
The second volume opens with a lively inventory of its many sections, each promising a mix of satire, moral digressions, and outright farce. A narrator who delights in turning serious subjects—religion, law, and philosophy—into playful banter guides the listener through a parade of short stories, mock sermons, and whimsical dissertations. The tone is brisk and irreverent, often comparing lofty ideas to the everyday mishaps of servants, merchants, and would‑be aristocrats.
Among the episodes, listeners encounter the mischievous adventures of characters such as Quenault, the absurd debates of a pretentious priest, and the bawdy escapades of Sapho and a certain Esculape. The work revels in wordplay, parodying proverbs and scholarly treatises while exposing the pretensions of its time. With its rapid shifts and vivid, sometimes outrageous imagery, the book offers a charmingly chaotic portrait of a world in which humor is the preferred tool for critique.
Language
fr
Duration
~4 hours (271K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Laurent Vogel, Guy de Montpellier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)
Release date
2018-09-09
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
1556–1626
A playful, hard-to-pin-down voice from the French Renaissance, he is best remembered for the strange, exuberant Le Moyen de parvenir. His life moved through exile, religion, medicine, and church office, and that mix helps explain why his writing feels so learned and so unruly at once.
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