Francois Rabelais was Born About this Date in 1483.

This Series:

• Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare.
• Francois Rabelais and Shakespeare
• The Tempests of Shakespeare and Rabelais.
• Francois Rabelais was Born About this Date in 1483.

Surely, Robert Chambers was more or less correct to give Francois Rabelais's birth date as March 1, 1483, in his popular Book of Days.¹ As for his brief memorial to the great fabulist, its intent was not to be rigorous. Other than a few dates and names it has little to offer as biography. That little follows:

Francois Rabelais, the son of an apothecary, was born at Chinon, a town of Touraine, in 1483. Brimming over with sport and humour, by a strange perversity it was decided to make the boy a monk, and Rabelais entered the order of Franciscans. His gaiety proved more than they could endure, and he was transferred to the easier fraternity of the Benedictines; but his high spirits were too much for these likewise, and he escaped to Montpelier, where he studied medicine, took a doctor's degree, and practised with such success, that he was invited to the court at Paris. In the train of an ambassador he went to Rome in 1536, and received absolution from the Pope for his violation of monastic vows. On his return to France he was appointed cure of Meudon, and died in 1553, aged 70.

Wit was the distinction of Rabelais. He was learned, and he had seen much of the world; and for the pedantry of scholars, the cant of priests, and the folly of kings, he had a quick eye and a light-hearted contempt. It was an age of deadly intolerance: to dissent from the church was to burn at the stake, and to criticise governors was mutilation or death on the scaffold. Rabelais had not earnestness for a martyr, but the contempt and fun that stirred within him demanded utterance, and donning the fool's cap and bells, he published the romance of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Gargantua was a giant who lived several centuries and begot a son, Pantagruel, as big and wonderful as himself. Beneath his tongue an army took shelter from the rain, and in his mouth and throat were populou s cities. Under the mask of their adventures Rabelais contrived to speak his mind concerning kings, priests, and scholars, just as Swift, following his example, did in Gulliver's Travels. He was accused of heresy and irreligion, but Francis I. read and enjoyed the story of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and said he could see no harm in it.

Calvin at one time thought he had found in Rabelais a Protestant, and was prepared to number him among his disciples, but gravely censuring him for nis profane jesting, Rabelais, in revenge, made Panurge, one of the characters in his romance, discourse in Calvinistic phrases. The obscenity which is inwrought in almost every page of Rabelais prevents his enjoyment by modern readers, although his coarseness gave no offence to the generation for which he wrote.

Charles Whibley likely provides us as much legitimate biography as we have of the man in the front matter of the 1900 edition of Thomas Urquhart's wonderful translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel.² Rabelais was clearly impressive in person. The Pope intervened for him on at least two occasions. A number of lesser luminaries in the church also helped him escape the monastic way of life.

Having been entered into the franciscan order as a young boy, he learned to read french and the classical languages and had access to fine libraries. Still a monk, he sought to escape into the secular world where he could enjoy the fruits of his education rather than humbly submit some stunted version of them to the monastery.

The cells of Rabelais and Amy were searched by the enemies of Greek (so much we gather from the letters of Budaeus), and incriminating literature was discovered, supplied may be by the Bishop of Maillezais himself. For this sin there was no palliation. What could be said in defence of a ruffian who had translated Herodotus, upon the tip of whose pen were constant tags from Lucian and Homer, who not only read the abhorred tongue but wrote it like a scholar? Budaeus intervened in vain: at last the life of scholarship, passed in the walks and gardens of Fontenay, was over; Rabelais left the brotherhood with The End of a hatred of friars in his heart; a vast material was stored up for the satire that was to come; yet in spite of persecution he could declare with truth that to the seclusion and leisure of [the monastery at] Fontenay-le-Comte he owed the encyclopaedic learning which has made him forever famous.

Like St. Augustine, centuries before, the Franciscan hierarchy despised the Greek language for the fact that they could not read it. This would be the enormously heavy straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. But the battle still had many years to go before he would surely break free.

Even as little of the story as we have is fascinating. The Reformation was in-progress (though Rabelais would never join it). Catholic scholars were choosing life outside the walls. After years as a guest of nobleman after nobleman, he, at last, found a home of his own.

However, Rabelais stayed not long at Ligugé: in 1528 began his life in the world. Hitherto, no doubt, books had said more to him than men. Neither Latin nor Greek withheld its secrets from him, and, monk as he was, he had made himself master of pagan antiquity. At whatever date his birth be fixed, he was no longer young, yet for all the profundity of his studies he was neither pedant nor dry-as-dust. The blood of Touraine was warm in his veins; his courage, as may be seen in his encounter with the Franciscans, was always high; and now began the years of wandering per saeculum, which were to supplement the erudition of his youth. It was towards Lyons that he first Lyons turned his steps, presbyteri saecularis habitu assumpto, as he said in a supplication to the Pope. Nor could he with his enterprise in view have chosen a more favourable city. The Lyons of 1528 was devoted to polite letters and active enterprise. It was as though Venice had crossed the Alps, bringing bankers and printing-presses in her train. Learned men sought the gracious capital of the South, for there they found a freedom and a welcome denied them by the Sorbonnists of Paris.

1   Chambers, Robert. The Book of Days a Miscellany Popular Antiquities (1888). I.316-7.

2   Rabelais Gargatua and Pantagruel translated into English by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter le Motteux (David Nutt, 1900). I.vii-xcv.

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