United States or Hungary ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Indeed we must look upon Rabelais as acting the part of a reformer. If he had sought simply popularity and the favor of the court and church, he would certainly not have written a book which is a scathing attack upon pope, prelate, and monk. The book is full of dirty expressions but the age was a very impure one, and we should not judge him too severely.
The king's advent, by affording me a brief respite, had enabled me to collect my thoughts, and, disregarding the ribald interruptions, which at first were frequent, I began as follows: 'I am no Rabelais, sire, I said, 'but droll things happen to the most unlikely.
He was young, small, vigorous, with black hair, a high and open forehead, a singularly expansive face for a blind man, and, as Rabelais says, a magnificent smile of thirty-two teeth. His wife remained standing behind him. "James," said Mr. Desgranges to him, "here is one of my good friends, who is very desirous to see you." "He is a good man, then, since he is your friend." "Yes.
The tiny room with its flowers, its perfume of lavender, its old-fashioned chintzes, and its fragrant linen, might still have been a room in a cottage. The sitting-room, with its veranda looking down upon the river, was provided with cigars, whisky and soda and cigarettes; a bookcase, with a rare copy of Rabelais, an original Surtees, a large paper Decameron, and a few other classics.
Gelays, Philibert de l'Orme, and the Sieur Brantome. Perceiving the good man, the king, who knew his wit, said to him, with a smile, after a short conversation "Hast thou ever delivered a sermon to thy parishioners of Meudon?" Master Rabelais, thinking that the king was joking, since he had never troubled himself further about his post than to collect the revenues accruing from it, replied
All the courtiers having applauded their companion, each one complimented Rabelais, who took his departure accompanied with great honour by the king's pages, who, by express command held torches before him.
A well-handled cross could so readily be used as a weapon, that probably it has served as such more than once, and other and even quite modern instances might be quoted. But other Italian sources are absolutely certain. There are few more wonderful chapters in Rabelais than the one about the drinkers.
No one suspected that Sterne, not content with borrowing his trick of rambling from Rabelais, and his airs of erudition from Burton, and his fooleries from Bruscambille, had coolly transferred whole passages from the second of these writers, not only without acknowledgment, but with the intention, obviously indicated by his mode of procedure, of passing them off as his own.
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.
I do not remember to have seen you before now, since the last time that you acted at Montpellier with our ancient friends, Anthony Saporra, Guy Bourguyer, Balthasar Noyer, Tolet, John Quentin, Francis Robinet, John Perdrier, and Francis Rabelais, the moral comedy of him who had espoused and married a dumb wife. I was there, quoth Epistemon.
Word Of The Day