10

10. On books

[Montaigne gives himself to us in this chapter; especially the [C] additions show how he had moved from studying himself as a particular man to studying also Man in general, and how he, as a man, should live. The framework of his judgement on books (which is clearly implied but was then so well-known that it did not need to be spelled out) was Horace’s division of good authors in his Ars Poetica into the author who ‘simply delights’ us and the very great one ‘qui miscuit utile dulci’ – who ‘mixes the useful with the sweet’. This notion was so current in the Renaissance that great authors such as Rabelais and Ronsard were often called utiles-doux (‘useful-delightful’). In this context, useful always meant ‘useful for learning moral lessons’. For Montaigne all good historians are both delightful and useful, in this sense, but there are very few of them.]

[A] I do not doubt that I often happen to talk of things which are treated better in the writings of master-craftsmen, and with more authenticity. What you have here is purely an assay of my natural, not at all of my acquired, abilities. Anyone who catches me out in ignorance does me no harm: I cannot vouch to other people for my reasonings: I can scarcely vouch for them to myself and am by no means satisfied with them. If anyone is looking for knowledge let him go where such fish are to be caught: there is nothing I lay claim to less. These are my own thoughts, by which I am striving to make known not matter but me. Perhaps I shall master that matter one day; or perhaps I did do so once when Fortune managed to bring me to places where light is thrown on it. But [C] I no longer remember anything about that. I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.1

[A] So I guarantee you nothing for certain, except my making known2 [Al] what point I have so far reached in my knowledge3 [C] of it. Do not linger over the matter but over my fashioning of it. Where my borrowings are concerned, see whether I have been able to select something which improves my theme: I get others to say what I cannot put so well myself, sometimes because of the weakness of my language and sometimes because of the weakness of my intellect. I do not count my borrowings: I weigh them; if I had wanted them valued for their number I would have burdened myself with twice as many. They are all, except for very, very few, taken from names so famous and ancient that they seem to name themselves without help from me. In the case of those reasonings and original ideas which I transplant into my own soil and confound with my own, I sometimes deliberately omit to give the author’s name so as to rein in the temerity of those hasty criticisms which leap to attack writings of every kind, especially recent writings by men still alive and in our vulgar tongue which allow anyone to talk about them and which seem to convict both their conception and design of being just as vulgar. I want them to flick Plutarch’s nose in mistake for mine and to scald themselves by insulting the Seneca in me. I have to hide my weakness beneath those great reputations. I will love the man who can pluck out my feathers – I mean by the perspicacity of his judgement and by his sheer ability to distinguish the force and beauty of the topics. Myself, who am constantly unable to sort out my borrowings by my knowledge of where they came from, am quite able to measure my reach and to know that my own soil is in no wise capable of bringing forth some of the richer flowers that I find rooted there and which all the produce of my own growing could never match.

[A] What I am obliged to answer for is for getting myself tangled up, or if there is any inanity or defect in my reasoning which I do not see or which I am incapable of seeing once it is pointed out to me. Faults can often escape our vigilance: sickness of judgement consists in not perceiving them when they are revealed to us. Knowledge and truth can lodge within us without judgement; judgement can do so without them: indeed, recognizing our ignorance is one of the surest and most beautiful witnesses to our judgement that I can find.

I have no sergeant-major to marshal my arguments other than Fortune. As my ravings present themselves, I pile them up; sometimes they all come crowding together: sometimes they drag along in single file. I want people to see my natural ordinary stride, however much it wanders off the path. I let myself go along as I find myself to be; anyway the matters treated here are not such that ignorance of them cannot be permitted nor talking of them casually or rashly. I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so. My design is to spend whatever life I have left gently and unlaboriously. I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning’s sake however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well:

[B] Has meus ad metas sudet oportet equus.

[This is the winning-post towards which my sweating horse must run.]4

[A] If I come across difficult passages in my reading I never bite my nails over them: after making a charge or two I let them be. [B] If I settled down to them I would waste myself and my time, for my mind is made for the first jump. What I fail to see during my original charge I see even less when I stubborn it out.

I can do nothing without gaiety: persistence [C] and too much intensity [B] dazzle my judgement, making it sad and weary. [C] My vision becomes confused and dissipated: [B] I must tell it to withdraw and then make fresh glancing attacks, just as we are told to judge the sheen of scarlet-cloth by running our eyes over it several times, catching various glimpses of it, sudden, repeated and renewed.

[A] If one book wearies me I take up another, applying myself to it only during those hours when I begin to be gripped by boredom at doing nothing. I do not have much to do with books by modern authors, since the Ancients seem to me to be more taut and ample; nor with books in Greek, since my judgement [C] cannot do its job properly on the basis of a schoolboy, apprenticed [A] understanding.5

[A] Among books affording plain delight, I judge that the Decameron of Boccaccio, Rabelais and the Basia of Johannes Secundus (if they are to be placed in this category)6 are worth spending time on. As for the Amadis and such like, they did not have enough authority to captivate me even in childhood.7 I will also add, boldly or rashly, that this aged heavy soul of mine can no longer be tickled by good old Ovid (let alone Ariosto): his flowing style and his invention, which once enraptured me, now hardly have the power of holding my attention.

I freely say what I think about all things – even about those which doubtless exceed my competence and which I in no wise claim to be within my jurisdiction. When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing. When I find that I have no taste for the Axiochus of Plato – a weak book, considering its author8 – my judgement does not trust itself: it is not so daft as to oppose the authority of so many [C] other judgements, famous and ancient, which it holds as its professors and masters: rather is it happy to err with them.9 [A] It blames itself, condemning itself either for stopping at the outer rind and for being unable to get right down to the bottom of things, or else for looking at the matter in some false light. My judgement is quite content merely to protect itself from confusion and unruliness: as for its weakness, it willingly acknowledges it and avows it. What it thinks it should do is to give a just interpretation of such phenomena as its power of conception presents it with: but they are feeble ones and imperfect. Most of Aesop’s fables have several senses and several ways of being understood. Those who treat them as myths select some aspect which squares well with the fable; yet [B] in most cases [A] that is only the first surface facet of them: there are other facets, more vivid, more of their essence, more inward, to which they never manage to penetrate; that is what I do.

But to get on: it has always seemed to me that in poetry Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus and Horace rank highest by far – especially Virgil in his Georgics, which I reckon to be the most perfect achievement in poetry; by a comparison with it one can easily see that there are passages in the Aeneid to which Virgil, if he had been able, would have given a touch of the comb. [B] And in the Aeneid the fifth book seems to me the most perfect. [A] I also love Lucan and like to be often in his company, not so much for his style as for his own worth and for the truth of his opinions and judgements. As for that good poet Terence – the grace and delight of the Latin tongue – I find him wonderful at vividly depicting the emotions of the soul and the modes of our behaviour; [C] our own actions today constantly bring me back to him. [A] However often I read him I always find some new grace and beauty in him.

Those who lived soon after Virgil’s time complained that some put Lucretius on a par with him. My opinion is that such a comparison is indeed between unequals; yet I have quite a job confirming myself in that belief when I find myself enthralled by one of Lucretius’ finer passages. If they were irritated by that comparison what would they say of the animal stupidity and barbarous insensitivity of those who now compare Ariosto with him? And what would Ariosto himself say?

[Al] O seclum insipiens et infacetum!

[O what a silly, tasteless age!]10

[A] I reckon that the Ancients had even more reason to complain of those who put Plautus on a par with Terence (who savours much more of the nobleman) than of those who did so for Lucretius and Virgil. [C] It does much for Terence’s reputation and superiority that the Father of Roman Eloquence has him – alone in his class – often on his lips, and so too the verdict which the best judge among Roman poets gave of his fellow-poet.11

[A] It has often occurred to me that those of our contemporaries who undertake to write comedies (such as the Italians, who are quite good at it) use three or four plots from Terence or Plautus to make one of their own. In one single comedy they pile up five or six tales from Boccaccio. What makes them so burden themselves with matter is their lack of confidence in their ability to sustain themselves with their own graces: they need something solid to lean on; not having enough in themselves to captivate us they want the story to detain us. In the case of my author, Terence, it is quite the reverse: the perfections and beauties of the fashioning of his language make us lose our craving for his subject: everywhere it is his elegance and his graciousness which hold us; everywhere he is so delightful –

liquidas puroque simillimus amni

[flowing exactly like a pure fountain]12

– and he so fills our souls to the brim with his graces that we forget those of his plot.

Considerations like these encourage me to go further: I note that the good poets of Antiquity avoided any striving to display not only such fantastic hyperboles as the Spaniards and the Petrarchists do but even those sweeter and more restrained acute phrases which adorn all works of poetry in the following centuries. Yet not one sound judge regrets that the Ancients lacked them nor fails to admire the incomparable even smoothness and the sustained sweetness and flourishing beauty of the epigrams of Catullus above the sharp goads with which Martial enlivens the tails of his. The reason for this is the same as I stated just now, and as Martial said of himself: ‘Minus illi ingenio laborandum fuit, in cujus locum materia successerat.’ [He had less need to strive after originality, its place had been taken by his matter.]13 Those earlier poets achieve their effects without getting excited and goading themselves on; they find laughter everywhere: they do not have to go and tickle themselves! The later ones need extraneous help: the less spirit they have, the more body they need. [B] They get up on their horses because they cannot stand on their own legs. [A] It is the same with our dancing: those men of low estate who teach it are unable to copy the deportment and propriety of our nobility14 and so try to gain favour by their daring footwork and other strange acrobatics. [B] And it is far easier for ladies to cut a figure in dances which require a variety of intricate bodily movements than in certain other stately dances in which they merely have to walk with a natural step and display their native bearing and their usual graces. [A] Just as some excellent clowns whom I have seen are able to give us all the delight which can be drawn from their art while wearing their everyday clothes, whereas to put us in a laughing mood their apprentices and those who are less deeply learned in that art have to put flour on their faces, dress up in funny clothes and hide behind silly movements and grimaces.

Better than any other way this idea as I conceive it can be understood from a comparison between the Aeneid and the Orlando furioso. We can see the Aeneid winging aloft with a firm and soaring flight, always pursuing its goal: the Orlando furioso we see hopping and fluttering from tale to tale as from branch to branch, never trusting its wings except to cross a short distance, seeking to alight on every hedge lest its wind or strength should give out,

Excursusque breves tentat.

[Trying out its wings on little sorties.]15

So much, then, for the authors who delight me most on that kind of subject.

As for my other category of books (that which mixes a little more usefulness with the delight16 and from which I learn how to control my humours and my qualities), the authors whom I find most useful for that are Plutarch (since he has become a Frenchman)17 and Seneca. They both are strikingly suited to my humour in that the knowledge that I seek from them is treated in pieces not sewn together (and so do not require me to bind myself to some lengthy labour, of which I am quite incapable). Such are the Moral Works of Plutarch, as well as the Epistles of Seneca which are the most beautiful part of his writings and the most profitable. I do not need a great deal of preparation to get down to them and I can drop them whenever I like, for one part of them does not really lead to another. Those two authors are in agreement over most useful and true opinions; they were both fated to be born about the same period; both to be the tutors of Roman Emperors; both came from foreign lands and both were rich and powerful.18 Their teachings are some of the cream of philosophy and are presented in a simple and appropriate manner. Plutarch is more uniform and constant: Seneca is more diverse and comes in waves. Seneca stiffens and tenses himself, toiling to arm virtue against weakness, fear and vicious appetites; Plutarch seems to judge those vices to be less powerful and to refuse to condescend to hasten his step or to rely on a shield. Plutarch holds to Plato’s opinions, which are gentle and well-suited to public life: Seneca’s opinions are Stoic and Epicurean, farther from common practice but in my judgement more suited [C] to the individual [A] and firmer. It seems that Seneca bowed somewhat to the tyranny of the Emperors of his day, for I hold it for certain that his judgement was under duress when he condemned the cause of those great-souled murderers of Caesar; Plutarch is a free man from end to end. Seneca is full of pithy phrases and sallies; Plutarch is full of matter. Seneca enflames you and stirs you: Plutarch is more satisfying and repays you more. [B] Plutarch leads us: Seneca drives us.

[A] As for Cicero, the works of his which are most suitable to my projects are those which above all deal with moral philosophy. But to tell the truth boldly (for once we have crossed the boundaries of insolence there is no reining us in) his style of writing seems boring to me, and so do all similar styles. For his introductory passages, his definitions, his sub-divisions and his etymologies eat up most of his work; what living marrow there is in him is smothered by the tedium of his preparations. If I spend an hour reading him (which is a lot for me) and then recall what pith and substance I have got out of him, most of the time I find nothing but wind, for he has not yet got to the material which serves my purposes and to the reasoning which actually touches on the core of what I am interested in. For me, who am only seeking to become more wise not more learned [C] or more eloquent, [A] all those marshallings of Aristotelian logic are irrelevant; I want authors [C] to begin with their conclusion: [A] I know19 well enough what is meant by death or voluptuousness: let them not waste time dissecting them; from the outset I am looking for good solid reasons which teach me how to sustain their attacks. Neither grammatical subtleties nor ingenuity in weaving words or arguments help me in that. I want arguments which drive home their first attack right into the strongest point of doubt: Cicero’s hover about the pot and languish. They are all right for the classroom, the pulpit or the Bar where we are free to doze off and find ourselves a quarter of an hour later still with time to pick up the thread of the argument. You have to talk like that to judges whom you want to win over whether you are right or wrong, or to schoolboys and the common people [C] to whom you have to say the lot and see what strikes home. [A] I do not want authors to strive to gain my attention by crying Oyez fifty times like our heralds. The Romans in their religion used to cry Hoc age! [This do!], [C] just as in our own we cry Sursum corda [Lift up your hearts];20 [A] for me they are so many wasted words. I leave home fully prepared: I need no sauce or appetizers: I can eat my meat quite raw; and instead of whetting my appetite with those preliminaries and preparations they deaden it for me and dull it.

[C] Will the licence of our times excuse my audacious sacrilege in thinking that even Plato’s Dialogues drag slowly along stifling his matter, and in lamenting the time spent on those long useless preparatory discussions by a man who had so many better things to say? My ignorance may be a better excuse, since I can see none of the beauty of his language.

In general I ask for books which use learning not those which trim it up.

[A] My first two, as well as Pliny and their like, have no Hoc age: they want to deal with people who are already on the alert – or if they do have one it is an Hoc age of substance with its own separate body.

I also like reading Cicero’s Letters to Atticus,21 not only because they contain much to teach us about the history and affairs of his time but, even more, so as to find out from them his private humours. For as I have said elsewhere I am uniquely curious about my authors’ soul and native judgement. By what their writings display when they are paraded in the theatre of the world we can indeed judge their talents, but we cannot judge them as men nor their morals.

I have regretted hundreds of times that we have lost the book which Brutus wrote about virtue: it is a beautiful thing to learn the theory from those who thoroughly know the practice; yet seeing that the preacher and the preaching are two different things, I am just as happy to see Brutus in Plutarch as in a book of his own. I would rather have a true account of his chat with his private friends in his tent on the eve of a battle than the oration which he delivered next morning to his army, and what he did in his work-room and bedroom than what he did in the Forum or Senate.

As for Cicero, I share the common opinion that, erudition apart, there was little excellence in his soul. He was a good citizen, affable by nature as fat jolly men like him frequently are; but it is no lie to say that his share of weakness and ambitious vanity was very great. I cannot excuse him for reckoning his poetry worth publishing; it is no great crime to write bad verses but it was an error of judgement on his part not to have known how unworthy they were of the glory of his name.

As for his eloquence it is beyond compare; I believe no one will ever equal it.22 The younger Cicero, who resembled his father only in name, when in command of Asia found there were several men whom he did not know seated at his table: among others there was Caestius at the foot of it, where people often sneak in to enjoy the open hospitality of the great. Cicero asked one of his men who he was and was told his name; but, as a man whose thoughts were elsewhere and who kept forgetting the replies to his questions, he asked it him again two or three times. The servant, to avoid the bother of having to go on repeating the same thing and so as to enable Cicero to identify the man by something about him, replied, ‘It is that man called Caestius who is said not to think much of your father’s eloquence compared to his own.’ Cicero, suddenly provoked by that, ordered his men to grab hold of that wretched Caestius and, in his presence, to give him a good flogging. A most discourteous host!23

Even among those who reckoned that his eloquence was, all things considered, beyond compare, there were some who did not omit to draw attention to some defects in it; such as his friend the great Brutus who said it was an eloquence ‘fractam et elumbem’ – ‘broken and dislocated’.24 Orators living near his own time criticized him for the persistent trouble he took to end his periods with lengthy cadences, and noted that he often used in them the words ‘esse videatur’ [it would seem to be].

Personally I prefer cadences which conclude more abruptly, cut into iambics. He too can, very occasionally, mix his rhythms quite roughly: my own ears pointed this sentence out to me: ‘Ego vero me minus diu senem esse mallem, quam esse senem, antequam essem.’ [I indeed hold being old less long better than being old before I am.]25

The historians play right into my court. They are pleasant and delightful; and at the same time26 [C] Man in general whom I seek to know appears in them more alive and more entire than in any other sort of writing, showing the true diversity of his inward qualities, both wholesale and retail, the variety of ways in which he is put together and the events which menace him.

[A] Now the most appropriate historians for me are those who write men’s lives, since they linger more over motives than events, over what comes from inside more than what happens outside. That is why, of historians of every kind, Plutarch is the man for me.

I am deeply sorry that we do not have Diogenes Laertiuses by the dozen, or that he himself did not spread himself more widely [C] or more wisely, for I consider the lives and fortunes of the great teachers of mankind no less carefully than their ideas and doctrines.27

[A] In this genre – the study of history – we must without distinction leaf our way through all kinds of authors, ancient and modern, in pidgin and in French, so as to learn about the matter which they treat in their divergent ways. But Caesar seems to me to deserve special study, not only to learn historical facts but on his own account, since his perfection excels that of all others, even including Sallust.

I certainly read Caesar with rather more reverence and awe than is usual for the works of men, at times considering the man himself through his deeds and the miracle of his greatness, at others the purity and the inimitable polish of his language which not only surpassed that of all other historians, as Cicero said, but [C] perhaps [A] that of Cicero himself.28 There is such a lack of bias in his judgement when he talks of his enemies29 that the only thing you can reproach him with, apart from the deceptive colours under which he seeks to hide his bad cause and the filth of his pernicious ambition, is that he talks of himself too sparingly. For so many great things cannot have been done by him without he himself contributing more to them than he includes in his books.

I like either very simple historians or else outstanding ones. The simple ones, who have nothing of their own to contribute, merely bringing to their task care and diligence in collecting everything which comes to their attention and chronicling everything in good faith without choice or selection, leave our judgement intact for the discerning of the truth. Among others there is for example that good man Froissart who strides with such frank sincerity through his enterprise that when he has made an error he is never afraid to admit it and to correct it at whatever point he has reached when told about it; and he relates all the various rumours which were current and the differing reports that were made to him. Here is the very stuff of history, naked and unshaped: each man can draw such profit from it as his understanding allows.

The truly outstanding historians are capable of choosing what is worth knowing; they can select which of two reports is the more likely; from the endowments and humours of princes they can draw conclusions about their intentions and attribute appropriate words to them. Such historians are right to assume the authority of controlling what we accept by what they do: but that certainly belongs to very few.

Those who lie in between (as most historians do) spoil everything for us: they want to chew things over for us; they give themselves the right to make judgements and consequently bend history to their own ideas: for once our judgement leans to one side we cannot stop ourselves twisting and distorting the narration to that bias. They take on the task of choosing what is worth knowing, often hiding from us some speech or private action which would have taught us much more; they leave out things they find incredible because they do not understand them, and doubtless leave out others because they do not know how to put them into good Latin or French. Let them make a display of their rhetoric and their arguments if they dare to; let them judge as they like: but let them leave us the means of making our own judgements after them; let them not deprave by their abridgements nor arrange by their selection anything of material substance, but rather let them pass it all on to us purely and wholly, in all its dimensions.30

As often as not, and especially in our own times, historiographers are appointed from among quite commonplace people, simply on account of their knowing how to write well, as though we wanted to learn grammar! They are right, having been paid to do that and having nothing but chatter to sell, to worry mainly about that aspect. And so with many a fine phrase they spin a web of rumours gathered at the crossroads of our cities.

The only good histories are those written by men who were actually in charge of affairs or who played some part in that charge, [C] or who at least were fortunate enough to have been in charge of others of a similar kind. [A] Such were virtually all the Greek and Roman historians. For, with several eye-witnesses having written on the same subject (as happened in those days when greatness and learning were [C] commonly [A] found together), if an error were made it must have been wonderfully slight, or concern some incident itself open to great doubt.31

What can we hope from a doctor who writes about war, or a schoolboy writing about the designs of kings?

To realize how scrupulous the Romans were over this, we need only one example: Asinius Pollio found even in Caesar’s histories some mistakes into which he had fallen because he had not been able to look with his own eyes at every part of his army and had believed individual men who had reported to him things which were often inadequately verified, or else because he had not been carefully enough informed by his commanders-delegate of their conduct of affairs during his absence.32

We can see from that example what a delicate thing our quest for truth is when we cannot even rely on the commander’s knowledge of a battle he has fought nor on the soldiers’ accounts of what went on round them unless, as in a judicial inquiry, we confront witnesses and accept objections to alleged proofs of the finer points of every occurrence. Truly, the knowledge we have of our own affairs is much slacker. But that has been adequately treated by Bodin, and in conformity with my own ideas.33

To help my defective and treacherous memory a little – and it is so extremely bad that I have more than once happened to pick up again, thinking it new and unknown to me, a book which I had carefully read several years earlier and scribbled all over with my notes – I have for some time now adopted the practice of adding at the end of each book (I mean of each book which I intend to read only once) the date when I finished reading it and the general judgement I drew from it, in order to show me again at least the general idea and impression I had conceived of its author when reading it. I would like to transcribe here some of those annotations.

Here is what I put about ten years ago on my Guicciardini (for no matter what language is spoken by my books, I speak to them in my own):34 ‘He is an industrious writer of history, from whom in my judgement we can learn the truth about the affairs of his time more accurately than from any other; moreover he played a part in most of them, holding an honoured position. There is no sign that he ever disguised anything through hatred, favour or vanity; that is vouched for by the unfettered judgements he makes of the great, especially of those by whom he had been promoted to serve in responsible positions, such as Pope Clement VII. As for the quality in which he seems to want most to excel, namely his digressions and reflections, some are excellent and enriched by beautiful sketches; but he enjoyed them too much: he did not want to leave anything out, yet his subject was a full and ample one – infinite almost – and so he can become sloppy and somewhat redolent of academic chatter. I have also been struck by the following: that among all his judgements on minds and actions, among so many motives and intentions, he attributes not one of them to virtue, religious scruple or conscience, as if those qualities had been entirely snuffed out in our world; and among all those deeds, no matter how beautiful they might seem in themselves, he attributes their cause to some evil opportunity or gain. It is impossible to conceive that among the innumerable actions on which he makes a judgement there were not at least some produced by means of reason. No corruption can have infected everyone so totally that there was not some man or other who escaped the contagion. That leads me to fear that his own taste was somewhat corrupted: perhaps he happened to base his estimates of others on himself.’

This is what I have on my Philippe de Commines: ‘You will find the language here smooth and delightful, of a natural simplicity; the narration pure, with the good faith of the author manifestly shining through it; himself free from vanity when talking of himself, and of favour and of envy when talking of others, together with a fine zeal for truth rather than any unusual acuteness; and from end to end, authority and weight showing him to be a man of good extraction and brought up to great affairs.’

And on the Memoirs of Monsieur Du Bellay,35 the following:

‘It is always a pleasure to see things written about by those who had assayed how to manage them, but there is no denying that in these two noblemen36 there is clearly revealed a great decline from that shining frankness and freedom in writing found in older authors of their rank such as the Seigneur de Joinville (the close friend of Saint Louis), Eginhard (the Chancellor of Charlemagne) and more recently Philippe de Commines. This is not history so much as pleading the case of King Francis against the Emperor Charles V. I am unwilling to believe that they altered any of the major facts, but they make it their job to distort the judgement of events to our advantage, often quite unreasonably, and to pass over anything touchy in the life of their master: witness the fall from grace of the Seigneur de Montmorency and the Seigneur de Brion, which is simply omitted: indeed the very name of Madame d’Estampes is not to be found in them!37 Secret deeds can be hushed up, but to keep silent about things which everyone knows about, especially things which led to public actions of such consequence, is a defect which cannot be pardoned. In short if you take my advice you should look elsewhere for a full account of King Francis and the events of his time; what can be profitable are the particulars given of the battles and military engagements when these noblemen were present; a few private words and deeds of a few princes of their time; and the transactions and negotiations conducted by the Seigneur de Langey which are chock full of things worth knowing and of uncommon reflections.’38