find most roasting cooks, as a
spy would be to reckon the bastions of a town. Now at Amiens, in four,
nay, five times less ground than we have trod in our contemplations, I
could have shown you above fourteen streets of roasting cooks, most
ancient, savoury, and aromatic. I cannot imagine what kind of pleasure you
can have taken in gazing on the lions and Africans (so methinks you call
their tigers) near the belfry, or in ogling the porcupines and estridges in
the Lord Philip Strozzi's palace. Faith and truth I had rather see a good
fat goose at the spit. This porphyry, those marbles are fine; I say
nothing to the contrary; but our cheesecakes at Amiens are far better in my
mind. These ancient statues are well made; I am willing to believe it;
but, by St. Ferreol of Abbeville, we have young wenches in our country
which please me better a thousand times.

What is the reason, asked Friar John, that monks are always to be found in
kitchens, and kings, emperors, and popes are never there? Is there not,
said Rhizotome, some latent virtue and specific propriety hid in the
kettles and pans, which, as the loadstone attracts iron, draws the monks
there, and cannot attract emperors, popes, or kings? Or is it a natural
induction and inclination, fixed in the frocks and cowls, which of itself
leads and forceth those good religious men into kitchens, whether they will
or no? He would speak of forms following matter, as Averroes calls them,
answered Epistemon. Right, said Friar John.

I will not offer to solve this problem, said Pantagruel; for it is somewhat
ticklish, and you can hardly handle it without coming off scurvily; but I
will tell you what I have heard.

Antigonus, King of Macedon, one day coming into one of the tents, where his
cooks used to dress his meat, and finding there poet Antagoras frying a
conger, and holding the pan himself, merrily asked him, Pray, Mr. Poet, was
Homer frying congers when he wrote the deeds of Agamemnon? Antagoras
readily answered: But do you think, sir, that when Agamemnon did them he
made it his business to know if any in his camp were frying congers? The
king thought it an indecency that a poet should be thus a-frying in a
kitchen; and the poet let the king know that it was a more indecent thing
for a king to be found in such a place. I'll clap another story upon the
neck of this, quoth Panurge, and will tell you what Breton Villandry
answered one day to the Duke of Guise.

Th