and as hard as they can, for the space of the first
two months after the decease of their husbands.
I pray you, my good lusty springal lads, if you find
any of these females, that are worth the pains of untying
the codpiece-point, get up, ride upon them, and bring
them to me; for, if they happen within the third month
to conceive, the child should be heir to the deceased,
if, before he died, he had no other children, and the
mother shall pass for an honest woman.
When she is known to have conceived, thrust forward
boldly, spare her not, whatever betide you, seeing
the paunch is full. As Julia, the daughter of
the Emperor Octavian, never prostituted herself to
her belly-bumpers, but when she found herself with
child, after the manner of ships, that receive not
their steersman till they have their ballast and lading.
And if any blame them for this their rataconniculation,
and reiterated lechery upon their pregnancy and big-belliedness,
seeing beasts, in the like exigent of their fulness,
will never suffer the male-masculant to encroach them,
their answer will be, that those are beasts, but they
are women, very well skilled in the pretty vales and
small fees of the pleasant trade and mysteries of
superfetation: as Populia heretofore answered,
according to the relation of Macrobius, lib. 2.
Saturnal. If the devil will not have them to
bag, he must wring hard the spigot, and stop the bung-hole.
Chapter 1.IV.
How Gargamelle, being great with Gargantua, did eat
a huge deal of tripes.
The occasion and manner how Gargamelle was brought
to bed, and delivered of her child, was thus:
and, if you do not believe it, I wish your bum-gut
fall out and make an escapade. Her bum-gut, indeed,
or fundament escaped her in an afternoon, on the third
day of February, with having eaten at dinner too many
godebillios. Godebillios are the fat tripes of
coiros. Coiros are beeves fattened at the cratch
in ox-stalls, or in the fresh guimo meadows.
Guimo meadows are those that for their fruitfulness
may be mowed twice a year. Of those fat beeves
they had killed three hundred sixty-seven thousand
and fourteen, to be salted at Shrovetide, that in the
entering of the spring they might have plenty of powdered
beef, wherewith to season their mouths at the beginning
of their meals, and to taste their wine the better.
They had abundance of tripes, as you have heard, and
they were so delicious, that everyone licked his fingers.
But the mischief was this, that, for all men could
do, there was no possibility to keep them long in
that relish; for in a very short while they would have
stunk, which had been an undecent thing. It
was therefore concluded, that they should be all of
them gulched up, without losing anything. To
this effect they invited all the burghers of Sainais,
of Suille, of the Roche-Clermaud, of Vaugaudry, without
omitting the Coudray, Monpensier, the Gue de Vede,
