On Oct. 23, 1533, Pantagruel was condemned by the Sorbonne, and in Jan. Jean du Bellay, passing through Lyons on an embassy to Rome, engaged Rabelais as physician. The visit did not last very long, but it left literary results in an edition of a de scription of Rome by Marliani, which Rabelais published in Sept. In the spring of 1535 the authorities of the Lyons hospital, considering that Rabelais had twice absented himself without leave, elected Pierre de Castel in his place; but the documents do not imply any blame, and the appointment of his successor was once definitely postponed in case he should return. In the summer of 1535 Rabelais once more accompanied Jean du Bellay, now a cardinal, to Rome, and stayed there till April in the next year. To this period belong letters to Geoffroy d'Estissac, the already mentioned Supplicatio pro Apostasia, and the bull of absolution which was the reply to it. This bull freed Rabelais from ecclesias tical censure, and gave him the right to return to the order of St. Benedict when he chose, and to practise medicine. He took ad vantage of this bull and became a canon of St. Maur. In 1537 he took his doctor's degree at Montpellier and lectured on the Greek text of Hippocrates, and in July 1538 he was present in the capacity of maitre des requetes at the conference between Francis I. and Charles V. at Aigues-Mortes. In 154o we find him for the third time in Italy in the service of Guillaume du Bellay-Langey, elder brother of Jean, who was governor of Piedmont ; and accord ing to the letters of Pellicier, bishop of Montpellier and ambassa dor to Venice, Rabelais was then employed by him to collect mss.
for the king's library. In Dec. 154o he was compelled to return to France to clear himself of a charge of having revealed diplo matic secrets, but he rejoined Guillaume du Bellay at Turin in the following spring, and remained in his service until he died on Jan. 9, 1543. Rabelais wrote a panegyrical memoir of Guillaume, which is lost, and the year before saw the publication of an edi tion of Gargantua and Pantagruel, book i., together (both had been repeatedly reprinted separately), in which some dangerous expressions were cut away. Nothing at all is known of his life, whereabouts, or occupations till the publication of the third book, which appeared in 1546, "avec privilege du roi," which had been given in Sept. Up to this time Rabelais, despite the condemnation of the Sorbonne referred to above, had experienced nothing like perse cution or difficulty. Even the action of Dolet, who in 1542 re printed the earlier form of the books which Rabelais had just slightly modified, seems to have done him no harm. But the storm of persecution which towards the end of the reign of Francis I. was fatal to Dolet himself and to Des Periers, while it exiled and virtually killed Marot, threatened him. It is certain that he passed nearly the whole of 1546 and part of 1547 at Metz in Lorraine as physician to the town at the salary of 120 livres, and Sturm speaks of him in a contemporary letter as having been "cast out of France by the times," and says that he himself in another letter gives a doleful account of his pecuniary affairs and asks for assistance. At Francis's death on March 31, Du Bellay went to Rome, and at some time not certain Rabelais joined him. He was certainly there before June 1548, and he was still there in Feb. 1549, when he dates from Du Bellay's palace a little account of the festivals given at Rome to celebrate the birth of the second son of Henry II. and Catherine de' Medici. This account, the Sciomachie as it is called, is extant. In the same year a monk of Fontevrault, Gabriel du Puits-Herbault, made in a book called Theotimus the first of the many attacks on Rabelais. It is, however, as vague as it is violent, and it does not seem to have had any effect. Rabelais had indeed again made for himself protectors whom no clerical or Sorbonnist jealousy could touch. The Sciomachie was written to the cardinal of Guise,
whose family were all-powerful at court, and Rabelais dedicated his next book to Odet de Chatillon, afterwards cardinal. Thus Rabelais was able to return to France, and in 155o was presented to the livings of Meudon and St. Christophe du Jambet. There is very little ground for believing that the "cure of Meudon" ever officiated or resided there. He certainly held the living for less than three years, resigning it in Jan. 1553 with his other bene fice, and at the episcopal visitation of 1551 he was not present.
Some chapters of Rabelais's fourth book had been published in 1548, but the whole did not appear till 1552. The Sorbonne censured it and the parlement suspended the sale, taking ad vantage of the king's absence from Paris. But it was soon relieved of the suspension. He died, it is said, on April 9, 1553, but actual history is quite silent save on the point that he was not alive in May of the next year, and the legends about his deathbed utterances—"La farce est jouee," "Je vais chercher un grand peut-etre," etc.—are altogether apocryphal. The same may be said of the numerous silly stories told of his life, such as that of his procuring a free passage to Paris by inscribing packets "Poison for the king," and so forth.
Ten years after the publication of the fourth book and nine after the supposed date of the author's death there appeared at Lyons 16 chapters entitled l'Ile sonnante par maistre Francois Rabelais, and two years later the entire fifth book was printed as such. In 1567 it took place with the others, and has ever since appeared with them. But from the beginning of the 17th century there have been disbelievers in its authenticity. The opponents of the book rely (I) on the testimony of a certain Louis Guyon, who in 1604 declared that the fifth book was made long after Rabelais's death by an author whom he knew, and who was not a doctor, and on the assertion of the bibliographer Du Verdier, about the same time, that it was written by an "ecolier de Valence"; (2) on the fact that the anti-monastic and even anti-Catholic polemic is much more accentuated in it ; (3) on the arguments that parts are apparently replicas or rough drafts of passages already appearing in the four earlier books ; and (4) that some allusions are manifestly posterior to even the farthest date which can be assigned for the reputed author's decease. On the other hand, it is urged that, though Guyon and Du Verdier were in a sense contemporaries they wrote long after the events, and that the testimony of the former is vitiated, not merely by its extreme vagueness, but by the fact that it occurs in a plaidoyer, tending to exculpate physicians from the charge of unorthodoxy ; that Du Verdier in another place assigns the Prognostication Pan tagrueline to this same unknown student of Valence, and had therefore probably confused and hearsay notions on the subject ; that the rasher and fiercer tone, as well as the apparent repeti tions, are sufficiently accounted for on the supposition that Rabelais never finally revised the book, which indeed dates show that he could not have done, as the fourth was not finally settled till just before his death; and that it is perfectly probable, and indeed almost certain, that it was prepared from his papers by another hand, which is responsible for the anachronous allusions above referred to. But the strongest argument, and one which has never been attacked by authorities really competent to judge, is that tfie "griffe de l'aigle" is on the book, and that no known author of the time except Rabelais was capable of writing the passage about the Chats fourres, the better part of the history of Queen Whims (La Quinte) and her court, and the conclusion giving the Oracle of the Bottle.