Chapter 4.LVIII.—How, at the court of the master of ingenuity, Pantagruel detested the Engastrimythes and the Gastrolaters.

At the court of that great master of ingenuity, Pantagruel observed two sorts of troublesome and too officious apparitors, whom he very much detested. The first were called Engastrimythes; the others, Gastrolaters.

The first pretended to be descended of the ancient race of Eurycles, and for this brought the authority of Aristophanes in his comedy called the Wasps; whence of old they were called Euryclians, as Plato writes, and Plutarch in his book of the Cessation of Oracles. In the holy decrees, 26, qu. 3, they are styled Ventriloqui; and the same name is given them in Ionian by Hippocrates, in his fifth book of Epid., as men who speak from the belly. Sophocles calls them Sternomantes. These were soothsayers, enchanters, cheats, who gulled the mob, and seemed not to speak and give answers from the mouth, but from the belly.

Such a one, about the year of our Lord 1513, was Jacoba Rodogina, an Italian woman of mean extract; from whose belly we, as well as an infinite number of others at Ferrara and elsewhere, have often heard the voice of the evil spirit speak, low, feeble, and small, indeed, but yet very distinct, articulate, and intelligible, when she was sent for out of curiosity by the lords and princes of the Cisalpine Gaul. To remove all manner of doubt, and be assured that this was not a trick, they used to have her stripped stark naked, and caused her mouth and nose to be stopped. This evil spirit would be called Curled-pate, or Cincinnatulo, seeming pleased when any called him by that name, at which he was always ready to answer. If any spoke to him of things past or present, he gave pertinent answers, sometimes to the amazement of the hearers; but if of things to come, then the devil was gravelled, and used to lie as fast as a dog can trot. Nay, sometimes he seemed to own his ignorance, instead of an answer letting out a rousing fart, or muttering some words with barbarous and uncouth inflexions, and not to be understood.

As for the Gastrolaters, they stuck close to one another in knots and gangs. Some of them merry, wanton, and soft as so many milk-sops; others louring, grim, dogged, demure, and crabbed; all idle, mortal foes to business, spending half their time in sleeping and the rest in doing nothing, a rent-charge and dead unnecessary weight on the earth, as Hesiod saith; afraid, as we judged, of offending or lessening their paunch. Others were masked, disguised, and so oddly dressed that it would have done you good to have seen them.

There’s a saying, and several ancient sages write, that the skill of nature appears wonderful in the pleasure which she seems to have taken in the configuration of sea-shells, so great is their variety in figures, colours, streaks, and inimitable shapes. I protest the variety we perceived in the dresses of the gastrolatrous coquillons was not less. They all owned Gaster for their supreme god, adored him as a god, offered him sacrifices as to their omnipotent deity, owned no other god, served, loved, and honoured him above all things.

You would have thought that the holy apostle spoke of those when he said (Phil. chap. 3), Many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly. Pantagruel compared them to the Cyclops Polyphemus, whom Euripides brings in speaking thus: I only sacrifice to myself—not to the gods—and to this belly of mine, the greatest of all the gods.

Chapter 4.LIX.—Of the ridiculous statue Manduce; and how and what the Gastrolaters sacrifice to their ventripotent god.

While we fed our eyes with the sight of the phizzes and actions of these lounging gulligutted Gastrolaters, we on a sudden heard the sound of a musical instrument called a bell; at which all of them placed themselves in rank and file as for some mighty battle, everyone according to his office, degree, and seniority.

In this order they moved towards Master Gaster, after a plump, young, lusty, gorbellied fellow, who on a long staff fairly gilt carried a wooden statue, grossly carved, and as scurvily daubed over with paint; such a one as Plautus, Juvenal, and Pomp. Festus describe it. At Lyons during the Carnival it is called Maschecroute or Gnawcrust; they call’d this Manduce.

It was a monstrous, ridiculous, hideous figure, fit to fright little children; its eyes were bigger than its belly, and its head larger than all the rest of its body; well mouth-cloven however, having a goodly pair of wide, broad jaws, lined with two rows of teeth, upper tier and under tier, which, by the magic of a small twine hid in the hollow part of the golden staff, were made to clash, clatter, and rattle dreadfully one against another; as they do at Metz with St. Clement’s dragon.

Coming near the Gastrolaters I saw they were followed by a great number of fat waiters and tenders, laden with baskets, dossers, hampers, dishes, wallets, pots, and kettles. Then, under the conduct of Manduce, and singing I do not know what dithyrambics, crepalocomes, and epenons, opening their baskets and pots, they offered their god:

Eternal drink intermixed. Brisk delicate white wine led the van; claret and champagne followed, cool, nay, as cold as the very ice, I say, filled and offered in large silver cups. Then they offered:

All this associated with sempiternal liquor. Then they housed within his muzzle:

Vinegar brought up the rear to wash the mouth, and for fear of the squinsy; also toasts to scour the grinders.

Chapter 4.LX.—What the Gastrolaters sacrificed to their god on interlarded fish-days.

Pantagruel did not like this pack of rascally scoundrels with their manifold kitchen sacrifices, and would have been gone had not Epistemon prevailed with him to stay and see the end of the farce. He then asked the skipper what the idle lobcocks used to sacrifice to their gorbellied god on interlarded fish-days. For his first course, said the skipper, they gave him:

Then he must drink, or the devil would gripe him at the throat; this, therefore, they take care to prevent, and nothing is wanting. Which being done, they give him lampreys with hippocras sauce:

If, when he had crammed all this down his guttural trapdoor, he did not immediately make the fish swim again in his paunch, death would pack him off in a trice. Special care is taken to antidote his godship with vine-tree syrup. Then is sacrificed to him haberdines, poor-jack, minglemangled, mismashed, &c.

Which to concoct and digest the more easily, vinegar is multiplied. For the latter part of their sacrifices they offer:

It was none of their fault, I will assure you, if this same god of theirs was not publicly, preciously, and plentifully served in the sacrifices, better yet than Heliogabalus’s idol; nay, more than Bel and the Dragon in Babylon, under King Belshazzar. Yet Gaster had the manners to own that he was no god, but a poor, vile, wretched creature. And as King Antigonus, first of the name, when one Hermodotus (as poets will flatter, especially princes) in some of his fustian dubbed him a god, and made the sun adopt him for his son, said to him: My lasanophore (or, in plain English, my groom of the close-stool) can give thee the lie; so Master Gaster very civilly used to send back his bigoted worshippers to his close-stool, to see, smell, taste, philosophize, and examine what kind of divinity they could pick out of his sir-reverence.

Chapter 4.LXI.—How Gaster invented means to get and preserve corn.

Those gastrolatrous hobgoblins being withdrawn, Pantagruel carefully minded the famous master of arts, Gaster. You know that, by the institution of nature, bread has been assigned him for provision and food; and that, as an addition to this blessing, he should never want the means to get bread.

Accordingly, from the beginning he invented the smith’s art, and husbandry to manure the ground, that it might yield him corn; he invented arms and the art of war to defend corn; physic and astronomy, with other parts of mathematics which might be useful to keep corn a great number of years in safety from the injuries of the air, beasts, robbers, and purloiners; he invented water, wind, and handmills, and a thousand other engines to grind corn and to turn it into meal; leaven to make the dough ferment, and the use of salt to give it a savour; for he knew that nothing bred more diseases than heavy, unleavened, unsavoury bread.

He found a way to get fire to bake it; hour-glasses, dials, and clocks to mark the time of its baking; and as some countries wanted corn, he contrived means to convey some out of one country into another.

He had the wit to pimp for asses and mares, animals of different species, that they might copulate for the generation of a third, which we call mules, more strong and fit for hard service than the other two. He invented carts and waggons to draw him along with greater ease; and as seas and rivers hindered his progress, he devised boats, galleys, and ships (to the astonishment of the elements) to waft him over to barbarous, unknown, and far distant nations, thence to bring, or thither to carry corn.

Besides, seeing that when he had tilled the ground, some years the corn perished in it for want of rain in due season, in others rotted or was drowned by its excess, sometimes spoiled by hail, eat by worms in the ear, or beaten down by storms, and so his stock was destroyed on the ground; we were told that ever since the days of yore he has found out a way to conjure the rain down from heaven only with cutting certain grass, common enough in the field, yet known to very few, some of which was then shown us. I took it to be the same as the plant, one of whose boughs being dipped by Jove’s priest in the Agrian fountain on the Lycian mountain in Arcadia, in time of drought raised vapours which gathered into clouds, and then dissolved into rain that kindly moistened the whole country.

Our master of arts was also said to have found a way to keep the rain up in the air, and make it to fall into the sea; also to annihilate the hail, suppress the winds, and remove storms as the Methanensians of Troezene used to do. And as in the fields thieves and plunderers sometimes stole and took by force the corn and bread which others had toiled to get, he invented the art of building towns, forts, and castles, to hoard and secure that staff of life. On the other hand, finding none in the fields, and hearing that it was hoarded up and secured in towns, forts, and castles, and watched with more care than ever were the golden pippins of the Hesperides, he turned engineer, and found ways to beat, storm, and demolish forts and castles with machines and warlike thunderbolts, battering-rams, ballists, and catapults, whose shapes were shown to us, not over-well understood by our engineers, architects, and other disciples of Vitruvius; as Master Philibert de l’Orme, King Megistus’s principal architect, has owned to us.

And seeing that sometimes all these tools of destruction were baffled by the cunning subtlety or the subtle cunning (which you please) of fortifiers, he lately invented cannons, field-pieces, culverins, bombards, basiliskos, murdering instruments that dart iron, leaden, and brazen balls, some of them outweighing huge anvils. This by the means of a most dreadful powder, whose hellish compound and effect has even amazed nature, and made her own herself outdone by art, the Oxydracian thunders, hails, and storms by which the people of that name immediately destroyed their enemies in the field being but mere potguns to these. For one of our great guns when used is more dreadful, more terrible, more diabolical, and maims, tears, breaks, slays, mows down, and sweeps away more men, and causes a greater consternation and destruction than a hundred thunderbolts.

Chapter 4.LXII.—How Gaster invented an art to avoid being hurt or touched by cannon-balls.

Gaster having secured himself with his corn within strongholds, has sometimes been attacked by enemies; his fortresses, by that thrice threefold cursed instrument, levelled and destroyed; his dearly beloved corn and bread snatched out of his mouth and sacked by a titanic force; therefore he then sought means to preserve his walls, bastions, rampiers, and sconces from cannon-shot, and to hinder the bullets from hitting him, stopping them in their flight, or at least from doing him or the besieged walls any damage. He showed us a trial of this which has been since used by Fronton, and is now common among the pastimes and harmless recreations of the Thelemites. I will tell you how he went to work, and pray for the future be a little more ready to believe what Plutarch affirms to have tried. Suppose a herd of goats were all scampering as if the devil drove them, do but put a bit of eringo into the mouth of the hindmost nanny, and they will all stop stock still in the time you can tell three.

Thus Gaster, having caused a brass falcon to be charged with a sufficient quantity of gunpowder well purged from its sulphur, and curiously made up with fine camphor, he then had a suitable ball put into the piece, with twenty-four little pellets like hail-shot, some round, some pearl fashion; then taking his aim and levelling it at a page of his, as if he would have hit him on the breast. About sixty strides off the piece, halfway between it and the page in a right line, he hanged on a gibbet by a rope a very large siderite or iron-like stone, otherwise called herculean, formerly found on Ida in Phrygia by one Magnes, as Nicander writes, and commonly called loadstone; then he gave fire to the prime on the piece’s touch-hole, which in an instant consuming the powder, the ball and hail-shot were with incredible violence and swiftness hurried out of the gun at its muzzle, that the air might penetrate to its chamber, where otherwise would have been a vacuum, which nature abhors so much, that this universal machine, heaven, air, land, and sea, would sooner return to the primitive chaos than admit the least void anywhere. Now the ball and small shot, which threatened the page with no less than quick destruction, lost their impetuosity and remained suspended and hovering round the stone; nor did any of them, notwithstanding the fury with which they rushed, reach the page.

Master Gaster could do more than all this yet, if you will believe me; for he invented a way how to cause bullets to fly backwards, and recoil on those that sent them with as great a force, and in the very numerical parallel for which the guns were planted. And indeed, why should he have thought this difficult? seeing the herb ethiopis opens all locks whatsoever, and an echinus or remora, a silly weakly fish, in spite of all the winds that blow from the thirty-two points of the compass, will in the midst of a hurricane make you the biggest first-rate remain stock still, as if she were becalmed or the blustering tribe had blown their last. Nay, and with the flesh of that fish, preserved with salt, you may fish gold out of the deepest well that was ever sounded with a plummet; for it will certainly draw up the precious metal, since Democritus affirmed it. Theophrastus believed and experienced that there was an herb at whose single touch an iron wedge, though never so far driven into a huge log of the hardest wood that is, would presently come out; and it is this same herb your hickways, alias woodpeckers, use, when with some mighty axe anyone stops up the hole of their nests, which they industriously dig and make in the trunk of some sturdy tree. Since stags and hinds, when deeply wounded with darts, arrows, and bolts, if they do but meet the herb called dittany, which is common in Candia, and eat a little of it, presently the shafts come out and all is well again; even as kind Venus cured her beloved byblow Aeneas when he was wounded on the right thigh with an arrow by Juturna, Turnus’s sister. Since the very wind of laurels, fig-trees, or sea-calves makes the thunder sheer off insomuch that it never strikes them. Since at the sight of a ram, mad elephants recover their former senses. Since mad bulls coming near wild fig-trees, called caprifici, grow tame, and will not budge a foot, as if they had the cramp. Since the venomous rage of vipers is assuaged if you but touch them with a beechen bough. Since also Euphorion writes that in the isle of Samos, before Juno’s temple was built there, he has seen some beasts called neades, whose voice made the neighbouring places gape and sink into a chasm and abyss. In short, since elders grow of a more pleasing sound, and fitter to make flutes, in such places where the crowing of cocks is not heard, as the ancient sages have writ and Theophrastus relates; as if the crowing of a cock dulled, flattened, and perverted the wood of the elder, as it is said to astonish and stupify with fear that strong and resolute animal, a lion. I know that some have understood this of wild elder, that grows so far from towns or villages that the crowing of cocks cannot reach near it; and doubtless that sort ought to be preferred to the stenching common elder that grows about decayed and ruined places; but others have understood this in a higher sense, not literal, but allegorical, according to the method of the Pythagoreans, as when it was said that Mercury’s statue could not be made of every sort of wood; to which sentence they gave this sense, that God is not to be worshipped in a vulgar form, but in a chosen and religious manner. In the same manner, by this elder which grows far from places where cocks are heard, the ancients meant that the wise and studious ought not to give their minds to trivial or vulgar music, but to that which is celestial, divine, angelical, more abstracted, and brought from remoter parts, that is, from a region where the crowing of cocks is not heard; for, to denote a solitary and unfrequented place, we say cocks are never heard to crow there.

Chapter 4.LXIII.—How Pantagruel fell asleep near the island of Chaneph, and of the problems proposed to be solved when he waked.

The next day, merrily pursuing our voyage, we came in sight of the island of Chaneph, where Pantagruel’s ship could not arrive, the wind chopping about, and then failing us so that we were becalmed, and could hardly get ahead, tacking about from starboard to larboard, and larboard to starboard, though to our sails we added drabblers.

With this accident we were all out of sorts, moping, drooping, metagrabolized, as dull as dun in the mire, in C sol fa ut flat, out of tune, off the hinges, and I-don’t-know-howish, without caring to speak one single syllable to each other.

Pantagruel was taking a nap, slumbering and nodding on the quarter-deck by the cuddy, with an Heliodorus in his hand; for still it was his custom to sleep better by book than by heart.

Epistemon was conjuring, with his astrolabe, to know what latitude we were in.

Friar John was got into the cook-room, examining, by the ascendant of the spits and the horoscope of ragouts and fricassees, what time of day it might then be.

Panurge (sweet baby!) held a stalk of Pantagruelions, alias hemp, next his tongue, and with it made pretty bubbles and bladders.

Gymnast was making tooth-pickers with lentisk.

Ponocrates, dozing, dozed, and dreaming, dreamed; tickled himself to make himself laugh, and with one finger scratched his noddle where it did not itch.

Carpalin, with a nutshell and a trencher of verne (that’s a card in Gascony), was making a pretty little merry windmill, cutting the card longways into four slips, and fastening them with a pin to the convex of the nut, and its concave to the tarred side of the gunnel of the ship.

Eusthenes, bestriding one of the guns, was playing on it with his fingers as if it had been a trump-marine.

Rhizotome, with the soft coat of a field tortoise, alias ycleped a mole, was making himself a velvet purse.

Xenomanes was patching up an old weather-beaten lantern with a hawk’s jesses.

Our pilot (good man!) was pulling maggots out of the seamen’s noses.

At last Friar John, returning from the forecastle, perceived that Pantagruel was awake. Then breaking this obstinate silence, he briskly and cheerfully asked him how a man should kill time, and raise good weather, during a calm at sea.

Panurge, whose belly thought his throat cut, backed the motion presently, and asked for a pill to purge melancholy.

Epistemon also came on, and asked how a man might be ready to bepiss himself with laughing when he has no heart to be merry.

Gymnast, arising, demanded a remedy for a dimness of eyes.

Ponocrates, after he had a while rubbed his noddle and shaken his ears, asked how one might avoid dog-sleep. Hold! cried Pantagruel, the Peripatetics have wisely made a rule that all problems, questions, and doubts which are offered to be solved ought to be certain, clear, and intelligible. What do you mean by dog-sleep? I mean, answered Ponocrates, to sleep fasting in the sun at noonday, as the dogs do.

Rhizotome, who lay stooping on the pump, raised his drowsy head, and lazily yawning, by natural sympathy set almost everyone in the ship a-yawning too; then he asked for a remedy against oscitations and gapings.

Xenomanes, half puzzled, and tired out with new-vamping his antiquated lantern, asked how the hold of the stomach might be so well ballasted and freighted from the keel to the main hatch, with stores well stowed, that our human vessels might not heel or be walt, but well trimmed and stiff.

Carpalin, twirling his diminutive windmill, asked how many motions are to be felt in nature before a gentleman may be said to be hungry.

Eusthenes, hearing them talk, came from between decks, and from the capstan called out to know why a man that is fasting, bit by a serpent also fasting, is in greater danger of death than when man and serpent have eat their breakfasts;—why a man’s fasting-spittle is poisonous to serpents and venomous creatures.

One single solution may serve for all your problems, gentlemen, answered Pantagruel; and one single medicine for all such symptoms and accidents. My answer shall be short, not to tire you with a long needless train of pedantic cant. The belly has no ears, nor is it to be filled with fair words; you shall be answered to content by signs and gestures. As formerly at Rome, Tarquin the Proud, its last king, sent an answer by signs to his son Sextus, who was among the Gabii at Gabii. (Saying this, he pulled the string of a little bell, and Friar John hurried away to the cook-room.) The son having sent his father a messenger to know how he might bring the Gabii under a close subjection, the king, mistrusting the messenger, made him no answer, and only took him into his privy garden, and in his presence with his sword lopped off the heads of the tall poppies that were there. The express returned without any other despatch, yet having related to the prince what he had seen his father do, he easily understood that by those signs he advised him to cut off the heads of the chief men in the town, the better to keep under the rest of the people.

Chapter 4.LXIV.—How Pantagruel gave no answer to the problems.

Pantagruel then asked what sort of people dwelt in that damned island. They are, answered Xenomanes, all hypocrites, holy mountebanks, tumblers of beads, mumblers of ave-marias, spiritual comedians, sham saints, hermits, all of them poor rogues who, like the hermit of Lormont between Blaye and Bordeaux, live wholly on alms given them by passengers. Catch me there if you can, cried Panurge; may the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows if ever you find me among them! Hermits, sham saints, living forms of mortification, holy mountebanks, avaunt! in the name of your father Satan, get out of my sight! When the devil’s a hog, you shall eat bacon. I shall not forget yet awhile our fat Concilipetes of Chesil. O that Beelzebub and Astaroth had counselled them to hang themselves out of the way, and they had done’t! we had not then suffered so much by devilish storms as we did for having seen ‘em. Hark ye me, dear rogue, Xenomanes, my friend, I prithee are these hermits, hypocrites, and eavesdroppers maids or married? Is there anything of the feminine gender among them? Could a body hypocritically take there a small hypocritical touch? Will they lie backwards, and let out their fore-rooms? There’s a fine question to be asked, cried Pantagruel. Yes, yes, answered Xenomanes; you may find there many goodly hypocritesses, jolly spiritual actresses, kind hermitesses, women that have a plaguy deal of religion; then there’s the copies of ‘em, little hypocritillons, sham sanctitos, and hermitillons. Foh! away with them, cried Friar John; a young saint, an old devil! (Mark this, an old saying, and as true a one as, a young whore, an old saint.) Were there not such, continued Xenomanes, the isle of Chaneph, for want of a multiplication of progeny, had long ere this been desert and desolate.

Pantagruel sent them by Gymnast in the pinnace seventy-eight thousand fine pretty little gold half-crowns, of those that are marked with a lantern. After this he asked, What’s o’clock? Past nine, answered Epistemon. It is then the best time to go to dinner, said Pantagruel; for the sacred line so celebrated by Aristophanes in his play called Concionatrices is at hand, never failing when the shadow is decempedal.

Formerly, among the Persians, dinner-time was at a set hour only for kings; as for all others, their appetite and their belly was their clock; when that chimed, they thought it time to go to dinner. So we find in Plautus a certain parasite making a heavy do, and sadly railing at the inventors of hour-glasses and dials as being unnecessary things, there being no clock more regular than the belly.

Diogenes being asked at what times a man ought to eat, answered, The rich when he is hungry, the poor when he has anything to eat. Physicians more properly say that the canonical hours are,

The famous king Petosiris’s magic was different,—Here the officers for the gut came in, and got ready the tables and cupboards; laid the cloth, whose sight and pleasant smell were very comfortable; and brought plates, napkins, salts, tankards, flagons, tall-boys, ewers, tumblers, cups, goblets, basins, and cisterns.

Friar John, at the head of the stewards, sewers, yeomen of the pantry, and of the mouth, tasters, carvers, cupbearers, and cupboard-keepers, brought four stately pasties, so huge that they put me in mind of the four bastions at Turin. Ods-fish, how manfully did they storm them! What havoc did they make with the long train of dishes that came after them! How bravely did they stand to their pan-puddings, and paid off their dust! How merrily did they soak their noses!

The fruit was not yet brought in, when a fresh gale at west and by north began to fill the main-course, mizen-sail, fore-sail, tops, and top-gallants; for which blessing they all sung divers hymns of thanks and praise.

When the fruit was on the table, Pantagruel asked, Now tell me, gentlemen, are your doubts fully resolved or no? I gape and yawn no more, answered Rhizotome. I sleep no longer like a dog, said Ponocrates. I have cleared my eyesight, said Gymnast. I have broke my fast, said Eusthenes; so that for this whole day I shall be secure from the danger of my spittle.

Chapter 4.LXV.—How Pantagruel passed the time with his servants.

In what hierarchy of such venomous creatures do you place Panurge’s future spouse? asked Friar John. Art thou speaking ill of women, cried Panurge, thou mangy scoundrel, thou sorry, noddy-peaked shaveling monk? By the cenomanic paunch and gixy, said Epistemon, Euripides has written, and makes Andromache say it, that by industry, and the help of the gods, men had found remedies against all poisonous creatures; but none was yet found against a bad wife.

This flaunting Euripides, cried Panurge, was gabbling against women every foot, and therefore was devoured by dogs, as a judgment from above; as Aristophanes observes. Let’s go on. Let him speak that is next. I can leak now like any stone-horse, said then Epistemon. I am, said Xenomanes, full as an egg and round as a hoop; my ship’s hold can hold no more, and will now make shift to bear a steady sail. Said Carpalin, A truce with thirst, a truce with hunger; they are strong, but wine and meat are stronger. I’m no more in the dumps cried Panurge; my heart’s a pound lighter. I’m in the right cue now, as brisk as a body-louse, and as merry as a beggar. For my part, I know what I do when I drink; and it is a true thing (though ‘tis in your Euripides) that is said by that jolly toper Silenus of blessed memory, that—

We must not fail to return our humble and hearty thanks to the Being who, with this good bread, this cool delicious wine, these good meats and rare dainties, removes from our bodies and minds these pains and perturbations, and at the same time fills us with pleasure and with food.

But methinks, sir, you did not give an answer to Friar John’s question; which, as I take it, was how to raise good weather. Since you ask no more than this easy question, answered Pantagruel, I’ll strive to give you satisfaction; and some other time we’ll talk of the rest of the problems, if you will.

Well then, Friar John asked how good weather might be raised. Have we not raised it? Look up and see our full topsails. Hark how the wind whistles through the shrouds, what a stiff gale it blows. Observe the rattling of the tacklings, and see the sheets that fasten the mainsail behind; the force of the wind puts them upon the stretch. While we passed our time merrily, the dull weather also passed away; and while we raised the glasses to our mouths, we also raised the wind by a secret sympathy in nature.

Thus Atlas and Hercules clubbed to raise and underprop the falling sky, if you’ll believe the wise mythologists, but they raised it some half an inch too high, Atlas to entertain his guest Hercules more pleasantly, and Hercules to make himself amends for the thirst which some time before had tormented him in the deserts of Africa. Your good father, said Friar John, interrupting him, takes care to free many people from such an inconveniency; for I have been told by many venerable doctors that his chief-butler, Turelupin, saves above eighteen hundred pipes of wine yearly to make servants, and all comers and goers, drink before they are a-dry. As the camels and dromedaries of a caravan, continued Pantagruel, use to drink for the thirst that’s past, for the present, and for that to come, so did Hercules; and being thus excessively raised, this gave new motion to the sky, which is that of titubation and trepidation, about which our crackbrained astrologers make such a pother. This, said Panurge, makes the saying good: