Montaigne will make a hodge-podge of names the way mixed herbs disappear under one name of a sallet. Every nation has names taken, he knows not why, in no good sense: with us, John, William, Benedict. Princes seem to carry fatal names as well: Ptolemies, Henries, Charleses, Baldwins, and the Williams of Aquitaine. At a feast of Henry, Duke of Normandy, the nobility divided for sport by names, and the first troop seated a hundred and ten knights named William, without reckoning ordinary gentlemen and servants. Geta served whole courses by the first letter of the meats. A well-sounding name, easy to say and easy to remember, is convenient besides: kings know us by it, and we call first the servants whose names sit ready on the tongue. Montaigne has seen Henry II unable to hit of a Gascon gentleman's name, and fain to call a maid of honour by the general name of her race. Socrates thinks it worthy a father's care to give fine names to his children.
A name can halt a life. At Poitiers a debauched young fellow asked a wench her name, heard Mary, and felt himself so pierced by that sacred name of the Blessed Virgin that he sent her away and became a reformed man; Notre Dame la Grande rose on the place. That reproof went in by the ear, right into the soul. Pythagoras, seeing wild young fellows complot to violate an honest house, had the singing wench change her wanton airs, and a grave spondaic music laid their ardour asleep. The modern reformation, Montaigne notes, has quarrelled even with Charles, Louis, and Francis, to fill the world with Methuselahs, Ezekiels, and Malachis. A neighbour hears other kind of men in Don Grumedan than in Pierre, Guillot, and Michel. Jacques Amyot pleases him by leaving Latin names entire, because turning Vaudemont into Vallemontanus loses the persons and the story. Worse is the French custom of calling every one by his manor or seigneury. A younger brother's title passes, ten years after his death, into a stranger's hand, and families are confounded; the royal house itself makes a new surname at every partition until the original is lost. Anyone fortune raises gets genealogical titles unknown to his father and is inoculated into some illustrious stem. How many gentlemen in France are, by their own account, of royal extraction? More, Montaigne thinks, than will confess they are not.
Gentlemen assembled about a dispute of seigneury alleged extraction, resemblance of name or arms, an old worm-eaten patent; the least of them was great-grandchild to some foreign king. When they sat down to dinner, a friend of Montaigne's retired with profound conges and said it would ill become him to sit among so many princes. Let us, in God's name, he told them, satisfy ourselves with what our fathers were contented with, with what we are. Arms have no more security than surnames: a son-in-law or a paltry purchaser can carry Montaigne's trefoils and lion's paw into another house. Glory, for which the world is turned upside down, is in the end Peter or William: a sound, or three or four dashes with a pen, so easy to vary that he would fain know whether so many victories belong to Guesquin, Glesquin, or Gueaquin. Denisot built the Count d'Alsinois by anagram and endowed it with his poetry; Suetonius cashiered Lenis for Tranquillus; Captain Bayard's honour is Peter Terrail's deeds under another name. History already knows three Socrateses and eight Aristotles. Who hinders Montaigne's groom from calling himself Pompey the Great? What then fixes those flourishes of the pen upon the deceased groom, or upon the Pompey who had his head cut off in Egypt? Survivors tickle themselves with verses written for Epaminondas and Africanus, and flatter themselves they shall one day wear the same character. Juvenal's commanders have aroused themselves for these: so much greater is the thirst for fame than for virtue.
