How the Quintessence cured the sick with a song.
The captain showed us the queen, attended with her ladies and gentlemen, in
the second gallery. She looked young, though she was at least eighteen
hundred years old, and was handsome, slender, and as fine as a queen, that
is, as hands could make her. He then said to us: It is not yet a fit time
to speak to the queen; be you but mindful of her doings in the meanwhile.
You have kings in your world that fantastically pretend to cure some
certain diseases, as, for example, scrofula or wens, swelled throats,
nicknamed the king’s evil, and quartan agues, only with a touch; now our
queen cures all manner of diseases without so much as touching the sick,
but barely with a song, according to the nature of the distemper. He then
showed us a set of organs, and said that when it was touched by her those
miraculous cures were performed. The organ was indeed the strangest that
ever eyes beheld; for the pipes were of cassia fistula in the cod; the top
and cornice of guiacum; the bellows of rhubarb; the pedas of turbith, and
the clavier or keys of scammony.
While we were examining this wonderful new make of an organ, the leprous
were brought in by her abstractors, spodizators, masticators, pregustics,
tabachins, chachanins, neemanins, rabrebans, nercins, rozuins, nebidins,
tearins, segamions, perarons, chasinins, sarins, soteins, aboth, enilins,
archasdarpenins, mebins, chabourins, and other officers, for whom I want
names; so she played ‘em I don’t know what sort of a tune or song, and they
were all immediately cured.
Then those who were poisoned were had in, and she had no sooner given them
a song but they began to find a use for their legs, and up they got. Then
came on the deaf, the blind, and the dumb, and they too were restored to
their lost faculties and senses with the same remedy; which did so
strangely amaze us (and not without reason, I think) that down we fell on
our faces, remaining prostrate, like men ravished in ecstasy, and were not
able to utter one word through the excess of our admiration, till she came,
and having touched Pantagruel with a fine fragrant nosegay of white roses
which she held in her hand, thus made us recover our senses and get up.
Then she made us the following speech in byssin words, such as Parisatis
desired should be spoken to her son Cyrus, or at least of crimson alamode:
The probity that scintillizes in the superfices of your persons informs my
ratiocinating faculty, in a most stupendous manner, of the radiant virtues
latent within the precious caskets and ventricles of your minds. For,
contemplating the mellifluous suavity of your thrice discreet reverences,
it is impossible not to be persuaded with facility that neither your
affections nor your intellects are vitiated with any defect or privation of
liberal and exalted sciences. Far from it, all must judge that in you are
lodged a cornucopia and encyclopaedia, an unmeasurable profundity of
knowledge in the most peregrine and sublime disciplines, so frequently the
admiration, and so rarely the concomitants of the imperite vulgar. This
gently compels me, who in preceding times indefatigably kept my private
affections absolutely subjugated, to condescend to make my application to
you in the trivial phrase of the plebeian world, and assure you that you
are well, more than most heartily welcome.
I have no hand at making of speeches, quoth Panurge to me privately;
prithee, man, make answer to her for us, if thou canst. This would not
work with me, however; neither did Pantagruel return a word. So that Queen
Whims, or Queen Quintessence (which you please), perceiving that we stood
as mute as fishes, said: Your taciturnity speaks you not only disciples of
Pythagoras, from whom the venerable antiquity of my progenitors in
successive propagation was emaned and derives its original, but also
discovers, that through the revolution of many retrograde moons, you have
in Egypt pressed the extremities of your fingers with the hard tenants of
your mouths, and scalptized your heads with frequent applications of your
unguicules. In the school of Pythagoras, taciturnity was the symbol of
abstracted and superlative knowledge, and the silence of the Egyptians was
agnited as an expressive manner of divine adoration; this caused the
pontiffs of Hierapolis to sacrifice to the great deity in silence,
impercussively, without any vociferous or obstreperous sound. My design is
not to enter into a privation of gratitude towards you, but by a vivacious
formality, though matter were to abstract itself from me, excentricate to
you my cogitations.
Having spoken this, she only said to her officers, Tabachins, a panacea;
and straight they desired us not to take it amiss if the queen did not
invite us to dine with her; for she never ate anything at dinner but some
categories, jecabots, emnins, dimions, abstractions, harborins, chelemins,
second intentions, carradoths, antitheses, metempsychoses, transcendent
prolepsies, and such other light food.
Then they took us into a little closet lined through with alarums, where we
were treated God knows how. It is said that Jupiter writes whatever is
transacted in the world on the dipthera or skin of the Amalthaean goat that
suckled him in Crete, which pelt served him instead of a shield against the
Titans, whence he was nicknamed Aegiochos. Now, as I hate to drink water,
brother topers, I protest it would be impossible to make eighteen goatskins
hold the description of all the good meat they brought before us, though it
were written in characters as small as those in which were penned Homer’s
Iliads, which Tully tells us he saw enclosed in a nutshell.
For my part, had I one hundred mouths, as many tongues, a voice of iron, a
heart of oak, and lungs of leather, together with the mellifluous abundance
of Plato, yet I never could give you a full account of a third part of a
second of the whole.
Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the queen had given the symbolic
word used among her subjects to denote sovereign good cheer, when she said
to her tabachins, A panacea; just as Lucullus used to say, In Apollo, when
he designed to give his friends a singular treat; though sometimes they
took him at unawares, as, among the rest, Cicero and Hortensius sometimes
used to do.