How the wild Chitterlings laid an ambuscado for Pantagruel.
While Xenomanes was saying this, Friar John spied twenty or thirty young
slender-shaped Chitterlings posting as fast as they could towards their
town, citadel, castle, and fort of Chimney, and said to Pantagruel, I smell
a rat; there will be here the devil upon two sticks, or I am much out.
These worshipful Chitterlings may chance to mistake you for Shrovetide,
though you are not a bit like him. Let us once in our lives leave our
junketing for a while, and put ourselves in a posture to give ‘em a
bellyful of fighting, if they would be at that sport. There can be no
false Latin in this, said Xenomanes; Chitterlings are still Chitterlings,
always double-hearted and treacherous.
Pantagruel then arose from table to visit and scour the thicket, and
returned presently; having discovered, on the left, an ambuscade of squab
Chitterlings; and on the right, about half a league from thence, a large
body of huge giant-like armed Chitterlings ranged in battalia along a
little hill, and marching furiously towards us at the sound of bagpipes,
sheep’s paunches, and bladders, the merry fifes and drums, trumpets, and
clarions, hoping to catch us as Moss caught his mare. By the conjecture of
seventy-eight standards which we told, we guessed their number to be two
and forty thousand, at a modest computation.
Their order, proud gait, and resolute looks made us judge that they were
none of your raw, paltry links, but old warlike Chitterlings and Sausages.
From the foremost ranks to the colours they were all armed cap-a-pie with
small arms, as we reckoned them at a distance, yet very sharp and
case-hardened. Their right and left wings were lined with a great number of
forest puddings, heavy pattipans, and horse sausages, all of them tall and
proper islanders, banditti, and wild.
Pantagruel was very much daunted, and not without cause; though Epistemon
told him that it might be the use and custom of the Chitterlingonians to
welcome and receive thus in arms their foreign friends, as the noble kings
of France are received and saluted at their first coming into the chief
cities of the kingdom after their advancement to the crown. Perhaps, said
he, it may be the usual guard of the queen of the place, who, having notice
given her by the junior Chitterlings of the forlorn hope whom you saw on
the tree, of the arrival of your fine and pompous fleet, hath judged that
it was without doubt some rich and potent prince, and is come to visit you
in person.
Pantagruel, little trusting to this, called a council, to have their advice
at large in this doubtful case. He briefly showed them how this way of
reception with arms had often, under colour of compliment and friendship,
been fatal. Thus, said he, the Emperor Antonius Caracalla at one time
destroyed the citizens of Alexandria, and at another time cut off the
attendants of Artabanus, King of Persia, under colour of marrying his
daughter, which, by the way, did not pass unpunished, for a while after
this cost him his life.
Thus Jacob’s children destroyed the Sichemites, to revenge the rape of
their sister Dinah. By such another hypocritical trick Gallienus, the
Roman emperor, put to death the military men in Constantinople. Thus,
under colour of friendship, Antonius enticed Artavasdes, King of Armenia;
then, having caused him to be bound in heavy chains and shackled, at last
put him to death.
We find a thousand such instances in history; and King Charles VI. is
justly commended for his prudence to this day, in that, coming back
victorious over the Ghenters and other Flemings to his good city of Paris,
and when he came to Bourget, a league from thence, hearing that the
citizens with their mallets--whence they got the name of Maillotins--were
marched out of town in battalia, twenty thousand strong, he would not go
into the town till they had laid down their arms and retired to their
respective homes; though they protested to him that they had taken arms
with no other design than to receive him with the greater demonstration of
honour and respect.