Very willingly, quoth Pantagruel, I condescend to your request. But before we enter in upon our progress towards the accomplishment of so far a journey, replenished and fraught with eminent perils, full of innumerable hazards, and every way stored with evident and manifest dangers — What dangers? quoth Panurge, interrupting him. Dangers fly back, run from, and shun me whithersoever I go, seven leagues around, as in the presence of the sovereign a subordinate magistracy is eclipsed; or as clouds and darkness quite evanish at the bright coming of a radiant sun; or as all sores and sicknesses did suddenly depart at the approach of the body of St. Martin a Quande. Nevertheless, quoth Pantagruel, before we adventure to set forwards on the road of our projected and intended voyage, some few points are to be discussed, expedited, and despatched. First, let us send back Triboulet to Blois. Which was instantly done, after that Pantagruel had given him a frieze coat. Secondly, our design must be backed with the advice and counsel of the king my father. And, lastly, it is most needful and expedient for us that we search for and find out some sibyl to serve us for a guide, truchman, and interpreter. To this Panurge made answer, that his friend Xenomanes would abundantly suffice for the plenary discharge and performance of the sibyl’s office; and that, furthermore, in passing through the Lanternatory revelling country, they should take along with them a learned and profitable Lanternesse, which would be no less useful to them in their voyage than was the sibyl to Aeneas in his descent to the Elysian fields. Carpalin, in the interim, as he was upon the conducting away of Triboulet, in his passing by hearkened a little to the discourse they were upon; then spoke out, saying, Ho, Panurge, master freeman, take my Lord Debitis at Calais alongst with you, for he is goud-fallot, a good fellow. He will not forget those who have been debitors; these are Lanternes. Thus shall you not lack for both fallot and lanterne. I may safely with the little skill I have, quoth Pantagruel, prognosticate that by the way we shall engender no melancholy. I clearly perceive it already. The only thing that vexeth me is, that I cannot speak the Lanternatory language. I shall, answered Panurge, speak for you all. I understand it every whit as well as I do mine own maternal tongue; I have been no less used to it than to the vulgar French.
Now guess, friend Epistemon, what this is. They are, quoth Epistemon, names of errant devils, passant devils, and rampant devils. These words of thine, dear friend of mine, are true, quoth Panurge; yet are they terms used in the language of the court of the Lanternish people. By the way, as we go upon our journey, I will make to thee a pretty little dictionary, which, notwithstanding, shall not last you much longer than a pair of new shoes. Thou shalt have learned it sooner than thou canst perceive the dawning of the next subsequent morning. What I have said in the foregoing tetrastich is thus translated out of the Lanternish tongue into our vulgar dialect:
There is little more, then, quoth Pantagruel, to be done, but that we understand what the will of the king my father will be therein, and purchase his consent.
Chapter 48
How Gargantua showeth that the children ought not to marry without the special knowledge and advice of their fathers and mothers.
No sooner had Pantagruel entered in at the door of the great hall of the castle, than that he encountered full butt with the good honest Gargantua coming forth from the council board, unto whom he made a succinct and summary narrative of what had passed and occurred, worthy of his observation, in his travels abroad, since their last interview; then, acquainting him with the design he had in hand, besought him that it might stand with his goodwill and pleasure to grant him leave to prosecute and go through-stitch with the enterprise which he had undertaken. The good man Gargantua, having in one hand two great bundles of petitions endorsed and answered, and in the other some remembrancing notes and bills, to put him in mind of such other requests of supplicants, which, albeit presented, had nevertheless been neither read nor heard, he gave both to Ulric Gallet, his ancient and faithful Master of Requests; then drew aside Pantagruel, and, with a countenance more serene and jovial than customary, spoke to him thus: I praise God, and have great reason so to do, my most dear son, that he hath been pleased to entertain in you a constant inclination to virtuous actions. I am well content that the voyage which you have motioned to me be by you accomplished, but withal I could wish you would have a mind and desire to marry, for that I see you are of competent years. Panurge in the meanwhile was in a readiness of preparing and providing for remedies, salves, and cures against all such lets, obstacles, and impediments as he could in the height of his fancy conceive might by Gargantua be cast in the way of their itinerary design. Is it your pleasure, most dear father, that you speak? answered Pantagruel. For my part, I have not yet thought upon it. In all this affair I wholly submit and rest in your good liking and paternal authority. For I shall rather pray unto God that he would throw me down stark dead at your feet, in your pleasure, than that against your pleasure I should be found married alive. I never yet heard that by any law, whether sacred or profane, yea, amongst the rudest and most barbarous nations in the world, it was allowed and approved of that children may be suffered and tolerated to marry at their own goodwill and pleasure, without the knowledge, advice, or consent asked and had thereto of their fathers, mothers, and nearest kindred. All legislators, everywhere upon the face of the whole earth, have taken away and removed this licentious liberty from children, and totally reserved it to the discretion of the parents.
My dearly beloved son, quoth Gargantua, I believe you, and from my heart thank God for having endowed you with the grace of having both a perfect notice of and entire liking to laudable and praiseworthy things; and that through the windows of your exterior senses he hath vouchsafed to transmit unto the interior faculties of your mind nothing but what is good and virtuous. For in my time there hath been found on the continent a certain country, wherein are I know not what kind of Pastophorian mole-catching priests, who, albeit averse from engaging their proper persons into a matrimonial duty, like the pontifical flamens of Cybele in Phrygia, as if they were capons, and not cocks full of lasciviousness, salacity, and wantonness, who yet have, nevertheless, in the matter of conjugal affairs, taken upon them to prescribe laws and ordinances to married folks. I cannot goodly determine what I should most abhor, detest, loathe, and abominate — whether the tyrannical presumption of those dreaded sacerdotal mole-catchers, who, not being willing to contain and coop up themselves within the grates and trellises of their own mysterious temples, do deal in, meddle with, obtrude upon, and thrust their sickles into harvests of secular businesses quite contrary and diametrically opposite to the quality, state, and condition of their callings, professions, and vocations; or the superstitious stupidity and senseless scrupulousness of married folks, who have yielded obedience, and submitted their bodies, fortunes, and estates to the discretion and authority of such odious, perverse, barbarous, and unreasonable laws. Nor do they see that which is clearer than the light and splendour of the morning star — how all these nuptial and connubial sanctions, statutes, and ordinances have been decreed, made, and instituted for the sole benefit, profit, and advantage of the flaminal mysts and mysterious flamens, and nothing at all for the good, utility, or emolument of the silly hoodwinked married people. Which administereth unto others a sufficient cause for rendering these churchmen suspicious of iniquity, and of an unjust and fraudulent manner of dealing, no more to be connived at nor countenanced, after that it be well weighed in the scales of reason, than if with a reciprocal temerity the laics, by way of compensation, would impose laws to be followed and observed by those mysts and flamens, how they should behave themselves in the making and performance of their rites and ceremonies, and after what manner they ought to proceed in the offering up and immolating of their various oblations, victims, and sacrifices; seeing that, besides the decimation and tithe-haling of their goods, they cut off and take parings, shreddings, and clippings of the gain proceeding from the labour of their hands and sweat of their brows, therewith to entertain themselves the better. Upon which consideration, in my opinion, their injunctions and commands would not prove so pernicious and impertinent as those of the ecclesiastic power unto which they had tendered their blind obedience. For, as you have very well said, there is no place in the world where, legally, a licence is granted to the children to marry without the advice and consent of their parents and kindred. Nevertheless, by those wicked laws and mole-catching customs, whereat there is a little hinted in what I have already spoken to you, there is no scurvy, measly, leprous, or pocky ruffian, pander, knave, rogue, skellum, robber, or thief, pilloried, whipped, and burn-marked in his own country for his crimes and felonies, who may not violently snatch away and ravish what maid soever he had a mind to pitch upon, how noble, how fair, how rich, honest, and chaste soever she be, and that out of the house of her own father, in his own presence, from the bosom of her mother, and in the sight and despite of her friends and kindred looking on a so woeful spectacle, provided that the rascal villain be so cunning as to associate unto himself some mystical flamen, who, according to the covenant made betwixt them two, shall be in hope some day to participate of the prey.