with all that was going on, and begged him to return as soon as his circumstances would permit.  “We are looking after our gates and guards, and a little more carefully in your absence. . . .  If anything important and fresh occurs, I shall send you a messenger immediately, so that if you hear no news from me, you may consider that nothing has happened.”  He begs M. de Matignon to remember, however, that he might not have time to warn him, “entreating you to consider that such movements are usually so sudden, that if they do occur they will take me by the throat without any warning.”  Besides, he will do everything to ascertain the march of events beforehand.  “I will do what I can to hear news from all parts, and to that end shall visit and observe the inclinations of all sorts of men.”  Lastly, after keeping the marshal informed of everything, of the least rumours abroad in the city, he pressed him to return, assuring him “that we spare neither our care, nor, if need be, our lives to preserve everything in obedience to the king.”  Montaigne was never prodigal of protestations and praises, and what with others was a mere form of speech, was with him a real undertaking and the truth.

Things, however, became worse and worse:  civil war broke out; friendly or hostile parties (the difference was not great) infested the country.  Montaigne, who went to his country house as often as he could, whenever the duties of his office, which was drawing near its term, did not oblige him to be in Bordeaux, was exposed to every sort of insult and outrage.  “I underwent,” he said, “the inconveniences that moderation brings along with it in such a disease.  I was pitied on all hands; to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, and to the Guelph a Ghibelline.”  In the midst of his personal grievances he could disengage and raise his thoughts to reflections on the public misfortunes and on the degradation of men’s characters.  Considering closely the disorder of parties, and all the abject and wretched things which developed so quickly, he was ashamed to see leaders of renown stoop and debase themselves by cowardly complacency; for in those circumstances we know, like him, “that in the word of command to march, draw up, wheel, and the like, we obey him indeed; but all the rest is dissolute and free.”  “It pleases me,” said Montaigne ironically, “to observe how much pusillanimity and cowardice there is in ambition; by how abject and servile ways it must arrive at its end.”  Despising ambition as he did, he was not sorry to see it unmasked by such practices and degraded in his sight.  However, his goodness of heart overcoming his pride and contempt, he adds sadly, “it displeases me to see good and generous natures, and that are capable of justice, every day corrupted in the management and command of this confusion. . . .  We had ill-contrived souls enough without spoiling those that were generous and good.”  He rather sought in that misfortune an opportunity and motive for fortifying and strengthening