The latter accept it too (how could they help themselves?) but they hold the gift in great contempt and fret about it like children who have been given a new little brother when they really wanted a puppy or a railroad train.
But whereas the cheerful brethren of “yes” are willing to accept their morose neighbors at their own valuation and tolerate them, and do not hinder them when they fill the landscape with their lamentations and the hideous monuments to their own despair, the fraternity of “no” rarely extends this same courtesy to the parties of the first part.
Indeed if they had their own way, the “nays” would immediately purge this planet of the “yeas.”
As this cannot very well be done, they satisfy the demands of their jealous souls by the incessant persecution of those who claim that the world belongs to the living and not to the dead.
Dr. Rabelais belonged to the former class. Few of his patients or his thoughts ever went out to the cemetery. This, no doubt, was very regrettable, but we cannot all be grave-diggers. There have to be a few Poloniuses and a world composed exclusively of Hamlets would be a terrible place of abode.
As for the story of Rabelais’ life, there was nothing very mysterious about it. The few details which are omitted in the books written by his friends are found in the works of his enemies and as a result we can follow his career with a fair degree of accuracy.
Rabelais belonged to the generation which followed immediately upon Erasmus but he was born into a world still largely dominated by monks, nuns, deacons, and a thousand and one varieties of mendicant friars. He was born in Chinon. His father was either an apothecary or a dealer in spirits (which were different professions in the fifteenth century) and the old man was sufficiently well-to-do to send his son to a good school. There young François was thrown into the company of the scions of a famous local family called du Bellay-Langey. These boys, like their father, had a streak of genius. They wrote well. Upon occasion they could fight well. They were men of the world in the good sense of that oft misunderstood expression. They were faithful servitors of their master the king, held endless public offices, became bishops and cardinals and ambassadors, translated the classics, edited manuals of infantry drill and ballistics and brilliantly performed all the many useful services that were expected of the aristocracy in a day when a title condemned a man to a life of few pleasures and many duties and responsibilities.
The friendship which the du Bellays afterwards bestowed upon Rabelais shows that he must have been something more than an amusing table companion. During the many ups and downs of his life he could always count upon the assistance and the support of his former classmates. Whenever he was in trouble with his clerical superiors he found the door of their castle wide open and if perchance the soil of France became a little too hot for this blunt young moralist, there was always a du Bellay, conveniently going upon a foreign mission and greatly in need of a secretary who should be somewhat of a physician besides being a polished Latin scholar.
This was no small detail. More than once when it seemed that the career of our learned doctor was about to come to an abrupt and painful end, the influence of his old friends saved him from the fury of the Sorbonne or from the anger of those much disappointed Calvinists who had counted upon him as one of their own and who were greatly incensed when he pilloried the jaundiced zeal of their Genevan master as mercilessly as he had derided the three-bottled sanctity of his erstwhile colleagues in Fontenay and Maillezais.
Of these two enemies, the former was of course by far the more dangerous. Calvin could fulminate to his heart’s content, but outside of the narrow boundaries of a small Swiss canton, his lightning was as harmless as a fire-cracker.