To go in search of Nostradamus’ fundamental pattern of thought earlier in his life, we have to take into account what is undoubtedly his first known work. Although published in 1557 (in Lyon by Antoine du Rosne), his Paraphrase of the Protreptic of Galen was possibly written in the 1530s.1 It seems to reveal a Nostradamus who was fascinated by humanism and who, working from a Latin translation by Erasmus, wanted to mount a defence of the arts, the ‘most prestigious Arts’.2 That defence was coupled with an advocacy of the just mean and began with a critique of those who disdain the Arts and make a fetish of ‘fortuitous’ chance, thereby denying the role of human reason as a guiding light in life. In the text, Galen presents the image of a woman holding onto the mast of a ship with her hands and, under her feet, a sphere. She has men in tears under her sway, men without learning. To that is juxtaposed the image of Mercury, ‘Lord of reason and Author of Arts’, represented as a beautiful adolescent boy whose face is the epitome of courage ‘for he has a joyous countenance, and piercing eyes’.3 Those who follow him faithfully are filled with joy whilst the disciples of the goddess of Fortune are led only by an endlessly false hope, chasing after her when she is herself escaping.4
Behind the image of Fortune, as Nostradamus calls it, there lies all those who are lured by worldly seductions and hurly-burly, who ignore the rationality behind unstable destinies. Their very opposites are those whose lives are serene, lived without cries of alarm, ‘all the self-effacing adepts of Arts’ who have God in their midst: ‘And they will not surrender the order which God has assigned to each one of them, some close at hand, surrounding Him with their well-grounded Art. Such are the artificers of Geometry, Arithmetic, Philosophy, Medicine, Astronomy, and Grammar. On the next rank follow artists, Sculptors, Potters, Writers, Goldsmiths, Architects and Stone-masons’.5 All the other arts occupy the third rank, each one obedient to the divine commandments, whilst in the fourth rank are located those who Hermes holds in the highest esteem, placing them closest to him, and preferring them to all others. That was where Socrates, Homer, Hippocrates and Plato were to be found. True nobility is not, therefore, what is transmitted hereditarily through blood; on the contrary, it is what Themistocles aspired to when he declared that his blood would begin (and end) with himself. Just so, true beauty does not reside in appearances, and true riches are not those which are put on display. Returning for a moment to the third quatrain of the first Century, and its evocation of the litter overturned by a tornado, the warning piece about a transition of human affairs into a period of trouble and a sign also of man's adherence to Fortune's fickle mutability, is arguably a similar message.
In Nostradamus’ paraphrase of Galen he cites an important anecdote in which Diogenes, one day, was invited to a banquet by a certain individual who vaunted himself as Fortune's beneficiary. Diogenes found himself ‘furnished with no spitoon’ so he went around looking for somewhere to spit and, finding nowhere else, he spat all over the proprietor of the house. The latter, filled with indignation, asked him why he did that, and Diogenes replied that he had singled him out as the most sordid object in a house that was otherwise decorated with the most beautiful paintings, whose floors were covered with mosaics representing the gods, whose tableware was immaculate, and whose beds and linen were made of the most beautiful and exquisite craftsmanship. True wealth is that acquired by erudition, a ‘sovereign gift’, the soul's wealth, whose best and most elevated Art is that of medicine.
It is above all in the context of physical sports that the Galenic text makes contextual sense, in his critique of athletes who wreck their bodies and often die young. He cites the striking example of the ancient wrestler, Milo of Croton, a giant of a man whose incomparable strength meant that he was able, without getting out of breath, to carry a bull on his shoulders the full 600 feet length of the Olympic stadium before throwing it to the ground, killing it with a single punch between the horns before eating it up. But that unsurpassed human strength met a tragic end, which offered the obvious symbolic moral, that whoever dedicates himself to worldly glory and the martial arts is destined to die in miserable circumstances. Milo had a dramatic end to his life for, seeing a young boy trying to cut a tree in half with the aid of wedges, tried to help him out with the strength of his bare hands but they got trapped in the trunk and were crushed and broken. The offspring of Pythagoras, too, became the ready prey for wolves at night, and his life ended wretchedly. That is where one rediscovers a denunciation of the superficial illusions in life, and its inherent risks, but also of the reckless illusions of the person who puts all his trust in his own capacities, symbolizing perhaps his capacites for wisdom too.
If one starts from the premiss that the underlying motive power in Nostradamus’ writing appears within its symbolic stress, we should give due heed to the declaration addressed to Paulin de la Garde, to whom the text is dedicated. It is a clarion call to understand that the everyday language of the world, based on riches, nobility, force, beauty, is not the language of truth. It is an invocation to us to become aware of the fact, through the paradigm of Milo of Croton, that when we imagine that we can solve the problems of human life by brute force, we disarm our own reason and our souls perish.6 It is the arts alone that we should call on and nourish, thereby signifying that knowledge alone can maintain mankind in the presence of God, and that it is that knowledge which expels violence and excludes active intervention in the debates and divisions of the human world. Through the instrument, therefore, of the translation of a text which emanated from the bonӕ literӕ of Antiquity, and which had attracted Erasmus’ attention, Nostradamus allows us a further glimpse at the basic principles of his cryptic imaginary. It appears as a declaration of the fact that misfortune will occur to those who abandon themselves to the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune, thoughtless of training themselves to become adept in the culture of erudition which allows God to come to man. It is a humanist diatribe against the present day, wedded to the pursuit of riches, to the use of force, and to persecution, supplanting divine providence. That pursuit is treated metaphorically and the cult of the individual is divinely chastised. Nostradamus chooses an evangelist rhetoric, expressing through a parable that to treat things by the Letter ‘kills’, leaving us with the illusion that, by ourselves and on our own, we can live, whereas the Spirit alone is the source of life conformable to the will of God.
Still more striking is Nostradamus’ text the Excellent and Most Useful Little Work, a text which dates from 1552, and whose first two editions were probably published in 1554 and 1555.7 The first part of the treatise is devoted to the ‘true and perfect beautification of the face, and sovereign whitening of the skin, preservation of the whole body, containing numerous secret and much sought-after recipes, hitherto unrevealed’.
Nostradamus extolled external appearances. That seems paradoxical, and at odds with our interpretation. Here, he praised the art of make-up in order to understand better what is nature and truth (or, rather, divine Truth). The effects of ageing on the skin are apparent in the presence of spots or ‘blotches’, and make-up or ‘the whitening of the face’ can give a fifty-five-year-old woman the look and cheeks of a twelve-year-old: ‘So sovereign a remedy is this grease-paint that even when one is close-up to the face one cannot make out or suspect anything other than a natural skin-colour, and if a woman used it for the space of four or five days she would be almost unknown to those closest to her’. But Nostradamus sings the praises of this grease-paint, not simply as a way of restoring to nature what the years had worn away, but also as an act of conservation, allowing one to hold back the ravages of time. If the make-up were applied from the age of fifteen, twenty or twenty-five years of age, he claims that the woman's face would retain its original beauty through to sixty years of age at the least. The face-paint does not, therefore, hide or mask nature; on the contrary, it embellishes it, and prevents it from being subject to the vicissitudes of time and the world. As Bernard Chevignard has written, ‘Being recharges itself, in the shadow of appearing’. It is by human artifice that nature is protected, preserved, honoured and maintained, and through the natural order of things. Nostradamus authenticates a complex relationship between nature and artifice (artifex) in which, paradoxically, artifice is not the destroyer or corruptor of nature as the moralist discourse of the time would have us believe. The recourse to the craft behind the making of face-paint is legitimate insofar as the physician only serves to preserve a face which has been created by God, a beauty which has its source in the Divine. This is a fundamental point because it determines the ethical value (‘axiology’) behind what is real, which implies that what is real achieves consistency through the effort put into recovering its true authenticity, and (above all) preserving it in proximity to the divine creative act, as willed by God.8
The make-up's effect, adds Nostradamus, is such that Hecuba (if only she had used it) could have been taken for Helen of Troy, and the scars she made on her breasts after Hector's death would have ended up being invisible. This natural physick is redolent above all of Hippocrates, for whom the physician is the ‘minister of nature’.9 The constituent axiom is that nature, its plants, roots and minerals, furnishes the wherewithal for human beings to divert the human condition from the wear and tear of the years. Knowing its language, understanding the grammar of its various properties, is a way to maintain the natural order (ordo naturӕ), understood as reflective of the divine will. As such, it is a divine gift when a human being knows how to make use of nature for the good of his own body, in the same way as knowing the hieroglyphs as put together from nature by Egyptian high priests provides that individual with a set of moral dispositions (ethos) derived from it. Nature is thus a repository of continuous marvels and it is composed, as we have already seen, of sympathies and antipathies whose diversity it can be read as an immense body of knowledge which can be mastered in order to preserve or perfect the human being, God's handiwork. The apothecary-physician is he who, by means of this natural reason, aids humans in the direction of this work of preservation and conservation; he should be able to restore their natural hair colour by means of dyes that reach into the hair follicles. He should be able to produce oils able to combat stomach disorders, perfumes or creams aimed to hide or dissipate bad odours, powder to whiten the teeth and sweeten the breath, and he should, following the recipes and hints from the Ancients, be able to produce ‘amorous beverages’. That is the outward face of the Book of Various Grease-Paints (Livre des divers fardemens) which is the first part of this treatise, and in which are found the recipes for the manufacture of a ‘muscat soap’ which whitens and softens the hands whilst perfuming them with a gentle and soft perfume.10
There is thus an affirmation by Nostradamus of the external appearance of the body on the grounds that it belongs to nature, the divine spokesman. This motivates his concern to reveal the secrets behind the natural preparations of tinctures, creams, powders and filters allowing human beings to realize their full potential. Although focused on the body, there is an underlying link between medicine and theology to the extent that the physician is the intermediary between God the Creator, and the created being who, through acquiring knowledge can become more profoundly aware of the divine in Creation. But philosophy is what makes that systemic link since it is axiomatic that nature does nothing in vain or by chance. Knowledge is the means by which the link is made – which is how Ficino and Erasmus saw it. Nature has its reason, is reason. To be is to be dignified in one's corporeal state. That corporeality is accompanied by a constant aspiration to be good, an urge not to stain the image of God which is the human being. This is what it means to live one's whole life within the reason which is in Creation. Appearance of being speaks of one's being; it is one's being. Hence the necessity for a facial cover-up. Make-up cream is not a strategy to hide the effects of ageing, as Bernard Chevignard thought. It is what permits the truth of human being to continue towards the fullness of its being, in conformity with the soul of the world. What is true only exists in a dialectical relationship between the visible and the invisible. Hence an inescapable logical corollary, which is that to ‘be’ in a true sense, is to be in what hides and dissimulates, in the enigma, in the absent sense. In order to ‘be’ it is necessary to be hidden, and to hide oneself away. The function of what covers things up, and thus of enigmatic discourse, is to say what is true. What is true is manifested in appearance, in what covers up. Between Nostradamus’ advocacy of make-up cream and his exposition of the value of hieroglyphic language, there is a connection. And that is because there is an episteme of reason at the heart of Creation; and it is man's task to find out more about this God-distributed reason and, as it were, commune with it in order thereby to discover what is its very truth.
If one analyses this text more deeply as an encryption of the relationship between the truth and the divine Truth, it becomes clear that the second book of Nostradamus’ treatise, which is about the art of jam-making, follows the same line, albeit with one difference. It is about what is within, rather than about our appearances. It aims to give sense to that notion of interiority, and how it must be nourished and sustained by a knowledge of recipes whose primary ingredient is sugar.11 Nature's fruits are essential. The metaphors in these concoctions have to be taken into consideration, and Nostradamus tells us so explicitly. Through the works of the physician François Valleriola, he alludes to an art of connections, which implies that his own writing should be decoded in terms of a skein of similarities and disparities, symmetries and asymmetries. Jam takes fruit and transforms it into something else through sugar, resulting in an enhancement of it since (thanks to the sugar) it endows it with therapeutic properties. To transform something is to make it better. Jam becomes a paradigm for transmutation as the metaphor for adjoining the soul of the world. And here, perhaps, we have made our way to one of Nostradamus’ preoccupations. To transform language is to transmute the regular order of words, and break with the grammatical rules. Does this not take us back to a physick for the soul?
Just as in the Horus Apollon, nature is a language of saving grace, giving mankind the epistemic codes to the knowledge of good and evil, and to be in conformity with the mysteries of Creation, and thus with divine reason, so too this Treatise on Jams offers a natural semiology allowing mankind, through his body, to minister to his soul. Sugar, the basis for cooking fruits and spices, is rather like the metaphor of the ‘celebrated pantagruelion’ in Rabelais’ Tiers Livre. That is what Nostradamus leads us to believe when he signals to the reader that ‘whoever has a perfect understanding and mastery of how well and properly to regulate sugar will be able to create the perfect jam with any fruit whatsoever’. In the treatise's preface (Proème), dedicated to Jean de Nostredame, procureur at the Parlement of Aix, Nostradamus lays out first of all his project's rationale. He evokes the concept of conservation ‘in a perpetual duration’, only applied this time to the fruits of nature. Cooking them prevents them from going mouldy and gives them ‘a sweet savour’. The recipes are certainly highly detailed and complex, but Nostradamus’ natural (or perhaps naturalist) semiology invites the reader to ask himself what it all means. Making conserves, transforming fruit, and the hard science that lies behind all the seeming variants in the art of jam-making, is not Nostradamus using it as a disguised way of talking about the making, the transforming of the self, of interiority? Losing sight of all the surface details, is it not about a journey within, a transformation of oneself, masquerading under a culinary metaphor? Do we not have to go through a form of personal metamorphosis in order to go ahead and meet the divine call? Is that not a conversion? The first recipe in the collection, which is about ‘How to Preserve Lemon Peel, or Candied Lemon’ provides an example:12
Take a whole lemon and, according to size, cut it lengthwise into six or seven pieces, so that each segment is at least two fingers’ width. When you have chopped it all up, fill an earthenware (or some other) pot with water. Peel the skin from the pieces, making sure that that there is no flesh attached; take care, too, that the peel is not too thick and is as long as the lemon. Then throw it into the said pot. If you want to preserve the flesh, the pieces must be somewhat thicker, but everything must be properly washed. Do not, though, discard the pips and the bits but dispose of the water and replace it with fresh, add a handful of salt and let it stand for a couple of days. Then change the water again and pour two or three fresh lots over the pieces and then a further one and let it stand for a whole day. Each morning, pour fresh water over them and go on doing that for nine days. On the ninth day, put the vessel on the fire and at first let it simmer slowly; then bring it to the boil until you see that it is possible to stick a needle through the pieces. But make sure that when you are boiling the flesh with the peel that you remove them during the first boiling, otherwise they will be boiled too hard. When you have well and truly boiled everything and it has become a little stiff, take it off the fire and lift it out of the water with a perforated ladle on to a white cloth. Make sure that the mixture is on the dry side, but treat it with care, so that it does not tear. When it has dried a little and cooled down, take as much sugar as you see fit. If there are two pounds of peel or pieces, use fine sugar, and if you want to preserve them in the best possible manner, dissolve the sugar in water. There should not, however, be too much water, only as much as the quantity of sugar requires, and when it is ready, do not refine or clarify it, but allow it or the honey to reduce to a somewhat thick syrup. Whatever you do, do not let it burn …
So, what role does food play in Nostradamus’ discourse more generally? Why does he publish a volume on the art of preserving fruit and a defence and illustration of cosmetics? They have in common, of course, the fact that they are both ‘recipe books’. But there is also the hint of another answer, offered by the astrophile himself, in the form of the addition, somewhat surprisingly, at the end of the book of what is presented as the translation of a Latin letter from Ermolao Barbaro to Pietro Cara di San Germane Vercellese (1440–1520), ‘jurisconsult and famed Orator’. Dating perhaps to the year 1488, it tells the story of a banquet, given in May of that year, by one Signor Gian Giacomo Trivulzio on the occasion of his marriage to a lady from Naples, Beatrice d’Avalos d’Aquino, including the menu of fifteen dishes offered to the invited guests on that occasion.
The letter offers a very precise description of it, from the moment when the rosewater was brought on for the guests to wash their hands, through the pinenuts on side tables, the marzepans, freshly picked asparagus, ‘giblets (“foyage”), which is what our chefs call the heart, liver and stomachs of small birds’, roast buckmeat, calves’ head, and boiled veal. The sixth dish on the menu consisted of capons, fattened chickens, pigeons, ox tongue, sow's leg, all stewed and served with a lemon dressing. Then followed an entire roasted lamb, the gravy spiced with bitter cherries (or ‘laurel cherries’), and thereafter turtledove, partridge, pheasant, quail, crane, ortolan, and such-like poultry, ‘carefully and gently roasted’ with a condiment of Salon olives (known as ‘colymbades’). The ninth dish was served up ‘with madeira sugar, sprinkled with rose-water’, which was followed by a small roasted piglet. The eleventh delicacy was a roasted cockerel, served with a white sauce made of minced liver and spices. Then came the desserts, with a cake known as a ‘saulgret’, pieces of crystallized quince, slices of edible thistle-cake, pinenuts, artichokes, and (to round it off) ‘all kinds of sugared delicacies’ – sugar-coated coriander, Florentine fennel, almonds, aniseed, cloves, candied orange-peel, cinnamon and ‘sugar-coated squash’. Once the meal was over, a space was cleared for actors, tumblers, acrobats, jugglers, tight-rope performers, mimics of animal-cries, and musicians. As Ermolao Barbaro says in Nostradamus’ translation, it was a most exquisite moment which amazed the invited guests, to the extent that, when the dishes arrived, preceded by waiters bearing perfumed torches, ‘there fell a silence as had not been observed since the days of Pythagoras and his followers’.
What led Nostradamus to place this account at the end of a text devoted to the making of preserves? Why should he include such a narrative, and what significance did he accord to this gastronomic event, in which food is ingested from animals and vegetables which, in the Horus Apollon have a role as divinely ordained signs by which we can come to know ourselves. Should we not see it as a kind of conclusion concerning the well-tempered maintenance of the balance between the body without, and the body within? Is not this banquet of 1488 an additional element in the formal establishement of a good bodily regime, in which we should take nature into account? Nostradamus was perhaps attempting to refer to the symbolism of the ingestion of knowledge in the context of thought processes that work like parables, delivering a secondary message obliquely. We should perhaps make a link between the way that Nostradamus presents this feast and Rabelais’ Gargantua, where there is a similar tension, eating being a metaphor for taking in the Word of God, an evangelist consciousness lurking behind the literal meaning of the words. The convivial gastronomic atmosphere perhaps consciously evokes a kind of euphoria, the words themselves being, metaphorically speaking, exotic and memorable food, described in detail just as in Marsilio Ficino's Commentary or Plato's Banquet. The dishes are signs, at the heart of a language which links the Creator and the created. For Ficino, ‘the feast is the face of another famine, another feast to come’ evoking a God who, in Michel Jeanneret's analysis, ‘alone satisfies the hunger in our hearts’. Body and soul, exterior and interior, embrace a kind of unity, the antitheses equal themselves out or become fundamentally neutralized in the dialogic form of the symposium (i.e. ‘convivium’): ‘Only the shared meal (‘convivium’) encompasses all parts of man, for … it restores the various parts of the bodies, rebalances the humours, renews the spirits, and recreates the senses, and sustains and reanimates our rational faculties’.13
The paradoxical nature of Nostradamus’ writing can be explored at deeper levels. The food for thought that he offers his reader is the ever-present axiom of the double sense of self, of a set of selves. The self who seems absorbed by worldly seductions (in this instance, gastronomic) lives, in reality, in an alternative and parallel universe. When someone eats, he or she might seem to be simply eating food but, in reality, they are eating words, they are ingesting a language which nourishes the soul, aligning it in harmony with the divine order in Creation, ensuring that it participates fully in it. That nourishment is a communion with this immanent nature of a God at once present and absent, anonymous and pantonymous, allowing it to participate in the Creation, in the Word. It is Michel Jeanneret who reminds us that the birth of Gargantua takes place in the midst of a feast, for which 367,014 oxen are slaughtered, at a time of plenty, and the newly-born giant ‘sets up for life as he sits down to drink’. Fondness for food propels one into the fullness of nature, ‘and thus it is good’, and it harks back to the pure time of Creation, when original sin was unheard of. With Rabelais there arises a rewriting of the book of Genesis, a reworking of it that latches onto a pure language, which is the language of signs. Those who feast are like the giants in the Rabelaisian fable; they commune with the first moment of original time, and thus with God. The gastronomic largesse which Nostradamus recounts is an invitation to become conscious of what it is to live in the signs of nature, in the knowledge of its message, as the physicians conceived and understood it, albeit in the light of Aristotle and Galenic medical theories. In this account of an actual event, Nostradamus provides an existential epistemology and a critically essential metaphor.
It is an existential epistemology because Nostradamus invites his reader to think that the accomplishment of the plenitude of self occurs through a learned dialectic between exteriority and interiority. With every appearance of living in the cares of the world, one can, in fact, live in oneself. That is encrypted in a play on words (in French, mets/mots). The banquet/communion is a purificatory act, such that it begins with the washing of hands. He or she who partakes in the convivium must play a game which rests on adopting a somewhat schizophrenic attitude. Living externally in the world of sin, subject to Fortuna's wicked spells, they can nonetheless assimilate internally the language of divinely speaking nature, and like those invited guests, filled with silent amazement when presented with the offerings of viands and desserts, it is in silence that the process takes place. This is where we find ourselves back with other dynamics that we have already encountered: a philosophy of conserving human being through adherence to the mysteries of Creation; and an encoding, which involves an incurving into the self, and thus a form of dissimulation, a speech-encounter which could be described as a speech of silence. To that should be added a structuring component, also contained in the translation of Ermolao Barbaro's letter, and one which mirrors that schizophrenic posture. It is the principle of a language which, to correspond to the divine will, is hieroglyphic, that is to say, a language which possesses, in a penumbra which is precisely where it illuminates, a range of secret significances, apparent only to the initiated, and deceiving the common multitude, who dwell in the land of the literal, where the Letter of the law kills.
That implies that whoever seeks to understand Nostradamus nowadays should not try to do so within the framework of the rational meaning of the words, within a futurological notion of sense. Our preoccupation should be to go beyond the words, which screen out meaning, or entrap us. Nostradamus’ reason lies beyond words since it is inscribed in the totality of Creation, and animated by divine will. Nostradamian writing is paradoxical and his use of the appellation ‘Michaël de Nostredame’, a pledge of his ‘conversion’, places this new apostle under the protection of the Virgin Mary – to which we should add ‘noster adamus’ as a further possible play on words, one which would authenticate his acceptance of a vocation to recover, thanks to the stars, an Adamite language from before the Fall, dating from the earliest days of Creation. What the skin-cream indicates is the desire to go beyond time itself. It is significant that Adam was seen as the first astrologer, its founder, and astrology was held to be among the oldest and principal liberal arts, a knowledge from the beginnings, Moses, Job and David being its subsequent guardians. If Nostradamus celebrated the fact that his age had brought about a return of ancient learning, it was not in order to ridicule his own claim that he proclaimed his capacity to speak the truth, but rather to make his reader aware of his having access to a wisdom, which is the wisdom of words. The Treatise on Preserves ends with a double assertion. On the one hand, in his native Provence, Nostradamus is surrounded by ‘brute beasts, barbarous people, the enemies of men of good will, mostly ignorant of good letters’. They are, he says, the ‘sworn enemies of good letters and notable erudition’. On the other hand, he has taken to heart what he once read engraved in marble: Credis sum Pythiovera magis tripode. That was directed at himself, a personal call to believe that he indeed was the possessor of truths still more true than those uttered from the pythic tripod. That was, no doubt, because he saw himself as ready to penetrate the secrets of Adamite language as he pronounced the invocation with Ficinian overtones: ‘not that the Sun in its majesty does not do me the pleasure of making me the participant in its immense splendour’.
On the other hand, the crucial metaphor of the gastronomic feast and its relationships to the other elements which run through Nostradamus’ writing must not be ignored. The banquet of May 1488 shares many of the paradigms of the Renaissance symposia. As Michel Jeanneret has written, narratives of banquets were far from anodyne, simply incidental, descriptive details. Nor was their aim to be purely medicinal. A banquet is a unique symbolic occasion. The participant is not alone, confronting the hieroglyphic relationship with nature, contemplating the relationship between his interior and exterior self. The occasion is convivial (convivere = ‘to live together’) and he is in conversation with others, sharing food being a recognition of someone else as playing an ‘essential role’. That someone else becomes a requirement for his own cogito, a performer in his own sense of consciousness. To eat means to speak and to know and in the Renaissance these are the determinant signs of how we show that we are at peace, one with another, that we refuse violence and embrace love. At this point, the Nostradamian project intersects with that of Rabelais, and especially in the episode of Gargantua and Pantagruel when Picrochole attacks the kingdom of Grandgousier, the guerre pichrocholine. Picrochole is a warlike king who, with his supporters, refuses Grandgousier's offer of bread (flatbreads – fouaces) and instead destroys their harvest, a sign that he does not want to break bread with them, to parley. In thus depriving humans, he ‘despises eating well’ and his mind is preoccupied with thoughts of war and evil. ‘These are grapes with freshly baked bread, these are celestial viands to dine out on’, so Picrochole is acting against God's will.14 ‘Just so various grapes – pineaux, fiers, muscat, bicane and foyrars – for those who are constipated’, continues Rabelais, so they free up those who are blocked inside.15
Beyond refusing point blank to sell their wares at market prices to the simple folk of Grandgousier, Picrochole's flatbread bakers add insult to injury, saying that they make do with ‘coarse doughbread and crust’. The ensuing argument turns in favour of the shepherds of Grandgousier, and they ‘celebrate[d] by devouring flatbreads and fine grapes, making merry together to the tune of the bagpipe’. The defeated bring their complaints before their king, Picrochole, who, without further ado, orders the home guard to assemble. The meaning is clear; war was the consequence of a refusal to break bread together, and conflict is the antithesis of a banquet of peace between souls. And the Picrocholian army embark on laying waste the countryside, pillaging rich and poor, destroying all around them, sacred and profane places alike. It goes directly against the order of nature, rounding up animals from geese to oxen, tearing down the vines, and seizing the crops. It is as though refusing the offer of a meal together was tantamount to unleashing a force that destroys nature, the fruits of God, and the language of God: ‘the disorder was unrivalled’. Convivial humanity is thus opposed to inhumanity, and even speaking violently one to another is a form of parley and a divine speech. The order of humanity, meaning the kingdom of the divine will, is thus symbolized by the breaking of bread together, and so it is no coincidence that Nostradamus ends his treatise on a meal. To him, it would have served as a marker that evil is defeated by living together, and that humans living together one with another was above all a reflection of the harmonic language in nature. In what follows in Gargantua, the pillage of Seuillé and the ‘laying waste’ of its vineyards by the gangs of Picrocholians incurs the wrath of Father John of the Funnels (Jean des Entommeures), who makes himself ready for combat, championing the link between God and wine in his battlecry: ‘Qui aime le vin, le corps Dieu sy me suive’. And those enamoured of peace, even in the ensuing war, far from abandoning their convivial ideal, seek to attenuate its consequences with the allure of feasts. They do not shy away from the battlefield but their civility and good nature steer them more towards repasts than towards bloodshed. A significant part of the Picrocholine war takes place around the table at Grandgousier, which is where skirmishes are recounted, battle-plans decided, and where people relax from the conflict. Ponocrates wanted to get stuck into the enemy without delay but good King Grandgousier has other plans: ‘Truly this is not the right moment, for I want you to feast tonight and be welcome guests at my table’, he said. ‘And with that, they readied themselves for supper’.