melons. My
father hated all sorts of sauces; I love them all. Eating too much hurts
me; but, as to the quality of what I eat, I do not yet certainly know
that any sort of meat disagrees with me; neither have I observed that
either full moon or decrease, autumn or spring, have any influence upon
me. We have in us motions that are inconstant and unknown; for example,
I found radishes first grateful to my stomach, since that nauseous, and
now again grateful. In several other things, I find my stomach and
appetite vary after the same manner; I have changed again and again from
white wine to claret, from claret to white wine.

I am a great lover of fish, and consequently make my fasts feasts and
feasts fasts; and I believe what some people say, that it is more easy of
digestion than flesh. As I make a conscience of eating flesh upon
fish-days, so does my taste make a conscience of mixing fish and flesh;
the difference betwixt them seems to me too remote.

From my youth, I have sometimes kept out of the way at meals; either to
sharpen my appetite against the next morning (for, as Epicurus fasted and
made lean meals to accustom his pleasure to make shift without abundance,
I, on the contrary, do it to prepare my pleasure to make better and more
cheerful use of abundance); or else I fasted to preserve my vigour for
the service of some action of body or mind: for both the one and the
other of these is cruelly dulled in me by repletion; and, above all
things, I hate that foolish coupling of so healthful and sprightly a
goddess with that little belching god, bloated with the fumes of his
liquor--[ Montaigne did not approve of coupling Bacchus with Venus.]--
or to cure my sick stomach, or for want of fit company; for I say, as the
same Epicurus did, that one is not so much to regard what he eats, as
with whom; and I commend Chilo, that he would not engage himself to be at
Periander's feast till he was first informed who were to be the other
guests; no dish is so acceptable to me, nor no sauce so appetising, as
that which is extracted from society. I think it more wholesome to eat
more leisurely and less, and to eat oftener; but I would have appetite
and hunger attended to; I should take no pleasure to be fed with three or
four pitiful and stinted repasts a day, after a medicinal manner: who
will assure me that, if I have a good appetite in the morning, I shall
have the same at supper? But we old fellows especially, let us t