RABELAIS, FRANcOIS (c. 1495-1553), French author, was born at Chinon on the Vienne in the province of Touraine. The date of his' birth is uncertain : it has been put by tradition, and by authorities long subsequent to his death, as 1483, 1490 and 1495. Most 17th-century authorities give the earliest date, and this also accords best with the age of the eldest of the Du Bellay brothers, with whom Rabelais was (perhaps) at school. In favour of the middle date, the testimony of Guy Patin (1601-72), a wit ness of some merit and not too far removed in point of time, is invoked. The only contribution which need be made here to the controversy is to point out that if Rabelais was born in 1483 he must have been an old man when he died, and that scarcely even tradition speaks of him as such. It is said that he had four brothers and no sisters, that his father had a country property called La Deviniere, and was either an apothecary or a tavern keeper. An indistinct allusion of his own has been taken to mean that he was tonsured in childhood at seven or nine years old; and tradition says that he was sent to the convent of Seuilly. From Seuilly at an unknown date tradition takes him to the convent school of La Baumette near Angers, where he is supposed to have been at school with the brothers Du Bellay, with Geoffroy d'Estis sac and others. He certainly entered the Franciscan monastery of Fontenay le Comte some time before April 5, 1519, by which date he held a position sufficiently senior to sign deeds for the community. The letters of the well-known Greek scholar Budaeus, together with some notices by Andre Tiraqueau, a learned jurist, to whom Rabelais rather than his own learning has secured im mortality, show what manner of life the future author of Gar gantua led in his convent. The letters of Budaeus show that an attempt was made by the heads of the convent or the order to check the studious ardour of these Franciscans; but it failed, and there is no positive evidence of anything like actual persecution. Papers were seized as suspicious, then given back as innocent ; but Rabelais was in all probability disgusted with the cloister—indeed his great work shows this beyond doubt. In 1524 his friend Geoffroy d'Estissac procured from Clement VII. an indult, licens ing a change of order and of abode for Rabelais. From a Francis can he became a Benedictine, and from Fontenay he moved to Maillezais, of which Geoffroy d'Estissac was bishop. But even this learned and hospitable retreat did not apparently satisfy Rabelais. In or before 153o he left Maillezais, abandoned his Benedictine garb for that of a secular priest, and, as he himself puts it in his subsequent Supplicatio pro Apostasia to Pope Paul III., per seculum diu vagatus fuit. For a time the Du Bellays provided him with an abode near their own château of Langey, but on Sept. 17, 153o, he entered the faculty of medicine at the University of Montpellier, becoming bachelor on Nov. 1, a re markably short interval, which shows what was thought of his ac quirements. Early in 1531 he lectured publicly on Galen and Hip pocrates, and his stay at Montpellier, which lasted rather more than a year at first, was renewed at intervals for several years.
In 1532, however, he had moved from Montpellier to Lyons. He was appointed before the beginning of November physician to the Hotel Dieu, with a salary of 4o livres per annum, and lec tured on anatomy with demonstrations from the human subject.
He edited for Sebastian Gryphius, in the single year 1532, the medical Epistles of Giovanni Manardi, the Aphorisms of Hip pocrates, with the Ars Parva of Galen, and an edition of two sup posed Latin documents, which, however, happened unluckily to be forgeries.
At this time Lyons was the centre of an unusually enlightened society, and indirectly it is clear that Rabelais became intimate with this society. A manuscript distich, which was found in the Toulouse library, deals with the death of an infant named Theodule, whose country was Lyons and his father Rabelais, but we know nothing more about the matter. What makes the Lyons sojourn of the greatest real importance is that at this time prob ably appeared the beginnings of the work which was to make Rabelais immortal. There is no doubt that both Gargantua and Pantagruel were popular names of giants in the Middle Ages, though no mention of the former in French literature much be fore Rabelais's time has been traced. In 1526, however, Charles de Bordigne, in a satiric work of no great merit, entitled la Legende de Pierre Faifeu, has the name Gargantua with an allusion, and in 1532 (if not earlier) there appeared at Lyons les Grandes et ines timables chroniques du grand et enorme geant Gargantua. This is a short book on the plan of the later burlesques and romances of the Round Table. Arthur and Merlin appear with Grandgosier, as he is here spelt, Galemelle (Gargamelle), Gargantua himself, and the terrible mare. But there is no trace of the action or other characters of Gargantua that was to be, nor is the manner of the piece in the least worthy of Rabelais. No one supposes that he wrote it, though it has been supposed that he edited it and that in reality it is older than 1532, and may be the direct subject of Bordigne's allusion six years earlier. What does, however, seem probable is that the first book of Pantagruel (the second of the whole work) was composed with a definite view to this chap book and not to the existing first book of Gargantua, which was written afterwards, when Rabelais discovered the popularity of his work and felt that it ought to have some worthier starting point than the Grandes chroniques. The earliest known and dated edition of Pantagruel is of 1533, of Gargantua 1535, though this would not be of itself conclusive; but the definite description of Gargantua in the title as "Pere de Pantagruel," the omission of the words "second livre" in the title of the first book of Pantagruel while the second and third are duly entitled "tiers" and "quart," the remarkable fact that one of the most important personages, Friar John, is absent from book ii., the first of Pantagruel, though he appears in book i. (Gargantua), and many other proofs show the order of publication clearly enough. Besides this, 1533 saw the publication of an almanac, the first of a long series which exists only in titles and fragments, and of the amusing Prognostication Pantagrueline (still, be it observed, Pantagrueline, not Gargan tuine). Both this and Pantagruel itself were published under the anagrammatic pseudonym of "Alcofribas Nasier," shortened to the first word only in the case of the Prognostication.