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Where does it all come
from? As a fact, he had at his command something like three languages,
which he used in turn, or which he mixed according to the effect he wished
to produce.

First of all, of course, he had ready to his hand the whole speech of his
time, which had no secrets for him. Provincials have been too eager to
appropriate him, to make of him a local author, the pride of some village,
in order that their district might have the merit of being one of the
causes, one of the factors of his genius. Every neighbourhood where he
ever lived has declared that his distinction was due to his knowledge of
its popular speech. But these dialect-patriots have fallen out among
themselves. To which dialect was he indebted? Was it that of Touraine, or
Berri, or Poitou, or Paris? It is too often forgotten, in regard to French
patois--leaving out of count the languages of the South--that the words or
expressions that are no longer in use to-day are but a survival, a still
living trace of the tongue and the pronunciation of other days. Rabelais,
more than any other writer, took advantage of the happy chances and the
richness of the popular speech, but he wrote in French, and nothing but
French. That is why he remains so forcible, so lucid, and so living, more
living even--speaking only of his style out of charity to the others--than
any of his contemporaries.

It has been said that great French prose is solely the work of the
seventeenth century. There were nevertheless, before that, two men,
certainly very different and even hostile, who were its initiators and its
masters, Calvin on the one hand, on the other Rabelais.

Rabelais had a wonderful knowledge of the prose and the verse of the
fifteenth century: he was familiar with Villon, Pathelin, the Quinze Joies
de Mariage, the Cent Nouvelles, the chronicles and the romances, and even
earlier works, too, such as the Roman de la Rose. Their words, their turns
of expression came naturally to his pen, and added a piquancy and, as it
were, a kind of gloss of antique novelty to his work. He fabricated words,
too, on Greek and Latin models, with great ease, sometimes audaciously and
with needless frequency. These were for him so many means, so many
elements of variety. Sometimes he did this in mockery, as in the humorous
discourse of the Limousin scholar, for which he is not a little indebted to
Geoffroy Tory in the Champfleury; sometimes, on the contrary, seriously,
from a habit acquired in dealing with classical tongues.

Again, another reason of the richness of his vocabulary was that he
invented and forged words for himself. Following the example of
Aristophanes, he coined an enormous number of interminable words, droll
expressions, sudden and surprising constructions. What had made Greece and
the Athenians laugh was worth transporting to Paris.

With an instrument so rich, resources so endless, and the skill to use
them, it is no wonder that he could give voice to anything, be as humorous

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