How the Queen passed her time after dinner.
When we had dined, a chachanin led us into the queen’s hall, and there we
saw how, after dinner, with the ladies and the princes of her court, she
used to sift, searce, bolt, range, and pass away time with a fine large
white and blue silk sieve. We also perceived how they revived ancient
sports, diverting themselves together at--
1. Cordax. 6. Phrygia. 11. Monogas.
2. Emmelia. 7. Thracia. 12. Terminalia.
3. Sicinnia. 8. Calabrisme. 13. Floralia.
4. Jambics. 9. Molossia. 14. Pyrrhice.
5. Persica. 10. Cernophorum. 15. (Nicatism.)
And a thousand other dances.
(Motteux has the following footnote:--‘1. A sort of country-dance. 2. A
still tragic dance. 3. Dancing and singing used at funerals. 4. Cutting
sarcasms and lampoons. 5. The Persian dance. 6. Tunes, whose measure
inspired men with a kind of divine fury. 7. The Thracian movement. 8.
Smutty verses. 9. A measure to which the Molossi of Epirus danced a
certain morrice. 10. A dance with bowls or pots in their hands. 11. A
song where one sings alone. 12. Sports at the holidays of the god of
bounds. 13. Dancing naked at Flora’s holidays. 14. The Trojan dance in
armour.’)
Afterwards she gave orders that they should show us the apartments and
curiosities in her palace. Accordingly we saw there such new, strange, and
wonderful things, that I am still ravished in admiration every time I think
of’t. However, nothing surprised us more than what was done by the
gentlemen of her household, abstractors, parazons, nebidins, spodizators,
and others, who freely and without the least dissembling told us that the
queen their mistress did all impossible things, and cured men of incurable
diseases; and they, her officers, used to do the rest.
I saw there a young parazon cure many of the new consumption, I mean the
pox, though they were never so peppered. Had it been the rankest Roan ague
(Anglice, the Covent-garden gout), ‘twas all one to him; touching only
their dentiform vertebrae thrice with a piece of a wooden shoe, he made
them as wholesome as so many sucking-pigs.
Another did thoroughly cure folks of dropsies, tympanies, ascites, and
hyposarcides, striking them on the belly nine times with a Tenedian
hatchet, without any solution of the continuum.
Another cured all manner of fevers and agues on the spot, only with hanging
a fox-tail on the left side of the patient’s girdle.
One removed the toothache only with washing thrice the root of the aching
tooth with elder-vinegar, and letting it dry half-an-hour in the sun.
Another the gout, whether hot or cold, natural or accidental, by barely
making the gouty person shut his mouth and open his eyes.
I saw another ease nine gentlemen of St. Francis’s distemper [‘A
consumption in the pocket, or want of money; those of St. Francis’s order
must carry none about ‘em.’--Motteux.) in a very short space of time,
having clapped a rope about their necks, at the end of which hung a box
with ten thousand gold crowns in’t.
One with a wonderful engine threw the houses out at the windows, by which
means they were purged of all pestilential air.
Another cured all the three kinds of hectics, the tabid, atrophes, and
emaciated, without bathing, Tabian milk, dropax, alias depilatory, or other
such medicaments, only turning the consumptive for three months into monks;
and he assured me that if they did not grow fat and plump in a monastic way
of living, they never would be fattened in this world, either by nature or
by art.
I saw another surrounded with a crowd of two sorts of women. Some were
young, quaint, clever, neat, pretty, juicy, tight, brisk, buxom, proper,
kind-hearted, and as right as my leg, to any man’s thinking. The rest were
old, weather-beaten, over-ridden, toothless, blear-eyed, tough, wrinkled,
shrivelled, tawny, mouldy, phthisicky, decrepit hags, beldams, and walking
carcasses. We were told that his office was to cast anew those she-pieces
of antiquity, and make them such as the pretty creatures whom we saw, who
had been made young again that day, recovering at once the beauty, shape,
size, and disposition which they enjoyed at sixteen; except their heels,
that were now much shorter than in their former youth.
This made them yet more apt to fall backwards whenever any man happened to
touch ‘em, than they had been before. As for their counterparts, the old
mother-scratch-tobies, they most devoutly waited for the blessed hour when
the batch that was in the oven was to be drawn, that they might have their
turns, and in a mighty haste they were pulling and hauling the man like
mad, telling him that ‘tis the most grievous and intolerable thing in
nature for the tail to be on fire and the head to scare away those who
should quench it.
The officer had his hands full, never wanting patients; neither did his
place bring him in little, you may swear. Pantagruel asked him whether he
could also make old men young again. He said he could not. But the way to
make them new men was to get ‘em to cohabit with a new-cast female; for
this they caught that fifth kind of crinckams, which some call pellade, in
Greek, ophiasis, that makes them cast off their old hair and skin, just as
the serpents do, and thus their youth is renewed like the Arabian
phoenix’s. This is the true fountain of youth, for there the old and
decrepit become young, active, and lusty.
Just so, as Euripides tells us, Iolaus was transmogrified; and thus Phaon,
for whom kind-hearted Sappho run wild, grew young again, for Venus’s use;
so Tithon by Aurora’s means; so Aeson by Medea, and Jason also, who, if
you’ll believe Pherecides and Simonides, was new-vamped and dyed by that
witch; and so were the nurses of jolly Bacchus, and their husbands, as
Aeschylus relates.