re of garlic, onions, shallots, hams, botargos,
caviare, biscuits, neat's tongues, old cheese, and such like comfits, very
artificially interwoven, and packed together with vine-stocks.
On another were a hundred sorts of drinking glasses, cups, cisterns, ewers,
false cups, tumblers, bowls, mazers, mugs, jugs, goblets, talboys, and such
other Bacchic artillery.
On the frontispiece of the triumphal arch, under the zoophore, was the
following couplet:
You who presume to move this way,
Get a good lantern, lest you stray.
We took special care of that, cried Pantagruel when he had read them; for
there is not a better or a more divine lantern than ours in all
Lantern-land.
This arch ended at a fine large round alley covered over with the interlaid
branches of vines, loaded and adorned with clusters of five hundred
different colours, and of as many various shapes, not natural, but due to
the skill of agriculture; some were golden, others bluish, tawny, azure,
white, black, green, purple, streaked with many colours, long, round,
triangular, cod-like, hairy, great-headed, and grassy. That pleasant alley
ended at three old ivy-trees, verdant, and all loaden with rings. Our
enlightened lantern directed us to make ourselves hats with some of their
leaves, and cover our heads wholly with them, which was immediately done.
Jupiter's priestess, said Pantagruel, in former days would not like us have
walked under this arbour. There was a mystical reason, answered our most
perspicuous lantern, that would have hindered her; for had she gone under
it, the wine, or the grapes of which 'tis made, that's the same thing, had
been over her head, and then she would have seemed overtopped and mastered
by wine. Which implies that priests, and all persons who devote themselves
to the contemplation of divine things, ought to keep their minds sedate and
calm, and avoid whatever might disturb and discompose their tranquillity,
which nothing is more apt to do than drunkenness.
You also, continued our lantern, could not come into the Holy Bottle's
presence, after you have gone through this arch, did not that noble
priestess Bacbuc first see your shoes full of vine-leaves; which action is
diametrically opposite to the other, and signifies that you despise wine,
and having mastered it, as it were, tread it under foot.
I am no scholar, quoth Friar John, for which I'm heartily sorry, yet I find
by my breviary that in the Revelation a w
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