Perrault found the subjects of his stories in the tales told by mothers and nurses.
He fixed them finally by writing them down.

Floating about vaguely as they were, he seized them, worked them up, gave them shape, and yet of scarcely any of them is there to be found before his time a single trace.

So we must resign ourselves to know just as little of what Gargantua and Pantagruel were before the sixteenth century.
In a book of a contemporary of Rabelais, the Legende de Pierre Faifeu by the Angevin, Charles de Bourdigne, the first edition of which dates from 1526 and the second 1531--both so rare and so forgotten that the work is only known since the eighteenth century by the reprint of Custelier--in the introductory ballad which recommends this book to readers, occur these lines in the list of popular books which Faifeu would desire to replace: 'Laissez ester Caillette le folastre, Les quatre filz Aymon vestuz de bleu, Gargantua qui a cheveux de plastre.' He has not 'cheveux de plastre' in Rabelais.

If the rhyme had not suggested the phrase--and the exigencies of the strict form of the ballade and its forced repetitions often imposed an idea which had its whole origin in the rhyme--we might here see a dramatic trace found nowhere else.

The name of Pantagruel is mentioned too, incidentally, in a Mystery of the fifteenth century.