The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  III. MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE: 1533–92

  1. Education

  Joseph Scaliger described Montaigne’s father as a seller of herring. The great scholar skipped a generation; it was the grandfather, Grimon Eyquem, who exported wines and dried fish from Bordeaux. Grimon inherited the business from Michel’s great-grandfather Ramon Eyquem, who made the family fortune so, and bought (1447) the mansion and estate known as Montaigne on a hill outside the city. Grimon expanded his patrimony with a judicious marriage. His son Pierre Eyquem preferred war to herring; he joined the French army, soldiered in Italy with Francis I, returned with scars and a rubbing of the Renaissance, and rose to be mayor of Bordeaux. In 1528 he married Antoinette, daughter of a wealthy merchant of Toulouse who was Jewish by birth, Christian by baptism, and Spanish by cultural background. Michel Eyquem, who became the Sieur de Montaigne, was born to Pierre and Antoinette with Gascon and Jewish blood in his brain. To further broaden his outlook, his father was a pious Catholic, his mother was probably a Protestant, and a sister and a brother were Calvinists.

  Pierre had ideas on education. “That good father,” Michel tells us, “even from my cradle sent me to be brought up in a poor village of his, where he kept me so long as I sucked, and somewhat longer, breeding me after the meanest and simplest common fashion.”20 While the boy was still nursing he was given a German attendant who spoke to him only in Latin. “I was six years old before I understood more of French than of Arabic.”21 When he went to the Collège de Guienne his teachers (except George Buchanan) were loath to talk Latin to him, he spoke it so glibly. Such mastery he had acquired “without books, rules, or grammar, without whipping or whining.”

  Perhaps the father had read Rabelais on education. He tried to rear his son on libertarian principles, substituting affection for compulsion. Montaigne relished this regimen and recommended it in a long letter on education,22 professedly written for Lady Diane de Foix; but in a later essay he recanted it and recommended the rod as a convincing supplement to reason.23 Nor did he follow his father in giving priority to Latin or the classics. Though his own memory bubbled over with classical quotations and instances, he deprecated a merely classical education, scorned book learning and bookworms, and stressed, rather, the training of the body to health and vigor and of the character to prudence and virtue. “We have need of little learning to have a good mind,”24 and a game of tennis may be more instructive than a diatribe against Catiline. A boy should be made hardy and brave, able to bear heat and cold without whimpering, and to relish the inevitable risks of life. Montaigne quoted Athenian authors, but preferred Spartan ways; his ideal was a manly virtue, almost in the Roman sense that made such a phrase redundant—to which he added the Greek ideal of “nothing in excess.” Temperance in everything, even in temperance. A man should drink moderately, but be able, if occasion should require, to drink abundantly without becoming stupefied.

  Travel can form a vital part of education, if we leave our prejudices at home. “It was told to Socrates that a certain man had been no whit improved by travel. ‘I believe it well,’ said he, ‘for he carried himself with him.’ “25 If we can keep our minds and eyes open, the world will be our best textbook, for “so many strange humors, sundry sects … diverse opinions, different laws, and fantastical customs teach us to judge rightly of ours.”26 Next to travel, the best education is history, which is travel extended into the past. The student “shall, by the help of histories, inform himself of the worthiest minds that were in the best ages…. What profit shall he not reap … reading the Lives of our Plutarch?”27 Finally, the student should get some philosophy—not the “thorny quiddities of logic,” but such philosophy as “teaches us how to live … what it is to know, and not to know; what valor, temperance, and justice are; what difference there is between ambition and avarice, bondage and freedom; by what marks a man may distinguish true and perfect contentment; and how far one ought to fear … death, pain, or disgrace. … A child coming from nurse is more capable of them [such lessons] than he is to learn to read or write.”28

  After seven years at the Collège de Guienne Montaigne proceeded to university and the study of law. No subject could have been less congenial to his discursive mind and limpid speech. He never tired of praising custom and berating law. He noted with joy that Ferdinand II of Spain had sent no lawyers to Spanish America, lest they should multiply disputes among the Indians; and he wished that physicians too had been forbidden there, lest they make new ailments with their cures.29 He thought those countries worst off that had most laws, and he reckoned that France had had “more than the rest of the world besides.” He saw no progress in the humaneness of the law, and doubted if any such savagery could be found among barbarians as togaed judges and tonsured ecclesiastics practiced in the torture chambers of European states.30 He gloried that “to this day [1588?] I am a virgin from all suits of law.”31

  2. Friendship and Marriage

  Nevertheless, we find him in 1557 councilor in the Court of Aids at Périgueux and in 1561 a member of the Bordeaux Parlement—the municipal court. There he met and loved Étienne de La Boétie. We have seen elsewhere how, about the age of eighteen, this young aristocrat wrote, but did not publish, a passionate Discours sur la servitude volontaire, which came to be called Contr’un—i.e., against one-man rule. With all the eloquence of Danton, it called upon the people to rise against absolutism. Perhaps Montaigne himself felt some republican ardor in his youth. In any case, he was drawn to the noble rebel, who, three years older, seemed a paragon of wisdom and integrity.

  We sought one another before we had seen one another, and, by the reports we heard of one another … I think by some secret ordinance of the heavens we embraced one another by our names. And at our first meeting, which was by chance at a great feast and solemn meeting of a whole township, we found ourselves so surprised, so … acquainted, and so … bound together, that from thenceforward nothing was so near to us as one unto another.32

  Why this profound attachment? Montaigne answered, “Because it was he, because it was I”33—because they were so different that they completed each other. For La Boétie was all idealism, warm devotion, tenderness; Montaigne was too intellectual, prudent, impartial to be so dedicated; this very friend described him as “equally inclined to both outstanding vices and virtues.”34 Perhaps the deepest experience of Montaigne’s life was watching his friend die. In 1563, during a plague at Bordeaux, La Boétie fell suddenly ill with fever and dysentery. He bore his lingering death with a stoic fortitude and a Christian patience never forgotten by his friend, who stayed at his bedside during those final days. Montaigne inherited the manuscript of the dangerous essay and concealed it for thirteen years; a copy was printed in a pirated edition (1576); thereupon he published the original, and explained that it was the rhetorical exercise of a boy of “sixteen.”

  That friendship made every later human relationship seem insipid to Montaigne. He wrote, again and again, that half of him had died with La Boétie. “I was so accustomed to be ever two, and so inured to be never single, that methinks I am but half myself.”35 In the warmth of that memory he placed friendship above the love between father and son, maid and youth, husband and wife. He himself seems to have had no romantic passion for any woman: “In my youth I opposed myself to the notions of love, which I felt to usurp upon me; and I labored to diminish its enjoyment, lest in the end it might… captivate me to its mercy.”36 Not that he lacked erotic hours; on the contrary, he acknowledges premarital relations of proud scope and frequency.37 He described sexual love as no “other than a tickling delight of emptying one’s seminary [sic] vessels, as is the pleasure which nature giveth us to discharge other parts”; and he thought it absurd that nature “hath pell-mell lodged our joys and filths together.”38

  He agreed with most philosophers that the itch to detumesce is no reason for marriage. “I see no marriages fail sooner, or more troubled, than such as are concluded for beauty’s sake, or huddled up for amorous de
sires.”39 Marriage should be arranged by “a third hand”; it should reject the company and conditions of [sexual] love” and should try “to imitate those of friendship”; marriage must become friendship to survive. He inclined to the view of Greek thinkers that a man should not marry before thirty. He avoided the tie as long as he could. Still single at twenty-eight, he traveled to Paris, fell in love with it,40 enjoyed the life of the court for a while (1562), saw some American Indians at Rouen, hesitated between the rival charms of civilization and savagery, returned to Bordeaux, and married (1565) Françoise de Chassaigne.

  He seems to have married for strictly rational reasons: to have a home and a family, to transmit his estate and his name. Amid all his fifteen hundred pages he says almost nothing of his wife—but that may have been good manners. He claims to have been faithful to her: “Licentious as the world reputes me, I had (in good faith) more strictly observed the laws of wedlock than either I had promised or hoped.”41 She made allowances for the self-absorption of genius; she took competent care of the household, the land, even the accounts, for he had no mind for business. For his part, he gave her full respect, and now and then a sign or word of love—as when he responded gratefully to her quick aid after his fall from a horse, and when he dedicated to her his edition of La Boétie’s translation of Plutarch’s Letter of Consolation. It was a successful marriage, and we must not take very seriously the quips against women in the Essays; they were a fashion among philosophers. Françoise bore him six children, all girls; all died in childhood but one, of whom he speaks tenderly.42 When he was fifty-four he adopted into the family a twenty-year-old girl, Marie de Gournay, “truly of me beloved with more than a fatherly love, and as one of the best parts of my being, enfeoffed in my home and solitariness.”43 He was not above the common feelings of humanity.

  3. The Essays

  In 1568 his father died, and Michel, as the oldest son, inherited the estate. Three or four years later he resigned from the Parliament of Bordeaux, and retired from the bedlam of the city to the boredom of the countryside. Even there peace was precarious, for religious war was dividing France, its cities, and its families. Soldiers raided villages, entered homes, stole, raped, and killed. “I have a thousand times gone to bed … imagining I should, the very same night, have been either betrayed or slain in my bed.”44 As a dissuasion to violence, he left his doors unlocked and gave orders that if marauders came they were to be received without resistance. They stayed away, and Montaigne was left free to live in his corner of philosophy amid the clatter of creeds and arms. While Paris and some provinces murdered Protestants in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, Montaigne wrote the supreme work of French prose.

  His favorite retreat was the library on the third floor of the tower that rose in the façade of his château. (The château was destroyed by fire in 1885, but the tower survived.) He loved his library as himself, his alter ego.

  The form of it is round, and hath no flat side but what serveth for my table and chair; in which … manner at one look it offers me the full sight of all my books … There is my seat, there is my throne. I endeavor to make my rule therein absolute, and to sequester that only corner from the community of wife, of children, and of acquaintance.45

  Seldom has a man so relished solitude, which is almost our direst dread.

  A man must sequester and recover himself from himself … We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves … altogether ours … wherein we may hoard up and establish our true liberty. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know how to be his own.46

  In that library he had a thousand books, most of them bound in tooled leather. He called them “meas delicias” (my delights). In them he could choose his company and live with the wisest and the best. In Plutarch alone, “since he spoke French” (through Amyot), he could find a hundred great men to come and talk with him, and in Seneca’s Epistles he could savor a pleasant Stoicism melodiously phrased; these two (including Plutarch’s Moralia) were his favorite authors, “from whom, like the Danaïdes, I draw my water, incessantly filling as fast as emptying47 … The familiarity I have with them, and the aid they afford me in my old age, and my book merely framed of their spoils, binds me to maintain their honor.”48

  He never quotes the Bible (perhaps as too well known), though he frequently cites St. Augustine. For the most part he prefers the ancients to the moderns, the pagan philosophers to the Christian Fathers. He was a humanist insofar as he loved the literature and the history of old Greece and Rome; but he was no indiscriminate idolater of classics and manuscripts; he thought Aristotle superficial and Cicero a windbag. He was not quite at home with the Greeks. He quoted the Latin poets with roaming erudition, even one of Martial’s most privy epigrams. He admired Virgil, but preferred Lucretius. He read Erasmus’ Adagia predaceously. In the early essays he was a pedant, adorning himself with classical tags. Such excerpts were in the manner of the age; readers who had no competence for the originals relished these samples as little windows glimpsing antiquity, and some complained that there were not more.49 From all his pilfering Montaigne emerged uniquely himself, laughing at pedantry and making up his own mind and speech. He looks like scissors and paste, and tastes like ambrosia.

  So, leisurely, page by page and day by day, after 1570, he wrote his Essais.I He seems to have invented the term,50 almost the type; for though there had been discorsi and discours, they were formidably formal, not the informal, meandering conversations of Montaigne; and this easygoing, buttonholing style has tended to characterize the essay since his death, making it a predominantly modern genre. “I speak to paper,” he said, “as I do to the first person I meet.”51 The style is the man, natural, intimate, confidential; it is a comfort to be spoken to so familiarly by a seigneur of the mind. Open him at any page, and you are caught by the arm and swept along, never knowing, and seldom caring, where you will go. He wrote piecemeal, on any subject that struck his thought or matched his mood; and he diverged anarchically from the initial topic as he rambled on; so the essay “On Coaches” rattles off into ancient Rome and new America. Of the three volumes, three consist of digressions. Montaigne was lazy, and nothing is so arduous as producing and maintaining order in ideas or men. He confessed himself divers et ondoyant—wavering and diverse. He made no fetish of consistency; he changed his opinions with his years; only the final composite picture is Montaigne.

  Amid the confused flux of his notions his style is as clear as the soul of simplicity. Yet it sparkles with metaphors as surprising as Shakespeare’s, and with illuminating anecdotes that instantaneously transform the abstract into the real. His probing curiosity snatches at such instances anywhere, admitting no moral hindrance. He carefully hands down to us the remark of the Toulouse woman who, having been handled by several soldiers, thanked God that “once in my life I have had my bellyful without sin.”52Nihil naturae alienum putat.

  4. The Philosopher

  He claims to have only one subject—himself. “I look within myself; I have no business but with myself; I incessantly consider … and taste myself.”53 He proposes to study human nature at first hand, through his own impulses, habits, likes, dislikes, ailments, feelings, prejudices, fears, and ideas. He does not offer us an autobiography; he says almost nothing, in the Essays, about his career as a councilor or mayor, about his travels, his visits to the court. He does not wear his religion or his politics on his sleeve. He gives us something more precious—a frank and penetrating analysis of his body, mind, and character. He expounds his faults and vices with pleasure and at length. To accomplish his purpose he asks permission to speak freely; he will violate good taste to exhibit a man naked in body and soul. He talks with noisy candor about his natural functions, quotes St. Augustine and Vives on melodic flatulence, and meditates on coitus:

  Each one avoideth to see a man born, but all run hastily to see him die. To destroy him we seek a spacious field and full light; but to construct him we hide ourselves in some dark corner and work as close as we
may.54

  Even so, he claims to have practiced some reticence. “I speak truth, not my bellyful, but as much as I dare.”55

  He tells us a great deal about his physical self, and he nurses his health from page to page. Health is the summum bonum. “Renown or glory is overdearly bought by a man of my humor, in God’s name.”56 He records the vicissitudes of his bowels in affectionate detail. He sought the philosopher’s stone and found it lodged in his bladder. He hoped to pass these pebbles in some amorous ecstasy, but found, instead, that they “do strangely diswench me,”57 threatening him with inopportune disablement. He consoled himself with his proud capacity to “hold my water full ten hours,”58 and to be in the saddle long hours without exhausting fatigue. He was stout and strong, and he ate so avidly that he almost bit his fingers in his greed. He loved himself with indefatigable virtuosity.

  He was vain of his genealogy, his coat of arms,59 his fine dress, and his distinction as a Chevalier of St. Michael—and wrote an essay “Of Vanity.” He pretends to most of the vices, and assures us that if there is any virtue in him it entered by stealth. He had many nevertheless: honesty, geniality, humor, equanimity, pity, moderation, tolerance. He tossed explosive ideas into the air, but caught and extinguished them before they fell. In an age of dogmatic slaughter he begged his fellow men to moderate their certainties this side of murder; and he gave the modern world one of its first examples of a tolerant mind. We forgive his faults because we share them. And we find his self-analysis fascinating because we know that it is about us that the tale is told.