Then he went into some private place to make excretion of his natural waste-products, and there his tutor repeated what had been read, explaining to him the more obscure and difficult points.
Puis il allait aux lieux secrets excréter le produit des digestions naturelles. Là, son précepteur répétait ce qu'on avait lu et lui expliquait les passages les plus obscurs et les plus difficiles.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, July 22, 2025
A Dedicated Tutor
François Rabelais (1494-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel I.23 (he = Gargantua, his tutor = Ponocrates; tr. J.M. Cohen):