Gargantua and Pantagruel eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,126 pages of information about Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Gargantua and Pantagruel eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,126 pages of information about Gargantua and Pantagruel.
may in the haste of their rage and fury of their impatience take a qui for a quo, and instead of Raminagrobis snatch up poor Panurge frank and free?  Though formerly, when I was deep in debt, they always failed.  Get you hence!  I will not go thither.  Before God, the very bare apprehension thereof is like to kill me.  To be in a place where there are greedy, famished, and hunger-starved devils; amongst factious devils—­amidst trading and trafficking devils—­O the Lord preserve me!  Get you hence!  I dare pawn my credit on it, that no Jacobin, Cordelier, Carmelite, Capuchin, Theatin, or Minim will bestow any personal presence at his interment.  The wiser they, because he hath ordained nothing for them in his latter will and testament.  The devil take me, if I go thither.  If he be damned, to his own loss and hindrance be it.  What the deuce moved him to be so snappish and depravedly bent against the good fathers of the true religion?  Why did he cast them off, reject them, and drive them quite out of his chamber, even in that very nick of time when he stood in greatest need of the aid, suffrage, and assistance of their devout prayers and holy admonitions?  Why did not he by testament leave them, at least, some jolly lumps and cantles of substantial meat, a parcel of cheek-puffing victuals, and a little belly-timber and provision for the guts of these poor folks, who have nothing but their life in this world?  Let him go thither who will, the devil take me if I go; for, if I should, the devil would not fail to snatch me up.  Cancro.  Ho, the pox!  Get you hence, Friar John!  Art thou content that thirty thousand wainload of devils should get away with thee at this same very instant?  If thou be, at my request do these three things.  First, give me thy purse; for besides that thy money is marked with crosses, and the cross is an enemy to charms, the same may befall to thee which not long ago happened to John Dodin, collector of the excise of Coudray, at the ford of Vede, when the soldiers broke the planks.  This moneyed fellow, meeting at the very brink of the bank of the ford with Friar Adam Crankcod, a Franciscan observantin of Mirebeau, promised him a new frock, provided that in the transporting of him over the water he would bear him upon his neck and shoulders, after the manner of carrying dead goats; for he was a lusty, strong-limbed, sturdy rogue.  The condition being agreed upon, Friar Crankcod trusseth himself up to his very ballocks, and layeth upon his back, like a fair little Saint Christopher, the load of the said supplicant Dodin, and so carried him gaily and with a good will, as Aeneas bore his father Anchises through the conflagration of Troy, singing in the meanwhile a pretty Ave Maris Stella.  When they were in the very deepest place of all the ford, a little above the master-wheel of the water-mill, he asked if he had any coin about him.  Yes, quoth Dodin, a whole bagful; and that he needed not to mistrust his
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Gargantua and Pantagruel from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.