The historian Lucien Febvre, in a study of the religious beliefs in Rabelais' time, attempted to describe the
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Rabelais' House in Chinon, France.
writer in sixteenth-century terms. "What was Rabelais like mentally? Something of a buffoon . . . boozing his fill and in the evening writing obscenities? Or perhaps a learned physician, a humanist scholar who filled his prodigious memory with beautiful passages from the ancients ... ? Or, better yet, a great philosopher, acclaimed as such by the likes of Theodore Beza and Louis Le Caron?" Febvre asks, and concludes, "Our ancestors were more fortunate than we are. They did not choose between two images. They accepted them both at the same time, the respectable one along with the other."310
Rabelais was able to maintain simultaneously both a questioning spirit, and faith in what he saw as the established truth. He needed to probe the assertions of fools, and to judge for himself the weight of truisms. The books he read as a scholar, full of the wisdom of the ancients, must have been balanced in his mind by the questions left unanswered and the treatises never written. His own library of parchment and paper was grounded by his imaginary library of forgotten or neglected subjects of study and reflection. We know what books (real books) he carried in his "portable library," a chestful that accompanied him throughout the twenty years of his wanderings in Europe. The list—which left him in constant peril of the Inquisition—included Hippocrates' Aphorisms, the works of Plato, Seneca and Lucian, Erasmus's In Praise ofFolly and More's Utopia, and even a dangerous recently published Polish book, the De revolutionibus of Copernicus.311 The books he invented for Pantagruel are their irreverent but tacit gloss.
The critic Mikhail Bahktin has pointed out that Rabelais' imaginary books have their antecedent in the parodic liturgies and comic gospels of earlier centuries. "The medieval parody," he says, "intends to describe only the negative or imperfect aspects of religion, ecclesiastical organization and scholarly science. For these parodists, everything, without exception, is humorous; laughter is as universal as seriousness, and encompasses the whole of the universe, history, society and conception of the world. Theirs is an all-embracing vision of the world."312
Rabelais' Gargantua was succeeded by a number of imitations in the following century. Most popular among these were a series of catalogues of imaginary libraries published (largely as political satires) in England during the Civil War, such as the Bibliotheca Parliamenti of 1653, attributed to Sir John Birkenhead, which included such irreverent titles as Theopoeia, a discourse shewing to us mortals, that Cromwel may be reckoned amongst the gods, since he hath put offall humanity.:313 In that same year Sir Thomas Urquhart published the first English translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the learned Sir Thomas Browne composed, in imitation of Rabelais, a tract he called Musaeum Clausum, or, Bibliotheca abscondita: containing some remarkable Books, Antiquities, Pictures and Rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living. In this "Closed Museum or Hidden Library" are many strange volumes and curious objects: among them an unknown poem written in Greek by Ovid during his exile in Tomis, a letter from Cicero describing the Isle of Britain, a relation of Hannibal's march from Spain to Italy, a treatise on dreams by King Mithridates, an eight-year- old girl's miraculous collection of writings in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and a Spanish translation of the works of Confucius. Among pictures of "rare objects" Sir Thomas lists "An handsome Piece of Deformity expressed in a notable hard Face" and "An Elephant dancing upon the Ropes with a Negro Dwarf upon his Back."314 The clear intention is to mock the popular beliefs of the day, but the result is slightly stilted and far less humorous than its model. Even imaginary libraries can sink under the prestige and pompousness of academia.
In one instance both the library space and the book titles were visible, yet the books represented were imaginary. At Gad's Hill (the house he dreamed of as a child, which he managed to buy twelve years before his death in 1870), Charles Dickens assembled a copious library. A door in the wall was hidden behind a panel lined with several rows of false book spines. On these spines Dickens playfully inscribed the titles of apocryphal works of all sorts: Volumes 1 to xix of Hansard's Guide
A wood-carving by Gwen Raverat depicting Sir Thomas Browne inspired by Death.
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to Refreshing Sleep, Shelley's Oysters, Modern Warfare by General Tom Thumb (a famous Victorian circus dwarf), a handbook by the notoriously henpecked Socrates on the subject of wedlock, and a ten-volume Catalogue of Statues to the Duke of Wellington.31
Colette, in one of the books of memoirs with which she delighted in scandalizing her readers in the thirties and forties, tells the story of imaginary catalogues compiled by her friend Paul Masson—a ex—colonial magistrate who worked at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and an eccentric who ended his life by standing on the edge of the Rhine, stuffing cotton wool soaked in ether up his nose and, after losing consciousness, drowning in barely a foot of water. According to Colette, Masson would visit her at her seaside villa and pull from his pockets
Charles Dickens in his library in Gad's Hill.
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Portrait of Paul Masson.
a portable desktop, a fountain pen and a small pack of blank cards. "What are you doing?" she asked him one day. "I'm working," he answered. "I'm working at my job. I've been appointed to the catalogue section of the Bibliotheque Nationale. I'm making an inventory of titles." "Oh, can you do that from memory?" she marvelled. "From memory? What would be the merit? I'm doing better. I've realized that the Nationale is poor in Latin and Italian books from the fifteenth century," he explained. "Until chance and erudition fill the gaps, I am listing the titles of extremely interesting works that should have been written. ... At least these titles may save the prestige of the catalogue. . . ." "But if the books don't exist ... ?" "Well," Masson answered with a frivolous gesture, "I can't be expected to do everything! "316