To the Burgundy wine of France we owe this moral analgesia, which chases away passions and all cares engendered by stupid worldly ambition. He preferred the face of a jolly drunkard to the head of a tyrannical Cæsar. He loved the wine bibber’s nose, as he says “that musical bugle richly inlaid with colors of gorgeous design, purple, with crimson bands, enameled with jewel-like pimples, embroidered with veins of heavenly blue. Such a nose has the good priest Panzoult, and Piedbois, physician at Angers.” Rabelais did not ignore the fact that these “good drinkers” once had the gout, for he did not forget to give a medical prognosis in the case of the voracious Gargantura. “All his life he will be subject to gravel.” But what difference is it though he had gravel, and the red nose, that glorious work of Bacchus? He derived his warmest consolation from the thought that a little good wine heated his blood and soothed the bitterness of life, making him forget the injustice of some, and the ingratitude of others; a veritable _nepenthe_ for his miseries, cares and apprehensions. Every good drinker is a sage. Horace had said so, and Rabelais who had read this master of Latin poetry, inscribed on the front of his dwelling place “HIC BIBITUR.” “_Within this place they drink wine, that delicious, precious, celestial, joyous, God-given, nectar and liquor._” But, at the bottom of Master Francois Rabelais’ cask was a flavor not fancied by all the world, the taste of free thought, opposition to all tyranny, a Homeric spirit with a sonorous voice whose echo will resound into future ages. Our authors, including historians, philosophers and poets, revere his memory; and one of their greatest minds has said: “Rabelais was a Gaul, and what is Gallic is Grecian, for Rabelais is the formidable masque of antique comedy detached from the Greek proscenium, bronze turned into living flesh, a human face full of laughter, making us merry and laughing with us.” A similar judgment is pronounced by the author of _Burgraves_, and _Notre Dame de Paris_. Rabelais is immortal in spite of the ecclesiastical detractors who have covertly assailed his memory for several centuries. A doctor, philosopher, writer, he was the first exception in the positive world, of that profound faith identical with science. It was for that reason that the physicians of the Middle Ages looked up to him as one of their glories; it is for this reason that his works should hereafter be placed among the medical classics and no longer remain neglected by the masses of that profession he honored. In the epitaph he left, he did not forget the doctoral title he always so honorably bore: “Cordiger et medicus, dein pastor et intus obivi, Si nomen quæris, te mea Scripta docent.”[107]