[Gargantua and Pantagruel<br> Book II. by Francois Rabelais]@TWC D-Link book
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Book II.

CHAPTER 2
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Presently the fire took hold in the straw, and from the straw to the bed, and from the bed to the loft, which was planked and ceiled with fir, after the fashion of the foot of a lamp.

But the best was, that the fire which I had cast into the lap of my paltry roaster burnt all his groin, and was beginning to cease (seize) upon his cullions, when he became sensible of the danger, for his smelling was not so bad but that he felt it sooner than he could have seen daylight.

Then suddenly getting up, and in a great amazement running to the window, he cried out to the streets as high as he could, Dal baroth, dal baroth, dal baroth, which is as much to say as Fire, fire, fire.

Incontinently turning about, he came straight towards me to throw me quite into the fire, and to that effect had already cut the ropes wherewith my hands were tied, and was undoing the cords from off my feet, when the master of the house hearing him cry Fire, and smelling the smoke from the very street where he was walking with some other Bashaws and Mustaphas, ran with all the speed he had to save what he could, and to carry away his jewels.

Yet such was his rage, before he could well resolve how to go about it, that he caught the broach whereon I was spitted and therewith killed my roaster stark dead, of which wound he died there for want of government or otherwise; for he ran him in with the spit a little above the navel, towards the right flank, till he pierced the third lappet of his liver, and the blow slanting upwards from the midriff or diaphragm, through which it had made penetration, the spit passed athwart the pericardium or capsule of his heart, and came out above at his shoulders, betwixt the spondyls or turning joints of the chine of the back and the left homoplat, which we call the shoulder-blade.
True it is, for I will not lie, that, in drawing the spit out of my body I fell to the ground near unto the andirons, and so by the fall took some hurt, which indeed had been greater, but that the lardons, or little slices of bacon wherewith I was stuck, kept off the blow.


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