The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [Some impious soldier, then, will get these well-farmed lands!]75

  What remedy is there? I was born in this place and so were most of my ancestors. They have entrusted their love and reputation unto it. We get hardened to anything to which we are accustomed. And in wretched circumstances such as ours now it is a most kindly gift of Nature that we do grow accustomed to it, so that it deadens our sense of suffering many evils.

  What makes civil wars worse than other wars is that each man is on sentry-guard over his own home.

  Quam miserum porta vitam muroque tueri,

  Vixque suæ tutum viribus esse domus.

  [How pitiful it is to need gates and walls to protect your life and scarcely to be able to trust in the strength of your own home.]

  It is to be in great extremity to be hard-pressed even within your very house, in the quiet of your home.76 The place where I dwell is always the first and the last to be pounded by our strife: peace never shows her full face there:

  Tum quoque cum pax est, trepidant formidine belli.

  [Even when there is peace we tremble for fear of war.]77

  Quoties pacem fortuna lacessit,

  Hac iter est bellis. Melius, fortuna, dedisses

  Orbe sub Eoo sedem, gelidaque sub Arcto,

  Errantesque domos.

  [Every rime that Fortune strikes at peace, that is the road to war. Fortune, you would have been better advised to settle me in lands beneath the Morning Star or the wandering planets of the frozen North.]

  Sometimes I find in indifference and languor the means of firming myself against such reflections – for they too can make us somewhat resolute. It often happens that I think with some pleasure of those mortal dangers and wait for them: I lower my head and plunge, devoid of sensation, into death, neither contemplating it nor exploring it, as into some voiceless, darkling deep, which swallows me up at one jump and in an instant overwhelms me with a powerful sleep entirely lacking any sensation or suffering. And what I foresee to follow upon those short and violent deaths consoles me more than their reality disturbs me. [C] (Life, they say, is no better for being long: death is better for not being so.) [B] I do not recoil from being dead but, rather, I become reassured about dying. I wrap up and crouch down during the storm, which, with one quick attack, one unfelt blow, must blind me and ravish me in its frenzy.

  Just as some gardeners say that roses and violets spring up more sweet-scented near garlic and onions which attract and draw to themselves all that is foul-smelling in the soil,78 suppose those depraved characters similarly suck up all the venom in the air of our climate, rendering me better and purer by their proximity, so that all is not loss. But things are not so. Yet there may be something in the following: goodness is more beautiful and attractive when it is rare, while the determination to act well is stiffened by contradiction and concentrated in us by opposition, being enflamed by glory and a jealous desire to resist.

  [C] Robbers, of their courtesy, do not have it in for me personally. Do I not return the compliment? I would need to have it in for too many people! [’95] Under various kinds of dress [C] are lodged79 similar consciences, similar cruelty, treachery and robbery, and they are all the worse when they are more cowardly and safe for being better hidden behind the shadow of the law. Avowed injuries I hate less than treacherous ones, and those of war less than those of peace – [’95] judicial ones. [C] This fever of ours has occurred in a body which it has hardly made worse: the fire was there already: the flames had already taken. The din is much greater, the evil but little more.

  [B] When people ask why I go on my travels I usually reply that I know what I am escaping from but not what I am looking for. If they tell me that there may be [C] just as little soundness [B] among foreigners80 and that their morals may be no better than ours, I reply: first, that that would not be easy:

  Tam multae scelerum facies.

  [Our wickedness has assumed so many faces.]

  Secondly, that there is always gain in changing a bad condition for an uncertain one, and that the ills of others do not need to sting us as our own do.

  And I do not want to omit that I am never such an enemy of France that I fail to look kindly on Paris: Paris has had my heart since boyhood. And as happens with all incomparable things, the more beautiful the other towns I have seen the more the beauty of Paris gains power over my affections. I love her for herself, more when left alone than overloaded with extra ornaments. I love her tenderly, warts, stains and all. That great city alone makes me. Frenchman,81 a city great in citizens, great in its happy choice of site, but great above all and incomparable in the variety and diversity of its attractions; it is the glory of France and one of the world’s great splendours. God drive our divisions far from her! When entire and united she is safe from other violence. The worst of all decisions, by my counsel, would be one which brought discord to her. I fear nothing for her but herself. And I certainly fear for her more than for any part of our State. While she endures I shall not lack a lair in which I can die at bay, one enough to make me lose all regret for any other.

  Not because Socrates said it but because it truly corresponds to my humour (and is perhaps not free from excess): I reckon all men my fellow-citizens,82 embracing. Pole as I do. Frenchman, placing a national bond after the common universal one. I do not particularly hanker after the sweetness of my native soil. Acquaintances which are entirely new and entirely mine seem to me to be worth just as much as the other common kind, casually based on neighbourhood. Those loving relationships which are purely our own achievement normally outweigh those to which we are bound by ties of place or blood. Nature brought us forth free and unbound: we imprison ourselves in particular confines, like those kings of Persia who bind themselves to drink no water but that of the river Choaspes, foolishly renouncing their right to use all other waters, making, so far as they are concerned, all the rest of the world a desert.83

  [C] When Socrates was near his end he judged that a sentence of exile was for him worse than a sentence of death. As far as I can tell I could never be so broken in, nor so narrowly accustomed to my part of the world, as to say that. Those heaven-marked lives have many traits which I embrace more with esteem than emotion. They also have other traits so soaring and inordinate that I cannot even do so with esteem, since I am quite unable to conceive them. That was a very delicate humour in a man who considered the whole world his city! It is true that he despised travel and had hardly set foot outside Attic territory. And what about his sparing his friends’ money with which they would have saved his life, and his refusal to escape from prison through the intercession of anyone at all, so as not to disobey the laws at a time when they were highly corrupt? Those examples fall into my first category: there are others to be found in that great man which fall into my second one. Many such examples surpass my power of action, but some surpass even my power of judgement.

  [B] In addition to such reasons, travel seems to me to be an enriching experience. It keeps our souls constantly exercised by confronting them with things new and unknown; and (as I have often said) I know of no better school for forming our life than ceaselessly to set before it the variety found in so many other lives, [C] concepts and customs, [B] and to give it a taste of the perpetual diversity of the forms of human nature. The body is neither idle nor exhausted by it: the moderate exercise keeps it in good trim. Even suffering from the stone as I do, I can stay in the saddle, without dismounting, for eight or ten hours at I stretch:

  Vires ultra sortemque senectae.

  [strength beyond the lot of old age.]84

  No weather is inimical to me except the harsh heat of a blazing sun (for those parasols which Italy has used since the Ancient Romans put more weight on your arm than they take off your head). [C] I would love to know how hard it was for the Persians, so long ago at the very birth of luxury, to produce at will cool winds, as Xenophon says they did, and patches of shade.85

  [B] I take to rain and mud like a duck. I change of air and we
ather does not disturb me: to me all climates are the same. The only things which do batter me are such internal disturbances as I produce within me – and they occur less during my travels.

  It is hard to get me moving, but once I have started I will go on as far as you like. I resist little expeditions [C] as much as [B] big ones,86 and equipping myself for a day-trip or a visit to a cousin [C] as much as [B] for a real journey. I have learned to do each day’s journey in the Spanish style, all at one go, a long but reasonable day. When it is extremely hot I travel by night, from sunset to sunrise. (The other way – stopping to eat en route, in chaos and haste over your post-house dinner – is disagreeable, especially when the days are drawing in.) My horses are all the better for it. No horse which can get through the first day’s journey with me has ever let me down. I water them everywhere, merely taking the precaution of having enough road left for them to work it off. My own reluctance to get up allows my retinue to breakfast at leisure before we set off. I myself never dine very late. Appetite comes to me only with eating;87 except at table I never feel hungry.

  Some complain at my delight in continuing this practice as a man married and old.88 They are wrong. The best time to leave our family is after we have set it on course to proceed without us, after we can leave behind such order as does not belie its former character. It is far more imprudent to go off if you leave your home in charge of a protectress who is less reliable and who may take less trouble to provide for your needs. The most useful science and the most honourable occupation for a wife is home-management. I am aware of more than one wife who is mean but of few who are good managers. Yet to be one is a wife’s chief virtue, the one that we should look for first as the only dowry which may either save our households or ruin them. [C] There is no need to lecture me on the subject: experience has taught me to seek one virtue above all others in a married woman: the virtue of sound housekeeping. [B] I enable my wife to do this properly when, by my absence, I leave the government of my house in her hands. It irritates me to see in many a household my lord coming home about noon, all grimy and tetchy from business worries, while my lady is still in her dressing-room, dolling herself up and doing her hair. That is for queens – and I am not sure even then. It is unjust and absurd that our wives should be maintained in idleness89 by our sweat and toil. [C] As far as it lies with me, nobody shall have a more serene enjoyment of my goods than I do, one more quit and more quiet. [B] Though the husbands provide the matter, Nature herself wills that the wives provide the form.90

  As for the duties of conjugal love which are thought to be infringed by such absences, I do not believe that they are. On the contrary: such intercourse can easily be cooled by too continuous a presence and impaired by assiduity: every other woman seems charming then! Everyone knows that seeing each other all the time cannot provide the same pleasure as is given by alternately going away and coming together. [C] Such intervals fill me with fresh love for my family and restore me to a more agreeable use of my home. Alternation sharpens my appetite for both home and travel. [B] Loving affection, as I know, has arms long enough to stretch from one end of the world to the other and meet – especially conjugal love, for it comports a continuous exchange of duties which reawaken our memory of the tie. The Stoics say that there are such great bonds of interdependence and interconnection between the wise, that he who dines in France nourishes his fellow in Egypt and that, wherever he may be, if he merely raises a finger to help, all the wise men on this habitable earth feel the benefit.91

  Enjoyment – possession – belongs mainly to the mind. [C] It more ardently embraces whatever it goes a-seeking than anything we actually hold, and it does so more continuously. Note how you spend your time every day: you will find that you are most absent from the one you love when he is present: your attentiveness is released by the fact that he is there; that gives your thoughts freedom to go absent at any time, on any pretext.

  [B] Outwards from Rome I control and govern my household and the good things I have left there. Just as when I am there, I know within an inch or two how my walls, my trees or my rents are growing or declining:

  Ante oculos errat domus, errat forma locorum.

  [Before my eyes there floats a vision of my home and the places I have left.]92

  If we only enjoy things when we touch them, then goodbye to our golden sovereigns when they are in our money-chests – and to our sons when they are out hunting. We want them nearer. They are in our grounds: is that ‘far’? Is half a day’s journey ‘far’? How about ten leagues? Is that ‘far’ or ‘near’? If near, how about eleven leagues, twelve, thirteen and so on, pace by pace? Truly, if any wife can lay down for her husband how many paces make ‘far’ and how many paces make ‘near’, my counsel is to make him stop half-way –

  excludat jurgia finis.

  Utor pemisso, caudœque pilos ut equinœ

  Paulatim vello, et demo unum, demo etiam unum,

  Dum cadat elusus ratione ruentis acervi

  [‘Let us set limits and end this domestic strife!’… Yes, but I take whatever you allow and (like plucking hair after hair, one by one, from my horse’s tail) I take yard after yard until you are cheated by my accumulated sophisms]’93

  – and let those wives dare to call Philosophy to their aid. But someone will object that Philosophy can only judge very vaguely where the middle point lies: she can descry neither of the limits linking too much and too little, long and short, light and heavy, since she can recognize neither their end nor beginning: [C] ‘Rerum natura nullam nobis dedit cognitionem finium.’ [Nature has given us no faculty which can know the boundaries of anything.]

  [B] Are they not still the wives and beloveds of the dead who are not at the end of this world but in the next? Our arms enfold not only our absent ones but also those who have died or are yet to be. When we married each other we did not contract to be ever attached to each other’s tails like some little creatures or other we know of,94 [C] or doggy-fashion, like those bewitched couples of Karenty.95 Moreover a wife should not have her eyes so hungrily fixed on her husband’s foreparts that when the need arises she cannot bear to see his backside.

  [B] Perhaps this jest from a most excellent portrayer of wives’ humours would not be out of place here to describe the cause of their complaints:

  Uxor, si cesses, aut te amare cogitat,

  Aut tete amari, aut potare, aut animo obsequi,

  Et tibi bene esse soli, cum sibi sit male.

  [You are late coming home. Your wife assumes that you are in love with somebody, or somebody with you, that you are getting drunk and having a good time without her while she feels miserable.]96

  Or would it not be, perhaps, because they like opposing and thrive on contradiction, happy enough if they can make you unhappy?

  In a truly loving relationship – which I have experienced – rather than drawing the one I love to me I give myself to him.97 Not merely do I prefer to do him good than to have him do good to me, I would even prefer that he did good to himself rather than to me: it is when he does good to himself that he does most good to me. If his absence is either pleasant or useful to him, then it delights me far more than his presence. And it is not strictly absence when there are means of keeping in touch. In former times I found advantages and pleasure in our being far apart. By going our separate ways we possessed life more fully and widely. It was for me that he lived, and saw and enjoyed things: and I for him – more fully than if he had been there. When we were together part of us remained idle: we were merged into one. Geographical separation rendered more rich the union of our wills. That insatiable hunger for physical presence reveals a certain weakness in the enjoyment of our souls.

  As for my old age, which they cite against me, it is on the contrary for youth to be enslaved by common opinions and to restrain itself for someone else. Youth has plenty enough to provide for itself and others: we have too much to do to provide for ourselves. As natural pleasures fail us, let us support ourselves by artificial
ones. It is unfair to forgive youth for pursuing its pleasures, while forbidding old age even to look for any. [C] when I was young I veiled my playful passions behind wisdom: now I am old, I disperse my gloomy ones by excess. Though Plato’s laws forbid foreign travel before forty or fifty so as to make it more useful and instructive, I would more readily subscribe to the second article in those same laws, which prohibits it after sixty.98

  [B] ‘But at your age you will never return from so long a road’ – What does that matter to me? I did not set out either to return or to complete. I set out merely to keep on the move while moving pleases me. [C] I travel for travelling’s sake. They do not run for sport who course after hares or benefices: they run for sport who gallop in tournaments for the joy of the coursing.

  [B] My itinerary can be interrupted at any point; it is not based on great expectations: each day’s journey is complete in itself. My life’s journey is conducted the same way. Yet I have seen enough far-off places where I would have liked to have been retained. And why ever not, when so many [C] wise [B] men of the most glowering sect99 – Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Zeno and Antipater – abandoned their homeland, having no cause to complain of it but merely to enjoy a different clime. Indeed what most displeases me in my peregrinations is that I cannot bring with me the right to make my home wherever I please and that (adapting myself to the common prejudice) I must always intend to come back. If I were to afraid of dying anywhere else but where I was born, and if I thought that I would die less at my ease when far from my family, not only would I hardly ever go out of France without terror, I would hardly go out of my parish: I feel death all the time, jabbing at my throat and loins. But I am made otherwise: death is the same for me anywhere. If I were to allowed to choose I would, I think, prefer to die in the saddle rather than in my bed, away from home and far from my own folk. There is more heartbreak than comfort in taking leave of those we love. I am inclined to neglect that social duty: for of all the obligations of loving affection it alone is displeasing. I would willingly therefore neglect to bid that great and everlasting farewell. Although some advantage may be drawn from the presence of others, there are hundreds of disadvantages. I have seen several men die most wretchedly, besieged by all that activity; they are suffocated by the crowd. It is undutiful, and a sign of slight care and affection, to let you die in peace! Someone is messing about with your eyes, another with your ears and another with your tongue: you have no limb nor sense which they are not badgering. Your heart is racked with pity at hearing the lamentations of those who love you – and perhaps with anger at hearing other lamentations, feigned and hypocritical. Anyone with a taste for gentleness has it more when he is weak. In such great straits he needs a soft hand to scratch him precisely where it itches. Otherwise, leave him alone. If we need. ‘wise-woman’ to midwife us into this world we need an even wiser man to get us out of it. We ought to pay a high price to have such a man, a friend, for such an event.