The Wedding Feast, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1568. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
« Let’s drink this wine, friends. Children, drink your fill. If you don’t like it, leave it. »
Third book, Prologue
Laughter
With Rabelais, laughter burst spectacularly into literature. Above all, his laughter is an appetite for life — the laughter of a newborn, the expression of physical joy, often scatological and irreverently bawdy:
Listen to this, little balls. Have you ever seen the monk of Castres’s cowl? Whenever it was laid down in any house, whether openly or hidden, at once, by its terrifying virtue, every peasant and inhabitant of the place went into rut — beasts and humans alike, men and women, right down to rats and cats.
(Third Book, ch. XXVII)
Through humor and mockery, laughter also becomes a weapon against what cannot be destroyed: the hypocrisy of monks, the bogus erudition of the Sorbonagres (a satirical term for Sorbonne doctors), the absurdity of scholastic teaching, social injustice, or the stupidity that seizes men during so-called “Picrocholine wars,” a term now drawn from Gargantua (especially chapters 32 and 33).
The body
In the 16th century, people talked about the body openly and without shame. It was the classical writers of the 17th century who pushed it out of literature for a long time. Like Montaigne after him, Rabelais treats the body in a way that may seem unorthodox today: in his world, muscles, organs, and entrails practically celebrate their own existence.
For Rabelais, this is no accident: he believed the soul lived in the blood. It circulates through every part of the body, from the toes to the scalp. Mind and body are inseparable. Like Montaigne, he understands that when one is unwell, the other suffers too. In the utopian Abbey of Thélème — his imagined ideal community — people are encouraged to stretch their legs and breathe fresh air as often as possible. Everything must be done in a state of bodily fulfillment.
Brueghel, Children’s Games, 1560, Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna.
This visual repertoire of children’s games, almost contemporary with Rabelais, strangely echoes the famous list of games in chapter XX of Gargantua.
Wine
For Rabelais, life is impossible without “good, fresh wine.” Just as blood gives life to the body, wine becomes a life-giving force. His characters never drink bad or joyless wine — they drink to celebrate and to feel alive:
Suddenly the monk arrived, and from the farmyard gate he shouted: ‘Fresh wine! Fresh wine! Gymnast, my friend!’
Across Rabelais’s work runs an unquenchable thirst — for life, for pleasure, and for knowledge. Wine and learning spring from the same appetite. When Gargantua and his companions arrive in Paris, they inquire both about the “people of learning” to be found there and the wine that is drunk there.
Were Rabelais’s great drinkers partial to a particular grape? Pineau (the ancestor of today’s Chenin) seems to have been a favorite, if we believe Jean des Entommeures:
“Ah, lacrima Christi, that’s from La Devinière — that’s Pineau wine. Oh, what a lovely white! By my soul, it’s velvet! Look at how well it’s trimmed, and of the finest wool!” (Gargantua)
Words
Rabelais’s language is not the delicate flute music of Racine — it comes from the belly. His characters don’t whisper; they shout, swear, and slam their fists on the table. Raising one’s voice is even part of the ideal education described in Gargantua:
And to exercise his chest and lungs, he would shout like all the devils.
What strikes readers is the sheer vitality of his words. They have flesh and flavor, but also breath, force, and explosive energy — as in the strange, almost surreal episode of the frozen words in the Fourth Book, trapped in winter ice, cracking loudly as they thaw.
Rabelais wrote at a moment when French was emerging both as a shared language and as a language of culture. Spelling was still fluid, borrowings from foreign tongues were abundant, Greek and Latin neologisms flourished, and Rabelais (followed later by Montaigne) freely used expressions from local dialects. It was a prodigiously vibrant age for words — multiplying wildly and gaining a new kind of reality through the printing press.
Veronese, The Wedding at Cana, 1563. Louvre Museum, Paris.
A Puritan, if he could, would turn wine into water. Jesus turns water into wine.
In Rabelais’s time, people consumed around 2 liters of wine per day per person (the wine of the time had an alcohol content of between 7 and 9%), including men, women, and children.