He does not mention Françoise often in the Essays; when he does, he makes her sound like Antoinette, only louder. “Wives always have a proclivity for disagreeing with their husbands,” he wrote. “They seize with both hands every pretext to go contrary to them.” He was probably thinking of Françoise both here and in another passage, where he wrote that there was no point in raging uselessly at servants:
I admonish … my family not to get angry in the air, and to see to it that their reprimand reaches the person they are complaining about: for ordinarily they are yelling before he is in their presence and continue yelling for ages after he has left … No one is punished or affected by it, except someone who has to put up with the racket of their voice.
One can imagine Montaigne putting his hands over his ears, and heading off to his tower.
Among the many things for which he admired the philosopher Socrates was his having perfected the art of living with an aggressive wife. Montaigne presented this as a tribulation almost as great as the one Socrates suffered at the hands of the Athenian parliament, when it condemned him to death by hemlock. He hoped to emulate Socrates’s policy of forbearance and humor, and liked the reply he gave when Alcibiades asked him how he stood the nagging. One gets used to it, said Socrates, as those who live close to a mill do to the sound of the water-wheel turning. Montaigne also liked the way Socrates adapted the experience as a philosophical “trick” for his own spiritual improvement, using his wife’s bad temper for practice in the art of enduring adversity.
As well as forcefulness, Françoise had staying power. She would outlive Montaigne by nearly thirty-five years, dying on March 7, 1627, at the age of eighty-two. She also survived all her children, including the only one to make it beyond infancy into adulthood. Montaigne’s mother survived him too. One almost gets the impression that, between them, they drove him into an early grave.
Some of the best information about Françoise’s character dates from her old age, long after Montaigne’s time. By then, she had become very pious. Her daughter’s second husband, Charles de Gamaches, described her as observing fasts every Friday and for half of Lent, even at seventy-seven years old. She kept up an intense correspondence with a spiritual adviser, Dom Marc-Antoine de Saint-Bernard; several letters survive. He sent her gifts of oranges and lemons; she sent him quince marmalade and hay. She often wrote to him about her money worries and legal affairs. Her last letter shows relief over some business deal: “By this God has given me a means of supporting this house of my late husband and my children.” The tone is sometimes passionate: “Truly I do not know whether I would not rather choose to die than to know that you are going away.” On the other hand, she feared for her adviser’s safety if he traveled to visit her: “I would rather die than have you take the road in this miserable weather.” As a young woman, she was probably less fretful, but her preoccupation with matters of money and law may have been a constant. At the very least, one can venture to state that she was more alert to practical concerns than Montaigne. This was not difficult: so was almost everyone, if his own account is to be believed.
Françoise and her husband usually spent their days in separate parts of the château complex. Montaigne went to his tower and she went to hers, at the other end of the boundary wall: the “Tour de Madame.” (After being converted into a pigeon loft in the early nineteenth century, the tower collapsed, and does not survive today.) This left the main building as the domain of Montaigne’s mother, who remained there through most of her son’s marriage, until about 1587. It looks as if the towers were adapted as retreats partly so the young couple could get away both from each other and from her. In his writing, Montaigne remains silent about his mother’s presence in their lives; when he mentions playing card games with his family in the evenings, he gives no indication that Granny was playing too.
This image of a family dispersed around the property is a sad one. But there must have been days when spirits were lighter, and in any case, nowhere on the estate would have felt solitary or empty. People were always around: servants, employees, guests and their entourages, sometimes children. Montaigne himself did not brood in his tower like a Gormenghast earl: he liked to be out walking. “My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it.” And separation of male and female lifestyles was normal. Husband and wife were expected to have different realms; new or modernized properties were often designed with this in mind. In 1452, Leon Battista Alberti recommended in his De re aedificatoria (On Building), “The husband and wife must have separate bedrooms, not only to ensure that the husband be not disturbed by his wife, when she is about to give birth or is ill, but also to allow them, even in summer, an uninterrupted night’s sleep.” The only differences in the Montaigne household were that an entire outdoor gallery divided their “rooms,” and that his tower was also his workplace.
Was it a good marriage, by the standards of the time? Some commentators have seen it as disastrous; others as typical of its era and even good. On balance, it does not seem to have been a terrible relationship, merely a mildly unsatisfactory one. It is probably best summed up, as Montaigne’s biographer Donald Frame suggested, by the remark in the Essays: “Whoever supposes, to see me look sometimes coldly, sometimes lovingly, on my wife, that either look is feigned, is a fool.”
Genuine affection is implied in Montaigne’s decision to dedicate one of his earliest publications to Françoise: La Boétie’s translation of the letter written by Plutarch to his own wife following the death of their child. Uxorious dedications were not fashionable; they could be seen as quaint and rustic. Montaigne remarks defiantly, “Let us let them talk … You and me, my wife, let us live in the old French way.” His dedication has a warm tone, and he even says, “I have, so I believe, none more intimate than you,” which puts her on a level close to La Boétie’s.
Whatever affection he felt for Françoise probably built up after marriage rather than before. He had entered into wedlock like an unresisting prisoner being put into handcuffs. “Of my own choice, I would have avoided marrying Wisdom herself, if she had wanted me. But say what we will, the custom and practice of ordinary life bears us along.” He did not really mind having such business arranged for him: he often felt that other people had better sense than he did anyway. But he still needed persuasion, being in an “ill-prepared and contrary” state of mind. Had he been free to choose, he would not have been the marrying kind at all. “Men with unruly humors like me, who hate any sort of bond or obligation, are not so fit for it.” Later, he made the best of things, and even attempted to remain faithful—with, he said, more success than he had expected. He became contented, in a way, as he discovered was often the case with developments one would rather have avoided. “For not only inconvenient things, but anything at all, however ugly and vicious and repulsive, can become acceptable through some condition or circumstance.”
Fortunately, Françoise herself was by no means ugly or repulsive. Montaigne seems to have found her attractive enough—or so his friend Florimond de Raemond asserted in a marginal note on a copy of the Essays. The problem lay more in the principle of being obliged to have regular sex with someone, for Montaigne never liked feeling boxed in. He fulfilled his conjugal duties reluctantly, “with only one buttock” as he would have said, doing what was necessary to beget children. This, too, comes from Florimond de Raemond’s marginal note, which, in full, reads:
I have often heard the author say that although he, full of love, ardor, and youth, had married his very beautiful and very lovable wife, yet the fact is that he had never played with her except with respect for the honor that the marriage bed requires, without ever having seen anything but her hands and face uncovered, and not even her breast, although among other women he was extremely playful and debauched.
This sounds appalling to a modern reader, but it was conventional enough. For a husband to behave as an impassioned lover to his wife was thought morally wrong, because it might
turn her into a nymphomaniac. Minimal, joyless intercourse was the proper sort for marriage. In an essay almost entirely about sex, Montaigne cites the wisdom of Aristotle: “A man … should touch his wife prudently and soberly, lest if he caresses her too lasciviously the pleasure should transport her outside the bounds of reason.” The physicians warned, too, that excessive pleasure could make sperm curdle inside the woman’s body, rendering her unable to conceive. It was better for the husband to bestow ecstasy elsewhere, where it did not matter what damage it caused. “The kings of Persia,” relates Montaigne, “used to invite their wives to join them at their feasts; but when the wine began to heat them in good earnest and they had to give completely free rein to sensuality, they sent them back to their private rooms.” They then brought on a more suitable set of women.
The Church was with Aristotle, the doctors, and the kings of Persia in this. Confessors’ manuals of the time show that a husband who engaged in sinful practices with his wife deserved a heavier penance than if he had done the same things with someone else. By corrupting his wife’s senses, he risked ruining her eternal soul—a betrayal of his responsibility to her. If a married woman must pick up licentious habits, it was better to get them from someone who had no such duty. As Montaigne observed, most women seemed to prefer that option anyway.
Montaigne is amusingly wry on the subject of women, but he can also sound conventional. Unlike some contemporaries, however, he does not seem to have considered wives mere breeding cows. His ideal marriage would be a true meeting of minds as well as bodies; it would be even more complete than an ideal friendship. The difficulty was that, unlike friendship, marriage was not freely chosen, so it remained in the realm of constraint and obligation. Also, it was hard to find a woman capable of an exalted relationship, because most of them lacked intellectual capacity and a quality he called “firmness.”
Montaigne’s opinion on women’s spiritual flaccidity can be disheartening enough to make one come over quite floppy oneself. George Sand confessed that she was “wounded to the heart” by it—the more so because she found Montaigne an inspiration in other respects. Yet one has to remember what most women were like in the sixteenth century. They were woefully uneducated, often illiterate, and they had little experience of the world. A few noble families hired private tutors for daughters, but most taught vapid accomplishments, as in Victorian times: Italian, music, and some arithmetic for household management. Classical education, the only kind considered worth having, was almost always absent. The few truly learned women of the sixteenth century were vanishingly rare exceptions, like Marguerite de Navarre, author of the collection of stories known as the Heptameron, or the poet Louise Labé, who (assuming she really existed, and was not a pseudonym for a group of male poets as one recent hypothesis suggests) urged other women to “lift their minds a little above their distaffs and spindles.”
France did have a feminist movement in the sixteenth century. It formed one side of the “querelle des femmes,” a fashionable quarrel among intellectual men who formulated arguments for and against women: were they, in general, a good thing? Those in favor seemed to have more success than those against, but such arch debate made little difference to women’s lives.
Montaigne is often dismissed as anti-feminist, but had he taken part in this querelle, he would probably have been on the pro-woman side. He did write, “Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them.” And he believed that, by nature, “males and females are cast in the same mold.” He was very conscious of the double standard used to judge male and female sexual behavior. Aristotle notwithstanding, Montaigne suspected that women had the same passions and needs as men, yet they were condemned far more when they indulged them. His usual perspective-shifting habits also made it apparent to him that his view of women must be as partial and unreliable as women’s views of men. His feelings on the whole subject are encapsulated in his observation: “We are in almost all things unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours.”
Given such injustice, it is not surprising that he decided his own best policy at home was to absent himself from the female realm as much as possible. He let them enjoy their kind of domesticity, while he enjoyed his. In an essay on solitude, he wrote:
We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.
The phrase about the “back shop,” or “room behind the shop” as it is sometimes translated—the arrière boutique—appears again and again in books about Montaigne, but it is rarely kept within its context. He is not writing about a selfish, introverted withdrawal from family life so much as about the need to protect yourself from the pain that would come if you lost that family. Montaigne sought detachment and retreat so that he could not be too badly hurt, but in doing so he also discovered that having such a retreat helped him establish his “real liberty,” the space he needed to think and look inward.
He certainly had reason to work at Stoic detachment. Having lost his friend, his father, and his brother in short order, Montaigne was now to lose almost all of his children—all daughters. He noted the sad sequence of births and deaths in his diary, the Beuther Ephemeris:
June 28, 1570: Thoinette. Montaigne wrote, “This is the first child of my marriage,” but later added, “And died two months later.”
September 9, 1571: Léonor was born—the only survivor.
July 5, 1573: Unnamed daughter. “She lived only seven weeks.”
December 27, 1574: Unnamed daughter. “Died about three months later, and was hastily baptized under pressure of necessity.”
May 16, 1577: Unnamed daughter; died after a month.
(illustration credit i8.1)
February 21, 1583: “We had another daughter who was named Marie, baptised by the sieur de Jaurillac councillor of parlement, her uncle, and my daughter Léonor. She died a few days later.”
Montaigne wrote that he had lost most of the children “without grief, or at least without repining,” because they were so young. People generally did try not to get too attached to children while they were in early infancy, because the likelihood of their dying was great, but Montaigne seemed exceptionally good at staying aloof. It was an affliction he did not feel deeply, he admitted. He even wrote, in the mid-1570s, of having lost “two or three” children, as if uncertain of the figure, though this could just be his usual habit of vagueness about numbers. It is very much like his way of dating his riding accident, which he said happened “during our third civil war, or the second (I do not quite remember which).” In his dedication to his wife in the Plutarch translation, he gets the details even more startlingly wrong, writing that their first daughter had died “in the second year of her life,” although she died at two months. This was probably a slip of the pen rather than of the mind. Or was it? One has the feeling, with Montaigne, that anything is possible.
There were other disasters in life that he knew would not bother him as much as they should:
I see enough other common occasions for affliction which I should scarcely feel if they happened to me, and I have disdained some, when they came to me, to which the world has given such an atrocious appearance that I wouldn’t dare boast of my indifference to them to most people without blushing.
One wonders if he was contemplating the possible death of his wife, here, or perhaps of his mother. If so, he had no such luck in either case. Or perhaps he wa
s thinking back to the death of his father, or wondering what it would be like if his castle were sacked in the wars, or his lands burned. He seems to have found almost anything manageable other than the death of La Boétie: that was the one thing that knocked him off balance and made him unwilling to become so attached again.
In reality, his detachment is likely to have been less extreme than he pretended. His written notes of his children’s deaths are plain but poignant. And he could be eloquent about fatherly grief in the Essays—just not his own. His essay on sadness, written in the mid-1570s when he had already lost several children, dwells on stories of paternal bereavement in literature. He also wrote feelingly about the ancient story of Niobe, who, after losing seven sons and then seven daughters, wept so much that she changed into a waterfall of stone—“to represent that bleak, dumb, and deaf stupor that benumbs us when accidents surpassing our endurance overwhelm us.” Whether or not it was losing his children that gave Montaigne this sensation, he surely knew what it felt like.
Montaigne failed in the main responsibility of a nobleman, which was to have a male heir to ensure the succession. But he did have one healthy child, Léonor, and he became fond of her as she grew beyond infancy. Born in 1571, she must have been conceived not long after his ceremonial retirement in 1570. This made her the child of his midlife crisis and of his spiritual rebirth; perhaps it gave her that extra shot of life force. The sole survivor, she lived until 1616, marrying twice and having two daughters of her own.
How to Live Page 18