It’s unlikely that Montaigne’s ancestors were aware that they were part of this “trial” (“essay” in the French).

Montaigne’s arithmetic is also a little off, since 1402+182=1584, and he’s writing in 1580.

“Domestic” has a wide range of meaning in Montaigne; it can have to do with the household, the multigenerational family, the nation (at the time torn by religious warfare), or even his own body.

Montaigne is willfully confusing the long tradition of knowledge passed down within a medical community with the savoir-vivre he’s picked up from his own personal experience.

Montaigne is being that guy, whose grandfather lived on a diet of cigarettes and whiskey until he died of old age peacefully in his sleep.

A fancy word for “kidneys.”

Montaigne had a complicated relationship with his father – who, among other things, forced his son to speak only in Latin in his early years – and mentions him frequently throughout the Essays. (He very rarely mentions his mother, or, for that matter, his wife or children.)

Needless to say, Montaigne is only interested in male children.

We finally arrive at the ostensible subject of the whole essay: the resemblance of children to fathers.

It was commonly thought in the Renaissance that all genetic information was contained in the sperm, with the woman providing only a receptacle. In Aristotle’s terms, the father provided the spiritual “form”; the mother, the physical “matter.”

There’s something proto-Romantic about Montaigne’s appeal to the immediate senses over and above the contrivances of the intellect.

“essayé”