Of the qualities and conditions of Panurge.
Panurge was of a middle stature, not too high nor
too low, and had somewhat an aquiline nose, made like
the handle of a razor. He was at that time five
and thirty years old or thereabouts, fine to gild like
a leaden dagger—for he was a notable cheater
and coney-catcher—he was a very gallant
and proper man of his person, only that he was a little
lecherous, and naturally subject to a kind of disease
which at that time they called lack of money—it
is an incomparable grief, yet, notwithstanding, he
had three score and three tricks to come by it at
his need, of which the most honourable and most ordinary
was in manner of thieving, secret purloining and filching,
for he was a wicked lewd rogue, a cozener, drinker,
roister, rover, and a very dissolute and debauched
fellow, if there were any in Paris; otherwise, and
in all matters else, the best and most virtuous man
in the world; and he was still contriving some plot,
and devising mischief against the sergeants and the
watch.
At one time he assembled three or four especial good
hacksters and roaring boys, made them in the evening
drink like Templars, afterwards led them till they
came under St. Genevieve, or about the college of Navarre,
and, at the hour that the watch was coming up that
way—which he knew by putting his sword
upon the pavement, and his ear by it, and, when he
heard his sword shake, it was an infallible sign that
the watch was near at that instant—then
he and his companions took a tumbrel or dung-cart,
and gave it the brangle, hurling it with all their
force down the hill, and so overthrew all the poor
watchmen like pigs, and then ran away upon the other
side; for in less than two days he knew all the streets,
lanes, and turnings in Paris as well as his Deus det.
At another time he made in some fair place, where
the said watch was to pass, a train of gunpowder,
and, at the very instant that they went along, set
fire to it, and then made himself sport to see what
good grace they had in running away, thinking that
St. Anthony’s fire had caught them by the legs.
As for the poor masters of arts, he did persecute
them above all others. When he encountered with
any of them upon the street, he would not never fail
to put some trick or other upon them, sometimes putting
the bit of a fried turd in their graduate hoods, at
other times pinning on little foxtails or hares’-ears
behind them, or some such other roguish prank.
One day that they were appointed all to meet in the
Fodder Street (Sorbonne), he made a Borbonesa tart,
or filthy and slovenly compound, made of store of
garlic, of assafoetida, of castoreum, of dogs’
turds very warm, which he steeped, tempered, and liquefied
in the corrupt matter of pocky boils and pestiferous
botches; and, very early in the morning therewith anointed
all the pavement, in such sort that the devil could
