The Land of Papagosse

Ils sont prins s'ils ne s'envolent,(*) ces pourceaux qui vestus à la Turque,(†) le Turban sur la teste, le halebarde sur l'espaule, vont s'embarquer dans un panier percé, pour faire une grande guerre navalle(‡) sur l'aisle d'un moulin à vent, aux pays de Papagosse,(§) où les chiens chient la poix, les chats gosillent(‖) le diamerdis,¶ les femmes enceintes pissent un pucelage gros comme le bras, & les grenoüilles crachent les oysons touts cuits & farcis.

Bruscambille, "En Faveur du Galimathias", Les Plaisants paradoxes de Bruscambille, & autres discours Comiques, 1617

They're snared if they don't fly away, these swine dressed up Turkish-style, with turbans on their bonces, halberds over their shoulders, who are off to board a holey basket so that they can wage a big naval war, on the windmill isle in the lands of Papagosse, where the dogs shit pitch, the cats disgorge pulvilio of turds, the pregnant women piss virginity as thick as your arm, and the frogs spit out goslings ready stuffed and roasted.

* Ils sont prins s'ils ne s'envolent - Antoine Oudin, who in his Curiositez françoises, pour supplement aux Dictionnaires, ou Recueil de plusieurs belles proprietez, avec une infinité de Proverbes & Quolibets, pour l'explication de toutes sortes de Livres (1640) draws heavily on the works of Bruscambille, defines this expression as "une façon de parler, pour desapprouver ce qu'un autre dit."

† pourceaux - possibly an allusion to the Pugna Porcorum per Publium Porcium Poëtam (1530), a comic epyllion whose every word begins with the letter p, which for more than two centuries was widely reprinted in Latin collections of facetiae.

‡ grande guerre navale - possibly an allusion to the Battle of Lepanto (1571), thitherto the largest naval battle since Antiquity, in which the Holy League defeated the Ottoman fleet.

§ Papagosse - imaginary region whose origin lies in mediaeval Provençal folklore, also called Pampérigouste, by which name it can be found in Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin (1869), and Papeligosse, which Randle Cotgrave, in his A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) defines as the "countrey of the Butterflyes".

‖ gosillent - the verb gosiller derives from gosillier, gosier 'gullet, gorge', and means 'to vomit', figuratively 'to talk, speak' (see: Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française). Bruscambille's series of images encompasses all the possible bodily evacuations: defecation, vomition/regurgitation, urination, sputation.

¶ Diamerdis - Cotgrave defines this as a "confection of turds, pilgrims salve". Desiccated and blanched faeces (album graecum)  were widely used as medicinal preparations up until the eighteenth century. See, for example, Christian Franz Paullini, Heilsame Dreck-Apotheke: Wie nemlich mit Koth und Urin Fast alle ja auch die schwerste gifftige Kranckheiten und bezauberte Schaden vom Haupt biß zun Füssen inn- und äusserlich glücklich curirt worden (1696), a textbook on the pharmaceutics and curative properties of human and animal faeces and urine. In Rabelais, Pantagruel, Chapter 30, Panurge revives the decapitated Epistemon using diamerdis.