A Monk Who Loved Books
The unique, tireless, skeptical, cheerful, learned and bawdy author of "the most entertaining and useful stories ever told" entered the world in 1495 (as the book gives it). His father kept a respectable law office in the town of Chinon, and his mother placed him in a Franciscan convent in early childhood, about which Rabelais later complained: "Women who keep their children nine months under their hearts ... cannot bear their presence until they are nine years old ... so they add two cubits to the length of their clothes and shave I know not how many hairs from the crowns of their heads, and with a few words whispered in their ears turn them into birds of heaven," meaning that the middle of the head was shaved round and they were made monks.
The boy submitted to this fate because he longed for study, and probably, like Erasmus, gave his heart to books in the convent library. There he met two or three monks who wanted to learn Greek, excited by the breadth of the ancient world that scholars were revealing to the mind more each day. Francois Rabelais advanced so far in his studies that he received a letter of praise from Guillaume Bude himself. Things seemed to go well, and in 1520 the future great skeptic took holy orders in a ceremony. But some older monks of the convent, who smelled heresy in philology, accused the young Hellenists of spending on books the alms they gained from their preaching, instead of handing it to the common treasury of the convent. Rabelais and several other monks were sentenced to live in solitude and to be deprived of reading of any kind, which for them was half the meaning of life.
Bude learned of the disaster and appealed to Francis I, and the king at once ordered the disgraced scholars restored to freedom and the ordinary privileges of life. Later, through another intercession, a papal brief arrived allowing Rabelais to change his residence and allegiance from the Franciscan convent; he went to Maillezais and joined the Benedictines (1524). There Bishop Geoffroy d'Estissac grew so attached to him that he allowed him to go wherever he wished to continue his studies. Rabelais went and forgot to return.
Medicine and Lyons
After studying at several universities, Rabelais finally chose the medical school of the University of Montpellier (1530). He apparently had earlier training in the field, since after only a year he obtained his bachelor's degree in medicine; but for reasons unknown he did not continue toward the doctorate, and again took to wandering until 1532, when he settled in Lyons. Like Servetus, he continued scholarly research alongside medicine. At one time he worked as a kind of assistant editor in the press of Sebastian Gryphius, supervised the printing of several Greek texts, translated the Aphorisms of Hippocrates into Latin, and took eager part in the humanist movement that was then stirring Lyons.
On 30 November 1532 he sent a copy of the history of Flavius Josephus to Erasmus, with a flattering letter that seems far from what one expects of a man of thirty-seven, yet has the special flavor of that ardent age. He wrote that Georges d'Armagnac had sent him the book to forward, that he eagerly seized the occasion to offer his gratitude, deep respect and loyal service, and that he should have called Erasmus not father but mother, if his generosity allowed: for as mothers nourish the fruit of the womb before they see it, so Erasmus had, for a man whose face he did not know and whose small name meant nothing to him, nourished and strengthened him with the milk of his divine learning; whatever he was, whatever worth he had, he owed to Erasmus alone, and he would be the most ungrateful of men if he did not say so openly. "Once again, greetings, beloved father, honor of your country, support of letters and unconquerable champion of truth."
In that same November of 1532 we find Rabelais in the city hospital of Lyons, practicing medicine at a salary of 40 livres a year. But we should not think of him as a scholar or physician in the narrow sense. The truth is that Rabelais's knowledge was very wide, and like Shakespeare he seems to have had professional information in the sciences and arts of his age: law, medicine, literature, theology, cooking, history, botany, astronomy and mythology. In his works he alludes to a hundred ancient legends, quotes some fifty writers and great men of ancient Greece and Rome, and sometimes even shows off his learning like a beginner. Rabelais was so absorbed in living that he lacked time for sustained scientific practice or deep research, and even the works published under his supervision were not good examples of careful editing. It was not in his nature to devote himself wholly to scholarship, as Erasmus or Bude did; on the whole he liked life better than books.
In our imagination he is a dignified, tall, handsome man, a spring of learning, light and fire of speech. If he has wrongly been portrayed as a drunkard, it may be because of the toasts he paid to drinkers and the praises he sang of wine; in truth, apart from a private lapse of no lasting consequence, he lived a relatively quiet and honorable life, and was repeatedly honored by the finest minds of his time, including several high clergymen. At the same time Rabelais had in him many traits of the French peasant. He welcomed warmly the boasters and charmers he met in fields or streets, loved their jokes, their laughter, their tale-spinning and their earthy talk. For that reason, without meaning to, he lived so as to dim the fame of Erasmus beside the brilliance of his own name; for he collected these tales and traditions, joined their parts, completed them, embroidered them, adorned them with sayings and allusions of the classics, sharpened their satirical edge, and turned them into instructive satires, keeping their frank tone and bold allusions as untouched as possible.
Gargantua and Pantagruel
One of the common stories of the time, in many rural districts, was the tale of a kindly giant named Gargantua, with his insatiable appetite, his amours and his feats of strength. According to local tradition, the hills and boulders seen here and there had all fallen from his hand basket as Gargantua passed. These legends were still told as late as about 1860 in the peasant cottages of France, where Rabelais's fame had never reached. An anonymous writer, or perhaps Rabelais himself, in jest and amusement, put some of these tales on paper and had them printed at Lyons as a book titled The Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua (1521). The book sold so eagerly that Rabelais thought of adding a sequel about Gargantua's son. So at the Lyons fair in the autumn of 1532 a book without an author's name appeared, titled The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Prowess of the Renowned Pantagruel. The name had earlier appeared in some popular plays, but Rabelais gave that giant being new meaning and depth. The Sorbonne and the monks condemned the book as indecent and crude, and its sales went up. Francis I enjoyed reading it, and some clergymen also tasted its flavor. Fourteen years passed before Rabelais acknowledged authorship of the book, since he feared to lose his life, or at least his reputation, over it.
Rabelais was still so absorbed in acquiring learning that he neglected his duties at the hospital, and as a result was dismissed from his hospital post. If Jean du Bellay, bishop of Paris and one of the founders of the College de France, had not taken him as his personal physician on his mission to Italy (January 1534), Rabelais might have had trouble earning his bread. On his return to Lyons, Rabelais published in October of that year The Very Horrific Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel. This story, which was to be the first book of the whole series, contained such mischievous satires of the clergy that the Sorbonne again condemned it. Soon both stories were printed together, and their sales exceeded those of any other work in France except the Bible and the Imitation of Christ. As reported, the king of France laughed at it again and praised its author.
Danger and Protection
But on the night of 17 October 1534, when Protestants put up insulting placards and handbills on the walls of Paris houses and even on the doors of the royal palace, Rabelais's position as a possible opponent of Catholicism was again in danger. Although he had again not named himself in his book, he knew he was under general suspicion, and feared that the Sorbonne, with its influence at court, would demand from the king the head of this licentious writer.
Again Jean du Bellay came to Rabelais's rescue. That kindly cleric, who had now risen to cardinal, saved our scholar, physician and bawdy writer from the scene and took him to Rome (1535). By good luck Rabelais spoke in Rome with an enlightened pope. Paul III excused his neglect of his monastic and priestly duties and allowed him to practice medicine. To "make moral amends for his sins," Rabelais revised his book for later editions, removing parts that offended the taste of devout Christians; and when Etienne Dolet played a trick on him and printed his book without permission and still uncorrected, Rabelais struck Dolet's name from the list of his friends.
Under Cardinal du Bellay's protection Rabelais again studied at Montpellier, took his doctorate in medicine, lectured there to large crowds, and then returned to Lyons to resume his life as physician and scholar. In June 1537 Dolet described him as professor of anatomy dissecting the body of an executed criminal before a group of students.
After this, apart from scattered and incomplete information, nothing is known about Rabelais's eventful life. At the historic meeting of Francis I and Charles V at Aigues-Mortes (July 1538), Rabelais was in the French king's train. Two years later we find him in Turin as personal physician to Guillaume du Bellay, the cardinal's brother and French ambassador in the province of Savoy. In those days spies extracted from Rabelais's letters material that caused an uproar in Paris. Rabelais hurried to the capital, faced the storm boldly, and through the king's intervention was cleared (1541).
Later Years
Although the two books Gargantua and Pantagruel were repeatedly banned by the Sorbonne's authorities, Francis took the beleaguered author into his service, gave him a small state post as "examiner of petitions," and officially permitted him to print the second book of Pantagruel, which Rabelais in gratitude dedicated to Marguerite of Navarre (1546, as the book's chronology implies). Its publication raised such an uproar among the theologians that Rabelais thought it wise to take refuge at Metz. He worked a year as a physician in the city hospital of Metz (1546 and 1547), then in 1548 found Lyons a safe place, and in 1549 returned to Paris. At last his church patrons were able to secure him a post as parish priest of Meudon, southwest of the capital (1551), and the persecuted old gadfly once again put on a priest's robe. He apparently left his personal duties to his subordinates and kept only the spending of the income in his own hands.
As far as we know he was still parish priest of Meudon when, almost anonymously, he printed what is now counted as the fourth book of his great work (1552) and dedicated it to Odet, Cardinal de Chatillon. This seems to have been done with prior permission, since in France of that day, as in Renaissance Italy, broad-minded and learned clergy could be found. Nevertheless the book was condemned by the Sorbonne and its publication banned by decree of the parliament. By now Francis I and Marguerite of Navarre had died, and Rabelais found no approval from the grim Henry II. He kept away from Paris for a while but soon returned, and there, after a long illness, he died. As the story goes, when asked on his deathbed where he thought he was going, he replied: "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." Alas, this is only a legend.