Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 5Rabelais, François
Science
Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 5
Rabelais, François
Fantasy fiction, French -- Translations into English; Gargantua (Legendary character) -- Fiction; Giants -- Fiction
From thence, as he was leading us to see a thousand little puny presses, we
spied another paltry bar, about which sat four are five ignorant waspish
churls, of so testy, fuming a temper, (like an ass with squibs and crackers
tied to its tail,) and so ready to take pepper in the nose for yea and nay,
that a dog would not have lived with 'em. They were hard at it with the
lees and dregs of the grapes, which they gripped over and over again, might
and main, with their clenched fists. They were called contractors in the
language of the country. These are the ugliest, misshapen, grim-looking
scrubs, said Friar John, that ever were beheld, with or without spectacles.
Then we passed by an infinite number of little pimping wine-presses all
full of vintage-mongers, who were picking, examining, and raking the grapes
with some instruments called bills-of-charge.
Finally we came into a hall downstairs, where we saw an overgrown cursed
mangy cur with a pair of heads, a wolf's belly, and claws like the devil of
hell. The son of a bitch was fed with costs, for he lived on a
multiplicity of fine amonds and amerciaments by order of their worships, to
each of whom the monster was worth more than the best farm in the land. In
their tongue of ignorance they called him Twofold. His dam lay by him, and
her hair and shape was like her whelp's, only she had four heads, two male
and two female, and her name was Fourfold. She was certainly the most
cursed and dangerous creature of the place, except her grandam, which we
saw, and had been kept locked up in a dungeon time out of mind, and her
name was Refusing-of-fees.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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