Montaigne says the laws that try to curb idle expense in meat and clothes work against their own end. The true way would be to beget in men a contempt of silks and gold as vain, frivolous, and useless. Instead those laws augment the honours of such things and enhance their value. To enact that none but princes shall eat turbot, or wear velvet or gold lace, and to interdict those things to the people, is only to bring them into greater esteem and set everyone more agog to eat and wear them. Kings have other ensigns of grandeur; these excesses are more excusable in anyone else than in a prince. Distinction of quality is still requisite in a state, but other nations mark it without this corruption.
Custom in indifferent things establishes itself with strange speed and becomes authority. France had scarce worn cloth a year, in compliance with the court mourning for Henry II, before silks grew into such contempt that a man so clad was presently concluded a citizen. Silks were divided betwixt the physicians and surgeons, and even when almost everyone went in the same habit, some one mark still distinguished the several conditions of men. Greasy chamois and linen doublets become the fashion in the armies, while richness of habit falls into contempt. Let kings but lead the dance and begin to leave off this expense, and in a month the business will be done throughout the kingdom, without edict or ordinance. It should rather be proclaimed that no one should wear scarlet or goldsmiths' work but courtesans and tumblers. Zeleucus reclaimed the Locrians by that same invention: jewels, embroidered robes, and gold rings were left to drunk women, public prostitutes, and bravos, so that infamous exceptions diverted citizens from superfluities by honour and ambition rather than by force.
Our kings can do what they please in such external reformations; their own inclination stands for a law. What princes themselves do, they seem to prescribe, and whatever is done at court passes for a rule through the rest of France. Let the courtiers fall out with the abominable breeches, the great bellied doublets unfit for arms, the long effeminate locks, and the foolish kissing of equals. Let them not permit a gentleman to appear without his sword, unbuttoned as though from the house of office, or to stand a long time bare to so many petty kings. These errors look superficial, yet they are of ill augury: the whole fabric is crazy and tottering when the roughcast of the walls begins to cleave. Plato esteems nothing more pestiferous than giving young men liberty to hunt novelty in habits, dances, and songs until old institutions are nauseated. The laws that keep their true credit are those whose beginning no one knows, or that there ever was any other.
Coming Up in Chapter 44
A wise man, Montaigne says, may keep the right path without keeping the same pace, and need not stand like a motionless Colossus. Even virtue in flesh would pulse faster going to assault than to dinner. On the morning of battle with Darius, Alexander sleeps so long that Parmenio must wake him.
