ODOURS AND MOUSTACHES
[Sidenote: _Montaigne_]
The simplest and merely natural smells are most pleasing unto me; which
care ought chiefly to concerne women. In the verie heart of Barbarie,
the Scithian women, after they have washed themselves, did sprinkle,
dawbe, and powder all their bodies and faces over with a certain
odoriferous drug that groweth in their countrie: which dust and dawbing
being taken away, when they come neere men, or their husbands, they
remaine verie cleane, and with a verie sweet savouring perfume. What
odour soever it be, it is strange to see what hold it will take on me,
and how apt my skin is to receive it. He that complaineth against
nature, that she hath not created man with a fit instrument, to carrie
sweet smells fast-tied to his nose, is much to blame; for they carrie
themselves. As for me in particular, my mostachoes, which are verie
thick, serve me for that purpose. Let me but approach my gloves or my
hand kercher to them, their smell will sticke upon them a whole day.
They manifest the place I come from. The close-smacking,
sweetnesse-moving, love-alluring, and greedi-smirking kisses of youth,
were heretofore wont to sticke on them many houres after; yet I am
little subject to those popular diseases that are taken by conversation
and bred by the contagion of the ayre: And I have escaped those of my
time of which there hath beene many and severall kinds, both in the
Townes, about me, and in our Armie: We read of Socrates that during the
time of many plagues and relapses of the pestilence, which so often
infested the Citie of Athens, he never forsooke or went out of the
Towne: yet was he the only man that was never infected, or that felt any
sickness.
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