Gargantua and Pantagruel | Page 8

father of Rabelais has been set
down as an innkeeper. More probably he was an apothecary, which
would fit in with the medical profession adopted by his son in after
years. Rabelais had brothers, all older than himself. Perhaps because he
was the youngest, his father destined him for the Church.
The time he spent while a child with the Benedictine monks at Seuille
is uncertain. There he might have made the acquaintance of the
prototype of his Friar John, a brother of the name of Buinart, afterwards
Prior of Sermaize. He was longer at the Abbey of the Cordeliers at La
Baumette, half a mile from Angers, where he became a novice. As the
brothers Du Bellay, who were later his Maecenases, were then studying
at the University of Angers, where it is certain he was not a student, it
is doubtless from this youthful period that his acquaintance and alliance
with them should date. Voluntarily, or induced by his family, Rabelais
now embraced the ecclesiastical profession, and entered the monastery
of the Franciscan Cordeliers at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Lower Poitou,
which was honoured by his long sojourn at the vital period of his life
when his powers were ripening. There it was he began to study and to
think, and there also began his troubles.
In spite of the wide-spread ignorance among the monks of that age, the
encyclopaedic movement of the Renaissance was attracting all the lofty
minds. Rabelais threw himself into it with enthusiasm, and Latin
antiquity was not enough for him. Greek, a study discountenanced by
the Church, which looked on it as dangerous and tending to freethought
and heresy, took possession of him. To it he owed the warm friendship
of Pierre Amy and of the celebrated Guillaume Bude. In fact, the Greek
letters of the latter are the best source of information concerning this

period of Rabelais' life. It was at Fontenay-le-Comte also that he
became acquainted with the Brissons and the great jurist Andre
Tiraqueau, whom he never mentions but with admiration and deep
affection. Tiraqueau's treatise, De legibus connubialibus, published for
the first time in 1513, has an important bearing on the life of Rabelais.
There we learn that, dissatisfied with the incomplete translation of
Herodotus by Laurent Valla, Rabelais had retranslated into Latin the
first book of the History. That translation unfortunately is lost, as so
many other of his scattered works. It is probably in this direction that
the hazard of fortune has most discoveries and surprises in store for the
lucky searcher. Moreover, as in this law treatise Tiraqueau attacked
women in a merciless fashion, President Amaury Bouchard published
in 1522 a book in their defence, and Rabelais, who was a friend of both
the antagonists, took the side of Tiraqueau. It should be observed also
in passing, that there are several pages of such audacious
plain-speaking, that Rabelais, though he did not copy these in his
Marriage of Panurge, has there been, in his own fashion, as out spoken
as Tiraqueau. If such freedom of language could be permitted in a
grave treatise of law, similar liberties were certainly, in the same
century, more natural in a book which was meant to amuse.
The great reproach always brought against Rabelais is not the want of
reserve of his language merely, but his occasional studied coarseness,
which is enough to spoil his whole work, and which lowers its value.
La Bruyere, in the chapter Des ouvrages de l'esprit, not in the first
edition of the Caracteres, but in the fifth, that is to say in 1690, at the
end of the great century, gives us on this subject his own opinion and
that of his age:
'Marot and Rabelais are inexcusable in their habit of scattering filth
about their writings. Both of them had genius enough and wit enough
to do without any such expedient, even for the amusement of those
persons who look more to the laugh to be got out of a book than to
what is admirable in it. Rabelais especially is incomprehensible. His
book is an enigma,--one may say inexplicable. It is a Chimera; it is like
the face of a lovely woman with the feet and the tail of a reptile, or of
some creature still more loathsome. It is a monstrous confusion of fine

and rare morality with filthy corruption. Where it is bad, it goes beyond
the worst; it is the delight of the basest of men. Where it is good, it
reaches the exquisite, the very best; it ministers to the most delicate
tastes.'
Putting aside the rather slight connection established between two men
of whom one is of very little importance compared with the other, this
is otherwise very admirably said, and the judgment is a very just one,
except with regard