A monstrous war!  Other wars are bent against strangers, this against itself, destroying itself with its own poison.  It is of so malignant and ruinous a nature, that it ruins itself with the rest; and with its own rage mangles and tears itself to pieces.  We more often see it dissolve of itself than through scarcity of any necessary thing or by force of the enemy.  All discipline evades it; it comes to compose sedition, and is itself full of it; would chastise disobedience, and itself is the example; and, employed for the defence of the laws, rebels against its own.  What a condition are we in!  Our physic makes us sick!

                    “Nostre mal s’empoisonne
                    Du secours qu’on luy donne.”

“Exuperat magis, aegrescitque medendo.”

     ["Our disease is poisoned with its very remedies”—­AEnead, xii. 46.]

               “Omnia fanda, nefanda, malo permista furore,
               Justificam nobis mentem avertere deorum.”

     ["Right and wrong, all shuffled together in this wicked fury, have
     deprived us of the gods’ protection.” 
     —­Catullus, De Nuptiis Pelei et Thetidos, V. 405.]

In the beginning of these popular maladies, one may distinguish the sound from the sick; but when they come to continue, as ours have done, the whole body is then infected from head to foot; no part is free from corruption, for there is no air that men so greedily draw in that diffuses itself so soon and that penetrates so deep as that of licence.  Our armies only subsist and are kept together by the cement of foreigners; for of Frenchmen there is now no constant and regular army to be made.  What a shame it is! there is no longer any discipline but what we see in the mercenary soldiers.  As to ourselves, our conduct is at discretion, and that not of the chief, but every one at his own.  The general has a harder game to play within than he has without; he it is who has to follow, to court the soldiers, to give way to them; he alone has to obey:  all the rest if disolution and free licence.  It pleases me to observe how much pusillanimity and cowardice there is in ambition; by how abject and servile ways it must arrive at its end; but 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.  Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation.  We had ill-formed souls enough, without spoiling those that were generous and good; so that, if we hold on, there will scarcely remain any with whom to intrust the health of this State of ours, in case fortune chance to restore it: 

              “Hunc saltem everso juvenem succurrere seclo,
               Ne prohibete.”

["Forbid not, at least, that this young man repair this ruined age.” 
—­Virgil, Georg., i. 500.  Montaigne probably refers to Henry, king
of Navarre, afterwards Henry iv.]