How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  Both “Don’t worry about death” and “Pay attention” were answers to a midlife loss of direction: they emerged from the experience of a man who had lived long enough to make errors and false starts. Yet they also marked a beginning, bringing about the birth of his new essay-writing self.

  3. Q. How to live? A. Be born

  MICHEAU

  MONTAIGNE’S ORIGINAL SELF, the one that did not write essays but merely moved and breathed like everyone else, had a simpler start. He came into this world on February 28, 1533—the same year as the future Queen Elizabeth I of England. His birth took place between eleven o’clock and noon, in the family château, which would be his lifelong home. He was named Michel, but, to his father at least, he would always be known as Micheau. This nickname appears even in documents as formal as his father’s will, after the boy had turned into a man.

  In the Essays, Montaigne wrote that he had been carried in his mother’s womb for eleven months. This was an odd claim, since it was well known that such a prodigy of nature was barely possible. Mischievous minds would surely have leaped to indelicate conclusions. In Rabelais’s Gargantua, the eponymous giant also spends eleven months in his mother’s womb. “Does this sound strange?” Rabelais asks, and answers himself with a series of tongue-in-cheek case studies in which lawyers were clever enough to prove the legitimacy even of a child whose supposed father had died eleven months before its birth. “Thanks to these learned laws, our virtuous widows may, for two months after their husbands’ demise, freely indulge in games of grip-crupper with a pig in the poke, heels over head and to their hearts’ content.” Montaigne had read Rabelais, and must have thought of the obvious jokes, but he seemed unconcerned.

  No paternity doubts emerge elsewhere in the Essays. Montaigne even muses on the power of inheritance in his family, describing traits that had come down to himself through his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, including an easygoing honesty and a propensity to kidney stones. He seems to have considered himself very much his father’s son.

  Montaigne was happy to talk about honesty and hereditary ailments, but was more discreet about other aspects of his heritage, for he came not from ancient aristocracy but, on both sides, from several generations of upwardly mobile merchants. He even made out that the Montaigne estate was the place where “most” of his ancestors were born, a blatant fudge: his own father was the first to be born there.

  The property itself had been in the family for longer, it was true. Montaigne’s great-grandfather Ramon Eyquem bought it in 1477, towards the end of a long, successful money-making life dealing in wine, fish, and woad—the plant from which blue dye is extracted, an important local product. Ramon’s son Grimon did little to the estate other than adding an oak- and cedar-lined path to the nearby church. But he built up the Eyquem wealth even further, and started another family tradition by getting involved in Bordeaux politics. At some point he gave up trade and began living “nobly,” an important step. Being noble was not a je ne sais quoi of class and style; it was a technical matter, and the main rule was that you and your descendants must engage in no trade and pay no taxes for at least three generations. Grimon’s son Pierre also avoided trade, so noble status fell, for the first time, on generation number three: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne himself. By that time, ironically, his father Pierre had turned the estate from a tract of land into a successful commercial concern. The château became the head office of a fairly large wine-producing business, yielding tens of thousands of liters of wine per year. It still produces wine today. This was allowed: you could make as much money as you liked selling the products of your own land, without its being considered trade.

  (illustration credit i3.1)

  The Eyquem story exemplifies the degree of mobility then possible, at least towards the upper end of the social scale. New nobles sometimes found it hard to gain full respect, but this mainly applied to the so-called “nobility of the robe,” who were elevated for contributions to political and civil service, not to the “nobility of the sword,” who gained their status from property, as Montaigne’s family did, and prided themselves on the military calling that was expected to come with it. Peasants, meanwhile, mostly stayed where they had always been: on the bottom. Their lives were still dominated by the local seigneur—in this case, the head of the Eyquem family. He owned their homes, employed them, and rented out the use of his wine press and bread oven. When Montaigne’s turn came along, he probably remained a typical seigneur from their point of view, however much he praised the peasants’ wisdom in the Essays—a book no agricultural worker on his estate was ever likely to read.

  The entry on Montaigne’s birth in the family book states that he was born “in confiniis Burdigalensium et Petragorensium”: on the borders between Bordeaux and Périgord. This was significant, for Bordeaux was mostly Catholic, while Périgord was dominated by supporters of the new religion, the Reformist or Protestant one. The Eyquem family had to keep its peace with both sides of a divergence that would split Europe in two throughout Montaigne’s life, and far beyond it.

  The Reformation was still very recent news: its inception is generally dated to 1517, the year in which Martin Luther wrote a treatise attacking the Catholic tradition of selling fast-track earthly pardons or “indulgences,” and reportedly nailed it to the church door in Wittenberg by way of a challenge. Widely circulated, the treatise set off a major rebellion against the Church. The Pope responded first by dismissing Luther as a “drunken German,” then by excommunicating him. The secular powers of the Holy Roman Empire pronounced Luther an outlaw who could be killed on sight, thus making him a popular hero. Eventually most of Europe would fall into two camps: those who kept loyal to the Church, and those who backed Luther’s rebellion. There was never anything geographically or ideologically neat about this division. Europe fell apart like a crumbling loaf, not like an apple halved by a knife. Almost every country was affected, but few went decisively one way or the other. In many places, especially France, the fault lines ran through villages and even families, rather than between separate territories.

  Montaigne’s region of Guyenne (also known as Aquitaine) did show a pattern: roughly, the countryside went one way and the capital city went the other. Tensions were heightened by the general feeling, already widespread in the area before the Reformation, that Aquitaine did not form part of France. It had its own language, and few historical connections with the north of the country. For a long time, it had been English territory. The English were driven out only in 1451, by French invaders who were seen as alien and untrustworthy raptors. People harked back to the old era with nostalgia, not because they really missed the English, but because they so hated the northern French. Rebellions were frequent. The authorities built three heavy fortresses to keep the city under watch: the Château Trompette, the Fort du Hâ, and Fort Louis. All were hated; all are gone today.

  Where possible, Bordeaux formed diplomatic links with anyone other than its conquerors. In Montaigne’s time the area was much influenced by the Protestant court of Navarre, based in Béarn in the Spanish border country to the south. It also kept up ties with England, which developed a taste for Bordeaux wine. An English wine fleet called there regularly to top up supplies—good news for local suppliers, not least the Eyquem family of Montaigne.

  As the estate grew in importance, so “Montaigne” came to overshadow the older Eyquem name. The latter had, and has, a distinctive regional sound. One branch of the family is still remembered for its legendary wine estate: the Château d’Yquem. Despite a preference for locality and particularity in most things, Montaigne became the first to sideline this and to be known by the more generic French name of his home. Biographers have been harsh on him for this decision, but he was only extending a move his father had already made by styling himself “de Montaigne” when he signed documents. Whereas his father dropped this extra part if he wanted to be brief, Montaigne tended to leave out the “Eyquem.”

  If Michel Eyqu
em de Montaigne, product of a meteoric social rise, hastened over his father’s mercantile background in the Essays, it could have been to ensure that his book appealed to the right sort of noble, leisured market; it could also be that he simply gave it little thought. His father probably avoided regaling him with stories about their origins; Montaigne may have grown up barely aware of them. No doubt vanity came into it too: it was one of the many petty weaknesses Montaigne cheerfully acknowledged, adding:

  If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off—though I don’t know.

  That final coda—“though I don’t know”—is pure Montaigne. One must imagine it appended, in spirit, to almost everything he ever wrote. His whole philosophy is captured in this paragraph. Yes, he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way so we may as well relax and live with it.

  If his father’s background was murky, a more significant secret apparently lurked in the family of his mother, Antoinette de Louppes de Villeneuve. Her ancestors were merchants; they were also immigrants from Spain, which, in the context of the time, strongly suggests that they were Jewish refugees. Like many others, they converted to Christianity under duress, and left following the persecution of Jews on the peninsula in the late fifteenth century.

  Montaigne may not have realized that he was of Jewish origin, if indeed he was. He showed no more than mild interest in the subject, mentioning Jews only occasionally in the Essays, usually either neutrally or with sympathy, but never in a way that suggested he felt personally involved. Traveling in Italy later in life, he visited synagogues and witnessed a circumcision, but he did all this with the same curiosity he showed for everything else he came across: Protestant church services, executions, brothels, trick fountains, rock gardens, and unusual furniture.

  He also expressed a wry skepticism about the “conversions” of some recent refugees—reasonably enough, since the act was not done by choice. If, as some have speculated, this was meant as a subtle dig at his mother’s family, it would not be surprising. In his political life, he suffered constant difficulties from some of her relatives in Bordeaux. He even seems to have had trouble getting on with Antoinette herself.

  Montaigne’s mother was undoubtedly a strong character, but convention kept her powerless and frustrated. She married young, as women usually did, and probably had little choice in the matter. Pierre Eyquem was considerably older than her: in the marriage document, of January 15, 1529, he is described as thirty-three, while she is only “of age.” This could mean anything between twelve and twenty-five; since she managed to have the last of her children over thirty years after the wedding, she must have been at the young end of this range. Two babies were born before Michel, though neither survived. She was very likely still a teenager when he came along, yet by then she had been married for four years.

  If there was anything childish or demure about her as a bride, that soon vanished. Legal documents surviving from various periods of her life create a picture of someone fierce, opinionated, and very able. Her husband’s first will, of 1561, left the task of managing the household to her rather than to his eldest son, though he later changed this. In 1561, Pierre Eyquem either lacked faith in Micheau (nearly twenty-eight at the time) or had an exceptionally high opinion of his wife—which would be impressive in an era when women were barely considered capable of rational thought.

  The second will, of September 22, 1567, showed more trust in his son, but by now Pierre seemed to feel the need to use the document to command his wife to love her children, and to tell them to respect and honor her. He apparently feared that she and her eldest son would not live together amicably, for he ordered Montaigne to find accommodation for her elsewhere if living at the family estate did not work out. Antoinette did stay with him and his family for a long time after her husband’s death—until about 1587—but not very convivially. Another legal document drawn up between mother and son on August 31, 1568, asserted Antoinette’s right to receive “all filial honor, respect, and service,” as well as servants to attend her and a hundred livres tournois a year for petty cash. She, in turn, had to acknowledge his “command and mastery” of the château and estate. The contract implies that Antoinette felt poorly looked after, while Montaigne wanted to stop her meddling.

  Things got worse. Antoinette’s own will, written on April 19, 1597—five years after her son’s death, for she outlived him—stated that she did not wish to be buried on the estate, and virtually cut Montaigne’s one child Léonor out of the inheritance. She complained that her original dowry should have gone on buying more property, yet did not, and she added: “I worked for a period of forty years in the house of Montaigne with my husband in such a way that by my work, care, and management the said house has been greatly increased in value, improved, and enlarged.” Her son Montaigne enjoyed the benefit of this throughout his life, as did Léonor, who thus became quite “rich and opulent” enough and needed nothing more. Finally, Antoinette remarked that she knew herself to be “of an age easy to circumvent”; she was probably around eighty. It seems that she feared a challenge to the will on grounds of senility.

  Reading the frequent confessions of indolence and ineptitude that fill Montaigne’s book, it is easy to see why Antoinette thought the estate was neglected during the time he was in charge of it. He found practical affairs a bore and avoided them as much as possible. It is more surprising that she should make the same complaint against her husband Pierre, for he does not come across in the Essays that way at all. Montaigne makes his father sound like a dynamo of a man, devoted to his duties and always at work on home improvements—restless and interventionist to a fault.

  Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne was a fifteenth-century man, just—he was born on September 29, 1495. Everything about him proclaimed his remoteness from his son’s world. Following noble tradition, he took up the profession of war, being the first in his family to do so. Michel did not follow him in this. As a nobleman he was obliged to carry a sword, but there is no indication in the Essays that he unsheathed it very often. One contemporary, Brantôme, described Montaigne as “dragging” the sword around town and suggested that he confine himself to carrying a pen. No such aspersions could have been cast on Pierre, who rushed off at the first opportunity to join France’s wars in Italy.

  French forces had been regularly attacking and conquering states on the peninsula since 1494, and would continue doing so until 1559, when the Peace of Câteau Cambrésis stopped France’s foreign invasions and thus opened the way to its real sixteenth-century catastrophe: the civil wars. The Italian adventures were less damaging, but they were expensive and mostly pointless, as well as traumatic for those involved. Pierre plunged into battle some time around 1518. Apart from a brief interlude the year after that, he remained away from home until early 1529, when he came back to get married.

  Sixteenth-century warfare was a messy business, a matter less of battlefield glamour than of hypothermia, fever, hunger, disease, and infected sword cuts and gunshot wounds for which there was little effective treatment. Above all, there were sieges, in which civilians and soldiers alike were starved into surrender. Pierre may have been involved in sieges of Milan and Pavia in 1522, and perhaps also in a disastrous siege of Pavia in 1525, which ended with French soldiers being slaughtered in large numbers and the French king being taken prisoner. In later life Pierre would regale his family with hair-raising stories of his war experiences, including accounts of whole villages of starving people committing suicide en masse for lack of a better way out. If Montaigne grew up to prefer dragging a pen to a sword, perhaps this was why.

  The Italian wars may have been unedifying in one way, but in the literal sense of offering an education, they were highly improving for the French. Between sieges, Frenchmen encountered exciting ideas abou
t science, politics, philosophy, pedagogy, and fashionable manners. The high Italian Renaissance had petered out by now, but Italy was still by far the most advanced civilization in Europe. French soldiers learned new ways of thinking about almost everything, and when they came home they brought their discoveries with them. Pierre was certainly one of this breed of Italianized Frenchmen, influenced by their travels and by their own charismatic, modernizing king François I. Later kings gave up on François’s Renaissance ideal, and during the civil wars almost everyone lost faith in the future altogether—but in Pierre’s youth that disillusionment was a long way off. The ideals were still new enough to be exciting.

  (illustration credit i3.2)

  Except, perhaps, for having a more soldierly bearing than his son, Pierre was physically of the same stamp. Montaigne describes him as “a small man, full of vigor, and straight and well-proportioned in stature,” with “an attractive face, inclining to brown.” He was fit, and kept himself that way. He liked to exercise his biceps using canes filled with lead, and he wore shoes with leaded soles to train him for running and jumping. The latter was a particular talent. “Of his vaulting, he has left some small miracles in people’s memory,” wrote Montaigne. “I have seen him, past sixty, put our agility to shame: leap into the saddle in his furred gown, do a turn over the table on his thumb, hardly ever go up to his room without taking three or four steps at a time.”