A severe illness of a few days carried off this admirable friend. Montaigne recounts, in a letter to his father, the progress of the malady, and his death bed; and nothing can be more affecting, nor better prove the noble and virtuous qualities of both, than these sad hours when the one prepared to die, and the other ministered to the dying. This loss was never forgotten; and we find, in the journal of his travels in Italy, written eighteen years after, an observation, that he fell one morning into so painful a reverie concerning M. de la Boëtie that his health was affected by it. Montaigne married at the age of thirty-three: he married neither from wish nor choice. "Of my own will," he says, "I would have shunned marrying Wisdom herself, had she asked me. But we strive in vain; custom, and the uses of common life, carry us away: example, not choice, leads me in almost all my actions. In this, truly, I did not go of my own accord, but was led, or carried, by extraneous circumstances; and certainly I was then less prepared, and more averse than now that I have tried it. But I have conducted myself better than I expected. One may keep one's liberty prudently; but, when once one has entered on the obligation, one must observe the laws of a common duty." Montaigne made, therefore, a good husband, though not enthusiastically attached, and a good father--indeed, in all the duties of life, he acted better than was expected of him. At his death, his father[5] left him his estate, fancying that it would be wasted through his indolence and carelessness; but Montaigne's faults were negative; and he easily brought himself to regard his income as the limit of his expenses, and even kept within it. His hatred of business and trouble, joined to sound common sense, led him to understand that ease could be best attained by limiting his desires to his means, and by the degree of order necessary to know what these means were; and his practice accorded with this conclusion.