On the title page of one of the copies he worked on, Montaigne wrote the Latin words, ‘viresque acquirit eundo’, from Virgil: ‘It gathers force9 as it proceeds’. This might have referred to how well his book had been doing commercially; more likely, it described the way it had collected material by rolling like a snowball down a hill. Even Montaigne apparently feared that he was losing control of it. When he gave his friend Antoine Loisel a copy of the 1588 edition, his inscription asked Loisel to tell him what he thought of it – ‘for I fear I am getting worse10 as I go on’.
