TRAVAUX D'HUMANISME ET RENAISSANCE

CCCXVI

EDWIN M. DUVAL.

The Design of Rabelais’s "Tiers Livre de Pantagruel"

LIBRAIRIE DROZ

11, rue Massot

GENÈVE

1997

www.droz.org

Copyright 1997 by Librairie Droz S.A., 11, rue Massot, Genève.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
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NOUVELLES FRANÇAISES DU XVIe SIÈCLE

NOUVELLES FRANÇAISES
DU XVIe SIÈCLE

IMAGES
DE LA VIE DU TEMPS

GENÈVE

LIBRAIRIE DROZ

11, Rue Massot

1997

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments.

11

A Note on Texts and Abbreviations.

13

Chapter 1. Rabelais’s

Art et Maniere d’Escrire Histoires

.

15

Chapter 2. Good and Bad Government in Dipsodie.

29

Chapter 3. The Economy of Love.

43

Chapter 4. Pantagrueline Prognostication.

57

Chapter 5. Pantagruel’s

Chanson de Ricochet

.

81

Chapter 6. The Word at the Center.

107

Chapter 7. Judging the Juge Bridoy.

133

Chapter 8. Panurge in the House of Bondage.

155

Chapter 9. Interpreting Rabelais.

187

Appendix I. Parallels between Lucian’s

How to Write History

and the Prologue to Rabelais’s

Tiers Livre

.

223

Appendix II. Parallels between Lucian’s

A Prometheus in Words

and the Prologue to Rabelais’s

Tiers Livre

.

226

Appendix III. Parallels among Consultations with Frere Jan, Hippothadée, and Rondibilis

228

Appendix IV. Parallels between Consultations with Pantagruel and Epistemon.

231

Appendix V. The Design of Rabelais’s

Tiers Livre de Pantagruel

.

233

References.

235

Index.

243

Epigraphe

Deus enim creator est omnium, qui ubi et quando creari quid oporteat vel oportuerit, ipse novit, sciens universitatis pulchritudinem quarum partium vel similitudine vel diversitate contexat. Sed qui totum inspicere non potest, tamquam deformitate partis offenditur, quoniam cui congruat et quo referatur ignorat.
Augustine,

De civitate dei

16.8

Forma mutata mutatur substantia…. Forma dat esse rei.
Bridoye

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book continues the project begun in

The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel

(New Haven and London : Yale University Press, 1991), extending the study of «  design » to the second of Rabelais’s Pantagrueline epics, the so-called

« Tiers Livre de Pantagruel

 ». The

Tiers Livre

is by general agreement the most learned and complex of all Rabelais’s works. It is also the most experimental in its subject, form, and purpose. It is arguably the most difficult and original work of narrative fiction written in the Renaissance. For these reasons the

Tiers Livre

remains an elusive book, even after a century of superb scholarship devoted to it, and a book frustrat-ingly inaccessible to modern readers. We are ill prepared by our culture, experience, and sensibility to perceive the design of a work so dependent for its meaning on a vast range of classical and biblical learning, on archaic traditions of literary composition, and on indirect forms and modes of expression favored by the world’s great and misunderstood ironists - Socrates, Diogenes, Christ, Lucian, and Erasmus.

In the present study, as in the first one, I have attempted to bring to a bewilder-ingly complex work as much as I could of the knowledge and experience it presupposes in its readers (aided in this by the erudition of many earlier scholars, M.A. Screech first among them) and thus prepared to discern and respond to its « design » - its intention, its structure, and its built-in guides to interpretation - as completely and as faithfully as possible. As in the first volume, my single aim has been to put before the reader as complete and accurate an account as I could of the nature and meaning of Rabelais’s work - not only what the work is about but, more important, the indirect and purely literary means by which it signifies what it does.

Although the writing of this book has taken fifteen years and some parts of it date from the early 1980s, most was written in 1992-93 at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where I was able to spend a year of uninterrupted work thanks to a generous Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Yale University Senior Faculty Fellowship. I am very grateful to the NEH, the NHC, and Corporation of Yale University for the support without which this book could not possibly have been written. The larger project of which this book is a part has received support from many other sources as well. A University of California Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship in 1979, a University of California Regents’ Humanities Fellowship in 1983, and a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1983-84, all contributed to the completion of the companions to the present book.

Chapters One and Five of this book include portions of an article published in two different forms elsewhere : « Pantagruel’s

chanson de ricochet

and Rabelais’s

art et manière d’escrire histoires »

, which appeared in

Rabelais in Context : Proceedings of

the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference

, ed. Barbara C. Bowen (Birmingham, AL : Summa Publications, 1993), pp. 21-38, and « History, Epic, and the Design of Rabelais’s

Tiers Livre  »

, which appeared in

François Rabelais : Critical Assessments

, ed. Jean-Claude Carron (Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 121-32. Chapters Six and Seven incorporate and develop arguments first presented in two articles published in the early 1980s : « Panurge, Perplexity, and the Ironic Design of Rabelais’s

Tiers Livre », Renaissance Quarterly

, 35 : 3 (1982), 381-400, and « The Juge Bridoye, Pantagruelism, and the Unity of Rabelais’

Tiers Livre », Etudes Rabelaisiennes

, 17 (1983), 37-60. I wish to thank Summa Publications, The Johns Hopkins University Press, The Renaissance Society of America, and the Librairie Droz for their kind permission to reprint portions of those earlier publications here.

This book is dedicated to the friends who have encouraged me in this project from the beginning and have given me the courage to pursue it even when our views of Rabelais diverged. To the faithful Pantagruelists : Richard Helgerson, David Quint, Ray La Charité, Gérard Defaux, François Rigolot, Barbara Bowen, André Tournon.

Yale University

August 16, 1995

A NOTE ON TEXTS AND ABBREVIATIONS

The text of Rabelais used in this book is that of the

Œuvres complètes

superbly edited by Mireille Huchon and published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1994. Quotations from Rabelais’s works will be identified by title, chapter, and page number in this edition (see list of abbreviations below). I have also consulted editions of the Œ

uvres complètes

edited by Pierre Jourda (Paris : Garnier, 1962) and Guy Demerson (Paris  : Seuil, 1973), critical editions of the

Tiers Livre

edited by Abel Lefranc and his team (Paris : Champion, 1931) and M.A. Screech (Geneva : Droz, 1964), and a photocopy of the « definitive » edition of the

Tiers Livre

(Paris : Michel Fezandat, 1552) held at the Bibliothèque Nationale (Rés Y

2

2162), kindly given to me by Gérard Defaux. The most recent critical edition of the

Tiers Livre

edited by Jean Céard (Paris : Livre de Poche, 1995) appeared too late to be consulted before this book was completed.

For the sake of convenience I quote Greek and Latin classics (unless otherwise indicated) from the editions of the Loeb Classical Library, checking these wherever appropriate against sixteenth-century editions available to Rabelais and his readers. Similarly for convenience I quote Erasmus’s works in the accessible modern facsimile of the eighteenth-century Clericus edition of the

Opera Omnia

(which was in turn based on the Basel edition of 1544), checking it also wherever appropriate against original sixteenth-century editions or against the new standard but still incomplete edition of the

Opera Omnia

published in Amsterdam by the North-Holland Publishing Company. The text of the Bible quoted here is that of the Revised Standard Version except in cases where the Vulgate offers a different reading that is important for a proper understanding of Rabelais’s work. In all such cases I have modified the RSV by substituting an English equivalent of the Vulgate reading in brackets. All translations from Greek, Latin, and French in this book are my own.

Principal abbreviations used throughout these pages are the following :

AP

Horace,

Ars poetica

BHR

Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance

CL

Le Cinquiesme Livre

Div

Cicero,

De divinatione

ER

Etudes Rabelaisiennes

G

Gargantua

HN

Pliny,

Historia naturalis

Inst

Erasmus,

Institutio principis christiani

, ed. O. Herding

NRB

A New Rabelais Bibliography

, ed. S. Rawles,

et al.

Opera

Erasmus,

Opera Omnia

, ed. J. Clericus

P

Pantagruel

PL

Patrologia Latina

, ed. Migne

Plan

Plan, Pierre-Paul,

Bibliographie Rabelaisienne : les éditions de Rabelais de 1532 à 1711

PPr

Pantagrueline Prognostication

QL

Le Quart Livre

RSV

Bible, Revised Standard Version

STFM

Société des Textes Français Modernes

THR

Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance

TL

Le Tiers Livre

TLF

Textes Littéraires Français

CHAPTER 1 RABELAIS’S

ART ET MANIERE D’ESCRIRE HISTOIRES

Some fourteen years after the

Pantagruel

first appeared at the Lyon fair in 1532, Rabelais published a sequel to his great epic of redemption and brotherly reconciliation under the title :

Tiers Livre des faictz et dictz Heroïques du noble Pantagruel.

The

Tiers Livre

takes up the narrative precisely where the first Pantagrueline epic left off to pursue the history of the messianic hero, Pantagruel, and his epic companion, Panurge, beyond their great victory over the invading Dipsodes and into the liberated, pacified realm of Dipsodie itself.

Despite this clear continuity of character and plot, the sequel is an utterly perplexing book entirely unlike its predecessor. Contrary to what its title suggests, Pantagruel’s « deeds and words » do not seem even remotely heroic. Nor does Pantagruel himself appear to be the hero. The focal character would appear to be Panurge and the subject something as unheroic as marriage and cuckoldry - a marriage that never takes place, moreover, and the cuckoldry that might or might not result if it did. Or perhaps the subject is predestination, providence, and freedom of the will. Or Christian folly and the wisdom of the world. Or the progress and limits of science. Or the polyvalence of language and the impossibility of univocal interpretation. It is hard to know precisely

what

this book is about.

The form of the

Tiers Livre

is even more anomalous than its subject. Unlike the

Pantagruel

, the sequel conforms to no known epic pattern, nor indeed to any recognizable narrative model. The

Tiers Livre

begins neither

in medias res

, as classical epics do, nor

ah ovo

, as historical narratives do (including Alcofrybas’s original « epic New Testament »), but

in finem

. In the first chapter Pantagruel establishes a Utopian reign of never-ending peace and brotherly love in a liberated Dipsodie from which fratricide and war have been banished forever. This inaugural episode is transposed almost verbatim from the end of the preceding epic. As such it marks not the beginning of the story but the end, and the virtual end of history as it was recorded at the conclusion of that « epic to end all epics ». From this grandiose beginning, which is really an end, the narrative sinks to trivial matters, meanders through mock encomia of debts and codpieces, and eventually finds its way to a kind of quest whose agent (Panurge) and object (certainty of happiness in marriage) are hardly heroic, but which at least lends some belated direction to an apparently aimless narrative. But the quest, too, soon degenerates into a random series of inconclusive consultations that appear to be virtually interchangeable and that could obviously go on forever, signifying nothing and leading nowhere. Weighed down by great masses of erudition and interrupted by irrelevant digressions - diatribes, anecdotes, and

facetiae

, and an interminable trial that has no apparent relevance to either the quester or his telos - the quest never reaches its goal. The book ends without a climax or even a conclusion, as a still-perplexed Panurge doggedly vows to continue his search for a single « word », Pantagruel prepares a fleet of ships to transport his companion toward yet another consultation, and the narrator trails off in an irrelevant, enigmatic encomium of a weed.

It is difficult to imagine a more disorienting sequel to the book whose overarching epic design was so simple and straightforward. Unlike the perfectly teleolog-ical

Pantagruel

, which narrated a single redemptive exploit prophesied at the beginning, prepared in the middle, and accomplished at the end, the

Tiers Livre

begins with an ending, ends with a beginning, and contains within it an open-ended quest whose point is never clear and whose telos is indefinitely deferred. The reader must sympathize with Panurge. We too are perplexed and bewildered. Is there a design to Rabelais’s

Tiers Livre de Pantagruel

 ? Has Rabelais forgotten the rules for writing an epic, or even for writing a simple history ?

*
* *

The first intimations of a deliberate intention, if not a coherent design, may be seen in the fact that these very questions are raised explicitly within the text of the

Tiers Livre

itself. At two salient points in the work we find highly self-conscious, emblematic representations of the work as a whole, both of which emphasize its own anomalousness, suggesting that the apparent incoherence and directionlessness of the

Tiers Livre

are not accidental or indifferent aspects of the book, but themselves effects of a deliberate design.

The first of these representations is contained in the author’s prologue, where Rabelais establishes an explicit analogy between himself as a writer and the cynic philosopher Diogenes as a satirist of Corinthian folly. After observing the entire city of Corinth seized with terror and desperately preparing to defend itself against a rumored attack by Philip of Macedon, Diogenes retired to the edge of the city to « help » the Corinthians defend their home by rolling

his

home - the empty tub in which he lived - up and down and around Craneion hill in derisive imitation and implicit mockery of their frantic, futile, and dangerous efforts :

Y roulla le tonneau fictil, qui pour maison luy estoit contre les injures du ciel, et en grande vehemence d’esprit desployant ses braz… le devalloit de mont à val, et præci-pitoit par le Cranie : puys de val en mont le rapportoit, comme Sisyphus faict sa pierre : tant que peu s’en faillit, qu’il ne le defonçast

[

TL

prol. : 347-48]

Rabelais, finding himself in a situation identical to Diogenes’, does exactly the same thing. Like Diogenes (« Je pareillement ») he looks on as the entire kingdom of France single-mindedly devotes itself to intense military activity, making a dreadful spectacle of itself by playing out before the eyes of all Europe a bellicose « Tragicque comedie ». And like Diogenes he proposes to « help » his compatriots in cynic fashion, mimicking their foolish efforts by rolling his own « tonneau Diogenic » (pp. 348-49).

Given Diogenes’ obvious intention of holding up a mirror of ridicule to the Corinthians’ futile and foolish activity - futile because the luxurious Corinthians could never have withstood a Macedonian attack, foolish because Philip never intended to attack Corinth in the first place but made it the seat of a Hellenic congress after his victory at Chaeronea in 338 B.C. - the narrator’s analogy strongly suggests an anti-nationalistic pacifism antithetical to the military zeal attributed to the « tresnoble royaulme de France » and entirely consonant with the design of the preceding epic. But the principal function of the prologue is not to satirize dystopian militarism in France. It is to present the book that follows as something analogous to Diogenes’ tub. Whether we take the

Tiers Livre

to be the equivalent of a Diogenic « triballement de tonneau » (p. 349), as the initial comparison suggests, or as the convivial wine drawn from a messianic « tonneau inexpuisible » (p. 351), as the narrator goes on to suggest, the tub is explicitly identified as an emblem of this third book of « sentences Pantagruelicques » - or « Diogenicques », as Rabelais would also have them called (p. 350).

What this emblem suggests about the design of the

Tiers Livre

corresponds exactly to the reader’s first experience of the book itself. Diogenes’ parodic, intentionally ineffectual tub-rolling finds clear counterparts both in Panurge’s obstinate search for an elusive answer and in the mocking, anomalous epic sequel as a whole. The quest and the book, like Diogenes’ pantomime, appear perfectly Sisyphus-like in their pointlessness, repetitiveness, endlessness, and infinite futility. As for the « source vive, et vene perpetuelle » of an inexhaustible « Cornucopie de joyeuseté et raillerie » (pp. 351-52), it too finds a counterpart in the abundant, ever-renewed narrative that has no apparent telos or even end. The analogy of the prologue represents the

Tiers Livre

as a work so gratuitous in its mockery, so formless and repetitive, so ateleological, that it would seem to deserve and even to demand to be classed as a « Menippean satire »

But the prologue’s suggestion of designlessness is even more focused and ironic than this, for the anecdote about Diogenes, and indeed the articulation of the whole prologue, are borrowed directly from a work that was very well known to literate readers of the 1530s and 40s - a book by the greatest surviving author of authentic Menippean satire, Lucian of Samosata, entitled, significantly,

How to Write History

.. Many circumstances and details indicate that this book, and not some other work deriving from it, was the direct source for Rabelais’s prologue and that Rabelais intended for his readers to recognize it as such.. One such indication occurs at the very outset where the narrator introduces his anecdote with a nod to the title of his source. If you have not heard of Diogenes, he tells us, « de luy vous veulx presentement une

histoire narrer » (TL

prol. : 346, emphasis mine). In other words, Rabelais will narrate an « histoire » about Diogenes copied directly from the best-known treatise on how to narrate « histoire ».

Once we have recognized the source and recalled the original context of Rabelais’s anecdote we may begin to perceive a much more pointed irony in the use to which Rabelais puts it here. In the prologue of

How to Write History

Lucian, exactly like Rabelais in the prologue to the

Tiers Livre

, tells the story of Philip’s putative attack, of the Corinthians’ panic, and of Diogenes’ mimetic mock-frenzy (§3). Exactly like Rabelais he goes on to compare his own situation as a writer to Diogenes’ situation as a useless citizen and proposes to imitate the cynic in his own writing. And exactly like Rabelais he offers the following book as the equivalent of Diogenes’ parodic and censorious tub-rolling (§4). But there is a crucial difference between the two prologues. For Lucian, the current crisis analogous to the one at Corinth is not pandemic war-fever, as it is for Rabelais in a bellicose France. It is a comically tragic epidemic of

history writing

stimulated in an excessively literary Greece by the events of current wars. « There is no one », Lucian laments, « who is not writing a history. What is more, they all claim to be our Thucydi-deses, Herodotuses, and Xenophons. The old proverb is true, it seems : ’war is the father of all things’, since it has begotten so many writers all at one blow » (§2). Not wishing to remain the only « mute  »(άφωνος) in such a verbose, « polyphonic » (πολυφώνω) time, Lucian decides to play Diogenes to the Corinthian madness of mass historiography, not by writing yet another history - for such an undertaking is beyond his means, and the perils of doing so are all too evident from the flood of artless histories now being published - but rather by offering from a safe distance, like Diogenes, some lessons in writing history (§4). The original, Lucianic equivalent to Diogenes’ censorious tubrolling, then, is

How to Write History

- that is, Lucian’s humorous textbook designed to ridicule the failings of modern historians and teach them to write good narrative history according to the rules of the genre (§§4 and 63).

By appropriating the prologue of this book of rules as the prologue of his own unruly book, Rabelais assimilates his own tubrolling not only to Diogenes’ but to Lucian’s as well, and in so doing deliberately invites his readers to consider the

Tiers Livre des faicts et diets Heroïques du bon Pantagruel

alongside

How to Write History

, and in the light of the norms of historical narrative as they are codified in Lucian’s book. For Rabelais’s intended audience, who knew Lucian’s book well, the prologue thus contained a subtle but unmistakable signal that this sequel to the history of Pantagruel acknowledges, but deliberately ignores, the rules of writing good history. It breaks the rules of narrative history not out of negligence, but by conscious, deliberate design.

The implications of Rabelais’s appropriation appear even more obvious when we recall that Lucian goes on in his prologue to evoke the futility of his own tubrolling in the following terms :

Yet most [of these mad historians] do not even think they need instruction in their work, any more than they need some special skill to walk, see, and eat. They think that nothing is simpler or easier than writing history and that anyone can do it simply by putting into words whatever comes into his head…. I know that I shall not convert many of these and that I shall even seem a nuisance to some, especially to those whose histories are already completed and published. And if these have been received with praise it would be folly to hope that their authors will rework or rewrite anything in what is now canonized and put up at a royal court, so to speak. Nevertheless, it will not hurt to speak even to these, so that if another war should ever occur - say between the Celts and the Getes, or the Indians and the Bactrians (for surely no one will ever make war on us, since we have subdued everyone by now) -they will be able to construct better histories by using this rule… if the rule seems straight to them, that is. If not, they can continue to measure their work by their own cubits, as they do now.

[How to Write History

, 5]

As a latter-day Diogenes in a nation devoted to war, Rabelais presents himself as one of those writers foreseen by Lucian who would someday find themselves witness to another war and thus have a second chance to write a proper history. As an idle spectator of just such a war, Rabelais has precisely the opportunity, envisaged by Lucian in his prologue, to profit from Lucian’s rules for writing history.

Yet in the

Tiers Livre

Rabelais apparently remains one of those impenitent, raving historiographers for whom Lucian played his Diogenes in vain. Uncured by the tub-rolling of

How to Write History

, he rolls his own tub by putting down whatever comes to mind with no respect for the art of composition - that essential art by which, Lucian promises, the writer may never « stray from the straight path that leads directly onward » and that consists in knowing precisely « what kind of beginning to begin with, what kind of order to impose on the parts, what proportion to give to each part, what to leave out, what to dwell on, what to mention only in passing, and how to express and arrange everything harmoniously » (

How to Write History

, 6)

This art of composition, as Lucian defines it in his prologue and goes on to teach it throughout the rest of his treatise, is precisely what appears to be wanting in Rabelais’s bizarre sequel to the

Pantagruel

. By appropriating Lucian’s famous prologue as his own, adapting it to his own purposes and allowing the model to resonate within the imitation, Rabelais uses and compounds Lucian’s ironies, announcing from the very beginning of the

Tiers Livre

that he knows

How to Write History

very well but still does not know « how to write history ». Or rather, that he has deliberately chosen to write his history otherwise. His prologue not only represents, emblematically, the anomalousness of the historical narrative that follows but also alludes, intertextually, to the very norms by which his historical narrative could be judged to fail.

*
* *

The ironic implications of the prologue are confirmed and compounded in a second, more specific representation of the

Tiers Livre

, this one placed conspicuously

en abyme

near the center of the work, in chapter 24. By this point it has already become painfully clear that Panurge’s search for a resolution to his doubts concerning marriage is leading nowhere and that the sequence of consultations could conceivably go on forever. But the quester, much to the reader’s dismay, renews his original vow to « porter lunettes au bonnet, ne porter braguette en chausses » until he has had a « resolution aperte » to his « perplexité d’esprit »

(TL

24 : 424-25 ; compare

TL

7 : 371-72). At this, Panurge’s companion Epistemon loses patience. Speaking for all of us, it would seem, Epistemon scolds Panurge for his foolish obstinacy, comparing his vow to one made by the Argives in their skirmish with the Lacedaemonians before the outbreak of the Persian Wars.

Epistemon’s allusion is to an event recorded in the world’s first work of narrative history, written by the « father of history » himself, Herodotus (see

Histories

1.82). Lucian had praised Herodotus in his

How to Write History

and again in his short introduction entitled

Herodotus, or Aetion

. But Herodotus’s great historical narrative was of course famous for its implausible stories, its formlessness, its digressions, and its narrative prostheses. In this respect it is a prototype of the

Tiers Livre

itself. Just as the

Histories

set out to relate « great and wonderful deeds »

(Histories

1.1, quoted in

How to Write History

, 54) but often stray from their purpose and sometimes digress on trivial details like the Argive’s silly vow, so too the

Tiers Livre

sets out to narrate the « heroic deeds and words of the noble Pantagruel » but loses itself in the shaggy dog story of a vow as silly as the one recounted by Herodotus. If the

Tiers Livre

does not conform to the rules of historical narrative, it does bear a certain topical and formal resemblance to the great historical narrative praised by the author of those rules, and deliberately points to this resemblance near the center of the book.

Far more explicit and significant is Epistemon’s second comparison of Pan-urge’s vow to one made by a certain Spanish knight, Michel d’Oris, to wear on his leg a painful « trançon de greve » - that is, a mutilated fragment from a torn shin guard - until some English knight accepted his challenge to do single combat with him. As Epistemon goes on to state, this second example of a foolish vow is recorded in a more modern historical narrative, Enguerrand de Monstrelet’s fifteenth-century chronicle of the Hundred Years’ War. Monstrelet’s chronicles may have been as familiar to French readers of the 1540’s as Herodotus’s

Histories

were.. As the most complete account of the final decades of the devastating, 120-year-long struggle between France and England, it offered an invaluable record of what was still in 1546 one of the great crises of modern history. As the self-avowed continuation of Froissard, which takes up the narrative precisely where Froissard had left off on Easter Sunday, 1400, it was a natural sequel to one of the most prestigious works of modern historiography.

Book I of Monstrelet’s work chronicles the first twenty-two years of the fifteenth century, the bleakest period of the entire Hundred Years’ War, beginning with revolts and civil war and culminating in the disaster at Agincourt (1415), the legal demise of the Kingdom of France sealed by the Treaty of Troyes (1420), and the death of the insane king Charles VI, known derisively as the « king of Bourges » (1422). But in Monstrelet’s narration the very first event of the fifteenth century, and of this entire tragic period, is the utterly frivolous, trivial, and inconsequential episode alluded to by Epistemon. Immediately following a background chapter on Charles VI’s insanity and its devastating consequences for the political stability of France (chapter 1) and immediately preceding a brief chapter on the « tresgrant mortalité universelle » that cut down legions of pilgrims to Rome in the jubilee year of 1400 (chapter 3), Monstrelet devotes an interminable chapter (eight double-columned folio pages in the early sixteenth-century editions) to transcriptions of eight long letters by Michel d’Oris of Aragon and Jehan de Prendegrest, a knight in the service of the count of Somerset.

This epistolary exchange, which begins with the new century and continues for four long years, is actually a masterpiece of situation comedy in which an amusing caricature of Hispanic braggadocio gives rise to a long series of contretemps and comic errors - letters sent to the wrong address, unforwarded mail, mistaken identities, deliberately misinterpreted intentions, missed rendez-vous - leading eventually to quibbles about protocol, like the question of which party is responsible for defraying travel expenses to the site of the duel. The correspondence finally degenerates into petty squabbles about the correspondence itself : who said what to whom at what date and in answer to which letter. The last letters are devoted almost entirely to recapitulating the history of the whole exchange, introducing new errors and misunderstandings in the process. The final result of all this writing and wrangling about writing is… absolutely

nothing

. The chapter concludes : « Lesquelles lectres ainsi envoiées d’une partie et d’aultre, finablement quant au fait ne vint pas à nul effect.  ». Like the digressive

Histories

of Herodotus, the comically impertinent and incongruous chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet would appear to be a prototype for the anomalous

Tiers Livre

. This time the analogy is explicit and sustained. Immediately after comparing Panurge’s vow to the one made by Michel d’Oris, Epistemon goes on at great length to condemn Monstrelet for his poor historiography. As he does so, he suggests an explicit analogy with Rabelais himself :

Et ne sçay lequel des deux seroit plus digne et meritant porter chapperon verd et jausne à aureilles de lievre, ou icelluy glorieux champion, ou Enguerrant qui en faict le tant long, curieux, et fascheux compte, oubliant l’art et maniere d’escrire histoires, baillée par le philosophe Samosatoys. Car lisant icelluy long narré, l’on pense que doibve estre commencement, et occasion de quelque forte guerre, ou insigne mutation des Royaulmes : mais en fin de compte on se mocque et du benoist champion, et de l’Angloys qui le deffia, et de Enguerrant leur tabellion plus baveux qu’un pot à moustarde.

[

TL

24 : 425]

If Panurge’s vow is comparable to that of the foolish Spaniard, then by analogy the narration of Panurge’s quest - that is, the

Tiers Livre

- is obviously no less comparable to the « long narré » of the Spaniard’s quest. And indeed this sequel to the

Pantagruel

has begun to look very much like Monstrelet’s sequel to Froissard. The epic that began with an « insigne mutation des Royaulmes » as Pantagruel established an ideal Utopian colony in Dipsodie

(TL

1 : 353-34) has degenerated completely into a « long, curieux, et fascheux compte » apparently written by a « baveux » lunatic who is as mad as Panurge. In this

mise en abyme

lodged near the very center of the

Tiers Livre

Rabelais deliberately represents his own book as a history without a design, and himself as a historian as foolish and unskilled as the notoriously witless and verbose Enguerrand de Monstrelet.

At the same time, Epistemon’s pointed allusion to the « philosophe Samosa-toys » in this passage links this ironic representation of the

Tiers Livre

directly to that of the prologue, for the « philosophe Samosatoys » is of course none other than Lucian himself, and the book in which he set forth the « art et maniere d’escrire histoires » is

How to Write History -

the very book whose prologue Rabelais has already borrowed and put to such ingenious, ironic use in his own. Here again, but even more explicitly this time, Rabelais alludes to Lucian’s

How to Write History

as the rule by which narrative histories, including his own, must be judged. And in doing so he points ostentatiously to the fact that the Diogenic narrator of the

Tiers Livre

, as a « tabellion plus baveux qu’un pot à moustarde » like Enguerrand de Monstrelet, has indeed forgotten « l’art et maniere d’escrire histoires ».

As Epistemon continues to deride Monstrelet’s history in this otherwise unmotivated digression on the rules of narrative, he simultaneously brings into even sharper focus the anomalies of the

Tiers Livre.

La mocquerie est telle que de la montaigne d’Horace, laquelle crioyt et lamentoyt enormement, comme femme en travail d’enfant. A son cris et lamentation accourut tout le voisinaige en expectation de veoir quelque admirable et monstrueux enfantement, mais en fin ne nasquit d’elle qu’une petite souriz.

[

TL

24 : 425]

Behind these remarks about laboring mountains lies a well-known ancient proverb « ὤδννεν όρος  », or « parturiunt montes ». Epistemon’s words are in fact borrowed directly from Erasmus’s commentary on this proverb in the

Adagia

(1.9.14).. Now according to Erasmus, this proverb was used in antiquity against « homines gloriosos et ostentatores » - « braggarts and show-offs who, with their magnificent promises and their pompous mien and attire, raise expectations of marvelous things but in the end deliver nothing but trifles ». Understood in this way the proverb of course applies perfectly to that « glorieux » and « benoist champion », Michel d’Oris - and by extension, to Panurge.

But as Erasmus also notes, the same proverb had become a commonplace of literary criticism, thanks to Horace’s

Ars poetica

and to Lucian’s

How to Write History

. And it is precisely as a commonplace of literary criticism that Epistemon uses the proverb here, mentioning both Horace and Lucian by name. In

How to

Write History

the « philosophe Samosatoys » singles out for special derision those ill-composed histories whose « brilliant, dramatic, and excessively long proœmia » promise Herodotean «  marvelous things » (θαυμαστά ήλίκα), only to be belied by a narrative « so meager and base » that the work as a whole resembles a small child wearing the mask of Hercules or a Titan. The audience of such a history will immediately hoot : « Ώδινεν όρος » (

How to Write History

, 23). In the

Ars poetica

Horace used the same proverb to make precisely the same point, not about history but about epic. If an epic poet were to begin his poem with a tumescent line like : « Of the fortunes of Priam I sing and a great and famous war », what could he possibly deliver that would live up to such a promise ? Horace’s ironic answer to this rhetorical question is the proverb : « Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus » (

AP

137-39).

As a critical commonplace having to do with overblown procemia and epic inci-pits that promise wonders only to be belied by the work that follows, the proverb applies perfectly to that « baveux » chronicler of the Hundred Years’ War, Enguerrand de Monstrelet - and by extension to Rabelais, the undisciplined « tabellion » of Panurge’s foolish and utterly inconsequential quest. The

Tiers Livre

, no less than Monstrelet’s chronicles, is indeed a perfect case of a mighty mountain giving birth to a ridiculous mouse. In this complexly ironic

mise en abyme

placed near the center, then, as in the Diogenic emblem placed at the beginning in the prologue, Rabelais points ostentatiously to the fact that the

Tiers...