‘That world which lends nothing will then be no better than a dog-fight, than a brawl more unruly than the ones for the Rector of Paris, than a devil-play more disorderly than in the mysteries at Doué. Amongst human beings none will save another; it will be no good a man shouting Help! Fire! I’m drowning! Murder! Nobody will come and help him. Why? Because he has lent nothing: and no one owes him anything. No one has anything to lose by his fire, his shipwreck, his fall or his death. He has lent nothing. And: he would lend nothing either thereafter.
‘In short, Faith, Hope and Charity will be banished from this world (for men are born to help and succour others). In their stead will succeed Distrust, Contempt and Rancour with their cohort of every misery, malediction and mischief. You will justly think that it is there that Pandora has emptied her bottle. “Unto men, men wolves shall be,” werewolves and hobgoblins, (as were Lycaon, Bellerophon and Nebuchadnezzar), brigands, assassins, poisoners, evil-doers, evil-thinkers, evil-willers, each hating all the others, such as were Ishmael, Metabus and Timon of Athens (who for that reason was surnamed Misanthropos). As a result, easier will it be for Nature to nourish fish in the air and feed stags in the depths of the ocean than to maintain such a lewd rascal of a World which lends nothing. Faith, how well I hate them.
‘And then if you picture to yourself that other World, that microcosm which is Man formed after the model of that nasty, depressive World which never lends, you will find in him a terrifying turmoil. The head would not lend its eyesight to guide the feet and hands; the feet would not deign to carry the head; the hands would cease to work for it; the heart, angry at having to bestir itself to lend pulsations to the limbs, will no longer lend them anything; the lungs will no longer lend them their breathing; the liver no longer supply blood to maintain it; the bladder will decline to be debtor to the kidneys and urine will be suppressed; the brain, contemplating so disnatured a process, will drive itself raving mad, bestowing no sentiment on the sinews nor motion on the muscles.
‘In short, in that disordered world, owing nothing, lending nothing, borrowing nothing, you will see a machination more pernicious than that which Aesop figured in his fable. And beyond a doubt he will perish: not only perish but very quickly perish, even if Aesculapius himself were there. And his body will soon become putrefied whilst his soul, all indignation, will flee to all the devils – all after my money.’
Panurge’s eulogy of lenders and debtors: continued
CHAPTER 4
[More comic effrontery from Panurge, whose ideal world is one in which he alone borrows and never repays. Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium remains a template of the ideas which he abuses. So do the standard medical notions of those who follow Plato, Aristotle and Avicenna (rather than always following Galen) of how food is digested and eventually refined into the ‘animal spirits’ (the spirits of the anima, the soul).
The ‘rete mirabile’ is a supposed plexus of blood-vessels in the cranium at the end of the carotid artery. It refined the animal spirits. Rabelais holds to its existence, although Vesalius proved that it does not exist in Man.
In the name of mutual love and collaboration Panurge is in fact exemplifying philautia, selfish love of self.
Black bile is melancholia.
Medical theories of sexuality come to the fore again in Chapter 31. Hippocrates held that semen is produced as Panurge says here. Galen denied it. It is Panurge’s misuse of good Classical ideas which is skewed as here, not the ideas themselves (as Chapter 31 emphasizes).
The ‘marriage debt’ is the duty of husband and wife each to be attentive to the reasonable sexual demands of the other.]
‘On the contrary: now evoke for yourself a different world, a world in which each one lends, each one owes, where all are debtors, all are lenders.
‘O! amongst the regular motions of the heavens what harmony there will be! I believe I can hear it as well as Plato once did.4
‘What sympathy between the elements! O how Nature will delight in the fruits she there brings forth: Ceres laden with corn, Bacchus with wine, Flora with flowers, Pomona with fruit: Juno, health-giving, delightful, and all serene in her air serene!
‘I lose myself in such contemplation. Between human beings, from hand to hand there would trot peace, love, affection, faithfulness, repose, banquets, feastings, joy, happiness, gold, silver, petty cash, necklaces, rings and merchandise. No lawsuits: no wars: no contentions: there, no one will be a usurer, no one rapacious, no one tight-fisted, no one will ever turn you down. True God! Will it not be the Age of Gold, the Reign of Saturn, the Idea of those Olympic regions in which all other virtues cease while Charity reigns, rules, directs and triumphs alone? Everybody will be good, everyone beautiful, everyone just.
‘O happy world! O inhabitants of that happy world. O folk thrice and four times blessèd! I think I am there already! I swear to you by our Good Gosh that if in that world, [that blessèd world, thus lending to all and refusing none,] they had a pope abounding in cardinals and in fellowship with his Sacred College, then in the space of a few years you would see saints more thick on the ground, working more miracles, with more vows, lessons, banners and candles than all the saints of the nine bishoprics of Brittany, excepting only Saint Ives.
‘Consider, I beg you, how that noble fellow Pathelin wished to render immortal the father of Guillaume Jousseaulme and raise him by his sanctifying prayers even to the Third Heaven: he said nothing except:
… and his goods he would lend
To those who wished for cash to spend.
How beautifully put!
‘After such a model imagine this our microcosm, [i.e., this little world which is Man,] with all his members borrowing, lending, owing: that is to say, Man in his natural state. For Nature created Man but to lend and to borrow. The harmony of the heavens will not be grander than the harmony of his polity.
‘The intention of the Founder of this microcosm is to maintain therein its soul, whom he has placed within as its host, its life. Now life consists in blood. Blood is the seat of the soul. That is why one single task weighs down upon this microcosm: continually to forge blood. And in that forging all its members are in their proper roles, their hierarchy being such that each borrows from the other, each lends to the other. The material – the substance – proper to be transmuted into blood is supplied by Nature: bread and wine. Within those two are comprehended every kind of food: hence the term companage in Gothick Provençal.
‘It is to find, prepare and concoct them that the hands toil and that the feet walk and support the whole structure; the eyes oversee it; the appetite, within the orifice of the stomach, by means of a little black bile despatched by the spleen, warns it to load food into its oven: the tongue tastes it, the teeth chew it, the stomach receives it, digests it and turns it into chyle; the mesenteric arteries absorb from it what is good and proper (leaving aside the excrements which are voided through the expressly made conduits by an expulsive force) and convey it to the liver which at once transmutes it, turning it into blood.
‘What joy do you think there to be amongst all those artisans once they have seen that golden stream which is their sole restorative! No greater is the joy of alchemists when, after long labours and vast trouble and expense, they see the metals transmuted in their furnaces, Whereupon each member readies itself and strives afresh to purify and refine that treasure. The kidneys strain out through the emulgent veins the fluid which you call urine and send it flowing down. There below it finds a specific vessel, the bladder, which voids it when appropriate. The spleen draws off the grounds and the lees which you call black bile. The gall-bag extracts from them the excess of yellow bile.
‘The blood is then conveyed to another smithy to be further refined, that is, to the heart, which by means of its diastolic and systolic motions so well rarefies and calorifies it that it is brought to perfection by the right ventricle and dispatched to all the members through the veins. They – feet, hands, eyes, the lot – draw it to them
selves and each in its own way finds nourishment in it: and so they which were lenders are turned into debtors. The heart, by means of the left ventricle, then renders it so refined that it is turned into what is called spiritous blood, which is then dispatched through the arteries to all the members in order to heat and ventilate the other kind of blood which is in the veins. The lungs ceaselessly keep it fresh with their lobes and bellows. Out of gratitude for this service the heart separates out the best of the blood and sends it back through the arterial vein. Lastly it is so refined within the rete mirabile that from it are eventually made the animal spirits thanks to which the soul imagines, discourses, judges, resolves, deliberates, ratiocinates and remembers.
‘Golly! When I enter into the deep abyss of that lending, owing world, I am drowned, lost and lose my way! Believe you me: to lend is an act divine, and to owe is an heroic virtue.
‘And that is still not all. This lending, owing, borrowing world is so benevolent that, as soon as its own alimentation is complete, it already thinks of lending to those who are yet unborn, and by that loan to multiply itself if it can and perpetuate itself in images like unto itself: that is, children. To which end each member pares off and cuts away a portion of its most precious nutriment and sends it down below. There Nature has prepared appropriate vessels and receptacles for it through which it descends to the genitals via long sinuous and flexile conduits; it receives its proper form and then finds private parts which, in both men and women, are appropriate to the conserving and perpetuating of the human race. All of which is achieved by loans and debts from one to another – hence the term, the marriage debt: for anyone who refuses it Nature establishes a punishment: an acrid torment amongst the members and madness amongst the senses; to the lender, as a reward, are assigned pleasure, joy and sensual delight.’
How Pantagruel loathes debtors and borrowers
CHAPTER 5
[Topics is the title of a much-studied work by Aristotle, a compendium of which was given by Cicero. It formed a basis of education in an age which appreciated eloquence and skilled argument. But rhetoric and dialectic do not themselves lead to the truth. To overthrow the perverse fluent ingenuity of Panurge one verse of Saint Paul suffices: ‘Owe no man any thing, but to love one another’ (Romans 13:8). The words ‘mutual love-and-affection’ render that love which is agape (so different from Panurge’s self-love, philautia). Saint Paul is supported by Plato (Laws, 98) as cited by Plutarch in his treatise On Avoiding Usury. Rabelais’ big guns are out!
Apollonius of Tyana claimec to have encountered the Plague personified: he found her horrifying.]
‘I understand you,’ answered Pantagruel; ‘you seem to me to be good at your Topics and zealous for your cause; but preach and patrocinate from now to Whitsuntide and you’ll be amazed to learn that you have failed in the end to persuade me. “Owe no man anything,” said the holy Apostle, “save mutual love-and-affection.” You are employing fine graphic terms and vivid descriptions. I find them most enjoyable, but I can tell you this: that if you picture for yourself a flagrant fraudster, a relentless loan-taker, newly arriving in a town already warned of his way of life, you will find that the townsfolk will be more agitated and terrified by his arrival titan if the Plague had arrived in person, dressed as she was when the Philosopher of Tyana came across her in Ephesus. And I am of the opinion that the Persians were not in error when they judged lying to be the second vice, the first being to run up debts, for debts and lies normally go together.
‘Yet I do not mean to infer that we must never owe, never lend. None so rich but at times must owe: none so poor but at times can lend. The time for it will be such as Plato states in his Laws, where he rules that you should never allow neighbours to draw water from your land before they had first trenched and ditched their own meadows and found the soil called ceramite – potter’s earth, that is – without uncovering a source or even a trickle of water; for that soil, by its substance, which is greasy, tough, smooth and dense, retains humidity and does not easily allow any [draining away or] evaporation. It is therefore a great dishonour to be forever borrowing everywhere and from everyone rather than working and earning. In my judgement you should lend only when the person working has not been able to derive any benefit from his labour, or when he has been suddenly plunged into an unforeseen loss of his goods.
‘So, change the subject, shall we? And from now on do not be beholden to creditors.
‘From your past debts I shall free you.’
‘The least and the most I can do is to thank you,’ said Panurge; ‘and if thanks are to be measured against the affection of the benefactors, that will be endlessly, sempiternally: for the love which you graciously bear me is beyond the dice of judgement, it transcends all weight, number and measure; it is infinite, sempiternal. Yet if you measure it against the calibre of the gains and gratification of the recipients, it will be somewhat slackly. You do many good things for me: much more than I ought to receive from you; much more than I deserve; more than my merits demand. That I must admit. But in this matter nothing like as much as you may think. What grieves me, what hurts me and gnaws at me is not that! But from henceforth, now that I am free of debt, what shall I look like? Believe me. I shall appear graceless during the first few months, seeing that I am not used to it, not brought up to it. I am very much afraid of it.
‘Moreover, in all the land of Salmagundi, from this day forth not one fart will be born which is not to be directed towards my nose. For whenever they break wind, all the farters in the world say, “That’s for those who are out of debt!” My life will soon come to an end: I can foresee that. I entrust my epitaph to you. And I shall die, all peacefully pickled in farts. Should it ever come to pass that the usual medicines fail to satisfy physicians seeking a restorative to enable good dames to break wind when suffering from an extreme access of the gripes, powdered mummy from my wretched be-farted body will be a ready remedy for them. And taking the tiniest bit of it, they will fart more than the physicians ever expected.
‘That is why I would beseech you to leave me with a good hundred or so debts, just as, when King Louis the Eleventh had quashed all the lawsuits of Miles d’Illiers, the bishop of Chartres, he was pressed to leave him just one to practise upon. Why I’d rather pay them all off with my cockchafers and snails, without touching the capital though.’
‘Let us drop the subject,’ said Pantagruel. ‘I have already told you once.’
Why newly married men were exempt from going to war
CHAPTER 6
[Rabelais seriously conflates two passages of the Mosaic Law: Deuteronomy 20:5–7 and 24:5 Rabelais uses the form ‘Moses’ not the traditional form ‘Moïse’. It was condemned by some theologians of the Sorbonne.
Panurge on the other hand misuses and misapplies Scripture, twisting the sense of the Book of Life in Revelation 13:8 and of the faithful men who are ‘lively stones’ to be ‘built into a spiritual house’, in I Peter 2:5.
The story of Brother Screwum (in the French: Frère Enguainnant) goes back to a tale of Poggio, but in his Jests ten virgins are concerned, not as here a hundred.
‘Courcaillet’ and the ‘Battle of Cornabons’ remain unexplained, but may be a way of suggesting that Panurge will be a cuckold (with cornabon loosely meaning ‘good for horns’).
The final allusion to Galen is confused, Panurge mistaking Galen’s On the Difficulty of Breathing for his treatise On the Use of Respiration. There Galen in fact rejects the opinion attributed to him. A pure lapse or a learned joke?]
‘But,’ asked Panurge, ‘in which Law was it laid down and established that men who had planted a new vineyard, had built a new house or had newly wed, should be exempt from going to war for the first year?’
‘In the Law of Moses,’ replied Pantagruel.
‘Why newly married men?’ asked Panurge. ‘I’m too old to worry about planters of vines – though I do agree that we should be concerned about the vendangeurs – while those fine new builders of d
ead stones are not written in my Book of Life: I build up only lively stones – men, that is.’
‘As I judge it,’ replied Pantagruel, ‘it was to let them freely enjoy love-making during that first year, working at establishing a family and producing heirs. If they were then killed in battle during the second year, their names and family arms would remain through their children; they would also know for certain whether their wives were barren or fruitful – one year seemed long enough for that, given the mature age at which they married – so enabling them to arrange second marriages for the wives after the death of their first husbands, bestowing the fruitful on men who wished to multiply in children, and the barren on those who did not wish to do so and would take them for their virtues, knowledge and comeliness, purely for solace at home and the running of their households.’
‘The preachers at Varennes,’ said Panurge, ‘revile remarriages as wanton and improper.’
‘For them,’ replied Pantagruel, ‘they are like a strong dose of quarten fever.’
‘And so they are for Brother Screwum,’ said Panurge, ‘who, when preaching against second marriages at Parillé, swore in mid-sermon that he would give himself to the nimblest devil in Hell if he would not rather deflower a hundred virgins than cover one widow.’
‘I find your reasons good and well-founded. But what if that exemption were to have been granted them because they had given their newly wedded darlings such a drumming during that first year (as is right and proper) and so drained their spermatic vessels that they themselves were left all floppy, unmanned, feeble and flagging so that, come the day of battle, they would rather go plunging down like ducks with the baggage-train than go with the fighting-men and valiant champions, there where Enyo harks on the fray and blows are traded: they could never strike a worthwhile blow beneath the banner of Mars since their mighty blows had already been well aimed behind the bed-curtains of Venus, Mars’ lady-love.
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 44
