Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

I shall merely quote you what a venerable Doctor of Theology – the author of the Bagpipes of Prelates – foretold in the spirit of prophecy. What does the scallywag say? Harken, ye old asses’ pricks! Hearken: That Jubilee when the daft world was shorn In figures now exceeds the thirtieth morn Supernumerically. Scant respect! Daft it appeared, all perseverance wrecked Of lengthy bills; no longer avid he; For the sweet fruit of grass shall shelled be, Of which the flower in spring feared to be lorn.

Come spring the world will no more be called daft. The fools – the number of which is infinite as Salomon testifies – will die insane. Then there shall cease all species of madness, which are similarly countless: The species of mania are infinite, as Avicenna states.

And so the world, growing wise, will no more fear the flower of beans in spring: that is (as you can piteously believe with a glass in your hand and a tear in your eye) in Lent it will feel no fear from piles of books which could seem to be flowering, florescent and florulent like fair butterflies but are in fact all boring, troubling, endangering, prickling and darkling like the numbers of Pythagoras, who, as Horace testifies, was the Monarch of the Bean.

Erasmus: I, I, LXIV, ‘To move the Camarina’ (that is, to disturb the Camerine marshes and so bring ills on to oneself),

The prosecution

You will be retained here by force majeure, unless you prefer to fight against Juno, Neptune, Doris, Aeolus and all the little counter-Joves.

from what lands does this cornucopia come from, this abundance of good and toothsome tidbits?’ ‘From all over that other world,’ replied the Aedituus, ‘except for certain lands in the Northern climes who have stirred up the Camerine marshes these last few years, tra-la-la, They shall repent of it, ding-dong: They shall repent of it, dong-ding.

as Theophrastus clearly demonstrates, but in that they have their heads – their trunks, that is – down in the soil with their hair (that is, their roots) while their feet (that is, their branches) are up above, as when a man stands on his head and plays the forked oak.

A ‘serargeant-at-law’ (a portmanteau word) is a grasping serjeant, a legal official who serre argent (clutches money).

‘God grant, Good Folk, that you get out of here safely. Consider well the facial expressions of those valiant pillaging-pillars, those flying buttresses of Catty clavian justice. And take note, that if you live for six Olympiads plus the age of two curs, you will find those Furry Scribble-cats have become lords of all Europe, calm possessors of all the goods and properties contained therein (unless all the goods and income unjustly acquired by them do not, by divine punishment, suddenly perish).

‘Amongst them reigns the Sixth Essence, by means of which they grab everything, devour everything and beshit everything; they burn, batter, behead, slaughter, imprison, ruin and destroy everything before them without any distinction between good and evil. For amongst them vice is called virtue, and wickedness is dubbed goodness; treachery, fealty; and larceny, liberality. Pillaging is their watch-word, and, when done by them, pillaging is adjudged good by every human (except the heretics). And they do all the above by sovereign and unshakable authority.

‘That explains why, just as Hannibal received from Hamilcar his father the command, sealed by a binding religious oath, to fight the Romans as long as he lived, I too likewise received from my late father an injunction to abide here outside, waiting for Heaven’s thunderbolt to fall upon those within and reduce them to ashes (as new sacrilegious Titans fighting against the Divine) since human beings have bodies so inured that they cannot register, feel nor predict the harm that has been done, is being done, and will be done among them; or, if they do feel it, they either cannot or will not destroy them.’

Harpocrates, the Egyptian god of silence portrayed with his finger over his lips).

‘Despite Minerva’ is a very well-known adage of Erasmus (I, I, XLII) meaning to do something against intelligence, nature or the heavens.

satyrs, hemipans, aegipans, sylvans, fauns, lemures, lares, goblins and hobgoblins,

In your world you state that sack is a noun common to all languages, rightly and justly accepted by all tongues:42 that is because all humans, being by nature indigent and all begging from one another, are born with a sack slung over their shoulders as in Aesop’s fable.