Is it not making bricks without straw, or very like, to build books without science and without art? The fantasies of music are conducted by art, mine by chance.
And his answer is very earnest.
At least I have this from my course of study (discipline), that never a man treated a subject that he understood and knew better than I do the one that I have undertaken, and that in this subject I am the most learned man alive; secondly, that no one ever penetrated farther into its material, nor peeled more sedulously its parts and their consequences, nor reached more precisely and fully the end that he had proposed for his job. To accomplish this, I need bring no more than fidelity. That I have, the most sincere and pure that is to be found (III. ii).
Montaigne’s method, then, is deliberate.[90] If he passes, as in Des coches (III. vi), from examples of lavish display to the cruelty of Spanish conquest in Mexico and frankly begins his last paragraph with retumbons à nos coches, that is because he usually prefers to take us on a journey around his idea. Hundreds of readers have found the talk of such a guide on the way more winsome than the conclusions of others after they have come home.
The art of growing an idea by successive additions sets the pace also for his sentences. Knowing Latin, he tells us, as a native language, and better than French, he puts aside Cicero for Seneca. This is more than the rejection of Ciceronianism, more than preference for Seneca’s philosophy; it is in detail the same aggregative method that he uses for the composition of a whole essay. That vernacular sentences were commonly more aggregative than those of Augustan Latin may have been a reason for his choosing the vernacular. At any rate, he keeps the two languages quite apart. Instead of applying his Latin to the pointing of his French sentences, he prefers to let them accumulate as in talk.
(1) They do still worse who keep the revelation of some intention of hatred toward their neighbor for their last will,
(2) having hid it during their lives,
(3) and show that they care little for their own honor,
(4) irritating the offense by bringing it to mind,
(5) instead of bringing it to conscience,