made this epitaph in the manner as followeth.

Dead is the noble Badebec,
Who had a face like a rebeck;
A Spanish body, and a belly
Of Switzerland; she died, I tell ye,
In childbirth. Pray to God, that her
He pardon wherein she did err.
Here lies her body, which did live
Free from all vice, as I believe,
And did decease at my bedside,
The year and day in which she died.

Chapter 2.IV.

Of the infancy of Pantagruel.

I find by the ancient historiographers and poets that divers have been born
in this world after very strange manners, which would be too long to
repeat; read therefore the seventh chapter of Pliny, if you have so much
leisure. Yet have you never heard of any so wonderful as that of
Pantagruel; for it is a very difficult matter to believe, how in the little
time he was in his mother's belly he grew both in body and strength. That
which Hercules did was nothing, when in his cradle he slew two serpents,
for those serpents were but little and weak, but Pantagruel, being yet in
the cradle, did far more admirable things, and more to be amazed at. I
pass by here the relation of how at every one of his meals he supped up the
milk of four thousand and six hundred cows, and how, to make him a skillet
to boil his milk in, there were set a-work all the braziers of Somure in
Anjou, of Villedieu in Normandy, and of Bramont in Lorraine. And they
served in this whitepot-meat to him in a huge great bell, which is yet to
be seen in the city of Bourges in Berry, near the palace, but his teeth
were already so well grown, and so strengthened with vigour, that of the
said bell he bit off a great morsel, as very plainly doth appear till this
hour.

One day in the morning, when they would have made him suck one of his cows
--for he never had any other nurse, as the history tells us--he got one of
his arms loose from the swaddling bands wherewith he was kept fast in the
cradle, laid hold on the said cow under the left foreham, and grasping her
to him ate up her udder and half of her paunch, with the liver and the
kidneys, and had devoured all up if she had not cried out most horribly, as
if the wolves had held her by the legs, at which noise company came in and
took away the said cow from Pantagruel. Yet could they not so well do it
but that the quarter whereby he caught her was left in his hand, of which
quarter he gulped up the flesh in a trice, even with as much ease as you
would eat a