36

36. On the custom of wearing clothing

[In this chapter Montaigne makes a pun on the French taste for bigarures, which means, as Cotgrave explains it in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1632) both a medley of ‘sundry colours mingled together’ and a discourse ‘running odly and fantastically, from one matter to another’. This chapter is an example of such a colourful medley, hopping from thoughts on Man’s natural nakedness to examples of extraordinary cold.]

[A] Whichever way I want to go I find myself obliged to break through some barrier of custom, so thoroughly has she blocked all our approaches. During this chilly season I was chatting about whether the habit of those newly discovered peoples of going about stark naked was forced on them by the hot climate, as we say of the Indians and the Moors, or whether it is the original state of mankind. Since the word of God says that ‘everything under the sun’ is subject to the same law,1 in considerations such as these, where a distinction has to be made between natural laws and contrived ones, men of understanding regularly turn for advice to the general polity of the world: nothing can be counterfeit there. Now, since everything therein is exactly furnished with stitch and needle for maintaining its being, it is truly unbelievable that we men alone should have been brought forth in a deficient and necessitous state, a state which can only be sustained by borrowings from other creatures. I therefore hold that just as plants, trees, animals and all living things are naturally equipped with adequate protection from the rigour of the weather –

Proptereaque fere res omnes aut corio sunt, Aut seta, aut conchis, aut callo, aut cortice tectæ

[Wherefore virtually everything is protected by hides, silks, shells, tough skin or bark]2

– so too were we; but like those who drown the light of day with artificial light, we have drowned our natural means with borrowed ones. It can easily be seen that custom makes possible things impossible for us: for some of the peoples who have no knowledge of clothing live under much the same climate as ourselves – and even we leave uncovered the most delicate parts of our bodies: [C] our eyes, mouth, nose, ears and, in the case of our peasants and forebears, the chest and the belly. If we had been endowed at birth with undergarments and trousers there can be no doubt that Nature would have armed those parts of us which remained exposed to the violence of the seasons with a thicker skin, as she has done for our fingertips and the soles of our feet.

[C] Why should this seem so hard to believe? The gulf between the way I dress and the way my local peasant does is wider than that between him and a man dressed only in his skin. In Turkey especially many go about naked for the sake of their religion.3

[A] In midwinter somebody or other asked one of our local tramps who was wearing nothing but a shirt yet remained as merry as a man swaddled up to his ears in furs how he could stand it. ‘You, Sir,’ he replied, ‘have your face quite uncovered: myself am all face!’

The Italians tell a tale about (I think it was) the Duke of Florence’s jester. He was poorly clad; his master asked him how he managed to stand the cold, which he himself found very troublesome. ‘Do as I do,’ he said, ‘and you won’t feel the cold either. Pile on every stitch you’ve got!’

Even when very old, King Massinissa could not be persuaded to wear anything on his head, come cold, wind or rain.4 [C] And the same is told about the Emperor Severus.

Herodotus says that both he and others noted that, of those who were left dead in the battles between the Egyptians and the Persians, the Egyptians had by far the harder cranium: that was because the Persians always kept their heads covered first with boys’ caps and then with turbans, whereas the Egyptians went close-cropped and bareheaded from childhood.5

[A] And King Agesilaus wore the same clothes, summer and winter, until he was decrepit. According to Suetonius, Caesar always led his armies, normally bareheaded and on foot, in sunshine as in rain. The same is said of Hannibal:

tum vertice nudo Excipere insanos imbres cælique ruinam.

[Bareheaded he withstood the furious rainstorms and the cloudbursts.]6

[C] A Venetian just back from the Kingdom of Pegu where he had spent a long time writes that the men and women there cover all the rest of their body, but always go barefoot even on their horses. And Plato enthusiastically advises that, for the health of our entire body, we should give no other covering to head or foot than what Nature has put there.7

[Al] The man whom the Poles elected King after our own monarch8 (and he is truly one of the greatest of princes) never wears gloves and never fails to wear the same hat indoors, no matter what the winter weather.

[B] Whereas I cannot bear to go about with my buttons undone or my jacket unlaced, the farm-labourers in my neighbourhood would feel shackled if they did not do so. Varro maintains that when mankind was bidden to remain uncovered in the presence of gods and governors it was for our health’s sake and to help us to endure the fury of the seasons rather than out of reverence.9

[A] While on the subject of cold, since the French are used to a medley of colours – not me though: I usually wear black and white like my father – let me switch subject and add that Captain Martin Du Bellay relates how he saw it freeze so hard during the Luxembourg expedition that the wine-ration had to be hacked at with axes, weighed out to the soldiers and carried away in baskets.10 Ovid is but a finger’s breadth from that:

Nudaque consistunt formam servantia testæ Vina, nec hausta meri, sed data frusta bibunt.

[The naked wine stands straight upright, retaining the shape of the jar: they do not swallow draughts of wine but chunks of it.]11

[B] It freezes so hard in the swampy distributaries of Lake Maeotis that in the very same spot where Mithridates’ lieutenant fought dry-shod against his enemies and defeated them, he defeated them again, when summer came, in a naval engagement.

[C] In their battle against the Carthaginians near Placentia, the Romans were at a great disadvantage since they had to charge while their blood was nipped and their limbs stiff with the cold, whereas Hannibal had caused fires to be lit throughout his camp to warm his soldiers and had also distributed an embrocation oil to his troops to rub in, thaw out their muscles and limber up, while clogging their pores against the penetrating blasts of the prevailing bitter wind.

The Greeks’ homeward retreat from Babylon is famous for the hardships and sufferings they had to overcome. One was their encountering a dreadful snowstorm in the Armenian mountains; they lost all their bearings in that country and its roads; they were so suddenly beset that, with most of their mule-train dead, they went one whole day and night without food or drink; many of them met their deaths or were blinded by the hailstones and the glare of the snow; many had frostbitten limbs and many others remained conscious but were frozen stiff and unable to move.12

Alexander came across a people where they bury their fruit trees in winter to protect them from the frost.13

[B] While on the subject of clothing, the King of Mexico changed four times a day and never wore the same clothes twice; his cast-off garments were constantly used for gifts and rewards; similarly no pot, plate, kitchen-ware or table-ware was ever served him twice.14