Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais & M. A. Screech

Author:Francois Rabelais & M. A. Screech
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Classics, Humor, Fiction
ISBN: 9780393308068
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

How Rondibilis declares cuckoldry to be one of the adjuncts of matrimony

CHAPTER 32

[S.P.Q.R. stands for Senatus populusque Romanus (The Roman people and Senate). To Panurge it means si peu que rien (so little as to be nothing). The jest is here transposed in the translation to an English equivalent.

Rondelet’s domain is the Natural. He draws on sound authorities, including the Letter to Dionysus of Pseudo-Hippocrates, The Laws of Marriage of Tiraqueau, and the Marriage Precepts of Plutarch.

In this chapter woman, as in Virgil, is ‘fickle and variable’ (tacitly cited from Aeneid, IV, 569).

Woman’s instability is explained with the help of Plato, but (as was true of other medical authorities of the time) it exploits a passage ripped out of context. Plato in the Timaeus, 91 A-D, made both male and female human beings each subject to a different ‘animal’ which drove them to sexual intercourse. Galen (in On Affected Parts and elsewhere) cited – in total isolation from its context – only the ‘animal’ which worked in woman: the womb, ‘an animal avid for generation’. (The parallel ‘animal’ of the male is simply not mentioned.) The animal within a woman makes her whole life unstable and precarious. Many insisted as here, on Plato’s authority, that the womb was indeed an animal in the strictest sense: it is capable of self-movement and can distinguish between smells, qualities used in the diagnosis and treatment of hysteria. Others insisted that its movements were ‘accidental’ (incidental and secondary). Here such contentions are severely rejected.

The only change later made is to turn ‘five hundred times’ into ‘five hundred and five’.]

‘There remains,’ continued Panurge, ‘one little item to void. You have, sometime or other, seen on the gonfalon of Rome, S.P.Q.R., that is, Such a Piddling Question Really. I shan’t be cuckolded, shall I?’

‘Haven of Grace!’ cried Rondibilis, ‘What are you asking of me! Will you be cuckolded! My friend, I am married, you soon will be; but inscribe this saying on your brain with a pen of iron: every married man is in danger of being cuckolded. Cuckoldom is naturally one of the adjuncts of matrimony. The shadow no more naturally follows the body than cuckoldom follows married men; and whenever you hear these words of a man, He is married, you will not be thought an inexperienced construer of natural consequences if you say, He therefore is, has been, will be, or may be cuckolded’

‘Hypochondriums of all the devils!’ Panurge exclaimed. ‘What are you telling me!’

‘My friend,’ replied Rondibilis, ‘one day when Hippocrates was leaving Lango for Polystylo to visit Democritus the philosopher, he wrote a letter to his old friend Dionysius asking him (since he did not want his wife to remain at home by herself) to take her to her father’s and mother’s during his absence. They were decent folk of sound reputation, but he nevertheless should keep a careful eye on her and spy out where she went with her mother and what sort of people called on her at her

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