Corpus boundary — Montaigne v1

Included

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, tr. Charles Cotton, ed. W.C. Hazlitt
(1877), Project Gutenberg #3600 — PROOF WORK. Eleven central essays plus the
author's preface, ~141k words:

• «К читателю» (Au lecteur; Hazlitt's rendering in the same PD volume,
  marked "Omitted by Cotton" — supplied by the editor)
• I.8 Of Idleness — рождение метода essai
• I.19 That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die
• I.22 Of Custom, and that we should not easily change a law received
• I.25 Of the Education of Children
• I.30 Of Cannibals
• I.38 Of Solitude
• II.1 Of the Inconstancy of our Actions
• II.12 Apology for Raimond Sebond — bounded slice, 3 segments
  (presumption/cat; plague-of-wisdom; the skeptical core from the taxonomy of
  philosophies through «Que sais-je?», senses, flux, to the chapter's close)
• II.17 Of Presumption
• III.2 Of Repentance
• III.13 Of Experience

Chapter numbers follow Cotton/Hazlitt (modern French editions shift Book I
numbers by one: Of Cannibals = I.31 there).

Included separately, marked

• French arbiter passages (sources/fr_arbiter_passages.txt): 1595/1907
  French for «Que sais-je?», «branloire perenne» / «je ne peinds pas
  l'estre», «Au lecteur». Reference-only, NOT part of the verbatim gate.

Excluded

• The ~90 remaining essays, including famous ones (Of Friendship, Of Books,
  Of Vanity, Of Physiognomy, Of Cruelty II.11, On some verses of Virgil) —
  quotes from them may NOT appear in the KB. In particular «смерть — конец,
  но не цель жизни» (III.12) is outside the corpus.
• The Apology outside the three segments (the fideist defense of Sebond, the
  long natural-history catalogue, the astronomy survey between segments).
• Travel Journal, letters, the Ephemeris marginalia.
• Modern translations (Frame, Screech, Бобович) — not PD; reference-only at
  most, never evidence.
• Internet quote collections; «Монтень сказал…» без указания эссе.

Editorial-strata caveat

Montaigne wrote in layers (A: 1580, B: 1588, C: 1595 marginalia). The Cotton
text is the 1595 composite; the corpus does NOT encode the strata, so this KB
must not claim «ранний/поздний Монтень» from within a single essay. Where the
KB speaks of drift (I.19 → III.13 on death), it relies on Book I vs Book III
composition dates, which is safe at essay granularity.

Reason

The Essays are huge (107 chapters, ~500k words); a bounded, coherent set of
the central self-portrait + skepticism + ethics essays keeps the evidence
pool auditable while covering every concept the debates need. The Apology is
sliced because its skeptical core is load-bearing for the debate persona
while the fideist catalogue sections are not; the slice boundaries are stated
line-exactly in the manifest, so the gate stays deterministic.