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<h2> Chapter 3.XVIII.—How Pantagruel and Panurge did diversely expound the verses of the Sibyl of Panzoust. </h2>
<p>The leaves being thus collected and orderly disposed, Epistemon and Panurge
returned to Pantagruel's court, partly well pleased and other part
discontented; glad for their being come back, and vexed for the trouble
they had sustained by the way, which they found to be craggy, rugged,
stony, rough, and ill-adjusted. They made an ample and full relation of
their voyage unto Pantagruel, as likewise of the estate and condition of
the sibyl. Then, having presented to him the leaves of the sycamore, they
show him the short and twattle verses that were written in them.
Pantagruel, having read and considered the whole sum and substance of the
matter, fetched from his heart a deep and heavy sigh; then said to Panurge,
You are now, forsooth, in a good taking, and have brought your hogs to a
fine market. The prophecy of the sibyl doth explain and lay out before us
the same very predictions which have been denoted, foretold, and presaged
to us by the decree of the Virgilian lots and the verdict of your own
proper dreams, to wit, that you shall be very much disgraced, shamed, and
discredited by your wife; for that she will make you a cuckold in
prostituting herself to others, being big with child by another than you,
—will steal from you a great deal of your goods, and will beat you, scratch
and bruise you, even to plucking the skin in a part from off you,—will
leave the print of her blows in some member of your body. You understand
as much, answered Panurge, in the veritable interpretation and expounding
of recent prophecies as a sow in the matter of spicery. Be not offended,
sir, I beseech you, that I speak thus boldly; for I find myself a little in
choler, and that not without cause, seeing it is the contrary that is true.
Take heed, and give attentive ear unto my words. The old wife said that,
as the bean is not seen till first it be unhusked, and that its swad or
hull be shelled and peeled from off it, so is it that my virtue and
transcendent worth will never come by the mouth of fame to be blazed abroad
proportionable to the height, extent, and measure of the excellency
thereof, until preallably I get a wife and make the full half of a married
couple. How many times have I heard you say that the function of a
magistrate, or office of dignity, discovereth the merits, parts, and
endowments of the person so advanced and promoted, and what is in him.
That is to say, we are then best able to judge aright of the deservings of
a man when he is called to the management of affairs; for when before he
lived in a private condition, we could have no more certain knowledge of
him than of a bean within his husk. And thus stands the first article
explained; otherwise, could you imagine that the good fame, repute, and
estimation of an honest man should depend upon the tail of a whore?</p>
<p>Now to the meaning of the second article! My wife will be with child,
—here lies the prime felicity of marriage,—but not of me. Copsody, that I
do believe indeed! It will be of a pretty little infant. O how heartily I
shall love it! I do already dote upon it; for it will be my dainty feedle-
darling, my genteel dilly-minion. From thenceforth no vexation, care, or
grief shall take such deep impression in my heart, how hugely great or
vehement soever it otherwise appear, but that it shall evanish forthwith at
the sight of that my future babe, and at the hearing of the chat and
prating of its childish gibberish. And blessed be the old wife. By my
truly, I have a mind to settle some good revenue or pension upon her out of
the readiest increase of the lands of my Salmigondinois; not an inconstant
and uncertain rent-seek, like that of witless, giddy-headed bachelors, but
sure and fixed, of the nature of the well-paid incomes of regenting
doctors. If this interpretation doth not please you, think you my wife
will bear me in her flanks, conceive with me, and be of me delivered, as
women use in childbed to bring forth their young ones; so as that it may be
said, Panurge is a second Bacchus, he hath been twice born; he is re-born,
as was Hippolytus,—as was Proteus, one time of Thetis, and secondly, of
the mother of the philosopher Apollonius,—as were the two Palici, near the
flood Simaethos in Sicily. His wife was big of child with him. In him is
renewed and begun again the palintocy of the Megarians and the palingenesy
of Democritus. Fie upon such errors! To hear stuff of that nature rends
mine ears.</p>
<p>The words of the third article are: She will suck me at my best end. Why
not? That pleaseth me right well. You know the thing; I need not tell you
that it is my intercrural pudding with one end. I swear and promise that,
in what I can, I will preserve it sappy, full of juice, and as well
victualled for her use as may be. She shall not suck me, I believe, in
vain, nor be destitute of her allowance; there shall her justum both in
peck and lippy be furnished to the full eternally. You expound this
passage allegorically, and interpret it to theft and larceny. I love the
exposition, and the allegory pleaseth me; but not according to the sense
whereto you stretch it. It may be that the sincerity of the affection
which you bear me moveth you to harbour in your breast those refractory
thoughts concerning me, with a suspicion of my adversity to come. We have
this saying from the learned, That a marvellously fearful thing is love,
and that true love is never without fear. But, sir, according to my
judgment, you do understand both of and by yourself that here stealth
signifieth nothing else, no more than in a thousand other places of Greek
and Latin, old and modern writings, but the sweet fruits of amorous
dalliance, which Venus liketh best when reaped in secret, and culled by
fervent lovers filchingly. Why so, I prithee tell? Because, when the feat
of the loose-coat skirmish happeneth to be done underhand and privily,
between two well-disposed, athwart the steps of a pair of stairs lurkingly,
and in covert behind a suit of hangings, or close hid and trussed upon an
unbound faggot, it is more pleasing to the Cyprian goddess, and to me also
—I speak this without prejudice to any better or more sound opinion—than
to perform that culbusting art after the Cynic manner, in the view of the
clear sunshine, or in a rich tent, under a precious stately canopy, within
a glorious and sublime pavilion, or yet on a soft couch betwixt rich
curtains of cloth of gold, without affrightment, at long intermediate
respites, enjoying of pleasures and delights a bellyfull, at all great
ease, with a huge fly-flap fan of crimson satin and a bunch of feathers of
some East-Indian ostrich serving to give chase unto the flies all round
about; whilst, in the interim, the female picks her teeth with a stiff
straw picked even then from out of the bottom of the bed she lies on. If
you be not content with this my exposition, are you of the mind that my
wife will suck and sup me up as people use to gulp and swallow oysters out
of the shell? or as the Cilician women, according to the testimony of
Dioscorides, were wont to do the grain of alkermes? Assuredly that is an
error. Who seizeth on it, doth neither gulch up nor swill down, but takes
away what hath been packed up, catcheth, snatcheth, and plies the play of
hey-pass, repass.</p>
<p>The fourth article doth imply that my wife will flay me, but not all. O
the fine word! You interpret this to beating strokes and blows. Speak
wisely. Will you eat a pudding? Sir, I beseech you to raise up your
spirits above the low-sized pitch of earthly thoughts unto that height of
sublime contemplation which reacheth to the apprehension of the mysteries
and wonders of Dame Nature. And here be pleased to condemn yourself, by a
renouncing of those errors which you have committed very grossly and
somewhat perversely in expounding the prophetic sayings of the holy sibyl.
Yet put the case (albeit I yield not to it) that, by the instigation of the
devil, my wife should go about to wrong me, make me a cuckold downwards to
the very breech, disgrace me otherwise, steal my goods from me, yea, and
lay violently her hands upon me;—she nevertheless should fail of her
attempts and not attain to the proposed end of her unreasonable
undertakings. The reason which induceth me hereto is grounded totally on
this last point, which is extracted from the profoundest privacies of a
monastic pantheology, as good Friar Arthur Wagtail told me once upon a
Monday morning, as we were (if I have not forgot) eating a bushel of
trotter-pies; and I remember well it rained hard. God give him the good
morrow! The women at the beginning of the world, or a little after,
conspired to flay the men quick, because they found the spirit of mankind
inclined to domineer it, and bear rule over them upon the face of the whole
earth; and, in pursuit of this their resolution, promised, confirmed,
swore, and covenanted amongst them all, by the pure faith they owe to the
nocturnal Sanct Rogero. But O the vain enterprises of women! O the great
fragility of that sex feminine! They did begin to flay the man, or peel
him (as says Catullus), at that member which of all the body they loved
best, to wit, the nervous and cavernous cane, and that above five thousand
years ago; yet have they not of that small part alone flayed any more till
this hour but the head. In mere despite whereof the Jews snip off that
parcel of the skin in circumcision, choosing far rather to be called
clipyards, rascals, than to be flayed by women, as are other nations. My
wife, according to this female covenant, will flay it to me, if it be not
so already. I heartily grant my consent thereto, but will not give her
leave to flay it all. Nay, truly will I not, my noble king.</p>
<p>Yea but, quoth Epistemon, you say nothing of her most dreadful cries and
exclamations when she and we both saw the laurel-bough burn without
yielding any noise or crackling. You know it is a very dismal omen, an
inauspicious sign, unlucky indice, and token formidable, bad, disastrous,
and most unhappy, as is certified by Propertius, Tibullus, the quick
philosopher Porphyrius, Eustathius on the Iliads of Homer, and by many
others. Verily, verily, quoth Panurge, brave are the allegations which you
bring me, and testimonies of two-footed calves. These men were fools, as
they were poets; and dotards, as they were philosophers; full of folly, as
they were of philosophy.</p>
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