[Gargantua and Pantagruel Book III. by Francois Rabelais]@TWC D-Link bookGargantua and Pantagruel Book III. CHAPTER 3 4/8
But I know well enough how to shield and preserve myself from that horned champion.
He will not, trust me, have to deal in my person with a sottish, dunsical Amphitryon, nor with a silly witless Argus, for all his hundred spectacles, nor yet with the cowardly meacock Acrisius, the simple goose-cap Lycus of Thebes, the doting blockhead Agenor, the phlegmatic pea-goose Aesop, rough-footed Lycaon, the luskish misshapen Corytus of Tuscany, nor with the large-backed and strong-reined Atlas.
Let him alter, change, transform, and metamorphose himself into a hundred various shapes and figures, into a swan, a bull, a satyr, a shower of gold, or into a cuckoo, as he did when he unmaidened his sister Juno; into an eagle, ram, or dove, as when he was enamoured of the virgin Phthia, who then dwelt in the Aegean territory; into fire, a serpent, yea, even into a flea; into Epicurean and Democratical atoms, or, more Magistronostralistically, into those sly intentions of the mind, which in the schools are called second notions,--I'll catch him in the nick, and take him napping.
And would you know what I would do unto him? Even that which to his father Coelum Saturn did--Seneca foretold it of me, and Lactantius hath confirmed it--what the goddess Rhea did to Athis.
I would make him two stone lighter, rid him of his Cyprian cymbals, and cut so close and neatly by the breech, that there shall not remain thereof so much as one--, so cleanly would I shave him, and disable him for ever from being Pope, for Testiculos non habet.
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