himself.  Attacked one by one by many disagreeables and evils, which he would have endured more cheerfully in a heap—­that is to say, all at once--pursued by war, disease, by all the plagues (July 1585), in the course things were taking, he already asked himself to whom he and his could have recourse, of whom he could ask shelter and subsistence for his old age; and having looked and searched thoroughly all around, he found himself actually destitute and ruined. For, “to let a man’s self fall plumb down, and from so great a height, it ought to be in the arms of a solid, vigorous, and fortunate friendship.  They are very rare, if there be any.”  Speaking in such a manner, we perceive that La Boetie had been some time dead.  Then he felt that he must after all rely on himself in his distress, and must gain strength; now or never was the time to put into practice the lofty lessons he spent his life in collecting from the books of the philosophers.  He took heart again, and attained all the height of his virtue:  “In an ordinary and quiet time, a man prepares himself for moderate and common accidents; but in the confusion wherein we have been for these thirty years, every Frenchman, whether in particular or in general, sees himself every hour upon the point of the total ruin and overthrow of his fortune.”  And far from being discouraged and cursing fate for causing him to be born in so stormy an age, he suddenly congratulated himself:  “Let us thank fortune that has not made us live in an effeminate, idle and languishing age.”  Since the curiosity of wise men seeks the past for disturbances in states in order to learn the secrets of history, and, as we should say, the whole physiology of the body social, “so does my curiosity,” he declares, “make me in some sort please myself with seeing with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public death, its forms and symptoms; and, seeing I could not hinder it, am content to be destined to assist in it, and thereby to instruct myself.”  I shall not suggest a consolation of that sort to most people; the greater part of mankind does not possess the heroic and eager curiosity of Empedocles and the elder Pliny, the two intrepid men who went straight to the volcanoes and the disturbances of nature to examine them at close quarters, at the risk of destruction and death.  But to a man of Montaigne’s nature, the thought of that stoical observation gave him consolation even amid real evils.  Considering the condition of false peace and doubtful truce, the regime of dull and profound corruption which had preceded the last disturbances, he almost congratulated himself on seeing their cessation; for “it was,” he said of the regime of Henri iii., “an universal juncture of particular members, rotten to emulation of one another, and the most of them with inveterate ulcers, that neither required nor admitted of any cure.  This conclusion therefore did really more animate than depress me.”  Note that his health, usually delicate, is here raised to the level of his morality, although what it had suffered through the various disturbances might have been enough to undermine it.  He had the satisfaction of feeling that he had some hold against fortune, and that it would take a greater shock still to crush him.