After Le Duchat, all the editions, in their care that nothing should be lost, made the mistake of collecting and placing side by side things which had no connection with each other, which had even been substituted for each other.  The result was a fabricated text, full of contradictions naturally.  But since the edition issued by M. Jannet, the well-known publisher of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, who was the first to get rid of this patchwork, this mosaic, Rabelais’ latest text has been given, accompanied by all the earlier variations, to show the changes he made, as well as his suppressions and additions.  It would also be possible to reverse the method.  It would be interesting to take his first text as the basis, noting the later modifications.  This would be quite as instructive and really worth doing.  Perhaps one might then see more clearly with what care he made his revisions, after what fashion he corrected, and especially what were the additions he made.

No more striking instance can be quoted than the admirable chapter about the shipwreck.  It was not always so long as Rabelais made it in the end:  it was much shorter at first.  As a rule, when an author recasts some passage that he wishes to revise, he does so by rewriting the whole, or at least by interpolating passages at one stroke, so to speak.  Nothing of the kind is seen here.  Rabelais suppressed nothing, modified nothing; he did not change his plan at all.  What he did was to make insertions, to slip in between two clauses a new one.  He expressed his meaning in a lengthier way, and the former clause is found in its integrity along with the additional one, of which it forms, as it were, the warp.  It was by this method of touching up the smallest details, by making here and there such little noticeable additions, that he succeeded in heightening the effect without either change or loss.  In the end it looks as if he had altered nothing, added nothing new, as if it had always been so from the first, and had never been meddled with.

The comparison is most instructive, showing us to what an extent Rabelais’ admirable style was due to conscious effort, care, and elaboration, a fact which is generally too much overlooked, and how instead of leaving any trace which would reveal toil and study, it has on the contrary a marvellous cohesion, precision, and brilliancy.  It was modelled and remodelled, repaired, touched up, and yet it has all the appearance of having been created at a single stroke, or of having been run like molten wax into its final form.

Something should be said here of the sources from which Rabelais borrowed.  He was not the first in France to satirize the romances of chivalry.  The romance in verse by Baudouin de Sebourc, printed in recent years, was a parody of the Chansons de Geste.  In the Moniage Guillaume, and especially in the Moniage Rainouart, in which there is a kind of giant, and occasionally a comic giant, there are situations and