Excerpt from Literary Portraits Fontenay he might devote himself, so long as the secret was kept, to every branch of knowledge. Nothing eluded his curiosity: an expert in law and theology, he acquired so deep an insight into medical science as set him above all his contemporaries. He became as ready as Pantagruel himself to discuss the insoluble problems of magic, alchemy, geomancy, and philosophy. He plumbed 'the true Well and Abyss of Encyclopedic learning.' But above all, he devoted himself to the study of Greek. He mastered the many authors whose works he was destined to quote with so fantastic an erudition; nor was his tasle' so simple as it might seem. He had to fight, not only with the scarcity of books and manuscripts, but with the bitterly declared prejudice of the age. Greek, in fact, was the forbidden tongue, the plain mark of heresy, and the controversy raged most bitterly during the years spent by Rabelais among the Grey Friars. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.