On the other hand, the influence of Aristophanes and of Lucian, his intimate acquaintance with nearly all the writers of antiquity, Greek as well as Latin, with whom Rabelais is more permeated even than Montaigne, were a mine of inspiration.  The proof of it is everywhere.  Pliny especially was his encyclopaedia, his constant companion.  All he says of the Pantagruelian herb, though he amply developed it for himself, is taken from Pliny’s chapter on flax.  And there is a great deal more of this kind to be discovered, for Rabelais does not always give it as quotation.  On the other hand, when he writes, ‘Such an one says,’ it would be difficult enough to find who is meant, for the ‘such an one’ is a fictitious writer.  The method is amusing, but it is curious to account of it.

The question of the Chronique Gargantuaine is still undecided.  Is it by Rabelais or by someone else?  Both theories are defensible, and can be supported by good reasons.  In the Chronique everything is heavy, occasionally meaningless, and nearly always insipid.  Can the same man have written the Chronique and Gargantua, replaced a book really commonplace by a masterpiece, changed the facts and incidents, transformed a heavy icy pleasantry into a work glowing with wit and life, made it no longer a mass of laborious trifling and cold-blooded exaggerations but a satire on human life of the highest genius?  Still there are points common to the two.  Besides, Rabelais wrote other things; and it is only in his romance that he shows literary skill.  The conception of it would have entered his mind first only in a bare and summary fashion.  It would have been taken up again, expanded, developed, metamorphosed.  That is possible, and, for my part, I am of those who, like Brunet and Nodier, are inclined to think that the Chronique, in spite of its inferiority, is really a first attempt, condemned as soon as the idea was conceived in another form.  As its earlier date is incontestable, we must conclude that if the Chronique is not by him, his Gargantua and its continuation would not have existed without it.  This would be a great obligation to stand under to some unknown author, and in that case it is astonishing that his enemies did not reproach him during his lifetime with being merely an imitator and a plagiarist.  So there are reasons for and against his authorship of it, and it would be dangerous to make too bold an assertion.

One fact which is absolutely certain and beyond all controversy, is that Rabelais owed much to one of his contemporaries, an Italian, to the Histoire Macaronique of Merlin Coccaie.  Its author, Theophilus Folengo, who was also a monk, was born in 1491, and died only a short time before Rabelais, in 1544.  But his burlesque poem was published in 1517.  It was in Latin verse, written in an elaborately fabricated style.  It is not dog Latin, but Latin ingeniously italianized, or rather Italian, even Mantuan, latinized.  The contrast between the modern form of the word and its Roman garb produces the most amusing effect.  In the original it is sometimes difficult to read, for Folengo has no objection to using the most colloquial words and phrases.