The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (54 page)

Luxuriating in the vulgar tongue, Rabelais makes his book a showcase for its fresh eloquence. Exploiting the exclamations, hyperboles, and obscenities of the marketplace, he never uses one word when twenty would possibly come to mind. Even through English translations like those of J. M. Cohen and Samuel Putnam, we can still see Rabelais wallowing in the vernacular. Now that printing presses reached an ever-widening market of the newly literate, the French language offered the novel incentives of money and celebrity.
Gargantua and Pantagruel
displays the ebullience of a language newly liberated from the academy, and Rabelais himself is drunk on words. We can imagine that he might have swallowed a French dictionary—if one had been available at the time. But Robert Estienne’s pioneer Latin-French dictionary did not appear until 1538.

In 1546, twelve years after
Gargantua
, when Rabelais produced his Third Book, orthodoxy had become more fervent. Only the year before, Waldensian heretics had been massacred in southeastern France, and in Paris that same year Rabelais’s friend Dolet was burned at the stake for heresy. This Third Book, a sequel to the narrative of Pantagruel, is the first to bear Rabelais’s name as author and “doctor of medicine.” It is more serious than its predecessors, in a Rabelaisian way. Dedicated to a friend of literature, Margaret Queen of Navarre, sister of Francis I, it rambles around “The Woman Question” (
La Querelle des Femmes
), then widely agitated by learned men. Panurge, deciding to marry, consults with theologians, philosophers, lawyers, doctors, and miscellaneous divines and diviners. Rabelais precipitately brings Gargantua all the way back from the afterlife to harangue his son Pantagruel on the importance of parental consent to marriage. But the pope had held that parental consent was not required because the sacrament of marriage performed by a priest was enough to join the parties in the eyes of God. Still, Rabelais, along with Erasmus, the Evangelicals, and the Protestants, found the need for parental consent in the Old Testament and feared the pope’s monopoly over a realm that God had assigned to father and mother. For aristocrats and propertied people in those days marriage was more a political and commercial than an amorous alliance. Fortune-hunters or romantics could and often did abscond with well-endowed daughters to the ruin of the family estates. Yet the collusion of a priest (as in Romeo’s case, with unfortunate consequences) did not prevent noble families from using the law of rape against a suitor who married without parental consent. While Rabelais lets us share Panurge’s
pains of indecision, we hear on all sides that cuckoldry is the only certainty in marriage.

When Pantagruel asks Panurge when he is going to get out of debt, Panurge shrewdly replies:

With his genius for seeing the other side, Rabelais reports Judge Bridlegoose’s simple procedure for deciding law cases by casting dice. The only trouble is that with advancing age the judge cannot make out the score on the dice. But why, if he can no longer read, does he still require parties to submit so many documents? First, for the sake of formality “without which whatever is done is of no value,” and also because preparing and handling the papers provides “a dignified and salutary form of exercise.” Finally, the slow procedure allows a wholesome interval of time before the case is decided. “If judgement were given when the case was raw, unripe, and in its early stages, there would be a danger of the same trouble as physicians say follows on the lancing of an abcess before it is ripe, or the purging of some harmful humour from the body before it has fully matured.… Furthermore, Nature instructs us to pick and eat fruit when they are ripe … likewise to marry our daughters when they are nubile.”

Rabelais’s Third Book, written as a sequel to
Pantagruel
, had received the royal privilege, but neither this nor his dedication had saved it from suppression by the Sorbonne. They found no explicit heresy, but still his irreverent puns on “soul” and “ars-oul” irritated them. Now he explains, in his dedication of the Fourth Book to Cardinal Odet de Chatillon, that “the slanders of certain cannibals, misanthropes, and agelasts” had tried his patience and almost decided him “not to write another iota.” It may have seemed to his credit that he was attacked by Calvin in 1550. His new patron, the cardinal, renewed the royal privilege for all his works.

This Fourth Book (1548; enlarged, 1552), the longest and the least incoherent of all, delightfully embroiders the tales of the search for a Northwest Passage then fascinating Western Europe. Rabelais may have known Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), explorer of Canada and “discoverer” of the St.
Lawrence River, from whom he borrowed the outline of Pantagruel’s voyage, still an adventure in dipsomania. On this journey to the Oracle of the Divine Bottle, the Holy Bacbuc (from Hebrew for bottle), we rediscover Pantagruelism, “a certain gaiety of spirit pickled in disdain of fortuitous things.” On the high seas, on strange islands, and in exotic ports he meets Windmill-Swallowers, Spouting Whales, Ruachs (who live on wind), Serpentine Chitterlings, Popefigs, Papimaniacs, Gastrolators, and Rodilardus the large cat whom he took for a Devil. The land was so frigid that even words were frozen:

The so-called Fifth Book, which was not printed until 1562, nine years after Rabelais’s death, is not generally accepted as the work of Rabelais. But it does have some authentic Rabelaisian turns, like the Furred Cats, who cause all the world’s evils. The oracle Bacbuc now firmly revises Aristotle: “Not laughing, but drinking is the proper role of man.” The shibboleth “Drink!” takes on new meaning when she explains that when a certain Jewish captain of old was leading his people across the desert “he received manna out of the skies, which to their imagination tasted exactly as food had tasted in the past. Similarly here, as you drink of this miraculous liquor you will detect the taste of whatever wine you may imagine.” It was an age when each Renaissance scholar, blessed by new thirsts for ancient liquor, was finding something to his own taste.

Just as Rabelais’s Fourth Book appeared, the French king Henry II was in his most anti-Roman mood, issuing new edicts against papistical abuses. And Rabelais was called a pliant royal propagandist for his gibes at Popejiggers and Papimaniacs. Unfortunately in April of that very year when King Henry II made up his differences with the pope, ridicule of Rome was suddenly not only unstylish but life-risking. The magistrate who sniffed the shift in royal doctrine and banned Rabelais’s book on March 1, 1552, was
none other than an old friend and the ally of his youth, fellow pioneer of humanism, André Tiraqueau (1480–1558). Rabelais must have found it hard to whet his thirst for laughter. We know nothing for sure about how Rabelais’s life ended in 1553. There were stories of his death in prison, and various reports of his last words. The most appealing were noted by his inventive English translator Pierre Motteux (c.1663–1718). “I am going to seek a grand perhaps; draw the curtain, the farce is played.”

C
ERVANTES’S
Don Quixote
, sometimes called the first modern novel, was born as a kind of anti-novel. Beginning as the tale of an “ingenious gentleman of La Mancha” whose mind had been unbalanced by reading too many books of chivalry, Don Quixote soon became a nickname for anyone inspired by lofty but unrealizable ideals. The self-educated son of an impoverished apothecary-surgeon, Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) would embroider the disparity between illusion and reality. With personal experience more of “reverses than of verses” he sought in words a reward that he had earned but never received in the world. An expert on poverty, Cervantes cheerily concluded that “the best sauce in the world is hunger, and as the poor are never without it, they always eat with relish.” One of seven children, he was born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, a small town then the site of one of Spain’s great universities. His father, an itinerant, impecunious
médico cirujano
(apothecary and paramedic), was imprisoned for debt at least once before he moved his family to Madrid, still only a large village (it became Philip II’s capital in 1561). Miguel’s father, Roderigo, had tried unsuccessfully to avoid imprisonment on the grounds of his family’s status as
hidalgos
. We know little else of Cervantes’s first twenty-one years. He probably never attended a university, but loved to read anything he could find. In the household of a Spanish cardinal in Rome he came to know Italian life and letters.

All his adult life Cervantes bore the mark of his courage in the quixotic effort of his age—to defend the faith against the Turkish-Muslim hordes. Christian forces, split every which way by theological quibbles and dynastic
rivalries, somehow managed for a time to unite against the menace. At Lepanto, at the western end of the Gulf of Corinth on October 5, 1571, the Christian allies, 208 galleys, and numerous smaller vessels with thirty thousand men fought a four-hour battle against the inferior Ottoman fleet. By nightfall the allies had won a decisive victory. Cervantes later recalled that “there were fifteen thousand Christians, all at the oar in the Turkish fleet, who regained their longed-for liberty that day.”

At that Battle of Lepanto when the signal to fire was given, the young Cervantes was lying below with a fever. But he demanded to be taken on deck to command his perilous post. As Cervantes himself reported:

He never ceased to be proud of the two gunshot wounds in his chest and the loss of the use of his left arm and hand, which he said was “to the greater glory of the right.”

After convalescing a few months, by April 1572 he was serving again on Spanish ships. But the quarreling allies soon abandoned hope of crushing the resurgent Ottoman navy, and Cervantes, eager for action and promotion, made his way back to Spain. Since he did not yet have the ten years’ service normal for promotion to captain, he sought promotion directly from the king, with impressive letters of recommendation. The letters did not secure his promotion but would cost him dearly in Turkish captivity.

As his ill-starred galley
El Sol
approached France it was attacked by a Turkish flotilla of pirates and taken to Algiers to be held for ransom. Cervantes’s prized letters of recommendation made him seem an especially valuable hostage. His five and a half years as a slave in Algiers, he said, “taught him patience in adversity.”

His captors’ impression that he was a person of high station who could command the highest ransom was, of course, false. But it led them to keep him under heavy security, and “tempted by the bait of covetousness … they looked after my health with somewhat more care.” In the spring of 1576 the restless twenty-eight-year-old Cervantes failed in his first effort at escape. He and some fellow Christians, seeking to reach Oran, were abandoned by their guide and returned to Algiers to be punished as fugitives. Cervantes was put in heavy chains, but his high price discouraged terminal punishment.

The next summer Cervantes’s family sent three hundred crowns for ransom, which the pirates took for his brother Roderigo, while they awaited a higher price for Miguel. Cervantes himself organized a plan to hide in the cave outside Algiers awaiting a Spanish frigate along the coast. Betrayed by a Spaniard, he was hauled before the pasha of Algiers, and threatened with death and torture. When Cervantes insisted that he alone had contrived the whole affair, the pasha was so impressed with Cervantes’s courage that he bought the valiant Cervantes from his Algerian owners. Within five months the restless Cervantes had got a message through to the commander of the Spanish garrison in Oran, with instructions on how to help the captives. The unlucky Moor who carried these messages was impaled and Cervantes was sentenced to two thousand blows, but he once again eluded punishment.

By the fall of 1579 Cervantes had been in captivity for four years. He secretly engaged a Valencia merchant residing in Algiers to buy a frigate to rescue him and sixty other captives. Again a fellow Spaniard, Dr. Juan Blanco de Paz, a Dominican monk at Salamanca, betrayed the plot. With his hands tied behind and a halter around his neck for his imminent execution, Cervantes again claimed that he alone was responsible and demanded all the punishment for himself. His “gallant effrontery” once more carried the day. The pirates’ covetousness and the pasha’s admiration for his courage spared his life. The treacherous Dominican was rewarded by a single gold
escudo
and a pot of Algerian butter (which some considered more a punishment than a reward).