A few years before the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539), the founding act of the primacy and exclusivity of French in documents relating to public life in the kingdom of France, François Rabelais published his novels Gargantua (1532) and Pantagruel (1534). One of the great founders of this idiom, the author took great pleasure in playing with words, listening to their sound and thus sharing his prodigious wealth. By all accounts, his grotesque style is characterized by profusion, excess and exaggeration. This article focuses on two emblematic figures of exaggeration: hyperbole and the litote.