Gargantua |
“Que grand tu as!” — “What a big one you've got!” — chortled Grandgousier at the sight of his newborn son. Gargantua was delivered of his mother Gargamelle’s left ear after she had stuffed herself on feast of tripes, as Alcofribas records in the sixth chapter of The Most Fearsome Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel. The jolly feasters declared that the boy must be named Gargantua, those being the first words his father spoke at his birth, after what they thought was the fashion of the Hebrews, a belief in some dispute. Gargantua's own first words were, “Drink, drink, drink.” Seventeen thousand, nine hundred and thirteen cows were required to keep him supplied with milk. On that day in June when the fleet departed, Gargantua had recently reappeared from the land of the fairies, where Morgan la Fay had transported him, as she had King Arthur, Enoch of Genesis, Elijah of Kings, and Ogier the Dane. Preceeded by his dog Kyne, Gargantua arrived amidsdt a banquet at Pantagruel’s palace, just, as you would have guessed, in time for dessert. Moments earlier one of the young serving girls, fresh from picking a stick of kindling from the path to the privy, had whispered to Prince Panurge, “Keep your fork, Duke, the pie’s coming.” As Panurge parted his lips to respond, Pantagruel spotted the dog and shouted, “All stand for the King.” Gargantua begged the crowd to do him the favor of not leaving their seats or interrupting their discourse, and in compliance, discussion continued on a question posed by Panurge: should he marry, or should he not. The philosopher Trouillogan had offered two pieces of advice: “Both the two together,” and “Neither the one, nor the other.” Gargantua chimed in that the answer “is like the one given by an ancient philosopher, when asked whether he had a certain woman as his wife. ‘I’ve had her,’ he answered, ‘but she hasn’t got me.’” Pantagruel smiled. “A similar answer was made by a Spartan wench when she was asked whether she had ever had a man,” he said. “She answered, ‘Never, but they sometimes have had me.’” “That same wench,” said Garganuta, “if I be not mistaken, used to fill her mouth full of wheat and run around the neighborhood, listening at doors. If a boy’s name was mentioned, it was he who was to be her husband.” “Yes.” said Epistemon, “She would buy a penny’s worth of pins, stick nine into an apple, throw the tenth away, and put the apple in her left stocking. She tied the stocking with her right garter and then went to bed, hoping to dream of her future husband. On Halloween she would go into a strange garden and steal a head of cabbage. She would take the cabbage into a field, find a dunghill, and standing on it and eating the cabbage, would look into a mirror, hoping for a glimpse of her future husband.” “But the Fates were cruel to her in the end,” said Pantagruel. “When she was groping, blindfolded, for her wedding ring, the children tricked her into dipping her hand in a bowl of clay.” Panurge said that the mention of a wedding ring put him in mind of the story of Hans Carvel, which he would relate in its proper time. « PANTAGRUELION » |