But Gargantua kept on dodging around corners and dashing up staircases, and there was nothing for it but to stumble after. Finally he flung open his bedroom door.
“Here are my great horses!” he cried. “Here is my roan, here is my bay, here is my race horse!” And with that he gave a lash at the beams and poles.
As soon as the steward and the gentleman-of-horse got their breath, they laughed indeed, and fairly tripped over each other in rushing downstairs to tell the joke in the banquet hall.
When Grangousier heard it, he roared till his chins shook again. “The young rogue!” he bellowed. “The rascal! If he is old enough to be up to mischief, he is old enough to go to SCHOOL!”
From that moment Gargantua’s fate was sealed. The next day an old schoolmaster named Tubal Holofernes came to teach him his letters. Now, Master Holofernes was a little, wizened man whom Gargantua could have lifted up in one of his big hands. Standing on the ground he had to shout through a trumpet to reach Gargantua’s ears. So, in order to get on faster with the teaching, Grangousier had him lifted up on one of the wooden horses, and ordered Gargantua to stand quietly alongside.
“A, B, C,” Holofernes would shout into his pupil’s tremendous ear. And Gargantua, who thought the whole thing a fine new game, would roar the letters out gaily after him.
So well did he learn them, in fact, that by the time he was ten years old, he could say the whole alphabet by heart backwards, to the immense delight of his father and all the banqueters.
Master Holofernes
“And now,” cried Grangousier, fairly bursting with pride and pudding, “he must be at his Latin.” For the truth of it was Grangousier did not know a word of Latin himself, and so he was determined that his son should be a great scholar.