Rabelais’ style has many different sources.  Besides its force and brilliancy, its gaiety, wit, and dignity, its abundant richness is no less remarkable.  It would be impossible and useless to compile a glossary of Voltaire’s words.  No French writer has used so few, and all of them are of the simplest.  There is not one of them that is not part of the common speech, or which demands a note or an explanation.  Rabelais’ vocabulary, on the other hand, is of an astonishing variety.  Where does it all come from?  As a fact, he had at his command something like three languages, which he used in turn, or which he mixed according to the effect he wished to produce.

First of all, of course, he had ready to his hand the whole speech of his time, which had no secrets for him.  Provincials have been too eager to appropriate him, to make of him a local author, the pride of some village, in order that their district might have the merit of being one of the causes, one of the factors of his genius.  Every neighbourhood where he ever lived has declared that his distinction was due to his knowledge of its popular speech.  But these dialect-patriots have fallen out among themselves.  To which dialect was he indebted?  Was it that of Touraine, or Berri, or Poitou, or Paris?  It is too often forgotten, in regard to French patois—­leaving out of count the languages of the South—­that the words or expressions that are no longer in use to-day are but a survival, a still living trace of the tongue and the pronunciation of other days.  Rabelais, more than any other writer, took advantage of the happy chances and the richness of the popular speech, but he wrote in French, and nothing but French.  That is why he remains so forcible, so lucid, and so living, more living even—­speaking only of his style out of charity to the others—­than any of his contemporaries.

It has been said that great French prose is solely the work of the seventeenth century.  There were nevertheless, before that, two men, certainly very different and even hostile, who were its initiators and its masters, Calvin on the one hand, on the other Rabelais.

Rabelais had a wonderful knowledge of the prose and the verse of the fifteenth century:  he was familiar with Villon, Pathelin, the Quinze Joies de Mariage, the Cent Nouvelles, the chronicles and the romances, and even earlier works, too, such as the Roman de la Rose.  Their words, their turns of expression came naturally to his pen, and added a piquancy and, as it were, a kind of gloss of antique novelty to his work.  He fabricated words, too, on Greek and Latin models, with great ease, sometimes audaciously and with needless frequency.  These were for him so many means, so many elements of variety.  Sometimes he did this in mockery, as in the humorous discourse of the Limousin scholar, for which he is not a little indebted to Geoffroy Tory in the Champfleury; sometimes, on the contrary, seriously, from a habit acquired in dealing with classical tongues.