Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 3Rabelais, François
General
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 3
Rabelais, François
Fantasy fiction, French -- Translations into English; Gargantua (Legendary character) -- Fiction; Giants -- Fiction
A junto hereupon
being convocated, the better to consult upon the manner of obviating a so
dreadful danger, Jove, sitting in his presidential throne, asked the votes
of all the other gods, which, after a profound deliberation amongst
themselves on all contingencies, they freely gave at last, and then
resolved unanimously to withstand the shocks of all whatsoever sublunary
assaults.
Chapter 3.LII.
How a certain kind of Pantagruelion is of that nature that the fire is not
able to consume it.
I have already related to you great and admirable things; but, if you might
be induced to adventure upon the hazard of believing some other divinity of
this sacred Pantagruelion, I very willingly would tell it you. Believe it,
if you will, or otherwise, believe it not, I care not which of them you do,
they are both alike to me. It shall be sufficient for my purpose to have
told you the truth, and the truth I will tell you. But to enter in
thereat, because it is of a knaggy, difficult, and rugged access, this is
the question which I ask of you. If I had put within this bottle two
pints, the one of wine and the other of water, thoroughly and exactly
mingled together, how would you unmix them? After what manner would you go
about to sever them, and separate the one liquor from the other, in such
sort that you render me the water apart, free from the wine, and the wine
also pure, without the intermixture of one drop of water, and both of them
in the same measure, quantity, and taste that I had embottled them? Or, to
state the question otherwise. If your carmen and mariners, entrusted for
the provision of your houses with the bringing of a certain considerable
number of tuns, puncheons, pipes, barrels, and hogsheads of Graves wine, or
of the wine of Orleans, Beaune, and Mireveaux, should drink out the half,
and afterwards with water fill up the other empty halves of the vessels as
full as before, as the Limosins use to do in their carriages by wains and
carts of the wines of Argenton and Sangaultier; after that, how would you
part the water from the wine, and purify them both in such a case? I
understand you well enough. Your meaning is, that I must do it with an ivy
funnel. That is written, it is true, and the verity thereof explored by a
thousand experiments; you have learned to do this feat before, I see it.
But those that have never known it, nor at any time have seen the like,
would hardly believe that it were possible. Let us nevertheless proceed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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