de quelque missique precation de nos sacrificules. . . . Je revere des olympicoles. Je venere patrialement le supernel astripotens. Je dilige et redame mes proximes." After which Pantagruel comments again, "'Je croy qu'il nous forge ici quelque langaige diabolique et qu'il nous charme comme enchanteur.' A quoy dist un de ses gens: 'Seigneur, sans nulle doubte ce gallant veult contrefaire la langue des Parisiens, mais il ne fait que escorcher le latin, et cuide ainsi Pindariser; et il lui semble bien qu'il est quelque grand orateur en françois, parce qu'il dedaigne l'usance commun de parler.'" And when Pantagruel, anticipating Moliere, has proceeded to "escorcher" the offender, Rabelais tells how the latter after a few years died in a certain manner, "ce que faisant la vengeance divine, et nous demonstrant ce que dist le philosophe, et Aulu Gelle, qu'il nous convient parler selon le langaige usité, et, comme disoit Octavian Auguste, qu'il fault éviter les motz espaves, en pareille diligence que les patrons de navires evitent les rochiers de la mer." It was Caius and not Octavian; but no matter. Rabelais's own book, with its rich store of "motz usités" and "espaves," gave the French people a sufficiency of "langaige" to live by; and the vainer pedantries passed, as they needs must, leaving their memory not only in Rabelais's caricature but, after all, in his own exuberant vocabulary,[1] as in that of Montaigne, whose French speech was inevitably enriched by that other which his father had made for him equally a mother tongue.
IV
A far subtler preciosity is that which we find flourishing as Euphuism in England under Elizabeth, and as a more grotesque
- ↑ This is duly noted by M. Lanson.
