If [couples] are not ready, they should not try to rush things. Rather than fall into perpetual wretchedness by being struck with despair at a first rejection, it is better … to wait for an opportune moment … a man who suffers a rejection should make gentle assays and overtures with various little sallies; he should not stubbornly persist in proving himself inadequate once and for all.
It was a new language, unsensational and intimate, with which to articulate the loneliest moments of our sexuality. Cutting a path into the private sorrows of the bedchamber, Montaigne drained them of their ignominy, attempting all the while to reconcile us to our bodily selves. His courage in mentioning what is secretly lived but rarely heard expands the range of what we can dare to express to our lovers and to ourselves – a courage founded on Montaigne’s conviction that nothing that can happen to man is inhuman, that ‘every man bears the whole Form of the human condition,’ a condition which includes – we do not need to blush nor hate ourselves for it – the risk of an occasional rebellious flaccidity in the penis.
Montaigne attributed our problems with our bodies in part to an absence of honest discussion about them in polite circles. Representative stories and images do not tend to identify feminine grace with a strong interest in love-making, nor authority with the possession of a sphincter or penis. Pictures of kings and ladies do not encourage us to think of these eminent souls breaking wind or making love. Montaigne filled out the picture in blunt, beautiful French:
Au plus eslevé throne du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul
.
Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.
Les Roys et les philosophes fientent, et les dames aussi
.
Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies.
King Henri III (Ill. 16.1)
Catherine de’ Medici (Ill. 16.2)
He could have put it otherwise. Instead of ‘cul’, ‘derrière’ or ‘fesses’. Instead of ‘fienter’, ‘aller au cabinet’. Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (for the furtherance of young Learners, and the advantage of all others that endeavour to arrive at the most exactly knowledge of the French language), printed in London in 1611, explained that ‘fienter’ referred particularly to the excretions of vermin and badgers. If Montaigne felt the need for such strong language, it was to correct an equally strong denial of the body in works of philosophy and in drawing rooms. The view that ladies never had to wash their hands and kings had no behinds had made it timely to remind the world that they shat and had arses:
The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter the words
kill
,
thieve
, or
betray
; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth.
In the vicinity of Montaigne’s château were several beech-tree forests, one to the north near the village of Castillon-la-Bataille, another to the east near St Vivien. Montaigne’s daughter Léonor must have known their silences and their grandeur. She was not encouraged to know their name: the French for ‘beech tree’ is ‘fouteau’. The French for ‘fuck’ is ‘foutre’.
‘My daughter – I have no other children – is of an age when the more passionate girls are legally allowed to marry,’ Montaigne explained of Léonor, then about fourteen:
She is slender and gentle; by complexion she is young for her age, having been quietly brought up on her own by her mother; she is only just learning to throw off her childish innocence. She was reading from a French book in my presence when she came across the name of that well-known tree
fouteau
. The woman she has for governess pulled her up short rather rudely and made her jump over that awkward ditch.
Twenty coarse lackeys could not, Montaigne wryly remarked, have taught Léonor more about what lurked beneath ‘fouteau’ than a stern injunction to longjump over the word. But for the governess, or the ‘old crone’ as her employer more bluntly termed her, the leap was essential because a young woman could not easily combine dignity with a knowledge of what might occur if in a few years’ time she found herself in a bedroom with a man.
Montaigne was faulting our conventional portraits for leaving out so much of what we are. It was in part in order to correct this that he wrote his own book. When he retired at the age of thirty-eight, he wished to write, but was unsure what his theme should be. Only gradually did an idea form in his mind for a book so unusual as to be unlike any of the thousand volumes on the semicircular shelves.
He abandoned millennia of authorial coyness to write about himself. He set out to describe as explicitly as possible the workings of his own mind and body – declaring his intention in the preface to the Essays, two volumes of which were published in Bordeaux in 1580, with a third added in a Paris edition eight years later:
Had I found myself among those peoples who are said still to live under the sweet liberty of Nature’s primal laws, I can assure you that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole, and wholly naked.
No author had hitherto aspired to present himself to his readers without any clothes on. There was no shortage of official, fully clothed portraits, accounts of the lives of saints and popes, Roman emperors and Greek statesmen. There was even an official portrait of Montaigne by Thomas de Leu (1562–c. 1620), which showed him dressed in the mayoral robes of the city, with the chain of the order of Saint-Michel offered to him by Charles IX in 1571, wearing an inscrutable, somewhat severe expression.
(Ill. 16.3)
But this robed, Ciceronian self was not what Montaigne wished his Essays to reveal. He was concerned with the whole man, with the creation of an alternative to the portraits which had left out most of what man was. It was why his book came to include discussions of his meals, his penis, his stools, his sexual conquests and his farts – details which had seldom featured in a serious book before, so gravely did they flout man’s image of himself as a rational creature. Montaigne informed his readers:
That the behaviour of his penis constituted an essential part of his identity
:
Every one of my members, each as much as another, makes me myself: and none makes me more properly a man than that one. I owe to the public my portrait complete.
That he found sex noisy and messy
:
Everywhere else you can preserve some decency; all other activities accept the rules of propriety: this other one can only be thought of as flawed or ridiculous. Just try and find a wise and discreet way of doing it!
That he liked quiet when sitting on the toilet
:
Of all the natural operations, that is the one during which I least willingly tolerate being disrupted.
And that he was very regular about going
:
My bowels and I never fail to keep our rendezvous, which is (unless some urgent business or illness disturbs us) when I jump out of bed.
If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves. What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.
When I picture to myself the most reflective and the most wise of men in [sexual] postures, I hold it as an effrontery that he should claim to be reflective and wise.
It is not that wisdom is impossible, rather it is the definition of wisdom that Montaigne was seeking to nuance. True wisdom must involve an accommodation with our baser selves, it must adopt a modest view about the role that intelligence and high culture can play in any life and accept the urgent and at times deeply un-edifying demands of our mortal frame. Epicure
an and Stoic philosophies had suggested that we could achieve mastery over our bodies, and never be swept away by our physical and passionate selves. It is noble advice that taps into our highest aspirations. It is also impossible, and therefore counter-productive:
What is the use of those high philosophical peaks on which no human being can settle and those rules which exceed our practice and our power?
It is not very clever of [man] to tailor his obligations to the standards of a different kind of being.
The body cannot be denied nor overcome, but there is at least, as Montaigne wished to remind the ‘old crone’, no need to choose between our dignity and an interest in fouteau:
May we not say that there is nothing in us during this earthly prison either purely corporeal or purely spiritual and that it is injurious to tear a living man apart?
3
On Cultural Inadequacy
Another cause of a sense of inadequacy is the speed and arrogance with which people seem to divide the world into two camps, the camp of the normal and that of the abnormal. Our experiences and beliefs are liable frequently to be dismissed with a quizzical, slightly alarmed, ‘Really? How weird!’, accompanied by a raised eyebrow, amounting in a small way to a denial of our legitimacy and humanity.
In the summer of 1580, Montaigne acted on the desire of a lifetime, and made his first journey outside France, setting off on horseback to Rome via Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He travelled in the company of four young noblemen, including his brother, Bertrand de Mattecoulon, and a dozen servants. They were to be away from home for seventeen months, covering 3,000 miles. Among other towns, the party rode through Basle, Baden, Schaffhausen, Augsburg, Innsbruck, Verona, Venice, Padua, Bologna, Florence and Siena – finally reaching Rome towards evening on the last day of November 1580.
As the party travelled, Montaigne observed how people’s ideas of what was normal altered sharply from province to province. In inns in the Swiss cantons, they thought it normal that beds should be raised high off the ground, so that one needed steps to climb into them, that there should be pretty curtains around them and that travellers should have rooms to themselves. A few miles away, in Germany, it was thought normal that beds should be low on the ground, have no curtains around them and that travellers should sleep four to a room. Innkeepers there offered feather quilts rather than the sheets one found in French inns. In Basle, people didn’t mix water with their wine and had six or seven courses for dinner, and in Baden they ate only fish on Wednesdays. The smallest Swiss village was guarded by at least two policemen; the Germans rang their bells every quarter of an hour, in certain towns, every minute. In Lindau, they served soup made of quinces, the meat dish came before the soup, and the bread was made with fennel.
French travellers were prone to be very upset by the differences. In hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods, requesting the normal dishes they knew from home. They tried not to talk to anyone who had made the error of not speaking their language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread. Montaigne watched them from his table:
Once out of their villages, they feel like fish out of water. Wherever they go they cling to their ways and curse foreign ones. If they come across a fellow-countryman … they celebrate the event … With a morose and taciturn prudence they travel about wrapped up in their cloaks and protecting themselves from the contagion of an unknown clime.
In the middle of the fifteenth century, in the southern German states, a new method of heating homes had been developed: the Kastenofen, a freestanding box-shaped iron stove made up of rectangular plates bolted together, in which coal or wood could be burnt. In the long winters, the advantages were great. Closed stoves could dispense four times the heat of an open fire, yet demanded less fuel and no chimney-sweeps. The heat was absorbed by the casing and spread slowly and evenly through the air. Poles were fixed around the stoves for airing and drying laundry, and families could use their stoves as seating areas throughout the winter.
(Ill. 17.1)
But the French were not impressed. They found open fires cheaper to build; they accused German stoves of not providing a source of light and of withdrawing too much moisture from the air, lending an oppressive feeling to a room.
(Ill. 17.2)
The subject was a matter of regional incomprehension. In Augsburg in October 1580, Montaigne met a German who delivered a lengthy critique of the way French people heated their houses with open fires, and who then went on to adumbrate the advantages of the iron stove. On hearing that Montaigne would be spending only a few days in the town (he had arrived on the 15th and was to leave on the 19th), he expressed pity for him, citing among the chief inconveniences of leaving Augsburg the ‘heavy-headedness’ he would suffer on returning to open fires – the very same ‘heavy-headedness’ which the French had long condemned iron stoves for provoking.
Montaigne examined the issue at close quarters. In Baden, he was assigned a room with an iron stove, and once he had grown used to a certain smell it released, spent a comfortable night. He noted that the stove enabled him to dress without putting on a furred gown, and months later, on a cold night in Italy, expressed regret at the absence of stoves in his inn.
On his return home, he weighed up the respective qualities of each heating system:
It is true that the stoves give out an oppressive heat and that the materials of which they are built produce a smell when hot which causes headaches in those who are not used to them … On the other hand, since the heat they give out is even, constant and spread all-over, without the visible flame, smoke and the draught produced by our chimneys, it has plenty of grounds for standing comparison with ours.
So what annoyed Montaigne were the firm, unexamined convictions of both the Augsburg gentleman and the French that their own system of heating was superior. Had Montaigne returned from Germany and installed in his library an iron stove from Augsburg, his countrymen would have greeted the object with the suspicion they accorded anything new:
Each nation has many customs and practices which are not only unknown to another nation but barbarous and a cause of wonder.
When there was of course nothing barbarous nor wondrous about either a stove or a fireplace. The definition of normality proposed by any given society seems to capture only a fraction of what is in fact reasonable, unfairly condemning vast areas of experience to an alien status. By pointing out to the man from Augsburg and his Gascon neighbours that an iron stove and an open fireplace had a legitimate place in the vast realm of acceptable heating systems, Montaigne was attempting to broaden his readers’ provincial conception of the normal – and following in the footsteps of his favourite philosopher:
When they asked Socrates where he came from, he did not say ‘From Athens’, but ‘From the world.’
This world had recently revealed itself to be far more peculiar than anyone in Europe had ever expected. On Friday 12 October 1492, forty-one years before Montaigne’s birth, Christopher Columbus reached one of the islands on the archipelago of the Bahamas at the entrance of the gulf of Florida, and made contact with some Guanahani Indians, who had never heard of Jesus and walked about without any clothes on.
Montaigne took an avid interest. In the round library were several books on the life of the Indian tribes of America, among them Francisco Lopez de Gomara’s L’histoire générale des Indes, Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia de mondo novo and Jean de Léry’s Le voyage au Brésil. He read that in South America, people liked to eat spiders, grasshoppers, ants, lizards and bats: ‘They cook them and serve them up in various sauces.’ There were American tribes in which virgins openly displayed their private parts, brides had orgies on their wedding day, men were allowed to marry each other, and the dead were boiled, pounded into a gruel, mixed with wine and drunk by their relatives at spirited parties. There were countries in which women stood up to pee and men squatted down, in which men let their hair grow on the front of their body, but shaved their back. There were countries i
n which men were circumcised, while in others, they had a horror of the tip of the penis ever seeing the light of day and so ‘scrupulously stretched the foreskin right over it and tied it together with little cords’. There were nations in which you greeted people by turning your back to them, in which when the king spat, the court favourite held out a hand, and when he discharged his bowels, attendants ‘gathered up his faeces in a linen cloth’. Every country seemed to have a different conception of beauty:
In Peru, big ears are beautiful: they stretch them as far as they can, artificially. A man still alive today says that he saw in the East a country where this custom of stretching ears and loading them with jewels is held in such esteem that he was often able to thrust his arm, clothes and all, through the holes women pierced in their lobes. Elsewhere there are whole nations which carefully blacken their teeth and loathe seeing white ones. Elsewhere they dye them red … The women of Mexico count low foreheads as a sign of beauty: so, while they pluck the hair from the rest of their body, there they encourage it to grow thick and propagate it artificially. They hold large breasts in such high esteem that they affect giving suck to their children over their shoulders.
From Jean de Léry, Montaigne learned that the Tupi tribes of Brazil walked around in Edenic nudity, and showed no trace of shame (indeed, when Europeans tried to offer the Tupi women clothes, they giggled and turned them down, puzzled why anyone would burden themselves with anything so uncomfortable).
Tant les hommes que la femme étaient aussi entièrement nus que quand ils sortirent du ventre de leur mère. Jean de Léry, Voyage au Brésil (1578) (Ill. 17.3)
De Léry’s engraver (who had spent eight years with the tribes) took care to correct the rumour rife in Europe that the Tupis were as hairy as animals (de Léry: ‘Ils ne sont point naturellement poilus que nous ne sommes en ce pays’). The men shaved their heads, and the women grew their hair long, and tied it together with pretty red braids. The Tupi Indians loved to wash; any time they saw a river, they would jump into it and rub each other down. They might wash as many as twelve times a day.
The Consolations of Philosophy Page 10