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The Essays of Montaigne — Volume 07 by Michel de Montaigne
page 28 of 79 (35%)
they cost us, as though that were a part of their substance; and we only
repute for value in them, not what they bring to us, but what we add to
them. By which I understand that we are great economisers of our
expense: as it weighs, it serves for so much as it weighs. Our opinion
will never suffer it to want of its value: the price gives value to the
diamond; difficulty to virtue; suffering to devotion; and griping to
physic. A certain person, to be poor, threw his crowns into the same sea
to which so many come, in all parts of the world, to fish for riches.
Epicurus says that to be rich is no relief, but only an alteration, of
affairs. In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that creates
avarice. I will deliver my own experience concerning this affair.

I have since my emergence from childhood lived in three sorts of
conditions. The first, which continued for some twenty years, I passed
over without any other means but what were casual and depending upon the
allowance and assistance of others, without stint, but without certain
revenue. I then spent my money so much the more cheerfully, and with so
much the less care how it went, as it wholly depended upon my
overconfidence of fortune. I never lived more at my ease; I never had
the repulse of finding the purse of any of my friends shut against me,
having enjoined myself this necessity above all other necessities
whatever, by no means to fail of payment at the appointed time, which
also they have a thousand times respited, seeing how careful I was to
satisfy them; so that I practised at once a thrifty, and withal a kind of
alluring, honesty. I naturally feel a kind of pleasure in paying, as if
I eased my shoulders of a troublesome weight and freed myself from an
image of slavery; as also that I find a ravishing kind of satisfaction in
pleasing another and doing a just action. I except payments where the
trouble of bargaining and reckoning is required; and in such cases; where
I can meet with nobody to ease me of that charge, I delay them, how
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