Bab Bab 110 · How Pantagruel and Panurge d

Chapter 3.XVIII.

How Pantagruel and Panurge did diversely expound the verses of the Sibyl of

Panzoust.

The leaves being thus collected and orderly disposed, Epistemon and Panurge

returned to Pantagruel’s court, partly well pleased and other part

discontented; glad for their being come back, and vexed for the trouble

they had sustained by the way, which they found to be craggy, rugged,

stony, rough, and ill-adjusted. They made an ample and full relation of

their voyage unto Pantagruel, as likewise of the estate and condition of

the sibyl. Then, having presented to him the leaves of the sycamore, they

show him the short and twattle verses that were written in them.

Pantagruel, having read and considered the whole sum and substance of the

matter, fetched from his heart a deep and heavy sigh; then said to Panurge,

You are now, forsooth, in a good taking, and have brought your hogs to a

fine market. The prophecy of the sibyl doth explain and lay out before us

the same very predictions which have been denoted, foretold, and presaged

to us by the decree of the Virgilian lots and the verdict of your own

proper dreams, to wit, that you shall be very much disgraced, shamed, and

discredited by your wife; for that she will make you a cuckold in

prostituting herself to others, being big with child by another than you,

--will steal from you a great deal of your goods, and will beat you, scratch

and bruise you, even to plucking the skin in a part from off you,--will

leave the print of her blows in some member of your body. You understand

as much, answered Panurge, in the veritable interpretation and expounding

of recent prophecies as a sow in the matter of spicery. Be not offended,

sir, I beseech you, that I speak thus boldly; for I find myself a little in

choler, and that not without cause, seeing it is the contrary that is true.

Take heed, and give attentive ear unto my words. The old wife said that,

as the bean is not seen till first it be unhusked, and that its swad or

hull be shelled and peeled from off it, so is it that my virtue and

transcendent worth will never come by the mouth of fame to be blazed abroad

proportionable to the height, extent, and measure of the excellency

thereof, until preallably I get a wife and make the full half of a married

couple. How many times have I heard you say that the function of a

magistrate, or office of dignity, discovereth the merits, parts, and

endowments of the person so advanced and promoted, and what is in him.

That is to say, we are then best able to judge aright of the deservings of

a man when he is called to the management of affairs; for when before he

lived in a private condition, we could have no more certain knowledge of

him than of a bean within his husk. And thus stands the first article

explained; otherwise, could you imagine that the good fame, repute, and

estimation of an honest man should depend upon the tail of a whore?

Now to the meaning of the second article! My wife will be with child,

--here lies the prime felicity of marriage,--but not of me. Copsody, that I

do believe indeed! It will be of a pretty little infant. O how heartily I

shall love it! I do already dote upon it; for it will be my dainty feedle-

darling, my genteel dilly-minion. From thenceforth no vexation, care, or

grief shall take such deep impression in my heart, how hugely great or

vehement soever it otherwise appear, but that it shall evanish forthwith at

the sight of that my future babe, and at the hearing of the chat and

prating of its childish gibberish. And blessed be the old wife. By my

truly, I have a mind to settle some good revenue or pension upon her out of

the readiest increase of the lands of my Salmigondinois; not an inconstant

and uncertain rent-seek, like that of witless, giddy-headed bachelors, but

sure and fixed, of the nature of the well-paid incomes of regenting

doctors. If this interpretation doth not please you, think you my wife

will bear me in her flanks, conceive with me, and be of me delivered, as

women use in childbed to bring forth their young ones; so as that it may be

said, Panurge is a second Bacchus, he hath been twice born; he is re-born,

as was Hippolytus,--as was Proteus, one time of Thetis, and secondly, of

the mother of the philosopher Apollonius,--as were the two Palici, near the

flood Simaethos in Sicily. His wife was big of child with him. In him is

renewed and begun again the palintocy of the Megarians and the palingenesy

of Democritus. Fie upon such errors! To hear stuff of that nature rends

mine ears.

The words of the third article are: She will suck me at my best end. Why

not? That pleaseth me right well. You know the thing; I need not tell you

that it is my intercrural pudding with one end. I swear and promise that,

in what I can, I will preserve it sappy, full of juice, and as well

victualled for her use as may be. She shall not suck me, I believe, in

vain, nor be destitute of her allowance; there shall her justum both in

peck and lippy be furnished to the full eternally. You expound this

passage allegorically, and interpret it to theft and larceny. I love the

exposition, and the allegory pleaseth me; but not according to the sense

whereto you stretch it. It may be that the sincerity of the affection

which you bear me moveth you to harbour in your breast those refractory

thoughts concerning me, with a suspicion of my adversity to come. We have

this saying from the learned, That a marvellously fearful thing is love,

and that true love is never without fear. But, sir, according to my

judgment, you do understand both of and by yourself that here stealth

signifieth nothing else, no more than in a thousand other places of Greek

and Latin, old and modern writings, but the sweet fruits of amorous

dalliance, which Venus liketh best when reaped in secret, and culled by

fervent lovers filchingly. Why so, I prithee tell? Because, when the feat

of the loose-coat skirmish happeneth to be done underhand and privily,

between two well-disposed, athwart the steps of a pair of stairs lurkingly,

and in covert behind a suit of hangings, or close hid and trussed upon an

unbound faggot, it is more pleasing to the Cyprian goddess, and to me also

--I speak this without prejudice to any better or more sound opinion--than

to perform that culbusting art after the Cynic manner, in the view of the

clear sunshine, or in a rich tent, under a precious stately canopy, within

a glorious and sublime pavilion, or yet on a soft couch betwixt rich

curtains of cloth of gold, without affrightment, at long intermediate

respites, enjoying of pleasures and delights a bellyfull, at all great

ease, with a huge fly-flap fan of crimson satin and a bunch of feathers of

some East-Indian ostrich serving to give chase unto the flies all round

about; whilst, in the interim, the female picks her teeth with a stiff

straw picked even then from out of the bottom of the bed she lies on. If

you be not content with this my exposition, are you of the mind that my

wife will suck and sup me up as people use to gulp and swallow oysters out

of the shell? or as the Cilician women, according to the testimony of

Dioscorides, were wont to do the grain of alkermes? Assuredly that is an

error. Who seizeth on it, doth neither gulch up nor swill down, but takes

away what hath been packed up, catcheth, snatcheth, and plies the play of

hey-pass, repass.

The fourth article doth imply that my wife will flay me, but not all. O

the fine word! You interpret this to beating strokes and blows. Speak

wisely. Will you eat a pudding? Sir, I beseech you to raise up your

spirits above the low-sized pitch of earthly thoughts unto that height of

sublime contemplation which reacheth to the apprehension of the mysteries

and wonders of Dame Nature. And here be pleased to condemn yourself, by a

renouncing of those errors which you have committed very grossly and

somewhat perversely in expounding the prophetic sayings of the holy sibyl.

Yet put the case (albeit I yield not to it) that, by the instigation of the

devil, my wife should go about to wrong me, make me a cuckold downwards to

the very breech, disgrace me otherwise, steal my goods from me, yea, and

lay violently her hands upon me;--she nevertheless should fail of her

attempts and not attain to the proposed end of her unreasonable

undertakings. The reason which induceth me hereto is grounded totally on

this last point, which is extracted from the profoundest privacies of a

monastic pantheology, as good Friar Arthur Wagtail told me once upon a

Monday morning, as we were (if I have not forgot) eating a bushel of

trotter-pies; and I remember well it rained hard. God give him the good

morrow! The women at the beginning of the world, or a little after,

conspired to flay the men quick, because they found the spirit of mankind

inclined to domineer it, and bear rule over them upon the face of the whole

earth; and, in pursuit of this their resolution, promised, confirmed,

swore, and covenanted amongst them all, by the pure faith they owe to the

nocturnal Sanct Rogero. But O the vain enterprises of women! O the great

fragility of that sex feminine! They did begin to flay the man, or peel

him (as says Catullus), at that member which of all the body they loved

best, to wit, the nervous and cavernous cane, and that above five thousand

years ago; yet have they not of that small part alone flayed any more till

this hour but the head. In mere despite whereof the Jews snip off that

parcel of the skin in circumcision, choosing far rather to be called

clipyards, rascals, than to be flayed by women, as are other nations. My

wife, according to this female covenant, will flay it to me, if it be not

so already. I heartily grant my consent thereto, but will not give her

leave to flay it all. Nay, truly will I not, my noble king.

Yea but, quoth Epistemon, you say nothing of her most dreadful cries and

exclamations when she and we both saw the laurel-bough burn without

yielding any noise or crackling. You know it is a very dismal omen, an

inauspicious sign, unlucky indice, and token formidable, bad, disastrous,

and most unhappy, as is certified by Propertius, Tibullus, the quick

philosopher Porphyrius, Eustathius on the Iliads of Homer, and by many

others. Verily, verily, quoth Panurge, brave are the allegations which you

bring me, and testimonies of two-footed calves. These men were fools, as

they were poets; and dotards, as they were philosophers; full of folly, as

they were of philosophy.