[TO TRH EDITOR OF TRH "SPECTATOR:] Sr,--The writer of the
gratifying review of my "Studies in Montaigne" in the Spectator of April 15th, while expressing an interest in my suggestion that Montaigne and Bacon met at Poitiers in 1577, manifests a natural hesitancy to admit that a boy of seventeen would call a man of forty-four " juvenis." But it is to be remembered that the passage in question occurs in Bacon's " Historia Vitae et Mortis," published in 1623, and probably written not much earlier ; and that if, as I believe, Bacon applied this term to Montaigne, it was not when he himself was a boy of seven- teen that he did so, but forty-six years afterward when he was a man of sixty-three, and when in retrospect the figure of his interlocutor (supposing it to be that of Montaigne) may easily have assumed a not " elderly " aspect. Your reviewer points out a carelessness on my part in saying : " Mademoiselle ' was then the title of married women." I ought to have limited the statement. It was not, however, merely the wives of the bourgeoisie, as your reviewer states, that were called "Mademoiselle." The wives of those nobles who were " chevaliers " (of course a large majority) alone received the title of "Madame." I must allow myself a few more words on still another point. Nothing could be farther from my thought (as I think it was from his own) than to imply that Montaigne had the slightest " claim to nobility." I only wished to insist upon the point, too often lost sight of, that his great-grandfather (his "ancestor "), who bought the Chateau de Montaigne, is scarcely rightly described in Scaliger's contemptuous phrase, adopted by your reviewer, as a "seller of salt fish," since he was a successful merchant, dealing largely in wines and drystuffs, and by inheritance from a maternal uncle, and marriage with an heiress, one of the richest citizens of Bordeaux. Not only the condition in life of Montaigne himself, but that of his immediate " ancestors " (a word he used inaccurately, but I think with simplicity), was that of possessors of a large and valuable and well-cared-for estate, with dependencies which made them landlords of a consider- able number of tenants.—I am, Sir, &c., Cambridge, Massachusetts. GRACE NORTON.
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