THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH
677
unaltered. When, at the city gate, Alcofrybas is asked for his health
certificate, because the plague is rampant in the great cities of the
land, this is a reference to the pestilence which raged in the cities of
northern France during the years 1532 and 1533
(d.
A.
Lefranc's
Introduction to his critical edition, p. xxxi ) ; the fine mountain land–
scape of the teeth is a picture of the Western European agricultural
countryside, and the country houses are built in the Italian style,
which was beginning to become the fashion in France too at that
period; and in the village where Alcofrybas spends the last days of his
stay in Pantagruel's mouth, the situation, except for the grotesque
method of earning money by sleeping, at five to six sous per diem,
with an extra bonus for powerful snorers (a recollection of the
traditional Land of Cockaigne), is thoroughly European; when the
senators condole with him for having been robbed on his way
through the mountain forest, they give him to understand that the
people "over yonder" are uncultured barbarians who do not know
how to live, whence he infers that in Pantagruel's maw there are
countries on this side and on the other side of the teeth, as at home
there are countries on this side and the other side of the mountains.
Whereas Lucian produces what is in all essentials a fantasy of
travel and adventure, and the chapbook puts all the emphasis on the
grotesqueness of enlarged dimensions, Rabelais maintains a con–
stant interplay of different locales, different themes, and different
stylistic levels. While Alcofrybas, the Abstractor of Quintessences, is
making his journey of discovery through Pantagruel's mouth, Panta–
gruel and his army continue the war against the Almyrodes aQd
Dipsodes; and in the journey of discovery itself, at least three dif–
ferent categories of experiences are mingled. The framework is pro–
vided by the grotesque theme of gigantic dimensions, which is never
for a moment left out of sight and is constantly recalled by ever-new
and absurd comic conceits; by the pigeons that fly into the giant's
mouth when he yawns, by the explanation of the plague as the result
of Pantagruel's eating garlic and the poisonous vapors which rise
from his stomach afterwards, by the transformation of the teeth into
a mountain landscape, by the manner of the return journey, and by
the closing conversation. Meanwhile there is developed an entirely dif–
ferent, entirely new, and, at the period, highly "live" theme-the
