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Leonard Gaultier, who
published this engraving towards the end of the sixteenth century,
reproduced a great many portraits besides from chalk drawings, in the style
of his master, Thomas de Leu. It must have been such drawings that were
the originals of those portraits which he alone has issued, and which may
therefore be as authentic and reliable as the others whose correctness we
are in a position to verify.

Now Rabelais has here nothing of the Roger Bontemps of low degree about
him. His features are strong, vigorously cut, and furrowed with deep
wrinkles; his beard is short and scanty; his cheeks are thin and already
worn-looking. On his head he wears the square cap of the doctors and the
clerks, and his dominant expression, somewhat rigid and severe, is that of
a physician and a scholar. And this is the only portrait to which we need
attach any importance.

This is not the place for a detailed biography, nor for an exhaustive
study. At most this introduction will serve as a framework on which to fix
a few certain dates, to hang some general observations. The date of
Rabelais' birth is very doubtful. For long it was placed as far back as
1483: now scholars are disposed to put it forward to about 1495. The
reason, a good one, is that all those whom he has mentioned as his friends,
or in any real sense his contemporaries, were born at the very end of the
fifteenth century. And, indeed, it is in the references in his romance to
names, persons, and places, that the most certain and valuable evidence is
to be found of his intercourse, his patrons, his friendships, his
sojournings, and his travels: his own work is the best and richest mine in
which to search for the details of his life.

Like Descartes and Balzac, he was a native of Touraine, and Tours and
Chinon have only done their duty in each of them erecting in recent years a
statue to his honour, a twofold homage reflecting credit both on the
province and on the town. But the precise facts about his birth are
nevertheless vague. Huet speaks of the village of Benais, near Bourgeuil,
of whose vineyards Rabelais makes mention. As the little vineyard of La
Deviniere, near Chinon, and familiar to all his readers, is supposed to
have belonged to his father, Thomas Rabelais, some would have him born
there. It is better to hold to the earlier general opinion that Chinon was
his native town; Chinon, whose praises he sang with such heartiness and
affection. There he might well have been born in the Lamproie house, which
belonged to his father, who, to judge from this circumstance, must have
been in easy circumstances, with the position of a well-to-do citizen. As
La Lamproie in the seventeenth century was a hostelry, the father of
Rabelais has been set down as an innkeeper. More probably he was an
apothecary, which would fit in with the medical profession adopted by his
son in after years. Rabelais had brothers, all older than himself.

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