Rabelais has been put aside, largely untasted, on the snap judgment that he is, as Voltaire said, a "drunken philosopher" who wrote "an extravagant and unintelligent book .
In "A Wee Sma' Drop" the author finds an old man sitting corpselike in a wineshop, an untasted bottle before him, passively allowing the flies to attack a pimple on his .
He left his food untasted, withdrew for meditation.