24. Less less favor, less fame.
25. Ambassage embassy.
26. Remarkable noticeable.
27. Serve virtue more hardly perform more difficult service to virtue.
28. Exercitation activity.
29. Oughly ugly.
30. Bruite (noisy) fame.
31. Artificer artisan, skilled manual laborer.
32. Close stool toilet seat.
33. Institution education.
34. Lucan, Pharsalia, IV.237–42.
35. Grubbed rooted, dug.
36. Fashions Montaigne has “moeurs”: mores, even morals.
37. Good-cheap at little cost or expense.
38. Intestine internal, internecine.
39. Swaying ruling. This is an interesting moment, when Montaigne posits at least part of the self that is stable, governs, “sways.”
40. Institution education.
41. Retreat retirement.
42. Burthenous burdensome.
43. Happily perhaps.
44. In this difficult passage, Montaigne imagines pleasure overwhelming the vice associated with it, as in theft, where there is a separation between pleasure and the vice, and sex, where pleasure is completely linked to the “sin.”
45. Pinching want poverty.
46. Of complexion constitutional, inherent, natural.
47. Courage individual heart, person.
48. He the sinner.
49. That is, he has neither the meta-human soul of the angels or the elevated human soul of Cato.
50. Respect consider.
51. Presage predict.
52. Success outcome.
53. Moathes motes, atoms.
54. Where leaving me by leaving me alone.
55. Impuissance sexual impotence.
56. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, V.xii.19.
57. Sacietie satiety.
58. They reason, rational powers.
59. Amendment convalescence, remedy.
60. Preposterously monstrously.
61. Varlet here—as often in Shakespeare—a worthless, dissipated man; Montaigne has “un homme perdu” (“a lost man”).
62. Discretion wisdom.
63. Florio gets this one wrong. Montaigne says that our conscience must amend itself through reinforcement of reason and not the weakening of appetites. Florio adds an extra negative.
64. Affect love, practice.
65. Catars catarrh, discharge of mucus in the nose and throat.
66. That is, when I was taunted in my youth for my beardless chin.
67. Frowardness difficulty, contrary behavior.
68. Tattle prattle, useless speech.
69. Carking for anxiety about.
70. Mustily with a musty taste.
71. Of purpose on purpose, purposely.
72. It old age.
73. Entrenchings retrenchments.
74. It old age.
OF THREE COMMERCES OR SOCIETIES
1. Commerces or Societies associations or social relationships. This essay includes Montaigne’s clearest description of the layout of his tower.
2. Livy, The History of Rome, XXXIX.xl.5.
3. Wire-draws stretches, elongates.
4. Seneca, Epistulae morales, LVI.9.
5. It the mind.
6. Vacation vocation.
7. Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, V.xxxviii.111.
8. Conceit reason, thinking.
9. Entertainments conversations.
10. Discourses of countenance conversations for appearance’s sake.
11. Complexion disposition.
12. Nice fastidious, difficult to please.
13. For the nonce for the purpose.
14. Insipience folly, silliness.
15. Forsake Montaigne uses the verb “desmeler,” which Cotgrave defines as “to performe a businesse iointly with.” Montaigne, in fact, is warning against forsaking common people.
16. Wrested strained, tense.
17. Squareth according to adjusts to.
18. Science knowledge.
19. Burden refrain.
20. Amities friendships.
21. Vulgar worldly friendships ordinary friendships (as opposed to the “rare amities” mentioned above).
22. If not unresisted and with hoised-full sails friendship is best when it is all out, with wind in its full and fully hoisted sails.
23. It is a beast sociable and for company, and not of troupe friendship works better in small groups and not in a herd.
24. Quarrel legal dispute.
25. Sance sans, without.
26. Indifferent equitable.
27. But in extension except when the mind reaches beyond itself, its normal limits.
28. Horace, Odes, III.xix.3–8.
29. Lacedemonian Spartan.
30. Spirit the mind.
31. Mincingly in an affected or effete manner. The Italian is proverbial.
32. Books book learning.
33. Closets private chambers.
34. Their the books’.
35. Countenance appearance.
36. Juvenal, Satires, VI.189–91.
37. Well-born well-born women.
38. Seneca, Epistulae morales, CXV.2. There is a criticism here of those whose lives derive completely from their clothes; all things, then, come out of a box. See Lafeu’s description of Parolles, in Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well: “the soul of this man is his clothes” (II.v.40).
39. Them Montaigne is still talking about well-born women.
40. Frowardness harshness, unfavorableness.
41. Both regents and schools both schoolmasters and schools.
42. Servant attendant, suitor, lover.
43. Local solitariness solitude of place.
44. Court in Montaigne, it is “la Louvre.”
45. Of mine own complexion by my own nature.
46. By intermission at intervals.
47. Envitings escortings.
48. Demeaneth behaves.
49. Conference, and frequentation conversation and frequent gathering.
50. Vouchsafe is pleased to, desires to.
51. Check-roll roster of names.
52. Good minds are intrinsically great. Art merely records the productions of such minds.
53. Cicero, Paradoxica stoicorum, V.ii.38. See Shakespeare’s Biron in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive. / They sparkle still the right Promethean fire. / They are the books, the arts, the academes / That show, contain, and nourish all the world” (IV.iii.324–27).
54. It sexual desire, lust.
55. My punishment for such acts in the past has taught me a lesson.
56. Ovid, Tristia, I.i.83–84.
57. Comedians actors.
58. Ought aught, anything.
59. Bare-conned merely memorized, not felt or believed.
60. Brachmanian Brahmans, high-caste Hindus.
61. Intercourse negotiation, business, sexual intercourse.
62. Tacitus, Annals, XIII.xlv.
63. Love and sexual desire go together like motherhood and babies.
64. Inter-lend and inter-owe one another lend and owe to each other.
65. She the beauty.
66. Brutal brutish.
67. Mercenary and common acquaintances encounters with prostitutes.
68. Montaigne has “la courtisane Flora.”
69. Cue disposition, frame of mind, mood.
70. Masculine beauty approaches feminine beauty only when it looks most like it: childlike and beardless.
71. The two previously discussed: interactions with friends and engagements with women.
72. Them...them books...troubling thoughts (of “importunate imagination” and “insinuating conceit”).
73. Skreene a seat with a high back to protect against the wind.
74. His health a cure.
75. Sentence maxim, proverb, sententia.
76. Peregrination life journey, pilgrimag
e.
77. Want lack.
78. Indite and enregister dictate and write down.
79. Cabinet little room.
80. A walk a place to walk.
81. My mind does not go along unless my legs move it.
82. In the same case in the same boat.
83. Unresisted prospect unrestricted view.
84. Void of free space.
85. Importeth suggests. His house (and family name), Montaigne, means “a Mountaine, a great hill” (see Cotgrave).
86. Particularly court pay court to himself.
87. Seneca, Consolatio ad Polybium, VI.4.
88. So much as at their privy even on the toilet.
89. Churchmen monks.
90. This kind of stuff books.
OF DIVERTING OR DIVERSION
1. Their women’s.
2. Juvenal, Satires, VI.273–45.
3. Froward grumpy, churlish.
4. Gull the assistants trick the attendants or bystanders.
5. Their mischief the trouble caused by the woman’s grief.
6. Want lack.
7. Make a load of all this mass arm myself with a pile of rhetorical cures.
8. Wedge ax.
9. Amuse satisfy, calm.
10. Semblable similar.
11. Intercessors mediators.
12. Predicament kind, category.
13. Protectress of all amorous delights Venus.
14. As at unawares as if inadvertently.
15. Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.666–67.
16. Receite remedy.
17. Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, IV.xxxv.74–75.
18. Wishly intently, fixedly.
19. And that so thick and so abundantly and completely (killed themselves).
20. Ruth-moving pity-inducing, pitiful.
21. Exigent extremity, emergency.
22. Let them blood let their blood.
23. Cogitations thoughts.
24. Down-fall precipice, cliff.
25. Virgil, Aeneid, IV.382–84, 387.
26. Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, II.xxvi.62.
27. At each clap all the time.
28. The white the bull’s-eye, the target.
29. Young prince almost certainly Henri de Navarre, eventually King Henri IV.
30. Persius, Satires, VI.72; Lucretius, De rerum natura, IV.1065.
31. Lucretius, De rerum natura, IV.1070–71.
32. Displeasure grief.
33. Complexion disposition, nature.
34. Buckle with do battle with, combat.
35. Fraughting supplying, furnishing.
36. Corrupteth broke up, dissipated.
37. Almost certainly an allusion to the death of Montaigne’s dear friend La Boétie, twenty-five years earlier.
38. Foresight anticipation.
39. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, I.xi, and Ben Jonson, “Timber: or, Discoveries,” in Works of Ben Jonson, Volume VIII: The Poems; The Prose Works, edited by C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 597.
40. Believe believe me that.
41. Vain rinds which rebound from subjects empty husks fall off of the things themselves.
42. Lucretius, De rerum natura, V.803–4.
43. Gingleth jingle, ring.
44. Auditory auditors, audience.
45. Just as preachers’ exclamations move their audiences more than their arguments do.
46. Poising balancing, weighing, keeping in equipoise.
47. Massy of mass, solid, substantial.
48. Lucan, Pharsalia, II.42.
49. Stone kidney stone.
50. Yard penis.
51. Emperor Tiberius (42 BC–AD 37; emperor of Rome AD 14–37).
52. Sottishly foolishly.
53. Proules robs, pilfers, makes a prey of.
54. Montaigne is saying that, in general (wholesale, “in great”), death can be held in contempt. In its minute details (“retail”), however, it affects him deeply.
55. Lackey servant.
56. Cast suits old clothes.
57. Entender me make me sad.
58. Passionate impassion.
59. Indurate obdurate, obstinate.
60. Florio is confusing. Montaigne’s point is that one cannot know another’s pain, only one’s own, when “presence” affects the “eyes and ears,” which cannot be affected except by direct experience.
61. Blockishness stupidity.
62. Juggling sleight of hand.
63. Comedians actors.
64. This entire section is influenced by Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VI.ii, especially sections 32–36. Montaigne has already alluded to the phenomenon earlier when discussing women who become what they play. See note 39. See also Hamlet’s advice to the Players in Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.ii.1–40. Perhaps even more relevant is Hamlet’s speech on seeming, which, like this passage from Montaigne, is negotiating the boundaries between real and feigned grief: “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’ / ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good-mother, / Nor customary suits of solemn black, / Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, / No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, / Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, / Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief, / That can denote me truly. These indeed ‘seem,’ / For they are actions that a man might play; / But I have that within which passeth show— / These but the trappings and suits of woe” (I.ii.76–86).
65. As Martin the Priest performed their roles like Prester Martin, a priest who famously recited both parts of the Mass—responses as well as questions.
66. Waymentings lamentations.
67. Instructing party instructive thing.
68. Flearing grimacing, grinning.
69. Mumps and mows grimaces, frowns.
70. Skippings fits and starts.
71. Presage omen.
72. Montaigne sardonically notes that we value life perfectly in being willing to abandon it for a dream.
73. It the body.
74. Mark target.
75. Propertius, Elegies, III.v.7–10.
UPON SOME VERSES OF VIRGIL
1. Cupping-glasses devices used for drawing blood.
2. Heedy heedful, wary.
3. Distaste them of it disgust them with sex.
4. Excuse permit.
5. Forwardest most passionate.
6. Slow physically immature.
7. Obscene word named in Montaigne, “fouteau” meant both “beech tree” and, with its proximity to foutre, “to fuck” or, as Cotgrave has it, “to leacher.”
8. Step over skip over, omit.
9. Horace, Odes, III.vi.21–24.
10. See Plato, Timaeus, 42b and 90e.
11. Ovid, Ars amatoria, III.93; Priapea, III.2.
12. That jealousy.
13. Fondest most foolish.
14. Adulter adulterer.
15. Johannes Secundus, Elegiae, I.vii.71–72.
16. Catullus, Epigrams, XV.17–19.
17. Vulcan, in Ovid (see next note).
18. Ovid, Metamorphoses, IV.187–88.
19. Virgil, Aeneid, VIII.395–96.
20. Ibid., VIII.383.
21. Ibid., VIII.441.
22. Catullus, Epigrams, LVIIIb.141.
23. Confusion of children children raised in common.
24. Women don’t mind the sharing of child-raising, which is interesting to Montaigne because, he says, they are constitutionally more jealous.
25. Catullus, Epigrams, LVIIIb.138–39.
26. Propertius, Elegies, II.viii.3.
27. See Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, in which the Abbess criticizes Adriana in similar terms (V.i.69–87).
28. Virgil, Aeneid, V.6.
29. A difficult passage in which Montaigne imagines how quickly men would be unchaste if—without fear of being seen or reported—they could fly like a bird from nest to nest of every woman who would have them.
30. Colour of heat pretext of passion, ar
dor.
31. My universal form my general nature.
32. Fond stupid, silly.
33. In my room in my place.
34. Tisicke phthisic, coughing and wheezing.
35. Insufficiency impotence.
36. Catullus, Epigrams, LXVII.21–22. Florio leaves this passage untranslated; see Frame: “Whose member, feebler than a beet, / Never rose even up to middle height” (659).
37. To justify himself to assert his masculinity.
38. Performed twenty courses had sex with his wife twenty times.
39. Convince convict.
40. Against the wool the wrong way.
41. Infantine childlike.
42. Postern back door, back entrance.
43. Martial, Epigrams, VII.lxii.6.
44. Ibid., VI.vii.6.
45. Pudicity chastity.
46. Playing with it engaging in sport, especially riding; perhaps engaging in masturbation.
47. Felt noticed, smelled.
48. Knot of the judgement of this duty the crux of judging this duty.
49. This accident cuckoldry.
50. Brokage mediation, sale.
51. His his wife.
52. He avouched as prettily he admitted gracefully.
53. Careful vexation painful anxiety.
54. Whether there is any profit in being agitated by jealousy.
55. Ring them to shackle or enchain women.
56. Juvenal, Satires, VI.347–48.
57. Intelligencer spy.
58. Bewrayeth betrayeth.
59. Blazon to proclaim or trumpet.
60. Moaned pitied.
61. Lucretius, De rerum natura, III.1028, 1026.
62. Catullus, Epigrams, LXIV.170.
63. Curst pate Florio misreads slightly: Montaigne has “la mauvaise teste,” which means something like “bad temper” or “bad disposition.” Florio reads this more literally as “bad head,” thus “cursed pate.” In Florio’s defense, “teste” was the common French spelling for “head” in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
64. Massie copious, abundant.
65. They are not Bee-busied about rhetoric flowers they are not preoccupied with rhetorical figures.
66. Gallant brave.
67. Quaintness clever, linguistically skilled.
68. Here, as often in Montaigne, “subject” is closer to what we think of as “object,” so love is primarily a desire for a desired object.
69. Semenary seminal.
70. Intermission mediation.
71. Zeno (490–430 BC) was a pre-Socratic philosopher famous for his paradoxes, and Cratippus (first century BC) was a philosopher who supposedly taught Cicero’s son. Both wrote about the terrifying power of emotions.
72. Pell-mell haphazardly, without order.
Shakespeare's Montaigne Page 45
