الفصل الفصل 140 · How Gargantua showeth that t

Chapter 3.XLVIII.

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.

Could the Goths, the Scyths, or Massagets do a worse or more cruel act to

any of the inhabitants of a hostile city, when, after the loss of many of

their most considerable commanders, the expense of a great deal of money,

and a long siege, they shall have stormed and taken it by a violent and

impetuous assault? May not these fathers and mothers, think you, be

sorrowful and heavy-hearted when they see an unknown fellow, a vagabond

stranger, a barbarous lout, a rude cur, rotten, fleshless, putrified,

scraggy, boily, botchy, poor, a forlorn caitiff and miserable sneak, by an

open rapt snatch away before their own eyes their so fair, delicate, neat,

well-behavioured, richly-provided-for and healthful daughters, on whose

breeding and education they had spared no cost nor charges, by bringing

them up in an honest discipline to all the honourable and virtuous

employments becoming one of their sex descended of a noble parentage,

hoping by those commendable and industrious means in an opportune and

convenient time to bestow them on the worthy sons of their well-deserving

neighbours and ancient friends, who had nourished, entertained, taught,

instructed, and schooled their children with the same care and solicitude,

to make them matches fit to attain to the felicity of a so happy marriage,

that from them might issue an offspring and progeny no less heirs to the

laudable endowments and exquisite qualifications of their parents, whom

they every way resemble, than to their personal and real estates, movables,

and inheritances? How doleful, trist, and plangorous would such a sight

and pageantry prove unto them? You shall not need to think that the

collachrymation of the Romans and their confederates at the decease of

Germanicus Drusus was comparable to this lamentation of theirs? Neither

would I have you to believe that the discomfort and anxiety of the

Lacedaemonians, when the Greek Helen, by the perfidiousness of the

adulterous Trojan, Paris, was privily stolen away out of their country, was

greater or more pitiful than this ruthful and deplorable collugency of

theirs? You may very well imagine that Ceres at the ravishment of her

daughter Proserpina was not more attristed, sad, nor mournful than they.

Trust me, and your own reason, that the loss of Osiris was not so

regrettable to Isis, nor did Venus so deplore the death of Adonis, nor yet

did Hercules so bewail the straying of Hylas, nor was the rapt of Polyxena

more throbbingly resented and condoled by Priamus and Hecuba, than this

aforesaid accident would be sympathetically bemoaned, grievous, ruthful,

and anxious to the woefully desolate and disconsolate parents.

Notwithstanding all this, the greater part of so vilely abused parents are

so timorous and afraid of devils and hobgoblins, and so deeply plunged in

superstition, that they dare not gainsay nor contradict, much less oppose

and resist those unnatural and impious actions, when the mole-catcher hath

been present at the perpetrating of the fact, and a party contractor and

covenanter in that detestable bargain. What do they do then? They

wretchedly stay at their own miserable homes, destitute of their

well-beloved daughters, the fathers cursing the days and the hours wherein

they were married, and the mothers howling and crying that it was not their

fortune to have brought forth abortive issues when they happened to be

delivered of such unfortunate girls, and in this pitiful plight spend at

best the remainder of their time with tears and weeping for those their

children, of and from whom they expected, (and, with good reason, should

have obtained and reaped,) in these latter days of theirs, joy and comfort.

Other parents there have been, so impatient of that affront and indignity

put upon them and their families, that, transported with the extremity of

passion, in a mad and frantic mood, through the vehemency of a grievous

fury and raging sorrow, have drowned, hanged, killed, and otherwise put

violent hands on themselves. Others, again, of that parental relation

have, upon the reception of the like injury, been of a more magnanimous and

heroic spirit, who, in imitation and at the example of the children of

Jacob revenging upon the Sichemites the rapt of their sister Dinah, having

found the rascally ruffian in the association of his mystical mole-catcher

closely and in hugger-mugger conferring, parleying, and coming with their

daughters, for the suborning, corrupting, depraving, perverting, and

enticing these innocent unexperienced maids unto filthy lewdnesses, have,

without any further advisement on the matter, cut them instantly into

pieces, and thereupon forthwith thrown out upon the fields their so

dismembered bodies, to serve for food unto the wolves and ravens. Upon the

chivalrous, bold, and courageous achievement of a so valiant, stout, and

manlike act, the other mole-catching symmysts have been so highly incensed,

and have so chafed, fretted, and fumed thereat, that, bills of complaint

and accusations having been in a most odious and detestable manner put in

before the competent judges, the arm of secular authority hath with much

importunity and impetuosity been by them implored and required, they

proudly contending that the servants of God would become contemptible if

exemplary punishment were not speedily taken upon the persons of the

perpetrators of such an enormous, horrid, sacrilegious, crying, heinous,

and execrable crime.

Yet neither by natural equity, by the law of nations, nor by any imperial

law whatsoever, hath there been found so much as one rubric, paragraph,

point, or tittle, by the which any kind of chastisement or correction hath

been adjudged due to be inflicted upon any for their delinquency in that

kind. Reason opposeth, and nature is repugnant. For there is no virtuous

man in the world who both naturally and with good reason will not be more

hugely troubled in mind, hearing of the news of the rapt, disgrace,

ignominy, and dishonour of his daughter, than of her death. Now any man,

finding in hot blood one who with a forethought felony hath murdered his

daughter, may, without tying himself to the formalities and circumstances

of a legal proceeding, kill him on a sudden and out of hand without

incurring any hazard of being attainted and apprehended by the officers of

justice for so doing. What wonder is it then? Or how little strange

should it appear to any rational man, if a lechering rogue, together with

his mole-catching abettor, be entrapped in the flagrant act of suborning

his daughter, and stealing her out of his house, though herself consent

thereto, that the father in such a case of stain and infamy by them brought

upon his family, should put them both to a shameful death, and cast their

carcasses upon dunghills to be devoured and eaten up by dogs and swine, or

otherwise fling them a little further off to the direption, tearing, and

rending asunder of their joints and members by the wild beasts of the field

(as unworthy to receive the gentle, the desired, the last kind embraces of

the great Alma Mater, the earth, commonly called burial).

Dearly beloved son, have an especial care that after my decease none of

these laws be received in any of your kingdoms; for whilst I breathe, by

the grace and assistance of God, I shall give good order. Seeing,

therefore, you have totally referred unto my discretion the disposure of

you in marriage, I am fully of an opinion that I shall provide sufficiently

well for you in that point. Make ready and prepare yourself for Panurge’s

voyage. Take along with you Epistemon, Friar John, and such others as you

will choose. Do with my treasures what unto yourself shall seem most

expedient. None of your actions, I promise you, can in any manner of way

displease me. Take out of my arsenal Thalasse whatsoever equipage,

furniture, or provision you please, together with such pilots, mariners,

and truchmen as you have a mind to, and with the first fair and favourable

wind set sail and make out to sea in the name of God our Saviour. In the

meanwhile, during your absence, I shall not be neglective of providing a

wife for you, nor of those preparations which are requisite to be made for

the more sumptuous solemnizing of your nuptials with a most splendid feast,

if ever there was any in the world, since the days of Ahasuerus.