Chapter Chapter 16 · How Gargantua was sent to Pa

Chapter 1.XVI.

How Gargantua was sent to Paris, and of the huge great mare that he rode

on; how she destroyed the oxflies of the Beauce.

In the same season Fayoles, the fourth King of Numidia, sent out of the

country of Africa to Grangousier the most hideously great mare that ever

was seen, and of the strangest form, for you know well enough how it is

said that Africa always is productive of some new thing. She was as big as

six elephants, and had her feet cloven into fingers, like Julius Caesar’s

horse, with slouch-hanging ears, like the goats in Languedoc, and a little

horn on her buttock. She was of a burnt sorrel hue, with a little mixture

of dapple-grey spots, but above all she had a horrible tail; for it was

little more or less than every whit as great as the steeple-pillar of St.

Mark beside Langes: and squared as that is, with tuffs and ennicroches or

hair-plaits wrought within one another, no otherwise than as the beards are

upon the ears of corn.

If you wonder at this, wonder rather at the tails of the Scythian rams,

which weighed above thirty pounds each; and of the Surian sheep, who need,

if Tenaud say true, a little cart at their heels to bear up their tail, it

is so long and heavy. You female lechers in the plain countries have no

such tails. And she was brought by sea in three carricks and a brigantine

unto the harbour of Olone in Thalmondois. When Grangousier saw her, Here

is, said he, what is fit to carry my son to Paris. So now, in the name of

God, all will be well. He will in times coming be a great scholar. If it

were not, my masters, for the beasts, we should live like clerks. The next

morning--after they had drunk, you must understand--they took their

journey; Gargantua, his pedagogue Ponocrates, and his train, and with them

Eudemon, the young page. And because the weather was fair and temperate,

his father caused to be made for him a pair of dun boots,--Babin calls them

buskins. Thus did they merrily pass their time in travelling on their high

way, always making good cheer, and were very pleasant till they came a

little above Orleans, in which place there was a forest of five-and-thirty

leagues long, and seventeen in breadth, or thereabouts. This forest was

most horribly fertile and copious in dorflies, hornets, and wasps, so that

it was a very purgatory for the poor mares, asses, and horses. But

Gargantua’s mare did avenge herself handsomely of all the outrages therein

committed upon beasts of her kind, and that by a trick whereof they had no

suspicion. For as soon as ever they were entered into the said forest, and

that the wasps had given the assault, she drew out and unsheathed her tail,

and therewith skirmishing, did so sweep them that she overthrew all the

wood alongst and athwart, here and there, this way and that way, longwise

and sidewise, over and under, and felled everywhere the wood with as much

ease as a mower doth the grass, in such sort that never since hath there

been there neither wood nor dorflies: for all the country was thereby

reduced to a plain champaign field. Which Gargantua took great pleasure to

behold, and said to his company no more but this: Je trouve beau ce (I

find this pretty); whereupon that country hath been ever since that time

called Beauce. But all the breakfast the mare got that day was but a

little yawning and gaping, in memory whereof the gentlemen of Beauce do as

yet to this day break their fast with gaping, which they find to be very

good, and do spit the better for it. At last they came to Paris, where

Gargantua refreshed himself two or three days, making very merry with his

folks, and inquiring what men of learning there were then in the city, and

what wine they drunk there.