Page 433

1. Montaigne’s complexion (balance of humours) was melancholy modified by sanguine elements. An access of melancholy humour would unbalance his complexion, plunging him into a depression (chagrin).

2. ’80: wild and monstrous. Nothing…

3. ’80: until [C]: the honour and particular reverence which […] merits and virtues. I…

4. Montaigne took him as a youth to Italy.

5. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, IX, vii, 4–6.

6. ’80: father, in his dotage and only half alive…

7. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, IV, i, 37.

8. Terence, Adelphi, I, i, 40–3.

9. The gentlemanly idea of education, as in Rabelais, who also loathed corporal punishment.

10. ’80: tasted the whip only twice…

11. Cf. Adagia, Frankfurt, 1656, Appendix Erasmi, p. 313, Scelera non habent consilia, cited after Livy, XXVIII, xxviii.

12. Aristotle, Politics, VII, xvi (age of thirty-seven not thirty-five); Plato, Republic, V, 460A ff.; cf. Tiraquellus, De legibus connubialibus, VI, §§ 44–7; 52.

13. Plutarch, Life of Thales; Caesar, Gallic Wars, VI (cf. Tiraquellus, ibid., VI, § 47); Torquato Tasso, Gierusalemme liberata, X, 39–41.

14. Tiraquellus, ibid., XV, § 26, citing Plato, Laws, VIII, 839E–840A.

15. Paolo Giovio, Historia sui temporis, on ‘Muleasses’ (Muley Hassan); Lopez de Gomara, Histoire générale des Indes.

16. Charles V resigned his crown and entered a monastery in 1557 (cf. J. Du Bellay, Regrets, 111).

17. Horace, Epistles, I, i, 8. (The ‘old nag’ is his Muse: hence the following development.)

18. [A] until [C]: I have of bringing forth whatever comes to my lips I told him…

19. Jean d’Estissac, who died in 1576. Such symptoms of melancholy as Montaigne describes are not rare in Renaissance medical treatises.

20. ’80: children of private intercourse and easy understanding with…

21. ’80: maintain a severe and distant frown, full of rancour and contempt, hoping…

22. Cf. Erasmus’ similar reaction in his Adages, II, IX, LXII, Oderint dum metuant.

23. ’88: against that poor man. If…

24. Terence, Adelphi, IV, ii, 9.

25. ’88: husbands, especially if they are old and irascible: but when it is a matter of favouring their children they grasp that pretext and glory in it. If the children…

26. Cf. Seneca, Epist. moral., XLVII, 5; but it was not Cato who said it. (The proverb applied to slaves, not valets or servants.)

27. This and the following passage between stars have been restored. In the Bordeaux manuscript they are deleted, but not certainly by Montaigne himself.

28. Caesar, Gallic Wars, VI, xviii.

29. Cf. Tiraquellus, De legibus connubialibus, V, § 1 ff., repeating Aristotle’s warning against wives who dominate because of their wealth.

30. Plato, Laws, XI, 922 D–924 A.

31. The English claim to the French crown was based on the irrelevance of the mythical Salic Law. (Guillaume Postel maintained that it specifically applied to France, its real name being the ‘Gallic’ Law: La Loi Salique, Paris, 1552.)

32. ’80: their young, or savour their kinship while…

33. Tiraquellus, De legibus connubialibus, VII, § 51; Herodotus, History, IV.

34. Plato, Phaedrus, 258 C, dealing with a man’s writings, his ‘brain-children’; but Montaigne has transcribed Minos for Darius.

35. His Greek novel, An Ethiopian History, tells of the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea. It was translated into French by Amyot (Paris, 1547) and often reprinted.

36. Labienus was, for the ferocious nature of his controversial style, nicknamed Rabienus (the Fierce One). (Cf. Marcus Annaeus Seneca, Controversiae, 10, Preface; Suetonius, Caligula, 16.)

37. Or rather, Cremutius Cordus, an historian honoured for his frankness: Tacitus, Annals, IV, xxxiv; Marcus Annaeus Seneca, Suasiora, VII; Quintilian, X, i, 104.

38. Cicero, De finibus, II, xxx, 96.

39. St Augustine did have an illegitimate son. If Montaigne had read the Confessions he would have known of him.

40. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, IX, vii, 3.

41. Ovid, Metamorphoses, X, 243 ff., citing 283–4.