Gargantua And Pantagruel

“Alas, Badebec, my sweeting, my beloved, my quim so little and lovely’— hers covered three acres and two square poles though—‘my tenderling, my codpiece, my slippers, my slip-on: never again shall I see you!”

Gargantua’s lament at Badebec’s death shows Rabelais’s signature mix of the serious and the scandalous. The grieving widower remembers his wife as his “codpiece” (since she covered his genitals) and, in an aside, notes her private parts were over three-acres big. He also laments his son becoming motherless. In this context, humor is a way to negotiate loss and make peace with the unacceptable fact of death.

“Then he entered Avignon, where he was barely three days before he fell in love, for (it being a papal domain) the women there enjoy playing at squeeze-crupper.”

This bawdy description of Pantagruel in university is a satire on The Development of Education as well as a dig at staunch Catholicism. Avignon being a papal domain, the women there are lascivious. A “squeeze-crupper” is the back part of the saddle that holds a horse’s harness in place; the reference here is to the women “riding” Pantagruel during sex.

“I intend and will that you acquire a perfect command of languages—first Greek (as Quintilian wishes), secondly Latin, and then Hebrew for the Holy Scriptures, as well as Chaldaean and Arabic likewise—and that, for your Greek, you mould your style by imitating Plato, and for your Latin, Cicero.”

This passage satirizes The Development of Education by poking fun at the excesses of the humanist educational ideal. Pantagruel is supposed to achieve a “perfect command” of at least five languages and, what is more, to model his own styles in Greek and Latin after Plato and Cicero—two of the most famous stylists in the classical world.