But these dialect-patriots have fallen out among themselves.

To which dialect was he indebted?
Was it that of Touraine, or Berri, or Poitou, or Paris?
It is too often forgotten, in regard to French patois--leaving out of count the languages of the South--that the words or expressions that are no longer in use to-day are but a survival, a still living trace of the tongue and the pronunciation of other days.

Rabelais, more than any other writer, took advantage of the happy chances and the richness of the popular speech, but he wrote in French, and nothing but French.

That is why he remains so forcible, so lucid, and so living, more living even--speaking only of his style out of charity to the others--than any of his contemporaries.
It has been said that great French prose is solely the work of the seventeenth century.

There were nevertheless, before that, two men, certainly very different and even hostile, who were its initiators and its masters, Calvin on the one hand, on the other Rabelais.
Rabelais had a wonderful knowledge of the prose and the verse of the fifteenth century: he was familiar with Villon, Pathelin, the Quinze Joies de Mariage, the Cent Nouvelles, the chronicles and the romances, and even earlier works, too, such as the Roman de la Rose.