The Counts of Anjou were not saints.

They were proud, quarrelsome, violent, rapacious, and extravagant, as greedy as they were charitable to the Church, treacherous and cruel.

Yet their anonymous panegyrist has made them patterns of all the virtues.

In reality it is both a history and in some sort a romance; especially is it a collection of examples worthy of being followed, in the style of the Cyropaedia, our Juvenal of the fifteenth century, and a little like Fenelon's Telemaque.

Now in it there occurs the address of one of the counts to those who rebelled against him and who were at his mercy.
Rabelais must have known it, for he has copied it, or rather, literally translated whole lines of it in the wonderful speech of Gargantua to the vanquished.