How Pantagruel went ashore in the island of Pope-Figland.

The next morning we arrived at the island of Pope-figs; formerly a rich and free people, called the Gaillardets, but now, alas! miserably poor, and under the yoke of the Papimen. The occasion of it was this:

On a certain yearly high holiday, and burgomaster, syndics, and topping rabbies of the Gaillardets chanced to go into the neighbouring island Papimany to see the festival and pass away the time. Now one of them having espied the pope’s picture (with the sight of which, according to a laudable custom, the people were blessed on high-offering holidays), made mouths at it, and cried, A fig for it! as a sign of manifest contempt and derision. To be revenged of this affront, the Papimen, some days after, without giving the others the least warning, took arms, and surprised, destroyed, and ruined the whole island of the Gaillardets; putting the men to the sword, and sparing none but the women and children, and those too only on condition to do what the inhabitants of Milan were condemned to by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

These had rebelled against him in his absence, and ignominiously turned the empress out of the city, mounting her a-horseback on a mule called Thacor, with her breech foremost towards the old jaded mule’s head, and her face turned towards the crupper. Now Frederick being returned, mastered them, and caused so careful a search to be made that he found out and got the famous mule Thacor. Then the hangman by his order clapped a fig into the mule’s jimcrack, in the presence of the enslaved cits that were brought into the middle of the great market-place, and proclaimed in the emperor’s name, with trumpets, that whosoever of them would save his own life should publicly pull the fig out with his teeth, and after that put it in again in the very individual cranny whence he had draw’d it without using his hands, and that whoever refused to do this should presently swing for it and die in his shoes. Some sturdy fools, standing upon their punctilio, chose honourably to be hanged rather than submit to so shameful and abominable a disgrace; and others, less nice in point of ceremony, took heart of grace, and even resolved to have at the fig, and a fig for’t, rather than make a worse figure with a hempen collar, and die in the air at so short warning. Accordingly, when they had neatly picked out the fig with their teeth from old Thacor’s snatch-blatch, they plainly showed it the headsman, saying, Ecco lo fico, Behold the fig!

By the same ignominy the rest of these poor distressed Gaillardets saved their bacon, becoming tributaries and slaves, and the name of Pope-figs was given them, because they said, A fig for the pope’s image. Since this, the poor wretches never prospered, but every year the devil was at their doors, and they were plagued with hail, stor............