THE WORLD IN PANTAGRUEL'S MOUTH
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which such passages evoke break through all the ideas of order and
decency which were in force at the time.
If
one reads such a short
text as, for example, the exhortation by Friar Jean des Entommeures
in Book I, chapter 42, one finds two robust jokes in it. The first is in
regard to the charm which protects against heavy artillery: Frere Jean
does not merely say that he does not believe in it, he effortlessly
changes the level of observation, places himself on that of the
church, which enforces the belief as
.a
condition of divine aid, and,
from that point of view, says: the charm will not help me because I
do not believe a word of it. The second joke
is
in regard to the effect
of a monk's frock. Frere Jean begins with the threat that he will
drape his frock over any man who shows himself a coward. Naturally
one's first thought is that this is intended as a punishment and a dis–
grace; any man so clad would be forthwith dispossessed of the
qualities of a proper man. But no, in a twinkling, he changes the
viewpoint: the frock is medicine for unmanly men; they become men
as soon as they have it on; by this he means that deprivation enforced
by vows and the monastic life, particularly increases the virile capaci–
ties both of courage and sexual potency; and he concludes his ex–
hortation with the anecdote of the Sieur de Meurles' "feeble-reined"
greyhound, which was wrapped in a monk's frock; from that moment
no fox or hare escaped him and he served all the bitches in the neigh–
borhood, though previously he had been among the
((frigidis et male–
ficiatis"
(this is the title of a decretal). Or again, read the long–
drawn-out account of the things which serve for wiping the posterior,
to which the young Gargantua treats us in Book I, chapter 13: what
a wealth of improvisation! We find poems and syllogisms, medicine,
zoology, and botany, contemporary satire and costume lore; finally
the delight which the intestines share with the whole body when the
act referred to is performed with the neck of a young, live, well–
downed gosling,
is
connected with the bliss of the heroes and demi–
gods in the Elysian fields, and Grandgousier compares the wit which
his son had displayed on this occasion with that of the young Alex–
ander in Plutarch's well-known anecdote which tells how he alone
recognized the cause of a horse's wildness, namely its fear of its own
shadow.
Let us consider a few selected passages from the later Books. In
Book III, chapter 31, the physician Rondibilis, consulted by Panurge
