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Perhaps because he was the youngest, his father destined him for the
Church.

The time he spent while a child with the Benedictine monks at Seuille is
uncertain. There he might have made the acquaintance of the prototype of
his Friar John, a brother of the name of Buinart, afterwards Prior of
Sermaize. He was longer at the Abbey of the Cordeliers at La Baumette,
half a mile from Angers, where he became a novice. As the brothers Du
Bellay, who were later his Maecenases, were then studying at the University
of Angers, where it is certain he was not a student, it is doubtless from
this youthful period that his acquaintance and alliance with them should
date. Voluntarily, or induced by his family, Rabelais now embraced the
ecclesiastical profession, and entered the monastery of the Franciscan
Cordeliers at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Lower Poitou, which was honoured by his
long sojourn at the vital period of his life when his powers were ripening.
There it was he began to study and to think, and there also began his
troubles.

In spite of the wide-spread ignorance among the monks of that age, the
encyclopaedic movement of the Renaissance was attracting all the lofty
minds. Rabelais threw himself into it with enthusiasm, and Latin antiquity
was not enough for him. Greek, a study discountenanced by the Church,
which looked on it as dangerous and tending to freethought and heresy, took
possession of him. To it he owed the warm friendship of Pierre Amy and of
the celebrated Guillaume Bude. In fact, the Greek letters of the latter
are the best source of information concerning this period of Rabelais'
life. It was at Fontenay-le-Comte also that he became acquainted with the
Brissons and the great jurist Andre Tiraqueau, whom he never mentions but
with admiration and deep affection. Tiraqueau's treatise, De legibus
connubialibus, published for the first time in 1513, has an important
bearing on the life of Rabelais. There we learn that, dissatisfied with
the incomplete translation of Herodotus by Laurent Valla, Rabelais had
retranslated into Latin the first book of the History. That translation
unfortunately is lost, as so many other of his scattered works. It is
probably in this direction that the hazard of fortune has most discoveries
and surprises in store for the lucky searcher. Moreover, as in this law
treatise Tiraqueau attacked women in a merciless fashion, President Amaury
Bouchard published in 1522 a book in their defence, and Rabelais, who was a
friend of both the antagonists, took the side of Tiraqueau. It should be
observed also in passing, that there are several pages of such audacious
plain-speaking, that Rabelais, though he did not copy these in his Marriage
of Panurge, has there been, in his own fashion, as out spoken as Tiraqueau.
If such freedom of language could be permitted in a grave treatise of law,
similar liberties were certainly, in the same century, more natural in a

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