roasted, and prefer them very high, and even, as to several, quite gone.
Nothing but hardness generally offends me (of any other quality I am as
patient and indifferent as any man I have known); so that, contrary to
the common humour, even in fish it often happens that I find them both
too fresh and too firm; not for want of teeth, which I ever had good,
even to excellence, and which age does not now begin to threaten; I have
always been used every morning to rub them with a napkin, and before and
after dinner. God is favourable to those whom He makes to die by
degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age; the last death will be so much
the less painful; it will kill but a half or a quarter of a man. There
is one tooth lately fallen out without drawing and without pain; it was
the natural term of its duration; in that part of my being and several
others, are already dead, others half dead, of those that were most
active and in the first rank during my vigorous years; 'tis so I melt and
steal away from myself. What a folly it would be in my understanding to
apprehend the height of this fall, already so much advanced, as if it
were from the very top! I hope I shall not. I, in truth, receive a
principal consolation in meditating my death, that it will be just and
natural, and that henceforward I cannot herein either require or hope
from Destiny any other but unlawful favour. Men make themselves believe
that we formerly had longer lives as well as greater stature. But they
deceive themselves; and Solon, who was of those elder times, limits the
duration of life to threescore and ten years. I, who have so much and so
universally adored that "The mean is best," of the passed time, and who
have concluded the most moderate measures to be the most perfect, shall
I pretend to an immeasurable and prodigious old age? Whatever happens
contrary to the course of nature may be troublesome; but what comes
according to her should always be pleasant:
"Omnia, quae secundum naturam fiunt, sunt habenda in bonis."
["All things that are done according to nature
are to be accounted good."--Cicero, De Senect., c. 19.]
And so, says Plato, the death which is occasioned by wounds and diseases
is violent; but that which comes upon us, old age conducting us to it, is
of all others the most easy, and in some sort delicious:
"Vitam adolescentibus vis aufert, senibus maturitas."
["Young men are taken away by violence, old men by maturity."
--Cicero, ubi sup.]
Death mixes and confounds itself throughout with life; decay anticipates
its hour, and shoulders itself even into the course of our advance.
I have portraits of myself taken at five-and-twenty and five-and-thirty
years of age. I compare them with that lately drawn: how many times is
it no longer me; how much more is my present image unlike the former,
than unlike my dying one? It is too much to abuse nature, to make her
trot so far that she must be forced to leave us, and abandon our conduct,
our eyes, teeth, legs, and all the rest to the mercy of a foreign and
haggard countenance, and to resign us into the hands of art, being weary
of following us herself.
I am not excessively fond either of salads or fruits, except melons. My
father hated all sorts of sauces; I love them all. Eating too much hurts
me; but, as to the quality of what I eat, I do not yet certainly know
that any sort of meat disagrees with me; neither have I observed that
either full moon or decrease, autumn or spring, have any influence upon
me. We have in us motions that are inconstant and unknown; for example,
I found radishes first grateful to my stomach, since that nauseous, and
now again grateful. In several other things, I find my stomach and
appetite vary after the same manner; I have changed again and again from
white wine to claret, from claret to white wine.
I am a great lover of fish, and consequently make my fasts feasts and
feasts fasts; and I believe what some people say, that it is more easy of
digestion than flesh. As I make a conscience of eating flesh upon
fish-days, so does my taste make a conscience of mixing fish and flesh;
the difference betwixt them seems to me too remote.
From my youth, I have sometimes kept out of the way at meals; either to
sharpen my appetite against the next morning (for, as Epicurus fasted and
made lean meals to accustom his pleasure to make shift without abundance,
I, on the contrary, do it to prepare my pleasure to make better and more
cheerful use of abundance); or else I fasted to preserve my vigour for
the service of some action of body or mind: for both the one and the
other of these is cruelly dulled in me by repletion; and, above all
things, I hate that foolish coupling of so healthful and sprightly a
goddess with that little belching god, bloated with the fumes of his
liquor--[ Montaigne did not approve of coupling Bacchus with Venus.]--
or to cure my sick stomach, or for want of fit company; for I say, as the
same Epicurus did, that one is not so much to regard what he eats, as
with whom; and I commend Chilo, that he would not engage himself to be at
Periander's feast till he was first informed who were to be the other
guests; no dish is so acceptable to me, nor no sauce so appetising, as
that which is extracted from society. I think it more wholesome to eat
more leisurely and less, and to eat oftener; but I would have appetite
and hunger attended to; I should take no pleasure to be fed with three or
four pitiful and stinted repasts a day, after a medicinal manner: who
will assure me that, if I have a good appetite in the morning, I shall
have the same at supper? But we old fellows especially, let us take the
first opportune time of eating, and leave to almanac-makers hopes and
prognostics. The utmost fruit of my health is pleasure; let us take hold
of the present and known. I avoid the invariable in these laws of
fasting; he who would have one form serve him, let him avoid the
continuing it; we harden ourselves in it; our strength is there stupefied
and laid asleep; six months after, you shall find your stomach so inured
to it, that all you have got is the loss of your liberty of doing
otherwise but to your prejudice.
I never keep my legs and thighs warmer in winter than in summer; one
simple pair of silk stockings is all. I have suffered myself, for the
relief of my colds, to keep my head warmer, and my belly upon the account
of my colic: my diseases in a few days habituate themselves thereto, and
disdained my ordinary provisions: we soon get from a coif to a kerchief
over it, from a simple cap to a quilted hat; the trimmings of the doublet
must not merely serve for ornament: there must be added a hare's skin or
a vulture's skin, and a cap under the hat: follow this gradation, and you
will go a very fine way to work. I will do nothing of the sort, and
would willingly leave off what I have begun. If you fall into any new
inconvenience, all this is labour lost; you are accustomed to it; seek
out some other. Thus do they destroy themselves who submit to be
pestered with these enforced and superstitious rules; they must add
something more, and something more after that; there is no end on't.
For what concerns our affairs and pleasures, it is much more commodious,
as the ancients did, to lose one's dinner, and defer making good cheer
till the hour of retirement and repose, without breaking up a day; and so
was I formerly used to do. As to health, I since by experience find, on
the contrary, that it is better to dine, and that the digestion is better
while awake. I am not very used to be thirsty, either well or sick; my
mouth is, indeed, apt to be dry, but without thirst; and commonly I never
drink but with thirst that is created by eating, and far on in the meal;
I drink pretty well for a man of my pitch: in summer, and at a relishing
meal, I do not only exceed the limits of Augustus, who drank but thrice
precisely; but not to offend Democritus rule, who forbade that men should
stop at four times as an unlucky number, I proceed at need to the fifth
glass, about three half-pints; for the little glasses are my favourites,
and I like to drink them off, which other people avoid as an unbecoming
thing. I mix my wine sometimes with half, sometimes with the third part
water; and when I am at home, by an ancient custom that my father's
physician prescribed both to him and himself, they mix that which is
designed for me in the buttery, two or three hours before 'tis brought
in. 'Tis said that Cranabs, king of Attica, was the inventor of this
custom of diluting wine; whether useful or no, I have heard disputed.
I think it more decent and wholesome for children to drink no wine till
after sixteen or eighteen years of age. The most usual and common method
of living is the most becoming; all particularity, in my opinion, is to
be avoided; and I should as much hate a German who mixed water with his
wine, as I should a Frenchman who drank it pure. Public usage gives the
law in these things.
I fear a mist, and fly from smoke as from the plague: the first repairs I
fell upon in my own house were the chimneys and houses of office, the
common and insupportable defects of all old buildings; and amongst the
difficulties of war I reckon the choking dust they made us ride in a
whole day together. I have a free and easy respiration, and my colds for
the most part go off without offence to the lungs and without a cough.
The heat of summer is more an enemy to me than the cold of winter; for,
besides the incommodity of heat, less remediable than cold, and besides
the force of the sunbeams that strike upon the head, all glittering light
offends my eyes, so that I could not now sit at dinner over against a
flaming fire.
To dull the whiteness of paper, in those times when I was more wont to
read, I laid a piece of glass upon my book, and found my eyes much
relieved by it. I am to this hour--to the age of fifty-four--Ignorant of
the use of spectacles; and I can see as far as ever I did, or any other.
'Tis true that in the evening I begin to find a little disturbance and
weakness in my sight if I read, an exercise I have always found
troublesome, especially by night. Here is one step back, and a very
manifest one; I shall retire another: from the second to the third, and
so to the fourth, so gently, that I shall be stark blind before I shall
be sensible of the age and decay of my sight: so artificially do the
Fatal Sisters untwist our lives. And so I doubt whether my hearing
begins to grow thick; and you will see I shall have half lost it, when I
shall still lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me. A man
must screw up his soul to a high pitch to make it sensible how it ebbs
away.
My walking is quick and firm; and I know not which of the two, my mind or
my body, I have most to do to keep in the same state. That preacher is
very much my friend who can fix my attention a whole sermon through: in
places of ceremony, where every one's countenance is so starched, where I
have seen the ladies keep even their eyes so fixed, I could never order
it so, that some part or other of me did not lash out; so that though I
was seated, I was never settled; and as to gesticulation, I am never
without a switch in my hand, walking or riding. As the philosopher
Chrysippus' maid said of her master, that he was only drunk in his legs,
for it was his custom to be always kicking them about in what place
soever he sat; and she said it when, the wine having made all his
companions drunk, he found no alteration in himself at all; it may have
been said of me from my infancy, that I had either folly or quicksilver
in my feet, so much stirring and unsettledness there is in them, wherever
they are placed.
'Tis indecent, besides the hurt it does to one's health, and even to the
pleasure of eating, to eat greedily as I do; I often bite my tongue, and
sometimes my fingers, in my haste. Diogenes, meeting a boy eating after
that manner, gave his tutor a box on the ear! There were men at Rome
that taught people to chew, as well as to walk, with a good grace. I
lose thereby the leisure of speaking, which gives great relish to the
table, provided the discourse be suitable, that is, pleasant and short.
There is jealousy and envy amongst our pleasures; they cross and hinder
one another. Alcibiades, a man who well understood how to make good
cheer, banished even music from the table, that it might not disturb the
entertainment of discourse, for the reason, as Plato tells us, "that it
is the custom of ordinary people to call fiddlers and singing men to
feasts, for want of good discourse and pleasant talk, with which men of
understanding know how to entertain one another." Varro requires all
this in entertainments: "Persons of graceful presence and agreeable
conversation, who are neither silent nor garrulous; neatness and
delicacy, both of meat and place; and fair weather." The art of dining
well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure; neither the
greatest captains nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or
science of eating well. My imagination has delivered three repasts to
the custody of my memory, which fortune rendered sovereignly sweet to me,
upon several occasions in my more flourishing age; my present state
excludes me; for every one, according to the good temper of body and mind
wherein he then finds himself, furnishes for his own share a particular
grace and savour. I, who but crawl upon the earth, hate this inhuman
wisdom, that will have us despise and hate all culture of the body; I
look upon it as an equal injustice to loath natural pleasures as to be
too much in love with them. Xerxes was a blockhead, who, environed with
all human delights, proposed a reward to him who could find out others;
but he is not much less so who cuts off any of those pleasures that
nature has provided for him. A man should neither pursue nor avoid them,
but receive them. I receive them, I confess, a little too warmly and
kindly, and easily suffer myself to follow my natural propensions. We
have no need to exaggerate their inanity; they themselves will make us
sufficiently sensible of it, thanks to our sick wet-blanket mind, that
puts us out of taste with them as with itself; it treats both itself and
all it receives, one while better, and another worse, according to its
insatiable, vagabond, and versatile essence:
"Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis, acescit."
["Unless the vessel be clean, it will sour whatever
you put into it."--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 54.]
I, who boast that I so curiously and particularly embrace the
conveniences of life, find them, when I most nearly consider them, very
little more than wind. But what? We are all wind throughout; and,
moreover, the wind itself, more discreet than we, loves to bluster and
shift from corner to corner, and contents itself with its proper offices
without desiring stability and solidity-qualities not its own.
The pure pleasures, as well as the pure displeasures, of the imagination,
say some, are the greatest, as was expressed by the balance of
Critolaiis. 'Tis no wonder; it makes them to its own liking, and cuts
them out of the whole cloth; of this I every day see notable examples,
and, peradventure, to be desired. But I, who am of a mixed and heavy
condition, cannot snap so soon at this one simple object, but that I
negligently suffer myself to be carried away with the present pleasures
of the, general human law, intellectually sensible, and sensibly
intellectual. The Cyrenaic philosophers will have it that as corporal
pains, so corporal pleasures are more powerful, both as double and as
more just. There are some, as Aristotle says, who out of a savage kind
of stupidity dislike them; and I know others who out of ambition do the
same. Why do they not, moreover, forswear breathing? why do they not
live of their own? why not refuse light, because it is gratuitous, and
costs them neither invention nor exertion? Let Mars, Pallas, or Mercury
afford them their light by which to see, instead of Venus, Ceres, and
Bacchus. These boastful humours may counterfeit some content, for what
will not fancy do? But as to wisdom, there is no touch of it. Will they
not seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives? I hate
that we should be enjoined to have our minds in the clouds, when our
bodies are at table; I would not have the mind nailed there, nor wallow
there; I would have it take place there and sit, but not lie down.
Aristippus maintained nothing but the body, as if we had no soul; Zeno
comprehended only the soul, as if we had no body: both of them faultily.
Pythagoras, they say, followed a philosophy that was all contemplation,
Socrates one that was all conduct and action; Plato found a mean betwixt
the two; but they only say this for the sake of talking. The true
temperament is found in Socrates; and, Plato is much more Socratic than
Pythagoric, and it becomes him better. When I dance, I dance; when I
sleep, I sleep. Nay, when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my
thoughts are some part of the time taken up with external occurrences,
I some part of the time call them back again to my walk, to the orchard,
to the sweetness of that solitude, and to myself.
Nature has mother-like observed this, that the actions she has enjoined
us for our necessity should be also pleasurable to us; and she invites us
to them, not only by reason, but also by appetite, and 'tis injustice to
infringe her laws. When I see alike Caesar and Alexander, in the midst
of his greatest business, so fully enjoy human and corporal pleasures, I
do not say that he relaxed his mind: I say that he strengthened it, by
vigour of courage subjecting those violent employments and laborious
thoughts to the ordinary usage of life: wise, had he believed the last
was his ordinary, the first his extraordinary, vocation. We are great
fools. "He has passed his life in idleness," say we: "I have done
nothing to-day." What? have you not lived? that is not only the
fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. "Had I been
put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I
could do." "Have you known how to meditate and manage your life? you
have performed the greatest work of all." In order to shew and develop
herself, nature needs only fortune; she equally manifests herself in all
stages, and behind a curtain as well as without one. Have you known how
to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
than he who has taken empires and cities.
The glorious masterpiece of man is to live to purpose; all other things:
to reign, to lay up treasure, to build, are but little appendices and
props. I take pleasure in seeing a general of an army, at the foot of a
breach he is presently to assault, give himself up entire and free at
dinner, to talk and be merry with his friends. And Brutus, when heaven
and earth were conspired against him and the Roman liberty, stealing some
hour of the night from his rounds to read and scan Polybius in all
security. 'Tis for little souls, buried under the weight of affairs, not
from them to know how clearly to disengage themselves, not to know how to
lay them aside and take them up again:
"O fortes, pejoraque passi
Mecum saepe viri! nunc vino pellite curas
Cras ingens iterabimus aequor."
["O brave spirits, who have often suffered sorrow with me, drink
cares away; tomorrow we will embark once more on the vast sea."
--Horace, Od., i. 7, 30.]
Whether it be in jest or earnest, that the theological and Sorbonnical
wine, and their feasts, are turned into a proverb, I find it reasonable
they should dine so much more commodiously and pleasantly, as they have
profitably and seriously employed the morning in the exercise of their
schools. The conscience of having well spent the other hours, is the
just and savoury sauce of the dinner-table. The sages lived after that
manner; and that inimitable emulation to virtue, which astonishes us both
in the one and the other Cato, that humour of theirs, so severe as even
to be importunate, gently submits itself and yields to the laws of the
human condition, of Venus and Bacchus; according to the precepts of their
sect, that require the perfect sage to be as expert and intelligent in
the use of natural pleasures as in all other duties of life:
"Cui cor sapiat, ei et sapiat palatus."
Relaxation and facility, methinks, wonderfully honour and best become a
strong and generous soul. Epaminondas did not think that to take part,
and that heartily, in songs and sports and dances with the young men of
his city, were things that in any way derogated from the honour of his
glorious victories and the perfect purity of manners that was in him.
And amongst so many admirable actions of Scipio the grandfather, a person
worthy to be reputed of a heavenly extraction, there is nothing that
gives him a greater grace than to see him carelessly and childishly
trifling at gathering and selecting cockle shells, and playing at quoits,
[This game, as the "Dictionnaire de Trevoux" describes it, is one
wherein two persons contend which of them shall soonest pick up some
object.]
amusing and tickling himself in representing by writing in comedies the
meanest and most popular actions of men. And his head full of that
wonderful enterprise of Hannibal and Africa, visiting the schools in
Sicily, and attending philosophical lectures, to the extent of arming the
blind envy of his enemies at Rome. Nor is there anything more remarkable
in Socrates than that, old as he was, he found time to make himself
taught dancing and playing upon instruments, and thought it time well
spent. This same man was seen in an ecstasy, standing upon his feet a
whole day and a night together, in the presence of all the Grecian army,
surprised and absorbed by some profound thought. He was the first,
amongst so many valiant men of the army, to run to the relief of
Alcibiades, oppressed with the enemy, to shield him with his own body,
and disengage him from the crowd by absolute force of arms. It was he
who, in the Delian battle, raised and saved Xenophon when fallen from his
horse; and who, amongst all the people of Athens, enraged as he was at so
unworthy a spectacle, first presented himself to rescue Theramenes, whom
the thirty tyrants were leading to execution by their satellites, and
desisted not from his bold enterprise but at the remonstrance of
Theramenes himself, though he was only followed by two more in all. He
was seen, when courted by a beauty with whom he was in love, to maintain
at need a severe abstinence. He was seen ever to go to the wars, and
walk upon ice, with bare feet; to wear the same robe, winter and summer;
to surpass all his companions in patience of bearing hardships, and to
eat no more at a feast than at his own private dinner. He was seen, for
seven-and-twenty years together, to endure hunger, poverty, the
indocility of his children, and the nails of his wife, with the same
countenance. And, in the end, calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, fetters,
and poison. But was this man obliged to drink full bumpers by any rule
of civility? he was also the man of the whole army with whom the
advantage in drinking, remained. And he never refused to play at
noisettes, nor to ride the hobby-horse with children, and it became him
well; for all actions, says philosophy, equally become and equally honour
a wise man. We have enough wherewithal to do it, and we ought never to
be weary of presenting the image of this great man in all the patterns
and forms of perfection. There are very few examples of life, full and
pure; and we wrong our teaching every day, to propose to ourselves those
that are weak and imperfect, scarce good for any one service, and rather
pull us back; corrupters rather than correctors of manners. The people
deceive themselves; a man goes much more easily indeed by the ends, where
the extremity serves for a bound, a stop, and guide, than by the middle
way, large and open; and according to art, more than according to nature:
but withal much less nobly and commendably.
Greatness of soul consists not so much in mounting and in pressing
forward, as in knowing how to govern and circumscribe itself; it takes
everything for great, that is enough, and demonstrates itself in
preferring moderate to eminent things. There is nothing so fine and
legitimate as well and duly to play the man; nor science so arduous as
well and naturally to know how to live this life; and of all the
infirmities we have, 'tis the most barbarous to despise our being.