Here is Dominic Hills’s video animation of his print of an old French saying about a big bottom, ‘a household arse, food and drink supplied’ (‘un cul de ménage, il y a à boire et à manger’):

Those with good French will notice some deliberate mistakes in the spelling, to mimic the printers’ errors that are so frequent in early printed books and that annoyed authors, who would complain about their printers in prefaces typset by those same printers.

One such author was Bruscambille (see previous posts) who, at the end of his speech in praise of the pleasure of defecation (‘En faveur de la félicité chiatique’) comments that  ‘escornifleurs’, that is to say, in Cotgrave’s translation, ‘A base pickthanke, or parasite; greedie feeder, or smell-feast; one that carries tales, jeasts, or newes from house to house, thereby to get victualls’, or, in the deflatingly prosaic modern vernacular, a ‘freeloader’, will always find in the loos of great houses ‘some household arse, who will save them something to eat and drink’ (‘quelque Cul de mesnage, qui leur conservera à boire et à manger’).

Bruscambille’s audience would have recognized this expression. As if to demonstrate how widespread it was, modern dictionaries note that the heir to the throne, the not quite three-year-old future Louis XIII, was introduced to it in August 1604. In his journal, Louis’s doctor, Jean Héroard, notes the following exchange between the young prince and one of the courtiers:

“Monsieur, voilà Mama dondon qui a un cul de mesnage où il y a à boire et à manger”. Respond: “Et moy aussy”. “Par où boit-on?” Resp.: “Par là”, monstrant sa guillery. “Par où mange-t-on?’ Resp.: “Pa là”, monstrant de la main son derriere en sousriant. (ed. Foisil, I, 504).

[“Sir, there’s Mama fatty with her household arse, food and drink supplied”. Replies: “Me too”. “Where does one drink from?”. Reply: “From there”, pointing to his willy. “Where does one eat from?”. Reply: “From there”, gesturing towards his bottom and smiling.]

Cotgrave translates ‘dondon’ as ‘A short, fat, and grosse woman; a femall bundle of farts’. Indeed, the household arse is not to be confused with the household fart (‘pet de ménage’), which is found in Rabelais among others, although the household fart also comes with food and drink supplied…

Sometime after 1588, 8 years after he published the first edition of the Essais, Michel de Montaigne added this Latin epigraph to his ever-growing, ever-increasing book: Viresque adquirit eundo, ‘winning vigour as she goes’. The quotation is from Virgil’s Aeneid, and describes the goddess Rumour, flying through Libya on swift and eager wings to broadcast the news of Aeneas and Dido’s dalliance, their amorous and voluptuous winter. ‘Rumour!’ exclaims Virgil. ‘What evil can surpass her speed?’

Here she is in a sixteenth-century woodcut by Hans Weigel, with rustling wings and eyes all over her body:

Virgil’s Fama

Montaigne tackles the issue of rumour himself in a chapter from Book 3, ‘Des boyteux’ (‘Of the Lame’). Here he talks of the plentiful ‘miracles’ – monstrous births, falling stars, plagues, and other portents – that had been spawned by the anxieties and suspicions of civil-war-torn France. His ‘miracles’ are very much products of the human imagination, however: they are born and gain persuasive power through our innate desire to exaggerate and amplify; to embroider a good story. This is how he describes the work of Rumour:

J’ay veu la naissance de plusieurs miracles de mon temps. Nous faisons naturellement conscience de rendre ce qu’on nous a presté sans quelque usure et accession de nostre creu. L’erreur particuliere faict premierement l’erreur publique, et à son tour apres, l’erreur publique faict l’erreur particuliere. Ainsi va tout ce bastiment, s’estoffant et formant de main en main: de maniere que le plus esloigné tesmoin en est mieux instruict que le plus voisin, et le dernier informé mieux persuadé que le premier. C’est un progrez naturel.

In John Florio’s magnificent 1603 translation:

I have seen the birth of divers miracles in my dayes. We naturally make it a matter of conscience, to restore what hath beene lent us, without some usury and accession of our increase. A particular errour, doeth first breede a publike errour: And when his turne commeth, a publike errour begetteth a particular errour. So goeth all this vast frame, from hand to hand, confounding and composing it selfe; in such sort that the furthest-abiding testimonie, is better instructed of it, then the nearest: and the last informed, better perswaded then the first. It is a natural progresse.

The ‘natural progress’ of rumour means that the miracle itself is inflated, blown out of all proportion and even all recognition, as the story is passed along the line, gaining substance as it goes. The whole process sounds like a particularly frantic and creative game of Chinese Whispers, where each teller is more convinced of the truth of the story than the last. As it is passed along, moving in and out of the public domain, error becomes contagious and infects all who come into contact with it. What makes rumour particularly pernicious is the subjective investment people seem unable to resist making in the story that they are passing on: it becomes almost a moral duty, a matter of ‘conscience’, to make the rumour more credible with some little added detail, or some clinching convincing witness.

So, Montaigne goes on to say, once we have risked our own credibility on a particular rumour, we are disproportionately attached to its future success; rejecting a rumour means rejecting the credibility of all those who have believed it. Irrational and arbitrary attachment to a story means that any resistance it encounters is met by the violence of frustrated opinion. Montaigne lists in a crescendo some increasingly violent responses: ‘le commandement, la force, le fer, et le feu’, ‘commandment, force, sword, and fire’. Since this chapter is, amongst other things, a plea for moderation and clemency in witchcraft trials, the fire that ends the list brings to mind the pyres on which heretics and witches were burned alive throughout sixteenth-century Europe; an association that Montaigne makes himself in a celebrated aphorism that comes a little later in the chapter: ‘Après tout, c’est mettre ses conjectures à bien haut pris que d’en faire cuire un home tout vif’ (‘When all is done, it is an over-valuing of ones conjectures, by them to cause a man to be burned alive’).

One of the great things about working on a project like this is to find in a library in Paris a nonsense love poem that has been lying around for a few centuries and which turns out to be a rather lovely thing from the past. Here is a sample:

Mais quand douze Elephans dans un noyau de prune

Joueront du Violon aux rayons de la Lune

On verra dans vos beaux yeux reluire Cupidon

Car si vostre merite avoit pris ses lunettes

Tous les quatre Elemens danseroient les sonnettes

Et se feroient la barbe avec un Espadon.

 

But when twelve elephants in a plum stone

Will play the violin in the moonbeams

Cupid will be seen shining in your beautiful eyes

Because if your merit had worn its glasses

All four elements would dance like little bells

And would shave with a short sword.

The last stanza rhymes liberty with fantasy, true freedom found in the imagination…:

Depuis que la vertu habite en l’Univers

L’Enclume a regardé le Marteau de travers

A cause que les Dieux boivent de l’Ambrosie

On a tant recherché dans l’antiquité

Qu’en fin on a treuvé que nostre liberté

Gist en la fantaisie.

 

Since virtue has lived in the universe

The anvil has looked askance at the hammer

Because the gods drink ambrosia

We have searched so much in antiquity

That in the end we have found that our liberty

Lies in fantasy.

In 1640, in his French Curiosities, the royal interpreter, Antoine Oudin, helpfully defines an old expression, ‘jus d’andouille’ (sausage juice) as ‘sperm’. In our more innocent times, should you search for ‘jus d’andouille’ on google you will find that it’s the name of an aperitif or even a by-product used as a substitute for petrol. Here Dominic Hills re-animates the old meaning. Anyone interested in pursuing the role of pork products in French Renaissance literature should of course consult Rabelais’s Fourth Book (1552), in which Friar John leads a regiment of cooks to battle fiendish female sausages, led by their queen, Niphleseth (‘Penis’ in Hebrew).

In a speech on the creation of women by Bruscambille, various characters, including a fool and a midget, put forward different versions of the origin of the fairer sex. The midget claims that the first woman was created from a cart. At the request of the man driving the cart, it was turned into something nicer, namely a woman, its shafts becoming her thighs, which is why women are still so keen to be shafted. Yet the others reject the midget’s version of events and send him off to Montmartre to fish for turds in the moonlight (‘pescher des estrons au clair de la lune’). A sign perhaps that Montmartre, then a village outside of Paris, was a place where men would go to … fish for turds in the moonlight.

In a speech in praise of spit, the comedian Bruscambille refers to the French proverb ‘Crache-moy au cul, je te chieray au nez’, that is to say ‘Spit in my arse and I’ll shit in your face’. The proverb doesn’t appear to feature in any dictionary from the seventeenth century or more modern times. Could this be an example of the oral tradition, the kind of thing people were saying to one another in France four hundred years ago? Proverbial lore? It’s certainly a striking image and you can see an animated illustration of it by Dominic Hills.

The same speech refers to newlyweds breaking open the doors of the dungeon of love with a rocket greased with spit. In an earlier speech, in praise of the pubic louse, the louse was held up as the guardian of the dungeon of love. Here is that same dungeon, as re-imagined by Dominic Hills.

In 1647, the grammarian and prime mover in the emasculation of the French language, Claude Favre de Vaugelas, remarked in his Remarks on the French Language of his pride in knowing a man who never pronounced the word ‘thing’ (‘chose’) because it was a word with which people make dirty jokes.

Here is a poem from the Satyres bastardes or Bastard Satyrs of 1615 of which Vaugelas would not have approved:

Mon chose veut choser vostre chose : mais chose
Garde que je ne puis enchoser vostre chose
Or si chose à la fin ne vous laisse enchoser
Je le choseray tant qu’il s’en ira choser.

My thing wants to thing your thing: but thingy
Make sure I can’t in-thing your thing
But if in the end thingy doesn’t let you in-thing
I’ll thing him until he things off.

Claude Paradin, Devises heroïques, 1557

‘Where are you going?’ The emblem addresses this question to an alarmingly disembodied tongue with whippy serpent’s tail and wings that strain to fly away. It expresses an anxiety that crops up constantly in Renaissance writing on the tongue and talk: that is, the ungovernable and uncontrollable nature of the tongue, and the fact that words cannot be taken back once spoken, but seem to take on a life of their own. The accompanying text refers to the tongue as an ambivalent organ, one that can be used for good or evil. But it’s the strange, almost uncanny autonomy of the tongue in the illustration that is most striking: uprooted from the mouth it flies off independently, a warning that this slippery organ needs careful governance and constant vigilance. There’s something interesting going on with the gendering of the tongue here too: while in the French text ‘la langue’ is insistently feminine, the illustration is undeniably phallic, with a muscular and virile energy. Where are you going? And, we might add, What are you, exactly?

This is Dominic Hills’s first print illustration of a Renaissance double-entendre (see Gallery for other examples). The phrase ‘Jeu du bilboquet sans chandelle’ (literally, cup and ball game without a candle) comes from a speech by the early seventeenth-century French stand-up Bruscambille, when he describes intervening in an argument between the king of the gods, Jupiter, and his long-suffering wife, Juno, about which sex gains most pleasure from … the cup and ball game with the lights off.

The gods initially turned to Tiresias, who was born a man but became a woman for seven years, to settle their dispute. Bruscambille goes to the heavens to support Tiresias’s judgement that women gain more sexual gratification than men. Indeed, he says that if any man in his audience is arguing with his wife on this very topic they should send her along to him, so he can prove that she can gain more pleasure in under fifteen minutes than a man could get in an entire day…