Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 4Rabelais, François
General
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 4
Rabelais, François
Fantasy fiction, French -- Translations into English; Gargantua (Legendary character) -- Fiction; Giants -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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