Orts #739

   Odd events and human narratives of all kinds appealed to him [Montaigne]. In . . . Vitry-le-Françcois, he was regaled with stories about seven or eight girls in the area who had “plotted together” to dress and live as men. One married a woman and lived with her for several months — “to her satisfaction, so they say” — until someone reported the case to the authorities and she was hanged. Another story in the same region concerned a man named Germain who had been a girl until the age of twenty-two, when a set of “virile instruments” popped out one day as he leaped over an obstacle. A folk song arose in the town, warning girls not to open their legs too wide when they jumped in case the same thoing happened to them.
     — Sarah Bakewell, in How to Live — or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010)
 
 
   In taking up his pen he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist, but he [Montaigne] became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind, in its naked simplicity and force.
     — William Hazlitt, quoted in Bakewell’s book
 
 
   This is (in my Opinion) the very best Book for Information of Manners, that has been writ; This Author says nothing but what every one feels att the Heart.
     — Alexander Pope, noted in his copy of Charles Cotton’s translation into English of Montaigne’s Essays, quoted in Bakewell’s book
 
 
    Of all authors Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences, or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.
     — T. S. Eliot, quoted in Bakewell’s book
 
 
    That such a man [Montaigne] wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth.
     — Nietzsche, quoted in Bakewell’s book