This in-depth study of Rabelais’s Third Book is aimed at specialist readers thoroughly at home not only with Rabelais, but also with Latin, Greek, and the vocabulary of classical rhetoric and logic. Each of its seven chapters focuses on specific vocabulary items, usually nouns or adverbs, and the introduction reinforces the title’s emphasis on the key terms paradoxe, scandale, and propriété. Like most French dissertations, it has numerous footnotes on every page.
In the first section, “Cailloux et jeunes pousses,” chapter 1, “Un caillou dans les lentilles,” pursues the connection between scandale and propre, via Rabelais’s debt to Pathelin and “manger son blé en herbe.” Chapter 2, “Scandale dans les moissons,” is 100 pages long, and, as well as the terms scandale and paradoxe, it discusses Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Lefèvre d’Etaples, Luther, and Calvin. Pouey-Mounou claims that the Third Book’s three paradoxical éloges (debts, codpieces, and Pantagruélion) have the same vegetable theme (140).
The second section is titled “Tropes et topiques,” and the third chapter, “A qui profite l’aptum? Une convenance ‘au rebours,’” stresses the adverb proprement but also considers bien and mal, and the next chapter, “Epithètes et blasons: la ‘compétence’ en question,” explores the blasons of fols and couillons, with supporting arguments from Valla and his commentator Perotti, Isidore of Seville, Erasmus, Thomas Aquinas again, and Augustine. The study of these blasons confirms, the author claims, “la fonction privilégiée de l’épithète” in the Tiers livre (343).
The last chapter in this second section, “Tristes topiques et sermons joyerux,” treats the adverbs prudentement and pertinemment, the relationship to adages of Epistémon and Panurge, and some key terms in deliberative rhetoric. Erasmus is quoted once again, as are the lawyer Nevizzano and Caelius Rhodiginus.
The final section, “Un point qui disparaît,” has only two chapters. Chapter 6, “Des pois et des points: L’appointeur et les spécialistes,” explores the plays on these two words, and on the adverbs respectivement and assertivement, with much discussion of Hippothadée and Bridoye. The last chapter, “Propriété et dépendances,” uses Plutarch, as well as Quintilian’s rhetorical terms, to discuss Panurge’s views on housing, transportation, and other subjects, with particular reference to Diogenes’s barrel. The conclusion summarizes the main themes treated in the book: the sea (and travel), scandal, property, and paradox. There is an enormous bibliography, an index of passages analyzed in the book, an index of classical and Renaissance names quoted, and one of subjects (rerum) which seems a little eccentric; why list scandale and paradoxe but not propre? Most helpfully, perhaps, the book ends with a long and very detailed summary of its chapters.
