Chapter 15
Panurge’s excuse and exposition of the monastic mystery concerning powdered beef.
The Lord save those who see, and do not hear! quoth Panurge. I see you well enough, but know not what it is that you have said. The hunger-starved belly wanteth ears. For lack of victuals, before God, I roar, bray, yell, and fume as in a furious madness. I have performed too hard a task to-day, an extraordinary work indeed. He shall be craftier, and do far greater wonders than ever did Mr. Mush, who shall be able any more this year to bring me on the stage of preparation for a dreaming verdict. Fie! not to sup at all, that is the devil. Pox take that fashion! Come, Friar John, let us go break our fast; for, if I hit on such a round refection in the morning as will serve thoroughly to fill the mill-hopper and hogs-hide of my stomach, and furnish it with meat and drink sufficient, then at a pinch, as in the case of some extreme necessity which presseth, I could make a shift that day to forbear dining. But not to sup! A plague rot that base custom, which is an error offensive to Nature! That lady made the day for exercise, to travel, work, wait on and labour in each his negotiation and employment; and that we may with the more fervency and ardour prosecute our business, she sets before us a clear burning candle, to wit, the sun’s resplendency; and at night, when she begins to take the light from us, she thereby tacitly implies no less than if she would have spoken thus unto us: My lads and lasses, all of you are good and honest folks, you have wrought well to-day, toiled and turmoiled enough — the night approacheth — therefore cast off these moiling cares of yours, desist from all your swinking painful labours, and set your minds how to refresh your bodies in the renewing of their vigour with good bread, choice wine, and store of wholesome meats; then may you take some sport and recreation, and after that lie down and rest yourselves, that you may strongly, nimbly, lustily, and with the more alacrity to-morrow attend on your affairs as formerly.
Falconers, in like manner, when they have fed their hawks, will not suffer them to fly on a full gorge, but let them on a perch abide a little, that they may rouse, bait, tower, and soar the better. That good pope who was the first institutor of fasting understood this well enough; for he ordained that our fast should reach but to the hour of noon; all the remainder of that day was at our disposure, freely to eat and feed at any time thereof. In ancient times there were but few that dined, as you would say, some church men, monks and canons; for they have little other occupation. Each day is a festival unto them, who diligently heed the claustral proverb, De missa ad mensam. They do not use to linger and defer their sitting down and placing of themselves at table, only so long as they have a mind in waiting for the coming of the abbot; so they fell to without ceremony, terms, or conditions; and everybody supped, unless it were some vain, conceited, dreaming dotard. Hence was a supper called coena, which showeth that it is common to all sorts of people. Thou knowest it well, Friar John. Come, let us go, my dear friend, in the name of all the devils of the infernal regions, let us go. The gnawings of my stomach in this rage of hunger are so tearing, that they make it bark like a mastiff. Let us throw some bread and beef into his throat to pacify him, as once the sibyl did to Cerberus. Thou likest best monastical brewis, the prime, the flower of the pot. I am for the solid, principal verb that comes after — the good brown loaf, always accompanied with a round slice of the nine-lecture-powdered labourer. I know thy meaning, answered Friar John; this metaphor is extracted out of the claustral kettle. The labourer is the ox that hath wrought and done the labour; after the fashion of nine lectures, that is to say, most exquisitely well and thoroughly boiled. These holy religious fathers, by a certain cabalistic institution of the ancients, not written, but carefully by tradition conveyed from hand to hand, rising betimes to go to morning prayers, were wont to flourish that their matutinal devotion with some certain notable preambles before their entry into the church, viz., they dunged in the dungeries, pissed in the pisseries, spit in the spitteries, melodiously coughed in the cougheries, and doted in their dotaries, that to the divine service they might not bring anything that was unclean or foul. These things thus done, they very zealously made their repair to the Holy Chapel, for so was in their canting language termed the convent kitchen, where they with no small earnestness had care that the beef-pot should be put on the crook for the breakfast of the religious brothers of our Lord and Saviour; and the fire they would kindle under the pot themselves. Now, the matins consisting of nine lessons, (it) it was so incumbent on them, that must have risen the rather for the more expedite despatching of them all. The sooner that they rose, the sharper was their appetite and the barkings of their stomachs, and the gnawings increased in the like proportion, and consequently made these godly men thrice more a-hungered and athirst than when their matins were hemmed over only with three lessons. The more betimes they rose, by the said cabal, the sooner was the beef-pot put on; the longer that the beef was on the fire, the better it was boiled; the more it boiled, it was the tenderer; the tenderer that it was, the less it troubled the teeth, delighted more the palate, less charged the stomach, and nourished our good religious men the more substantially; which is the only end and prime intention of the first founders, as appears by this, that they eat not to live, but live to eat, and in this world have nothing but their life. Let us go, Panurge.
Now have I understood thee, quoth Panurge, my plushcod friar, my caballine and claustral ballock. I freely quit the costs, interest, and charges, seeing you have so egregiously commented upon the most especial chapter of the culinary and monastic cabal. Come along, my Carpalin, and you, Friar John, my leather-dresser. Good morrow to you all, my good lords; I have dreamed too much to have so little. Let us go. Panurge had no sooner done speaking than Epistemon with a loud voice said these words: It is a very ordinary and common thing amongst men to conceive, foresee, know, and presage the misfortune, bad luck, or disaster of another; but to have the understanding, providence, knowledge, and prediction of a man’s own mishap is very scarce and rare to be found anywhere. This is exceeding judiciously and prudently deciphered by Aesop in his Apologues, who there affirmeth that every man in the world carrieth about his neck a wallet, in the fore-bag whereof were contained the faults and mischances of others always exposed to his view and knowledge; and in the other scrip thereof, which hangs behind, are kept the bearer’s proper transgressions and inauspicious adventures, at no time seen by him, nor thought upon, unless he be a person that hath a favourable aspect from the heavens.
Chapter 16
How Pantagruel adviseth Panurge to consult with the Sibyl of Panzoust.
A little while thereafter Pantagruel sent for Panurge and said unto him, The affection which I bear you being now inveterate and settled in my mind by a long continuance of time, prompteth me to the serious consideration of your welfare and profit; in order whereto, remark what I have thought thereon. It hath been told me that at Panzoust, near Crouly, dwelleth a very famous sibyl, who is endowed with the skill of foretelling all things to come. Take Epistemon in your company, repair towards her, and hear what she will say unto you. She is possibly, quoth Epistemon, some Canidia, Sagana, or Pythonissa, either whereof with us is vulgarly called a witch — I being the more easily induced to give credit to the truth of this character of her, that the place of her abode is vilely stained with the abominable repute of abounding more with sorcerers and witches than ever did the plains of Thessaly. I should not, to my thinking, go thither willingly, for that it seems to me a thing unwarrantable, and altogether forbidden in the law of Moses. We are not Jews, quoth Pantagruel, nor is it a matter judiciously confessed by her, nor authentically proved by others that she is a witch. Let us for the present suspend our judgment, and defer till after your return from thence the sifting and garbling of those niceties. Do we know but that she may be an eleventh sibyl or a second Cassandra? But although she were neither, and she did not merit the name or title of any of these renowned prophetesses, what hazard, in the name of God, do you run by offering to talk and confer with her of the instant perplexity and perturbation of your thoughts? Seeing especially, and which is most of all, she is, in the estimation of those that are acquainted with her, held to know more, and to be of a deeper reach of understanding, than is either customary to the country wherein she liveth or to the sex whereof she is. What hindrance, hurt, or harm doth the laudable desire of knowledge bring to any man, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a stool, a winter mitten, a truckle for a pulley, the lid of a goldsmith’s crucible, an oil-bottle, or old slipper? You may remember to have read, or heard at least, that Alexander the Great, immediately after his having obtained a glorious victory over the King Darius in Arbela, refused, in the presence of the splendid and illustrious courtiers that were about him, to give audience to a poor certain despicable-like fellow, who through the solicitations and mediation of some of his royal attendants was admitted humbly to beg that grace and favour of him. But sore did he repent, although in vain, a thousand and ten thousand times thereafter, the surly state which he then took upon him to the denial of so just a suit, the grant whereof would have been worth unto him the value of a brace of potent cities. He was indeed victorious in Persia, but withal so far distant from Macedonia, his hereditary kingdom, that the joy of the one did not expel the extreme grief which through occasion of the other he had inwardly conceived; for, not being able with all his power to find or invent a convenient mean and expedient how to get or come by the certainty of any news from thence, both by reason of the huge remoteness of the places from one to another, as also because of the impeditive interposition of many great rivers, the interjacent obstacle of divers wild deserts, and obstructive interjection of sundry almost inaccessible mountains — whilst he was in this sad quandary and solicitous pensiveness, which, you may suppose, could not be of a small vexation to him, considering that it was a matter of no great difficulty to run over his whole native soil, possess his country, seize on his kingdom, install a new king in the throne, and plant thereon foreign colonies, long before he could come to have any advertisement of it: for obviating the jeopardy of so dreadful inconveniency, and putting a fit remedy thereto, a certain Sidonian merchant of a low stature but high fancy, very poor in show, and to the outward appearance of little or no account, having presented himself before him, went about to affirm and declare that he had excogitated and hit upon a ready mean and way by the which those of his territories at home should come to the certain notice of his Indian victories, and himself be perfectly informed of the state and condition of Egypt and Macedonia within less than five days. Whereupon the said Alexander, plunged into a sullen animadvertency of mind, through his rash opinion of the improbability of performing a so strange and impossible-like undertaking, dismissed the merchant without giving ear to what he had to say, and vilified him. What could it have cost him to hearken unto what the honest man had invented and contrived for his good? What detriment, annoyance, damage, or loss could he have undergone to listen to the discovery of that secret which the good fellow would have most willingly revealed unto him? Nature, I am persuaded, did not without a cause frame our ears open, putting thereto no gate at all, nor shutting them up with any manner of enclosures, as she hath done unto the tongue, the eyes, and other such out-jetting parts of the body. The cause, as I imagine, is to the end that every day and every night, and that continually, we may be ready to hear, and by a perpetual hearing apt to learn. For, of all the senses, it is the fittest for the reception of the knowledge of arts, sciences, and disciplines; and it may be that man was an angel, that is to say, a messenger sent from God, as Raphael was to Tobit. Too suddenly did he contemn, despise, and misregard him; but too long thereafter, by an untimely and too late repentance, did he do penance for it. You say very well, answered Epistemon, yet shall you never for all that induce me to believe that it can tend any way to the advantage or commodity of a man to take advice and counsel of a woman, namely, of such a woman, and the woman of such a country. Truly I have found, quoth Panurge, a great deal of good in the counsel of women, chiefly in that of the old wives amongst them; for every time I consult with them I readily get a stool or two extraordinary, to the great solace of my bumgut passage. They are as sleuthhounds in the infallibility of their scent, and in their sayings no less sententious than the rubrics of the law. Therefore in my conceit it is not an improper kind of speech to call them sage or wise women. In confirmation of which opinion of mine, the customary style of my language alloweth them the denomination of presage women. The epithet of sage is due unto them because they are surpassing dexterous in the knowledge of most things. And I give them the title of presage, for that they divinely foresee and certainly foretell future contingencies and events of things to come. Sometimes I call them not maunettes, but monettes, from their wholesome monitions. Whether it be so, ask Pythagoras, Socrates, Empedocles, and our master Ortuinus. I furthermore praise and commend above the skies the ancient memorable institution of the pristine Germans, who ordained the responses and documents of old women to be highly extolled, most cordially reverenced, and prized at a rate in nothing inferior to the weight, test, and standard of the sanctuary. And as they were respectfully prudent in receiving of these sound advices, so by honouring and following them did they prove no less fortunate in the happy success of all their endeavours. Witness the old wife Aurinia, and the good mother Velled, in the days of Vespasian. You need not any way doubt but that feminine old age is always fructifying in qualities sublime — I would have said sibylline. Let us go, by the help, let us go, by the virtue of God, let us go. Farewell, Friar John, I recommend the care of my codpiece to you. Well, quoth Epistemon, I will follow you, with this protestation nevertheless, that if I happen to get a sure information, or otherwise find that she doth use any kind of charm or enchantment in her responses, it may not be imputed to me for a blame to leave you at the gate of her house, without accompanying you any further in.