The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

The Essenes whom Pliny mentions were maintained for several centuries without wet-nurses or swaddling-clothes by the arrival of outsiders who, attracted by the beauty of their doctrines, constantly joined them. An entire people risked self-extermination rather than engage in woman’s embraces, risked having no successors rather than create one.115 It is said that Zeno lay with a woman only once in his entire life; and that that was out of politeness, so as not to seem to have too stubborn a contempt for that sex.116

  [B] No man likes to be in on a birth: all men rush to be in on a death. [C] To unmake a human being we choose an open field in broad daylight: to make one, we hide away in a dark little hollow. When making one we must hide and blush: but glory lies in unmaking one, and it produces other virtues. One act is unwholesome: the other, an act of grace, for Aristotle says that in his country there is a saying ‘To do a man a favour’, which means to kill him.117 The Athenians showed those two activities to be equally blemished when they were required ritually to purge the island of Delos and to seek reconciliation with Apollo: within its coasts they forbade both childbirth and burial:118

  [B] Nostri nosmet pænitet.

  [We are embarrassed by our very selves.]

  [C] We regard our very being as vitiated.

  [B] There are some nations where they hide to eat. I know one lady (among the greatest) who shares the opinion that chewing distorts the face, derogating greatly from women’s grace and beauty; when hungry she avoids appearing in public. And I know a man who cannot tolerate watching people eat nor others watching him do so: he shuns all company even more when he fills his belly than when he empties it. [C] In the Empire of the Grand Turk you can find many men who, to rise above their fellows, never allow themselves to be seen eating a meal; they eat but once a week; they slash and disfigure their faces and limbs and never talk to anyone – [‘95] fanatics [C] all – folk who believe they are honouring their nature by defacing it; who pride themselves on their contempt; who seek to make themselves better by making themselves worse.

  [B] What a monstrosity of an animal,119 who strikes terror in himself, [C] whose pleasures are a burden to him and who thinks himself a curse. [B] Those there are who hide their existence –

  Exilioque domos et dulcia limina mutant

  [They give up their homes and domestic delights to go into exile]120

  – stealing away from the sight of other men; they shun health and happiness as harmful and inimical qualities. There are not merely several sects but whole peoples for whom birth is a curse, death a blessing. [C] And some there are who loathe the sunlight and worship the darkness.

  [B] We show our ingenuity only by ill-treating ourselves: that is the real game hunted by the power of our mind – [C] an instrument dangerous in its unruliness.

  [B] O miseri! quorum gaudia crimen habent.

  [O pitiful men, who hold their joys a crime.]

  Alas, wretched Man, you have enough [C] necessary [B] misfortunes121 without increasing them by inventing others. Your condition is wretched enough already without making it artificially so. You have uglinesses enough which are real and of your essence without fabricating others in your mind. [C] Do you really think that you are too happy unless your happiness is turned to grief? [B] Do you believe that you have already fulfilled all the necessary duties in which Nature involves you and that, unless you bind yourself to new ones, Nature is [C] defective and [B] idle within you? You are not afraid to infringe her universal and undoubted laws yet preen yourself on your own sectarian and imaginary ones: the more particular, [C] uncertain and [B] controverted they are, the more you devote your efforts to them. [C] The arbitrary laws of your own invention – your own parochial laws – engross you and bind you: you are not even touched by the laws of God and this world. [B] Just run through a few exempla of that assertion: why, all your life is there.

  Those lines of our two poets,122 treating sexual pleasure as they do with reserve and discretion, seem to me to reveal it and throw a closer light upon it. Ladies cover their bosoms with lace-work; priests similarly cover many sacred objects; painters paint shadows in the pictures to emphasize the light; and it is said that the sun and wind beat down more heavily on us when deflected than when they come direct. When that Egyptian was asked, ‘What are you carrying there, hidden under your cloak?’ he gave a wise reply: ‘It is hidden under my cloak so that you should not know what it is.’123 Nevertheless some things are hidden in order to reveal them more.

  Just listen to this man writing more openly:

  Et nudam pressi corpus adusque meum.

  [Nude against my body did I press her.]124

  I can feel him gelding me!

  Let Martial, as he does, pull up Venus’ skirts: he does not succeed in revealing her all that completely. The poet who tells all, gluts us and puts us off: the one who is timid about expressing his thoughts leads us in our thoughts to discover more than is there. There are revelations in that sort of modesty; especially when, as they do, they half-open such a beautiful highway for our imagination. Both that act and its portrayal should savour of theft.125

  For the Spaniard and the Italian sex-love is more timid and respectful, more coy and less open: I like that. (In ancient times someone or other wished that his throat was as long as the neck of a crane so as to have more time to taste what he was swallowing.126 Such a wish is more appropriate to this hasty and headlong pleasure, especially for natures such as mine whose fault is to be too quick.) For them, so as to stop its flight and to let it expand itself on preliminaries, everything serves as a grace and reward: a loving glance, a bow of the head, a word, a gesture.

  Would anyone who could actually dine on the smell of roast beef not be making a fine saving saving?127 Well, this is a passion which mingles very little essential solids with plenty of vanity and feverish madness: we should reward it and treat it accordingly. Let us instruct our ladies how to make themselves valued and esteemed, to keep us waiting and to be sweet deceivers. We French always make our last attack the first: there is always that impetuosity of ours.128 If only our ladies were to string out love’s favours, offering them retail, then each one of us, according to his worth and merit, would get a scrap even in our pitiful old age. A man who only enjoys enjoying a woman, a man who only wins if he takes the lot and who, in hunting, only likes the kill, is not made for joining our sect. The more the steps the greater the height, and the more the rungs the greater the honour, of that ultimate bastion. We should take delight in being conducted there as through splendid palaces, by varied portals and corridors, long and pleasant galleries and many a winding way. Such stewardship would turn to our advantage; there we would linger and love longer: without hope and desire we no longer achieve anything worthwhile. Women should infinitely fear our overmastery and entire possession. Their position is pretty perilous once they have totally thrown themselves on the mercy of our faith and constancy; those virtues are rare and exacting; as for the women, as soon as we have them, they no longer have us:

  postquam cupidæ mentis satiata libido est,

  Verba nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant.

  [as soon as eager longing is satisfied, our minds fear not for their pledged word nor care about perjury.]129

  [C] A young Greek called Thrasonides was so in love with love that, having won his lady’s heart, he refused to enjoy her so as not to weaken, glut and deaden by the joy of lying with her that unquiet ardour in which he gloried and on which he fed.

  [B] Foods taste better when they are dear. Think how far kisses, the form of greeting peculiar to our nation, have had their grace cheapened by availability: Socrates thought they were most powerful and dangerous at stealing our hearts.130 Ours is an unpleasant custom which wrongs the ladies who have to lend their lips to any man, however ugly, who comes with three footmen in his train.

  Cujus livida naribus caninis

  Dependet glacies rigetque barba:

  Centum occurrere malo culilingis.

  [Cold leaden snot drips from his dog-
like conk and bedews his beard. Why, I would a hundred times rather go and lick his arse.]131

  And we men gain little from it: for as the world is made we have to kiss fifty ugly women for every three beauties. And for the delicate gullets of men of my age, a bad kiss outweighs a good one.

  In Italy they play the swooning suitor even with women who sell their favours. They defend themselves thus: there are degrees in enjoying a woman; by such courtship they want to obtain for themselves the fullest enjoyment of all. Such women sell only their bodies; their wills cannot be up for sale: they are too free, too autonomous. It is her will that the Italians are after, they say. And they are right. What must be courted and ensnared is the will. I am horrified by the thought of a body given to me but lacking love. To me such raging madness is analogous to that of the boy who sullied with his love that beautiful statue of Venus sculpted by Praxiteles, or to that of the Egyptian madman who was inflamed with love for the corpse of a dead woman he was embalming while wrapping it in its shroud, and who gave rise to the law subsequently proclaimed in Egypt that the corpses of beautiful young women and of women of noble families should be kept for three days before being handed over to those whose task it was to bury them. Periander acted more horrifyingly still when he prolonged his conjugal love (itself most proper and legitimate) by enjoying his departed wife Melissa.132

  [C] And was Luna’s humour not clearly lunatic when, being unable to enjoy in any other way her beloved Endymion, she went and put him to sleep for several months, feasting herself on the enjoyment of a boy who never stirred but in her dreams?133

  [B] I claim that we are similarly loving a body deprived of soul and sensation when we make love to one without its agreement and desire. All enjoyings of women are not the same. Some are thin and languid: hundreds of causes other than tenderness can obtain that privilege from women. It is not in itself a sufficient proof of affection: deceiving can be found in that as in anything else; sometimes they only set about it with one cheek of their arse:

  tanquam thura merumque parent:

  Absentem marmoreamve putes.

  [as cool as though preparing an offertory of incense and wine; you would think she was somewhere else, or made of marble.]134

  Some ladies I know would rather lend you ‘that’ than their carriage: it is the only way they know how to converse. You need to see whether your company pleases them for some other end also (or, as does some hulking great stable-boy, only for ‘that’), and in what rank, and at what price, you are accepted:

  tibi si datur uni

  Quo lapide illa diem candidiore notet.

  [whether she gives herself to you alone, and marks that day with her whitest milestone.]

  What if she is eating your bread with a sauce derived from more pleasing thoughts!

  Te tenet, absentes alios suspirat amores.

  [She holds you close while sighing for the loves of an absent lover.]

  What! Do we not know of a man who in our own day used this activity as a means of horrifying vengeance, so as to inject poison into a decent woman and kill her?135

  Those who know Italy will never find it odd if, while on this subject, I do not go anywhere else for excempla, since that nation can claim to be the world’s professor in such matters. They have more routinely beautiful women than we do and fewer ugly ones, though for rare and outstanding beauties we are on a par. And I think the same applies to wit: of routinely fine ones they have more and it is obvious that brutish stupidity is incomparably more rare. But in matchless minds, those of the highest rank, we owe them [C] nothing.136 [B] Were I to have to extend that comparison it could probably be said, on the contrary, that, by their standards, valour is commonplace and natural with us: yet sometimes you can see it so full and vigorous as they handle it that it surpasses all the stern examples which we have. Italian marriages are crippled: by their customs, so harsh and slavish a rule is imposed on their wives that the slightest acquaintance with another man is as capital an offence as the most intimate. The result of this rule is that any approach to their wives becomes, of necessity, basic; and since whatever they do amounts to the same, the choice is made for them already. [C] And once they have broken out of their pens, believe you me, they are all ablaze: ‘luxuria ipsis vinculis, sicut fera bestia, irritata, deinde emissa.’ [sexual desire then breaks loose, like a wild beast first provoked and then set free.]137 [B] They really ought to give them a little more rein.

  Vidi ego nuper equum, contra sua frena tenacem,

  Ore reluctanti fulminis ire modo.

  [Of late I saw a horse, straining at the bit, pulling with its mouth and careering along like lightning.]

  We can weaken the desire for such companionship by allowing them a mite of freedom.138

  Both run more or less equal risks. They are excessive in restraint: we, in freedom. One of the fine customs of our nation is that the boys of good families are taken in as pages to be educated and brought up, schooled for nobility. It is said to be rude and discourteous to refuse a young gentleman. I have noted (but there are as many fashions as there are different homes) that ladies who have sought to impose the most austere of rules on the girls in their entourage have not produced any better results. What we need is moderation. We should leave a good bit of the behaviour of girls to their own discretion; whatever you do, there is no training that can bridle them in all the time; but what is true is that a girl who has bolted, bag and baggage, from a dressage in freedom inspires much more confidence than one who emerges with propriety from an austere prison of a school.

  Our forefathers trained their daughters’ countenances to be bashful and timorous; their minds and desires were alike: we, knowing nothing about the matter, train them to be bold. [C] That is for Sauromatians who are forbidden to lie with a man until they have killed one with their own hands in war.139 [B] It suffices me (who have no rights in the matter except to be heard) that they retain me as a counsellor, according to the privilege of my age. So I would counsel them – [C] and us too – [B] to refrain; but if this age is too inimical to that, at least to show discretion and moderation. [C] As in the story told of Aristippus: some young men blushed at seeing him go in to the house of a courtesan: he said to them: ‘The error lies not in going in but in never coming out.’140 [B] If a woman cannot save her conscience let her at least save her reputation: even if the base is not worth it let appearances hold out. I advocate gradualness and stringing things out when dispensing of love’s favours. [C] Plato demonstrates that surrendering easily or quickly is forbidden to the defenders in loves of all kinds.141 [B] To yield all, so inadvisedly and so hastily, is a sign of voracity,142 which they must hide with all their art. By acting ordinately and with measure when distributing their gifts they succeed far better in tempting our desires and hiding their own. Let them ever flee before us – I mean even those who intend to be caught: like the Scythians they beat us best when retreating. By the law which Nature gives them, it is truly not for them to wish and to desire: their role is to accept, to obey, to consent. That is why Nature has made them able to do it at any time: we men are only able to do it occasionally and unreliably. The time is always right for them, so that they will be always ready when our time comes along: [C] ‘pati natae’ [they are born to be passive].143 [B] And whereas Nature has so arranged it that men’s desires should declare themselves by a visible projection, theirs are hidden and internal and she has furnished them with organs [C] unsuited to making a display and [B] strictly defensive.

  [C] We should leave to the licence of the Amazons events like the following: when Alexander was marching through Hircania, Queen Thalestris of the Amazons came to meet him with three hundred warriors of her sex, well mounted and well armed, having left beyond the nearby mountains the rest of a big army which followed her leadership; she told him, aloud and in public, that the rumour of his victories and of his valour had brought her there to see him and to offer him her might and her support to forward his campaigns; she added that as she found h
im to be so beautiful, young and full of vigour she, who was perfection itself in all her qualities, advised him that they should lie together, so that there should be born from the most valiant woman in the world and the most valiant man then alive some great and rare offspring for the future. For the rest Alexander merely thanked her kindly, but he remained for thirteen days to allow time to fulfil her last request, days which he celebrated with all possible eagerness to please so courageous a princess.144

  [B] In virtually everything we men are as unjust judges of women’s actions as they are of ours – I confess the truth when it goes against me just as when it serves me. It is a base disorder which drives them to change so frequently and which impedes them from settling their affections firmly on any person whatsoever; as we can see in that goddess Venus to whom is attributed so many changes of lovers. Yet it is true that it is against the nature of sex-love not to be impetuous, and it is against the nature of what is impetuous to remain constant: so those men who are amazed by this and who denounce and seek the causes of this in women as unbelievable and unnatural, ought to ask themselves why that distemper finds acceptance in themselves, without their being stunned as by a miracle. It would perhaps be more odd to find any fixity in it. It is not a passion of the body alone. Just as there is no end to covetousness and ambition, so there is no end to lust. It still lives on after satiety: you can prescribe to it no end, no lasting satisfaction: it always proceeds beyond possession. And fickleness is perhaps somewhat more excusable in them than in us. Like us they can cite in their defence the penchant we both have for variety and novelty; secondly they can cite, what we cannot, that they buy a pig in a poke [C] (Queen Joanna of Naples caused her first husband Andreosso to be hanged from the grill of her window by a gold and silver cord, plaited by her own hands, once she discovered that neither his organs nor his potency corresponded to the hopes she had conceived of his matrimonial duties from his stature, his beauty, his youth and his disposition, by which he had won her and deceived her);145 [B] they can also cite the fact that since the active partner is required to make more effort than the passive one, they at least can always provide for this necessity while we cannot. [C] That is why Plato wisely established in his laws that those making a judgement on the suitability of a marriage should see the youths who were ambitious to marry stark naked but the maidens naked only down to the girdle.146 [B] By assaying us that way the women might perhaps find us not worth the choosing: