least, not with the idea of being distressed if we do not see the end of it.[1] We are born to act [and I am of opinion that not only an emperor, as Vespasian said, but every high-spirited man ought to die standing up].[2]
I desire that a man should act, (c) and prolong the employments of life as long as he can, (a) and that death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent regarding it, and even more regarding my unfinished garden. I have seen a man die, who, when he was at the last gasp, incessantly complained because his fate cut the thread of the history he had in hand of the fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings.
(b) Illud in his rebus non addunt, nec tibi earum
Jam desiderium rerum super insidet una.[4]
(a) We must get rid of such ordinary and harmful ideas. Just as our cemeteries have been laid out adjoining the churches and in the most frequented part of the towns, in order, as Lycurgus said,[5] to accustom the lower classes, the women and children, not to take fright at the sight of a dead body, and that the constant spectacle of bones and tombs and funerals might warn us of our condition —
(b) Quin etiam exhilarare viris convivia cæde
Mos olim, et miscere epulis spectacula dira
Certantum ferro, sæpe et super ipsa cadentum
Pocula, respersis non parco sanguine mensis;[6]
- ↑ The Édition Municipale has pour n’en voir la fin; all other texts, pour en voir la fin.
- ↑ The passage in brackets is omitted in the Édition Municipale and in 1595.
- ↑ When I die, may I find my release in the midst of my work and surrounded by it. — Ovid, Amores, II, 10.36.
- ↑ They do not add thereto: “Neither does there now remain in your mind any longing for these things.” — Lucretius, III, 900.
- ↑ See Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus.
- ↑ Once it was the custom to enliven a banquet for the revellers by carnage, and to combine with the feast the horrible spectacle of fighting swordsmen, who often fell over the cups, and the tables were splashed with blood.— Silius Italicus, XI, 51. Montaigne took it from J. Lipsius, Saturnalium sermonum libri duo, I, 6.
