbey, with rules "contrary to all
others." First, there should be no encompassing walls; inmates are
to be free to leave at their pleasure. Second, there is to be no
exclusion of women; however, only such women shall enter as are "fair,
well-featured, of a sweet disposition," and between the ages of ten
and fifteen. Third, only men between twelve and eighteen will be
accepted, and they must be comely, and of good birth and manners; no
sots or bigots may apply, no beggars, lawyers, judges, scribes,
usurers, gold-graspers, or "sniveling hypocrites." Fourth, no vows
of chastity, poverty, or obedience; the members may marry, enjoy
wealth, and in all matters be free. The abbey is to be called Theleme,
or What You Will, and its sole rule will be Fais ce que vous
vouldras - "Do what you wish." For "men that are free, wellborn,
well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an
instinct and spur that prompteth them to virtuous actions and
withdraws them from vice; and this instinct is called Honor" (I,
lvii). Gargantua provided the funds for this aristocratic anarchism,
and the abbey rose according to specifications which Rabelais gave
in such detail that architects have made drawings of it. He provided
for it a library, a theater, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a
football field, a chapel, a garden, a hunting park, orchards, stables,
and 9,332 rooms. It was an American hotel in vacation land. Rabelais
forgot to provide a kitchen, or to explain who would do the menial
work in this paradise.
3. Pantagruel
-
After Gargantua had succeeded his father as king he took his turn at
procreation and pedagogy. At the age of "four hundred fourscore
forty and four years" he begot Pantagruel on Badebec, who died in
giving birth; whereat Gargantua "wept like a cow" for his wife, and
"laughed like a calf" over his robust son. Pantagruel grew up to
Brobdingnagian proportions. In one of his meals he inadvertently
swallowed a man, who had to be excavated by a mining operation in
the young giant's digestive tract. When Pantagruel went to Paris for
his higher schooling Gargantua sent him a letter redolent of the
Renaissance:
-
MOST DEAR SON:
...Although my deceased father, of happy memory, Grangousier, had
bent his best endeavors to make me profit in all perfection and
political knowledge, and that my labor and study was fully
correspondent to, yea, went beyond his desire; nevertheless, as thou
may'st well understand, the time then was not so proper and fit for
learning as it is at present... for that time was darksome, obscured
with clouds of ignorance, and savoring a little of the infelicity
and calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set footing,
destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the divine
goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity, and that
with such amendment and increase of knowledge, that now hardly
should I be admitted unto the first form of the little
grammar-school boys....
Now the minds of men are qualified with all manner of discipline,
and the old sciences revived which for many ages were extinct; now the
learned languages are to their pristine purity restored- viz., Greek
(without which a man may be ashamed to account himself a scholar),
Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean, and Latin. Printing likewise is now in
use, so elegant, and so correct, that better cannot be imagined....
I intend... that thou learn the languages perfectly.... Let there be
no history which thou shalt not have ready in thy memory.... Of the
liberal arts of geometry, arithmetic, and music, I gave thee some
taste when thou wert yet little... proceed further in them.... As
for astronomy, study all the rules thereof; let pass nevertheless...
astrology... as being nothing else but plain cheats and vanities. As
for the civil law, of that I would have thee to know the texts by
heart, and then to confer them with philosophy...
The works of nature I would have thee study exactly.... Fail not
most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian, and Latin
physicians, not despising the talmudists and cabalists; and by
frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of the microcosm,
which is man. And at some hours the study of the day apply thy mind to
the study of the Holy Scriptures: first in Greek the New
Testament... then the Old Testament in Hebrew....
But because, as the wise man Solomon saith, wisdom entereth not into
a malicious mind, and science without conscience is but the ruin of