674
PARTISAN REVIEW
La commenfay penser qu'il est bien vray ce que l'on dit que la moytie
du monde ne sfait comment l'autre vit, veu qu nul avoit encores
escrit de ce pais la, auquel sont plus de XXV royaulmes habitez, sans
les desers et un gros bras de mer, mais len ai compose un grand livre
intitute l'Histoire des Gorgias, car ainsi les ay-je nommez parce qu'ilz
demourent en La gorge de mon maistre Pantagruel. Finablement vou–
Luz retourner, et passant par sa barbe, me gettay sur ses epaulles, et de
la me devalle en terre et tumbe devant luy. Quand il me apperceut,
il me demandas: ((D'ont viens tu, Alcofrybas?
-
Je luy responds:
De vostre gorge, Monsieur.
-
Et depuis quand y es tu, dist ill -
Despuis, dis je, que vous alliez contre les Almyrodes.
-
Il y a, dist il,
plus de six mois. Et de quoy vivois tu? Que beuvoys tu?-Je responds:
Seigneur, de mesme vous, et des plus frians morceaulx qui passoient
par vostre gorge' len prenois le barraige.
-
Voire mais, dist il,
OU
chioys tu?
-
En vostre gorge, Monsieur, dis-je.
-
Ha, ha, tu es gentil
compaignon, dist il. N ous avons, avecques
l'
ayde de Dieu, conqueste
tout
Ie
pays des Dipsodes; je te donne la chatellenie de Salmigondin.
- Grand mercy, dis je, Monsieur. Vous me faictes de bien plus que
n'ay deservy envers vous."
Rabelais did not himself invent the theme of this comic ad–
venture. In the chapbook of the Giant Gargantua (I use a reprint
of a copy preserved in Dresden, from W. Weigand's edition of Regis'
translation of Rabelais, 3rd ed., Berlin, 1923, Vol. II, pp. 398 ff.:
d.
also note 7 in Abel Lefranc's critical edition, IV, 330), we .are told
how the 2,943 armed men who were to strangle Gargantua in his
sleep wandered into his open mouth, mistaking the teeth for great
cliffs, and how later, when he quenched his thirst after sleeping, all
but three of them were drowned, the three saving themselves in a
hollow tooth. In a later passage of the chapbook Gargantua gives fifty
prisoners temporary quarters in a hollow tooth; they even find an
indoor tennis court there, a
jeu de paume,
to keep them amused.
(Rabelais uses the hollow tooth in another passage, in the thirty–
eighth chapter of the First Book, where Gargantua swallows six pil–
grims and a head of lettuce.) Aside from these French sources,
Rabelais has in mind, in connection with our passage, an ancient
author whom he highly esteemed, Lucian, who in his "True History"
(I, 30 ff.) tells of a sea monster which swallows a ship with all its
crew; in its maw they find woods, mountains, and lakes, in which
