Gargantua and Pantagruel | Page 6

Whims or Entelechy

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

Chapter 5.
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

Chapter 5.
XXIV.--How there was a ball in the manner of a tournament, at which
Queen Whims was present

Chapter 5.
XXV.--How the thirty-two persons at the ball fought

Chapter 5.
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

Chapter 5.
XXIX.--How Epistemon disliked the institution of Lent

Chapter 5.
XXX.--How we came to the land of Satin

Chapter 5.
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

Chapter 5.
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

Chapter 5.
XXXVI.--How we went down the tetradic steps, and of Panurge's fear

Chapter 5.
XXXVII.--How the temple gates in a wonderful manner opened of
themselves

Chapter 5.
XXXVIII.--Of the temple's admirable pavement

Chapter 5.
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

Chapter 5.
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 of a monk of Fontevrault, Gabriel de Puy-Herbault, who
seems to have drawn his conclusions concerning the author from the
book, and, more especially, in the regrettable satirical epitaph of
Ronsard, piqued, it is said, that the Guises had given him only a little
pavillon in the