How Bacbuc explained the word of the Goddess-Bottle.

Bacbuc having thrown I don’t know what into the fountain, straight the water ceased to boil; and then she took Panurge into the greater temple, in the central place, where there was the enlivening fountain.

There she took out a hugeous silver book, in the shape of a half-tierce, or hogshead, of sentences, and, having filled it at the fountain, said to him, The philosophers, preachers, and doctors of your world feed you up with fine words and cant at the ears; now, here we really incorporate our precepts at the mouth. Therefore I’ll not say to you, read this chapter, see this gloss; no, I say to you, taste me this fine chapter, swallow me this rare gloss. Formerly an ancient prophet of the Jewish nation ate a book and became a clerk even to the very teeth! Now will I have you drink one, that you may be a clerk to your very liver. Here, open your mandibules.

Panurge gaping as wide as his jaws would stretch, Bacbuc took the silver book — at least we took it for a real book, for it looked just for the world like a breviary — but in truth it was a breviary, a flask of right Falernian wine as it came from the grape, which she made him swallow every drop.

By Bacchus, quoth Panurge, this was a notable chapter, a most authentic gloss, o’ my word. Is this all that the trismegistian Bottle’s word means? I’ troth, I like it extremely; it went down like mother’s milk. Nothing more, returned Bacbuc; for Trinc is a panomphean word, that is, a word understood, used and celebrated by all nations, and signifies drink.

Some say in your world that sack is a word used in all tongues, and justly admitted in the same sense among all nations; for, as Aesop’s fable hath it, all men are born with a sack at the neck, naturally needy and begging of each other; neither can the most powerful king be without the help of other men, or can anyone that’s poor subsist without the rich, though he be never so proud and insolent; as, for example, Hippias the philosopher, who boasted he could do everything. Muc............