From my youth, I have sometimes kept out of the way at meals; either to sharpen my appetite against the next morning (for, as Epicurus fasted and made lean meals to accustom his pleasure to make shift without abundance, I, on the contrary, do it to prepare my pleasure to make better and more cheerful use of abundance); or else I fasted to preserve my vigour for the service of some action of body or mind:  for both the one and the other of these is cruelly dulled in me by repletion; and, above all things, I hate that foolish coupling of so healthful and sprightly a goddess with that little belching god, bloated with the fumes of his liquor—­[ Montaigne did not approve of coupling Bacchus with Venus.]—­ or to cure my sick stomach, or for want of fit company; for I say, as the same Epicurus did, that one is not so much to regard what he eats, as with whom; and I commend Chilo, that he would not engage himself to be at Periander’s feast till he was first informed who were to be the other guests; no dish is so acceptable to me, nor no sauce so appetising, as that which is extracted from society.  I think it more wholesome to eat more leisurely and less, and to eat oftener; but I would have appetite and hunger attended to; I should take no pleasure to be fed with three or four pitiful and stinted repasts a day, after a medicinal manner:  who will assure me that, if I have a good appetite in the morning, I shall have the same at supper?  But we old fellows especially, let us take the first opportune time of eating, and leave to almanac-makers hopes and prognostics.  The utmost fruit of my health is pleasure; let us take hold of the present and known.  I avoid the invariable in these laws of fasting; he who would have one form serve him, let him avoid the continuing it; we harden ourselves in it; our strength is there stupefied and laid asleep; six months after, you shall find your stomach so inured to it, that all you have got is the loss of your liberty of doing otherwise but to your prejudice.

I never keep my legs and thighs warmer in winter than in summer; one simple pair of silk stockings is all.  I have suffered myself, for the relief of my colds, to keep my head warmer, and my belly upon the account of my colic:  my diseases in a few days habituate themselves thereto, and disdained my ordinary provisions:  we soon get from a coif to a kerchief over it, from a simple cap to a quilted hat; the trimmings of the doublet must not merely serve for ornament:  there must be added a hare’s skin or a vulture’s skin, and a cap under the hat:  follow this gradation, and you will go a very fine way to work.  I will do nothing of the sort, and would willingly leave off what I have begun.  If you fall into any new inconvenience, all this is labour lost; you are accustomed to it; seek out some other.  Thus do they destroy themselves who submit to be pestered with these enforced and superstitious rules; they must add something more, and something more after that; there is no end on’t.