Wherever I wish to go, I must break through some barrier of custom, so carefully has it bridled all our avenues. I wonder, in this chilly season, if the custom of going naked, recently found in these nations, is a custom forced by the warm temperature of the air, as we say of the Indians and Moors, or if it is the original state of men.
People of understanding, especially since everything under the sky, as the Holy Word says, is subject to the same laws, have become accustomed, in considerations similar to those here, where it is necessary to distinguish natural laws from contrived ones, to resort to the general police of the world, where there can be nothing counterfeit. Now, everything being exactly provided elsewhere with a net and needle to maintain its being, it is, in truth, incredible that we are the only ones produced in a defective and indigent state, and in a state that cannot maintain itself without foreign aid. Thus I maintain that, like plants, trees, animals and all living things, we are naturally equipped with sufficient cover to defend ourselves from the ravages of time,
Therefore, almost all things are covered with leather, or bristles, or shells, or callus, or bark (Lucretius)
so were we; but, like those who extinguish daylight with artificial light, we have extinguished our own means with borrowed means. And it is easy to see that it is custom that makes impossible for us what is not: for, of those nations that have no knowledge of clothing, there are some that sit under the same sky as we do; and then the most delicate part of us is the one that is always uncovered: the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the ears; for our peasants, as for our forefathers, the chest and the stomach.
If we were to go nose to nose with the conditions of cotillions and folk dances, there is no doubt that nature would have armed with a more hopeful skin what she had abandoned to the battery of the seasons, as she did the tips of the fingers and soles of the feet. Why does it seem so hard to believe? Between the way I am dressed and the way a peasant from my country is dressed, I find there is a greater distance than there is between him and a man who is dressed only in his skin. How many men, and in Turkey especially, go naked out of devotion. I don’t know who asked one of our beggars why he was seen in the middle of winter in just a shirt, as shivering as such a one who stands cowering in the snow up to his ears, how he could possibly have the patience: And you, sir, he replied, you have your face uncovered; now me, I am all face.
The Italians tell of the fool of the Duke of Florence, it seems to me, that his master, inquiring how he could bear the cold so poorly clad, to which he was well prevented himself: Follow, he said, my recipe for putting on all your accouterments, as I do mine, and you will suffer no more than I do. King Massinissa, even in extreme old age, cannot be persuaded to go about with his head covered, in spite of the cold, storm and rain that he endured. The same is said of the Emperor Severus. In the battles between the Egyptians and the Persians, Herodotus said that it had been noted by others and by him that, of those who died in battle, the test was incomparably harder for the Egyptians than for the Persians, because the Egyptians always wore their heads covered with headdresses and then turbans, those shaven from childhood and uncovered. And King Agesilaus observed until his old age to wear the same attire in winter as in summer. Caesar, says Suetonius, always marched ahead of his troops, and most often on foot, with his head uncovered, whether it was sunny or raining; and the same is said of Hannibal,
Then the top is bare, To welcome the insane showers of heavenly destruction. (Silius Italicus)
A Venetian who has lived there for a long time, and who has only just arrived, writes that in the Kingdom of Pegu, with the rest of the body clothed, men and women always go barefoot, even on horseback. And Plato marvelously advises, for the health of the whole body, not to give the feet and the head any covering other than that which nature has put there. The Pole who chose our own King as his, who is in truth one of the greatest Princes of our century, never wears gloves, nor changes, for winter and whatever the weather, the same hat that he wears to dinner. As I cannot bear to go unbuttoned and unfastened, the laborers in my neighborhood would feel hampered by it. Varro maintains that, when we were ordered to keep our heads uncovered in the presence of the Gods or the Magistrate, it was done more for our health, and to protect us from the inclemency of the weather, than for the sake of reverence.
And since we are on the subject of the cold, and François is accustomed to dressing us up (not me, because I hardly ever wear anything but black or white, in imitation of my father), let us add, from another source, that Captain Martin du Bellay said, on the voyage from Luxembourg, having seen frosts so harsh that the wine for the ammunition had to be cut with axes and hammers, was poured onto the soldiers in pitch, and they carried it away in baskets.
And the vessels stand naked, preserving their form. They drink wine, not drunk straight, but given in pieces. (Ovid)
The frosts are so harsh at the mouth of the Maeotian Marshes that in the same place where Mithridates’ lieutenant had fought a battle against the enemy on dry land and had defeated them, the summer came and he won another naval battle against them there. The Romans suffered great disadvantage in the battle they had against the Carthaginians near Placentia, because they went on the charge with frozen blood and limbs constrained by the cold, where Hannibal had caused fire to spread throughout his army, to warm up his soldiers, and distributed oil in bands, so that, by anointing themselves, they would make their nerves more supple and limber, and encrust the pores against the blows of the air and the frozen wind that was blowing at the time.
The retreat of the Greeks, from Babylon to their country, is famous for the difficulties and troubles they had to overcome. This was the case when, welcomed to the mountains of Armenia by a horrible snowstorm, they lost all knowledge of the country and the roads, and, being besieged outright, went a day and a night without food or drink, with most of their animals dead; many of them dead, many blinded by the glare of the snow, many with twisted limbs, many frozen stiff and motionless, yet all of them fully conscious. Alexander saw a nation in which fruit trees are buried in winter to protect them from frost. On the subject of clothing, the King of Mexico changed his attire four times a day, never wore the same clothes twice, using his power for his continual liberality and rewards; likewise, neither pot, dish, nor utensil from his kitchen and table were ever served to him twice.