Alexander the Great, it is said, had sweat that smelled sweet, a rare constitution whose cause Plutarch and others have been inquisitive into. Ordinary human bodies, Montaigne says, work the other way. Their best excellency is to be exempt from smell. Even the sweetness of the purest breath has no greater perfection than to be without any offensive smell, like the breath of healthful children. Plautus said a woman smells sweetest when she smells not at all. Those who make use of fine exotic perfumes are with good reason suspected of some natural imperfection they endeavour by these odours to conceal. To smell, though well, is still to stink. Martial would rather not smell at all than smell well.
Montaigne is nevertheless a great lover of good smells and hates the ill ones, which he thinks he scents at a greater distance than other men. Of smells, the simple and natural please him most. He leaves that chiefly to the ladies, then tells of Scythian women who, after bathing, powdered and crusted their faces and bodies with an odoriferous drug of their country, and who were later found perfumed and sleek. His full mustachios perform the office of a vehicle: if he strokes them with his gloves or handkerchief, the smell will not out a whole day, and they manifest where he has been. The close kisses of his wanton age left a sweetness on his lips for several hours after. And yet he has ever found himself little subject to epidemic diseases caught from the sick or from the air. Socrates, who never departed from Athens during the frequent plagues that infested the city, was never infected.
Physicians might, he believes, extract greater utility from odours than they do, for smells alter him and work upon his spirits. That is why he approves the ancient use of incense in churches: to cheer us and to rouse the senses for contemplation. He would have liked to taste the cooks who seasoned meats with exotic odours for the king of Tunis, Muley-Hassam, who landed at Naples in 1543 to meet Charles the Emperor. One peacock and two pheasants cost a hundred ducats to dress, and when the carver cut them up the dining-room, the apartments, and the adjoining streets filled with a vapour that did not presently vanish. Montaigne's chiefest care in choosing lodgings is always to avoid a thick and stinking air. Venice and Paris, beautiful as they are, very much lessen the kindness he has for them: the one by the offensive smell of her marshes, the other of her dirt.
Coming Up in Chapter 56
Montaigne hands his formless fancies to the Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, into which he was born and in which he will die, then still ventures on prayer. God has prescribed the Lord's Prayer word by word, and Montaigne would have Christians keep it in the mouth at table, at rising, and at bed.
