About the Author
Sarah Bakewell was a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before becoming a full-time writer, publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart and The English Dane. She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University and catalogues rare book collections for the National Trust.
About the Book
An illuminating and humane book… It’s rare to come across a biographer who remains so deliciously fond of her subject’ Independent
How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live?
This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, whose free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience were unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog’s ears twitched when it was dreaming, events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, readers still come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment – and in search of themselves.
This first full biography of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored.
‘Bakewell writes with verve. This is an intellectually lively treatment of a Renaissance giant and his world’ Daily Telegraph
‘Splendidly conceived and exquisitely written… It should persuade another generation to fall in love with Montaigne’ Sunday Times
‘This welding together of biography and self-help mirrors exactly the project of Montaigne’s Essays’ Financial Times
‘A bright, engaging book that can only enthuse you to read the essays themselves … Try it and you will make a new, most intimate friend’ Daily Mail
My five years of ‘voluntary servitude’ to Montaigne have been an extraordinary half-decade, during which I have learned a lot – not least about the kindness of the friends, scholars and colleagues who have helped me in so many ways.
In particular, I wish to thank Warren Boutcher, Emily Butterworth, Philippe Desan, George Hoffmann, Peter Mack and John O’Brien for the warmth of their encouragement, the generosity of their assistance, and their willingness to share their time, knowledge and experience.
My gratitude goes to Elizabeth Jones for supplying me with fascinating material from her documentary The Man Who Ate His Archbishop’s Liver, as well as to Francis Couturas at the Musée l’art et d’archéologie du Périgord in Périgueux, Anne-Laure Ranoux at the Musée du Louvre, Anne-Sophie Marchetto of Sud-Ouest, and to Michel Iturria for permission to use his cartoon ‘Enfin! Une groupie!’ I am also extremely grateful to John Stafford for allowing me to use his photographs.
I relied a great deal on libraries including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux, the British Library and the London Library, and I thank the staff of all these for their expertise. Stanford University Press’s generosity in so readily granting permission to quote from Donald Frame’s translation is very much appreciated.
The book was completed with the help of an Authors’ Foundation grant from the Society of Authors, and a London Library Carlyle Membership; I am most grateful for both.
As always, many thanks go to my agent Zoë Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge & White, and to my editor Jenny Uglow as well as Alison Samuel, Parisa Ebrahimi, Beth Humphries, Sue Amaradivakara and everyone else at Chatto & Windus who believed in the book and helped bring it to life.
For reading the manuscript in various stages of disarray, advising me wisely, and reassuring me that everything was going to plan however unlikely this looked, I thank Tündi Haulik, Julie Wheelwright, Jane and Ray Bakewell, and Simonetta Ficai-Veltroni – who lived with Montaigne for so long and never lost faith in him (or me).
I first met Montaigne when, some twenty years ago in Budapest, I was so desperate for something to read on a train that I took a chance on a cheap Essays translation in a second-hand shop. It was the only English-language book on the shelf; I very much doubted that I would enjoy it. There is no one in particular I can thank for this turn of events; only Fortune, and the Montaignean truth that the best things in life happen when you don’t get what you think you want.
Improve your life with Shelf Help. From literary bestsellers to thought-provoking works of non-fiction, each title is explored in depth on the Vintage website.
CONVERSATION
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, Stephen Grosz
READING
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson
FAMILY
Far From the Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love, Andrew Solomon
NATURE
Nature Cure, Richard Mabey
PHILOSOPHY
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, Sarah Bakewell
SILENCE
Teach Us To Sit Still, Tim Parks
LAUGHTER
Heartbreak Hotel, Deborah Moggach
EXERCISE
Waterlog, Roger Deakin
CONFRONTING THE BIGGEST FEAR
Nothing to be Frightened of, Julian Barnes
PURSUING DREAMS
Stoner, John Williams
UNDERSTANDING
Human Traces, Sebastian Faulks
INHERITANCE
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, Edward de Waal
Twelve Reasons to Feel Better
www.vintageshelfhelp.co.uk
@vintagebooks #shelfhelp
MONTAIGNE WAS NOT always a natural at social gatherings. From time to time, in youth, while his friends were dancing, laughing and drinking, he would sit apart under a cloud. His companions barely recognised him on these occasions: they were more used to seeing him flirting with women, or animatedly debating a new idea that had struck him. They would wonder whether he had taken offence at something they had said. In truth, as he confided later in his Essays, when he was in this mood he was barely aware of his surroundings at all. Amid the festivities, he was thinking about some frightening true tale he had recently heard – perhaps one about a young man who,1 having left a similar feast a few days earlier complaining of a touch of mild fever, had died of that fever almost before his fellow party-goers had got over their hangovers. If death could play such tricks, then only the flimsiest membrane separated Montaigne himself from the void at every moment. He became so afraid of losing his life that he could no longer enjoy it while he had it.
In his twenties, Montaigne suffered this morbid obsession because he had spent too much time reading classical philosophers. Death was a topic of which the ancients never tired. Cicero summed up their principle neatly: ‘To philosophise is to learn how to die’.2 Montaigne himself would one day borrow this dire thought for a chapter title.
But if his problems began with a surfeit of philosophy at an impressionable age, they did not end just because he grew up. As he reached his thirties, when he might have been expected to gain a more measured perspective, Montaigne’s sense of the oppressive proximity of death became stronger than ever, and more personal. Death turned from an abstraction into a reality, and began scything its way through almost everyone he cared about, getting closer to himself. When he was thirty, in 1563, his best friend Étienne de La Boétie was killed by the plague. In 1568, his father died, probably of complications following a kidney-stone attack. In the spring of the following year, Montaigne lost his younger brother Arnaud de Saint-Martin to a freak sporting accident. He himself had just got married then: the first baby of this marriage would live to the age of two months, dying in August 1570. Montaigne went on to lose four more children: of six, only one survived to become an adult. This series of bereavements made death less nebulous as a threat, but it was hardly reassuring. His fears were as strong as ever.
The most painful loss was apparently that of La Boétie: Montaigne loved him more than anyone. But the most shocking must have been that of his brother Arnaud. At just twenty-seven, Arnaud was struck on the head by a ball while playing the contemporary version of tennis, the jeu de paume. It cannot have been a very forceful blow, and he showed no immediate effect, but five or six hours later he lost consciousness and died, presumably from a clot or haemorrhage. No one would have expected a simple knock on the head to cut off the life of a healthy man. It made no sense, and was even more personally threatening than the story of the young man who had died of fever. ‘With such frequent and ordinary examples3 passing before our eyes,’ wrote Montaigne of Arnaud, ‘how can we possibly rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment4 it is gripping us by the throat?’
Rid himself of this thought he could not; nor did he even want to. He was still under the sway of his philosophers. ‘Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death,’ he wrote in an early essay on the subject:
At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. At the stumbling of a horse, the fall of a tile, the slightest pin prick, let us promptly chew on this: Well, what if it were death itself?
If you ran through the images of your death often enough, said his favourite sages, the Stoics, it could never catch you by surprise. Knowing how well prepared you were, you should be freed to live without fear. But Montaigne5 found the opposite. The more intensely he imagined the accidents that might befall him and his friends, the less calm he felt. Even if he managed, fleetingly, to accept the idea in the abstract, he could never accommodate it in detail. His mind filled with visions of injuries and fevers; or of people weeping at his deathbed, and perhaps the ‘touch of a well-known hand’ laid on his brow to bid him farewell. He imagined the world closing around the hole where he had been: his possessions being gathered up, and his clothes distributed among friends and servants. These thoughts did not free him; they imprisoned him.
Fortunately, this constriction did not last. By his forties and fifties, Montaigne was liberated into light-heartedness. He was able to write the most fluid and life-loving of his essays, and he showed almost no remaining sign of his earlier morbid state of mind. We only know that it ever existed because his book tells us about it. He now refused to worry about anything. Death is only a few bad moments6 at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over. From being the gloomiest among his acquaintances, he became the most carefree of middle-aged men, and a master of the art of living well. The cure lay in a journey to the heart of the problem: a dramatic encounter with his own death, followed by an extended mid-life crisis which led him to the writing of his Essays.
The great meeting between Montaigne and death happened on a day some time in 1569 or early 1570 – the exact period is uncertain – when he was out doing one of the things that usually dissipated his anxieties and gave him a feeling of escape: riding7 his horse.
He was about thirty-six at this time, and felt he had a lot to escape from. Following his father’s death, he had inherited full responsibility for the family château and estate in the Dordogne. It was beautiful land, in an area covered, then as now, by vineyards, soft hills, villages and tracts of forest. But for Montaigne it represented the burden of duty. On the estate, someone was always plucking at his sleeve, wanting something or finding fault with things he had done. He was the seigneur: everything came back to him.
Fortunately, it was not usually difficult to find an excuse to be somewhere else. As he had done since he was twenty-four, Montaigne worked as a magistrate in Bordeaux, the regional capital some thirty miles away – so there were always reasons to go there. Then there were the far-flung vineyards8 of the Montaigne property itself, scattered in separate parcels around the countryside for miles, and useful for visits if he felt so inclined. He also made occasional calls on the neighbours who lived in other châteaux of the area: it was important to stay on good terms. All these tasks formed excellent justifications for a ride through the woods on a sunny day.
Out on the forest paths, Montaigne’s9 thoughts could wander as widely as he wished, although even here he was invariably accompanied by servants and acquaintances. People rarely went around alone in the sixteenth century. But he could spur his horse away from boring conversations, or turn his mind aside in order to daydream, watching the light glinting in the canopy of trees over the forest path. Was it really true, he might wonder, that a man’s semen came from the marrow of the spinal column, as Plato said? Could a remora fish really be so strong that it could hold back a whole ship just by fastening its lips on it and sucking? And what about the strange incident he had seen at home the other day, when his cat gazed intently into a tree until a bird fell out of it, dead, right between her paws? What power did she have? Such speculations were so absorbing that Montaigne sometimes forgot to pay full attention to the path and to what his companions were doing.
On this occasion, he was progressing calmly through the woods with a group of other mounted men, all or most of them his employees, some three or four miles from the château. It was an easy ride and he was expecting no trouble, so he had chosen a placid horse of no great strength. He was wearing ordinary clothes: breeches, a shirt, a doublet, probably a cloak. His sword was at his side – a nobleman never went anywhere without one – but he wore no armour or other special protection. Yet there were always dangers outside town or château walls: robbers were common, and France was presently suspended in a lawless state between two outbreaks of civil war. Groups of unemployed soldiers roamed the countryside, looking for any loot they could get in lieu of wages lost during the peace interlude. Despite his anxieties about death in general, Montaigne usually remained calm about such specific risks. He did not flinch from every suspicious stranger as others did, or jump out of his skin at hearing unidentified sounds in the woods. Yet the prevailing tension must have got to him too, for, when a great weight slammed into him from behind, his first thought was that he had been attacked deliberately. It felt like a shot from an arquebus, the rifle-like firearm of the day.
He had no time to wonder why anyone should fire a weapon at him. The thing struck him ‘like a thunderbolt’: his horse was knocked down, and Montaigne himself went flying. He hit the ground hard, metres away, and instantly lost consciousness.
There lay the horse bowled over and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword, which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having no more motion or feeling than a log.
The arquebus idea came to him later; in fact, there was no weapon involved. What had happened was that one of Montaigne’s10 servants, a muscular man riding behind him on a powerful horse, had goaded his mount into a full gallop along the path – ‘in order to show his daring and get ahead of his companions’, as Montaigne surmised. He somehow failed to notice Montaigne in his way, or perhaps miscalculated the width of the path and thought he could pass. Instead, he ‘came down like a colossus on the little man and little horse’.
The rest of the riders stopped in consternation. Montaigne’s servants dismounted and tried to revive him; he remained unconscious. They picked him up and, with difficulty, started carrying his limp body back towards the castle. On the way, he came back to life. His first feeling was that he had been hit on the head (and his loss of consciousness suggests that this was right), yet he also started coughing, as if he had received a blow to the chest. Seeing him struggling for air, his men lifted him into a more upright position, and did their best to carry him at that awkward angle. Several times, he threw up lumps of clotted blood. This was an alarming symptom, but the coughing and vomiting helped to keep him awake.
As they approached the castle, he regained his wits more and more, yet he still felt as if he were slipping towards death, not emerging into life. His vision remained blurred; he could barely make out the light. He became aware of his body, but what he saw was hardly comforting, for his clothes were spattered with the blood he had been throwing up. He just had time to wonder about the arquebus before drifting back into semi-oblivion.
During what followed, as witnesses later told him, Montaigne thrashed about. He ripped at his doublet with his nails, as if to rid himself of a weight. ‘My stomach was oppressed with the clotted blood; my hands flew to it of their own accord, as they often do where we itch, against the intention of our will.’ It looked as if he were trying to rip his own body apart, or perhaps to pull it away from him so his spirit could depart. All this time, however, his inward feelings were tranquil:
It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep.
The servants continued to carry him towards the house, in this state of inward languor and outward agitation. His family noticed the commotion and ran out to him – ‘with the outcries customary in such cases’, as he later put it. They asked what had happened. Montaigne was able to give answers, but not coherent ones. He saw his wife picking her way awkwardly over the uneven path and considered telling his men to give her a horse to ride. You would think that all this must have come from ‘a wide-awake soul’, he wrote. Yet, ‘the fact is that I was not there at all’. He had travelled far away. ‘These were idle thoughts, in the clouds, set in motion by the sensations of the eyes and ears; they did not come from within me’ – chez moy, a term usually meaning ‘at home’. All his actions and words were somehow produced by the body alone. ‘What the soul contributed was in a dream, touched very lightly, and merely licked and sprinkled, as it were, by the soft impression of the senses’. Montaigne and life, it seemed, were about to part company with neither regret nor formal farewells, like two drunken guests leaving a feast too dazed to say goodbye.
His confusion continued after he was carried indoors. He still felt as if he were borne aloft on a magic carpet instead of being heaved around by servants’ hands. He suffered no pain, and no concern at the sight of those around him in emergency mode. All he felt was laziness and weakness. His servants put him to bed; he lay there, perfectly happy, not a thought in his head apart from that of how pleasurable it was to rest. ‘I felt infinite sweetness in this repose, for I had been villainously yanked about by those poor fellows, who had taken the pains to carry me in their arms over a long and very bad road.’ He refused all medicines, sure that he was destined just to slip away. It was going to be ‘a very happy death’.
This experience went far beyond Montaigne’s earlier imaginings about dying. It was a real voyage into death’s territory: he slipped in close and touched it with his lips. He could taste it, like a person sampling an unfamiliar flavour. This was an essay of death: an exercise or exercitation, the word he used when he came to write about the experience. He would later spend much time going over the sensations in his mind, reconstructing them as precisely as possible so as to learn from them. Fortune had handed him the perfect opportunity to test the philosophical consensus about death. But it was hard to be sure that he had learned the right answer. The Stoics would certainly have looked askance at his results.
Parts of the lesson were correct: through his exercitation, he had learned not to fear his own non-existence. Death could have a friendly face, just as the philosophers promised. Montaigne had looked into this face – but he had not stared into it lucidly, as a rational thinker should. Instead of marching forward with eyes open, bearing himself like a soldier, he had floated into death with barely a conscious thought, seduced by it. In dying, he now realised, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away. If other people try to pull you back, you hear their voices on ‘the edges of the soul’. Your existence is attached by a thread; it rests only on the tip of your lips, as he put it. Dying is not an action that can be prepared for. It is an aimless reverie.
From now on, when Montaigne read about death, he would show less interest in the exemplary ends of the great philosophers, and more in those of ordinary people, especially those whose deaths took place in a state of ‘enfeeblement and stupor’.11 In his most mature essays, he wrote admiringly of men such as Petronius and Tigillinus, Romans who died surrounded by jokes, music and everyday conversation, so that death simply flowed into them amid the general good cheer. Instead of turning a party into a death scene, as Montaigne had done in his youthful imagination, they turned their death scenes into parties. He particularly liked the story of Marcellinus, who avoided a painful death from disease by a gentle method of euthanasia. After fasting for several days, Marcellinus laid himself down in a very hot bath. No doubt he was already weakened by his illness; the bath simply steamed the last breaths of life out of him. He passed out slowly, and then he passed away. As he went, he murmured languorously to his friends about the pleasure he was experiencing.
One might expect pleasure in a death like that of Marcellinus. But Montaigne had learned something more surprising: that he could enjoy the same delightful floating sensations even while his body seemed to be convulsed, thrashing around in what looked to others like torment.
This discovery of Montaigne’s ran counter to his classical models; it also defied the Christian ideal which dominated his own era. For Christians, one’s last thought should be the sober commending of one’s soul to God, not a blissful ‘Aaaaah …’ Montaigne’s own experience apparently included no thoughts of God at all. Nor did it seem to occur to him that dying inebriated and surrounded by wenches might jeopardise a Christian afterlife. He was more interested in his purely secular realisation that human psychology, and nature in general, were the dying man’s best friends. And it now seemed to him that the only people who regularly died as bravely as philosophers should were those who knew no philosophy at all: the uneducated peasants in his local estates and villages. ‘I never saw one of my peasant neighbours12 cogitating over the countenance and assurance with which he would pass this last hour,’ he wrote – not that he would necessarily have known if they did. Nature took care of them. It taught them not to think about death except when they were dying, and very little even then. Philosophers find it hard to leave the world because they try to maintain control. So much for ‘To philosophise is to learn how to die.’ Philosophy looked more like a way of teaching people to unlearn the natural skill that every peasant had by birthright.
On this occasion, despite his willingness to float away, Montaigne did not die. He recovered – and from then on, lived a bit differently. From his essay of death, he took a decidedly unphilosophical philosophy lesson, which he summed up in the following casual way:
If you don’t know how to die,13 don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.
‘Don’t worry about death’ became his most fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live.
But life is more difficult than death; instead of passive surrender, it takes attention and management. It can also be more painful. Montaigne’s pleasurable drift on the currents of oblivion did not last. When he revived fully, after two or three hours, it was to find himself assailed with aches, his limbs ‘battered and bruised’.14 He suffered for several nights afterwards, and there were longer-term consequences. ‘I still feel the effect of the shock of that collision,’ he wrote, at least three years later.
His memory took longer to come back than his physical sensations, although he spent several days trying to reconstruct the event by interrogating witnesses. None of it struck any spark until the whole incident came back at a blow, with a shock like being struck by lightning – a reprise of the ‘thunderbolt’ of the initial impact. His return to life was as violent as the accident: all jostlings, impacts, flashes and thunderclaps. Life thrust itself deeply into him, whereas death had been a light and superficial thing.
From now on, he tried to import some of death’s delicacy and buoyancy into life. ‘Bad spots’15 were everywhere, he wrote in a late essay. We do better to ‘slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface’. Through this discovery of gliding and drifting, he lost much of his fear, and at the same time acquired a new sense that life, as it passed through his body – his particular life, Michel de Montaigne’s – was a very interesting subject for investigation. He would go on to attend to sensations and experiences, not for what they were supposed to be, or for what philosophical lessons they might impart, but for the way they actually felt. He would go with the flow.
This was a new discipline for him: one which took over his daily routine, and – through his writing – gave him a form of immortality. Thus, around the middle of his life, Montaigne lost his bearings and found himself reborn.
THE RIDING ACCIDENT, which so altered Montaigne’s1 perspective, lasted only a few moments in itself, but one can unfold it into three parts and spread it over several years. First, there is Montaigne lying on the ground, clawing at his stomach while experiencing euphoria. Then comes Montaigne in the weeks and months that followed, reflecting on the experience and trying to reconcile it with his philosophical reading. Finally, there is Montaigne a few years later, sitting down to write about it – and about a multitude of other things. The first scene could have happened to anyone; the second to any sensitive, educated young man of the Renaissance. The last makes Montaigne unique.
The connection is not a simple one: he did not sit up in bed and immediately start writing about the accident. He began the Essays a couple of years later, around 1572, and, even then, he wrote other chapters before coming to the one about losing consciousness. When he did turn to it, however, the experience made him try a new kind of writing, barely attempted by other writers: that of re-creating a sequence of sensations as they felt from the inside, following them from instant to instant. And there does seem to be a chronological link between the accident and another turning-point in his life, which opened up his path into literature: his decision to quit his job as magistrate in Bordeaux.
Montaigne had hitherto been keeping two lives going: one urban and political, the other rural and managerial. Although he had run the country estate since the death of his father in 1568, he had continued to work in Bordeaux. In early 1570, however, he put his magistracy up for sale. There were other reasons besides the accident: he had just been rejected for a post he had applied for in the court’s higher chamber, probably because political enemies had blocked him. It would have been more usual to appeal against this, or fight it; instead, he bailed out. Perhaps he did so in anger, or disillusionment. Or perhaps his own encounter with death, in combination with the loss of his brother, made him think differently about how he wanted to live his life.
Montaigne had put in thirteen years of work at the Bordeaux parlement when he took this step. He was thirty-seven – middle-aged perhaps, by the standards of the time, but not old. Yet he thought of himself as retiring: leaving the mainstream of life in order to begin a new, reflective existence. When his thirty-eighth birthday came around, he marked the decision – almost a year after he had actually made it – by having a Latin inscription painted on the wall of a side-chamber to his library:
In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins [the Muses], where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out. If the fates permit he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquillity, and leisure.
From now on, Montaigne would live for himself rather than for duty. He may have underestimated the work involved in minding the estate, and he made no reference yet to writing essays. He spoke only of ‘calm and freedom’. Yet he had already completed several minor literary projects. Rather reluctantly, he had translated2 a theological work at his father’s request, and afterwards he had edited a sheaf of manuscripts left by his friend Étienne de La Boétie, adding dedications and a letter of his own describing La Boétie’s last days. During those few years around the turn of 1570, his dabblings in literature coexisted with other experiences: the series of bereavements and his own near-death, the desire to get out of Bordeaux politics, and the yearning for a peaceful life – and something else too, for his wife was now pregnant with their first child. The expectation of new life met the shadow of death; together they lured him into a new way of being.
Montaigne’s change of gear during his mid- to late thirties has been compared to the most famous life-changing crises in literature: those of Don Quixote,3 who abandoned his routine to set off in search of chivalric adventure, and of Dante, who lost himself in the woods ‘midway on life’s path’. Montaigne’s steps into his own mid-life forest tangle, and his discovery of the path out of it, leave a series of footprints – the marks of a man faltering, stumbling, then walking on:
June 1568 – Montaigne finishes his theological translation. His father dies; he inherits the estate
Spring 1569 – His brother dies in the tennis accident
1569 – His career stalls in Bordeaux
1569 or early 1570 – He almost dies
Autumn 1569 – His wife becomes pregnant
Early 1570 – He decides to retire
Summer 1570 – He retires
June 1570 – His first baby is born
August 1570 – His first baby dies
1570 – He edits La Boétie’s works
February 1571 – He makes his birthday inscription on the library wall
1572 – He starts writing the Essays
Having committed himself to what he hoped would be a contemplative new life, Montaigne went to great trouble to set it up just as he wanted it. After his retirement, he chose one of two towers at the corners of his château4 complex to be his all-purpose retreat and centre of operations; the other tower was reserved for his wife. Together with the main château building and the linking walls, these two corner-pieces enclosed a simple, square courtyard, set amid fields and forests.
The main building has gone now. It burned down in 1885, and was replaced by a new building to the same design. But, by good fortune, the fire did not touch Montaigne’s tower: it remains essentially unchanged, and can still be visited. Walking around, it is not hard to see why he liked it so much. From the outside, it looks endearingly chubby for a four-storey tower, having walls as thick as a sandcastle’s. It was originally designed to be used for defence; Montaigne’s father adapted it for more peaceful uses. He turned the ground floor into a chapel, and added an inner spiral staircase. The floor above the chapel became Montaigne’s bedroom. He often slept there rather than returning to the main building. Set off the steps above this room was a niche for a toilet. Above that – just below the attic, with its ‘very big bell’ which rang out hours deafeningly – was Montaigne’s favourite haunt: his library.
Climbing up the steps today – their stone worn into hollows by many feet – one can enter this library and walk around it in a tight circle, looking out of the windows over the courtyard and landscape just as Montaigne would have done. The view would not have been that different in his time, but the room itself would. Now stark and white, with bare stone floors, it would then have had a covering underfoot, probably of rushes. On its walls were murals, still fresh. In winter, fires would have burned in most of the rooms, though not in the main library, which had no fireplace. Cold days sent Montaigne to the cosier side-chamber next door, since that did have a fire.
The most striking feature of the main library room, when Montaigne occupied it, was his fine collection of books, housed in five rows on a beautiful curving set of shelves.5 The curve was necessary to fit the round tower, and must have been quite a carpentry challenge. The shelves presented all Montaigne’s books to his view at a single glance: a satisfying sweep. He owned around a thousand volumes by the time he moved into the library, many inherited from his friend La Boétie, others bought by himself. It was a substantial collection, and Montaigne actually read his books, too. Today they are dispersed; the shelves too have gone.
Also around the room were Montaigne’s other collections: historical memorabilia, family heirlooms, artefacts from South America. Of his ancestors, he wrote, ‘I keep their handwriting,6 their seal, the breviary and a peculiar sword that they used, and I have not banished from my study some long sticks that my father ordinarily carried in his hand.’ The South American collection was built up from travellers’ gifts; it included jewellery, wooden swords, and ceremonial canes used in dancing. Montaigne’s library was not just a repository or a work space. It was a chamber of marvels, and sounds like a sixteenth-century version of Sigmund Freud’s last home in London’s Hampstead: a treasure-house stuffed with books, papers, statuettes, pictures, vases, amulets and ethnographic curiosities, designed to stimulate both imagination and intellect.
The library also marked Montaigne out as a man of fashion. The trend for such retreats had been spreading slowly through France, having begun in Italy in the previous century. Well-off men filled chambers with books and reading-stands, then used them as a place to escape to on the pretext of having to work. Montaigne took the escape factor further by removing his library from the house altogether. It was both a vantage point and a cave, or, to use a phrase he himself liked, an arrière-boutique: a ‘room behind the shop’.7 He could invite visitors there if he wished – and often did – but he was never obliged to. He loved it. ‘Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!’
Since the library represented freedom itself, it is not surprising that Montaigne made a ritual of decorating it and setting it apart. In the side-chamber, along with the inscription celebrating his retirement, he had floor-to-ceiling murals8 painted. These have faded, but, from what remains visible, they depicted great battles, Venus mourning the death of Adonis, a bearded Neptune, ships in a storm, and scenes of bucolic life – all evocations of the classical world. In the main chamber, he had the roof beams painted with quotations, also mostly classical. This, too, was a fashion, though it remained a minority taste. The Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino put quotations on the walls of his villa in Tuscany, and later, in the Bordeaux area, the baron de Montesquieu would do the same in deliberate homage to Montaigne.
Over the years, Montaigne’s roof beams faded too, but they were later restored to clear legibility, so that, as you walk around the room now, voices whisper from above your head:
Solum certum nihil esse certi
Et homine nihil miserius aut superbius
Only one thing is certain: that nothing is certain
And nothing is more wretched or arrogant than man. (Pliny the Elder)
ΚΡΙΝΕΙ ΤΙΣ ΑΥΤΟΝ ΠΩΠΟΤ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΝ ΜΕΓΑΝ ΟΝ ΕΞΑΛΕΙΦΕΙ ΠΡΟΦΑΣΙΣ Η ΤΥΧΟΥΣ’ ΟΛΟΝ
How can you think yourself a great man, when the first accident that comes along can wipe you out completely? (Euripides)
ΕΝ ΤΩ ΦΡΟΝΕΙΝ ΓΑΡ ΜΗΔΕΝ ΗΔΙΣΤΟΣ ΒΙΟΣ ΤΟ ΜΗ ΦΡΟΝΕΙΝ ΓΑΡ ΚΑΡΤ’ ΑΝΩΔΥΝΟΝ ΚΑΚΟΝ
There is no more beautiful life than that of a carefree man; Lack of care is a truly painless evil. (Sophocles)
The beams form a vivid reminder of Montaigne’s decision to move from public life into a meditative existence – a life to be lived, literally, under the sign of philosophy rather than that of politics. Such a shift of realms was also part of the ancients’ advice. The great Stoic Seneca repeatedly urged his fellow Romans to retire in order to ‘find themselves’, as we might put it. In the Renaissance, as in ancient Rome, it was part of the well-managed life. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to begin the long process of preparing for death. Montaigne developed reservations about the second part of this, but there is no doubt about his interest in contemplating life. He wrote: ‘let us cut loose9 from all the ties that bind us to others; let us win from ourselves the power to live really alone and to live that way at our ease’.
Seneca, in advising retirement, had also warned of dangers. In a dialogue called ‘On Tranquillity of Mind’,10 he wrote that idleness and isolation could bring to the fore all the consequences of having lived life in the wrong way, consequences that people usually avoided by keeping busy – that is, by continuing to live life in the wrong way. The symptoms could include dissatisfaction, self-loathing, fear, indecisiveness, lethargy and melancholy. Giving up work brings out spiritual ills, especially if one then gets the habit of reading too many books – or, worse, laying out the books for show and gloating over the view.
In the early 1570s, during his shift of values, Montaigne seems to have suffered exactly the existential crisis Seneca warned of. He had work to do, but less of it than he was used to. The inactivity generated strange thoughts and a ‘melancholy humour’11 which was out of character for him. No sooner had he retired, he said, than his mind galloped off like a runaway horse – an apt comparison, considering what had recently happened. His head filled with nonsense, just as a fallow field fills with weeds. In another vivid image – he loved piling up effects like this – he compared his idle brain to a woman’s unfertilised womb, which, as contemporary stories maintained, gives birth only to shapeless lumps of flesh instead of babies. And, in a simile borrowed from Virgil, he described his thoughts as resembling the patterns that dance across the ceiling when sunlight reflects off the surface of a water bowl. Just as the tiger-stripes of light lurch about, so an unoccupied mind gyrates unpredictably and brings forth mad, directionless whimsies. It generates fantasies or reveries12 – two words with less positive associations than they have today, suggesting raving delusions rather than daydreams.
His ‘reverie’ in turn gave Montaigne another mad idea: the thought of writing. He called this a reverie too, but it was one that held out the promise of a solution. Finding his mind so filled with ‘chimeras and fantastic monsters,13 one after another, without order or purpose’, he decided to write them down, not directly to overcome them, but to inspect their strangeness at his leisure. So he picked up his pen; the first of the Essays was born.
Seneca would have approved. If you become depressed or bored in your retirement, he advised, just look around you and interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things. Salvation lies in paying full attention14 to nature. Montaigne tried to do this, but he took ‘nature’ primarily to mean the natural phenomenon that lay closest to hand: himself. He began watching and questioning his own experience, and writing down what he observed.
At first, this mainly meant following his personal enthusiasms, especially stories from his reading: tales from Ovid, histories from Caesar and Tacitus, biographical snippets from Plutarch, and advice on how to live from Seneca and Socrates. Then he wrote down stories he heard from friends, incidents from the day-to-day life of the estate, cases that had lodged in his mind from his years in law and politics, and oddities he had seen on his (so far limited) travels. These were his modest beginnings; later, his material grew until it included almost every nuance of emotion or thought he had ever experienced, not least his strange journey in and out of unconsciousness.
The idea of publication may have crossed his mind early on, though he claimed otherwise, saying he wrote only for family and friends.15 Perhaps he even began with the intention of composing a commonplace book: a collection of thematically arranged quotations and stories, of a kind popular among gentlemen of the day. If so, it did not take him long to move beyond this, possibly under the influence of the one writer he liked more than Seneca: Plutarch. Plutarch had made his name in the first century A.D. with lively potted biographies of historical figures, and also wrote short pieces called Moralia, which were translated into French in the year Montaigne began writing16 his Essays. These gathered together thoughts and anecdotes on questions ranging from ‘Can animals be called intelligent?’ to ‘How does one achieve peace of mind?’ On the latter point, Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.
As the 1570s went on and Montaigne adjusted to his new post-crisis life, paying attention became a favourite pastime. His biggest writing year was 1572: that was when he began most of the essays of Book I and some in Book II. The rest followed in 1573 and 1574. Yet it would be a long time before he felt ready to publish; perhaps only because it did not occur to him, or perhaps because it took him many years to be satisfied with what he had done. A decade would pass from his retirement in 1570 to the day after his forty-seventh birthday, 1 March 1580, when he signed and dated the preface to the first edition of the Essays and made himself famous overnight.
Writing had got Montaigne through his ‘mad reveries’ crisis; it now taught him to look at the world more closely, and increasingly gave him the habit of describing inward sensations and social encounters with precision. He quoted Pliny on the idea of attending to such elusive fragments: ‘each man is a good education to himself,17 provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up’. As Montaigne the man went about his daily life on the estate, Montaigne the writer walked behind him, spying and taking notes.
When he came at last to write about his riding accident, therefore, he did it not only to shake out what remained of his fear of death like sand from his shoes, but also to raise his spying techniques to a level beyond anything he had tried before. Just as, in the days after the accident, he had made his servants repeatedly tell him the story of what had happened, so now he must have gone through it in his mind, reliving those floating sensations, that feeling of his breath or spirit lingering at the threshold of his body, and the pain of return. He ‘processed’ it, as psychologists might say today, through literature. In doing so, he reconstructed the experience as it actually was, not as the philosophers said it should be.
There was nothing easy about this new hobby of his. Montaigne liked to pretend that he threw the Essays together carelessly, but occasionally he forgot the pose and admitted what hard work it was:
It is a thorny undertaking,18 and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilise the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.
Montaigne may have extolled the beauty of gliding lightly over the surface of life; indeed, he did perfect that art as he got older. At the same time, as a writer, he worked at the art of plumbing the depths. ‘I meditate on any satisfaction,’19 he wrote. ‘I do not skim over it, I sound it.’ He was so determined to get to the bottom even of a phenomenon that was normally lost by definition – sleep – that he had a long-suffering servant wake him regularly in the middle of the night in the hope of catching a glimpse of his own unconsciousness as it left him.
Montaigne wanted to drift away, yet he also wanted to attach himself to reality and extract every grain of experience from it. Writing made it possible to do both. Even as he lost himself in his reveries, he secretly planted his hooks in everything that happened, so that he could draw it back at will. Learning how to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on.
In truth, however hard you try, you can never retrieve an experience in full. As a famous line by the ancient philosopher Heraclitus has it, you cannot step into the same river twice. Even if you return to the same spot on the bank, different water flows in upon you at every moment. Similarly, to see the world exactly as you did half an hour ago is impossible, just as it is impossible to see it from the point of view of a different person standing next to you. The mind flows on and on, in a ceaseless ‘stream of consciousness’20 – a phrase coined by the psychologist William James in 1890, though it was later made more famous by novelists.
Montaigne was among the many who quoted Heraclitus, and he mused on how we are carried along by our thoughts, ‘now gently, now violently,21 according as the water is angry or calm … every day a new fancy, and our humours shift with the shifts in the weather’. It is no wonder that the mind is like this, since even the apparently solid physical world exists in endless slow turmoil. Looking at the landscape around his house, Montaigne could imagine it heaving and boiling like porridge. His local river, the Dordogne, carved out its banks as a carpenter chisels grooves in wood. He had been astonished by the shifting sand dunes of Médoc, near where one of his brothers lived: they roamed the land and devoured it. If we could see the world at a different speed, he reflected, we would see everything like this, as ‘a perpetual multiplication and vicissitude of forms’. Matter existed in an endless branloire: a word deriving from the sixteenth-century peasant dance branle, which meant something like ‘the shake’. The world was a cosmic wobble: a shimmy.
Other sixteenth-century writers shared Montaigne’s fascination with the unstable. What was unusual in him was his instinct that the observer is as unreliable as the observed. The two kinds of movement interact like variables in a complex mathematical equation, with the result that one can find no secure point from which to measure anything. To try to understand the world is like grasping a cloud of gas, or a liquid, using hands that are themselves made of gas or water, so that they dissolve as you close them.
This is why Montaigne’s book flows as it does: it follows its author’s stream of consciousness without attempting to pause or dam it. A typical page of the Essays22believe