ABSTRACT
Montaigne, in that same famous essay of his on America, tells about the visit of three Indians to Rouen when Charles IX, then still a child, was there with the Court. Their observations, preserved for us by Montaigne, included one which brings up, in simple and even brutal terms, the question I intend to consider in this second part of my book. Montaigne first explains that the Indians “have a way in their language of speaking of men as halves of one another,” a graphic and striking expression of man’s essential solidarity and equality with his fellow man. They said, Montaigne tells us, that “they had noticed that there were among us men full and gorged with all sorts of good things, and that their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these needy halves could endure such injustice, and did not take the others by the throat, or set fire to their houses.”
