Literary portraits

Contents

RABELAIS PHILIPPE DE COMINES A TRANSLATOR GENERALL

JACQUES CASANOVA .

For so many centuries has the name of Rabelais stood for a book that the world is apt to forget that it was ever borne by a man, who in his busy life played the many and diverse parts of scholar, priest, doctor, courtier, humourist. John Milton calls up other images than Paradise Lost: we do not straightway confuse him with Lucifer; we remember also Cromwell’s accomplished secretary, and the author who proved in his Areopagitica that prose, no less than verse, might echo with noble music. Even Shakespeare, though he eludes the biographer, is seldom mistaken for his works: we do not ascribe to him the joviality of Falstaff, the misanthropy of Hamlet, the madness of Lear; we still recognise the poet who came from Warwickshire to conquer London, and who held his own against the wits and rufflers of Elizabeth’s glorious age. But Rabelais is merged in the ‘ Lives, ‘ Heroick Deeds, and Sayings of Gargantua and his ‘Sonne Pantagruel,’ until the amiable doctor and learned gentleman are both forgotten. And in the case of Francois Rabelais the injustice is the more profound, because of all men that ever thought and wrote he is the most clearly detached from his own creations. Moreover, since his speech is ever open and courageous, he is involved by the witless in the flagrant charge of indecent buffoonery. The illustrious ex- A travagances in word and deed of Gargantua, Panurge, and Friar John are too readily ascribed to their creator, who is insulted by modern censors as he was injured by the monks and Calvinists of his own day. But Francois Rabelais was a very real man, who worked, laughed, and fought with the best of his contemporaries; and, happily for his memory, the materials for a portrait are not lacking.

II

Thus was the Revival of Learning achieved in such secluded corners as the monastery of Fontenay-le- Comte. Within these quiet walls Rabelais laid the foundation of his vast learning; nor was his reputation obscured by the taunts of his colleagues. In Pierre Amy, at any rate, he found a generous and sympathetic friend, and it is pleasant to think of the two scholars pursuing in unity of mind and contempt of disaster the studies which were presently to disgrace them. ‘They purchased books, and they read them ; they did their utmost to make Fontenay a centre of learning; and with a freedom which doubtless affrighted the monks, they held a lettered intercourse with the outside world.

One document remains,? which gives us an intimate

1 Tiraqueau states in a second edition of his De Legibus Connudialibus that Rabelais had translated into Latin the First Book of Herodotus. But of this work we have no other trace.

2 The document is printed in M. Fillon’s Lettres écrites de la Vendée. By a curious irony the receipt was discovered pasted on one of the wooden boards used to bind the works of Dun Scotus

(printed by Jean Granjon, 1517), whom of all the schoolmen Rabelais and his friends most cordially despised.

view of their ambition and enthusiasm : this is nothing less than a receipt for seven crowns, which Henri Estienne, the publisher, declares was paid him by Pierre Amy for books sold to the Bishop of Maillezais. Now, this bishop—Geoffroy d’Estissac by name—was the lifelong friend of Rabelais; to him are addressed Rabelais’ letters from Rome; and no doubt the books purchased of Estienne were eagerly read by the two monks of Fontenay. They were, moreover, precisely the books which eager apostles of the New Learning would desire—Aristotle, Cicero, Homer, the Chronicle of Nuremberg, la Voye Celeste, and the Querela Pacis of Erasmus.

So it was not only within the walls of Fontenay that Rabelais found sympathy and encouragement. While Geoffroy d’Estissac sat upon the throne of the neighbouring bishopric, André Tiraqueau, the Bailiff of Fontenay, and the once famous jurisconsult, Aymery Bouchard, were among his devoted friends. And Rabelais, who never loosened an attachment, remembered them both in dedications, and always refers to Tiraqueau. with affection and respect. The ‘learned, wise, courteous and just civilian, André ‘ Tiraqueau, he calls him in the Prologue to the Fourth Book; and when the youthful Pantagruel goes abroad, does he not visit that erudite scholar and sound lawyer ? .

But the friendship with Tiraqueau was the more important, since to it we owe one of the few references to the young friar; and the slight sketch drawn by the lawyer has at least a hint of the gaiety which always distinguished Rabelais. Now Tiraqueau, too, was beset by the prevailing ambition of literature; he, too, could write Latin in a style of easy familiarity; moreover, he was engaged with Bouchard in a controversy on that question of women, which has agitated the world since Aristophanes, and has not yet received a final answer. ‘The Bailiff, in his De Legibus Connubialibus, made what Aymery Bouchard considered an insolent attack upon the sex; whereon Bouchard replied in a pamphlet zrepi tis yuvaskeias vrAns; and Tiraqueau in his second edition not only attempts to demolish Bouchard, but invokes the approving aid of Rabelais himself. That Rabelais should be on the side of the misogynists we, who know his book, can readily understand; and Tiraqueau could not quote a sounder authority. Bouchard, said his enemy, believed himself an orator, and all the world knows that one of the tricks recommended in Lucian’s ‘Pytépwv ArddcKados is to show oneself amiable to women. ‘That, at any rate,’ says Tiraqueau, ‘is the opinion of our friend Francois © Rabelais, a friar, well skilled both in Latin and * Greek.’

Such controversies tightened the bonds of acquaintanceship, and Rabelais, despite the persecution of the friars, enjoyed an intellectual freedom rare in the sixteenth century. What, indeed, would he have done at Toulouse, ‘ where they did cause burne their regents ‘alive’? But Poitou seems to have been endowed with a liberal intelligence, and the profound learning of Rabelais was speedily noised abroad. Above all, the friendship of Pierre Amy contrived an introduction to the celebrated Guillaume Budé, and a correspondence followed, partly in Latin, partly in Greek. Now Bude, or Budeeus, was the first scholar of France, the one rival in Europe to Erasmus. Yet unhappily, the oblivion that waits upon scholars long since overtook him, and his letters to Rabelais, clumsy as they are, have been longer remembered than his once admired treatise, De Asse.

But Rabelais was young and a friar; wherefore he approached the great man cap in hand. And for a while the great man kept a silence which Rabelais’ vanity did not easily brook. A second letter? is proof enough of wounded pride and hurt humility. He confesses that he would rate the intimate friendship of Budzus more highly than dominion over the whole of Asia. Yet he asks: ‘What can a young man look ‘ forward to who is unlettered and obscure, an utter ‘stranger to fair courtly phrases, at the hands of one ‘who is of the highest repute in literature, and who ‘has excelled all men in merit and genius?’ But he throws the blame, in a mock-heroic strain, upon his friend Amy: ‘If I were disposed to proceed to the ‘ extremity of justice against him, I see no skulking- ‘ place, no harbours of refuge in which he could hide ‘ himself.’

The pleasantry is heavy-shotted, and not of the kind that we should expect from Rabelais’ hand; yet if this Greeco-Latin letter does not prove his wit, at least it proves his erudition. On the other hand, the reply of Budeus might have been written by Mr. Barlow himself: it is lofty, grave, pretentious; it attacks Rabelais in a vein of portentous irony for suspecting Pierre Amy of bad faith. ‘Where now is ‘ your brotherly love,’ writes the learned doctor, ‘ the

1] have quoted this letter from Mr. W. F. Smith’s valuable edition of Rabelais, to which students are profoundly indebted.

‘ chain of monasteries, the pillar of religion, the glue ‘of unanimity, which you keep on declaiming almost ‘ in every other word must be revered asa Deity? If ‘a friend, who is not the first-comer, but chosen, ‘ reverenced, and faithful, makes a statement neither ‘at hazard nor in the way of a joke, a statement in ‘fine which demands credit, should you not believe ‘him?’

So the correspondence is continued, now in Greek, now in Latin, and, dull as it is, it casts a very clear light upon Rabelais’ character and erudition. Budzeus was not the man to write to any scholar that could address him in the decent prose of -either language. But Rabelais was already known to his contemporaries as doctissimus, and he was fighting the same battle as Budzeus himself. ‘Furthermore we ‘ know,’ says Budeeus, ‘that those theologians, haters ‘of the Greeks, have spent their utmost zeal and ‘ diligence that they might blot out the Greek tongue, ‘as nothing else to be sure than the trial and test of ‘ their own ignorance.’ Nor were they anywhere more active than among the Franciscans of Fontenay-le- Comte, when at last the tardy suspicion was aroused. The cells of Rabelais and Amy were searched by the enemies of Greek (so much we gather from the letters of Budzus), and incriminating literature was discovered, supplied, may be, by the Bishop of Maillezais himself. For this sin there was no palliation. What could be said in defence of a ruffian who had translated Herodotus, upon the tip of whose pen were constant tags from Lucian and Homer, who not only read the abhorred tongue, but wrote it like a scholar? Budeus intervened in vain; at last the life of erudition, passed in the walks and gardens of Fontenay, was over : Rabelais left the brotherhood with a hatred of friars in his heart; a vast material was stored up for the satire that was to come; yet in spite of persecution he could declare with truth that to the seclusion aud leisure of Fontenay-le-Comte he owed the encyclopeedic learning which has made him for ever famous.

The blow was weakened by the championship of powerful friends. Rabelais was always a man of carefulness and foresight: the fate of the red herring had no charm for him, and no sooner was he expelled from Fontenay than he took refuge with the old companion of his studies, Geoffroy d’Estissac, Bishop of Maillezais. And he did not then, nor at any other time, quarrel with the faith. A hatred of the friars and their morals was no interruption to his orthodoxy ; he was as little tainted by Lutheranism as Budeus himself; and unto the end he found room in the same church which sheltered Erasmus. Indeed, a promotion instantly followed his expulsion from the Franciscan monastery. A special indulgence from the Pope permitted him to enter the order of St. Benoit, ‘with the title and ‘habit of regular canon, and to receive and hold, ‘ despite his vows of poverty, such secular benefices ‘ as were afterwards his.’ Meantime he was free, under d’Estissac’s protection, to pursue his studies as he would: he dwelt at Ligugé in honour, and cultivated the Muses perhaps with more elegance and less labour than heretofore.

An epistle, in verse, which he addressed to Jean Bouchet, and which recalls the easy familiarity of Martial, still remains to us, and certainly suggests a life of lettered ease. Therein he compliments his friend upon his ‘ escritz, tant doulx et meliflues’; begs him, ‘differer ceste solicitude de litiger et de patro- ‘ciner’; and advises him, having procured ‘les ‘tallonniers de ton patron Mercure,’ to visit him at once. Of course, there is a classical allusion to every ten lines, and the whole letter might have been written by an exquisite of the sixteenth century. Thereto, as in duty bound, Bouchet, an advocate of Poitou, replies with a like array of policy and compliment. ‘Va, lettre, va de ce fascheux Palais,’ he explains with proper coxcombry, ‘te presenter aux ‘ yeux de Rabelays.’ But alas! though he can compliment Rabelais and the whole house of d’Estissac, he cannot leave Poitou and visit ‘le tien hermitage,’ because there he is detained by ‘le petit tripotage ‘de plaictz, proces et causes.’ Not an important correspondence, but memorable, because it is marked rather by benignity than by talent, and because benignity is the last quality wherewith posterity has credited the man whom the great Budeus called xpHnaT? Kepanrn.

Ill

However, Rabelais stayed not long at Ligugé: in 1528 began his life in the world. Hitherto, no doubt, books had said more to him than men. Neither Latin nor Greek withheld its secrets from him, and, monk as he was, he had made himself master of pagan antiquity. At whatever date his birth be fixed, he was no longer young, yet for all the profundity of his studies he was neither pedant nor dry-as-dust. The blood of 'Touraine was warm in his veins; his courage, as may be seen in his encounter with the Franciscans, was always high; and now began the years of wandering per saeculwm, which were to supplement the erudition of his youth. It was towards Lyons that he first turned his steps, presbytert saccularis habitu assumpto, as he said in a supplication to the Pope. Nor could he with his enterprise in view have chosen a more favourable city. The Lyons of 1528 was devoted to polite letters and active enterprise. It was as though Venice had crossed the Alps, bringing bankers and printing-presses in her train. Learned men sought the gracious capital of the South, for there they found a freedom and a welcome denied them by the Sorbonnists of Paris. Clement Marot sojourned there for a time, and Etienne Dolet, who at Lyons practised the art embellished by the Aldi; while neither Budeus nor Erasmus was a complete stranger.

At Lyons, then, Rabelais met many of the famous men whose works had been an inspiration to the friars of Fontenay, and in erudition he was a match for the best of them. Meanwhile he had interrupted the practice of religion. It was bodies that he healed at Lyons, not souls; and though the fame of his medical skill was growing, he threw himself heart and soul into the proper business of Lyons—the editing and printing of books. He became, in brief, a bookseller’s hack, expert and energetic. He read proofs, may be, if proofs were read in those days; he wrote prefaces, he compiled almanacks. Of the Lyonnese printers the greatest, of course, was Sebastian Gryphius, a profound scholar and elegant Latinist, who dreamed of rivalling the press of Venice with his editions of the classics. But while Gryphius appealed to the learned few, Claude Nourry and Francois Juste devised such trivial little books as amuse the people; and it is a clear symbol of Rabelais’ career that he worked for all three. Some day he was to prove to the world that the chap-book transformed by humour and learning might take its place among the great literature of the world : that Aristophanes need not disdain, if he read beyond the grave, a set of little volumes which were thrust into a pedlar’s pack and carried up and down the countryside of France.

But meantime he played the part of the professed scholar, and his first work was an epistle dedicatory to his old friend André Tiraqueau, which served as preface for the Medical Letters of Manardus. There is perhaps in a single phrase—‘ Boys have now a ‘Rhinoceros nose all the world over ’—a trick of the real Rabelais. Yet, for the rest, the epistle is commonplace enough. Compliments are paid to Tiraqueau himself, and to the Bishop of Maillezais, ‘my kindest Mecenas’; a regret is uttered that in his own practice of medicine very few adapt themselves to better methods. ‘So it is, writes Rabelais, ‘that as we know is the common fate of them ‘that perish by shipwreck, whatever they snatch at ‘when the ship is wrecked and founders, be it beam, ‘or coat, or straw, they cling to it with clenched ‘ hands, forgetful meanwhile of swimming and without ‘ care, so long as that which is in their hands fall not ‘ away, until they are sucked down in the vast whirl- ‘ pool: in the same way our doctors hold on to their ‘loves in the books, to which they have been accus-

‘tomed from their boyhood with all their might and ‘ careless of wrong, even if they see their bark of false ‘ knowledge battered and leaking in every corner. And, ‘if they are pushed off, they think that their very soul ‘is driven from its seat.’ Here, of course, is sketched the sound doctrine of Rabelais, the hatred of false authority, the contempt of stale-grown custom. But that spirit of raillery, which reshaped the world, was not yet awake within him.

His next enterprise was the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, collated in accord with an ancient Greek manuscript in his own possession. He undertook the work with peculiar care, because, said he, inaccuracy in a physician’s book is not merely a fault, but a sin which demands expiation. ‘A single little word added, or ‘ erased, nay, even an accent inverted, or set in a wrong ‘ place, often involves the death of many thousands.’ Sebastian Gryphius, ‘that most consummate and ‘ highly finished printer,’ printed the little book with his accustomed care, and it was dedicated with all the eloquence of gratitude to Geoffroy d’Estissac. Rabelais, in truth, forgot neither his friends nor his enemies, and we readily condone his extraordinary flattery for its eloquent expression. ‘Whatever my ‘ Jabour can achieve properly belongs to you’—thus he writes to the Bishop of Maillezais—‘ who have until ‘now cherished me so warmly with your kindness, ‘that wherever I cast my eyes, nothing confronts my ‘senses save the sea and sky of your munificence,’! The compliments are turned prettily enough; the allusions to the literature of Greece and Rome are

1 Rabelais leaves the quotation from Homer, ovdéy 7) ovpavds 75e 6dé\acca, in its original Greek, constant and appropriate ; but many another scholar of this generation might have indited these flimsy prefaces, and we are still many leagues from the admirable Pantagruel.

Nor does Rabelais’ third performance bring us nearer to his genius: rather it involves him in the ridicule which his scorn would joyfully have hurled at a rival. With a heedlessness foreign to his character, he assumed a wanton responsibility for two scraps ‘saved by a ‘happier fate from fire, shipwreck, and the ruin of ‘age.’ The one was the will of Lucius Cuspidius, the other an ancient contract of sale. Rabelais, confessing in a dedication to Aymery Bouchard that he has never seen the original manuscript, is content to evoke the authority of the renowned Gryphius. But the fragments were the work of one Pontanus, who had mystified the learned more darkly than he had dared to hope. Rabelais treated the matter with characteristic nonchalance : he waited for his Gargantua, and therein held up Pontanus, Secular Poet, to inapposite contempt.

Did Rabelais ever meet Erasmus in the flesh— Erasmus, whom above all men he might call his master? ‘The question has been asked many times, and never found a satisfactory answer. Yet one would like to think that he who wrote the Moria once encountered his greatest disciple. Of all the heroes who fought the fight of freedom in the sixteenth century, Rabelais and Erasmus present the strongest resemblance. Each had suffered the terrors of monkish discipline ; each had come forth into the world armed with vengeance and resentment. Erasmus, no doubt, was the finer scholar; and while Rabelais had no

RABELAIS en reason to fear his rival, they were both brilliant in satire, as they were pitiless in contempt. Yet obvious as is the resemblance, the contrast also is notable. Wit was the weapon of Erasmus, humour the weapon of Rabelais: the one pressed home the rapier’s point, the other laid about him with a solid bludgeon. No man has the right to call the dainty, the elegant, the polished Erasmus a coward; but none the less it is true that had his intellect allowed him he would have lived at peace with all men. His pleasures were the children rather of refinement than of joyousness. He must drink good wine, and ride a good horse, because these gifts of life were due to a gentleman and a scholar. The storm which he let loose in Europe appalled him, and, rather than be shipwrecked himself, he would have run into the nearest harbour of safety. When he was reproached with laying the egg whence came forth the Reformation, ‘ Yes,’ he said; ‘ but I laida hen’s egg; Luther has hatched a fighting © cock.’

Rabelais, on the other hand, preferred joyousness before refinement. He, too, loved wine, but he held an over-nice taste in liquor for a sign of age. Again, laughter was as urgent a necessity for him as the combat; and, if his blows were less deft, they were always heavier than the blows of Erasmus. Yet for scholarship and grandeur of intelligence Erasmus and Rabelais are the twin forces of the intellectual renaissance ; and, but for the ill-fortune that persuaded Erasmus to hide his thoughts in the obscurity of a dead tongue, who knows how exalted a position he would have held in the world of letters? Did the two, then, ever meet ? An interview between them would have been far more

B remarkable than the encounter between Pope and Dryden; nor is there any hindrance in the path of those who would imagine it. Erasmus surely visited Lyons, and Rabelais, who had read his works in Fontenay, surely sought him out. One thing, at least, is certain: a letter, reprinted in the Clarorum Virorum Epistole centum (1702), bears internal evidence that it was addressed by Rabelais to Erasmus. True, it gives greeting to Bernard Salignac, a name unknown in history ; but a copy has been found in the Library at Ziirich addressed to Erasmus himself. Nor could it well have been addressed to any other. The scholars mentioned were all intimate (for friendship or enmity) with the author of the Moria. Hilary Bertholf had been his private secretary ; Aleander had enjoyed his interrupted acquaintance.

But above all, the tone which Rabelais adopts towards his correspondent could have befitted none other than the scholar of Rotterdam. The excuse for the letter was the restoration to its owner of a Jewish History, once borrowed by the Bishop of Rhodez. ‘I gladly seized this handle and occasion,’ says Rabelais, ‘of making known to you, my humane father, by ‘some pleasing office, with what feeling and affection ‘Tregard you. I called you my father, I would also ‘say mother, if in your indulgence you would allow it. ‘ For that which we find daily happens to those who ‘bear offspring in their womb, that they nourish ‘ children which they have never seen, protecting them ‘from the dangers of the ambient air, you too have ‘ suffered the very same, you, who have educated me, ‘unknown to you in face, unworthy to be known by ‘name.’ Thus Rabelais confesses an obligation which he might reasonably have felt, and at the same time declares that hitherto he had never looked upon his ‘humane father.’ Such a gracious letter must needs have met with a response, and it is likely that Erasmus hereafter discovered his ardent disciple at Lyons. +

IV

Meanwhile Rabelais was quietly deserting the wide fields of scholarship for the meadows of eternal gaiety. If he did a pedant’s work for the illustrious Sebastian Gryphius, he was already, under the auspices of Nourry and Juste, appealing to the larger world of courtiers, wits, and people. Almanacks were the fashion of the hour, and who so well skilled to provide the mob with a safe prediction of the future as Francois Rabelais, doctor of medicine and ironic searcher into the secrets of astrology? So we find him contriving the trivial chap-books, which the people loved, and with no better motive for the work than to supplement a modest income. Many are the almanacks which we owe to his pen, and though mere fragments of them remain, there is enough to prove their worthlessness. In vain we look for any hint of the real Rabelais: we find nothing more characteristic than a casual quotation from the classics.

The first (of 1533) is marked by a mild piety. He hints—as who would not, at that time?—that the conjunction of Saturn with Mercury indicates a change of kingdoms and religions. But having given the hint, he refrains from further speech. ‘'These,’ says he, ‘are the secrets of the close council of the Eternal ‘King’; and so he implores his readers to let the veil fall on what is written in the eternal registers. ‘It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, ‘which the Father hath put in His own power... .« ‘ Whoso searcheth out His Majesty, shall be crushed by ‘it. The almanack of 1535 is even more discreet. ‘If ‘the kings, princes, and christian communities have ‘in reverence the divine word of God... we have ‘ never seen in our times a year more healthy for the ‘body, more peaceful for the soul, more fertile in ‘blessings than this shall be. To such a prediction as that none could be found to object, and if Rabelais’ experiments in divination are dull and trivial, he must at least be pronounced a safe prophet. Far more important is the fact that he has now appeared as a writer of French: henceforth, save in letter or preface, he deserts the Latin tongue, and thus it was that through the bookseller’s shop he reached the gates of immortality. Had he remained as loyal as Budeeus to scholarship and Latinity, he never would have taken his place by the side of the masters of living literature.

But, while there is neither amusement nor promise in the little almanacks, with the Pantagrueline Prognostication Rabelais’ true career begins. This chap-book, published in 1533, scintillates with a spark, at least, of Rabelaisian humour. The author declares himself for the first time, ‘ Alcofribas Nasier, Archi- ‘triclin to the afore-mention’d Pantagruel,’ and - dedicates the work in a style that seems natural enough, ‘for the Benefit and Noddification of the ‘ giddy-brained and weather-wise Would be’s. The Prognostication is, indeed, a frank and free parody of the popular almanacks. Rabelais laughs with contempt at the Astrologers of Lyons, among whom he was lately enrolled, and writes with something of his own dash and vigour. The satire is coarse, even brutal, and the prophesies are sure for any year in the world’s history. As for the golden number, non est inventus, but the true spirit of Pantagruelism is already there; the renowned vocabulary is busily forming itself; and while Rabelais’ previous works throw no ray of light upon his talent, here at last we suspect the real Alcofribas.

So far we are on certain ground: the Prognostication is pure Rabelais, and acknowledged as such. Only Rabelais could have written it: Pantagruel, King of Utopia and Dipsody, is already introduced, and the praise of wine is sung as lustily as in the masterpiece itself. But a year before was published, possibly by the same bookseller, a little chap-book of proper style and fitting type, which bears another familiar name. The woodcut which adorns the first page is characteristic of the pedlar’s wares, and the title arouses a just curiosity. ‘les grandes et inestimables ‘ Croniques,’ thus it runs: ‘du grant et enorme geant ‘ Gargantua: contenant sa genealogie, La grandeur et ‘force de son corps. Aussi les merveilleux faicts ‘darmes qu'il fist pour le Roy Artus comme verrez ‘cy apres. Imprimé nouvellement, 1532.2 Was it from another’s work that the real author of Gargantua borrowed his hero’s name and descent? Or is this the work of Rabelais ? °

If another writer than Rabelais were in question, one would instantly say no. It is contrary to the general experience that the author of Pantagruel, or even of the Pantagrueline Prognostication, should a

Q2 RABELAIS brief year before have composed so tiresome and bombastic a work as les Grandes Croniques. On the other hand, there is no reason why the author of the dedicatory epistles to Tiraqueau and the rest should not have described the foolish creation of Grant- Gosier and Galemelle by Merlin the Wizard. ‘The epistles and the Croniques are alike the work of a literary hack, and in 1532 Rabelais was the hack not only of Gryphius, but of Claude Nourry. Above all he was a man who kept his head, so to say, in water-tight compartments. The right half of his brain, it seems, knew not what the left was doing. And we have no right to declare on internal evidence alone that the Grandes Croniques are or are not the work of his hand.

Thus we are thrown back upon uncertainty and the division of the critics. M. Brunet holds that Rabelais is the true author of the Cronigues, and his argument is not unsound, Apart from the similarity of name, which is wholly unimportant, the Croniques suggest the real Gargantua in more than one incident. The destruction of the trees by a whisking of the mare’s tail, the theft of the church bells, the concealment of his prisoners in a hollow tooth, King Artus’s banquet of four hundred salted hams, and Gargantua’s gorgeous and giant wardrobe—all these are familiar episodes. Moreover, in a second edition, as M. Brunet points out, there is a definite allusion t6 Pantagruel, in which Rabelais’ own hand might be traced. ‘Gargantua vesquit cing cens et ung an,’ thus ends the text, ‘et eut de grosses gueres, desquelles ‘je me tays pour le present. Et eut ung filz de ‘ Badebec son epouse, lequel a faict autant de vail-