A book admired by writers as diverse as Hugo and Balzac, Prosper Mérimée and Anatole France. Its echoes can be heard in the works of Racine, La Fontaine, and Molière. It was illustrated by Gustave Doré, and inspired Honoré Daumier. The roots of the phantasmagorical story of the giant king Gargantua and his son Pantagruel lie in medieval French folklore. Rabelais also borrowed many of the stylistic features of his novel from there: demonstrative and humorously implausible exaggerations, fairy-tale plot twists, a riot of popular imagination, and a frankly crude, yet equally genuinely folksy humor. However, beneath the novel's carnivalesque, comical atmosphere, there emerge elements of harsh social satire, which takes aim at the modern church, the judicial system, pedagogy, and much else, as well as a humanistic moral message extolling the freedom and independence of the human personality, love of life, and the simple joys of existence.