At the beginning of the essay, translator M.E. Screech notes something vital about it:
[In this chapter Montaigne makes a pun on the French taste for bigarures, which means, as Cotgrave explains it in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1632) both a medley of ‘sundry colours mingled together’ and a discourse ‘running odly and fantastically, from one matter to another’. This chapter is an example of such a colourful medley, hopping from thoughts on Man’s natural nakedness to examples of extraordinary cold.]
There’s very little else that holds this brief, amusing trifle together than the aforementioned pun. Montaigne is taking glory because he can write about any subject he wishes—and without an extensive amount of knowledge of the subject — while conducting a bull session on why human beings wear clothing when most mammals carry around their own protection.
He doesn’t really provide an answer to that question, although he makes this interesting point:
If we had been endowed at birth with undergarments and trousers, there can be no doubt that Nature would have armed those parts of us which remained exposed to the violence of the seasons with a thicker skin, as she has done for our fingertips and the soles of our feet.
Interesting, because Montaigne is basically making a case for evolution, even if it’s the minor sort that happens through a lifetime instead of using natural selection over scores of generations.
Otherwise, there’s not much to point out in this essay. It feels like something you’d come across on the back pages of a magazine, a light wrap-up piece. I enjoy the fact that he talks about his own preference for black-and-white clothing over the more colorful garb, more typical of the French.
Twice a year, I work backstage at a work event for about a week at a time and am required to I wear all black every day. At the close of the event, I am always so sick of wearing black that I swear not to do so again until the next convention.
And then, inevitably, within several days, I’m back to wearing all black. By now I should know myself well enough to avoid making such sweeping pronouncements about anything
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