that the several kinds of madness are infinite.  Though this much of Triboulet’s words tend little to my advantage, howbeit the prejudice which I sustain thereby be common with me to all other men, yet the rest of his talk and gesture maketh altogether for me.  He said to my wife, Be wary of the monkey; that is as much as if she should be cheery, and take as much delight in a monkey as ever did the Lesbia of Catullus in her sparrow; who will for his recreation pass his time no less joyfully at the exercise of snatching flies than heretofore did the merciless fly-catcher Domitian.  Withal he meant, by another part of his discourse, that she should be of a jovial country-like humour, as gay and pleasing as a harmonious hornpipe of Saulieau or Buzansay.  The veridical Triboulet did therein hint at what I liked well, as perfectly knowing the inclinations and propensions of my mind, my natural disposition, and the bias of my interior passions and affections.  For you may be assured that my humour is much better satisfied and contented with the pretty, frolic, rural, dishevelled shepherdesses, whose bums through their coarse canvas smocks smell of the clover grass of the field, than with those great ladies in magnific courts, with their flandan top-knots and sultanas, their polvil, pastillos, and cosmetics.  The homely sound, likewise, of a rustical hornpipe is more agreeable to my ears than the curious warbling and musical quavering of lutes, theorbos, viols, rebecs, and violins.  He gave me a lusty rapping thwack on my back,—­what then?  Let it pass, in the name and for the love of God, as an abatement of and deduction from so much of my future pains in purgatory.  He did it not out of any evil intent.  He thought, belike, to have hit some of the pages.  He is an honest fool, and an innocent changeling.  It is a sin to harbour in the heart any bad conceit of him.  As for myself, I heartily pardon him.  He flirted me on the nose.  In that there is no harm; for it importeth nothing else but that betwixt my wife and me there will occur some toyish wanton tricks which usually happen to all new-married folks.

Chapter 3.XLVII.

How Pantagruel and Panurge resolved to make a visit to the oracle of the holy bottle.

There is as yet another point, quoth Panurge, which you have not at all considered on, although it be the chief and principal head of the matter.  He put the bottle in my hand and restored it me again.  How interpret you that passage?  What is the meaning of that?  He possibly, quoth Pantagruel, signifieth thereby that your wife will be such a drunkard as shall daily take in her liquor kindly, and ply the pots and bottles apace.  Quite otherwise, quoth Panurge; for the bottle was empty.  I swear to you, by the prickling brambly thorn of St. Fiacre in Brie, that our unique morosoph, whom I formerly termed the lunatic Triboulet, referreth me, for attaining