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Le Duchat. One fault to be found with him is his further complication of
the spelling. This he did in accordance with a principle that the words
should be referred to their real etymology. Learned though he was,
Rabelais had little care to be so etymological, and it is not his theories
but those of the modern scholar that have been ventilated.

Somewhat later, from 1823 to 1826, Esmangart and Johanneau issued a
variorum edition in nine volumes, in which the text is often encumbered by
notes which are really too numerous, and, above all, too long. The work
was an enormous one, but the best part of it is Le Duchat's, and what is
not his is too often absolutely hypothetical and beside the truth. Le
Duchat had already given too much importance to the false historical
explanation. Here it is constantly coming in, and it rests on no evidence.
In reality, there is no need of the key to Rabelais by which to discover
the meaning of subtle allusions. He is neither so complicated nor so full
of riddles. We know how he has scattered the names of contemporaries about
his work, sometimes of friends, sometimes of enemies, and without
disguising them under any mask. He is no more Panurge than Louis XII. is
Gargantua or Francis I. Pantagruel. Rabelais says what he wants, all he
wants, and in the way he wants. There are no mysteries below the surface,
and it is a waste of time to look for knots in a bulrush. All the
historical explanations are purely imaginary, utterly without proof, and
should the more emphatically be looked on as baseless and dismissed. They
are radically false, and therefore both worthless and harmful.

In 1840 there appeared in the Bibliotheque Charpentier the Rabelais in a
single duodecimo volume, begun by Charles Labiche, and, after his death,
completed by M. Paul Lacroix, whose share is the larger. The text is that
of L'Aulnaye; the short footnotes, with all their brevity, contain useful
explanations of difficult words. Amongst the editions of Rabelais this is
one of the most important, because it brought him many readers and
admirers. No other has made him so well and so widely known as this
portable volume, which has been constantly reprinted. No other has been so
widely circulated, and the sale still goes on. It was, and must still be
looked on as a most serviceable edition.

The edition published by Didot in 1857 has an altogether special character.
In the biographical notice M. Rathery for the first time treated as they
deserve the foolish prejudices which have made Rabelais misunderstood, and
M. Burgaud des Marets set the text on a quite new base. Having proved,
what of course is very evident, that in the original editions the spelling,
and the language too, were of the simplest and clearest, and were not
bristling with the nonsensical and superfluous consonants which have given
rise to the idea that Rabelais is difficult to read, he took the trouble
first of all to note the spelling of each word.

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