Had Rabelais never written his strange and marvellous romance, no one would ever have imagined the possibility of its production. It stands outside other things — a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly¹ and reason, of childishness and grandeur², of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of baseness and nobility, of personalities³ and broad generalization⁴, of the comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. Throughout the whole there is such a force of life and thought, such a power of good sense, a kind of assurance so authoritative⁶, that he takes rank with the greatest; and his peers are not many. You may like him or not, may attack him or sing his praises, but you cannot ignore him. He is of those that die hard. Be as fastidious as you will; make up your mind to recognize only those who are, without any manner of doubt, beyond and above all others; however few the names you keep, Rabelais’ will always remain.

We may know his work, may know it well, and admire it more every time we read it. After being amused by it, after having enjoyed it, we may return again to study it and to enter more fully⁷ into its meaning. Yet there is no possibility of knowing his own life in the same fashion. In spite of all the efforts, often successful, that have been made to throw light on it, to bring forward a fresh document, or some obscure mention in a forgotten book, to add some little fact, to fix a date more precisely⁸, it remains⁹ nevertheless full of uncertainty¹⁰ and of gaps. Besides, it has been burdened and sullied by all kinds of wearisome stories and foolish

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