“Our minds were agreeably entertained” Reflections on the structure of The Fifth Book

Beyond the rewriting of certain episodes from the two series of drafts that comprise The Fifth Book, the following question has often been considered: What use would Rabelais potentially have made of these pages if he had written a genuine “Fifth Book”? Using the example of a short episode—Bacchus’s conquest of the Indians and its Lucianist intertext (CL, XXXVIII–XLII)—, this contribution proposes a review of this subject, factoring in the Rabelaisian method of using and “digesting” his sources in order to open up the possibility of a reevaluation of the initial project.