It was modelled and remodelled, repaired, touched up, and yet it has all the appearance of having been created at a single stroke, or of having been run like molten wax into its final form.
Something should be said here of the sources from which Rabelais borrowed.
He was not the first in France to satirize the romances of chivalry.

The romance in verse by Baudouin de Sebourc, printed in recent years, was a parody of the Chansons de Geste.

In the Moniage Guillaume, and especially in the Moniage Rainouart, in which there is a kind of giant, and occasionally a comic giant, there are situations and scenes which remind us of Rabelais.

The kind of Fabliaux in mono-rhyme quatrains of the old Aubery anticipate his coarse and popular jests.

But all that is beside the question; Rabelais did not know these.