SOURCE_MANIFEST — Montaigne
Montaigne died in 1592 — everything is deep public domain. The English used
here is the Charles Cotton translation (17th c.), revised and edited by
William Carew Hazlitt (1877), from Project Gutenberg eBook #3600
(Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete, release 2004, updated 2023).
One translator, one idiom, one eBook — the whole evidence pool is cut from
this single file (pg3600.txt), line ranges recorded below.
| essay | file | pg3600 lines | words |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Author to the Reader (Au lecteur) | to_the_reader_pg3600.txt |
2030–2049 | 237 |
| I.8 Of Idleness | i08_of_idleness_pg3600.txt |
3127–3190 | 451 |
| I.19 That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die | i19_to_study_philosophy_is_to_learn_to_die_pg3600.txt |
4433–5210 | 7 237 |
| I.22 Of Custom, and that we should not easily change a law received | i22_of_custom_pg3600.txt |
5786–6489 | 7 674 |
| I.25 Of the Education of Children | i25_of_the_education_of_children_pg3600.txt |
7516–9074 | 16 688 |
| I.30 Of Cannibals | i30_of_cannibals_pg3600.txt |
10216–10765 | 6 013 |
| I.38 Of Solitude | i38_of_solitude_pg3600.txt |
11580–12087 | 4 900 |
| II.1 Of the Inconstancy of our Actions | ii01_of_the_inconstancy_of_our_actions_pg3600.txt |
16400–16702 | 2 938 |
| II.12 Apology for Raimond Sebond — bounded slice, 3 segments | ii12_apology_for_raimond_sebond_SLICE_pg3600.txt |
21248–21289, 22836–23041, 23491–28292 | 49 849 |
| II.17 Of Presumption | ii17_of_presumption_pg3600.txt |
29587–30927 | 13 831 |
| III.2 Of Repentance | iii02_of_repentance_pg3600.txt |
36805–37360 | 6 361 |
| III.13 Of Experience | iii13_of_experience_pg3600.txt |
48554–50878 | 24 885 |
Total: ~141 000 words of Cotton English across 12 files. Chapter
numbering follows the Cotton/Hazlitt edition (e.g. «Of Cannibals» is Book I
Chapter XXX there; modern French editions count it I.31). The KB cites
essays by the Cotton/Hazlitt number with the modern number in TERMINOLOGY.
Kept verbatim from the eBook, including: curly quotes and apostrophes,
‘Tis, OCR-era slips of the source («PHILOSOPY» in the I.19 chapter head,
«refusç» in the cat passage, «cusmographers», «tobe»), Hazlitt's bracketed
translations of Latin verse, and editorial footnotes that fall inside a
chapter's line range. Segment markers inside the Apology slice file are
ours and are excluded from the verbatim gate by construction (no >
quote may span them).
Why Cotton, not Florio
Both are PD. Cotton (per the task hint) is the cleaner, more literal
seventeenth-century rendering; Florio (1603) is Elizabethan, freer, and
would make paraphrase-drift harder to police. Single translator keeps the
evidence pool idiom-uniform.
Why this slice of the Apology
The full II.12 is ~80k words, mostly the fideist defense of Sebond and a
long natural-history catalogue. The three segments keep the skeptical core
Montaigne is famous for:
- lines 21248–21289 — presumption as «our natural and original disease»,
the cat passage; - lines 22836–23041 — «The plague of man is the opinion of wisdom»,
Pyrrho and the hog, knowledge vs. ignorance of evils; - lines 23491–28292 — the taxonomy of philosophies (dogmatists /
Academics / Pyrrhonians), the profession of Pyrrhonism and ataraxy,
«Que sais-je?» and the balance, reason's dependence on the senses, the
critique of the senses, the flux passage («no communication with
being»), and the chapter's closing («raise himself above humanity»).
Everything of the Apology outside these ranges is outside the corpus:
no quote from it may appear in the KB.
Evidence-language decision
English (Cotton/Hazlitt, #3600) is the single evidence pool. Every >
blockquote in the vault is a verbatim, whitespace-normalized substring of
one of the 12 corpus files, checked by scripts/verify_quotes.py.
French is used only as arbiter where a line is load-bearing:
fr_arbiter_passages.txt holds the 1595/1907 French (fr.wikisource,
Michaud 1907 dual edition) for «Que sais-je ?», «branloire perenne» / «Ie ne
peinds pas l'estre», and «Au lecteur». The arbiter file is reference-only
and NOT part of the verbatim gate.
RU layer
No clean public-domain Russian translation of the Essays was used (the
standard Russian Montaigne — Бобович, «Литературные памятники» — is modern
and non-PD). All Russian renderings in this vault are our own careful,
academic-leaning translations from the Cotton English, cross-checked against
the French arbiter passages where available, marked «перевод наш». English
is the primary evidence pool; Russian never carries a > blockquote and is
never machine-matched.