the great bells, which were in the said towers, and
made them sound very harmoniously. Which whilst
he was doing, it came into his mind that they would
serve very well for tingling tantans and ringing campanels
to hang about his mare’s neck when she should
be sent back to his father, as he intended to do, loaded
with Brie cheese and fresh herring. And indeed
he forthwith carried them to his lodging. In
the meanwhile there came a master beggar of the friars
of St.
Anthony to demand in his canting way the usual
benevolence of some hoggish stuff, who, that he might
be heard afar off, and to make the bacon he was in
quest of shake in the very chimneys, made account to
filch them away privily. Nevertheless, he left
them behind very honestly, not for that they were
too hot, but that they were somewhat too heavy for
his carriage. This was not he of Bourg, for he
was too good a friend of mine. All the city
was risen up in sedition, they being, as you know,
upon any slight occasion, so ready to uproars and
insurrections, that foreign nations wonder at the
patience of the kings of France, who do not by good
justice restrain them from such tumultuous courses,
seeing the manifold inconveniences which thence arise
from day to day. Would to God I knew the shop
wherein are forged these divisions and factious combinations,
that I might bring them to light in the confraternities
of my parish! Believe for a truth, that the
place wherein the people gathered together, were thus
sulphured, hopurymated, moiled, and bepissed, was called
Nesle, where then was, but now is no more, the oracle
of Leucotia. There was the case proposed, and
the inconvenience showed of the transporting of the
bells. After they had well ergoted pro and con,
they concluded in baralipton, that they should send
the oldest and most sufficient of the faculty unto
Gargantua, to signify unto him the great and horrible
prejudice they sustain by the want of those bells.
And notwithstanding the good reasons given in by
some of the university why this charge was fitter for
an orator than a sophister, there was chosen for this
purpose our Master Janotus de Bragmardo.
Chapter 1.XVIII.
How Janotus de Bragmardo was sent to Gargantua to
recover the great bells.
Master Janotus, with his hair cut round like a dish
a la Caesarine, in his most antique accoutrement liripipionated
with a graduate’s hood, and having sufficiently
antidoted his stomach with oven-marmalades, that is,
bread and holy water of the cellar, transported himself
to the lodging of Gargantua, driving before him three
red-muzzled beadles, and dragging after him five or
six artless masters, all thoroughly bedaggled with
the mire of the streets. At their entry Ponocrates
met them, who was afraid, seeing them so disguised,
and thought they had been some masquers out of their
wits, which moved him to inquire of one of the said
artless masters of the company what this mummery meant.
