Gargantua and Pantagruel Part 36

Pigs, with wine sauce. Chickens. Macaroons.

Blackbirds, ousels, and Rabbits, and sucking Tarts, twenty sorts.

rails. rabbits. Lemon cream, rasp- Moorhens. Quails, and young berry cream, &c.

Bustards, and bustard quails. Comfits, one hundred poots. Pigeons, squabs, and colours.

Fig-p.e.c.k.e.rs. squeakers. Cream wafers.

Young Guinea hens. Fieldfares. Cream cheese.

Vinegar brought up the rear to wash the mouth, and for fear of the squinsy; also toasts to scour the grinders.

Chapter 4.LX.-What the Gastrolaters sacrificed to their G.o.d on interlarded fish-days.

Pantagruel did not like this pack of rascally scoundrels with their manifold kitchen sacrifices, and would have been gone had not Epistemon prevailed with him to stay and see the end of the farce. He then asked the skipper what the idle lobc.o.c.ks used to sacrifice to their gorbellied G.o.d on interlarded fish-days. For his first course, said the skipper, they gave him: Caviare. tops, bishop's-cods, Red herrings.

Botargoes. celery, chives, ram- Pilchards.

Fresh b.u.t.ter. pions, jew's-ears (a Anchovies.

Pease soup. sort of mushrooms Fry of tunny.

Spinach. that sprout out of Cauliflowers.

Fresh herrings, full old elders), spara- Beans.

roed. gus, wood-bind, Salt salmon.

Salads, a hundred and a world of Pickled grigs.

varieties, of cres- others. Oysters in the sh.e.l.l.

ses, sodden hop- Then he must drink, or the devil would gripe him at the throat; this, therefore, they take care to prevent, and nothing is wanting. Which being done, they give him lampreys with hippocras sauce: Gurnards. Thornbacks. Fried oysters.

Salmon trouts. Sleeves. c.o.c.kles.

Barbels, great and Sturgeons. Prawns.

small. Sheath-fish. Smelts.

Roaches. Mackerels. Rock-fish.

c.o.c.kerels. Maids. Gracious lords.

Minnows. Plaice. Sword-fish.

Skate-fish. Sharplings. Soles.

Lamprels. Tunnies. Mussels.

Jegs. Silver eels. Lobsters.

Pickerels. Chevins. Great prawns.

Golden carps. Crayfish. Dace.

Burbates. Pallours. Bleaks.

Salmons. Shrimps. Tenches.

Salmon-peels. Congers. Ombres.

Dolphins. Porpoises. Fresh cods.

Barn trouts. Bases. Dried melwels.

Miller's-thumbs. Shads. Darefish.

Precks. Murenes, a sort of Fausens, and grigs.

Bret-fish. lampreys. Eel-pouts.

Flounders. Graylings. Tortoises.

Sea-nettles. Smys. Serpents, i.e. wood- Mullets. Turbots. eels.

Gudgeons. Trout, not above a Dories.

Dabs and sandings. foot long. Moor-game.

Haddocks. Salmons. Perches.

Carps. Meagers. Loaches.

Pikes. Sea-breams. Crab-fish.

Bott.i.toes. Halibuts. Snails and whelks.

Rochets. Dog's tongue, or kind Frogs.

Sea-bears. fool.

If, when he had crammed all this down his guttural trapdoor, he did not immediately make the fish swim again in his paunch, death would pack him off in a trice. Special care is taken to antidote his G.o.ds.h.i.+p with vine-tree syrup. Then is sacrificed to him haberdines, poor-jack, minglemangled, mismashed, &c.

Eggs fried, beaten, sliced, roasted in Green-fish.

b.u.t.tered, poached, the embers, tossed Sea-batts.

hardened, boiled, in the chimney, &c. Cod's sounds.

broiled, stewed, Stock-fish. Sea-pikes.

Which to concoct and digest the more easily, vinegar is multiplied. For the latter part of their sacrifices they offer: Rice milk, and hasty Stewed prunes, and Raisins.

pudding. baked bullace. Dates.

b.u.t.tered wheat, and Pistachios, or fistic Chestnut and wal- flummery. nuts. nuts.

Water-gruel, and Figs. Filberts.

milk-porridge. Almond b.u.t.ter. Parsnips.

Frumenty and bonny Skirret root. Artichokes.

clamber. White-pot.

Perpetuity of soaking with the whole.

It was none of their fault, I will a.s.sure you, if this same G.o.d of theirs was not publicly, preciously, and plentifully served in the sacrifices, better yet than Heliogabalus's idol; nay, more than Bel and the Dragon in Babylon, under King Belshazzar. Yet Gaster had the manners to own that he was no G.o.d, but a poor, vile, wretched creature. And as King Antigonus, first of the name, when one Hermodotus (as poets will flatter, especially princes) in some of his fustian dubbed him a G.o.d, and made the sun adopt him for his son, said to him: My lasanoph.o.r.e (or, in plain English, my groom of the close-stool) can give thee the lie; so Master Gaster very civilly used to send back his bigoted wors.h.i.+ppers to his close-stool, to see, smell, taste, philosophize, and examine what kind of divinity they could pick out of his sir-reverence.

Chapter 4.LXI.-How Gaster invented means to get and preserve corn.

Those gastrolatrous hobgoblins being withdrawn, Pantagruel carefully minded the famous master of arts, Gaster. You know that, by the inst.i.tution of nature, bread has been a.s.signed him for provision and food; and that, as an addition to this blessing, he should never want the means to get bread.

Accordingly, from the beginning he invented the smith's art, and husbandry to manure the ground, that it might yield him corn; he invented arms and the art of war to defend corn; physic and astronomy, with other parts of mathematics which might be useful to keep corn a great number of years in safety from the injuries of the air, beasts, robbers, and purloiners; he invented water, wind, and handmills, and a thousand other engines to grind corn and to turn it into meal; leaven to make the dough ferment, and the use of salt to give it a savour; for he knew that nothing bred more diseases than heavy, unleavened, unsavoury bread.

He found a way to get fire to bake it; hour-gla.s.ses, dials, and clocks to mark the time of its baking; and as some countries wanted corn, he contrived means to convey some out of one country into another.

He had the wit to pimp for a.s.ses and mares, animals of different species, that they might copulate for the generation of a third, which we call mules, more strong and fit for hard service than the other two. He invented carts and waggons to draw him along with greater ease; and as seas and rivers hindered his progress, he devised boats, galleys, and s.h.i.+ps (to the astonishment of the elements) to waft him over to barbarous, unknown, and far distant nations, thence to bring, or thither to carry corn.

Besides, seeing that when he had tilled the ground, some years the corn perished in it for want of rain in due season, in others rotted or was drowned by its excess, sometimes spoiled by hail, eat by worms in the ear, or beaten down by storms, and so his stock was destroyed on the ground; we were told that ever since the days of yore he has found out a way to conjure the rain down from heaven only with cutting certain gra.s.s, common enough in the field, yet known to very few, some of which was then shown us. I took it to be the same as the plant, one of whose boughs being dipped by Jove's priest in the Agrian fountain on the Lycian mountain in Arcadia, in time of drought raised vapours which gathered into clouds, and then dissolved into rain that kindly moistened the whole country.

Our master of arts was also said to have found a way to keep the rain up in the air, and make it to fall into the sea; also to annihilate the hail, suppress the winds, and remove storms as the Methanensians of Troezene used to do. And as in the fields thieves and plunderers sometimes stole and took by force the corn and bread which others had toiled to get, he invented the art of building towns, forts, and castles, to h.o.a.rd and secure that staff of life. On the other hand, finding none in the fields, and hearing that it was h.o.a.rded up and secured in towns, forts, and castles, and watched with more care than ever were the golden pippins of the Hesperides, he turned engineer, and found ways to beat, storm, and demolish forts and castles with machines and warlike thunderbolts, battering-rams, ballists, and catapults, whose shapes were shown to us, not over-well understood by our engineers, architects, and other disciples of Vitruvius; as Master Philibert de l'Orme, King Megistus's princ.i.p.al architect, has owned to us.

And seeing that sometimes all these tools of destruction were baffled by the cunning subtlety or the subtle cunning (which you please) of fortifiers, he lately invented cannons, field-pieces, culverins, bombards, basiliskos, murdering instruments that dart iron, leaden, and brazen b.a.l.l.s, some of them outweighing huge anvils. This by the means of a most dreadful powder, whose h.e.l.lish compound and effect has even amazed nature, and made her own herself outdone by art, the Oxydracian thunders, hails, and storms by which the people of that name immediately destroyed their enemies in the field being but mere potguns to these. For one of our great guns when used is more dreadful, more terrible, more diabolical, and maims, tears, breaks, slays, mows down, and sweeps away more men, and causes a greater consternation and destruction than a hundred thunderbolts.

Chapter 4.LXII.-How Gaster invented an art to avoid being hurt or touched by cannon-b.a.l.l.s.

Gaster having secured himself with his corn within strongholds, has sometimes been attacked by enemies; his fortresses, by that thrice threefold cursed instrument, levelled and destroyed; his dearly beloved corn and bread s.n.a.t.c.hed out of his mouth and sacked by a t.i.tanic force; therefore he then sought means to preserve his walls, bastions, rampiers, and sconces from cannon-shot, and to hinder the bullets from hitting him, stopping them in their flight, or at least from doing him or the besieged walls any damage. He showed us a trial of this which has been since used by Fronton, and is now common among the pastimes and harmless recreations of the Thelemites. I will tell you how he went to work, and pray for the future be a little more ready to believe what Plutarch affirms to have tried. Suppose a herd of goats were all scampering as if the devil drove them, do but put a bit of eringo into the mouth of the hindmost nanny, and they will all stop stock still in the time you can tell three.

Thus Gaster, having caused a bra.s.s falcon to be charged with a sufficient quant.i.ty of gunpowder well purged from its sulphur, and curiously made up with fine camphor, he then had a suitable ball put into the piece, with twenty-four little pellets like hail-shot, some round, some pearl fas.h.i.+on; then taking his aim and levelling it at a page of his, as if he would have hit him on the breast. About sixty strides off the piece, halfway between it and the page in a right line, he hanged on a gibbet by a rope a very large siderite or iron-like stone, otherwise called herculean, formerly found on Ida in Phrygia by one Magnes, as Nicander writes, and commonly called loadstone; then he gave fire to the prime on the piece's touch-hole, which in an instant consuming the powder, the ball and hail-shot were with incredible violence and swiftness hurried out of the gun at its muzzle, that the air might penetrate to its chamber, where otherwise would have been a vacuum, which nature abhors so much, that this universal machine, heaven, air, land, and sea, would sooner return to the primitive chaos than admit the least void anywhere. Now the ball and small shot, which threatened the page with no less than quick destruction, lost their impetuosity and remained suspended and hovering round the stone; nor did any of them, notwithstanding the fury with which they rushed, reach the page.

Master Gaster could do more than all this yet, if you will believe me; for he invented a way how to cause bullets to fly backwards, and recoil on those that sent them with as great a force, and in the very numerical parallel for which the guns were planted. And indeed, why should he have thought this difficult? seeing the herb ethiopis opens all locks whatsoever, and an echinus or remora, a silly weakly fish, in spite of all the winds that blow from the thirty-two points of the compa.s.s, will in the midst of a hurricane make you the biggest first-rate remain stock still, as if she were becalmed or the bl.u.s.tering tribe had blown their last. Nay, and with the flesh of that fish, preserved with salt, you may fish gold out of the deepest well that was ever sounded with a plummet; for it will certainly draw up the precious metal, since Democritus affirmed it. Theophrastus believed and experienced that there was an herb at whose single touch an iron wedge, though never so far driven into a huge log of the hardest wood that is, would presently come out; and it is this same herb your hickways, alias woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, use, when with some mighty axe anyone stops up the hole of their nests, which they industriously dig and make in the trunk of some st.u.r.dy tree. Since stags and hinds, when deeply wounded with darts, arrows, and bolts, if they do but meet the herb called dittany, which is common in Candia, and eat a little of it, presently the shafts come out and all is well again; even as kind Venus cured her beloved byblow Aeneas when he was wounded on the right thigh with an arrow by Juturna, Turnus's sister. Since the very wind of laurels, fig-trees, or sea-calves makes the thunder sheer off insomuch that it never strikes them. Since at the sight of a ram, mad elephants recover their former senses. Since mad bulls coming near wild fig-trees, called caprifici, grow tame, and will not budge a foot, as if they had the cramp. Since the venomous rage of vipers is a.s.suaged if you but touch them with a beechen bough. Since also Euphorion writes that in the isle of Samos, before Juno's temple was built there, he has seen some beasts called neades, whose voice made the neighbouring places gape and sink into a chasm and abyss. In short, since elders grow of a more pleasing sound, and fitter to make flutes, in such places where the crowing of c.o.c.ks is not heard, as the ancient sages have writ and Theophrastus relates; as if the crowing of a c.o.c.k dulled, flattened, and perverted the wood of the elder, as it is said to astonish and stupify with fear that strong and resolute animal, a lion. I know that some have understood this of wild elder, that grows so far from towns or villages that the crowing of c.o.c.ks cannot reach near it; and doubtless that sort ought to be preferred to the stenching common elder that grows about decayed and ruined places; but others have understood this in a higher sense, not literal, but allegorical, according to the method of the Pythagoreans, as when it was said that Mercury's statue could not be made of every sort of wood; to which sentence they gave this sense, that G.o.d is not to be wors.h.i.+pped in a vulgar form, but in a chosen and religious manner. In the same manner, by this elder which grows far from places where c.o.c.ks are heard, the ancients meant that the wise and studious ought not to give their minds to trivial or vulgar music, but to that which is celestial, divine, angelical, more abstracted, and brought from remoter parts, that is, from a region where the crowing of c.o.c.ks is not heard; for, to denote a solitary and unfrequented place, we say c.o.c.ks are never heard to crow there.

Chapter 4.LXIII.-How Pantagruel fell asleep near the island of Chaneph, and of the problems proposed to be solved when he waked.

The next day, merrily pursuing our voyage, we came in sight of the island of Chaneph, where Pantagruel's s.h.i.+p could not arrive, the wind chopping about, and then failing us so that we were becalmed, and could hardly get ahead, tacking about from starboard to larboard, and larboard to starboard, though to our sails we added drabblers.

With this accident we were all out of sorts, moping, drooping, metagrabolized, as dull as dun in the mire, in C sol fa ut flat, out of tune, off the hinges, and I-don't-know-howish, without caring to speak one single syllable to each other.

Pantagruel was taking a nap, slumbering and nodding on the quarter-deck by the cuddy, with an Heliodorus in his hand; for still it was his custom to sleep better by book than by heart.

Epistemon was conjuring, with his astrolabe, to know what lat.i.tude we were in.

Friar John was got into the cook-room, examining, by the ascendant of the spits and the horoscope of ragouts and frica.s.sees, what time of day it might then be.