How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  —some four hundred years of Montaigne-reading English essayists and accidental philosophers;

  —a not-so-accidental philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who admired Montaigne’s lightness of spirit and reimagined his Stoic and Epicurean tricks of living for a new era;

  —modernists like Virginia Woolf, who tried to capture the feeling of being alive and conscious;

  —editors, transcribers, and remixers, who molded Montaigne into different shapes;

  —late twentieth-century interpreters who built extraordinary structures out of a handful of Montaigne’s words.

  All along the way, there have been those who thought he wrote too much about his urinary system, those who thought he needed help with his writing style, and those who found him too cozy; as well as those who found a sage in him, or a second self so close that they were unsure whether they were reading the Essays or writing it themselves.

  Many of these disparate readings have been transformations of the three great Hellenistic traditions, as transmitted—and altered—by Montaigne. This is natural, since those traditions were the foundation of his thought, and their lines of influence run through the whole of European culture. They can hardly be separated from each other even in their earliest origins; in Montaigne’s modernized version they became more entangled than ever. They are held together above all by their shared pursuit of eudaimonia or human flourishing, and by their belief that the best way of attaining it is through equanimity or balance: ataraxia. These principles bind them to Montaigne, and through him to all the later readers who come to the Essays looking for companionship, or for a practical, everyday wisdom they can use.

  Modern readers who approach Montaigne asking what he can do for them are asking the same question he himself asked of Seneca, Sextus, and Lucretius—and the same question they asked of their predecessors. This is what Virginia Woolf’s chain of minds really means: not a scholarly tradition, but a series of self-interested individuals puzzling over their own lives, yet doing it cooperatively. All share a quality that can simply be thought of as “humanity”: the experience of being a thinking, feeling being who must get on with an ordinary human life—though Montaigne willingly extended the union of minds to embrace other species too.

  This is why, for Montaigne, even the most ordinary existence tells us all we need to know:

  I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff.

  Indeed, that is just what a common and private life is: a life of the richest stuff imaginable.

  BE IMPERFECT

  Montaigne was so often in poor health in his last few years that he seemed to pass half his time in the borderlands between life and death—that zone he had briefly visited in his prime, after his riding accident. He was not yet old, being only in his late fifties, but he knew that his kidney-stone attacks could kill him at any time, and sometimes he longed for it, so great was the agony. But these days the stone did not grab him by the ruff like a bullying strongman and pull him up close to death’s tyrannical face. It enticed him “artfully and gently,” leaving him plenty of time to think between attacks. Death looked friendly, just as the Stoics said it should be.

  I have at least this profit from the stone, that it will complete what I have still not been able to accomplish in myself and reconcile and familiarize me completely with death.

  What he had first realized after his fall into unconsciousness was now amply confirmed: nature does everything for you, and there is no need to trouble your head about anything. It leads us by the hand, he wrote, as if “down a gentle and virtually imperceptible slope, bit by bit.” We hardly need to look where we are going. By making him ill, nature gave him what he had sought for so long: ataraxia, and thus eudaimonia. The greatest moments of well-being he had known in life came immediately after an attack, when the stone passed through. There was physical relief, but also a liberating spiritual lightness.

  Is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full …?

  He even came to find a similar pleasure in the midst of the attacks themselves. They were still painful, but he learned to delight in their few compensations, including the glow of satisfaction he felt on seeing admiration in other people’s eyes:

  There is pleasure in hearing people say about you: There indeed is strength, there indeed is fortitude! They see you sweat in agony, turn pale, turn red, tremble, vomit your very blood, suffer strange contractions and convulsions, sometimes shed great tears from your eyes, discharge thick, black, and frightful urine, or have it stopped up by some sharp rough stone that cruelly pricks and flays the neck of your penis; meanwhile keeping up conversation with your company with a normal countenance, jesting in the intervals with your servants.

  Only he knew the truth: that it was easier to joke and keep up conversations in the grip of pain than an observer could ever guess. As his earlier near-death experience had intimated, one’s outward appearance might bear no relation to what was going on in one’s inner world. This time he really was in agony, unlike the moments when he had been ripping at his doublet. Yet he still felt the same insouciance of soul. The experience seemed to touch him lightly.

  I am already growing reconciled to this colicky life: I find in it food for consolation and hope.

  He drew a similar lesson from the fact of aging in general. It was not that age automatically conferred wisdom. On the contrary, he thought the old were more given to vanities and imperfections than the young. They were inclined to “a silly and decrepit pride, a tedious prattle, prickly and unsociable humors, superstition, and a ridiculous concern for riches.” But this was the twist, for it was in the adjustment to such flaws that the value of aging lay. Old age provides an opportunity to recognize one’s fallibility in a way youth usually finds difficult. Seeing one’s decline written on body and mind, one accepts that one is limited and human. By understanding that age does not make one wise, one attains a kind of wisdom after all.

  Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it.

  Our being is cemented with sickly qualities … Whoever should remove the seeds of these qualities from man would destroy the fundamental conditions of our life.

  Even philosophy needs to be “thickened and obscured” before it can be applied to real life. “There is no need to light up affairs so deeply and so subtly.” Nothing is to be gained from living like Tasso, blinding oneself with one’s own brilliance. It is better to be moderate, modest, and a little vague. Nature will take care of the rest.

  All through these last years, mellower than ever, Montaigne continued to work on the Essays. He remained at home, but still wrote letters, including several to Henri IV. And he saw friends, writers, and former colleagues from Bordeaux and elsewhere, among them Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony. His daughter, Léonor, now grown up, married François de la Tour on May 27, 1590, in a ceremony at the Montaigne estate. The following year, Montaigne became a grandfather, when Léonor gave birth to a daughter named Françoise on March 31, 1591. Still he kept writing, adding his last fancies and anecdotes, including his final thoughts on the art of living in harmony with ordinariness and imperfection. He looked more and more like a man who had learned how to live; or perhaps it was just his usual nonchalance, developed to a more masterly degree than ever.

  20. Q. How to live? A. Let life be its own answer

  NOT THE END

  AN ATTACK OF the stone assailed Montaigne in early September of 1592. He had been through this many times before, and probably took it in his stride at first. But this time, as he had always known might happen, severe complications ensued. Instead of the stone passing through and giving him that rush of relief and joy, it stayed where it was. Then an infection set in.

  His whole
body began to swell. Before long, the inflammation spread to his throat. This produced a condition known as “cynanche,” taking its name from the Greek for a leash or noose used to strangle a dog or other animal—a name that gives a vivid sense of how unpleasant it was. As it grew, Montaigne’s throat closed ever more tightly, until he had to struggle for every breath.

  The cynanche in turn led to a quinsy, a serious throat infection, still considered potentially fatal today if left untreated. It would have needed a course of antibiotics, but no such thing was available for Montaigne. From now on, with his throat swollen, he could not speak, but he remained fully conscious and was able to communicate his wishes to those around him by writing notes.

  Three days went by after the quinsy set in. Montaigne sat propped in his bed, while his family and servants gathered to watch and wait. The room became the setting for the kind of overcrowded deathbed scene he had always hoped to avoid. Such rituals made death worse than it needed to be; they did nothing but terrify the dying man and everyone around him. The doctors and preachers bending over the bed; the grief-stricken visitors; the “pale and weeping servants; a darkened room; lighted candles; … in short, everything horror and fright around us”—it was all very remote from the simple, even absent-minded death he would have preferred. Yet, now that it came to it, he did not attempt to make the crowd go away.

  Once it became obvious that no hope of recovery remained, he wrote his last testament and final wishes. One local writer, Bernard Automne, asserted that during these last days Montaigne “got up out of bed in his nightshirt,” and had his valets and other minor beneficiaries of his will called in, so he could pay them their bequests in person. Maybe this is true, although it does not fit well with the descriptions of him lying paralyzed. No account of his last hours is completely reliable; all are secondhand. But one, at least, should be fairly accurate: it was written by Montaigne’s old friend Étienne Pasquier based on what he heard from Françoise, who remained at her husband’s side throughout. Unlike La Boétie all those years ago, Montaigne did not send his wife away from his deathbed.

  (illustration credit i20.1)

  With the will arranged, Montaigne had a last mass said in his room. He could now barely breathe. According to Pasquier, he rose up in bed while the priest was speaking, “with a desperate effort, hands clasped,” to commend his own spirit to God. It was a final act of Catholic convention: a brief acknowledgment to God in the life of this joyfully secular man.

  Shortly afterwards, the last small channel of air in his throat closed. A stroke may have carried him off, or he may simply have suffocated. Surrounded by family, friends, and servants, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne died on September 13, 1592, at the age of fifty-nine.

  Montaigne’s death must have been distressing to watch—the struggle for air, the desperate effort, the hideous swelling—and he seemed to be fully aware of what was going on, another thing he had hoped to avoid. But perhaps it did not feel so distressing to him. On the day of his riding accident, he had thrashed around vomiting blood while his soul floated in pleasure; the same thing could have happened at the end too. He may have felt only the sensation of his life being gently detached from his lips: that slender thread being cut at last.

  Étienne Pasquier and another friend, Pierre de Brach, composed their hearsay accounts of the scene for their contemporaries, making Montaigne’s death an exemplary Stoic one. They performed the same service for his memory as he had done for La Boétie’s. Montaigne had lived happily, wrote Pierre de Brach in a letter to Justus Lipsius; now, he had died happily, and well. The only ones to feel pain would be his survivors, who would be for ever deprived of his agreeable company.

  The first job those survivors had to handle was the funeral ceremony, along with a rather gruesome dismantling of Montaigne’s body. As a note in the family’s Beuther Ephemeris recorded:

  His heart was placed in the church of Saint Michel, and Françoise de la Chassaigne madame de Montaigne, his widow, had his body taken to Bordeaux and interred in the church of the Feuillants, where she had a raised tomb built for him, and bought the rights for this from the church.

  It was not unusual to separate out the body parts for burial, though it does seem a strange choice to put only the heart, rather than the whole body, in the little twelfth-century church on the estate. That would have made a peaceful resting place: he could have lain alongside his own father as well as the tiny skeletons of so many of his own children.

  Instead, the remains of his remains went to the church of the Feuillant Order, an odd decision, again, and apparently not the original one. The first plan had been to bury him in the cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux; its canons authorized this on December 15, 1592. That would have placed him among members of Françoise’s family, rather than his own. But she changed her mind, either because she herself was a devotee of the Feuillants, or because he was: he had expressed admiration for them in the Essays. The decision was certainly good for the monks. In return for housing Montaigne’s body and saying regular masses for his soul, they received a generous rent which they used to fund a paint job on the building’s interior. They gave him a magnificent tomb, which survives; it shows him lying in full knight’s armor with his hands drawn out of his gauntlets and joined in prayer. Epitaphs in Greek and Latin cover the sides of the tomb, praising his Christian Pyrrhonism, his adherence to the laws and religion of his ancestors, his “gentle ways,” his judgment, his honesty, and his bravery. The Latin text ends, movingly:

  (illustration credit i20.2)

  Françoise de la Chassaigne, left a prey, alas, to perpetual mourning, has erected this monument to the memory of this husband whom rightly she regrets. He had no other wife; she will have had no other husband.

  His body, minus the heart, was laid in this tomb at last on May 1, 1594, a year and a half after his death. He had already had to wait a long time for his eternal rest—and it was not to be eternal at all. About a decade later, work began on enlargements to the church and alterations to its layout. This would have left Montaigne’s tomb stranded a long way from the new altar, in breach of the agreement with Françoise. She sued the Feuillants, and won. They were obliged to move the tomb, in 1614, to a prime position in the new chapel.

  There he lay, and the decades went by peacefully until the French Revolution came along some nine generations later. The new secular state abolished the Feuillants along with other religious orders, and confiscated their property, including the church and everything in it. This was during a time when Montaigne was being held up as a hero of the Enlightenment—a freethinking philosophe, someone worthy of honor by the revolutionary regime. It seemed wrong to leave him where he was. So it was ordered in 1800 that he be disinterred and reburied in the hall of monuments in Bordeaux’s great new secular temple: the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts. The precious remains were extracted and conveyed with portentous solemnity to the new location, accompanied by cavalry in procession and saluted all the way with brass fanfares.

  Two and a half years later, an antiquary working through records at the same Bordeaux Académie made an embarrassing discovery. The body that had been moved was not Montaigne’s. It was that of his nephew’s wife, a woman named Marie de Brian who had been buried in the same tomb along with other members of the family. Quietly, with no brass or cavalry this time, she was retrieved from the hall of monuments and returned to her original place. Montaigne remained where he had been all the time, untouched, in the original tomb. The man who so disliked building work, idealistic “innovation,” and unnecessary upheavals had, after all, remained undisturbed by the Revolution, which had swept over his head like a wave over a deep sea bed.

  Then, in May 1871, a fire destroyed the church. The tomb remained mostly undamaged, but it now sat unprotected amid the church’s gaping ruins for almost a decade. In December 1880, officials opened it to assess the state of the revered relic, and found that the lead shell around Montaigne’s remains had crumbled to b
its. They sorted out the fragments, and made a new oak coffin for him. The restored tomb then spent five years in temporary quarters in the Depository of the Charterhouse, before being installed on March 11, 1886 in the entrance hall of a new building at the University of Bordeaux, containing the faculties of theology, science, and literature. Today, it is at the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux, where it can be seen on proud display.

  There could hardly have been a more appropriate set of posthumous adventures for someone so attuned to the flux of the world, and so aware of how all human endeavors become muddled by error. Even after he died, something seemed to keep pulling Montaigne back into the stream of life rather than leaving him frozen in perfect remembrance. And his real legacy has nothing to do with his tomb at all. It is found in the turbulent fortunes of the Essays, his endlessly evolving second self. They remained alive, and, for Montaigne, it was always life that mattered. Virginia Woolf was especially fond of quoting this thought from his last essay: it was as close as Montaigne ever came to a final or best answer to the question of how to live.

  Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

  Either this is not an answer at all, or it is the only possible answer. It has the same quality as the answer given by the Zen master who, when asked, “What is enlightenment?” whacked the questioner on the head with a stick Enlightenment is something learned on your own body: it takes the form of things happening to you. This is why the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics taught tricks rather than precepts. All philosophers can offer is that blow on the head: a useful technique, a thought experiment, or an experience—in Montaigne’s case, the experience of reading the Essays. The subject he teaches is simply himself, an ordinary example of a living being.

  Although the Essays present a different facet to every eye, everything in them is united in that one figure: Montaigne. This is why readers return to him in a way they do to few others of his century, or indeed to most writers of any epoch. The Essays are his essays. They test and sample a mind that is an “I” to itself, as all minds are.