Project Gutenberg's Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book I., by Francois Rabelais

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Title: Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book I.
Five Books Of The Lives, Heroic Deeds And Sayings Of Gargantua And
His Son Pantagruel

Author: Francois Rabelais

Release Date: August 8, 2004 [EBook #8166]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL, BOOK I. ***

Produced by Sue Asscher and David Widger

MASTER FRANCIS RABELAIS

FIVE BOOKS OF THE LIVES, HEROIC DEEDS AND SAYINGS OF

GARGANTUA AND HIS SON PANTAGRUEL

[Illustration: He Did Cry Like a Cow--frontispiece]

[Illustration: titlepage]

Translated into English by

Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty

and

Peter Antony Motteux

The text of the first Two Books of Rabelais has been reprinted from the
first edition (1653) of Urquhart's translation. Footnotes initialled 'M.'
are drawn from the Maitland Club edition (1838); other footnotes are by the
translator. Urquhart's translation of Book III. appeared posthumously in
1693, with a new edition of Books I. and II., under Motteux's editorship.
Motteux's rendering of Books IV. and V. followed in 1708. Occasionally (as
the footnotes indicate) passages omitted by Motteux have been restored from
the 1738 copy edited by Ozell.

[Illustration: Rabelais Dissecting Society--portrait2]

CONTENTS.

[Illustration: Francois Rabelais--portrait]

Introduction.

Had Rabelais never written his strange and marvellous romance, no one would
ever have imagined the possibility of its production. It stands outside
other things--a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of
childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of
popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of
baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the
comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. Throughout the
whole there is such a force of life and thought, such a power of good
sense, a kind of assurance so authoritative, that he takes rank with the
greatest; and his peers are not many. You may