Vagabond Monk

RABELAIS--Anatole France--Holt ($5). THE LIVES, HEROIC DEEDS, AND SAYINGS OF GARGANTUA AND His SON PANTA-GRUEL--trans, from the French by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Le Motteux. In one volume.--Simon & Schuster ($3.50). On the banks of the Loire between Meung and Orleans there is a bubbling well by which "the master" sat, and a stone table on which he is said to have written. Add a weeping willow tree, and the late great Anatole France has made a Chinese sage of Rabelais--scholarly, ruminative, hardly Rabelaisian. France sought to unroll this innocuous picture before Argentine audiences (in 1909). But the Bishops of Buenos Aires, having heard of Rabelais' earthy humor, and having heard of the impious Anatole France, denounced them both. The pious dared not listen to the dean of the Academic. "There was not a soul in the boxes and not one woman in the house. In all, three hundred baldpates. It was funereal." The lecture tour was salvaged by substituting a laudatory address on South America. The original lectures now appear in book form to make pleasant if somewhat disappointing reading. From the mass of anecdote that has accumulated about the figure of the famed 16th Century Gascon, Lecturer France has gleaned the few bits that seem authentic and pieced them into the patchwork of Rabelais' vagabond life. Scholar and classicist, Francois Rabelais nevertheless defied Hippocrates, the Church and prevailing custom, to the extent of publicly dissecting a man who had been hanged. But the fascination of science waned. He divided his time between the hospital and the printing press. "At the Sign of the Griffin" he published various Latin documents two of which were "spurious, very spurious, absolutely spurious." Scholar that he was, his critical sense was temporarily submerged by an enthusiasm caught from the great humanists of his period. Some time later he abandoned both science and the humanities to play the monk at the Abbey of Saint-Maur-des-Fosses, a Paradise, he said, of healthfulness, amenity, serenity, delight and all honest pleasures of agriculture and rustic life. . . . But Rabelais could not remain in a Paradise, any more than Eve; like her he was too full of curiosity. Chastised for heresy and impiety, accused of Calvinism, drunkenness and gluttony, he retained his influence with a sufficient number of cardinals and bishops to acquire two curacies near Paris. Bored, no doubt, as cure, he shortly resigned both posts and disappeared from anecdote till on his deathbed, surrounded by grieving friends, he joked at their grief. Much that is lost of Rabelais' personal history crops up in his story of "his second self," Panurge -- cozener, roysterer, rhyme ster, philosopher, companion to Pantagruel, "a very gallant and proper man of his person, only that he was a little lecherous, and naturally subject to a kinde of disease, which at that time they called lack of money." Together these uncommonly good fellows rollicked and rioted over land and sea, playing havoc with solemn industrious citizenry, making mock of bump tious clergy and royalty. Pantagruel's father, Gargantua, had set the pace, rid ing into battle upon a Numidian mare whose tail was so long that by whisking it a few times she knocked down a forest. During the battle, Captain Tripet, enemy, gives up four potsful of soup and his soul amidst the pottage. The France lectures also summarize succinctly the complicated maze of Rabelais' writing with inclusion of quips and incidents that are among the most amusing and the least vulgar. The neatest summary and the most judicious excerpts could give no conception of the texture of Rabelais' wit ; but they point to a profitable perusal of the 1.021 close-packed pages that comprise the works of the original Rabelaisian, now available in one volume.