lazenby:

 

IN THE YEAR OF CHRIST 1571 Michael Montaigne, aged 38, on his birthday, the day preceding the Calends of March, already long wearied of the servitude of the law-courts, and of public offices, has retired, with faculties still entire, to the arms of the learned virgins, there to pass in all quiet and security, such length of days as remain to him, of his already more than half-spent years, if so the fates permit him to finish this abode and these sweet ancestral retreats consecrated to his freedom and tranquility and leisure.

Michel de Montaigne had this inscribed, in Latin, above the fireplace in his library. In the adjoining room he would invent the essay, give that form its first masterpieces, and, twenty-one years after retiring to it, Montaigne would die in his circular study.

Soon after he inscribed the obituary of his public self above the fireplace, Montaigne probably began painting inscriptions on the bare, wooden beams of his study. Taken together with the Essays, these inscriptions offer as clear a view as is possible not only into Montaigne’s mind, but into the mind of anyone who has ever lived.

As far as I know this is the first time these have been collected in English.

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