When they saw it, those who had issued forth from the city said,
‘They have all been cruelly slain: see the blood flowing!’
Yet they were mistaken, thinking that Pantagruel’s urine was his enemies’ blood, for they could see only by the glow of the burning pavilions plus just a little moonlight.
After the enemy had woken up and seen, on one flank, the fire in their camp and then that inundation and deluge of urine, they knew not what to think or say. Some said it was the End of the World and the Last Judgement, which must be consummated in fire; others, that sea-gods such as Neptune [, Proteus, Triton] and the rest were persecuting them and that it was in fact sea-water and salty.
O! Who now could sing how Pantagruel comported himself against three hundred giants! O, my Muse! my Calliope! my Thalia! Inspire me now! Restore ye now my spirits, for behold: here is the asses’ bridge of Logic, here the stumbling-block, here the difficulty of finding words to tell of the horrifying battle which then was joined.
Would that I now had a jar of the very best wine as will ever be drunk by such as shall read this so very true history.
How Pantagruel vanquished three hundred giants who were armed with blocks of sandstone, and Loup Garou their captain
CHAPTER 19
[Becomes Chapter 29.
The mock-heroic savour is marked from the outset by the reference to the conduct of Anchises, the father of Aeneas, at the sack of Troy (Virgil, Aeneid, I, 866 ff. and II, 975 ff.) while the style again recalls that of chivalrous romances, especially perhaps pseudo-Turpin.
‘That even Hercules could not take on two foes’ is one of the Adages of Erasmus (I, V, XXXIX).
A prayer before battle is a feature of the chivalrous tales. Rabelais unexpectedly uses it for dense evangelical propaganda. Fantagruel’s title for Christ is ‘Servateur’ (Servator). The theology is most arresting. A note commenting on it is placed at the end of this chapter for any who may want to go into it further.]
The giants, noting that their camp was submerged, bore King Anarch out of their stronghold as well as they could on their shoulders, as Aeneas bore his father Anchises from blazing Troy.
When Panurge saw them he said to Pantagruel:
‘Look. The giants have come out! Whack ’em [vigorously], my Lord, with your mast in our old style of swordsmanship, for now is the time to prove yourself a man of valour: we, on our side, will never fail you.
‘I am sure to kill many of them for you. Why? Because David killed Goliath easily enough: and I, who could knock down as many as a dozen such as David, for he was only a little shit of a fellow then, shall I not down a good dozen?103
‘And that great lecher Eusthenes, who is as strong as four bulls, will not spare himself. Be of good courage: run them through with cut and thrust.’
‘Well, I have fifty francs’ worth of courage,’ said Pantagruel, ‘but then, even Hercules dared not take on two at once.’
‘That’s talking dog-shit up my nose!’ said Panurge. ‘Are you comparing yourself to Hercules! You have [by God!] more strength in your teeth and more sense in your bum than Hercules had in all his body and soul. A man is as good as he reckons he is!’
While they were saying such words, behold, Loup Garou arrived with all his giants and, spotting Pantagruel alone, he was seized by temerity and overweening recklessness from the hope he had of killing our poor Pantagruel.104
Whereupon he said to his companion giants:
‘You lowland lechers, if any of you undertakes to fight against those fellows over there, I shall, by Mahoun, have you cruelly put to death.
‘My will is that you leave me to meet him in single combat.
‘Meanwhile your pastime shall be to watch us.’
All the giants and their king withdrew a short distance to the place where the flagons were kept; Panurge and his companions went with them, he mimicking men who have caught the pox, for he twisted his gullet, crooked his fingers, and croaked in a husky voice, ‘I renounce Gosh, comrades! We are not making war. Allow us to feed with you while our masters battle it out between them.’
To which the king and the giants readily consented, making them join in their feast, during which Panurge related legends [of Turpin,] exemplary stories of Saint Nicholas [and a Mother-Stork tale].
Loup Garou then confronted Pantagruel with a mace weighing nine thousand seven hundred hundredweight [plus two quarter-pounds] made entirely of steel from Chalybes; its end was studded with thirteen diamond points, the smallest of which was as big as the biggest bell in Notre-Dame-de-Paris – well, perhaps it fell short by a nail’s breadth or (I have no wish to lie) by the thickness of the back of those knives called ear-loppers, a little more or less. And it was enchanted, so that it could never be broken but, on the contrary, immediately broke everything it touched. And then, as he approached with great ferocity, Pantagruel, casting his eyes towards Heaven, commended himself to God with a right good heart, as he made a vow as now follows:
‘O Lord God, who have always been my Protector and Servator, you see the distress in which I now am. Nothing brings me here save the natural zeal which you have vouchsafed to human beings for the saving and defending of themselves, their wives, children, country and family, provided that it touch not upon your own proper concern which is the Faith; for in such a concern your will is to have no coadjutor except the affirmation of Catholicism and the ministry of your word, forbidding us all arms and defences: for you are the Almighty who, in your own proper concern where your own proper cause is drawn into action, can defend yourself far more than we can estimate, you who have a thousand thousands of hundreds of millions of legions of angels, the least of whom could kill all human beings and spin Heaven and Earth at his pleasure, as was made most manifest in the army of Sennacherib.
‘Wherefore if it pleases you to come to my aid in this hour, since my total faith and hope are in you alone, I vow to you that, throughout all the lands in Utopia or elsewhere where I shall have power or authority, I will cause your holy Gospel to be preached purely, simply and entirely, so that the abuses of a load of bacon-pappers and false prophets who have poisoned the whole world with their human doctrines and their depraved novelties shall be banished from about me.’
And then there was heard a voice from Heaven saying, ‘Hoc fac, et vinces,’ that is, This do and thou shalt conquer.
That said, Pantagruel, seeing Loup Garou approach with his chops agape, bravely advanced towards him and yelled as loud as he could, ‘Death, you scoundrel, death!’ (seeking to frighten him with that horrific cry in accordance with the art of war of the Spartans). Then from the salt-boat which he bore on his belt he threw eighteen barrels [and one Greek pound] of salt at Loup Garou, stuffing his gullet, chaps, nose and eyes with it.
Loup Garou, enraged, aimed a blow at him with his mace, hoping to bash his brains out. But Pantagruel was adroit, ever sure of foot and quick of eye. He stepped back on to his left foot, yet not so quick as to stop the blow from landing on his salt-boat, shattering it into [four thousand and eighty-] six fragments and spilling the remaining salt on to the ground.
On seeing which, Pantagruel [vigorously] flexed his arms and, following the art of the battle-axe, whacked him with the thick end of his mast, making a cut-and-thrust blow above his breast, hacking it out leftwards and then slashing him between the neck and shoulders. Next he put his right foot forward and gave him a downward blow upon his balls with the top end of the mast; it shattered the crow’s nest and spilt the three or four kegfuls of wine which were left: Loup Garou thought that Pantagruel had cut through his bladder and that the wine was his own urine escaping.
Pantagruel, not satisfied, tried to redouble his efforts to disengage, but Loup Garou, raising high his mace, stepped towards him and attempted to thwack it down on him. Indeed he aimed such a vigorous blow that if God had not come to the aid of our good Pantagruel he would have cloven him in two from the crown of his head to [the base of] his spleen. Owing to Pantagruel’s bris
k speed the blow swept past to the right and the mace drove three score [and thirteen] feet into the ground straight through a large boulder from which he struck more than a barrel of fire.105
Pantagruel, seeing Loup Garou delayed by tugging at the mace which was stuck inside the boulder underground, ran at him, intending to slash his head clean off, but his mast unfortunately brushed against the shaft of Loup Garou’s mace, which (as we have already told) was enchanted. By which means the mast broke off three fingers’ breadth from his grip. Pantagruel was as stunned as a bell-founder and cried out, ‘Ha! Panurge! Where are you?’ On hearing which, Panurge remarked to the king and the giants: ‘By God, if someone doesn’t separate them they’ll do each other some harm.’
But the giants were as merry as though they were at a wedding. Then Carpalim wanted to get up and help his master, but one of the giants said to him:
‘By Golfarin, the nephew of Mahoun, if you budge an inch I’ll stuff you up the bottom of my breeches like a suppository! I am constipated in fact and can only cagar by grinding my teeth.’
Then Pantagruel, thus stripped of his weapon, grasped the stump of his mast again, raining blows on to the giant this way and that, but he did him no more harm than you would do if you were to tweak a blacksmith’s anvil. Meanwhile Loup Garou went on tugging his mace out of the ground, and having done so, readied it to strike Pantagruel, who was suddenly all movement, dodging every one of his blows until, realizing that, this time, Loup Garou was really threatening him (saying, ‘You wretch! I’m now about to chop you up into chunks like force-meat for pies; never more will you cause poor folk to thirst!’) gave him such a kick in the guts that he knocked him on to his back with his feet in the air and then dragged him further than an arrow flies, scraping his bum along the ground. Loup Garou, spurting blood from his gullet, kept crying ‘Mahoun! Mahoun! Mahoun!’
At that cry all the giants rose to come to his aid. But Panurge said to them: ‘Gentlemen: if you believe me, don’t go there. Our Master is mad, lashing out right and left regardless. He’d give you a nasty time.’ But the giants, noting that Pantagruel was without his stave, took no heed. As they approached, Pantagruel grabbed Loup Garou by both his feet, and, [as though it were a pike,] raised his body aloft, armed as it was with anvils, and battered the giants with it – their armour was of sandstone – and knocked them down like a mason making chippings, so that none could pause before him without being battered to the ground. And at the splintering of their stone armour there was produced a din so horrible that it reminded me of the time when the great Butter-tower of Saint-Etienne-de-Bourges melted in the sun.
While that was going on, Panurge, Carpalim and Eusthenes were slitting the throats of those who had been knocked to the ground. And you can count on this: not a single one escaped; Pantagruel, if you had seen him, was like a mower who with his scythe (i.e. Loup Garou) was slicing through the meadowgrass (i.e. the giants).
But in that fencing-match Loup Garou lost his head: that was when Pantagruel was felling one by the name of Moricault,106 who, from top to toe, was clad in armour of fully dressed grey-freestone, a sliver of which sliced Epistemon’s neck right off. Otherwise the giants were lightly armed, some in tufa and others in slate.
In the end, seeing that all of them were dead, Pantagruel lobbed the body of Loup Garou as far as he could into the town, where it landed in the main square on its belly like a frog; and as it fell it struck and killed one scorched tom-cat, one drenched tabby-cat and one goose bearing a bridle.
[A note on Pantagruel’s prayer. Rabelais goes so far with Luther but not all the way. Rabelais is no pacifist: it is a prince’s duty, under God, to protect his subjects, but it is not right to start wars nor to fight battles in order to spread the Christian faith or even to defend it. Faith is God’s own domain. God does indeed want Christians to be his coadjutors elsewhere, but he never needs help from men’s armies and battles where the faith is concerned: the help he demands in that domain consists in the confessing of Catholic truth and the ministry of his word. (Rabelais later changed ‘ministry of your word’ to ‘service of your word’. Ministère may have sounded too Calvinistic, and no love was lost between Rabelais and Calvin.) The prayer is an example of an older style of biblical theology soon to be replaced by a humanist reading of the Greek New Testament, often in conjunction with Plato and the Greeks, but its central doctrine remains valid throughout the works of Rabelais, though the vocabulary is later refined. In the Latin Vulgate text of II Corinthians 3:9 Saint Paul states that ‘We are God’s “adjutores”’ (his helpers). The Greek original makes human beings God’s ‘co-operators’, a term which Rabelais came to prefer. What one single angel of God can do unaided by men was shown by the slaughter of the entire host of Sennacherib (II Kings 19:35, Isaiah 37:36, II Maccabees 15:22, and I Maccabees 7:41). That angel and his power is traditionally associated with a text from Matthew 26 and its gloss: Jesus told Peter: Tut up your sword. Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?’ Lefèvre d’Etaples, the theologian intimate with Marguerite de Navarre, wrote on Matthew 26 words which draw upon the same urgent common-places as Rabelais:
Christ rebukes Peter because He did not need human help. For had He needed help He could have asked the Father, and He would have sustained Him with more than twelve legions of angels (that is, one legion of angels for each of the apostles, one of whom was a traitor), troops more powerful than all mankind put together. For we read in Isaiah [37: 36] that one single angel ‘went forth and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred and fourscore and five thousand’, so what could twelve legions of angels have done?
That one angel was more powerful than the whole army of Sennacherib. It is on the eventual authority of Dionysius the Areopagite that Rabelais expands those ‘twelve legions’ into ‘a thousand thousands of hundreds of millions of legions of angels’. Those ‘twelve legions’ show God as mighty: Pantagruel shows God to be almighty in the traditional way, by juxtaposing and multiplying the greatest available numbers. Again faith is conceived as evangelicals conceived it, as trust: trust in God and his promises. The word ‘Catholic’ was never restricted by such as Rabelais to mean Roman Catholic: evangelicals and reformers of all kinds naturally retain the word in the creeds. The doctrine that it is necessary to suffer for the faith but not to fight for it is that of Luther, though not of him alone.
As Melanchthon insisted, Natural Law retained for men the right to fight to defend their families (‘family’ being interpreted very widely to include one’s country). Erasmus held that the only vow Christians should ever make to God is a vow to spread the true and living faith. Pantagruel does indeed make the one and only vow conceded to mankind by Erasmus in his treatise The Method of Praying to God.
The phrase ‘hoc fac, et vinces’ (‘This do, and thou shalt conquer’) is adapted from the Vulgate text of Luke 10:24: ‘hoc fac, et vives’ (‘This do, and thou shalt live’).
Luther held that the phrase in its context is ironical and so means the contrary of its literal meaning: for Pantagruel that is not so.
Rabelais is deeply influenced by Luther, but he does not follow him in everything.]
How Epistemon, who had his head sliced off, was cleverly healed by Panurge; also news about devils and the damned
CHAPTER 20
[Becomes (with noddle and cut confused in a Spoonerism):… who had his coddle nut off… Chapter 30.
Medieval tales recount several resurrections. Descents into Hell are common in popular religious stories. The reversal of roles in this list of denizens of the Underworld forms the essence of the fun. Names were added at various times, but here they are not individually dated: all additions follow the ‘42 text.
Rabelais quietly excised the allusions to ancient French heroes, almost certainly to meet royal susceptibilities.
Jean Le Maire de Belges would have subordinated popes to church councils.
Caillette and Tri
boullet were real Court fools.]
Having fully accomplished this rout of the giants, Pantagruel withdrew to where the flagons were kept and summoned Panurge and the others, who appeared before him safe and sound, except Eusthenes (whose face had been somewhat clawed about by one of the giants as he was slitting his throat) and Epistemon, who failed to appear. Pantagruel was so grieved at this that he felt like killing himself, but Panurge said to him: ‘Indeed my Lord, just wait a little, and we will go and seek him amongst the dead and discover the truth about it all.’
Then, as they were searching, they found him stone dead, with his head all bloody and cradled in his arms. At which Eusthenes exclaimed: ‘Ah! foul Death, you have taken from us the most perfect of men!’
At those words Pantagruel arose, with great grief such as was never before seen in this world [and said to Panurge:
‘That augury of yours made from the pole and two glasses was far too misleading.]
But Panurge said:
‘Shed no tears, lads. He’s still warm. I shall restore him for you as sound as he ever was.’
So saying, he took hold of the head and held it warm against his codpiece to stop air from getting in. Eusthenes and Carpalim carried the body to the spot where they had feasted, not in the hope that he could ever be healed but so that Pantagruel should see it. Nevertheless Panurge comforted them all, saying, ‘If I do not heal him may I lose my own head’ – which is a lunatic’s wager! ‘Stop those tears and come and help me.’
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 18
