Montaigne, in a shivering season, disputes with himself whether the newly found nations go naked because the air is hot, as Europeans say of the Indians and Moors, or because nakedness is mankind's original fashion. Men of understanding, he says, separate natural law from human invention by looking at the world's general polity, where nothing can be counterfeit. Other living things arrive furnished; Lucretius names skin, hair, shells, and bark. Montaigne will not believe we alone come into the world defective, unable to live without external aid. Nature would have clothed us too. We put that covering out the way artificial light puts out daylight: borrowed forms and fashions have destroyed our own. Custom, not climate, makes nudity look impossible. Nations without clothing live under the same temperature as France, and some in colder air. Eyes, mouth, nose, and ears stay bare already. Country labourers, like older French, still go with breasts and bellies open. Had petticoats and breeches been a necessity of birth, nature would have thickened those parts as she thickened the finger-ends and the soles of the feet.
The distance between Montaigne's habit and a country labourer's is greater, he finds, than the distance between that labourer and a man covered only in skin. Turks go naked for devotion. A beggar in his shirt in the depth of winter, as brisk as a man muffled to the ears in furs, is asked how he endures it. You go with your face bare, he answers; I am all face. The Duke of Florence's fool tells his warmly wrapped master to put on all his clothes at once. The same training shows in bare heads: Massinissa will not cover his in storm; Herodotus finds Egyptian skulls harder than Persian ones because one people went shaved from infancy while the other wore biggins and turbans; Caesar and Hannibal march uncovered in rain.
Montaigne cannot endure to go unbuttoned or untied; his neighbouring labourers would think themselves in chains if they were so braced. Near Piacenza the Romans charge with blood congealed, while Hannibal spreads fires through his camp and has oil distributed so his men may anoint themselves against the freezing wind. As far as clothes go, the King of Mexico changes his apparel four times a day and never puts it on again, giving away what he leaves off, and no dish of his table is served twice. Custom has shut the avenues so carefully that the essay has to trespass to speak, and the trespass still leaves Montaigne buttoned in a world where other bodies have learned a different skin.
Coming Up in Chapter 36
Montaigne opens by refusing the common error of judging another by himself. Though engaged to one form, he admits a thousand ways of living, and though he is not continent, he sincerely approves the Feuillans and Capuchins and would have every man measured by his own model.
