It makes for exciting reading, but after a few pages one craves a dose of Montaigne’s easygoing humanism. Pascal wants people to remain aware of ultimate things: the huge empty spaces, God, death. Yet few of us find it possible to maintain such thoughts for long. We get distracted; the mind drifts back to concrete and personal matters. Pascal found this infuriating: “What does the world think about? Never about that! But about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring …” Montaigne liked asking big questions too, but he preferred to explore life through his reading, the animals in his household, incidents he had witnessed on his travels, or a neighbor’s problems with his children. Pascal wrote: “Human sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things: sign of a strange disorder.” Montaigne would have put it exactly the other way around.
A century or so later, Voltaire, who thoroughly disliked Pascal, wrote: “I venture to champion humanity against this sublime misanthropist.” He ran through fifty-seven quotations from the Pensées, dismantling each in turn. “As for me,” he remarked,
when I look at Paris or London I see no reason for falling into this despair Pascal talks about. I see a city not looking in the least like a desert island, but populous, wealthy, policed, where men are as happy as human nature permits. What man of sense will be prepared to hang himself because he doesn’t know how one looks upon God face to face? … Why make us feel disgusted with our being? Our existence is not so wretched as we are led to believe. To look on the world as a prison cell and all men as criminals is the idea of a fanatic.
This led Voltaire to rush to the defense of Pascal’s “great adversary”:
What a delightful design Montaigne had to portray himself without artifice as he did! For he has portrayed human nature itself. And what a paltry project of … Pascal, to belittle Montaigne!
Voltaire was much more at home with a credo like Montaigne’s, as it appears in the final chapter of the Essays:
I accept with all my heart and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud of myself that I do. We wrong that great and all-powerful Giver by refusing his gift, nullifying it, and disfiguring it.
This comfortable acceptance of life as it is, and of one’s own self as it is, drove Pascal to a greater fury than Pyrrhonian Skepticism itself. The two go together. Montaigne places everything in doubt, but then he deliberately reaffirms everything that is familiar, uncertain, and ordinary—for that is all we have. His Skepticism makes him celebrate imperfection: the very thing Pascal, as much as Descartes, wanted to escape but never could. To Montaigne, it would be obvious why such escape is impossible. No one can rise above humanity: however high we ascend, we take that humanity with us. At the end of his final volume, in its final version, he wrote:
It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.
Like Pyrrhonism, the “rump” argument is impossible to argue against, yet it also seemed to Pascal to require refutation, because it represented a moral danger. Montaigne’s overriding principle of “convenience and calm,” as Pascal described it, was pernicious. It worried Pascal and sent him into a helpless rage, as if Montaigne were enjoying some advantage that he could not have.
A similar level of anger is visible in the reaction of another reader of the same period, the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche. He was a rationalist, closer to Descartes than to Pascal, but, like Pascal, he deplored Montaigne as much for his general attitude of nonchalance as for his acceptance of doubt.
Malebranche recognized that Montaigne’s book was a perennial best seller—but of course it would be, he writes bitterly. Montaigne tells good stories and appeals to the reader’s imagination: people enjoy that. “His ideas are false but beautiful; his expressions irregular or bold but agreeable.” But to read Montaigne for pleasure is especially dangerous. As you float in your bath of sensuous ease, Montaigne is lulling your reason to sleep and filling you with his poison. “The mind cannot be pleased by reading an author without adopting his opinions, or at least without receiving some coloring from them which, mixed with its own ideas, makes them confused and obscure.” That is, reading pleasure corrupts Descartes’s “clear and distinct ideas.” Montaigne neither argues nor persuades; he does not need to, for he seduces. Malebranche conjures up an almost diabolical figure. Montaigne fools you, like Descartes’s demon; he lures you into doubt and spiritual laxity.
These sinister images would prove long-lived. In 1866, the literary scholar Guillaume Guizot was still calling Montaigne the great “seducer” among French writers. T. S. Eliot saw him the same way. And the modern critic Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani describes the Essays as “a prodigious seduction machine.” Montaigne works his spell through his nonchalance, his meandering and casual tone, and his pretense of not caring about the reader—all tricks designed to draw you in and take possession.
Subjected to such a machine, modern readers are often happy to lie back like Barbarella and enjoy it. Seventeenth-century readers felt more threatened, for serious matters of reason and religion were at stake.
Even during this period, however, other readers loved Montaigne for the pleasure he gave them. Several came overtly to his defense. In his Caractères, the aphorist Jean de La Bruyère suggested that Malebranche had missed the point of Montaigne because he was too intellectual and could not “appreciate thoughts which come naturally.” This easygoing naturalness, together with Skeptical doubt, would make Montaigne a hero to a new breed of thinker: the vague confederacy of wits and rebels known as the libertins.
In English, “libertine” brings to mind a disreputable Casanova-like figure, but there was more to them than that (as indeed there was to Casanova). Although some libertins did seek sexual freedom, they also wanted philosophical freedom: the right to think as they liked, politically, religiously, and in every other way. Skepticism was a natural route to this inner and outer liberty.
They were a varied group, ranging from the major philosopher Pierre Gassendi to more lightweight scholars like François La Mothe le Vayer and imaginative writers like Cyrano de Bergerac, then best known for his science-fiction novel about a voyage to the moon. (His role in a more famous story based on his protuberant nose came later.) Montaigne’s first editor, Marie de Gournay, may have been a secret libertine, along with many of her friends. Another was Jean de La Fontaine, author of Plutarch-style fables about animals’ cleverness and stupidity. He got away with these by keeping them gentle in tone, yet they still constituted a challenge to human dignity. Their premise was the same as Montaigne’s: that animals and humans are made of the same material.
Libertinism remained a minority pursuit, but a disproportionately influential one, because out of the libertins would evolve the Enlightenment philosophers of the following century. They gave Montaigne a dangerous yet positive new image, which would stick. They also spawned a less radical breed of salon socialites: aphorists such as La Bruyère, and La Rochefoucauld whose Maximes gathered together brief, Montaignean observations on human nature:
At times we are as different from ourselves as we are from others.
The surest way to be taken in is to think oneself craftier than other people.
Chance and caprice rule the world.
And, as it happens, one La Rochefoucauld maxim provided a neat comment on Montaigne’s own seventeenth-century predicament:
We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.
As with Montaigne himself, much of what the libertins and aphorists said revolved around the question of how to live well. Libertins prized qualities such as bel esprit, which might be translated as “good spirits,” but w
as better defined by one writer of the time as being “gay, lively, full of fire like that displayed in the Essays of Montaigne.” They also aspired to honnêteté, “honesty,” which meant a life of good morals, but also of “good conversation” and “good company,” according to the French Académie’s dictionary of 1694.
Someone like Pascal did not even want to live like this; it would entail being distracted by the affairs of this world rather than keeping his eyes fixed on ultimate things. One imagines Pascal staring upwards into the open spaces of the universe, in mystical terror and bliss, just as Descartes stared with equal intensity into the blazing stove. In both cases, there is silence, and there is a fixed gaze: eyes rounded with awe, deep cogitation, alarm, or horror.
Libertins, and all those of the company of the bel esprit, did not stare. My dears! They would not dream of fixing anything, high or low in the universe, with gawping owl-eyes. Instead, they watched human beings slyly, from under half-closed lids, seeing them as they were—beginning with themselves. Those sleepy eyes perceived more about life than Descartes with his “clear and distinct ideas,” or Pascal with his spiritual ecstasies. As Friedrich Nietzsche would remark centuries later, most of the genuinely valuable observations about human behavior and psychology—and thus also about philosophy—“were first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort of sacrifice not for scientific knowledge, but for a witty coquetry.”
Nietzsche relished the irony of this because he abhorred professional philosophers as a class. For him, abstract systems were of no use; what counted was critical self-awareness: the ability to pry into one’s own motivations and yet to accept oneself as one was. This is why he loved the aphorists La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, as well as their forefather Montaigne. He called Montaigne “this freest and mightiest of souls,” and added: “That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth.” Montaigne apparently managed the trick of living as Nietzsche longed to do: without petty resentments or regrets, embracing everything that happened without the desire to change it. The essayist’s casual remark, “If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived,” embodied everything Nietzsche spent his life trying to attain. Not only did Montaigne achieve it, but he even wrote about it in a throwaway tone, as if it were nothing special.
Like Montaigne, Nietzsche simultaneously questioned everything and tried to accept everything. The very things that most repelled Pascal about Montaigne—his bottomless doubt, his “skeptical ease,” his poise, his readiness to accept imperfection—were the things that would always appeal to this other, very different tradition, running from the libertins through to Nietzsche and beyond, to many of his biggest fans today.
Unfortunately, in the seventeenth century, the resenters of Montaigne proved stronger than the devotees, especially once the former organized themselves and launched a direct campaign for suppression. In 1662, the year after Pascal’s death, his former colleagues Pierre Nicole and Antoine Arnauld unleashed an assault on Montaigne in their best-selling book Logique du Port-Royal. Their second edition, in 1666, openly called for the Essays to be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, as an irreligious and dangerous text. The call was heeded ten years later: the Essays appeared on the Index on January 28, 1676. Montaigne stood condemned, as much by association as anything else—for by now he was the favorite reading of a disreputable crew of fops, wits, atheists, skeptics, and rakes.
This marked the beginning of a dramatic decline in Montaigne’s fortunes in France. From their first publication in 1580 to 1669, new editions of the Essays had appeared every two or three years, together with popular reworkings by editors who often drew attention to the most Pyrrhonian passages. After the ban, this changed. The work in its full form could no longer be published or sold in full in Catholic countries; no French publisher would touch it. For years, it was available only in bowdlerized or foreign editions, the latter often in French and designed to be smuggled home for a nonconformist readership.
Montaigne once remarked that certain books “become all the more marketable and public by being suppressed.” To some extent, this happened to him: the suppression of his book in France gave it an irresistible aura. In the century to come, it enhanced his appeal to rebellious Enlightenment philosophers and even to full-blown revolutionaries.
But, on the whole, censorship did his posthumous sales more harm than good. It confined him to a limited audience in France, while in some other countries he continued to appeal to a wider range of taste—rebels and pillars of the community alike. Astonishingly, the Essays would stay on the Index for almost two hundred years, until May 27, 1854. It was a long exile, and one that outlived the genuine frisson of alarm he provoked in the late seventeenth century.
Pascal’s remark, “It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there,” could be intoned like a mantra through the whole of the story to come. The centuries go on; each new reader finds his or her own self in the Essays and thus adds to the accumulation of its possible meanings. In Descartes’s case, what he found were two nightmare figures from his own psyche: a demon resistant to logic, and an animal that could think. He shrank from both. Pascal and Malebranche saw the prospect of their own seduction on a bed of Skeptic ease, and they too fled in horror.
The libertins, seeing the same things, responded with an amused smile and a raised eyebrow. They too recognized themselves in Montaigne. Their much later descendant, Nietzsche, would do the same, and would also return Montaigne to his philosophical homeland: to the heart of the three great Hellenistic philosophies, with their investigation of the question of how to live.
8. Q. How to live? A. Keep a private room behind the shop
GOING TO IT WITH ONLY ONE BUTTOCK
THE FLESH-AND-BLOOD Montaigne, back in the 1560s, was still getting on with that very question. He used all three of the Hellenistic philosophical traditions to manage his life and to help himself recover from the loss of La Boétie. He successfully merged his Skepticism with loyalty to Catholic dogma—a combination no one yet questioned. He finished his first major literary project, the translation of Raymond Sebond, and he worked on the dedications for La Boétie’s books and his own published letter describing his friend’s death. Another change occurred during this period too: he got married, and became the head of a family.
Montaigne seems, in general, to have been attractive to women. At least some of the appeal must have been physical: he makes ironic remarks about women who claim to love men only for their minds. “I have never yet seen that for the sake of our beauty of mind, however wise and mature that mind may be, they were willing to grant favors to a body that was slipping the least little bit into decline.” Yet his intelligence, his humor, his amiable personality, and even his tendency to get swept away by ideas and talk too loudly, probably all contributed to his charm. So, perhaps, did the air of emotional inaccessibility hanging over him after La Boétie’s death. It presented a challenge. In reality, when he liked someone, the aloofness soon disappeared: “I make advances and I throw myself at them so avidly, that I hardly fail to attach myself and to make an impression wherever I land.”
Montaigne liked sex, and indulged in a lot of it throughout his life. It was only in late middle age that both his performance and his desire declined, as well as his attractiveness—all facts he bemoaned in his final Essays. It is depressing to be rejected, he said, but even worse to be accepted out of pity. And he hated to be troublesome to someone who did not want him. “I abhor the idea of a body void of affection being mine.” This would be like making love to a corpse, as in the story of the “frantic Egyptian hot after the carcass of a dead woman he was embalming and shrouding.” A sexual relationship must be reciprocal. “In truth, in this delight the pleasure I give tickles my imagination more sweetly than that which I feel.”
He was realistic about the extent to which he made the earth move for his lovers, however. Sometimes a woman’s heart
is not really in it: “Sometimes they go to it with only one buttock.” Or perhaps she is fantasizing about someone else: “What if she eats your bread with the sauce of a more agreeable imagination?”
Montaigne understood that women know more about sex than men usually think, and indeed that their imagination leads them to expect better than they get. “In place of the real parts, through desire and hope, they substitute others three times life-size.” He tutted over irresponsible graffiti: “What mischief is not done by those enormous pictures that boys spread about the passages and staircases of palaces! From these, women acquire a cruel contempt for our natural capacity.” Does one conclude that Montaigne had a smallish penis? Yes, indeed, because he confessed later in the same essay that nature had treated him “unfairly and unkindly,” and he added a classical quotation:
“Even the matrons—all too well they know—
Look dimly on a man whose member’s small.”
He showed no shame about revealing such things: “Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it.” It also seemed unfair to him that poets had more license simply because they wrote in verse. He quoted two examples from contemporaries:
“May I die if your crack is more than a faint line.”—Théodore de Bèze
“A friendly tool contents and treats her well.”—Saint-Gelais
Amid the varied adventures of his friendly tool, nevertheless, Montaigne also did what all dutiful noblemen must do, particularly heirs to great estates: he got himself a wife.
Her name was Françoise de La Chassaigne, and she came from a family greatly respected in Bordeaux. The marriage, which took place on September 23, 1565, would have been arranged in collaboration between the two families. This was traditional, and even the spouses’ ages were more or less what custom decreed. Montaigne noted that his own age (thirty-three, he says, though he was thirty-two), was close to the ideal recommended by Aristotle, which Montaigne thought was thirty-five (actually it was thirty-seven). If he was slightly too young, his wife was a little older than usual: she was born on December 13, 1544, which made her just under twenty-one on her wedding day. At that age she could still expect to have many childbearing years ahead of her. Unfortunately, children were to bring the couple mostly disappointment and sorrow. And, despite his being over a decade older than his wife, Montaigne very decidedly seems to have done what many men do: he married his mother. The choice would not make him particularly happy.
How to Live Page 17