The French for this – “leurs despouïlles” – suggests something more graphic: “their hides,” or even “their corpses.” Montaigne has borrowed from these authors in a carnal way.

Montaigne ends this complex essay with a bromide: opinions are only alike insofar as they’re all different.

Montaigne’s professed tolerance for differing opinions is fortunate, since his own opinions often seem to differ from each other; any reader of the Essays will be frustrated by what seems to be an ongoing catalog of contradictions.

In more condensed form than the entrail-reading/goat autopsy above, this is a blending of the medical physicality and religious spirituality.

Montaigne’s disdain for “airy and imaginary pleasure” resonates with the famous lines of Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.15-18):

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

The immateriality of glory is reflected in the Greek word “doxa,” which means “mere opinion” and “superficial appearance” as well as “glory” – a semantic range exploited in the Greek New Testament.

The Four Sons of Aymon is a medieval chanson de geste about a quest for glory that ends badly.

Here Montaigne takes a simple medical truism – that all disease can be helped by purging – and introduces conflicting evidence: sometimes, far from helping, purging can hurt, since all healthy bodies (and fermenting wines) need to retain some “excrements.”

Montaigne would likely not be surprised to learn how many bacteria are necessary to keep our microbiomes healthy.

As Montaigne suggests earlier in this chapter, though, the “lees” at the bottom of a wine barrel have powerful preservative properties.

It would seem unnecessary – given that no one is actually asking him if he’d rather be a good orator or a good soldier, or a good writer or a good cook – to bring up the fact that he already has a cook. If the point of the hypothetical is that he would rather be a good cook than have one, mentioning that he does in fact have one confuses reality with wish.

Having enjoyed a full career in public life, Montaigne could be said to have “mended his breeches” pretty well before setting to work writing his good books.

But his claim that a man of real value shows it through the management of his household (“economics” translates “oeconomie de sa maison”) is a strange one, since Montaigne admits (in “Of Vanity,” among other places) that he has no interest or talent in estate management.

This may be true, but we could also understand Montaigne’s “present and real conveniences” to include the writing of his Essays, which, although he insists won’t last long, have become a stock for posterity.

The idea that “understanding” could serve his writing as well as (or, as a part of) his life comes earlier, in “Of Pedantry” (1.24):

I go here and there, culling out of several books the sentences that best please me, not to keep them (for I have no memory to retain them in), but to transplant them into this; where, to say the truth, they are no more mine than in their first places.