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The Renaissance and Its Ancients: Dismembering and Devouring

My Essais, acknowledges Montaigne, are full of quotations from the Ancients. But the greater the dependence, the more important it is to claim one's freedom, one's infidelity: "I, among so many borrowings of mine, am very glad to be able to hide one now and then, disguising and altering it for a new service" (III, 12; 809).1 In a sentence which, it is true, was crossed out later, he goes as far as to make a strange comparison concerning the authors he quotes: "Like those who steal horses, I paint their mane and tail, and sometimes blind them in one eye" (ibid.). The Ancients, who are so encroaching that one must disguise and mutilate them, are, for Montaigne, much more than a myth. They are omnipresent, they saturate his intellectual space. Their books fill up his library; their mottoes are engraved on the beams of the ceiling; their examples haunt his memory and, when he sets himself to write, their words, their ideas flow from his pen. For all the humanists, the Ancients are the unavoidable partners. Whether observing the closest fidelity to the models or acknowledging the necessity of a deviation, whether insisting on the continuity or the change, on the possibility or the impossibility of equaling the masters,