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1. François de Guise, born outside France (in Lorraine).
2. Catherine de’ Medici.
3. 1562.
4. The Reformed Church. Guise was. Roman Catholic.
5. Seneca, De clementia, I, ix. Montaigne doubtless savoured the fact that John Calvin had edited this text (Paris, 1532). It later provides the subject of Corneille’s tragedy, Cinna, ou la clémence d’Auguste.
6. François de Guise was assassinated in 1563.
7. The Platonic concept of poetic rapture widely accepted in Montaigne’s time, especially by the Pléiade. The main source is Plato’s dialogue, Io.
8. In Plutarch’s Life of Sylla.
9. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, V; Dion, I.
10. Plutarch, Life of Alexander.
11. Perhaps Henry III of France, but it could be Henry IV.
12. Perhaps Henry IV, but it could be Duc Henri de Guise.
13. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (Livy, XXVIII, 17). Syphax was a King of Numidia during the Second Punic War.
14. Livy, XXII, 22.
15. Louis XI, who, according to Commines, entrusted his life to Charles the Bold at Conflans.
16. Lucan, Pharsalia, V, 316–18.
17. Probably during the riots against the salt-tax in Bordeaux (1548), when the King’s representative was murdered.
18. The mob.
19. At Bordeaux, in 1585, when Montaigne was mayor. Some of the soldiers were thought to be disloyal.
20. After Suetonius’ Life of Twelve Caesars.
21. Plutarch, tr. Amyot: Dicts des anciens Roys, XXII.
22. Related by Giovanni Villani in his Historia di suoi tempi.
23. Appianus of Alexandria, De civilibus Romanorum bellis, widely read during the Civil Wars in the French translation of Claude de Seyssel.