"Montaigne's Uses of Classical Learning." Journal of Education 179 (1997): 61-75.

Montaigne's Uses of Classical Learning¹

Michael L. Hall

Montaigne distinguishes his characteristically personal and illuminating uses of classics from mere pedantry or appeal to authority. His essay "Of the education of children" demonstrates the importance of questioning classical authors in order to test understanding and develop judgment. The complications that emerge with "It is folly to measure the true and the false by our own capacity" underscore the difficulties that accompany his approach to learning and experience and well illustrate in his own practice Montaigne's sage advice on education.

Anyone even slightly acquainted with Montaigne's essays will have been struck by his constant practice of referring to and recalling quotations from the authors of classical antiquity. And yet it seems to be precisely this practice that he condemns as the most lamentable form of pedantry. He complains that too often "We labor only to fill our memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty." And to drive his point home he hits on a particularly disparaging image: "Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in their beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, so our pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds" (I, 25: 100). That this comes very near to describing his own practice in the Essays, Montaigne self-consciously acknowledges in the next paragraph: "It is wonderful how appropriately this folly fits my case. Isn't it doing the same thing, what I do in most of this composition? I go about cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouse, but to transport them into this one, in which, to tell the truth, they are no more mine than in their original place" (I, 25: 100).

There is less contradiction than seems apparent in Montaigne's remarks. His real target in the essay "Of pedantry" is not learning itself but the empty display of learning, what we might be inclined to call mere learning or book learning. It must have been difficult for a man who had spent so much time among books, especially the great authorities of classical literature, to confront this shortcoming in men of letters. In the opening sentences of the essay he confesses to being annoyed in his childhood when he saw teachers and scholars portrayed as comic figures, as buffoons and the butts of coarse humor. And yet he acknowledges that with maturity he has come to recognize that there are good reasons for the lowly reputation acquired by the learned, for all too frequently "the greatest scholars are not the wisest men" (I, 25: 98). Nevertheless, Montaigne remains troubled by this low regard for learning, and he expends a good deal of effort in attempting to sort out the reasons why it is so often held in contempt. He observes, for example, that when the learned withdraw themselves from the public sphere and from intercourse with others about the ordinary affairs of life, they make themselves and their learned disputes appear ridiculous or contemptible. When asked to "judge the merits of a case" or "the actions of a man," our philosophers are more apt to fall into disputes about "whether there is life, whether there is movement, whether man is something other than an ox, what it is to act and to be acted upon, what kind of animals laws and justice are" (I, 25: 98). And Montaigne goes on to remark that when scholars speak to magistrates or princes, they often seem to hold them in contempt or mock them. But he recognizes that even such arrogance does not fully account for the apparent failure of learning to make us wise. Montaigne laments that the greater problem comes when we substitute mere learning for the use of learning, which is wisdom: "it is no wonder if neither the students nor the masters grow in ability, although they do make themselves more learned. In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge; of judgment and virtue, little news" (I, 25: 100).

Montaigne's greatest insight, and the one that explains the apparent contradiction between his criticism of pedants and his own constant practice in the Essays, is that the man who is truly wise makes his learning his own:

Montaigne continues by observing that only when we have made our learning a part of ourselves do we begin to derive the benefit of it: "What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not make us bigger and stronger?" (I, 25: 101).

The Renaissance: an Age of Readers

The problem Montaigne was attempting to understand was common in his day. Montaigne lived and wrote his essays during a time when fairly widespread knowledge of the ancients was at or near its zenith. Of course, many of Montaigne's contemporaries were relatively uneducated; some were barely literate. But among men (and a few women) of letters, the ancients were revered, especially for their moral insights and knowledge of human nature. The most popular works inherited from the classical past tended to be the moral writings of Seneca and Plutarch, followed closely by the Moral Distichs attributed to Cato, the Sententiae of Stobaeus, and many other works now almost forgotten by everyone but a few specialists in this particularly neglected corner of classical studies.

These moral works often reveled in didacticism and seldom recounted a story without demonstrating, usually explicitly, some moral or lesson. What is more, while a few readers enjoyed perusing the ancients in their original and undigested versions, many others were given access to classical learning through popular collections such as Erasmus' Adages (1500) and Colloquies (1518). Such works, which became international best sellers, allowed readers (and writers) to find the wisdom of classical antiquity in more organized collections of sententiae, wise sayings and moral tales or proverbs that both entertained and instructed their readers. Renaissance authors and readers took to heart what Horace advised in his Ars Poetica:

The habit of collecting particularly striking passages from classical authors and arranging them under topical headings suited so many habits of the Renaissance that it is worthwhile to remark on this widespread practice. There were at least two kinds of collections. One was the professional or "scholarly" collection, such as those of Erasmus and others, collections of passages from classical authors sometimes grouped according to topics and themes. Some were in Latin, but others were in the vernaculars. Although he otherwise heaps scorn on those who cover themselves with other men's armor, Montaigne approves of these useful compendia, distinguishing between his own recourse to quotation and allusion and the systematic collection of classical topoi on a given subject:

Such works were the "self-help" books of their day, not to mention their value as sources for authors and public speakers in search of just the right classical authority to illustrate almost any theme.

The other kind were more amateur and personal collections, commonplace books kept by readers who wanted to remember and profit from their reading of classical literature. A number of Renaissance habits probably contributed to the widespread popularity of this sort of methodical mining of ancient authors for nuggets of moral wisdom. One was the almost universal reliance on the study of rhetoric in the schools. Renaissance training in arts and letters was everywhere essentially classical: students were expected to study Latin and sometimes Greek, and to learn their grammar and the style of the languages by studying established classical models. Most of these school texts, like Virgil's Aeneid and Xenophon's Cyropaedia, were chosen for the lessons they had to teach young boys, many of whom might reasonably expect to participate in public life: thus these school texts are replete with lessons about character, virtue, and leadership. The Renaissance schoolboy learned his Latin by reading classical authors, often marking passages and keeping a record of his reading in a commonplace book, sometimes establishing the habit of a lifetime. Among Englishmen we have the well-known examples of Francis Bacon's Essays, which began in their first edition (1597) as little more than elaborations on his own commonplace book entries, and Ben Johnson's Discoveries, which reflected a lifetime of reading and studying the classics.

Of course, reliance on classical authority antedates the Renaissance, and in some respects it was the Renaissance itself, and Renaissance Humanism, which would precipitate a rejection of the unquestioning acceptance of classical authority and a turn toward skepticism, the very movement Montaigne himself was associated with. Prior to Montaigne's invention of his personal essays in the 1570s, there had been a number of intellectual upheavals that eventually began to call much of the received wisdom of classical antiquity into question. We have only to recall the voyages of Columbus in 1492 and after, the New Philosophy that began to emerge in response to the astronomical theories of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543). Perhaps the greatest event was Gutenberg's invention of moveable type in the 1440s, which contributed to the widespread publication of the debates that followed Martin Luther's nailing of his ninety-five theses to a church door in 1517, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The intellectual ferment of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave rise eventually to the shift in western culture that we still refer to as the birth of the modern era. Montaigne's Essays were an early harbinger of this emerging modern world. We can see it most clearly in essays such as "Of cannibals" and "Of coaches," where he confronts those lessons of the New World, but his famous openness is present throughout his book. More than many of his contemporaries, Montaigne seemed to be aware that the cultural foundations of the past could no longer be transmitted without question from master to pupil. If such foundations were truly a source of wisdom, they must be questioned, studied, digested, and made one's own.

At a time when even the more learned among us can scarcely hope to equal Montaigne's own poor abilities -- "There is not a child halfway through school who cannot claim to be more learned than I," he exclaims -- it seems passing strange to be worrying over the burden of too much book learning. After all, who among us wishes to be less well read, or to have students whose minds are less encumbered by books and ancient authors? Would that we had to find an answer to the problem Montaigne appears to be worrying over in his essay "Of pedantry." On the contrary, we would appear to be living through an age in the history of classical learning when the problem is exactly the reverse of the one faced by Montaigne and his contemporaries. In our own time the vast majority of the educated men and women have very little acquaintance with the cultural foundations upon which Montaigne's Essays were based. Although a very few know a great deal about certain narrow specialties, even among classicists it is increasingly rare to find the generalist who has read broadly in all the ancient texts and can find the apt quotation always ready on the tip of his or her tongue. In fact, in our age of computers and electronic databases, who takes the trouble to learn by memory more than a few dozen lines of ancient texts. O tempora, o mores!

But we would be very mistaken to think that Montaigne's concern is not relevant to our own time. Montaigne stands at the threshold of the modern era in the same way that we seem to be standing at a similar threshold. In our day we appear to be leaving behind us that earlier conception of the modern age even as we are struggling to understand what will arise to replace it. If we wish to return to the classics, as the early humanists and Montaigne did, in an attempt to discover in those ancient authors wisdom for our own present circumstances, we could scarcely hope for a better teacher than Michel de Montaigne. In his essay "Of the education of children" he offers some penetrating analysis and enduring advice for those of us who wish to be teachers rather than pedants.

On the Upbringing and Education of Children

After reading Montaigne's essay "Of pedants," Madame Diane de Foix, Comtesse de Gurson, asked him to "enlarge a bit on the subject of the education of children." Montaigne complied, of course, although not before declaring himself incompetent: "But in truth I understand nothing about it except this, that the greatest and most important difficulty in human knowledge seems to lie in the branch of knowledge which deals with the upbringing and education of children" (I, 26: 109). Montaigne reduces his advice to a very few principles, which he then elaborates in his usual fashion with entertaining and edifying examples and allusions.

The teacher   First in importance, he insists, is the selection of the child's "tutor," "upon whose choice depends the whole success of his education." Montaigne urges the Countess to find someone with a "well-made rather than a well-filled head;" both qualities are required, "but more particularly character and understanding than learning." He does not favor tutors who "never stop bawling into our ears, as though they were pouring water into a funnel; and our task is only to repeat what has been told us." Instead, he urges the teacher, "and right from the start, according to the capacity of the mind he has in hand, to begin putting it through its paces, making it taste things, choose them and discern them by itself." Rather than thinking and talking alone, the teacher should "listen to his pupil speaking in his turn." Then Montaigne reminds us that "Socrates, and later Arcesilaus, first had their disciples speak, and then they spoke to them,"⁴ and he inserts at this point an apt quotation from Cicero: "The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn" (I, 26: 110).

Cultivating judgment   Montaigne advises the teacher to match his own pace to the pupil's, and he laments the custom of attempting to "regulate many minds of such different capacities and forms with the same lesson and a similar measure of guidance." He remarks that it is "no wonder if in a whole race of children they find barely two or three who reap any proper fruit from their teaching!" (I, 26: 110). But above all Montaigne urges teachers to ask their charges to account not only for the words of their lessons but for the "sense and substance" as well. Returning to a metaphor he had used in "Of pedantry," he observes that it is a "sign of rawness and indigestion to disgorge food just as we swallowed it" (I, 26: 111). Rather than rest on the authority of Aristotle, as some have been accustomed to do, Montaigne would have the student "pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle's principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured." By this method of instruction, Montaigne hopes, "if he [the pupil] embraces Xenophon's and Plato's opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. . . . Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this" (I, 26: 111).

And because ultimately it is the student's "judgment" that Montaigne aims to form by means of this education, he does not limit instruction to books, since "everything that comes to our eyes is book enough" (I, 26: 112). Therefore, he recommends that book learning be supplemented with travel and exercise and conversation. Montaigne insists that learning that resides in the memory only and is not practiced has no real value, and so he advises the teacher to allow his pupil to engage in discussion and debate, to learn to recognize his own mistakes and correct them himself even before they are pointed out to him by the teacher or his opponent: "Let him be made to understand that to confess the flaw he discovers in his own argument, though it be still unnoticed except by himself, is an act of judgment and sincerity, which are the principal qualities he seeks" (I, 26: 114). And in pursuit of this judgment, Montaigne recommends a very general conversation: "He will sound the capacity of each man: a cowherd, a mason, a passer-by; he must put everything to use and borrow from each man according to his wares, for everything is useful in a household; even the stupidity and weakness of others will be an education to him" (I, 26: 114-5).

By nurturing the student's natural curiosity, Montaigne hopes to encourage him to "inquire into all things; whatever is unusual around him he will see: a building, a fountain, a man, the field of an ancient battle, the place where Caesar or Charlemagne passed" (I, 26: 115). And in this general commerce Montaigne means "to include, and foremost, those who live only in the memory of books":

At this point Montaigne speaks directly to the subject of my own essay: the proper use of the cultural foundations of the classical past. He explains why Plutarch, for example, is so worthy of our study:

Here, it seems to me, is Montaigne's method of using classical learning, as well as other learning from books and from experience. His main object for the student and for himself is to form and improve judgment, and also to gain knowledge of one's self. In doing this he finds himself devouring the classics but also digesting them and measuring his own judgment against them. And in this spirit, with his characteristic mixture of humor, irony, and sincerity, Montaigne excuses his borrowings from classical authors:

But Montaigne does not despair. He expresses his pleasure at discovering that his opinions "have the honor of often coinciding with theirs," and while recognizing (as not everyone does) "the vast difference between them and me," he nevertheless lets his "thoughts run on, weak and lowly as they are, as I have produced them, without plastering and sewing up the flaws that this comparison has revealed to me." Then he observes: "One needs very strong loins to undertake to march abreast of those men." And he goes on to explain the difference between his method of employing the ancient texts and that of the pedants, who merely "cover themselves with other men's armor":

This is Montaigne's constant method, here and throughout his Essays, to take on classical learning at its "stiffest points" and try his strength against the best authorities. As he remarks a little further on: "I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better" (I, 26: 108).

Some would perhaps take Montaigne at his word in "Of Pedantry," when he appears to condemn learning as an empty affectation of scholars who have much learning and little or no wisdom, or in "Of experience," when he seems to elevate practical experience above the knowledge that comes from books:

But a careful reading of both of those essays, against his advice to parents and teachers in "Of the education of children" suggests that his position is much more complicated.⁵ And it becomes more complicated still when we consider his observations in the essay that follows "Of the education of children."

Seeking the Balance: A Prudent Skepticism

In the next essay, "It is folly to measure the true and the false by our own capacity," Montaigne begins by musing that we tend to "attribute facility in belief and conviction to simplicity and ignorance," and for that reason tend to think that children, common people, women, and sick people are the more easily "led by their ears." But he quickly observes that it is just as foolish to doubt whatever seems unlikely to us--"returning spirits, prognostications of future events, enchantments, sorcery,"--which is the usual practice of those who think they have a little more ability than the average person. Montaigne says he has reached this conclusion not because his experience has shown him anything to remove his earlier doubts, "and that through no fault of my curiosity," but because he has come to recognize that "to condemn a thing thus, dogmatically, as false and impossible is to assume the advantage of knowing the bounds and limits of God's will and the power of our mother Nature; and that there is no more notable folly in the world than to reduce these things to the measure of our capacity and competence" (I, 27: 132).

At this point, Montaigne, following his usual practice, gives some examples to illustrate his thesis. If on the one hand we "call prodigies or miracles whatever our reason cannot reach, how many of these appear continually to our eyes!" (I, 27: 132). He remarks that we tend to think whatever we are familiar with is normal, and anything that goes beyond that is somehow "incredible," so that a man who had never seen a river might think the first one he saw was an ocean. And here Montaigne quotes aptly from Lucretius (De rerum natura, VI, 674-7) and Cicero (De natura deorum, II, xxxvii, 96):

But Montaigne appears to be troubled by those occasions when some respected "authority" offers an account of something that any reasonable educated man would be inclined to doubt. Although he cautions us about our inclination to be skeptical--"We must judge with more reverence the infinite power of nature, and with more consciousness of our ignorance and weakness" (I, 27: 133)--he nevertheless appears concerned about the examples he cites, not only contemporary reports which may lack authority, but examples from classical authors:

Clearly, what troubles Montaigne is the discrepancy between his own reason, which tells him that (in the absence of twentieth-century communication miracles) reports cannot possibly travel over such great distances with such speed, and his trust in the authority and judgment of a man so learned as Plutarch. What arrogance to think Plutarch any less "clear-sighted" than ourselves. And then he adds still another example:

In these passages Montaigne confronts directly the very issues of authority and skepticism that are at the heart of his Essays. But before I attempt further comment on these crucial passages, I want to place them in the context of the essay, because Montaigne has not finished with the complications he intends us to encounter. After introducing the problems presented by Plutarch, Caesar, and Pliny, he turns to the question of miracles. Suppose we dismiss Bouchet's accounts of the miracles "done by the relics of Saint Hilary," since "his credit is not great enough to take away our right to contradict him," what are we to say of the testimony of Saint Augustine, who "saw a blind child recover his sight upon the relics of Saint Gervase and Saint Protasius at Milan," and so forth. "Of what shall we accuse both him and two holy bishops, Aurelius and Maximinus, whom he calls upon as his witnesses? Shall it be of ignorance, simplicity, and credulity, or of knavery and imposture? Is there any man in our time so impudent that he thinks himself comparable to them, either in virtue and piety, or in learning, judgment, and ability? Who, though they brought forth no proof, might crush me by their mere authority" (I, 27: 134).⁶

We might expect Montaigne at this point to dismiss all such testimony based on mere authority. It would certainly be in keeping with his famous skepticism, the doubts he supposedly sows throughout the Essays. But, in fact, Montaigne does not call authority into question so much as reinforce its tremendous power over us. We may easily dismiss some authorities as being too light to sway our reason or judgment, but sooner or later we will come up against one that will make us bend under its weight. Montaigne recognizes this very clearly when he puts Saint Augustine up against Bouchet. But what if we were to take the position that no authority should be given to any testimony we have not been able to verify ourselves? Montaigne does not let us off so lightly: "It is a dangerous and fateful presumption," he observes, "besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine understanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits" (I, 27: 134).

To go further down this path would lead to the kind of relativism we have become so familiar with in our own day. But, instead of further demonstrating the untenablity of such a position, Montaigne abruptly introduces a dilemma that was all too contemporary for himself. Immediately following that last sentence quoted above, he interjects the following: "Now, what seems to me to bring as much disorder into our consciences as anything, in these religious troubles that we are in, is this partial surrender of their beliefs by Catholics" (I, 27: 134). This remark both redirects our attention and brings the issue home to Montaigne in a way we might not have expected. Throughout most of his Essays and, indeed, much of his life, Montaigne steered clear of the religious controversies that were taking their tremendous toll on his country and his countrymen. While he remained a practicing Catholic throughout his life, he refused to take sides in the civil wars and maintained friendly relations with the leaders of both factions. It is said that the gates of his estate were open to both sides throughout the years of civil war and religious strife.⁷ But here we can catch a glimpse of Montaigne struggling in a very personal way with this issue of belief and authority:

Almost from any perspective one takes on Montaigne's Essays, this is an extraordinarily interesting if not troubling passage. Is he for a moment saying the prudent thing in order not to attract the wrath of the Church?⁸ That would be a troubling equivocation from the man who has vowed to stand "naked" before us in this work that purports to be an accurate self-portrait of our author ("To the Reader," p. 2). But then how does the reader who sees only Montaigne the skeptic explain this defense of "ecclesiastical" authority? Nor does Montaigne stop here. He adds that he himself has attempted to exercise just such a personal freedom in the selection of his beliefs, only to discover that certain points he regarded with negligence as being mere vanities turned out to "have a massive and very solid foundation, and that it is only stupidity and ignorance that make us receive them with less reverence than the rest" (I, 27: 135).

Montaigne concludes this rather troubling essay with a couple of questions followed by two assertions:

Taken in the context of the rest of my own essay, and as a coda to our examination of Montaigne's observations about pedantry and the education of children, this passage provides much instruction. Montaigne offers no easy way out. In fact, he offers only a very arduous path, one that leaves him and us on the horns of a very ancient dilemma. Although he never mentions the words, he confronts us with the perplexing problem of faith versus reason. What is truth? Where is wisdom? Or, as Montaigne himself observed in the well-known phrase he took as his motto, Que sais-je? What do I know? In the face of such dilemmas neither classical learning nor Montaigne's nor our own modern varieties seem to offer easy solutions. We are all thrown back on our judgment, contradictions and all. That was the lesson Montaigne professed to learn from studying the cultural foundations of the classical past, and that was the reason he continued to admire Pliny, even in the face of obvious scientific shortcomings. Come to that, Montaigne would no doubt ask us why we should be any more (or less) confident in our own science? But in matters of judgment Pliny and Plutarch and Augustine, as well as Plato and Virgil and Cicero, and a library of other classical authors, have much to teach us, if we have the strength and courage to "take them on only at their stiffest points."

We could do worse than follow Montaigne's example. His Essays provide a worthy pedagogical model as well as a store of cultural wisdom. In a time when many of the same doubts that troubled Montaigne and his contemporaries are re-emerging with renewed currency, his habitual practice in the Essays, testing himself against the authorities of the classical past as well as his own judgment and experience, provides a firm foundation upon which to continue building our latter-day cultural edifice, a sure method of discovering ourselves and our own fundamental knowledge of the world and one another. It only remains for us to discover whether our reading of the classics will be as vigorous, our own judgment as sound or as informed and open as Montaigne's was. He has shown us a way to read our cultural inheritance, to engage the past in serious and sometimes skeptical dialogue, to digest the wisdom of the ancients and make it our own. What better preparation could we offer today's teachers or their students?

1. I am grateful to Patrick Henry for his encouragement and criticism of an early draft of this essay. His own discussion of the three essays I have concentrated on treats them as an important "triptych" in Montaigne's central core of essays in Book I and includes their significance in relation to the all important essay "Of Friendship," which Montaigne dedicated to his friendship with Etienne de La Boétie. See Patrick Henry, Montaigne in Dialogue: Censorship and Defensive Writing, Architecture and Friendship, The Self and the Other, Stanford French and Italian Studies, vol. 57 (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1987), 73-100.

2. Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) wrote his Essays, a genre he invented and named, over a period of twenty years (1572-92), publishing Books I and II in 1580 and adding Book III in 1588. His later additions were incorporated in the posthumous 1595 edition. My text is The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). Subsequent references in the text are to book, essay number, and page number.

3. omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, / lectorem delectando pariterque monendo (ll. 343-44). Opera, ed. Edward C. Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1901).

4. Montaigne was attracted to Socrates whose project of personal discovery and whose method of teaching by indirection, by asking probing questions and suspending judgment, corresponded with his own approach in the Essays. On Montaigne's attraction to and affinity for Socrates as teacher and example, see Margaret McGowan's chapter "Montaigne and Socrates" in Montaigne's Deceits: The Art of Persuasion in the Essais (London: University of London Press, 1974), 150-163.

5. For a thorough discussion of Montaigne's attitude toward books and experience see Richard Regosin, The Matter of my Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 67-93.

6. Somewhat adapted by Montaigne from Cicero's Tusculanarum disputationum, I.21.49: Ut enim rationem Plato nullam adferret (vide quid homini tribuam), ipsa auctoritate me frangeret. For even though Plato gave no reasons (see what a tribute to the man), he would convince me by his very authority. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, I, and Scipio's Dream, ed. Frank Ernest Rockwoood (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1903; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 39-40.

7. At the conclusion of the essay titled "That our desire is increased by difficulty" Montaigne remarks: "The fact that so many guarded houses have been lost, whereas this one endures, makes me suspect that they were lost because they were guarded. . . . Our war may change forms all it will, and multiply and diversify itself into new factions; as for me, I do not budge. Amid so many fortified houses, I alone of my rank in France, as far as I know, have entrusted purely to heaven the protection of mine" (II, 15: 467-8). See also Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965; reprint, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 125, 132.

8. For a discussion of Montaigne's deft handling of Roman Catholic censorship of the Essays see Patrick Henry's Montaigne in Dialogue: Censorship and Defensive Writing, Architecture and Friendship, The Self and the Other, Stanford French and Italian Studies, vol. 57 (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1987), 3-35.