To do this I would not avoid their company; I would like to be near so as to watch them and to enjoy their fun and festivities as much as my age permitted. Even if I did not live among them (as I could not do without embarrassing the company by the gloominess of my age and by my being subject to illnesses – and also without being forced to restrict my own rules and habits), I would at least like to live near them in some corner of my house – not the fanciest but the most comfortable. Not (as I saw a few years ago) a dean of St-Hilaire-de-Poitiers19 brought to such a pitch of solitude by the troublesome effects of his melancholy that, when I went into his room, he had not set foot outside it for twenty-two years; yet he could still move about freely and easily, apart from a rheumatic flux discharging into his stomach. He would let scarcely anyone in to see him even once a week; he always stayed shut up in that room all by himself except for a valet who brought him his food once a day and who merely went in and out. His only occupation was to walk about reading a book (for he had some acquaintance with literature), obstinately determined as he was to die in those conditions – as soon afterwards he did.
I would try to have gentle relations with my children and so encourage in them an active love and unfeigned affection for me, something easily achieved in children of a well-born nature; of course if they turn out to be wild beasts [C] (which our century produces in abundance) [A] then you must hate them and avoid them as such.
I am against the custom [C] of forbidding children to say ‘Father’ and requiring them to use some other, more respectful title, as though Nature had not sufficiently provided for our authority. We address God Almighty as Father and scorn to have our own children call us by that name.
It is also unjust, and mad, to [A] deprive our grown-up children of [C] easy relations [A] with their20 fathers by striving to maintain [C] an austere and contemptuous [A] frown, hoping21 by that to keep them in fear and obedience. That is a quite useless farce which makes fathers loathsome to children and, what is worse, makes them ridiculous. Since youth and vigour are in their children’s hands they enjoy the current favour of the world; they treat with mockery the fierce tyrannical countenance of a man with no blood left in his veins or his heart – scarecrows in a field of flax! Even if I were able to make myself feared I would rather make myself loved.22
[B] There are so many drawbacks in old age, so much powerlessness; it so merits contempt that the best endowment it can acquire is the fond love of one’s family: its arms are no longer fear and commands.
I know one man who had a most imperious youth. Now that old age is coming upon him, despite trying to accept it as well as he can, he slaps and bites and swears – [C] the stormiest master in France; [B] he frets himself with cares and watchfulness: but it is all a farce which the family conspire in; the others have access to the best part of his granary, his cellar and even his purse: meanwhile he keeps the keys in his pouch, dearer to him than sight itself. While he is happy to keep so spare and thrifty a table, in various secret places in his house all is dissipation, gambling, prodigality and tales about his fits of temper and his precautions. Everybody is on the lookout against [C] him.23 [B] If some wretched servant happens to become devoted to him, suspicion is immediately thrown on to him – a quality which old age is only too ready to ruminate upon. How many times has that man boasted to me of keeping his family on a tight rein, of the meticulous obedience and reverence he received because of it, and of the lucid watch he kept over his affairs:
Ille solus nescit omnia!
[He alone is unaware of the lot!]24
No man of my acquaintance can claim more qualities, natural and acquired, proper for maintaining his mastery; yet he had failed completely, like a child. That is why I have picked him out as an example from several other cases that I know.
[C] It would make a good scholastic debate: whether or not he is better off as he is. In his presence, all things defer to him; his authority runs its empty course: nobody ever resists him; they believe what he says, they fear and respect him… as much as he could wish! Should he dismiss a servant he packs his bag and is off at once – but only out of his presence. Old people’s steps are so slow and their senses so confused that the valet can live a full year in the house doing his duty without their even noticing it. At the appropriate time a letter arrives from distant parts, a pitiful one, a submissive one, full of promises to do better in the future; the valet then finds himself back in favour.
Does my Lord strike a bargain and send a missive which the family do not like? They suppress it, sometimes inventing afterwards reasons to explain the lack of action or reply. Since no letters from outside are ever brought to him first, he only sees the ones which it seems convenient for him to know. If he happens to get hold of any, he always has to rely on somebody else to read them for him, so they invent things on the spot: they are always pretending that someone is begging his pardon in the very letter that contains abuse. In short he sees his affairs only through some counterfeit image designed to be as pleasing to him as they can make it so as not to awake his spleen or his anger.
Under various guises, but all to the same effect, I have seen plenty of households run long and steadily in this way.
[B] Wives are always disposed to disagree with their husbands.25 [C] With both hands they grasp at any pretence for contradicting them; any excuse serves as full justification. I know one who used to rob her husband wholesale – in order, she told her confessor, to ‘fatten up her almsgiving’. (There’s a religious spendthrift for you to trust!) Whatever their husbands agree to never provides them with enough dignity. To give it grace and authority they must have usurped it by ruse or by force, but always unjustly. When, as in the case I am thinking of, they are acting against some poor old man on behalf of the children, they seize on this pretext and are honoured for serving their own passions; and, as though they were all slaves together, readily plot against his sovereignty and government. [B] If the children are male and grown-up, in the bloom of youth, then their mothers gang up with them and corrupt the steward, the bursar and everyone else by force or favour.
Old men without wives and children fall into this evil less easily but more cruelly and with less dignity. [C] Cato the Elder already said in his time, ‘So many valets: so many enemies.’ Given the gulf separating the purity of his century from ours, just think whether he was not really warning us that wife, sons and valet are all ‘so many enemies’ in our case.26
[B] It is a good thing that decrepitude furnishes us with the sweet gifts of inadvertency, ignorance and a readiness to be cheated. If we were to resist, what would happen to us, especially nowadays when the judges who settle our quarrels are usually on the side of the children – and venal?
[C] The cheating may escape my sight, but it does not escape my sight that I am very cheatable. Thrice and four times blessed is he who can entrust his pitiful old age into the hands of a friend. 27 And shall we have ever said enough about the value of a friend and how totally different it is from bonds based on contracts! Even that counterpart to a friend which I see between beasts, how devoutly I honour it! Am I better or worse off for having savoured a friend? Better off, certainly. My regret for him consoles me and honours me. Is it not a most pious and pleasant task in life to be ever performing his obsequies? Can any pleasure possessed equal that pleasure lost? I would readily let myself be rapt insensible lingering over so caressing a notion.
[C] Others may deceive me, but at least I do not deceive myself into thinking that I can protect myself against it; nor do I cudgel my brains for ways of making myself able to do so. Only in my own bosom can I find salvation from treachery like this – not in disquieting and tumultuous inquisitiveness but in diversion and constancy. Whenever I hear of the state that some other man is in, I waste no time over that but immediately turn my eyes on to myself to see how I am doing. Everything which touches him touches me too. What has happened to him is a warning and an alert coming from the same quarter. Every day, every hour, we say th
ings about others which ought more properly to be addressed to ourselves if only we had learned to turn our thoughts inward as well as widely outward. Similarly many authors inflict wounds on the cause they defend by dashing out against the attackers, hurling shafts at their enemies which can properly be hurled back at them.
[A] The late Monsieur de Monluc, the Marshal, when talking to me of the loss of his son (a truly brave gentleman of great promise who died on the island of Madeira), among other regrets emphasized the grief and heartbreak he felt at never having revealed himself to his son and at having lost the pleasure of knowing and savouring him, all because of his fancy to appear with the gravity of a stern father; he had never told him of the immense love he felt for him and how worthy he rated him for his virtue. ‘And all that poor boy saw of me,’ he said, ‘was a frowning face full of scorn; he is gone, believing I was unable to love him or to judge him as he deserved. Whom was I keeping it for, that knowledge of the special love I harboured for him in my soul! Should not he have felt all the pleasure of it, and all the bonds of gratitude? I forced myself, I tortured myself, to keep up that silly mask, thereby losing the joy of his company – and his goodwill as well, which must have been cold towards me: he had never received from me anything but brusqueness or known anything but a tyrannous façade.
I find that lament to be reasonable and rightly held: for as I know only too well from experience when we lose those we love there is no consolation sweeter than the knowledge of having remembered to tell them everything and to have enjoyed the most perfect and absolute communication with them.
[B] As much as I can I open myself to my own folk, and am most ready to tell them or anyone else what I intend towards them and what is the judgement I make on them. I hasten to reveal myself, to make myself known, for I do not want them to be misled about me in any way whatsoever.
[A] According to Caesar, among the customs peculiar to our ancient Gauls there was the following: sons were not presented to their fathers and never dared to appear in public with them until they had begun to bear arms, as if to signify that the time had now come for the fathers to admit them to their intimate acquaintance.28
Yet another abuse of paternal discretion which I have seen in my time is when fathers are not content with having deprived their children of their natural share of the property during their long lifetime, but then go and leave authority over all of it after their death to their widows, free to dispose of it at their pleasure. One lord I have known (among the highest officers of the Realm) could rightfully have expected to come into property worth fifty thousand crowns a year: yet he died in need, overwhelmed with debts at the age of fifty, while his mother, despite advanced senility, still enjoyed rights over the entire property under the will of his father, who himself had lived to be eighty.
To me that seems in no way reasonable.
[B] For all that, I cannot see it helps much when a man whose affairs are prospering goes and seeks a wife who burdens him with a large dowry: no debt contracted outside the family is more ruinous to a household. My ancestors have all followed this precept, most fittingly; so have I.
[C] Yet those who warn us against marrying rich wives out of fear that they might be less beholden to us and more difficult wrongly lose a real advantage for a frivolous conjecture.29 If a woman is unreasonable it costs her no more to jump over one reason than another. Such women are most pleased with themselves when they are most in the wrong: it is the injustice which allures them; whereas for good women it lies in their virtuous deeds: the richer they are the more gracious they are, just as beautiful women are more willingly and more triumphantly chaste.
[A] It is reasonable to let mothers run affairs until the sons are legally old enough to assume the responsibility; but the father has brought them up wrongly if (considering the normal weakness of the female) he could not expect them to be wiser and more competent than his wife once they have reached that age. But it would be even more unnatural to make mothers depend on the discretion of their sons. They should be given a provision generous enough to maintain their state according to the condition of their family and their age, especially since want or indigence are far more difficult for them to bear with decorum than for males: that burden ought to be put on the sons rather than on the mother.
[C] On the whole, the soundest way of sharing out our property when we die is (I believe) to follow local customary law. The Law has thought it out better than we have, so it is better to let the Law make the wrong choice than rashly hazard doing so ourselves. The property does not really belong to us personally, since without our leave it is entailed by civil law to designated heirs. And even though we have some discretion as well, I hold that it would take a great and very clear reason to justify our depriving anyone of what he was entitled to by the fortune of his birth and of what common law leads him to expect; it would be an unreasonable abuse of that freedom to make it serve whims both frivolous and private.
Fate has been kind, sparing me opportunities which might have tempted me to change my predilection for the dictates of common law. I know people whom it would be a waste of time to serve long and dutifully: one word taken the wrong way can wipe out ten years of merit. Anyone able to butter them up when they are just about to go is lucky indeed! The latest action scoops the lot: it is not the best and most frequent services which prove efficacious but recent ones, present ones.
There are people who exploit their wills as sticks and carrots to punish or reward every action of those who may claim an interest in the inheritance. But this is a matter of long-lasting consequence; it is too weighty to be changed from moment to moment: wise men settle it once and for all – and have regard for the reasonable customs of the community.
We are a little too fond of male entail; we foresee a ridiculous eternity for our family name and attach too much weight to silly conjectures about the future based on the minds of little boys. Somebody might easily have been unjust to me, ousting me from my place because I was more lumpish, more leaden, more slow and more unwilling to learn than any of my brothers (indeed, than all the children in my province), whether I was being taught to exercise mind or body. It is madness to make such selections, interrupting the succession on the faith of such fortune-telling which has so often deceived us. If we can ever infringe that rule and correct the choice of heirs made by destiny, it would probably be out of consideration for some huge noticeable physical deformity, of a permanent and incurable kind, one which those of us who are great admirers of beauty believe to be highly deleterious.
There is an agreeable dialogue between Plato’s Lawgiver and his citizens which may honour my pages here: ‘What!’ they say, feeling their end draw near: ‘Can we not bequeath our own property to anyone we please? What cruelty, O gods, that it be not lawful to give more or to give less just as we like, depending on how our heirs have helped us in our affairs, our illnesses or our old age!’ The Legislator made this reply: ‘My dear friends; you are certain to die soon: so it is difficult for any of you to “Know Thyself” (according to that Delphic inscription) and to know what is yours. I make these laws and maintain that you do not belong to yourselves, nor do the things of which you enjoy the use actually belong to you. You and your goods belong to your family, both past and future. And still more do your family and your goods belong to the commonwealth. Therefore if on your sickbed or in your old age some flatterer tries to persuade you to make an unjust will (or if a fit of temper does) I will protect you. Out of respect for the general concerns of our City and of your family, I will establish laws which make it known that private interests must reasonably yield to those of the community. Go, gently and willingly, whither human necessity bids you. It is for me, who favour all things equally and who take care of the people in general, to take care also of what you leave behind you.’30
To return to my subject, [A] it seems to me right, somehow, that women should have no mastery over men save only the natural one of motherhood – unless it be for the chastisement
of those who have wilfully submitted to them out of some feverish humour; but that does not apply to old women, the subject of our present discussion. It is the manifest truth of this consideration which has made us so ready to invent and entrench that Salic Law – which nobody has ever seen – which debars women from succeeding to our throne;31 and though Fortune has lent it more credence in some places than others, there is scarcely one jurisdiction in the world where that law is not cited as here, because of the genuine appearance of reason which gives it authority.
It is dangerous to leave the superintendence of our succession to the judgement of our wives and to their choice between our sons, which over and over again is iniquitous and fantastic. For those unruly tastes and physical cravings which they experience during pregnancy are ever-present in their souls. They regularly devote themselves to the weakest and to the feeblest, or to those (if they have any) who are still hanging about their necks. Since women do not have sufficient reasoning-power to select and embrace things according to their merits they allow themselves to be led to where natural impressions act most alone – like animals, which only know their young while they are still on the teat.32
The Complete Essays Page 55