But Rabelais is an exception to every rule

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 139.

Oxford should be fun, and so it was; but for me it was perhaps not quite as much fun as it might have been, because at the very outset I made a fatal mistake: I decided to read modern languages. My father had done his utmost to dissuade me. The only successful way to learn a language, he maintained, was by total immersion: to go off to the appropriate country, stay with a local family and saturate oneself in it all day, every day, from morning to night. As for literature, to study it academically was to turn what should be pleasure into drudgery. Briefly, I allowed myself to be persuaded and put my name down for PPE—politics, philosophy, and economics—but after a fortnight I could bear it no longer. I changed schools, for the rest of my Oxford life devoting all too many of my waking hours to French and Russian; and by the time I realized how right my father had been it was too late to change back again. (I am surprised, in retrospect, that I did not unhesitatingly plump for history, the writing of which has been my principal occupation since my mid-thirties. Perhaps the knowledge that I should be required to study the Pandects of Justinian in Latin may have had something to do with it.) Three years later when I left, my spoken French—always pretty fluent and further polished up in Paris and Strasbourg—was not appreciably better than it had been when I started; and though I could read Russian without too much difficulty, conversationally I could still barely get off the ground. What Oxford did do for me—though I have only myself to blame—was to ruin two of the greatest literatures of the world. After three years of force-feeding (I remember having to read three Dostoyevsky novels in a week) I had enough of them. I have hardly read a single French or Russian novel since. The one exception—if you can call him a novelist—was Rabelais, to whom Oxford introduced me and whose sheer fantasy and ebullience enchanted me and still does; but Rabelais is an exception to every rule.