Another consideration, humbler and more humane, upheld him in his troubles, the consolation arising from a common misfortune, a misfortune shared by all, and the sight of the courage of others.  The people, especially the real people, they who are victims and not robbers, the peasants of his district, moved him by the manner in which they endured the same, or even worse, troubles than his.  The disease or plague which raged at that time in the country pressed chiefly on the poor; Montaigne learned from them resignation and the practice of philosophy.  “Let us look down upon the poor people that we see scattered upon the face of the earth, prone and intent upon their business, that neither know Aristotle nor Cato, example nor precept.  Even from these does nature every day extract effects of constancy and patience, more pure and manly than those we so inquisitively study in the schools.”  And he goes on to describe them working to the bitter end, even in their grief, even in disease, until their strength failed them.  “He that is now digging in my garden has this morning buried his father, or his son. . . .  They never keep their beds but to die.”  The whole chapter is fine, pathetic, to the point, evincing noble, stoical elevation of mind, and also the cheerful and affable disposition which Montaigne said, with truth, was his by inheritance, and in which he had been nourished.  There could be nothing better as regards “consolation in public calamities,” except a chapter of some not more human, but of some truly divine book, in which the hand of God should be everywhere visible, not perfunctorily, as with Montaigne, but actually and lovingly present.  In fact, the consolation Montaigne gives himself and others is perhaps as lofty and beautiful as human consolation without prayer can be.

He wrote the chapter, the twelfth of the third book, in the midst of the evils described, and before they were ended.  He concluded it in his graceful and poetical way with a collection of examples, “a heap of foreign flowers,” to which he furnished only the thread for fastening them together.

There is Montaigne to the life; no matter how seriously he spoke, it was always with the utmost charm.  To form an opinion on his style you have only to open him indifferently at any page and listen to his talk on any subject; there is none that he did not enliven and make suggestive.  In the chapter “Of Liars,” for instance, after enlarging on his lack of memory and giving a list of reasons by which he might console himself, he suddenly added this fresh and delightful reason, that, thanks to his faculty for forgetting, “the places I revisit, and the books I read over again, always smile upon me with a fresh novelty.”  It is thus that on every subject he touched he was continually new, and created sources of freshness.