EFTA01154280.pdf

52 MONTAIGNE THE MAN distaste for affairs, it suited him better to have one minute's walk to his refuge than to seek it outside with any effort. Nobody might enter his tower, least of all his wife. As for friends, no doubt his cronies and fellow-scholars were permitted to find him there, but his visitors had to come on his own terms. He never escorted them to the door. He knew, he said, that they liked it, but it went against his grain, and he thought it better to offend people whom he only saw occasionally, than to offend himself every day. On the third floor of his tower he had a bedroom in which to rest, or spend the night, should he desire to escape from home. On the ground floor was his chapel, so that he could hear Mass thence in comfort, as he lay in bed above. There was a picture here of St. Michael and the Dragon—the picture which, no doubt, supplied the opportunist, Montaigne, with his analogy, when he wrote about his willingness to carry a candle in one hand for St. Michael, and a candle for the Dragon in the other. But it was the floor above the chapel—the second floor—which was the important one. This was the floor of the library—the raison d'être of the back- shop.' Another small chamber led out of it, EFTA01154280