How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

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  In terms of making him a native Latinist, it did bear fruit in these early years, but the seeds of that fruit did not germinate further. Eventually, through lack of practice, he ended up on the same level as any other well-educated young nobleman. The language lurked deep within him, though. When his father fainted from a kidney-stone attack, decades later, Montaigne exclaimed in Latin as he caught him in his arms.

  More lasting were the effects of Montaigne’s education on his personality. As happens with much early life experience, it benefited him in exactly the areas where it also damaged him. It set him apart from his household and from his whole contemporary world. This gave him independence of mind, but may have inclined him to a certain detachment in relationships. It gave him great expectations, since he grew up in the company of the greatest writers of antiquity rather than the provincial French of his neighborhood. Yet it also cut off other, more conventional, ambitions, because it led him to question everything that other people strove for. The young Montaigne was unique. He did not need to compete; he barely needed to exert himself. He grew up constrained by some of the most bizarre limits ever imposed on a child, and at the same time had almost unlimited freedom. He was a world unto himself.

  In the end he acquired good French, though never the restrained, immaculate version subsequent centuries liked to insist upon in their writers. He wrote idiosyncratically; some would accuse him of sounding like an undisciplined yokel. Still, French was his language of choice—not Latin. In the Essays he gives an odd reason for this. French could not be expected to last as long as the classical languages, he said; thus, his writings were doomed to ephemerality, and he could write in any way he liked without worrying about his reputation. The fact that it was not frozen in rigid perfection appealed to him on principle: if it was flawed, there was less pressure to use it impeccably.

  Montaigne usually disliked idealistic schemes, but in this case he approved of his father’s experiment. When he wrote about education himself, his ideas emerged as a more moderate version of Pierre’s—which were too extreme ever to have much appeal to anyone else. The contemporary Montaignesque writer Tabourot des Accords did suggest that a group of gentlemen might pool resources to bring up their children in a sort of Latin commune, since it was too hard to manage alone, but there is no sign that this was actually done.

  Less bizarre aspects of the sixteenth century’s “child centered” education did flourish through the years, all the way to the present. In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau made a cult of bringing up children in the light of nature; he borrowed some of his ideas from Montaigne, and especially from the uncharacteristically prescriptive essay Montaigne wrote about education.

  He had to be prescriptive, for the essay “Of Education” was more or less commissioned from him by a neighbor, the pregnant Diane de Foix, comtesse de Gurson, who wanted Montaigne’s opinion on how she should give her child (assuming it was a boy) the best start in life. Montaigne’s advice shows how pleased he was with his own early experiences. First, he said, she should restrain her maternal instincts sufficiently to bring in an outsider to be her son’s mentor instead; parents are too much at the mercy of their emotions. They cannot stop worrying about whether the boy might catch a cold in the rain, or be thrown from his horse, or have his skin cut in fencing practice. A tutor can be tougher. On the other hand, he must not be allowed to be cruel. Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one.

  He fulminates against the brutal methods of most schools. “Away with violence and compulsion!” If you enter a school in lesson time, he says, “you hear nothing but cries, both from tortured boys and from masters drunk with rage.” All this achieves is to put children off learning for life.

  Often, books need not be used at all. One learns dancing by dancing; one learns to play the lute by playing the lute. The same is true of thinking, and indeed of living. Every experience can be a learning opportunity: “a page’s prank, a servant’s blunder, a remark at table.” The child should learn to question everything: to “pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust.” Traveling is useful; so is socializing, which teaches the child to be open to others and to adapt to anyone he finds around him. Eccentricities should be ironed out early, because they make it difficult to get on with others. “I have seen men flee from the smell of apples more than from harquebus fire, others take fright at a mouse, others throw up at the sight of cream, and others at the plumping of a feather bed.” All this stands in the way of good relationships and of good living. It can be avoided, for young human beings are malleable.

  Or at least, they are malleable up to a point. Montaigne soon changes tack. Whatever you do, he says, you cannot really change inborn disposition. You can guide it or train it, but not get rid of it. In another essay he wrote, “There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a pattern all his own, a ruling pattern, which struggles against education.”

  Pierre, one imagines, had a less fatalistic view of human nature, for he thought that the young Micheau could be molded, and that the experiment was worth the trouble. With his usual can-do attitude, he set out to build and develop his son just as he set out to build and develop his estate.

  Alas, as with other projects, Pierre left the job unfinished, or so Montaigne believed. At the age of about six, the boy was abruptly removed from his unconventional hothouse and sent off to school like everyone else. All his life, he remained convinced that this was his fault: that some sign of his recalcitrance—his “ruling pattern”—had made his father give up. Or perhaps Pierre had merely caved in to convention, now that his original advisers were no longer around. It seems more likely that Pierre had always intended to send Micheau to school at a certain stage. Not understanding the plan, Montaigne read in a criticism of himself that was probably not there. The whole multistage progression, from peasant family to Latin nursery to school, amounted to a recipe for producing a perfect gentleman, independent of mind yet able to mold himself to society when necessary. Thus, in 1539, Montaigne joined other boys his age at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux.

  He would be a pupil there for a decade, until at least 1548, and to some extent would adjust to it, but at first it was a severe shock to his system. For a start, he had to get used to a city existence after the freedom of a boy’s life in the countryside. Bordeaux was some forty miles away from his home, several hours’ journey even on a fast horse. The trip was slowed further by the necessity of crossing the Dordogne on the way: a ferry picked travelers up from gentle green hills and vineyards, and dropped them in the heart of Bordeaux’s commercial district—a different world.

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  Walled and claustrophobic, clustered tightly around the river, sixteenth-century Bordeaux was not at all like the city of today. Its old streets were ripped out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to be replaced by boulevards and big creamy buildings which now give it a slightly abstract quality. In Montaigne’s day, there was nothing creamy about it. It was populous, having about twenty-five thousand residents, and very busy. Its river was full of shipping. Its banks were equipped for the unloading of cargo: mainly wine, as well as a richly aroma’d mixture of preserved fish, salt, and timber.

  The mood changed once one reached the Collège de Guyenne itself, which was set in a tranquil area of the city away from the commercial center and surrounded by elms. It was an excellent school, though Montaigne spoke ill of it. Its curriculum and methods sound formidable to a modern sensibility. Everything revolved around the rote study of Latin, the one subject in which Montaigne enjoyed an advantage so great that his teachers must have marveled at him. Both teachers and pupils were expected to converse in it. Just as in Montaigne’s own home, the school was full of awkward, stilted speech—but there the similarity ended. Here no gentle music was playe
d; there was no emphasis on pleasure and, most shockingly of all, no assumption that little Micheau was the center of the universe.

  Instead, he now had to fit in with everyone else. Classes began early in the morning with minute dissection of literary examples, usually from writers like Cicero who were least likely to appeal to young readers’ tastes. In the afternoons, they studied grammar in the abstract, without recourse to examples. In the evenings, texts were read out together with analyses dictated by the teacher, which the boys were expected to memorize and spout back on request.

  At first, Montaigne’s mastery of Latin got him quickly promoted to classes beyond his age group. But the bad influence of his less privileged classmates gradually destroyed his easy command of the language, so that—according to him—he left the school knowing less of it than when he arrived.

  In fact, the Collège was relatively adventurous and open minded, and some aspects of school life amused Montaigne more than he liked to admit. In the older classes, students competed in feats of oratory and debate, all in Latin of course, and with less attention to what they said than to how they said it. From these, Montaigne picked up rhetorical skills and critical habits of thought which he would use all his life. It was probably also here that he first encountered the idea of using “commonplace books”: notebooks in which to write down snippets one encountered in one’s reading, setting them in creative juxtaposition. In later years, as a teenager, Montaigne studied more interesting subjects, including philosophy—not, unfortunately, the kind he liked, which dealt with the question of how to live, but mostly Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. Some light relief was also allowed. A new teacher at the school, Marc-Antoine Muret, wrote and directed plays; Montaigne starred in one. He turned out to be a natural on stage, having (he wrote) an unexpected “assurance in expression and flexibility in voice and gesture.”

  All this occurred during a difficult period for the Collège. In 1547, the forward-thinking principal, André Gouvéa, was forced out by conservative political factions. He left for Portugal, taking his best teachers with him. The following year, upheavals broke out in Bordeaux itself: the salt-tax riots, which would cause such stress to Montaigne’s father during his term as mayor. The southwest had traditionally been exempt from this tax. Now, suddenly, the new king Henri II tried to impose it, with inflammatory results.

  Crowds of rebels assembled to protest, and for five days from August 17 to August 22, 1548, mobs roamed the streets setting fire to tax collectors’ houses. Some attacked the homes of anyone who looked rich, until the disorder threatened to turn into a general peasant uprising. A few tax collectors were killed. Their bodies were dragged through the streets and covered in heaps of salt to underline the point. In one of the worst incidents, Tristan de Moneins, the town’s lieutenant-general and governor—thus the king’s official representative—was lynched. He had shut himself up in the city’s massive royal citadel, the Château Trompette, but a crowd gathered outside and howled for him to come out. Perhaps thinking to earn their respect by facing up to them, he ventured forth, but it was a mistake. They beat him to death.

  Then fifteen, Montaigne was out in the streets, for the Collège had suspended classes during the violence. He witnessed the killing of Moneins, a scene he never forgot. It raised in his mind, perhaps for the first time, a question that would haunt the entire Essays in varying guises: whether it was better to win an enemy’s respect by an open display of defiance, or to throw yourself on his mercy and hope to win him over by submission or an appeal to his better self.

  In this case, Montaigne thought Moneins had failed because he was not sure what he was trying to do. Having decided to brave the crowd, he then lost his confidence and behaved with deference, sending mixed messages. He also underestimated the distorted psychology of a mob. Once worked up into a frenzy, it can only be either soothed or suppressed; it cannot be expected to show ordinary human sympathy. Moneins seemed not to know this. He expected the same fellow-feeling as he would from an individual.

  He was certainly brave to cast himself unarmed into a “sea of madmen.” But his only hope then would have been to maintain this bold face to the end. He

  should have swallowed the whole cup and not abandoned his role; whereas what happened to him was that after having seen the danger close up, he lost his nerve and changed once again that deflated and fawning countenance that he had assumed into a frightened one, filling his voice and his eyes with astonishment and penitence. Trying to hole up and hide, he inflamed them and called them down on himself.

  The shocking sight of Moneins’s murder, and no doubt of other disturbing scenes during that week, taught Montaigne a great deal about the psychological complexity of conflict and the difficulty of conducting oneself well in crises. In this case, the violence was eventually calmed, mainly by Montaigne’s future father-in-law, Geoffrey de La Chassaigne, who negotiated a truce. But the city would suffer a severe punishment for allowing such disobedience. Ten thousand royal troops were sent there in October under the Constable de Montmorency; the title “constable” officially meant only “chief of the royal stables,” but his job was one of immense power. The troops remained for over three months, with Montmorency conducting a reign of terror. He encouraged his men to loot and kill like an occupying force in a foreign country. Anyone directly identified as having taken part in the riots was broken on the wheel, or burned. Everything was done to humiliate Bordeaux physically, financially, and morally. It lost legal jurisdiction over its own affairs; its artillery and gunpowder were confiscated; its parlement was dissolved, and for a while it was governed by magistrates from other parts of France. It also had to pay the costs of its own occupation. And, when Moneins’s body was exhumed for reburial in the cathedral, local officials were obliged to fall on their knees in front of Montmorency’s house to beg forgiveness for the killing.

  The privileges were gradually restored, thanks in part to Montaigne’s father’s efforts, as mayor, to make Bordeaux look good again in the king’s eyes. Amazingly, in the long run, the rebellion did achieve its aim. Unnerved by the riots, Henri II decided not to enforce the salt tax. But the price had been high.

  Just as this drama subsided, in 1549, plague broke out in the city. It was not a long or major outbreak, but it was enough to make everyone examine their skin uneasily and dread the sound of a cough. It also forced the Collège to close again for a while—but by this time Montaigne had probably already moved on. He left the school some time around 1548, ready to start the next phase of his young life.

  There now follows a long period, until 1557, in which it is not clear what he was doing. He may have returned to the estate. He may have been sent to an academy, a sort of finishing school where young men learned the noble accomplishments of riding, dueling, hunting, heraldry, singing, and dancing. (If so, Montaigne paid no attention to anything except the riding lessons: this was the only one of these skills he later claimed to be good at.) At some stage, he must also have studied the law. He emerged into adulthood with all he needed to become a successful young seigneur, and, despite his dislike of the experience, with a useful set of abilities and experiences acquired from school. Foremost among these was a discovery that would have delighted his father: that of books, and of the worlds they opened up to him—worlds far beyond the vineyards of Guyenne and the tedium of a sixteenth-century schoolhouse.

  4. Q. How to live? A. Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted

  READING

  THE CLOSE GRAMMATICAL study of Cicero and Horace almost killed Montaigne’s interest in literature before it was born. But some of the teachers at the school helped keep it going, mainly by not taking more entertaining books out of the boy’s hands when they caught him reading them, and perhaps even by slipping a few more his way—doing this so discreetly that he could enjoy reading them without ceasing to feel like a rebel.

  One unsuitable text which Montaigne discovered for himself at the age of seven or eight, and which ch
anged his life, was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This tumbling cornucopia of stories about miraculous transformations among ancient gods and mortals was the closest thing the Renaissance had to a compendium of fairy tales. As full of horrors and delights as a Grimm or Andersen, and quite unlike the texts of the schoolroom, it was the sort of thing an imaginative sixteenth-century boy could read with eyes rounded and fingers white-knuckled from gripping the covers too tightly.

  In Ovid, people change. They turn into trees, animals, stars, bodies of water, or disembodied voices. They alter sex; they become werewolves. A woman called Scylla enters a poisonous pool and sees each of her limbs turn into a dog-like monster from which she cannot pull away because the monsters are also her. The hunter Actaeon is changed into a stag, and his own hunting-dogs chase him down. Icarus flies so high that the sun burns him. A king and a queen turn into two mountains. The nymph Samacis plunges herself into the pool where the beautiful Hermaphroditus is bathing, and wraps herself around him like a squid holding fast to its prey, until her flesh melts into his and the two become one person, half male, half female. Once a taste of this sort of thing had started him off, Montaigne galloped through other books similarly full of good stories: Virgil’s Aeneid, then Terence, Plautus, and various modern Italian comedies. He learned, in defiance of school policy, to associate reading with excitement. It was the one positive thing to come out of his time there. (“But,” Montaigne adds, “for all that, it was still school.”)

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  Many of his early discoveries remained lifelong loves. Although the initial thrill of the Metamorphoses wore off, he filled the Essays with stories from it, and emulated Ovid’s style of slipping from one topic to the next without introduction or apparent order. Virgil continued to be a favorite too, though the mature Montaigne was cheeky enough to suggest that some passages in the Aeneid might have been “brushed up a little.”