Every few phrases, a new way of looking at things occurs to him, so he changes direction. Even when his thoughts are most irrational and dreamlike, his writing follows them. “I cannot keep my subject still,” he says. “It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.” Anyone is free to go with him as far as seems desirable, and let him meander off by himself if it doesn’t. Sooner or later, your paths will cross again.
Having created a new genre by writing in this way, Montaigne created essais: his new term for it. Today, the word essay falls with a dull thud. It reminds many people of the exercises imposed at school or college to test knowledge of the reading list: reworkings of other writers’ arguments with a boring introduction and a facile conclusion stuck into each end like two forks in a corncob. Discourses of that sort existed in Montaigne’s day, but essais did not. Essayer, in French, means simply to try. To essay something is to test or taste it, or give it a whirl. One seventeenth-century Montaignist defined it as firing a pistol to see if it shoots straight, or trying out a horse to see if it handles well. On the whole, Montaigne discovered that the pistol shot all over the place and the horse galloped out of control, but this did not bother him. He was delighted to see his work come out so unpredictably.
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He may never have planned to create a one-man literary revolution, but in retrospect he knew what he had done. “It is the only book in the world of its kind,” he wrote, “a book with a wild and eccentric plan.” Or, as more often seemed the case, with no plan at all. The Essays was not written in neat order, from beginning to end. It grew by slow encrustation, like a coral reef, from 1572 to 1592. The only thing that eventually stopped it was Montaigne’s death.
Looked at another way, it never stopped at all. It continued to grow, not through endless writing but through endless reading. From the first sixteenth-century neighbor or friend to browse through a draft from Montaigne’s desk to the very last human being (or other conscious entity) to extract it from the memory banks of a future virtual library, every new reading means a new Essays. Readers approach him from their private perspectives, contributing their own experience of life. At the same time, these experiences are molded by broad trends, which come and go in leisurely formation. Anyone looking over four hundred and thirty years of Montaigne-reading can see these trends building up and dissolving like clouds in a sky, or crowds on a railway platform between commuter trains. Each way of reading seems natural while it is on the scene; then a new style comes in and the old one departs, sometimes becoming so outmoded that it is barely comprehensible to anyone but historians.
The Essays is thus much more than a book. It is a centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him: a conversation which changes through history, while starting out afresh almost every time with that cry of “How did he know all that about me?” Mostly it remains a two-person encounter between writer and reader. But sidelong chat goes on among the readers too; consciously or not, each generation approaches Montaigne with expectations derived from its contemporaries and predecessors. As the story goes on, the scene becomes more crowded. It turns from a private dinner party to a great lively banquet, with Montaigne as an unwitting master of ceremonies.
This book is about Montaigne, the man and writer. It is also about Montaigne, the long party—that accumulation of shared and private conversations over four hundred and thirty years. The ride will be a strange and bumpy one, for Montaigne’s book has not slid smoothly through time like a pebble in a stream, becoming ever more streamlined and polished as it goes. It has tumbled about in no set direction, picking up debris, sometimes snagging on awkward outcrops. My story rolls with the current too. It goes “befuddled and staggering,” with frequent changes of tack. At first, it sticks more closely to the man himself: Montaigne’s life, personality, and literary career. Later, it diverges ever further into tales of his book and his readers, all the way up to very recent ones. Since it is a twenty-first-century book, it is inevitably pervaded by a twenty-first-century Montaigne. As one of his favorite adages had it, there is no escaping our perspective: we can walk only on our own legs, and sit only on our own bum.
Most of those who come to the Essays want something from it. They may be seeking entertainment, or enlightenment, or historical understanding, or something more personal. As the novelist Gustave Flaubert advised a friend who was wondering how to approach Montaigne:
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Don’t read him as children do, for amusement, nor as the ambitious do, to be instructed. No, read him in order to live.
Impressed by Flaubert’s command, I am taking the Renaissance question “How to live?” as a guide-rope for finding a way through the tangle of Montaigne’s life and afterlife. The question remains the same throughout, but the chapters take the form of twenty different answers—each an answer that Montaigne might be imagined as having given. In reality, he usually responded to questions with flurries of further questions and a profusion of anecdotes, often all pointing in different directions and leading to contradictory conclusions. The questions and stories were his answers, or further ways of trying the question out.
Similarly, each of the twenty possible answers in this book will take the form of something anecdotal: an episode or theme from Montaigne’s life, or from the lives of his readers. There will be no neat solutions, but these twenty “essays” at an answer will allow us to eavesdrop on snippets of the long conversation, and to enjoy the company of Montaigne himself—most genial of interlocutors and hosts.
1. Q. How to live? A. Don’t worry about death
HANGING BY THE TIP OF HIS LIPS
MONTAIGNE WAS NOT always a natural at social gatherings. From time to time, in youth, while his friends were dancing, laughing, and drinking, he would sit apart under a cloud. His companions barely recognized him on these occasions; they were more used to seeing him flirting with women, or animatedly debating a new idea that had struck him. They would wonder whether he had taken offense at something they had said. In truth, as he confided later in his Essays, when he was in this mood he was barely aware of his surroundings at all. Amid the festivities, he was thinking about some frightening true tale he had recently heard—perhaps one about a young man who, having left a similar feast a few days earlier complaining of a touch of mild fever, had died of that fever almost before his fellow party-goers had got over their hangovers. If death could play such tricks, then only the flimsiest membrane separated Montaigne himself from the void at every moment. He became so afraid of losing his life that he could no longer enjoy it while he had it.
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In his twenties, Montaigne suffered this morbid obsession because he had spent too much time reading classical philosophers. Death was a topic of which the ancients never tired. Cicero summed up their principle neatly: “To philosophize is to learn how to die.” Montaigne himself would one day borrow this dire thought for a chapter title.
But if his problems began with a surfeit of philosophy at an impressionable age, they did not end just because he grew up. As he reached his thirties, when he might have been expected to gain a more measured perspective, Montaigne’s sense of the oppressive proximity of death became stronger than ever, and more personal. Death turned from an abstraction into a reality, and began scything its way through almost everyone he cared about, getting closer to himself. When he was thirty, in 1563, his best friend Étienne de La Boétie was killed by the plague. In 1568, his father died, probably of complications following a kidney-stone attack. In the spring of the following year, Montaigne lost his younger brother Arnaud de Saint-Martin to a freak sporting accident. He himself had just got married then; the first baby of this marriage would live to the age of two months, dying in August 1570. Montaigne went on to lose four more children: of six, only one survived to become an adult. This series of bereavements made death less nebulous as a threat, but it was hardly reassuring. His fears we
re as strong as ever.
The most painful loss was apparently that of La Boétie; Montaigne loved him more than anyone. But the most shocking must have been that of his brother Arnaud. At just twenty-seven, Arnaud was struck on the head by a ball while playing the contemporary version of tennis, the jeu de paume. It cannot have been a very forceful blow, and he showed no immediate effect, but five or six hours later he lost consciousness and died, presumably from a clot or hemorrhage. No one would have expected a simple knock on the head to cut off the life of a healthy man. It made no sense, and was even more personally threatening than the story of the young man who had died of fever. “With such frequent and ordinary examples passing before our eyes,” wrote Montaigne of Arnaud, “how can we possibly rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment it is gripping us by the throat?”
Rid himself of this thought he could not; nor did he even want to. He was still under the sway of his philosophers. “Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death,” he wrote in an early essay on the subject:
At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. At the stumbling of a horse, the fall of a tile, the slightest pin prick let us promptly chew on this: Well, what if it were death itself?
If you ran through the images of your death often enough, said his favorite sages, the Stoics, it could never catch you by surprise. Knowing how well prepared you were, you should be freed to live without fear. But Montaigne found the opposite. The more intensely he imagined the accidents that might befall him and his friends, the less calm he felt. Even if he managed, fleetingly, to accept the idea in the abstract, he could never accommodate it in detail. His mind filled with visions of injuries and fevers; or of people weeping at his deathbed, and perhaps the “touch of a well-known hand” laid on his brow to bid him farewell. He imagined the world closing around the hole where he had been: his possessions being gathered up, and his clothes distributed among friends and servants. These thoughts did not free him; they imprisoned him.
Fortunately, this constriction did not last. By his forties and fifties, Montaigne was liberated into light-heartedness. He was able to write the most fluid and life-loving of his essays, and he showed almost no remaining sign of his earlier morbid state of mind. We only know that it ever existed because his book tells us about it. He now refused to worry about anything. Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over. From being the gloomiest among his acquaintances, he became the most carefree of middle-aged men, and a master of the art of living well. The cure lay in a journey to the heart of the problem: a dramatic encounter with his own death, followed by an extended midlife crisis which led him to the writing of his Essays.
The great meeting between Montaigne and death happened on a day some time in 1569 or early 1570—the exact period is uncertain—when he was out doing one of the things that usually dissipated his anxieties and gave him a feeling of escape: riding his horse.
He was about thirty-six at this time, and felt he had a lot to escape from. Following his father’s death, he had inherited full responsibility for the family château and estate in the Dordogne. It was beautiful land, in an area covered, then as now, by vineyards, soft hills, villages, and tracts of forest. But for Montaigne it represented the burden of duty. On the estate, someone was always plucking at his sleeve, wanting something or finding fault with things he had done. He was the seigneur: everything came back to him.
Fortunately, it was not usually difficult to find an excuse to be somewhere else. As he had done since he was twenty-four, Montaigne worked as a magistrate in Bordeaux, the regional capital some thirty miles away—so there were always reasons to go there. Then there were the far-flung vineyards of the Montaigne property itself, scattered in separate parcels around the countryside for miles, and useful for visits if he felt so inclined. He also made occasional calls on the neighbors who lived in other châteaus of the area; it was important to stay on good terms. All these tasks formed excellent justifications for a ride through the woods on a sunny day.
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Out on the forest paths, Montaigne’s thoughts could wander as widely as he wished, although even here he was invariably accompanied by servants and acquaintances. People rarely went around alone in the sixteenth century. But he could spur his horse away from boring conversations, or turn his mind aside in order to daydream, watching the light glinting in the canopy of trees over the forest path. Was it really true, he might wonder, that a man’s semen came from the marrow of the spinal column, as Plato said? Could a remora fish really be so strong that it could hold back a whole ship just by fastening its lips on it and sucking? And what about the strange incident he had seen at home the other day, when his cat gazed intently into a tree until a bird fell out of it, dead, right between her paws? What power did she have? Such speculations were so absorbing that Montaigne sometimes forgot to pay full attention to the path and to what his companions were doing.
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On this occasion, he was progressing calmly through the woods with a group of other mounted men, all or most of them his employees, some three or four miles from the château. It was an easy ride and he was expecting no trouble, so he had chosen a placid horse of no great strength. He was wearing ordinary clothes: breeches, a shirt, a doublet, probably a cloak. His sword was at his side—a nobleman never went anywhere without one—but he wore no armor or other special protection. Yet there were always dangers outside town or château walls: robbers were common, and France was presently suspended in a lawless state between two outbreaks of civil war. Groups of unemployed soldiers roamed the countryside, looking for any loot they could get in lieu of wages lost during the peace interlude. Despite his anxieties about death in general, Montaigne usually remained calm about such specific risks. He did not flinch from every suspicious stranger as others did, or jump out of his skin at hearing unidentified sounds in the woods. Yet the prevailing tension must have got to him too, for when a great weight slammed into him from behind, his first thought was that he had been attacked deliberately. It felt like a shot from an arquebus, the rifle-like firearm of the day.
He had no time to wonder why anyone should fire a weapon at him. The thing struck him “like a thunderbolt”: his horse was knocked down, and Montaigne himself went flying. He hit the ground hard, meters away, and instantly lost consciousness.
There lay the horse bowled over and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword, which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having no more motion or feeling than a log.
The arquebus idea came to him later; in fact, there was no weapon involved. What had happened was that one of Montaigne’s servants, a muscular man riding behind him on a powerful horse, had goaded his mount into a full gallop along the path—“in order to show his daring and get ahead of his companions,” as Montaigne surmised. He somehow failed to notice Montaigne in his way, or perhaps miscalculated the width of the path and thought he could pass. Instead, he “came down like a colossus on the little man and little horse.”
The rest of the riders stopped in consternation. Montaigne’s servants dismounted and tried to revive him; he remained unconscious. They picked him up and, with difficulty, started carrying his limp body back towards the castle. On the way, he came back to life. His first feeling was that he had been hit on the head (and his loss of consciousness suggests that this was right), yet he also started coughing, as if he had received a blow to the chest. Seeing him struggling for air, his men lifted him into a more upright position, and did their best to carry him at that awkward angle. Several times, he threw up lumps of clotted blood. This was an alarming symptom, but the coughing and vomiting helped to keep him awake.
As they approached the castle, he regained his wits more and more, yet he still felt as if he were slip
ping towards death, not emerging into life. His vision remained blurred; he could barely make out the light. He became aware of his body, but what he saw was hardly comforting, for his clothes were spattered with the blood he had been throwing up. He just had time to wonder about the arquebus before drifting back into semi-oblivion.
During what followed, as witnesses later told him, Montaigne thrashed about. He ripped at his doublet with his nails, as if to rid himself of a weight. “My stomach was oppressed with the clotted blood; my hands flew to it of their own accord, as they often do where we itch, against the intention of our will.” It looked as if he were trying to rip his own body apart, or perhaps to pull it away from him so his spirit could depart. All this time, however, his inward feelings were tranquil:
It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep.
The servants continued to carry him towards the house, in this state of inward languor and outward agitation. His family noticed the commotion and ran out to him—“with the outcries customary in such cases,” as he later put it. They asked what had happened. Montaigne was able to give answers, but not coherent ones. He saw his wife picking her way awkwardly over the uneven path and considered telling his men to give her a horse to ride. You would think that all this must have come from “a wide-awake soul,” he wrote. Yet, “the fact is that I was not there at all.” He had traveled far away. “These were idle thoughts, in the clouds, set in motion by the sensations of the eyes and ears; they did not come from within me”—chez moi, a term usually meaning “at home.” All his actions and words were somehow produced by the body alone. “What the soul contributed was in a dream, touched very lightly, and merely licked and sprinkled, as it were, by the soft impression of the senses.” Montaigne and life, it seemed, were about to part company with neither regret nor formal farewells, like two drunken guests leaving a feast too dazed to say goodbye.
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