Montaigne’s main concern is with the very special loving-friendship which he shared with Etienne de La Boëtie. La Boëtie’s youthful treatise De la Servitude volontaire (On Willing Slavery) which praised the polity of the Republic of Venice at the expense of monarchy was used seditiously after his death by those who had taken up arms against their King in the Wars of Religion. Montaigne is at pains to show that a rare and exemplary friendship has ever been consonant with loyalty to the State and that both he and La Boëtie were loyal to each other and, therefore, loyal to their country.]
[A] I was watching an artist on my staff working on a painting when I felt a desire to emulate him. The finest place in the middle of a wall he selects for a picture to be executed to the best of his ability; then he fills up the empty spaces all round it with grotesques, which are fantastical paintings whose attractiveness consists merely in variety and novelty. And in truth what are these Essays if not monstrosities and grotesques botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?
Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne.
[A fair woman terminating in the tail of a fish.]1
I can manage to reach the second stage of that painter but I fall short of the first and better one: my abilities cannot stretch so far as to venture to undertake a richly ornate picture, polished and fashioned according to the rules of art. So I decided to borrow. ‘painting’ from Etienne de La Boëtie, which will bring honour to the rest of the job: I mean the treatise to which he gave the title On Willing Slavery but which others, not knowing this, very appropriately baptised afresh as Against One.2 He wrote it, while still very young,3 as a kind of essay against tyrants in honour of freedom. It has long circulated among men of discretion – not without great and well-merited esteem, for it is a noble work, as solid as may be. Yet it is far from being the best he was capable of. If, at the age when I knew him when he was more mature, he had conceived a design such as mine and written down his thoughts, we would now see many choice works bringing us close to the glory of the Ancients; for, particularly where natural endowments are concerned, I know nobody who can compare with him. Yet nothing of his survives apart from this treatise – and even that is due to accident: I do not think he ever saw it again once he let go of it – and some Considerations on that Edict of January which our civil wars have made notorious: I may [C] perhaps [A] still find a place for it elsewhere.4 That is all I have been able to recover of his literary remains, [C] I the heir to whom, with death on his lips, he so lovingly willed his books and his papers – [A] apart from the slim volume of his works which I have had published already.
Yet I am particularly indebted to that treatise, because it first brought us together: it was shown to me long before I met him and first made me acquainted with his name; thus preparing for that loving-friendship between us which as long as it pleased God we fostered so perfect and so entire that it is certain that few such can even be read about, and no trace at all of it can be found among men of today. So many fortuitous circumstances are needed to make it, that it is already something if Fortune can achieve it once in three centuries. There seems to be nothing for which Nature has better prepared us than for fellowship – [C] and Aristotle says that good lawgivers have shown more concern for friendship than for justice.5 [A] Within a fellowship the peak of perfection consists in friendship; for [C] all forms of it which are forged or fostered by pleasure or profit or by public or private necessity are so much the less beautiful and noble – and therefore so much the less ‘friendship’ – in that they bring in some purpose, end or fruition other than the friendship itself. Nor do those four ancient species of love conform to it: the natural, the social, the hospitable and the erotic.6
[A] From children to fathers it is more a matter of respect; friendship, being fostered by mutual confidences, cannot exist between them because of their excessive inequality; it might also interfere with their natural obligations: for all the secret thoughts of fathers cannot be shared with their children for fear of begetting an unbecoming intimacy; neither can those counsels and admonitions which constitute one of the principal obligations of friendship be offered by children to their fathers. There have been peoples where it was the custom for children to kill their fathers and others for fathers to kill their children to avoid the impediment which each can constitute for the other: one depends naturally on the downfall of the other.7
There have been philosophers who held such natural bonds in contempt – witness [C] Aristippus: when he was being pressed about the affection which he owed to his children since they had sprung from him, he began to spit, saying that that sprang from him too, and that we also engender lice and worms.8 [A] And there was that other one whom Plutarch sought to reconcile with his brother but who retorted: ‘He matters no more to me for coming out of the same hole.’9
The name of brother is truly a fair one and full of love: that is why La Boëtie and I made a brotherhood of our alliance. But sharing out property or dividing it up, with the wealth of one becoming the poverty of the other, can wondrously melt and weaken the solder binding brothers together. Brothers have to progress and advance by driving along the same path in the same convoy: they needs must frequently bump and jostle against each other. Moreover, why should there be found between them that congruity and affinity which engender true and perfect friendship? Father and son can be of totally different complexions: so can brothers. ‘He is my son, he is my kinsman, but he is wild, wicked or daft!’ And to the extent that they are loving relationships commanded by the law and the bonds of nature, there is less of our own choice, less ‘willing freedom’.10 Our ‘willing freedom’ produces nothing more properly its own than affection and loving-friendship. It is not that I have failed to assay all that the other kind can afford, having had the best father who ever was, and the most indulgent even into extreme old age, and coming as I do from a family renowned and exemplary from generation to generation in the matter of brotherly harmony:
[B] et ipse
Notus in fratres animi paterni.
[And myself known for my fatherly concern for my brothers.]11
[A] You cannot compare with friendship the passion men feel for women, even though it is born of our own choice, nor can you put them in the same category. I must admit that the flames of passion –
neque enim est dea nescia nostri
Que dulcem curis miscet amaritiem
[for I am not unacquainted with that goddess who mingles sweet bitterness with love’s cares]12 –
are more active, sharp and keen. But that fire is a rash one, fickle, fluctuating and variable; it is a feverish fire, subject to attacks and relapses, which only gets hold of a corner of us. The love of friends is a general universal warmth, temperate moreover and smooth, a warmth which is constant and at rest, all gentleness and evenness, having nothing sharp nor keen. What is more, sexual love is but a mad craving for something which escapes us:
Come segue la lepre il cacciatore
Al freddo, al caldo, alla montagna, al lito;
Ne piu l’estima poi che presa vede,
Et sol dietro a chi fugge affretta il piede.
[Like the hunter who chases the hare through heat and cold, o’er hill and dale, yet, once he has bagged it, he thinks nothing of it; only while it flees away does he pound after it.]13
As soon as it enters the territory of friendship (where wills work together, that is) it languishes and grows faint. To enjoy it is to lose it: its end is in the body and therefore subject to satiety. Friendship on the contrary is enjoyed in proportion to our desire: since it is a matter of the mind, with our souls being purified by practising it, it can spring forth, be nourished and grow only when enjoyed. Far below such perfect friendship those fickle passions also once found a place in me – not to mention in La Boëtie, who confesses to all too many in his verses. And so those two emotions came into me, each one aware of the other but never to be compared, the f
irst maintaining its course in a proud and lofty flight, scornfully watching the other racing along way down below.
As for marriage, apart from being a bargain where only the entrance is free (its duration being fettered and constrained, depending on things outside our will), it is a bargain struck for other purposes; within it you soon have to unsnarl hundreds of extraneous tangled ends, which are enough to break the thread of a living passion and to trouble its course, whereas in friendship there is no traffic or commerce but with itself. In addition, women are in truth not normally capable of responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn. And indeed if it were not for that, if it were possible to fashion such a relationship, willing and free, in which not only the souls had this full enjoyment but in which the bodies too shared in the union – [C] where the whole human being was involved – it is certain14 [A] that the loving-friendship would be more full and more abundant. But there is no example yet of woman attaining to it [C] and by the common agreement of the Ancient schools of philosophy she is excluded from it.
[A] And that alternative licence of the Greeks is rightly abhorrent to our manners; [C] moreover since as they practised it it required a great disparity of age and divergence of favours between the lovers, it did not correspond either to that perfect union and congruity which we are seeking here. ‘Quis est enim iste amor amicitiae? Cur neque deformem adolescentem quisquam amat, neque formosum senem?’ [What is this ‘friendship-love’? Why does nobody ever fall in love with a youth who is ugly or with a beautiful old man?]15 For even the portrayal of it by the Academy will not I think belie me when I say this about it: that the original frenzy inspired by Venus’ son16 in the heart of the Lover towards the bloom of a tender youth (in which they allow all the excessive and passionate assaults which an immoderate ardour can produce) was simply based on physical beauty, a false image of generation in the body (for it could not have been based on the mind, which had yet to show itself, which was even then being born, too young to sprout); that if so mad a passion took hold of a base mind the means of pursuing it were riches, presents, favouritism in advancement to high office and such other base traffickings which the Academy condemned; if it lighted on a more noble mind its inducements were likewise more noble: instruction in philosophy; lessons teaching reverence for religion, obedience to the law and dying for the good of one’s country; examples of valour, wisdom, justice, with the Lover striving to make himself worthy of acceptance by the graciousness and beauty of his soul (that of his body having long since faded) and hoping by this mental alliance to strike a more firm and durable match. When this suit produced its results – in due season (for while they did not require the Lover to devote time and discretion to this undertaking they strictly required it of the Beloved, since he had to reach a judgement about a kind of beauty which is internal, difficult to recognize and concealed from discovery) – there was then born in that Beloved the desire mentally to conceive through the medium of the beauty of the mind. For him this beauty was pre-eminent: that of the body, secondary and contingent – quite the opposite from the Lover. For this reason they held the Beloved in higher esteem and proved that the gods do so too; they severely rebuked the poet Aeschylus for having given, in the love of Achilles and Patroclus, the role of the Lover to Achilles, who was the fairest of all the Greeks, in the first verdure of unbearded youth.17
Once this general communion had been established, with the more worthy aspect of it fulfilling its duties and predominating, they said that it produced fruits useful for private and public life; that it was the strength of those countries where it was the accepted custom and the main defence of right conduct and freedom – witness the loves of Hermodius and Aristogiton. That is why they call it sacred and divine. By their reckoning only the violence of tyrants and the baseness of the people are opposed to it.18 Yet when all is said and done the only point we can concede to the Academy is that it was a love-affair which ended in friendship – which conforms well enough to the Stoic definition of love: ‘Amorem conatum esse amicitiae faciendae ex pulchritudinis specie.’ [Love is the striving to establish friendship on the external signs of beauty.]19
I now return to a kind of love more equable and more equitable: ‘Omnino amicitiae, corroboratis jam confirmatisque ingeniis et aetatibus, judicandae sunt.’ [Such only are to be considered friendships in which characters have been confirmed and strengthened with age.]20
[A] Moreover what we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances and familiar relationships bound by some chance or some suitability, by means of which our souls support each other. In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed [C] except by replying: ‘Because it was him: because it was me.’ [A] Mediating this union there was, beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can say [C] specifically [A] about it, some [C] inexplicable [A] force of destiny.21
[C] We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other – both because of the reports we each had heard (which made a more violent assault on our emotions than was reasonable from what they had said, and, I believe, because of some decree of Heaven: we embraced each other by repute, and, at our first meeting, which chanced to be at a great crowded town-festival, we discovered ourselves to be so seized by each other, so known to each other and so bound together that from then on none was so close as each was to the other. He wrote an excellent Latin Satire, which has been published,22 by which he defends and explains the suddenness of our relationship which so quickly reached perfection. Having so short a period to last, having begun so late (for we were both grown men – he more than a few years older than I) – it had no time to waste on following the pattern of those slacker ordinary friendships which require so much prudent foresight in long preliminary acquaintance. This friendship has had no ideal to follow other than itself; no comparison but with itself. [A] There is no one particular consideration – nor two nor three nor four nor a thousand of them – but rather some inexplicable quintessence of them all mixed up together which, having captured my will, brought it to plunge into his and lose itself [C] and which, having captured his will, brought it to plunge and lose itself in mine with an equal hunger and emulation. [A] I say ‘lose itself’ in very truth; we kept nothing back for ourselves: nothing was his or mine.
In the presence of the Roman Consuls (who, after the condemnation of Tiberius Gracchus were prosecuting those who had been in his confidence) Laelius eventually asked Caius Blosius, the closest friend of Gracchus, how much he would have done for him. He replied: ‘Anything.’ – ‘What, anything?’ Laelius continued: ‘And what if he had ordered you to set fire to our temples?’ – ‘He would never have asked me to,’ retorted Blosius. ‘But supposing he had,’ Laelius added. ‘Then I would have obeyed,’ he replied.23 Now if he really were so perfect a friend of Gracchus as history asserts, he had no business provoking the Consuls with that last rash assertion and ought never to have abandoned the certainty he had of the wishes of Gracchus.24 But those who condemn his reply as seditious do not fully understand the mystery of friendship and fail to accept the premiss that he had Gracchus’ intentions in the pocket of his sleeve, both by his influence and by his knowledge. [C] They were more friends than citizens; friends, more than friends or foes of their country or friends of ambition and civil strife. Having completely committed themselves to each other, they each completely held the reins of each other’s desires; grant that this pair were guided by virtue and led by reason (without which it is impossible to harness them together) Blosius’ reply is what it should have been. If their actions broke the traces, then they were, by my measure, neither friends of each other nor friends of themselves. Moreover [A] that reply sounds no diff
erent than mine would be, if I were interrogated thus: ‘If your will commanded you to kill your daughter would you kill her?’ and I said that I would. For that is no witness that I would consent to do so, because I do not doubt what my will is, any more than I doubt the will of such a friend. All the arguments in the world have no power to dislodge me from the certainty which I have of the intentions and decisions of my friend. Not one of his actions could be set before me – no matter what it looked like – without my immediately discovering its motive. Our souls were yoked together in such unity, and contemplated each other with so ardent an affection, and with the same affection revealed each to each other right down to the very entrails, that not only did I know his his mind as well as I knew my own but I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself.
Let nobody place those other common friendships in the same rank as this. I know about them – the most perfect of their kind – as well as anyone else, [B] but I would advise you not to confound their rules: you would deceive yourself. In those other friendships you must proceed with wisdom and caution, keeping the reins in your hand: the bond is not so well tied that there is no reason to doubt it. ‘Love a friend,’ said Chilo, ‘as though some day you must hate him: hate him, as though you must love him.’25 That precept which is so detestable in that sovereign master-friendship is salutary in the practice [C] of friendships which are common and customary,26 in relation to which you must employ that saying which Aristotle often repeated: ‘O my friends, there is no friend!’27
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