but with admiration and deep affection.  Tiraqueau’s treatise, De legibus connubialibus, published for the first time in 1513, has an important bearing on the life of Rabelais.  There we learn that, dissatisfied with the incomplete translation of Herodotus by Laurent Valla, Rabelais had retranslated into Latin the first book of the History.  That translation unfortunately is lost, as so many other of his scattered works.  It is probably in this direction that the hazard of fortune has most discoveries and surprises in store for the lucky searcher.  Moreover, as in this law treatise Tiraqueau attacked women in a merciless fashion, President Amaury Bouchard published in 1522 a book in their defence, and Rabelais, who was a friend of both the antagonists, took the side of Tiraqueau.  It should be observed also in passing, that there are several pages of such audacious plain-speaking, that Rabelais, though he did not copy these in his Marriage of Panurge, has there been, in his own fashion, as out spoken as Tiraqueau.  If such freedom of language could be permitted in a grave treatise of law, similar liberties were certainly, in the same century, more natural in a book which was meant to amuse.

The great reproach always brought against Rabelais is not the want of reserve of his language merely, but his occasional studied coarseness, which is enough to spoil his whole work, and which lowers its value.  La Bruyere, in the chapter Des ouvrages de l’esprit, not in the first edition of the Caracteres, but in the fifth, that is to say in 1690, at the end of the great century, gives us on this subject his own opinion and that of his age: 

’Marot and Rabelais are inexcusable in their habit of scattering filth about their writings.  Both of them had genius enough and wit enough to do without any such expedient, even for the amusement of those persons who look more to the laugh to be got out of a book than to what is admirable in it.  Rabelais especially is incomprehensible.  His book is an enigma,—­one may say inexplicable.  It is a Chimera; it is like the face of a lovely woman with the feet and the tail of a reptile, or of some creature still more loathsome.  It is a monstrous confusion of fine and rare morality with filthy corruption.  Where it is bad, it goes beyond the worst; it is the delight of the basest of men.  Where it is good, it reaches the exquisite, the very best; it ministers to the most delicate tastes.’

Putting aside the rather slight connection established between two men of whom one is of very little importance compared with the other, this is otherwise very admirably said, and the judgment is a very just one, except with regard to one point—­the misunderstanding of the atmosphere in which the book was created, and the ignoring of the examples of a similar tendency furnished by literature as well as by the popular taste.  Was it not the Ancients that began it?  Aristophanes, Catullus, Petronius, Martial, flew in the face of