ritten from tales older than Boccaccio, and moreover of
an extreme brevity and dryness. They are only the framework, the notes,
the skeleton of tales. The subject is often wonderful, but nothing is made
of it: it is left unshaped. Rabelais wrote a version of one, the ninth.
The scene takes place, not at Paris, but at Alexandria in Egypt among the
Saracens, and the cook is called Fabrac. But the surprise at the end, the
sagacious judgment by which the sound of a piece of money was made the
price of the smoke, is the same. Now the first dated edition of the Cento
Novelle (which were frequently reprinted) appeared at Bologna in 1525, and
it is certain that Rabelais had read the tales. And there would be much
else of the same kind to learn if we knew Rabelais' library.

A still stranger fact of this sort may be given to show how nothing came
amiss to him. He must have known, and even copied the Latin Chronicle of
the Counts of Anjou. It is accepted, and rightly so, as an historical
document, but that is no reason for thinking that the truth may not have
been manipulated and adorned. 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. His contemporaries, who approved of his borrowing from
antiquity, could not detect this one, because the book was not printed till
much later. But Rabelais lived in Maine. In Anjou, which often figures
among the localities he names, he must have met with and read the
Chronicles of the Counts in manuscript, probably in some monastery library,
whether at Fontenay-le-Comte or elsewhere it matters little. There is not
only a likeness in the ideas and tone, but in the words too, which cannot
be a mere matter of chance. He must have known the Chronicles of the
Counts of Anjou, and they in