Gargantua and Pantagruel | Page 5

François Rabelais
5.
IX.--How we arrived at the island of Tools

Chapter 5.
X.--How Pantagruel arrived at the island of Sharping

Chapter 5.
XI.--How we passed through the wicket inhabited by Gripe-men-all, Archduke of the Furred Law-cats

Chapter 5.
XII.--How Gripe-men-all propounded a riddle to us

Chapter 5.
XIII.--How Panurge solved Gripe-men-all's riddle

Chapter 5.
XIV.--How the Furred Law-cats live on corruption

Chapter 5.
XV.--How Friar John talks of rooting out the Furred Law-cats

Chapter 5.
XVI.--How Pantagruel came to the island of the Apedefers, or Ignoramuses, with long claws and crooked paws, and of terrible adventures and monsters there

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XVII.--How we went forwards, and how Panurge had like to have been killed

Chapter 5.
XVIII.--How our ships were stranded, and we were relieved by some people that were subject to Queen Whims (qui tenoient de la Quinte)

Chapter 5.
XIX.--How we arrived at the queendom of Whims or Entelechy

Chapter 5.
XX.--How the Quintessence cured the sick with a song

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XXI.--How the Queen passed her time after dinner

Chapter 5.
XXII.--How Queen Whims' officers were employed; and how the said lady retained us among her abstractors

Chapter 5.
XXIII.--How the Queen was served at dinner, and of her way of eating

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XXIV.--How there was a ball in the manner of a tournament, at which Queen Whims was present

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XXV.--How the thirty-two persons at the ball fought

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XXVI.--How we came to the island of Odes, where the ways go up and down

Chapter 5.
XXVII.--How we came to the island of Sandals; and of the order of Semiquaver Friars

Chapter 5.
XXVIII.--How Panurge asked a Semiquaver Friar many questions, and was only answered in monosyllables

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XXIX.--How Epistemon disliked the institution of Lent

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XXX.--How we came to the land of Satin

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XXXI.--How in the land of Satin we saw Hearsay, who kept a school of vouching

Chapter 5.
XXXII.--How we came in sight of Lantern-land

Chapter 5.
XXXIII.--How we landed at the port of the Lychnobii, and came to Lantern-land

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XXXIV.--How we arrived at the Oracle of the Bottle

Chapter 5.
XXXV.--How we went underground to come to the Temple of the Holy Bottle, and how Chinon is the oldest city in the world

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XXXVI.--How we went down the tetradic steps, and of Panurge's fear

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XXXVII.--How the temple gates in a wonderful manner opened of themselves

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XXXVIII.--Of the temple's admirable pavement

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XXXIX.--How we saw Bacchus's army drawn up in battalia in mosaic work

Chapter 5.
XL.--How the battle in which the good Bacchus overthrew the Indians was represented in mosaic work

Chapter 5.
XLI.--How the temple was illuminated with a wonderful lamp

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XLII.--How the Priestess Bacbuc showed us a fantastic fountain in the temple, and how the fountain-water had the taste of wine, according to the imagination of those who drank of it

Chapter 5.
XLIII.--How the Priestess Bacbuc equipped Panurge in order to have the word of the Bottle

Chapter 5.
XLIV.--How Bacbuc, the high-priestess, brought Panurge before the Holy Bottle

Chapter 5.
XLV.--How Bacbuc explained the word of the Goddess-Bottle

Chapter 5.
XLVI.--How Panurge and the rest rhymed with poetic fury

Chapter 5.
XLVII.--How we took our leave of Bacbuc, and left the Oracle of the Holy Bottle

Introduction.
Had Rabelais never written his strange and marvellous romance, no one would ever have imagined the possibility of its production. It stands outside other things--a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. Throughout the whole there is such a force of life and thought, such a power of good sense, a kind of assurance so authoritative, that he takes rank with the greatest; and his peers are not many. You may like him or not, may attack him or sing his praises, but you cannot ignore him. He is of those that die hard. Be as fastidious as you will; make up your mind to recognize only those who are, without any manner of doubt, beyond and above all others; however few the names you keep, Rabelais' will always remain.
We may know his work, may know it well, and admire it more every time we read it. After being amused by it, after having enjoyed it, we may return again to study it and to enter more fully into its meaning. Yet there is no possibility of knowing his own life in the same fashion. In spite of all the efforts, often successful, that have been made to throw light on it, to bring forward a fresh document, or some obscure mention in a forgotten book, to add some little fact, to fix a date more precisely, it remains nevertheless full of uncertainty and of gaps. Besides, it has been burdened and sullied by all kinds of wearisome stories and foolish anecdotes, so that really there is more to weed out than to add.
This injustice, at first wilful, had its rise in the sixteenth century, in the furious attacks
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