Yet again, he found himself having to decide what to do about the threat of plague. A facile conception of heroic behavior might dictate that he should remain with his tenants in order to suffer and, if necessary, die alongside them, together with his family. But, as before, the reality of the situation was more complicated. Anyone who could avoid remaining in a plague zone would certainly do so. Very few peasants had this option, but Montaigne did, and so he left. He interrupted work on the essay he was writing at the time, “On Physiognomy,” and took to the road with his family.
One could say that he was deserting his tenants in doing this. Their predicament must already have been dire before he left, for he wrote in the Essays of having seen people dig their own graves and lie down in them to wait for death. Once they had reached this stage, they were beyond rescue. No doubt Montaigne took his valets and personal servants with him, but he could not have taken the whole community of agricultural workers. When they saw his family packing up and leaving, they must have felt that they were being left to die: probably about what they would expect from their supposed noble protectors. Strangely, by contrast with the savage judgments on his desertion of Bordeaux, there has been almost no criticism of Montaigne on this count. Yet, here too, it is hard to see how he could have done otherwise, and he had a responsibility to his family.
Now converted into homeless wanderers, they would be obliged to stay away for six months, until they heard that the plague had subsided in March 1587. It was not easy to find six months’ worth of hospitality. Montaigne knew former colleagues from his years of public life, and both he and his wife had family connections. They were obliged to use all of these. Few people had room for his whole party, though, and of those who did, most looked with horror on plague refugees. Montaigne wrote: “I, who am so hospitable, had a great deal of trouble finding a retreat for my family: a family astray, a source of fear to their friends and themselves, and of horror wherever they sought to settle, having to shift their abode as soon as one of the group began to feel pain in the end of his finger.”
During these wandering months, Montaigne also resumed his political activity. Perhaps, in some cases, it was the price he had to pay for accommodation. He played an increasingly major role in attempts by politiques and others to defuse the crisis and secure a future for France. Leaving public office in 1570 had allowed him some space to meditate on life; this time was different. His post-mayoral years drew him ever higher into the pyramid of power, towards a realm where the air was thin and the fall could be dangerous. He liaised with some of the most eminent players of the era: first with Henri de Navarre, and now with Catherine de’ Medici, mother of the troubled king.
Catherine de’ Medici was always a believer in the idea that if everyone could just sit down and talk, problems would go away. She, more than anyone else, did her best to make this happen, and she found Montaigne a natural ally for such a plan. She summoned him to at least one in a series of meetings she held with Navarre at the château of Saint-Brice, near Cognac, between December 1586 and early March 1587. Montaigne brought his wife, and the couple were rewarded with a special allowance for travel expenses and clothes while there. It gave them somewhere to stay, but the pressure must have been intense. Catherine hoped to get a treaty out of these meetings; unfortunately, as so often before, talk proved not to be enough.
The Périgord plague receded during this period, so Montaigne returned with his family to find the château intact but the fields and vines devastated. He resumed work on the essay he had abandoned when he went away, picking up the pen and carrying on with the remark about the mighty load of disturbances. But his political commitments did not abate. That autumn, he met with Corisande, and then, separately, with Navarre, who called on the château in October. Montaigne apparently urged him again to seek compromise with the king. When Navarre went on to see Corisande, she tried to talk him into the same thing. She and Montaigne seem to have cooked up this strategy together: a two-pronged attack. Navarre began to show signs of giving in.
Early in 1588, Montaigne met Navarre again; shortly afterwards, Navarre sent him on a top-secret mission to the king in Paris. Suddenly, everyone in the capital seemed to be talking about this mission and its mysterious hero, so it must have been an important one. The Protestant writer Philippe Duplessis-Mornay discussed it in a letter to his wife. Sir Edward Stafford, English ambassador to France, talked about “Montigny” in his reports, describing him as “a very wise gentleman of the king of Navarre” and later adding that “all the king of Navarre’s servants here are jealous of his coming.” Navarre’s usual entourage must have felt out of the loop: here was Montaigne on an errand from their leader, yet no one would tell them what was going on. The Spanish ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, wrote to his king, Philip II, that Navarre’s men in Paris “do not know the reason why he has come,” and “suspect that he is on some secret mission.” A few days later, on February 28, he also alluded to Montaigne’s rumored influence over Corisande, adding that Montaigne was “considered to be a man of understanding, though somewhat addle-pated.” Stafford mentioned the Corisande connection too. Montaigne, he said, was her “great favorite”; he was also “a very sufficient man,” which in the language of the day meant a very capable one. It seems that Montaigne and Corisande had succeeded in maneuvering Navarre into some sort of a compromise, perhaps a preliminary agreement to renounce Protestantism if necessary, and that Montaigne was there to convey this message to the king.
(illustration credit i15.2)
The sensitivity of the affair meant that both the Leaguists and Navarre’s Protestant followers had every reason to want to stop Montaigne ever reaching Paris. Indeed, almost everyone seemed to dislike this mission of reconciliation and moderation. Even the English ambassador feared it, for England wished to remain influential over Navarre and did not want him reconverting to Catholicism. The only people who could have felt happy were the king, Catherine de’ Medici, and a scattering of politiques, ever hopeful for the future of a united France.
It is no wonder, then, that Montaigne’s trip did not go smoothly. Shortly after leaving home, while traveling through the forest of Villebois just southeast of Angoulême, his party was ambushed and held up by armed robbers. This was not the incident in which he was freed because of his honest face: that had evidently been a more random attack. This time the motive was political—or such, at least, was his belief. Writing to Matignon about it afterwards, Montaigne said that he suspected the perpetrators were Leaguists wanting to thwart any agreement between their two enemies. Under threat of violence, in the middle of the forest, he was forced to hand over his money, the fine clothes in his coffers (presumably intended for his appearance at the royal court), and his papers, which no doubt included secret documents from the Navarre camp. It was fortunate that they did not finish the job by killing him. Instead he survived and, one presumes, delivered his message safely. Yet, once again, despite all that Montaigne had risked, and despite all the excitement about him, nothing came out of the deal. And things were about to get worse.
The trouble began when the duc de Guise, still the most dangerous of the king’s enemies, arrived in the capital in May 1588, shortly after Montaigne. Henri III had banned Guise from the city, so this was an open challenge to royal authority, but Guise knew he had the backing of Paris’s rebellious parliamentarians. The king should have responded by having Guise arrested. Instead he did nothing even when Guise called on him in person. The new Pope, Sixtus V, reportedly later commented of this meeting, “Guise was a reckless fool to put himself in the hands of a King whom he was insulting; the King was a coward to let him go untouched.” It was another of those delicate balances: here, a stronger party had to decide how far to push a challenge, while the weaker had to decide whether to bow his head or offer resistance.
Henri III proceeded to make the wrong decision three times over. First he did nothing when he should have done something. Then, to compensate, he overreacted. On
the night of May 11, he posted royal troops all over the city as if getting ready for all-out battle, possibly even a massacre of Guise’s supporters. In alarm and fury, crowds of Leaguists poured out and blocked off streets, ready to defend themselves. What followed became known as the “Day of the Barricades.”
Henri III now made his third mistake. He retreated in a panic, showing the very combination of weakness and excess that Montaigne considered disastrous, especially when dealing with a mob. The king pleaded with Guise to calm his supporters; Guise rode through the streets, supposedly to comply with the request but actually stirring up the crowds further. Riots ensued. “I have never seen such a furious debauch of the people,” Montaigne’s friend Étienne Pasquier wrote in a letter afterwards. It looked like another St. Bartholomew, but there was less killing and, this time, there was a specific goal, which was achieved quickly. By the end of the next day, Pasquier said, “everything had become so quiet again that you would have said it had been a dream.” It was not a dream: Paris awoke to a changed reality. The king had fled his city. Slipping out so quietly that hardly anyone noticed, he had gone to Chartres and left Paris to Guise.
Having abandoned his city without a fight, Henri III was now a king in exile. He had virtually abdicated, though his supporters still recognized him as their monarch. Guise ordered him to accept the cardinal de Bourbon as his successor; Henri had no choice but to agree. There was no shortage of people ready to point out to him how this disaster had occurred. He had missed his one chance to take Guise out of the picture, either by arresting him or, more conclusively, by having him killed. Montaigne, still a loyal monarchist, joined the king in Charters. When Henri later moved on to Rouen, Montaigne went too. It is not surprising; the alternative would have been to remain with the Leaguists in Paris, or to back out entirely and go home. He did neither, but eventually he did part company with the king and returned to Paris in July 1588. He was ill at the time, being stricken by gout or rheumatism: an attack so bad that he was bedridden during part of his stay.
He would have expected to be left unmolested there, having probably gone for nothing more seditious than a meeting with his publishers—he had recently finished work on his final volume. But Paris was not the right place for anyone associated with the king. While Montaigne was resting in bed one afternoon, still very unwell, armed men burst in and seized him on League orders. The motive may have been revenge for a recent incident in Rouen, when Henri III had ordered the arrest of a Leaguist in similar circumstances: that at least was Montaigne’s theory, as he recorded it in his Beuther diary. They took him, mounted on his own horse, to the Bastille, and locked him up.
In the Essays, Montaigne had written of his horror of captivity:
No prison has received me, not even for a visit. Imagination makes the sight of one, even from the outside, unpleasant to me. I am so sick for freedom, that if anyone should forbid me access to some corner of the Indies, I should live distinctly less comfortably.
To be thrown into the Bastille, especially while ill, was a shock. Yet Montaigne had reason to hope that he would not be there for too long—and he wasn’t. After five hours, Catherine de’ Medici came to the rescue. She too was now in Paris, hoping as usual to sort out the crisis by getting everyone talking, beginning with Guise, with whom she was in conversation when the news of Montaigne’s arrest arrived. She immediately asked Guise to arrange for Montaigne’s release. With evident reluctance, he complied.
Guise’s orders went off to the commander of the Bastille, but even this did not suffice at first. The commander insisted on having confirmation from the prévôt des marchands, Michel Marteau, sieur de La Chapelle, who in turn sent his message of consent via another powerful man, Nicolas de Neufville, seigneur de Villeroy. Thus, in the end, it took four powerful people to get Montaigne freed. His own understanding of it was that he was “released by an unheard-of favor” and only after “much insistence” from Catherine de’ Medici. She must have liked him; the duc de Guise probably didn’t, but even he could see that Montaigne deserved special consideration.
Montaigne stayed in Paris for just a short while after this. The pain in his joints receded, but another illness struck him soon after. It was probably an attack of kidney stones, a condition from which he still suffered with little respite, and which he had so often feared might kill him. On this occasion, it nearly did. His friend Pierre de Brach described the episode some years later, in a highly Stoic-flavored letter to Justus Lipsius:
When we were together in Paris a few years ago, and the doctors despairing of his life and he hoping only for death, I saw him, when death stared him in the face from close up, push her well away by his disdain for the fear she brings. What fine arguments to content the ear, what fine teachings to make the soul wise, what resolute firmness of courage to make the most fearful secure, did that man then display! I never heard a man speak better, or better resolved to do what the philosophers have said on this point, without the weakness of his body having beaten down any of the vigor of his soul.
Brach’s account is conventional, but it does suggest that Montaigne had, to some extent, come to terms with his mortality since the days of his riding accident. He had been through a great deal since then, and his kidney-stone attacks had forced him into close encounters with death on a regular basis. These, too, were confrontations on a battlefield. Death was bound to prove the stronger party in the end, but Montaigne stood up to it for the moment.
While recuperating, Montaigne went to see a new friend he had met in Paris the previous year: Marie de Gournay, an enthusiastic reader of his work who invited him to stay with her family at her château in Picardy. This provided a welcome resting place. In the meantime, the new edition of the Essays had come out, and already he was thinking of new additions he would like to make to it, perhaps in the light of his recent experiences. He began adding notes to the freshly printed copy, sometimes alone, sometimes with secretarial help from Gournay and others.
Once he was fully recovered, around November of that year, Montaigne moved on to Blois, where the king was attending a meeting of the national legislative assembly known as the Estates-General, together with Guise. The aim was supposed to be further negotiation, but Henri III had gone beyond that. A king without a kingdom, he was feeling desperate. And he had spent six months listening to advisers remind him that it could all have been different had he wiped Guise out when he had the chance.
Now, with Guise in the Blois castle with him, the opportunity arose again and Henri decided to correct his mistake. On December 23, he invited Guise to his private chamber for a talk. Guise agreed, although his advisers warned him that it was dangerous. As he entered the private room beside Henri III’s bedchamber, several royal guardsmen leaped out from hiding places, slammed the door behind him, and stabbed him to death. Once again, to the shock even of his own supporters this time, the king had gone from one extreme to another, bypassing Montaigne’s zone of judicious moderation in the middle.
(illustration credit i15.3)
Although Montaigne had come to Blois to join the king’s entourage, there is no suggestion that he knew anything about the murder plot. In the days before the incident, he had been rather enjoying himself, catching up with old friends such as Jacques-Auguste de Thou and Étienne Pasquier—although the latter had the irritating habit of dragging Montaigne off to his room to point out all the stylistic errors in the latest edition of the Essays. Montaigne listened politely, and ignored everything Pasquier said, just as he had done with the officials of the Inquisition.
Pasquier, more emotionally volatile than Montaigne, fell into a black depression when he heard about the killing of Guise. “Oh, miserable spectacle!” he wrote to a friend. “I have long been nurturing a melancholic humor within me, which I must now vomit into your lap. I fear, I believe, that I am witnessing the end of our republic … the king will lose his crown, or will see his kingdom turned completely upside down.” Montaigne was not given to such dramatic talk
, but he too must have felt shocked. The worst of it, for a politique, was that this cold-blooded and mistimed killing threw serious doubt on the moral status of the king, whom the politiques considered the focus for all hopes of stability.
Henri III had apparently thought a surgical strike would end his troubles, rather like Charles IX in the run-up to the St. Bartholomew’s massacres. Instead, the death of Guise radicalized Leaguists further, and a new revolutionary body in Paris, the Council of Forty, pronounced Henri III tyrannical. The Sorbonne inquired of the Pope whether it were theologically permissible to kill a king who had sacrificed his legitimacy. The Pope said not, but Leaguist preachers and lawyers argued that any private person who felt suffused with zeal and called to the task by God could do the deed anyway. “Tyrant” was the word always in the air, but, unlike La Boétie in On Voluntary Servitude, the preachers did not call for passive resistance and peaceful withdrawal of consent. They unleashed a fatwa. If Henri was the Devil’s agent on earth, as a flood of propaganda publications now proclaimed, killing him was a holy duty.
The agitation in Paris in 1589 overflowed into every aspect of life. Protestant chronicler Pierre L’Estoile wrote of a city gone mad:
For today, to mug one’s neighbor, massacre one’s nearest relatives, rob the altars, profane the churches, rape women and young girls, ransack everybody, is the ordinary practice of a Leaguer and the infallible mark of a zealous Catholic; always to have religion and the mass on one’s lips, but atheism and robbery in one’s heart, and murder and blood on one’s hands.
How to Live Page 29