Book One (which follows Book Two) ends with a fine and foolish war won by Gargantua with the help of the scruffy monk Friar John for whom, in gratitude, Gargantua builds the Abbey of Theleme. Here the monks and the nuns have friendly dinners together and wear colorful modern dress (i.e., fifteenth-century) instead of black habits. The motto of the abbey is “Do as thou wilt.” All the inmates are excellent persons, says Rabelais, so it is both safe and a great promoter of happiness to allow them to do what they want instead of telling them how to do it or to do something else. The Abbey of Theleme is one of literature’s most beguiling resorts: it deserves three stars in the Michelin guidebook of imaginary places.
Book Three (which follows Book One) belongs not to Gargantua or Pantagruel but to their scapegrace friend and penniless follower, Panurge, the perennial student of the University of Paris. Panurge is one of the most delicious villains in literature. He is a very bad young man but you cannot help smiling at the things he says and does—for example, at his plan for reinforcing the walls of Paris or his account of his revenge on a certain lady who refused his advances. Panurge engages in a ridiculous scholastic debate conducted entirely in sign language and performs many other scurvy tricks and bawdy entertainments for the benefit, as Rabelais says, of all good Pantagruelists everywhere. Indeed, by the end of Book Three it is clear that the author of this strange, unique work knows that he has created not just a book but also what the Germans call Weltanschauung—a special way of looking at the world.
Book Four is not as good as Book Three, and Rabelais probably did not write Book Five. It can be skipped. But no Pantagruelist can afford to skip Books Two, One, and Three (in that order).
Rabelais wrote at a time when French was not yet a fully formed language (just as Shakespeare wrote when English was not yet fixed in its grammar and vocabulary). Rabelais’s bent was fantastical anyway, and Gargantua and Pantagruel contains hundreds, maybe thousands, of neologisms—words that Rabelais made up just because he liked the sound of them, or because there was no French word yet that meant what he wanted to say, or because there were only two or three French words and he wanted five or six. How, then, to translate such a work?
One of the miracles of literary history is that Rabelais found his ideal translator in Sir Thomas Urquhart, who produced a version of Books One and Two and part of Book Three (published 1653, 1693) that is fully as fantastical as the original. A second miracle: Urquhart did not complete his task; Pierre Motteux came along to finish it (in 1693-4) and if anything was better at the job than Urquhart. All good modern translations are based on their work, which you may read if you wish. In places, however, it is now rather antique, and so I recommend the fine modern redaction of Urquhart and Motteux prepared by that remarkable Pantagruelist Jacques LeClercq and published by the Modern Library.
NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI
1469–1527
The Prince
The life story of Niccolò Machiavelli is a sad one. Fortune, “that great strumpet” whom he described in colorful terms at the end of his little book, The Prince, did not deal with him either well or courteously.
Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, the son of an impecunious lawyer who was unable to give him a good education. As a consequence Machiavelli was largely self-educated, reading the many tattered old books in his father’s library and being forced, through lack of teachers, to decide for himself what they meant.
He had been born in the year when Lorenzo the Magnificent, the greatest of the Medici, came to power in Florence, thus inaugurating a period of wealth and splendor in the city but also subverting its civil liberties. In 1498 the Medici were exiled, and a new government appointed Machiavelli, now twenty-nine, to be Florentine Secretary—in effect the ambassador of the city-state to the other city-states of Italy and to the great European powers. Machiavelli’s family had always been civil servants, and he performed well in this post. He visited France three times and Germany once, writing reports on those countries that are still read. And he came to know Cesare Borgia, the son of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, at the time when the young man was attempting, at his father’s behest, to unify the Papal States. Machiavelli was struck by the skill and ruthlessness with which Cesare controlled his followers and eliminated his enemies. Niccolò learned another kind of lesson a few months later. He was present in Rome when Cesare suffered ruin and disgrace following the death of his father, the Pope, and the elevation to the papal chair of an enemy of the Borgia family.
In 1512, after fourteen years as Florentine Secretary and many signal achievements for his native city, Machiavelli was himself deposed and exiled when the Medici returned to power. Exile was not the worst of it; he was also suspected of being involved in a plot to overthrow the new government and was tortured on the rack and imprisoned. The strumpet Fortune, having carried him high on her wheel, had now brought him low.
He was released from prison and, with his wife and children, retired to a small farm close to Florence. There, in the last part of his life, he worked in the fields by day but in the evening, after dinner, took succor from his memories not only of the great men he had met and talked with, but also of those he had known only through books. He would repair to his study, where, he wrote:
At the threshold I take off my work-day clothes, filled with dust and mud, and don royal and curial garments. Worthily dressed, I enter into the ancient courts of the men of antiquity, where, warmly received, I feed on that which is my only food and which was meant for me. I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reasons of their actions and they, because of their humanity, answer me. Four hours can pass, and I feel no weariness; my troubles forgotten, I neither fear poverty nor dread death.
Alone in his study, he “conversed” with Livy, Aristotle, and Polybius, and considered the reasons of human history and of the rise and fall of cities and states. He composed a long book, a commentary on the first ten books of Livy’s History, and a short one, The Prince. The latter is one of the most famous books ever written.
Machiavelli attempted to use these works to regain the favor of the Medici in Florence. Curiously, it was not his brilliant political writings that brought him again to their attention but his comedies, one of which, Mandragola, was even performed before the Medici pope, Leo X, in 1520. He was asked to give advice and to write a history of Florence and a later Medici pope, Clement VII, exacted from him a plan for a national militia to defend Italy against the invaders from the north, most notably the King of France and the Emperor Charles V.
“I compare [Fortune] to one of those raging rivers,” Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, “which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it.” Such was the descent into Italy in 1527 of the troops of Charles V who, mutinous and their pay in arrears, sacked Rome. There and then ended Machiavelli’s hopes, as well as many other beautiful things. He died a few weeks later.