One day Pantagruel was strolling outside the city-walls towards the Abbey St. Antoine. While engaged in philosophical talk with his own people, and several students besides, he happened to see, coming along the road, a young man of fine height and handsome presence, who looked so bloody and so woebegone, and whose clothes hung around him in such tatters and rags, that he seemed to have barely escaped with his life from a pack of mad dogs. As soon as his eyes fell upon the man, Pantagruel said to his attendants:—
"Do you see that man yonder, coming from Charanton Bridge? By my faith, he is poor only in fortune. As far as I can judge by his features, Nature has given that man a rich and noble lineage."
When the stranger had come up to them, Pantagruel said to him: "My good friend, I beg you to stop a moment, and answer a few questions which I am about to ask you. You will not repent it if you do so, as I feel a strange desire to aid you in the distress in which I see you, for you excite my pity. Before all, my friend, tell me who you are? Where do you come from? What do you seek? And what is your name?"
The stranger then answered him:—
In German—
To which Pantagruel, not knowing a single word, replied:—
"My friend, I don't quite understand this gibberish. If you want us to get at your meaning, speak to us in another language."
Then the stranger spoke:—
In Arabic—
"Ha! Do you know what he is saying, Master?" cried Pantagruel to Epistemon.
Epistemon's answer was a shake of the head.
Then in Italian—
To which Master Epistemon only said: "As much of one as of the other, and nothing of either."
Then the solitary wanderer spoke:—
In English—
What he said in a very strange English was: "Lord, if you be so vertuous of intelligence, as you be naturally releaved to the body, you should have pity of me; for nature hath made us equal, but fortune hath some exalted, and others deprived; nevertheless is vertue often deprived, and the vertuous men despised; for before the last end none is good."
"Ho! still less," cried poor Pantagruel.
Then the Basque—
Carpalim, Pantagruel's valet, thought he caught something familiar here, but the stranger went on as if nothing had been said.
In a rattling unknown language—
"Do you speak a Christian tongue, my friend, or do you make your lingo as you go along?" asked Epistemon, who was beginning to get rather tired.
Then in Dutch—
"Quite as bad as the others!" muttered Pantagruel under his breath.
Then in Spanish—
"See here, my friend," retorted Pantagruel, who in his turn was getting tired, "I have not the slightest doubt that you are master of various languages. But all I ask is that you should tell us what you want to say in some tongue which we can understand."
Then in Danish—
"I think," said Eusthenes, "the old Goths must have spoken that way."
Then in a sonorous tongue—
Here Master Epistemon thought it right to say: "This time I have caught his meaning. What he has just said is in the old Hebrew, rhetorically pronounced."
Then in Greek—
"Oh! That's Greek. I know it. How long didst thou stay in Greece?" asked the valet Carpalim, who had once been in that country.
The the low Breton tongue—
It was now Pantagruel's turn to say: "It seems to me that I understand what you are trying to say; for it is the tongue of my own country, of Utopia, or something very like it."
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PANTAGRUEL MEETS PANURGE.
But, just as he was beginning to say something more, the stranger broke out again:—
In the Latin language—
"That's all very well, my friend, but can't you speak French?"
"Certainly, and very well, too, an it please you, my lord," answered the man. "By good luck, the French is at once my natural and maternal language. I was born in the garden of France,—fair Toulouse."
"Then you are a Frenchman! Let us know at once what is your name. If you satisfy me in this, you need never wander from my company, and we shall be one to the other, as ?neas and Achates."
"Sir," said the stranger, "my name in baptism was Panurge. I have just come home from Turkey, where I had the misfortune of being made a prisoner in the expedition against Metelin. I have ever so many good stories to tell Your Highness, more marvellous than those of Ulysses. As you are gracious enough to promise to keep me among your friends, I protest that I shall never leave you. I beg your pardon, my lord, I want one word more. I am desperately hungry, my teeth being very sharp, and my throat very dry. A dinner just now would be just as good as a balsam for sore eyes."
Pantagruel, on hearing these words from the stranger, was delighted. He at once ordered that a full meal should be got ready. This being set before him Panurge, who hadn't eaten for two whole days, stuffed himself and went to bed with the roosters, and never woke up until dinner-time next day, when he leaped from his bed, and, without so much as washing his face, reached the dining-room in three hops and one jump.