When the wife of the Roman Emperor Aelius Verus complains to him about his extramarital affairs, he explains that he has the affairs for reasons of conscience, since marriage is a bond of honor and dignity, not wanton lust. Picture the look on the face of the Emperor's wife as he explains this to her. Montaigne chooses the above anecdote to liven up his tepid defence of room-temperature marital sex. “These immodest caresses to which the first ardor incites us in the games o

In Montaigne’s day, a tale is told of a hungry porter who holds his bread over a cook’s spit to smoke it in the fumes of a roasting goose. When the porter is finished eating his bread, the cook demands payment for the goose smoke. The porter refuses to pay on the grounds that the smoke was escaping into the air and didn't technically belong to the cook. Among the crowd that gathers to watch the ensuing dispute is a famous fool whose great-grandfather was once a royal jester.

El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz Michel de Montaigne's noble roots are shallower than most. His great-grandfather, Ramon Felipe Eyquem, makes a fortune in the herring fishery along the southwest coast of France, buys a chateau in the village of Montaigne in the 1470s and settles in as its Seigneur before his hands have entirely lost the smell of fish. It’s bad enough that Michel, the fourth Seigneur de Montaigne, has taken up the vulgar hobby of book writing. No