Which brings me back one last time to Panurge. In Pantagruel, he falls in love with a woman and is determined to have her at all costs. In church, during mass (isn't that a hell of a sacrilege!), he addresses her with some outrageous obscenities (in today's America, such "verbal rape" would cost him dear) and, when she refuses to listen, takes his revenge by sprinkling her

gown with the minced genitals of a bitch in heat. As she leaves the church, all the dogs roundabout (six hundred thousand and fourteen, says Rabelais) run up and piss on her. I remember living in a workers' dormitory when I was twenty, my Rabelais in Czech translation under my bed. The men were curious about this fat book, and time and again I had to read them the story, which they soon knew by heart. Even though these were people of a rather conservative peasant mentality, their laughter hadn't a trace of condemnation for that rhetorical and urinary harasser; they adored Panurge, so much so that they gave his name to one of our companions; no, not a womanizer, but a youngster known for his naivete and his exaggerated chastity, who was ashamed to be seen naked in the shower. I can hear their cries as if it were yesterday: "Panurk"-our Czech pronunciation of the name- "get into the shower! Or well wash you down with dog piss!

I can still hear that hearty laughter, making fun of a pal's modesty but at the same time showing an almost marveling affection for it. They were delighted by the obscenities Panurge addresses to the woman in church, but equally delighted by the punishment the woman's chastity inflicted on him and then, to their great pleasure, her own punishment by the dogs' urine. With what or whom did my erstwhile companions sympathize? With modesty? With immodesty? With Panurge? With the woman? Or with the dogs who had the enviable privilege of urinating on a beauty?