Fransua Rable

François Rabelais (François Rabelais) - a French writer, one of the greatest European satirist-humanists of the Renaissance, author of the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Rabelais was born in Chinon (in Touraine); the exact date of his birth is unknown. Some sources give 1483, others 1494.

He was presumably the son of an innkeeper (some claim a pharmacist who also dealt in wine and spirits); according to other sources, his father was a lawyer. He lost his mother at a very early age, or (according to other reports) was rejected by her very early and placed in a monastery, which some biographers, rather far-fetchedly, explain as the reason for the absence of purity, idealism, and tenderness in Rabelais’s works.

Directly from the tavern milieu, where the first ten years of Rabelais’s life were spent, he was, at his father’s will, placed as a novice in the Franciscan monastery of Seuilly; from there he moved to the monastery of La Baumette, and then, also as a novice, to the Cordelier abbey in Fontenay-le-Comte. It is recorded that during these transitions he met among his fellow novices a youth who later served him as the model for one of the most remarkable figures in his novel — the monk Jean des Entommeures (in N. M. Lyubimov’s translation — Jean Teethbreaker).

Insufficiently educated to devote himself to one of the “liberal professions,” Rabelais became a monk. He was led to this, among other things, by the opportunity, with a certain material security, to study the “humanistic” sciences, which at that time, that is, at the height of the Renaissance in France, occupied the most prominent place in the intellectual life of the French. Monastic life (chiefly that of the Franciscans), which Rabelais embraced at the age of twenty-five, stood in sharp contradiction to his nature, which was hostile to all mystical excesses and ascetic mortification of the flesh. His aversion to monasticism was intensified by the ignorance, fanaticism, and at the same time the idleness and debauch