He tutted over irresponsible graffiti: ‘What mischief is not done by those enormous pictures that boys spread about the passages and staircases of palaces! From these, women acquire a cruel contempt for our natural capacity.’ Does one conclude that Montaigne had a smallish penis? Yes, indeed, because he confessed later in the same essay that nature had treated him ‘unfairly and unkindly’, and he added a classical quotation: ‘Even the matrons – all too well they know – Look dimly on a man whose member’s small.’
