Montaigne opens with the countrywoman who carries a calf daily until she can bear the full ox, then names custom a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. Habit slips in gently, fixes itself with time, and finally shows a tyrannic countenance we lack the courage to look at. Custom forces nature itself: perfumes, bells, diets, and foreign rites feel natural only because we were born into them.
He catalogs world practices to prove that what looks reasonable is often local. Some peoples mutilate children, others eat parents, and legal double standards vary by rank and place. We seem born on condition to follow the track we suck in with our milk, calling whatever differs from it unreasonable. Even cruelty can become custom, as when whole nations accept rites that horrify strangers who practice different horrors at home.
That is why changing a received law is dangerous, like pulling one stone from an arch. Charondas had to present himself with a halter about his neck before proposing reform. Montaigne watched novelty help wreck France in his own lifetime and warns that innovation often breaks more than it mends. Ambassadors enjoy discretion, yet rigid relay commands can ruin affairs when messengers obey letters against visible necessity.
He also notes how custom stupefies the senses: bells, perfumes, and diets that once seemed intolerable become pleasant through repetition. Children are mutilated, buried alive, or married by local rule while adults call the foreign practice barbarous and their own practice nature.
Still he does not counsel blind revolt. Question customs inwardly, travel to loosen false certainty, but obey the laws of the place where you live in public. Socrates refused to save himself by disobedience even to a wicked magistrate, because the general law of laws is observance of local order. Fortune sometimes forces laws to yield; otherwise measured conformity preserves civic peace while the soul stays free to judge what it follows. Custom is therefore both prison and teacher: it steadies society, yet it also blinds the wise until contrast wakes them.
Coming Up in Chapter 23
From custom's grip Montaigne turns to counsel under pressure. At Rouen the Duke of Guise will forgive a conspirator; Augustus will try mercy where severity bred new plots Jacques Amiot tells how the Duke of Guise, warned of an assassin at Rouen, summoned the man, exposed the plot, and forgave him because his religion commanded mercy even toward a convicted enemy. The man left.
