CHAPTER XIII
THE CEREMONY AT INTERVIEWS OF KINGS
All subjects belong to conversation, and so all matters may be touched upon in these Essays. Montaigne recognises this, and also that the topic he now takes up is not a very interesting one, when he says: “There is no subject so trivial as not to deserve a place in this medley” — this collection of fragments. It is of royal ceremonies and of courtesies among “the great” that he talks. He had just been reading Guicciardini, and the account of the meeting of the Pope and emperor at Boulogne, in 1532, had entertained him and so he transported it to his own pages.
In 1562 there was published Anales et croniques de France depuis la destruction de Troyes jusques au temps des roy Louis onzieme, with additions bringing it down to the year of publication. The first part was composed by “feu maistre Nicolle Gilles,” who had been “secrettaire iudiciaire du Roy, et controlleur de son tresor.” Montaigne owned a copy of this volume and made in it some hundred and seventy annotations. It became in our day the property of the well-known Montaigne scholar, M. Dezeimeris, who has published an elaborate study of it.
Among many other indications that Montaigne may have had it occasionally in mind when writing, M. Dezeimeris suggests that a passage in the additions, “De l’entree de l’empereur et son fils, Roy des Romains [Charles] en la ville de Paris,” might have been the occasion of this Essay.
The last paragraph was added in 1595.
The little personal touch, “For my part … I do away with all ceremony,” was inserted in 1588, and was changed in 1595 to “so far as I can."
In a later Essay (“Of Vanity,” Book III, chapter 9) Montaigne says: “There is more of heartbreak than of consolation in taking leave of one’s friends [when setting out on a journey]; I willingly forget this duty of our manners’’; a detail of the feeling expressed earlier here.
THERE is no subject so trivial as not to deserve a place in this medley.[1] According to our ordinary conventions, it would be a signal discourtesy, both to an equal and even more to a great man, to fail to be at home when he had notified you that he was about to come to your house. Indeed, Queen Marguerite of Navarre went further and said, on this subject, that it is uncivil for a gentleman to leave his house, as is most often
- ↑ Rapsodie.
