Gargantua and Pantagruel eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,126 pages of information about Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Gargantua and Pantagruel eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,126 pages of information about Gargantua and Pantagruel.
the upper part of them leather, a coif like a black pot tipped with tin.  He was a good likely sort of a body, and his name, as we heard afterwards, was Double-fee.  Epistemon asked him how they called those strange craggy rocks and deep valleys.  He told them it was a colony brought out of Attorneyland, and called Process, and that if we forded the river somewhat further beyond the rocks we should come into the island of the Apedefers.  By the memory of the decretals, said Friar John, tell us, I pray you, what you honest men here live on?  Could not a man take a chirping bottle with you to taste your wine?  I can see nothing among you but parchment, ink-horns, and pens.  We live on nothing else, returned Double-fee; and all who live in this place must come through my hands.  How, quoth Panurge, are you a shaver, then?  Do you fleece ’em?  Ay, ay, their purse, answered Double-fee; nothing else.  By the foot of Pharaoh, cried Panurge, the devil a sou will you get of me.  However, sweet sir, be so kind as to show an honest man the way to those Apedefers, or ignorant people, for I come from the land of the learned, where I did not learn over much.

Still talking on, they got to the island of the Apedefers, for they were soon got over the ford.  Pantagruel was not a little taken up with admiring the structure and habitation of the people of the place.  For they live in a swingeing wine-press, fifty steps up to it.  You must know there are some of all sorts, little, great, private, middle-sized, and so forth.  You go through a large peristyle, alias a long entry set about with pillars, in which you see, in a kind of landscape, the ruins of almost the whole world, besides so many great robbers’ gibbets, so many gallows and racks, that ’tis enough to fright you out of your seven senses.  Double-fee perceiving that Pantagruel was taken up with contemplating those things, Let us go further, sir, said he to him; all this is nothing yet.  Nothing, quotha, cried Friar John; by the soul of my overheated codpiece, friend Panurge and I here shake and quiver for mere hunger.  I had rather be drinking than staring at these ruins.  Pray come along, sir, said Double-fee.  He then led us into a little wine-press that lay backwards in a blind corner, and was called Pithies in the language of the country.  You need not ask whether Master John and Panurge made much of their sweet selves there; it is enough that I tell you there was no want of Bolognia sausages, turkey poots, capons, bustards, malmsey, and all other sorts of good belly-timber, very well dressed.

A pimping son of ten fathers, who, for want of a better, did the office of a butler, seeing that Friar John had cast a sheep’s eye at a choice bottle that stood near a cupboard by itself, at some distance from the rest of the bottellic magazine, like a jack-in-an-office said to Pantagruel, Sir, I perceive that one of your men here is making love to this bottle.  He ogles it, and would fain caress it; but I beg that none offer to meddle with it; for it is reserved for their worships.  How, cried Panurge, there are some grandees here then, I see.  It is vintage time with you, I perceive.

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Gargantua and Pantagruel from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.