have us despise and hate the culture of the body. 'Tis not a soul,
'tis not a body, we are training up, but a man; and we ought not to
divide him. Of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to
despise our being."

There was a fineness of sensation in these unpremeditated thoughts,
which to Gaston seemed to connect itself with the exquisite words he
had found to paint his two great affections, for his [112] father and
for Etienne de la Boetie,--a fineness of sensation perhaps quite
novel in that age, but still of physical sensation: and in pursuit of
fine physical sensation he came, on his broad, easy, indifferent
passage through the world, across the coarsest growths which also
thrive "under the sun," and was not revolted. They were akin to that
ruder earth within himself, of which a kind of undissembled greed was
symptomatic; the love of "meats little roasted, very high, and even,
as to several, quite gone"; while, in drinking, he loved "clear
glass, that the eye might taste too, according to its capacity"; akin
also to a certain slothfulness:--"Sleeping," he says, "has taken up a
great part of my life." And there was almost nothing he would not
say: no fact, no story, from his curious half-medical reading, he
would not find some plausible pretext to tell. Man's kinship to the
animal, the material, and all the proofs of it:--he would never blush
at them! In truth, he led the way to the immodesty of French
literature; and had his defence, a sort of defence, ready. "I know
very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings, who
have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their own thoughts."

Yet when Gaston, twenty years afterwards, heard of the seemingly
pious end of Monsieur de Montaigne, he recalled a hundred, always
quiet but not always insignificant, acts of devotion, noticeable in