THE NEW MASTER FOUND FOR GARGANTUA.
[Illustration: Initial W.]
"What! not know thy Latin! After forty-eight years, seven months, and
two days! Then, my little rogue, it is to Paris thou must go."
This is what Grandgousier said to Gargantua just one week after that
luckless dinner. I will tell you how it all happened. The first thing
the old King did the next morning was to send, post-haste, to his good
friend, Don Philip of the Marshes, Viceroy of Papeligosse, who knew
Latin, and who had told him, years and years before, that poor Master
Holofernes was nothing but a bit of an old humbug (humbug was not quite
the word used at that time, but the meaning was all the same). "Come
to me, my friend," he wrote, "thou art always prating of thy Latin
scholars. Now bring one of thy wonders along with thee."
So Don Philip came in great state, as befitted a visit to his King,
accompanied by the prettiest, the jauntiest, the sharpest, the
politest, the sweetest-voiced little fellow ever seen. Don Philip
introduced the curled darling as Master Eudemon, his page.
"Your Majesty sees this child?" he asked. "He is not yet twelve years
old; yet I dare promise that he will prove to Your Majesty, if it be
your pleasure, what difference there really is between the old dreamers
of the past and the lads of the present."
"So be it," cried the old Giant, gaily, as he put on his glasses, to
see the better.
When his eyes first fell on the young page, he swore under his
breath--which sounded for all the world like stifled thunder--that
he resembled rather "a little angel than a human child." As soon as
Eudemon was called to show what he knew, he rose with youthful modesty,
and bowed with charming grace to the King, then to his master, and
then to Gargantua, who was frowning at him, and wondering within
himself what all those pretty ways meant. Then the young page opened
in a Latin so good, so pure, and so musical that what he said sounded
rather like a speech made by a Gracchus, or a Cicero, or an Emilius,
in the old days of Roman glory, than one made by a youth of that day.
After a little, Eudemon--cunning rogue that he was!--began to praise
Gargantua to the skies. He spoke first of his young Prince's virtue
and good manners; secondly, of his knowledge; thirdly, of his noble
birth; fourthly, of his personal beauty; and fifthly, the little fellow
exhorted him so movingly to revere his great father in all things that
Gargantua was so ashamed at not understanding a word of what he was
saying, and at not being able to Latin away as he did, forgetting that
a dwarf had no business whatever to criticise a young Giant, that he
began to _moo-moo_ like a cow, and to hide his face in his cap without
having ever a word to say for himself.
[Illustration: EUDEMON.]
Here it was that Father Grandgousier grew really angry. He praised
Eudemon and scolded Gargantua by turns, until at last he fell asleep
among all the big bottles that had been emptied during the pretty tale
of the learned little angel, which nobody around the table understood
but Don Philip of the Marshes and the pretty little angel himself. It
is a bold thing at all times to awake a King without his own orders;
but when that King is a Giant, it is a bolder thing to do than ever.
No one dares, for his head, disturb him, and yet, he has to be waked,
or else the next morning his sneezes will make all the houses around
tumble down, as Giant's colds in the head are just about as big as
their bodies. Now, Gargantua being a young Giant himself, was the only
one who could venture upon the liberty of waking his Father, and I have
already said what he got for his pains:--
"What! not know thy Latin! After forty-eight years, seven months, and
two days, too! Then, my little rogue, it is to Paris thou shalt go."