Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/212

Rh 194 EABELAIS and no sisters, that his father had a country property called La Deviniere, and was either an apothecary or a tavern-keeper. Half a century after his death De Thou mentions that the house in which he was born had become a tavern. It still stands at the corner of a street called the Rue de la Lamproie, and the tradition may be correct. An indistinct allusion of his own has been taken to mean that he was tonsured in childhood at seven or nine years old; and tradition says that he was sent to the convent of Seuilly, though of course he could then have taken no definite vows, and there is no evidence whatever that the passage in question, which simply condemns the practice referred to, has any personal reference. From Seuilly at an unknown date tradition takes him either to the univer- sity of Angers or to the convent school of La Baumette or La Basmette, founded by good King Ren6 in the neighbourhood of the Angevin capital. Here he is sup- posed to have been at school with the brothers Du Bellay, with Geoffroy d'Estissac and others. The next stage in this (as far as evidence goes, purely imaginary) career is the monastery of Fontenay le Comte, where, as has been seen, he is certainly found in 1519 holding a position sufficiently senior to sign deeds for the community, where he, as will be seen, certainly, though at an unknown date, took priest's orders, and where he also pursued, again cer- tainly, the study of letters, and especially of Greek, with ardour. From this date, therefore, he becomes historically visible. The next certain intelligence which we have of Rabelais is somewhat more directly biographical than this bare entry of his name. The letters of the well-known Greek scholar Budseus, two of which are addressed to Rabelais himself and several more to his friend and fellow- monk Pierre Amy, together with some notices by Andre Tiraqueau, a learned jurist, to whom Rabelais rather than his own learning has secured immortality, show beyond doubt what manner of life the future author of Gargantua led in his convent. These letters are partly written in Greek and partly in Latin. In Tiraqueau's book De Legibus Connubialibus, which excited a controversy with another jurist of the west, Bouchard, also a friend of Rabelais, the latter is described as "a man most learned in both languages and all kinds of scholarship above his age, and beyond the wont and, if I may say so, the excessive scrupulousness of his order." The excessive scrupulousness of the order showed itself before long in reference to Amy and Rabelais, the latter of whom had, as this sentence of Tiraqueau's also informs us, translated the first book of Herodotus. The letters of Budaeus show that an attempt was made by the heads of the convent or the order to check the studious ardour of these Franciscans; but it failed, and there is no positive evidence of anything like actual persecution, the phrases in the letters of Budseus being merely the usual exaggerated Ciceronianism of the Renaissance. Some books and papers were seized as sus- picious, then given back as innocent ; but Rabelais was in all probability disgusted with the cloister, indeed his great work shows this beyond doubt. In 1524, the year of the publication of Tiraqueau's book above cited, his friend Geoffroy d'Estissac procured from Clement VII. an indult, licensing a change of order and of abode for Rabelais. From a Franciscan he became a Benedictine, and from Fontenay he moved to Maillezais, of which Geoffroy d'Estissac was bishop. He seems indeed to have been constantly in the company of the bishop and to have made many new literary acquaintances, notably Jean Bouchet, the poet. To him he wrote an epistle in French verse, still extant, which proves that Rabelais, much more truly than Swift, never could have been a poet. The title of this epistle is, however, noteworthy, inasmuch as the author is described in the original (a collection of Bouchet's works published in 1545) as a man of great literary knowledge in Greek and Latin, and as a great orator in Greek, Latin, and French. But even this learned and hospitable retreat did not apparently satisfy Rabelais. In of before 1530 he left Maillezais, abandoned his Benedictine garb for that of a secular priest, and, as he himself puts it in his subsequent Supplicatio pro Apostasia to Pope Paul III., " per seculum diu vagatus fuit." He is met at Montpellier in the year just mentioned. He entered the faculty of medicine there on the 16th of September and became bachelor on the 1st of November, a remarkably short in- terval, which shows what was thought of his acquirements. Early in 1531 he lectured publicly on Galen and Hippo- crates, while his more serious pursuits seem to have been chequered by acting in a morale comedie, then a very fre- quent university amusement. Visits to the lies d'Hieres, and the composition of a fish sauce in imitation of the ancient garum, which he sent to his friend Dolet, are associated, not very certainly, with his stay at Montpellier, which, lasting rather more than a year at first, was renewed at intervals for several years. In 1532, however, and probably rather early than late in that year, he had moved from Montpellier to Lyons. Here he plunged into manifold work, literary and professional. He was appointed before the beginning of November phy- sician to the hotel dieu, with a salary of forty livres per annum. He edited for Sebastian Gryphius, in the single year 1532, the medical Epistles of Giovanni Manardi, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, with the Ars Parva of Galen, and an edition of two supposed Latin documents, which, however, happened unluckily to be forgeries. These three works were dedicated in order to his three chief friends of Touraine and Poitou, Andr6 Tiraqueau, the bishop of Maillezais, and Bouchard. We also have a Latin letter written on 1st December 1532 to a certain Bernard de Salignac, otherwise unknown. It is certain that at this time Lyons was the centre and to a great extent the headquarters of an unusually enlightened society, and indirectly it is clear that Rabelais became intimate with this society. A manuscript distich, which was found in the Toulouse library, on the death of an infant named Theodule, whose country was Lyons and his father Rabelais, would seem to show that he here entered into other connexions than those of friendship. Absolutely nothing, however, is known about the child and its mother ; it is enough to say that the existence of the former would have been by the manners and morals of the time very easily condoned. But what makes the Lyons sojourn of the greatest real importance is that at this time probably appeared the beginnings of the work which was to make Rabelais immortal. It is necessary to say "probably," because the strange uncertainty which rests on so much of his life and writings exists here also. There is no doubt that both Gargantua and Pantagruel were popular names of giants in the Middle Ages, though, curiously enough, no mention of the former in French literature much before Rabelais's time has been traced. In 1526, however, Charles de Bordigne, in a satiric work of no great merit, entitled La Legende de, Pierre Faifeu, has the name Gargantua with an allusion, and in 1532 (if not earlier) there appeared at Lyons Les Grandes et Inestimables Chroniques du Grand et JSnorme Geant Gargantua. This is a short book on the plan of the later burlesques and romances of the Round Table. Arthur and Merlin appear with Grantgosier, as he is here spelt, Galemelle (Gargalelle), Gargantua himself, and the terrible mare. But there is no trace of the action or other characters of Gargantua that was to be, nor is the manner of the piece in the least worthy of Rabelais. No one supposes that he wrote it, though it has been supposed that he edited it and that in