Montaigne on Quebec’s Secularism Bill 21

A chaque pied son soulier.[1]

-          Montaigne, Essais (1588 edition), Book III, Ch. 13.

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[1] This has been translated as “For every foot its own shoe” by Charles Cotton in 1685.  More recently Donald Frame’s translation is “For every foot its own shoe.” And M.A. Screech has it as “For every foot its proper shoe.”  I am indebted to Peter Burke’s concise work on Montaigne in the Oxford “Past Masters” series which brought my attention to the metaphor, and he translates it as: “Let every foot have its own shoe”. 

See: Les Essais (eds. P. Villeny and V-L. Saulnier), online edition by P. Desan, University of Chicago, p. 1066; Essays of Michel de Montaigne, tr. Charles Cotton, ed. William Hazlitt, Project Gutenberg;   The Complete Works, tr. Donald Frame (Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 2003), p. 994; The Complete Essays, tr. M.A. Screech (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), p. 1209; Peter Burke, Montaigne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 33.