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BOOK III, CHAPTER V 47
all occasions, and however out of the common the subject you have in hand, he offers himself to your need and extends to you a liberal hand, inexhaustible in treasures and embel- lishments. It vexes me to be so greatly exposed to the accu- sation of pillage by those who are familiar with him. (c) I can not be with him so casually that I do not steal a leg or a wing from him.
(4) To carry out this purpose of mine, it also suits well that I should write in my own house, in an uncivilised region, where no one assists me or stimulates me, where I seldom meet a man who understands the Latin of his Pater Noster and who does not know French even less. I should have done it better elsewhere, but the work would have been less mine; and its chief aim and perfection is to be precisely mine. I should rightly correct an accidental error, of which, since I hasten on heedlessly, I am full; but the imperfections which are common and constant in me it would be disloyal to remove. When some one has said to me, or I have said to myself: “You make too much use of figures of speech; there you have a word of Gascon growth; there you have a haz- ardous expression” (I eschew none of those that are used on the French streets; they who think to combat usage with grammar make fools of themselves); “there you have an ignorant remark; there a paradoxical one; this other is too simple’’; (c) “you often play a part; it will be thought that you say in earnest what you say in an assumed character,” ! — (4) “Yes,” I answer, “but I correct heedless errors, not those of habit. Do I not commonly talk thus? Does not this represent me to the life? Enough. I have done what I desired to do: every one recognises me in my book and my . book in me.”
I have an aping and imitative tendency; when I under- took to write verses, — and I never wrote any but Latin ones, — they clearly betrayed what poet I had lately read; and of my first Essays some have a slightly extraneous flavour. (¢) At Paris I speak a somewhat different language from that I speak at Montaigne. (4) Whoever I regard atten- tively quickly stamps me with something belonging to him. What I examine I make my own: an ungainly bearing, a dis-
1 A feinte.