In François Rabelais' novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mardigras is a huge, fat, thick, grizzly swine, a deity and protector of the Chitterlings, the inhabitants of the Wild Island, "first founder and original of all the Chitterling race" (*******). In Rabelais’ work, Chitterlings (Andouilles) symbolize Calvinists and Protestants who diverged from Catholics over the issue of fasting, depicted as deeply suspicious and sternly insistent in their protest (**). And the name Mardigras, from French Mardi Gras — "Shrove Tuesday", is the final day of Carnival (also known as Shrovetide or Fastelavn), it thus falls on the day before the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday (****). So, in the English translation by Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux, the name Mardigras was rendered as Carnival:

Furthermore, Master Rabelais informs us that Mardigras originated from people who had tasted the medlars that had grown from the blood of Abel, slain by Cain. The consumption of the medlars affected human nature, "and divers and very different accidents did ensue thereupon; for there fell upon them all in their bodies a most terrible swelling, but not upon all in the same place". However, unlike the giants — including Gargantua and Pantagruel — who "grew both in length and width", the ancestors of Mardigras swelled in their bellies, "and their belly strouted out big like a great tun, of whom it is written, Ventrem omnipotentem" — "the almighty belly" (******).