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He failed to relish even Montaigne as he ought to have done, because Montaigne's method was too prolix, his scepticism too universal, his egoism too manifest, and because he did not produce complete and artistic wholes. Reasonableness is the strongest mark in Vauvenargues' thinking; balance, evenness, purity of vision, penetration finely toned with indulgence.
As impulses are formed from habits, so the regularity of De Montaigne's habits made his impulses virtuous and just, and he yielded to them as often as a hasty character might have done; but then those impulses never urged to anything speculative or daring. De Montaigne could not go beyond a certain defined circle of action.
Perhaps it adds to his purely personal charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his intellectual and moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists.
Actually, we may think, the "sweet society" of those four years, in comparison with which the rest of his so pleasant life "was but smoke," had touched Montaigne's nature with refinements it might otherwise have lacked. He would have wished "to speak concerning it, to those who had experience" of what he said, could such have been found.
That was a point which could hardly escape so reflective a mind as Gaston's: and at a later period of his life, at the harvest of his own second thoughts, as he pondered on the influence over him of that two-sided thinker, the opinion that things as we find them would bear a certain old-fashioned construction, seemed to have been the consistent motive, however secret and subtle in its working, of Montaigne's sustained intellectual activity.
17: Antonius and Cleopatra, act i. sc. 4. 18: We mean the usually received text, seeing that the folio edition of 1623 contains some passages which are wanting in the quarto edition, and vice versa. 19: Montaigne's Essays, which were published in folio, may have had the same price as Shakspere's folio of 1623.
The Contre-un, besides, is a work of pure theory and general philosophy, containing no allusion at all to the events of the day, to the sedition in Guienne no more than to any other. This little work owed to Montaigne's affectionate regard for its author a great portion of its celebrity. History must do justice even to the men whose brutal violence she stigmatizes and reproves.
Thus, Margaret of Navarre wrote books with great acclamation, and no one, seemingly, saw fit to call her conduct in question; but Mademoiselle de Gournay, Montaigne's adopted daughter, was in a controversy with the world as to whether a woman might be an author without incongruity.
Speaking generally, they belonged to the small nobility who fell under the category of the arriere-ban in time of war. In this tower Montaigne had his chapel, his bedroom to which he retired when the yearning for solitude was strong and his library. The chapel is on the ground-floor, and is very much what it was in Montaigne's time.
Nobody knows what has become of all the volumes which were here, and which were said to have numbered a thousand. They were given by Montaigne's only surviving child, his daughter Leonore, to the Abbe de Roquefort, but what became of them afterwards is a mystery. There is a small room adjoining the library, the one that Montaigne mentions as having a fireplace.
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