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Michel de Montaigne
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Michel de Montaigne
born Feb. 28, 1533, Chateau de Montaigne, near Bordeaux,
France
died Sept. 23, 1592, Château de Montaigne
in full Michel Eyquem de Montaigne French writer whose
Essais (Essays ) established a new literary form. In his
Essays he wrote one of the most captivating and intimate
self-portraits ever given, on apar with Augustine's and
Rousseau's.
Living, as he did, in the second half of the 16th century,
Montaigne bore witness to the decline of the intellectual
optimism that had marked the Renaissance. The sense of
immense human possibilities, stemming from the discoveries
of the New World travelers, from the rediscovery of
classical antiquity, and from the opening of scholarly
horizons through the works of the humanists, was shattered
in France when the advent of the Calvinistic Reformation was
followed closely by religious persecution and by the Wars of
Religion (1562–98). These conflicts, which tore the country
asunder, were in fact political and civil as well as
religious wars, marked by great excesses of fanaticism and
cruelty. At once deeply critical of his time and deeply
involved in its preoccupations and its struggles, Montaigne
chose to write about himself—“I am myself the matter of my
book,” he saysin his opening address to the reader—in order
to arrive at certain possible truths concerning man and the
human condition, in a period of ideological strife and
division when all possibility of truth seemed illusory and
treacherous.
Life
Born in the family domain of Château de Montaigne in
southwestern France, Michel Eyquem spent most of his life at
his château and in the city of Bordeaux, 30 miles to the
west. The family fortune had been founded in commerce by
Montaigne's great-grandfather, who acquired the estate and
the title of nobility. His grandfather and his father
expanded their activities to the realm of public service and
established the family in the noblesse de robe, the
administrative nobility of France. Montaigne's father,
PierreEyquem, served as mayor of Bordeaux.
As a young child Montaigne was tutored at home according to
his father's ideas of pedagogy, which included the creation
of a cosseted ambience of gentle encouragement and the
exclusive use of Latin, still the international language of
educated people. As a result the boy did not learn French
until he was six years old. He continued his education at
the College of Guyenne, where he found the strict discipline
abhorrent and the instruction only moderately interesting,
and eventually at the University of Toulouse, where he
studied law. Following in the public-service tradition begun
by his grandfather, he enteredin to the magistrature,
becoming a member of the Board of Excise, the new tax court
of Perigueux, and, when that body was dissolved in 1557, of
the Parliament of Bordeaux, one of the eight regional
parliaments that constituted the French Parliament, the
highest national court of justice. There, at the age of 24,
he made the acquaintance of Etienne de la Boetie, a meeting
that was one of the most significant events in Montaigne's
life. Between the slightly older La Boetie (1530–63), an
already distinguished civil servant, humanist scholar, and
writer, and Montaigne an extraordinary friendship sprang up,
based on a profound intellectual and emotional closeness and
reciprocity. In his essay “On Friendship” Montaigne wrote in
a very touching manner about his bond with La Boetie, which
he called perfect and indivisible, vastly superior to all
other human alliances. When La Boetie died of dysentery, he
left a void in Montaigne's life that no other being was ever
able to fill, and it is likely that Montaigne started on his
writing career, six years after La Boetie's death, in order
to fill the emptiness left by the loss of the irretrievable
friend.
In 1565 Montaigne was married, acting less out of love than
out of a sense of familial and social duty, to Françoise de
la Chassaigne, the daughter of one of his colleagues at the
Parliament of Bordeaux. He fathered six daughters, five of
whom died in infancy, whereas the sixth, Léonore, survived
him.
In 1569 Montaigne published his first book, a French
translation of the 15th-century Natural Theology by the
Spanish monk Raymond Sebond. He had undertaken the taskat
the request of his father, who, however, died in 1568,
before its publication, leaving to his oldest son the title
and the domain of Montaigne.
In 1570 Montaigne sold his seat in the Bordeaux Parliament,
signifying his departure from public life. After taking care
of the posthumous publication of La Boetie's works, together
with his own dedicatory letters, he retired in 1571 to the
castle of Montaigne in order to devote his time to reading,
meditating, and writing. His library, installed in the
castle's tower, became his refuge. It was in this round
room, lined with a thousand books and decorated with Greek
and Latin inscriptions, that Montaigne set out to put on
paper his essais, that is, the probings and testings of his
mind. He spent the years from 1571 to 1580 composing the
first two books of the Essays, which comprise respectively
57 and 37 chapters of greatly varying lengths; they were
published in Bordeaux in 1580.
Although most of these years were dedicated to writing,
Montaigne had to supervise the running of his estate as
well, and he was obliged to leave his retreat from time to
time, not only to travel to the court in Paris but also to
intervene as mediator in several episodes of the religious
conflicts in his region and beyond. Both the Roman Catholic
king Henry III and the Protestant king Henry of Navarre—who
as Henry IV would become king of France and convert to Roman
Catholicism—honoured and respected Montaigne, but extremists
on both sides criticized and harassed him.
After the 1580 publication, eager for new experiences and
profoundly disgusted by the state of affairs in France,
Montaigne set out to travel, and in the course of 15 months
he visited areas of France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria,
and Italy. Curious by nature, interested in the smallest
details of dailiness, geography, and regional
idiosyncrasies, Montaigne was a born traveler. He kept a
record of his trip, his Journal de voyage (not intended for
publication and not published until 1774), which is rich in
picturesque episodes, encounters, evocations, and
descriptions.
While still in Italy, in the fall of 1581, Montaigne
received the news that he had been elected to the office his
father hadheld, that of mayor of Bordeaux. Reluctant to
accept, because of the dismal political situation in France
and because of ill health (he suffered from kidney stones,
which had also plagued him on his trip), he nevertheless
assumed the position at the request of Henry III and held it
for two terms, until July 1585. While the beginning of his
tenure was relatively tranquil, his second term was marked
by an acceleration of hostilities between the warring
factions, and Montaigne played a crucial role in preserving
the equilibrium between the Catholic majority and the
important Protestant League representation in Bordeaux.
Toward the end of his term the plague broke out in Bordeaux,
soon raging out of control and killing one-third of the
population.
Montaigne resumed his literary work by embarking on the
third book of the Essays. After having been interrupted
again, by a renewed outbreak of the plague in the area that
forced Montaigne and his family to seek refuge elsewhere, by
military activity close to his estate, and by diplomatic
duties, when Catherine de Médicis appealed to his abilities
as a negotiator to mediate between herself and Henry of
Navarre—a mission that turned out to be unsuccessful—Montaigne
was able to finish the work in 1587.
The year 1588 was marked by both political and literary
events. During a trip to Paris Montaigne was twice arrested
and briefly imprisoned by members of the Protestant League
because of his loyalty to Henry III. During the same trip he
supervised the publication of the fifth edition of the
Essays, the first to contain the 13 chapters of Book III, as
well as Books I and II, enriched with many additions. He
also met Marie de Gournay, an ardent and devoted young
admirer of his writings. De Gournay, a writer herself, is
mentioned in the Essays as Montaigne's “covenant daughter”
and was to become his literary executrix. After the
assassination of Henry III in 1589, Montaigne helped to keep
Bordeaux loyal to Henry IV. He spent the last years of his
life at his château, continuing to read and to reflect and
to work on the Essays, adding new passages, which signify
not so much profound changes in his ideas as further
explorations of his thought and experience. Different
illnesses beset him during this period, and he died after an
attack of quinsy, an inflammation of the tonsils, which had
deprived him of speech. His death occurred while he was
hearing mass in hisroom.
The Essays
Montaigne saw his age as one of dissimulation, corruption,
violence, and hypocrisy, and it is therefore not surprising
that the point of departure of the Essays is situated in
negativity: the negativity of Montaigne's recognition of the
rule of appearances and of the loss of connection with the
truth of being. Montaigne's much-discussed skepticism
results from that initial negativity, as he questions the
possibility of all knowing and sees the human being as a
creature of weakness and failure, of inconstancy and
uncertainty, of incapacity and fragmentation, or, as he
wrote in the first of the essays, as “a marvelously vain,
diverse, and undulating thing.” His skepticism is reflected
in the French title of his work, Essais, or “Attempts,”
which implies not a transmission of proven knowledge or of
confident opinion but a project of trial and error, of
tentative exploration. Neither a reference to an established
genre (for Montaigne's book inaugurated the term essay for
the short prose composition treating a given subject in a
rather informal and personal manner) nor an indication of a
necessary internal unity and structure within the work, the
title indicates an intellectual attitude of questioning and
of continuous assessment.
Montaigne's skepticism does not, however, preclude a belief
in the existence of truth but rather constitutes a defense
against the danger of locating truth in false, unexamined,
and externally imposed notions. His skepticism, combined
with his desire for truth, drives him to the rejection of
commonly accepted ideas and to a profound distrust of
generalizations and abstractions; it also shows him the way
to an exploration of the only realm that promises certainty:
that of concrete phenomena and primarily the basic
phenomenon of his own body-and-mind self. This self, with
all its imperfections, constitutes the only possible site
where the search for truth can start, and it is thereason
Montaigne, from the beginning to the end of the Essays, does
not cease to affirm that “I am myself the matter of my
book.” He finds that his identity, his “master form” as he
calls it, cannot be defined in simple terms of a constant
and stable self, since it is instead a changeable
andfragmented thing, and that the valorization and
acceptance of these traits is the only guarantee of
authenticity and integrity, the only way of remaining
faithful to the truth of one's being and one's nature rather
than to alien semblances.
Yet, despite his insistence that the self guard its freedom
toward outside influences and the tyranny of imposed customs
and opinions, Montaigne believes in the value of reaching
outside the self. Indeed, throughout his writings, as he did
in his private and public life, he manifests the need to
entertain ties with the world of other people and of events.
For this necessary coming and going between the interiority
of the self and the exteriority of the world, Montaigne uses
the image of the back room: human beings have their front
room, facing the street, where they meet and interact with
others, but they need always to be able to retreat into the
back room of the most private self, where they may reaffirm
the freedom and strength of intimate identity and reflect
upon the vagaries of experience. Given that always-available
retreat, Montaigne encourages contact with others, from
which one may learn much that is useful. In order to do so,
he advocates travel, reading, especially of history books,
and conversations with friends. These friends, for Montaigne,
are necessarily men. While none can ever replace La Boetie,
it is possible to have interesting and worthwhile exchanges
with men of discernment and wit. As for his relations with
women, Montaigne wrote about them with a frankness unusual
for his time. The only uncomplicated bond is that of
marriage, which reposes, for Montaigne, on reasons of family
and posterity and in which one invests little of oneself.
Love, on the other hand, with its emotional and erotic
demands, comports the risk of enslavement and loss of
freedom. Montaigne, often designated as a misogynist, does
in fact recognize that men and women are fundamentally alike
in their fears, desires, and attempts to find and affirm
their own identity and that only custom and adherence to an
antiquated status quo establish the apparent differences
between the sexes, but he does not explore the possibility
of overcoming that fundamental separation and of
establishing an intellectual equality.
Montaigne extends his curiosity about others to the
inhabitants of the New World, with whom he had become
acquainted through his lively interest in oral and written
travel accounts and through his meeting in 1562 with three
Brazilian Indians whom the explorer Nicolas Durand de
Villegagnon had brought back to France. Giving an example of
cultural relativism and tolerance, rare in his time, he
finds these people, in their fidelity to their own nature
and in their cultural and personal dignity and sense of
beauty, greatly superior to the inhabitants of western
Europe, who in the conquests of the New World and in their
own internal wars have shown themselves to be the true
barbarians. The suffering and humiliation imposed on the New
World's natives by their conquerors provoke his indignation
and compassion.
Involvement in public service is also a part of interaction
with the world, and it should be seen as a duty to be
honourably and loyally discharged but never allowed to
become a consuming and autonomy-destroying occupation.
Montaigne applies and illustrates his ideas concerning the
independence and freedom of the self and the importance of
social and intellectual intercourse in all his writings and
in particular in his essay on the education of children.
There, aselse where, he advocates the value of concrete
experience over abstract learning and of independent
judgment over an accumulation of undigested notions
uncritically accepted from others. He also stresses,
throughout his work, the role of the body, as in his candid
descriptions of his own bodily functions and in his
extensive musings on the realities of illness, of aging, and
of death. The presence of death pervades the Essays, as
Montaigne wants to familiarize himself with the
inevitability of dying and so to rid himself of the tyranny
of fear, and he is able to accept death as part of nature's
exigencies, inherent in life's expectations and limitations.
Montaigne seems to have been a loyal if not fervent Roman
Catholic all his life, but he distrusted all human pretenses
to knowledge of a spiritual experience which is not attached
to a concretely lived reality. He declined to speculate on a
transcendence that falls beyond human ken, believing in God
but refusing to invoke him in necessarily presumptuous and
reductive ways.
Although Montaigne certainly knew the classical
philosophers, his ideas spring less out of their teaching
than out of the completely original meditation on himself,
which he extends to a description of the human being and to
an ethics of authenticity, self-acceptance, and tolerance.
The Essays are the record of his thoughts, presented not in
artificially organized stages but as they occurred and
reoccurred to him in different shapes throughout his
thinking and writing activity. They are not the record of an
intellectualevolution but of a continuous accretion, and he
insists on theimmediacy and the authenticity of their
testimony. To denote their consubstantiality with his
natural self, he describes them as his children, and, in an
image of startling and completely nonpejorative earthiness,
as the excrements of his mind. As he refuses to impose a
false unity on the spontaneous workings of his thought, so
he refuses to impose a false structure on his Essays. “As my
mind roams, so does my style,” he wrote, and the multiple
digressions, the wandering developments, the savory,
concrete vocabulary, all denote that fidelity to the
freshness and the immediacy of the living thought.
Throughout the text he sprinkles anecdotes taken from
ancient as well as contemporary authors and from popular
lore, which reinforcehis critical analysis of reality; he
also peppers his writing with quotes, yet another way of
interacting with others, that is, with the authors of the
past who surround him in his library. Neither anecdotes nor
quotes impinge upon the autonomy of his own ideas, although
they may spark or reinforce a train of thought, and they
become an integral part of the book's fabric.
Montaigne's Essays thus incorporate a profound skepticism
concerning the human being's dangerously inflated claims to
knowledge and certainty but also assert that there is no
greater achievement than the ability to accept one's being
without either contempt or illusion, in the full realization
of its limitations and its richness.
Readership
Throughout the ages the Essays have been widely and
variously read, and their readers have tended to look to
them, and into them, for answers to their own needs. Not all
his contemporaries manifested the enthusiasm of Marie de
Gournay, who fainted from excitement at her first reading.
She did recognize in the book the full force of an unusual
mind revealing itself, but most of the intellectuals of the
period preferred to find in Montaigne a safe reincarnation
of stoicism. Here started a misunderstanding that was to
last a long time, save in the case of the exceptional
reader. The Essays were to be perused as an anthology of
philosophical maxims, a repository of consecrated wisdom,
rather than as the complete expression of a highly
individual thought and experience. That Montaigne could
write about his most intimate reactions and feelings, that
he could describe his own physical appearance and
preferences, for instance, seemed shocking and irrelevant to
many, just as the apparent confusion of his writing seemed a
weakness to be deplored rather than a guarantee of
authenticity.
In the 17th century, when an educated nobility set the tone,
he was chiefly admired for his portrayal of the honnete
homme , the well-educated, nonpedantic man of manners,
asmuch at home in a salon as in his study, a gentleman of
smiling wisdom and elegant, discreet disenchantment. In the
same period, however, religious authors such as Francis of
Sales and Blaise Pascal deplored his skepticism as
anti-Christian and denounced what they interpreted as an
immoral self-absorption. In the pre-Revolutionary 18th
century the image of a dogmatically irreligious Montaigne
continued to be dominant, and Voltaire and Denis Diderot saw
in him a precursor of the free thought of the Enlightenment.
For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, the encounter with the
Essays was differently and fundamentally important, as he
rightly considered Montaigne the master and the model of the
self-portrait. Rousseau inaugurated the perception of the
book as the entirely personal project of a human being in
search of his identity and unafraid to talk without
dissimulation about his profound nature. In the 19th century
some of the old misunderstandings continued, but there was a
growing understanding and appreciation of Montaigne not only
as a master of ideas but also as the writer of the
particular, the individual, the intimate—the writer as
friend and familiar. Gustave Flaubert kept the Essays on his
bedside table and recognized in Montaigne an alter ego, as
would, in the 20th century, authors such as André Gide,
Michel Butor, and Roland Barthes.
The Essays were first translated into English by John Florio
in1603, and Anglophone readers have included Francis Bacon,
John Webster, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, William
Makepeace Thackeray, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf,
T.S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley.
Today Montaigne continues to be studied in all aspects of
his text by great numbers of scholars and to be read by
people from all corners of the earth. In an age that may
seemas violent and absurd as his own, his refusal of
intolerance and fanaticism and his lucid awareness of the
human potential for destruction, coupled with his belief in
the human capacity for self-assessment, honesty, and
compassion, appeal as convincingly as ever to the many who
find in him a guide and a friend.
Tilde A. Sankovitch
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'There is scarcely any less bother in the running of a
family than, in that of an entire state.
And domestic
business is no less importunate for being less important.'
Montaigne, Essais, ch. 39.
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ESSAYS
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Type of work: Essays
Author: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
First published: Books 1—II, 1580; I—II, revised, 1582; I—III,
1588; I—III, revised, 1595
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Montaigne began his essays as a stoical humanist, continued them as a
skeptic, and concluded them as a human being concerned with man.
Substantially, this evolution is the one upon which Montaigne scholars
are agreed. Surely these three phases of his thought are apparent in his
Essais, for one may find, in these volumes, essays in which Montaigne
considers how a man should face pain and die, such as "To Philosophize
Is to Learn to Die"; essays in which the skeptical attack on dogmatism
in philosophy and religion is most evident, such as the famous "Apology
for Raimond Sebond"; and essays in which the writer makes a constructive
effort to encourage men to know themselves and to act naturally for the
good of all men, as in "The Education of Children."
Montaigne retired to his manor when he was thirty-eight. Public life had
not satisfied him, and he was wealthy enough to live apart from the
active life of his times and to give himself to contemplation and the
writing of essays. He did spend some time in travel a few years later,
and he was made mayor of Bordeaux, but most of his effort went into the
writing and revision of his Essais, the attempt to essai, or test, the
ideas which came to him.
An important essay in the first volume is "That the Taste for Good and
Evil Depends in Good Part upon the Opinion We Have of Them." The essay
begins with a paraphrase of a quotation from Epictetus to the effect
that men are bothered more by opinions than by things. The belief that
all human judgment is, after all, more a function of the human being
than of the things judged suggested to Montaigne that by a change of
attitude human beings could alter the values of things. Even death can
be valued, provided the man who is about to die is of the proper
disposition. Poverty and pain can also be good provided a person of
courageous temperament develops a taste for them. Montaigne concludes
that "things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our
weakness or cowardice makes them so. To judge of great and high matters
requires a suitable soul. . . ."
This stoical relativity is further endorsed in the essay "To Study
Philosophy Is to Learn to Die." Montaigne's preoccupation with the
problem of facing pain and death was caused by the death of his best
friend, Etienne de la Boetie, who died in 1563 at the age of
thirty-three, and then the deaths of his father, his brother, and
several of his children. In addition, Montaigne was deeply disturbed by
the Saint Bartholomew Day massacres. As a humanist, he was well educated
in the literature and philosophy of the ancients, and from them he drew
support of the stoical philosophy suggested to him by the courageous
death of his friend La Boetie.
The title of the essay is a paraphrase of Cicero's remark "that to study
philosophy is nothing but to prepare one's self to die." For some
reason, perhaps because it did not suit his philosophic temperament at
the time, perhaps because he had forgotten it, Montaigne did not allude
to a similar expression attributed by Plato to Socrates, the point then
being that the philosopher is interested in the eternal, the unchanging,
and that life is a preoccupation with the temporal and the variable. For
Montaigne, however, the remark means either that the soul in
contemplation removes itself from the body, so to speak, or that
philosophy teaches us how to face death. It is the latter interpretation
that interested him.
Asserting that we all aim at pleasure, even in virtue, Montaigne argued
that the thought of death is naturally disturbing. He refers to the
death of his brother, Captain St. Martin, who was killed at the age of
twenty-three when he was struck behind the ear by a tennis ball. Other
instances enforce his claim that death often comes unexpectedly to the
young; for this reason the problem is urgent. With these examples before
us, he writes, how can we "avoid fancying that death has us, every
moment, by the throat?" The solution is to face death and fight it by
becoming so familiar with the idea of death that we are no longer
fearful. "The utility of living," he writes, "consists not in the length
of days, but in the use of time. . . ." Death is natural, and what is
important is not to waste life with the apprehension of death.
In the essay "Of Judging the Death of Another," Montaigne argues that a
man reveals his true character when he shows how he faces a death which
he knows is coming. A "studied and digested" death may bring a kind of
delight to a man of the proper spirit. Montaigne cites Socrates and Cato
as examples of men who knew how to die.
Montaigne's most famous essay is his "Apology for Raimond Sebond,"
generally considered to be the most complete and effective of his
skeptical essays. Yet what Montaigne is skeptical of is not religion, as
many critics have asserted, but of the pretensions of reason and of
dogmatic philosophers and theologians. When Montaigne asks "Que sais-je?"
the expression becomes the motto of his skepticism, "What do I
know?"—not because he thinks that man should give up the use of the
intellect and imagination, but because he thinks it wise to recognize
the limits of these powers.
The essay is obstensibly in defense of the book entitled Theologia
naturalis: sive Liber creaturarum magistri Raimondi de Sebonde, the work
of a philosopher and theologian of Toulouse, who wrote the book about
1430.
Montaigne considers two principal objections to the book: the first,
that Sebond is mistaken in the effort to support Christian belief upon
human reasons; the second, that Sebond's arguments in support of
Christian belief are so weak that they may easily be confuted. In
commenting upon the first objection, Montaigne agrees that the truth of
God can be known only through faith and God's assistance, yet Montaigne
argues that Sebond is to be commended for his noble effort to use reason
in the service of God. If one considers Sebond's arguments as an aid to
faith, they may be viewed as useful guides.
Montaigne's response to the second objection takes up most of the essay,
and since the work is, in some editions, over two hundred pages long, we
may feel justified in concluding from length alone the intensity of
Montaigne's conviction. Montaigne uses the bulk of his essay to argue
against those philosophers who suppose that by reason alone man can find
truth and happiness. The rationalists who attack Sebond do not so much
damage the theologian as show their own false faith in the value of
reason. Montaigne considers "a man alone, without foreign assistance,
armed only with his own proper arms, and unfurnished of the divine grace
and wisdom . . ." and he sets forth to show that such a man is not only
miserable and ridiculous but grievously mistaken in his presumption.
Philosophers who attempt to reason without divine assistance gain
nothing from their efforts except knowledge of their own weakness. Yet
that knowledge has some value; ignorance is then not absolute ignorance.
Nor is it any solution for the philosopher to adopt the stoical attitude
and try to rise above humanity, as Seneca suggests; paradoxically, the
only way to rise is by accepting suffering and the common lot of
humankind with a spirit of Christian faith.
In the essay "Of the Education of Children," Montaigne writes that the
only objective he had in writing the essays was to discover himself. In
giving his opinions concerning the education of children Montaigne shows
how the study of himself took him from the idea of philosophy as a study
of what is "grim and formidable" to the idea of philosophy as a way to
the health and cheerfulness of mind and body. He claims that "The most
manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness," and that "the
height and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and
pleasure of its exercise. . . ."Philosophy is "that which instructs us
to live." The aim of education is to lead the child so that he will come
to love nothing but the good, and the way to this objective is an
education that takes advantage of the youth's appetites and affections.
Though his love of books led Montaigne to live in such a manner that he
was accused of sloth-fulness and "want of mettle." he justifies his
education by pointing out that this is the worst men can say of him.
Not all of Montaigne's essays reflect the major stages of his
transformation from stoic and skeptic to a man of good will. Like Bacon,
he found satisfaction in working out his ideas concerning the basic
experiences of life. Thus he wrote of sadness, of constancy, of fear, of
friendship (with particular reference to La Boetie), of moderation, of
solitude, of sleep, of names, of books. These essays are lively,
imaginative, and informed with the knowledge of a gentleman well trained
in the classics. Yet it is when he writes of pain and death, referring
to his own long struggle with kidney stones and to the deaths of those
he loved, and when he writes of his need for faith and of man's need for
self-knowledge, that we are most moved. In such essays the great
stylist, the educated thinker, and the struggling human being are one.
It was in the essaying of himself that Montaigne became a great
essayist.
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THE LETTERS OF MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
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PREFACE
The present publication is intended to supply a recognised deficiency
in our literature—a library edition of the Essays of Montaigne. This
great French writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in
the land of his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures. His
Essays, which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of
his productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of
Bacon and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed,
as Hallam observes, the Frenchman's literary importance largely results
from the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval and
subsequent. But, at the same time, estimating the value and rank of the
essayist, we are not to leave out of the account the drawbacks and the
circumstances of the period: the imperfect state of education, the
comparative scarcity of books, and the limited opportunities of
intellectual intercourse. Montaigne freely borrowed of others, and he
has found men willing to borrow of him as freely. We need not wonder at
the reputation which he with seeming facility achieved. He was, without
being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals. His
book was different from all others which were at that date in the world.
It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new channels. It told
its readers, with unexampled frankness, what its writer's opinion was
about men and things, and threw what must have been a strange kind of
new light on many matters but darkly understood. Above all, the essayist
uncased himself, and made his intellectual and physical organism public
property. He took the world into his confidence on all subjects. His
essays were a sort of literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of the
writer's mind, made by himself at different levels and under a large
variety of operating influences.
Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most
fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most
truthful. What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect
his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what
relation it bore to external objects. He investigated his mental
structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the
mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations
abounding with originality and force, he delivered to his fellow-men in
a book.
Eloquence, rhetorical effect, poetry, were alike remote from his
design. He did not write from necessity, scarcely perhaps for fame. But
he desired to leave France, nay, and the world, something to be
remembered by, something which should tell what kind of a man he
was—what he felt, thought, suffered—and he succeeded immeasurably, I
apprehend, beyond his expectations.
It was reasonable enough that Montaigne should expect for his work a
certain share of celebrity in Gascony, and even, as time went on,
throughout France; but it is scarcely probable that he foresaw how his
renown was to become world-wide; how he was to occupy an almost unique
position as a man of letters and a moralist; how the Essays would be
read, in all the principal languages of Europe, by millions of
intelligent human beings, who never heard of Perigord or the League, and
who are in doubt, if they are questioned, whether the author lived in
the sixteenth or the eighteenth century. This is true fame. A man of
genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of
nature, which is always everywhere the same.
The text of these volumes is taken from the first edition of Cotton's
version, printed in 3 vols. 8vo, 1685-6, and republished in 1693, 1700,
1711, 1738, and 1743, in the same number of volumes and the same size.
In the earliest impression the errors of the press are corrected merely
as far as page 240 of the first volume, and all the editions follow one
another. That of 1685-6 was the only one which the translator lived to
see. He died in 1687, leaving behind him an interesting and little-known
collection of poems, which appeared posthumously, 8vo, 1689.
It was considered imperative to correct Cotton's translation by a
careful collation with the 'variorum' edition of the original, Paris,
1854, 4 vols. 8vo or 12mo, and parallel passages from Florin's earlier
undertaking have occasionally been inserted at the foot of the page. A
Life of the Author and all his recovered Letters, sixteen in number,
have also been given; but, as regards the correspondence, it can
scarcely be doubted that it is in a purely fragmentary state. To do more
than furnish a sketch of the leading incidents in Montaigne's life
seemed, in the presence of Bayle St. John's charming and able biography,
an attempt as difficult as it was useless.
The besetting sin of both Montaigne's translators seems to have been
a propensity for reducing his language and phraseology to the language
and phraseology of the age and country to which they belonged, and,
moreover, inserting paragraphs and words, not here and there only, but
constantly and habitually, from an evident desire and view to elucidate
or strengthen their author's meaning. The result has generally been
unfortunate; and I have, in the case of all these interpolations on
Cotton's part, felt bound, where I did not cancel them, to throw them
down into the notes, not thinking it right that Montaigne should be
allowed any longer to stand sponsor for what he never wrote; and
reluctant, on the other hand, to suppress the intruding matter entirely,
where it appeared to possess a value of its own.
Nor is redundancy or paraphrase the only form of transgression in
Cotton, for there are places in his author which he thought proper to
omit, and it is hardly necessary to say that the restoration of all such
matter to the text was considered essential to its integrity and
completeness.
My warmest thanks are due to my father, Mr Registrar Hazlitt, the
author of the well-known and excellent edition of Montaigne published in
1842, for the important assistance which he has rendered to me in
verifying and retranslating the quotations, which were in a most corrupt
state, and of which Cotton's English versions were singularly loose and
inexact, and for the zeal with which he has co-operated with me in
collating the English text, line for line and word for word, with the
best French edition.
By the favour of Mr F. W. Cosens, I have had by me, while at work on
this subject, the copy of Cotgrave's Dictionary, folio, 1650, which
belonged to Cotton. It has his autograph and copious MSS. notes, nor is
it too much to presume that it is the very book employed by him in his
translation.
W. C. H.
KENSINGTON, November 1877.
THE LIFE OF MONTAIGNE
[This is translated freely from that prefixed to the
'variorum' Paris edition, 1854, 4 vols. 8vo. This biography is the more
desirable that it contains all really interesting and important matter
in the journal of the Tour in Germany and Italy, which, as it was merely
written under Montaigne's dictation, is in the third person, is scarcely
worth publication, as a whole, in an English dress.]
The author of the Essays was born, as he informs us himself, between
eleven and twelve o'clock in the day, the last of February 1533, at the
chateau of St. Michel de Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, esquire,
was successively first Jurat of the town of Bordeaux (1530), Under-Mayor
1536, Jurat for the second time in 1540, Procureur in 1546, and at
length Mayor from 1553 to 1556. He was a man of austere probity, who had
"a particular regard for honour and for propriety in his person and
attire . . . a mighty good faith in his speech, and a conscience and a
religious feeling inclining to superstition, rather than to the other
extreme."[Essays, ii. 2.] Pierre Eyquem bestowed great care on the
education of his children, especially on the practical side of it. To
associate closely his son Michel with the people, and attach him to
those who stand in need of assistance, he caused him to be held at the
font by persons of meanest position; subsequently he put him out to
nurse with a poor villager, and then, at a later period, made him
accustom himself to the most common sort of living, taking care,
nevertheless, to cultivate his mind, and superintend its development
without the exercise of undue rigour or constraint. Michel, who gives us
the minutest account of his earliest years, charmingly narrates how they
used to awake him by the sound of some agreeable music, and how he
learned Latin, without suffering the rod or shedding a tear, before
beginning French, thanks to the German teacher whom his father had
placed near him, and who never addressed him except in the language of
Virgil and Cicero. The study of Greek took precedence. At six years of
age young Montaigne went to the College of Guienne at Bordeaux, where he
had as preceptors the most eminent scholars of the sixteenth century,
Nicolas Grouchy, Guerente, Muret, and Buchanan. At thirteen he had
passed through all the classes, and as he was destined for the law he
left school to study that science. He was then about fourteen, but these
early years of his life are involved in obscurity. The next information
that we have is that in 1554 he received the appointment of councillor
in the Parliament of Bordeaux; in 1559 he was at Bar-le-Duc with the
court of Francis II, and in the year following he was present at Rouen
to witness the declaration of the majority of Charles IX. We do not know
in what manner he was engaged on these occasions.
Between 1556 and 1563 an important incident occurred in the life of
Montaigne, in the commencement of his romantic friendship with Etienne
de la Boetie, whom he had met, as he tells us, by pure chance at some
festive celebration in the town. From their very first interview the two
found themselves drawn irresistibly close to one another, and during six
years this alliance was foremost in the heart of Montaigne, as it was
afterwards in his memory, when death had severed it.
Although he blames severely in his own book [Essays, i. 27.] those
who, contrary to the opinion of Aristotle, marry before five-and-thirty,
Montaigne did not wait for the period fixed by the philosopher of
Stagyra, but in 1566, in his thirty-third year, he espoused Francoise de
Chassaigne, daughter of a councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux. The
history of his early married life vies in obscurity with that of his
youth. His biographers are not agreed among themselves; and in the same
degree that he lays open to our view all that concerns his secret
thoughts, the innermost mechanism of his mind, he observes too much
reticence in respect to his public functions and conduct, and his social
relations. The title of Gentleman in Ordinary to the King, which he
assumes, in a preface, and which Henry II. gives him in a letter, which
we print a little farther on; what he says as to the commotions of
courts, where he passed a portion of his life; the Instructions which he
wrote under the dictation of Catherine de Medici for King Charles IX.,
and his noble correspondence with Henry IV., leave no doubt, however, as
to the part which he played in the transactions of those times, and we
find an unanswerable proof of the esteem in which he was held by the
most exalted personages, in a letter which was addressed to him by
Charles at the time he was admitted to the Order of St. Michael, which
was, as he informs us himself, the highest honour of the French
noblesse.
According to Lacroix du Maine, Montaigne, upon the death of his
eldest brother, resigned his post of Councillor, in order to adopt the
military profession, while, if we might credit the President Bouhier, he
never discharged any functions connected with arms. However, several
passages in the Essays seem to indicate that he not only took service,
but that he was actually in numerous campaigns with the Catholic armies.
Let us add, that on his monument he is represented in a coat of mail,
with his casque and gauntlets on his right side, and a lion at his feet,
all which signifies, in the language of funeral emblems, that the
departed has been engaged in some important military transactions.
However it may be as to these conjectures, our author, having arrived
at his thirty-eighth year, resolved to dedicate to study and
contemplation the remaining term of his life; and on his birthday, the
last of February 1571, he caused a philosophical inscription, in Latin,
to be placed upon one of the walls of his chateau, where it is still to
be seen, and of which the translation is to this effect:—"In the year of
Christ . . . in his thirty-eighth year, on the eve of the Calends of
March, his birthday, Michel Montaigne, already weary of court
employments and public honours, withdrew himself entirely into the
converse of the learned virgins where he intends to spend the remaining
moiety of the to allotted to him in tranquil seclusion."
At the time to which we have come, Montaigne was unknown to the world
of letters, except as a translator and editor. In 1569 he had published
a translation of the "Natural Theology" of Raymond de Sebonde, which he
had solely undertaken to please his father. In 1571 he had caused to be
printed at Paris certain 'opuscucla' of Etienne de la Boetie; and these
two efforts, inspired in one case by filial duty, and in the other by
friendship, prove that affectionate motives overruled with him mere
personal ambition as a literary man. We may suppose that he began to
compose the Essays at the very outset of his retirement from public
engagements; for as, according to his own account, observes the
President Bouhier, he cared neither for the chase, nor building, nor
gardening, nor agricultural pursuits, and was exclusively occupied with
reading and reflection, he devoted himself with satisfaction to the task
of setting down his thoughts just as they occurred to him. Those
thoughts became a book, and the first part of that book, which was to
confer immortality on the writer, appeared at Bordeaux in 1580.
Montaigne was then fifty-seven; he had suffered for some years past from
renal colic and gravel; and it was with the necessity of distraction
from his pain, and the hope of deriving relief from the waters, that he
undertook at this time a great journey. As the account which he has left
of his travels in Germany and Italy comprises some highly interesting
particulars of his life and personal history, it seems worth while to
furnish a sketch or analysis of it.
"The Journey, of which we proceed to describe the course simply,"
says the editor of the Itinerary, "had, from Beaumont-sur-Oise to
Plombieres, in Lorraine, nothing sufficiently interesting to detain us .
. . we must go as far, as Basle, of which we have a description,
acquainting us with its physical and political condition at that period,
as well as with the character of its baths. The passage of Montaigne
through Switzerland is not without interest, as we see there how our
philosophical traveller accommodated himself everywhere to the ways of
the country. The hotels, the provisions, the Swiss cookery, everything,
was agreeable to him; it appears, indeed, as if he preferred to the
French manners and tastes those of the places he was visiting, and of
which the simplicity and freedom (or frankness) accorded more with his
own mode of life and thinking. In the towns where he stayed, Montaigne
took care to see the Protestant divines, to make himself conversant with
all their dogmas. He even had disputations with them occasionally.
"Having left Switzerland he went to Isne, an imperial then on to
Augsburg and Munich. He afterwards proceeded to the Tyrol, where he was
agreeably surprised, after the warnings which he had received, at the
very slight inconveniences which he suffered, which gave him occasion to
remark that he had all his life distrusted the statements of others
respecting foreign countries, each person's tastes being according to
the notions of his native place; and that he had consequently set very
little on what he was told beforehand.
"Upon his arrival at Botzen, Montaigne wrote to Francois Hottmann, to
say that he had been so pleased with his visit to Germany that he
quitted it with great regret, although it was to go into Italy. He then
passed through Brunsol, Trent, where he put up at the Rose; thence going
to Rovera; and here he first lamented the scarcity of crawfish, but made
up for the loss by partaking of truffles cooked in oil and vinegar;
oranges, citrons, and olives, in all of which he delighted."
After passing a restless night, when he bethought himself in the
morning that there was some new town or district to be seen, he rose, we
are told, with alacrity and pleasure.
His secretary, to whom he dictated his Journal, assures us that he
never saw him take so much interest in surrounding scenes and persons,
and believes that the complete change helped to mitigate his sufferings
in concentrating his attention on other points. When there was a
complaint made that he had led his party out of the beaten route, and
then returned very near the spot from which they started, his answer was
that he had no settled course, and that he merely proposed to himself to
pay visits to places which he had not seen, and so long as they could
not convict him of traversing the same path twice, or revisiting a point
already seen, he could perceive no harm in his plan. As to Rome, he
cared less to go there, inasmuch as everybody went there; and he said
that he never had a lacquey who could not tell him all about Florence or
Ferrara. He also would say that he seemed to himself like those who are
reading some pleasant story or some fine book, of which they fear to
come to the end: he felt so much pleasure in travelling that he dreaded
the moment of arrival at the place where they were to stop for the
night.
We see that Montaigne travelled, just as he wrote, completely at his
ease, and without the least constraint, turning, just as he fancied,
from the common or ordinary roads taken by tourists. The good inns, the
soft beds, the fine views, attracted his notice at every point, and in
his observations on men and things he confines himself chiefly to the
practical side. The consideration of his health was constantly before
him, and it was in consequence of this that, while at Venice, which
disappointed him, he took occasion to note, for the benefit of readers,
that he had an attack of colic, and that he evacuated two large stones
after supper. On quitting Venice, he went in succession to Ferrara,
Rovigo, Padua, Bologna (where he had a stomach-ache), Florence, &c.; and
everywhere, before alighting, he made it a rule to send some of his
servants to ascertain where the best accommodation was to be had. He
pronounced the Florentine women the finest in the world, but had not an
equally good opinion of the food, which was less plentiful than in
Germany, and not so well served. He lets us understand that in Italy
they send up dishes without dressing, but in Germany they were much
better seasoned, and served with a variety of sauces and gravies. He
remarked further, that the glasses were singularly small and the wines
insipid.
After dining with the Grand-Duke of Florence, Montaigne passed
rapidly over the intermediate country, which had no fascination for him,
and arrived at Rome on the last day of November, entering by the Porta
del Popolo, and putting up at Bear. But he afterwards hired, at twenty
crowns a month, fine furnished rooms in the house of a Spaniard, who
included in these terms the use of the kitchen fire. What most annoyed
him in the Eternal City was the number of Frenchmen he met, who all
saluted him in his native tongue; but otherwise he was very comfortable,
and his stay extended to five months. A mind like his, full of grand
classical reflections, could not fail to be profoundly impressed in the
presence of the ruins at Rome, and he has enshrined in a magnificent
passage of the Journal the feelings of the moment: "He said," writes his
secretary, "that at Rome one saw nothing but the sky under which she had
been built, and the outline of her site: that the knowledge we had of
her was abstract, contemplative, not palpable to the actual senses: that
those who said they beheld at least the ruins of Rome, went too far, for
the ruins of so gigantic a structure must have commanded greater
reverence-it was nothing but her sepulchre. The world, jealous of her,
prolonged empire, had in the first place broken to pieces that admirable
body, and then, when they perceived that the remains attracted worship
and awe, had buried the very wreck itself.—[Compare a passage in one of
Horace Walpole's letters to Richard West, 22 March 1740 (Cunningham's
edit. i. 41), where Walpole, speaking of Rome, describes her very ruins
as ruined.]—As to those small fragments which were still to be seen on
the surface, notwithstanding the assaults of time and all other attacks,
again and again repeated, they had been favoured by fortune to be some
slight evidence of that infinite grandeur which nothing could entirely
extingish. But it was likely that these disfigured remains were the
least entitled to attention, and that the enemies of that immortal
renown, in their fury, had addressed themselves in the first instance to
the destruction of what was most beautiful and worthiest of
preservation; and that the buildings of this bastard Rome, raised upon
the ancient productions, although they might excite the admiration of
the present age, reminded him of the crows' and sparrows' nests built in
the walls and arches of the old churches, destroyed by the Huguenots.
Again, he was apprehensive, seeing the space which this grave occupied,
that the whole might not have been recovered, and that the burial itself
had been buried. And, moreover, to see a wretched heap of rubbish, as
pieces of tile and pottery, grow (as it had ages since) to a height
equal to that of Mount Gurson,—[In Perigord.]—and thrice the width of
it, appeared to show a conspiracy of destiny against the glory and
pre-eminence of that city, affording at the same time a novel and
extraordinary proof of its departed greatness. He (Montaigne) observed
that it was difficult to believe considering the limited area taken up
by any of her seven hills and particularly the two most favoured ones,
the Capitoline and the Palatine, that so many buildings stood on the
site. Judging only from what is left of the Temple of Concord, along the
'Forum Romanum', of which the fall seems quite recent, like that of some
huge mountain split into horrible crags, it does not look as if more
than two such edifices could have found room on the Capitoline, on which
there were at one period from five-and-twenty to thirty temples, besides
private dwellings. But, in point of fact, there is scarcely any
probability of the views which we take of the city being correct, its
plan and form having changed infinitely; for instance, the 'Velabrum',
which on account of its depressed level, received the sewage of the
city, and had a lake, has been raised by artificial accumulation to a
height with the other hills, and Mount Savello has, in truth, grown
simply out of the ruins of the theatre of Marcellus. He believed that an
ancient Roman would not recognise the place again. It often happened
that in digging down into earth the workmen came upon the crown of some
lofty column, which, though thus buried, was still standing upright. The
people there have no recourse to other foundations than the vaults and
arches of the old houses, upon which, as on slabs of rock, they raise
their modern palaces. It is easy to see that several of the ancient
streets are thirty feet below those at present in use."
Sceptical as Montaigne shows himself in his books, yet during his
sojourn at Rome he manifested a great regard for religion. He solicited
the honour of being admitted to kiss the feet of the Holy Father,
Gregory XIII.; and the Pontiff exhorted him always to continue in the
devotion which he had hitherto exhibited to the Church and the service
of the Most Christian King.
"After this, one sees," says the editor of the Journal, "Montaigne
employing all his time in making excursions bout the neighbourhood on
horseback or on foot, in visits, in observations of every kind. The
churches, the stations, the processions even, the sermons; then the
palaces, the vineyards, the gardens, the public amusements, as the
Carnival, &c.—nothing was overlooked. He saw a Jewish child circumcised,
and wrote down a most minute account of the operation. He met at San
Sisto a Muscovite ambassador, the second who had come to Rome since the
pontificate of Paul III. This minister had despatches from his court for
Venice, addressed to the 'Grand Governor of the Signory'. The court of
Muscovy had at that time such limited relations with the other powers of
Europe, and it was so imperfect in its information, that it thought
Venice to be a dependency of the Holy See."
Of all the particulars with which he has furnished us during his stay
at Rome, the following passage in reference to the Essays is not the
least singular: "The Master of the Sacred Palace returned him his
Essays, castigated in accordance with the views of the learned monks.
'He had only been able to form a judgment of them,' said he, 'through a
certain French monk, not understanding French himself'"—we leave
Montaigne himself to tell the story—"and he received so complacently my
excuses and explanations on each of the passages which had been
animadverted upon by the French monk, that he concluded by leaving me at
liberty to revise the text agreeably to the dictates of my own
conscience. I begged him, on the contrary, to abide by the opinion of
the person who had criticised me, confessing, among other matters, as,
for example, in my use of the word fortune, in quoting historical poets,
in my apology for Julian, in my animadversion on the theory that he who
prayed ought to be exempt from vicious inclinations for the time being;
item, in my estimate of cruelty, as something beyond simple death; item,
in my view that a child ought to be brought up to do everything, and so
on; that these were my opinions, which I did not think wrong; as to
other things, I said that the corrector understood not my meaning. The
Master, who is a clever man, made many excuses for me, and gave me to
suppose that he did not concur in the suggested improvements; and
pleaded very ingeniously for me in my presence against another (also an
Italian) who opposed my sentiments."
Such is what passed between Montaigne and these two personages at
that time; but when the Essayist was leaving, and went to bid them
farewell, they used very different language to him. "They prayed me,"
says he, "to pay no attention to the censure passed on my book, in which
other French persons had apprised them that there were many foolish
things; adding, that they honoured my affectionate intention towards the
Church, and my capacity; and had so high an opinion of my candour and
conscientiousness that they should leave it to me to make such
alterations as were proper in the book, when I reprinted it; among other
things, the word fortune. To excuse themselves for what they had said
against my book, they instanced works of our time by cardinals and other
divines of excellent repute which had been blamed for similar faults,
which in no way affected reputation of the author, or of the publication
as a whole; they requested me to lend the Church the support of my
eloquence (this was their fair speech), and to make longer stay in the
place, where I should be free from all further intrusion on their part.
It seemed to me that we parted very good friends."
Before quitting Rome, Montaigne received his diploma of citizenship,
by which he was greatly flattered; and after a visit to Tivoli he set
out for Loretto, stopping at Ancona, Fano, and Urbino. He arrived at the
beginning of May 1581, at Bagno della Villa, where he established
himself, order to try the waters. There, we find in the Journal, of his
own accord the Essayist lived in the strictest conformity with the
regime, and henceforth we only hear of diet, the effect which the waters
had by degrees upon system, of the manner in which he took them; in a
word, he does not omit an item of the circumstances connected with his
daily routine, his habit of body, his baths, and the rest. It was no
longer the journal of a traveller which he kept, but the diary of an
invalid,—["I am reading Montaigne's Travels, which have lately been
found; there is little in them but the baths and medicines he took, and
what he had everywhere for dinner."—H. Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, June
8, 1774.]—attentive to the minutest details of the cure which he was
endeavouring to accomplish: a sort of memorandum book, in which he was
noting down everything that he felt and did, for the benefit of his
medical man at home, who would have the care of his health on his
return, and the attendance on his subsequent infirmities. Montaigne
gives it as his reason and justification for enlarging to this extent
here, that he had omitted, to his regret, to do so in his visits to
other baths, which might have saved him the trouble of writing at such
great length now; but it is perhaps a better reason in our eyes, that
what he wrote he wrote for his own use.
We find in these accounts, however, many touches which are valuable
as illustrating the manners of the place. The greater part of the
entries in the Journal, giving the account of these waters, and of the
travels, down to Montaigne's arrival at the first French town on his
homeward route, are in Italian, because he wished to exercise himself in
that language.
The minute and constant watchfulness of Montaigne over his health and
over himself might lead one to suspect that excessive fear of death
which degenerates into cowardice. But was it not rather the fear of the
operation for the stone, at that time really formidable? Or perhaps he
was of the same way of thinking with the Greek poet, of whom Cicero
reports this saying: "I do not desire to die; but the thought of being
dead is indifferent to me." Let us hear, however, what he says himself
on this point very frankly: "It would be too weak and unmanly on my part
if, certain as I am of always finding myself in the position of having
to succumb in that way,—[To the stone or gravel.]—and death coming
nearer and nearer to me, I did not make some effort, before the time
came, to bear the trial with fortitude. For reason prescribes that we
should joyfully accept what it may please God to send us. Therefore the
only remedy, the only rule, and the sole doctrine for avoiding the evils
by which mankind is surrounded, whatever they are, is to resolve to bear
them so far as our nature permits, or to put an end to them courageously
and promptly."
He was still at the waters of La Villa, when, on the 7th September
1581, he learned by letter that he had been elected Mayor of Bordeaux on
the 1st August preceding. This intelligence made him hasten his
departure; and from Lucca he proceeded to Rome. He again made some stay
in that city, and he there received the letter of the jurats of
Bordeaux, notifying to him officially his election to the Mayoralty, and
inviting him to return as speedily as possible. He left for France,
accompanied by young D'Estissac and several other gentlemen, who
escorted him a considerable distance; but none went back to France with
him, not even his travelling companion. He passed by Padua, Milan, Mont
Cenis, and Chambery; thence he went on to Lyons, and lost no time in
repairing to his chateau, after an absence of seventeen months and eight
days.
We have just seen that, during his absence in Italy, the author of
the Essays was elected mayor of Bordeaux. "The gentlemen of Bordeaux,"
says he, "elected me Mayor of their town while I was at a distance from
France, and far from the thought of such a thing. I excused myself; but
they gave to understand that I was wrong in so doing, it being also the
command of the king that I should stand." This the letter which Henry
III. wrote to him on the occasion:
MONSIEUR, DE MONTAIGNE,—Inasmuch as I hold in great esteem your
fidelity and zealous devotion to my service, it has been a pleasure to
me to learn that you have been chosen mayor of my town of Bordeaux. I
have had the agreeable duty of confirming the selection, and I did so
the more willingly, seeing that it was made during your distant absence;
wherefore it is my desire, and I require and command you expressly that
you proceed without delay to enter on the duties to which you have
received so legitimate a call. And so you will act in a manner very
agreeable to me, while the contrary will displease me greatly. Praying
God, M. de Montaigne, to have you in his holy keeping.
"Written at Paris, the 25th day of November 1581.
"HENRI.
"A Monsieur de MONTAIGNE, Knight of my Order, Gentleman in Ordinary
of my Chamber, being at present in Rome."
Montaigne, in his new employment, the most important in the province,
obeyed the axiom, that a man may not refuse a duty, though it absorb his
time and attention, and even involve the sacrifice of his blood. Placed
between two extreme parties, ever on the point of getting to blows, he
showed himself in practice what he is in his book, the friend of a
middle and temperate policy. Tolerant by character and on principle, he
belonged, like all the great minds of the sixteenth century, to that
political sect which sought to improve, without destroying,
institutions; and we may say of him, what he himself said of La Boetie,
"that he had that maxim indelibly impressed on his mind, to obey and
submit himself religiously to the laws under which he was born.
Affectionately attached to the repose of his country, an enemy to
changes and innovations, he would have preferred to employ what means he
had towards their discouragement and suppression, than in promoting
their success." Such was the platform of his administration.
He applied himself, in an especial manner, to the maintenance of
peace between the two religious factions which at that time divided the
town of Bordeaux; and at the end of his two first years of office, his
grateful fellow-citizens conferred on him (in 1583) the mayoralty for
two years more, a distinction which had been enjoyed, as he tells us,
only twice before. On the expiration of his official career, after four
years' duration, he could say fairly enough of himself that he left
behind him neither hatred nor cause of offence.
In the midst of the cares of government, Montaigne found time to
revise and enlarge his Essays, which, since their appearance in 1580,
were continually receiving augmentation in the form of additional
chapters or papers. Two more editions were printed in 1582 and 1587; and
during this time the author, while making alterations in the original
text, had composed part of the Third Book. He went to Paris to make
arrangements for the publication of his enlarged labours, and a fourth
impression in 1588 was the result. He remained in the capital some time
on this occasion, and it was now that he met for the first time
Mademoiselle de Gournay. Gifted with an active and inquiring spirit,
and, above all, possessing a sound and healthy tone of mind,
Mademoiselle de Gournay had been carried from her childhood with that
tide which set in with sixteenth century towards controversy, learning,
and knowledge. She learnt Latin without a master; and when, the age of
eighteen, she accidentally became possessor of a copy of the Essays, she
was transported with delight and admiration.
She quitted the chateau of Gournay, to come and see him. We cannot do
better, in connection with this journey of sympathy, than to repeat the
words of Pasquier: "That young lady, allied to several great and noble
families of Paris, proposed to herself no other marriage than with her
honour, enriched with the knowledge gained from good books, and, beyond
all others, from the essays of M. de Montaigne, who making in the year
1588 a lengthened stay in the town of Paris, she went there for the
purpose of forming his personal acquaintance; and her mother, Madame de
Gournay, and herself took him back with them to their chateau, where, at
two or three different times, he spent three months altogether, most
welcome of visitors." It was from this moment that Mademoiselle de
Gournay dated her adoption as Montaigne's daughter, a circumstance which
has tended to confer immortality upon her in a far greater measure than
her own literary productions.
Montaigne, on leaving Paris, stayed a short time at Blois, to attend
the meeting of the States-General. We do not know what part he took in
that assembly: but it is known that he was commissioned, about this
period, to negotiate between Henry of Navarre (afterwards Henry IV.) and
the Duke of Guise. His political life is almost a blank; but De Thou
assures us that Montaigne enjoyed the confidence of the principal
persons of his time. De Thou, who calls him a frank man without
constraint, tells us that, walking with him and Pasquier in the court at
the Castle of Blois, he heard him pronounce some very remarkable
opinions on contemporary events, and he adds that Montaigne had foreseen
that the troubles in France could not end without witnessing the death
of either the King of Navarre or of the Duke of Guise. He had made
himself so completely master of the views of these two princes, that he
told De Thou that the King of Navarre would have been prepared to
embrace Catholicism, if he had not been afraid of being abandoned by his
party, and that the Duke of Guise, on his part, had no particular
repugnance to the Confession of Augsburg, for which the Cardinal of
Lorraine, his uncle, had inspired him with a liking, if it had not been
for the peril involved in quitting the Romish communion. It would have
been easy for Montaigne to play, as we call it, a great part in
politics, and create for himself a lofty position but his motto was,
'Otio et Libertati'; and he returned quietly home to compose a chapter
for his next edition on inconveniences of Greatness.
The author of the Essays was now fifty-five. The malady which
tormented him grew only worse and worse with years; and yet he occupied
himself continually with reading, meditating, and composition. He
employed the years 1589, 1590, and 1591 in making fresh additions to his
book; and even in the approaches of old age he might fairly anticipate
many happy hours, when he was attacked by quinsy, depriving him of the
power utterance. Pasquier, who has left us some details his last hours,
narrates that he remained three days in full possession of his
faculties, but unable to speak, so that, in order to make known his
desires, he was obliged to resort to writing; and as he felt his end
drawing near, he begged his wife to summon certain of the gentlemen who
lived in the neighbourhood to bid them a last farewell. When they had
arrived, he caused mass to be celebrated in apartment; and just as the
priest was elevating the host, Montaigne fell forward with his arms
extended in front of him, on the bed, and so expired. He was in his
sixtieth year. It was the 13th September 1592.
Montaigne was buried near his own house; but a few years after his
decease, his remains were removed to the church of a Commandery of St.
Antoine at Bordeaux, where they still continue. His monument was
restored in 1803 by a descendant. It was seen about 1858 by an English
traveller (Mr. St. John).'—["Montaigne the Essayist," by Bayle St. John,
1858, 2 vols. 8vo, is one of most delightful books of the kind.]— and
was then in good preservation.
In 1595 Mademoiselle de Gournay published a new edition of
Montaigne's Essays, and the first with the latest emendations of the
author, from a copy presented to her by his widow, and which has not
been recovered, although it is known to have been in existence some
years after the date of the impression, made on its authority.
Coldly as Montaigne's literary productions appear to have been
received by the generation immediately succeeding his own age, his
genius grew into just appreciation in the seventeenth century, when such
great spirits arose as La Bruyere, Moliere, La Fontaine, Madame de
Sevigne. "O," exclaimed the Chatelaine des Rochers, "what capital
company he is, the dear man! he is my old friend; and just for the
reason that he is so, he always seems new. My God! how full is that book
of sense!" Balzac said that he had carried human reason as far and as
high as it could go, both in politics and in morals. On the other hand,
Malebranche and the writers of Port Royal were against him; some
reprehended the licentiousness of his writings; others their impiety,
materialism, epicureanism. Even Pascal, who had carefully read the
Essays, and gained no small profit by them, did not spare his
reproaches. But Montaigne has outlived detraction. As time has gone on,
his admirers and borrowers have increased in number, and his Jansenism,
which recommended him to the eighteenth century, may not be his least
recommendation in the nineteenth. Here we have certainly, on the whole,
a first-class man, and one proof of his masterly genius seems to be,
that his merits and his beauties are sufficient to induce us to leave
out of consideration blemishes and faults which would have been fatal to
an inferior writer.
THE LETTERS OF MONTAIGNE.
I.—To Monsieur de MONTAIGNE
[This account of the death of La Boetie begins imperfectly. It first
appeared in a little volume of Miscellanies in 1571. See Hazlitt, ubi
sup. p. 630.]—As to his last words, doubtless, if any man can give good
account of them, it is I, both because, during the whole of his sickness
he conversed as fully with me as with any one, and also because, in
consequence of the singular and brotherly friendship which we had
entertained for each other, I was perfectly acquainted with the
intentions, opinions, and wishes which he had formed in the course of
his life, as much so, certainly, as one man can possibly be with those
of another man; and because I knew them to be elevated, virtuous, full
of steady resolution, and (after all said) admirable. I well foresaw
that, if his illness permitted him to express himself, he would allow
nothing to fall from him, in such an extremity, that was not replete
with good example. I consequently took every care in my power to
treasure what was said. True it is, Monseigneur, as my memory is not
only in itself very short, but in this case affected by the trouble
which I have undergone, through so heavy and important a loss, that I
have forgotten a number of things which I should wish to have had known;
but those which I recollect shall be related to you as exactly as lies
in my power. For to represent in full measure his noble career suddenly
arrested, to paint to you his indomitable courage, in a body worn out
and prostrated by pain and the assaults of death, I confess, would
demand a far better ability than mine: because, although, when in former
years he discoursed on serious and important matters, he handled them in
such a manner that it was difficult to reproduce exactly what he said,
yet his ideas and his words at the last seemed to rival each other in
serving him. For I am sure that I never knew him give birth to such fine
conceptions, or display so much eloquence, as in the time of his
sickness. If, Monseigneur, you blame me for introducing his more
ordinary observations, please to know that I do so advisedly; for since
they proceeded from him at a season of such great trouble, they indicate
the perfect tranquillity of his mind and thoughts to the last.
On Monday, the 9th day of August 1563, on my return from the Court, I
sent an invitation to him to come and dine with me. He returned word
that he was obliged, but, being indisposed, he would thank me to do him
the pleasure of spending an hour with him before he started for Medoc.
Shortly after my dinner I went to him. He had laid himself down on the
bed with his clothes on, and he was already, I perceived, much changed.
He complained of diarrhoea, accompanied by the gripes, and said that he
had it about him ever since he played with M. d'Escars with nothing but
his doublet on, and that with him a cold often brought on such attacks.
I advised him to go as he had proposed, but to stay for the night at
Germignac, which is only about two leagues from the town. I gave him
this advice, because some houses, near to that where he was ping, were
visited by the plague, about which he was nervous since his return from
Perigord and the Agenois, here it had been raging; and, besides, horse
exercise was, from my own experience, beneficial under similar
circumstances. He set out, accordingly, with his wife and M.
Bouillhonnas, his uncle.
Early on the following morning, however, I had intelligence from
Madame de la Boetie, that in the night he had fresh and violent attack
of dysentery. She had called in physician and apothecary, and prayed me
to lose no time coming, which (after dinner) I did. He was delighted to
see me; and when I was going away, under promise to turn the following
day, he begged me more importunately and affectionately than he was wont
to do, to give him as such of my company as possible. I was a little
affected; yet was about to leave, when Madame de la Boetie, as if she
foresaw something about to happen, implored me with tears to stay the
night. When I consented, he seemed to grow more cheerful. I returned
home the next day, and on the Thursday I paid him another visit. He had
become worse; and his loss of blood from the dysentery, which reduced
his strength very much, was largely on the increase. I quitted his side
on Friday, but on Saturday I went to him, and found him very weak. He
then gave me to understand that his complaint was infectious, and,
moreover, disagreeable and depressing; and that he, knowing thoroughly
my constitution, desired that I should content myself with coming to see
him now and then. On the contrary, after that I never left his side.
It was only on the Sunday that he began to converse with me on any
subject beyond the immediate one of his illness, and what the ancient
doctors thought of it: we had not touched on public affairs, for I found
at the very outset that he had a dislike to them.
But, on the Sunday, he had a fainting fit; and when he came to
himself, he told me that everything seemed to him confused, as if in a
mist and in disorder, and that, nevertheless, this visitation was not
unpleasing to him. "Death," I replied, "has no worse sensation, my
brother." "None so bad," was his answer. He had had no regular sleep
since the beginning of his illness; and as he became worse and worse, he
began to turn his attention to questions which men commonly occupy
themselves with in the last extremity, despairing now of getting better,
and intimating as much to me. On that day, as he appeared in tolerably
good spirits, I took occasion to say to him that, in consideration of
the singular love I bore him, it would become me to take care that his
affairs, which he had conducted with such rare prudence in his life,
should not be neglected at present; and that I should regret it if, from
want of proper counsel, he should leave anything unsettled, not only on
account of the loss to his family, but also to his good name.
He thanked me for my kindness; and after a little reflection, as if
he was resolving certain doubts in his own mind, he desired me to summon
his uncle and his wife by themselves, in order that he might acquaint
them with his testamentary dispositions. I told him that this would
shock them. "No, no," he answered, "I will cheer them by making out my
case to be better than it is." And then he inquired, whether we were not
all much taken by surprise at his having fainted? I replied, that it was
of no importance, being incidental to the complaint from which he
suffered. "True, my brother," said he; "it would be unimportant, even
though it should lead to what you most dread." "For you," I rejoined,
"it might be a happy thing; but I should be the loser, who would thereby
be deprived of so great, so wise, and so steadfast a friend, a friend
whose place I should never see supplied." "It is very likely you may
not," was his answer; "and be sure that one thing which makes me
somewhat anxious to recover, and to delay my journey to that place,
whither I am already half-way gone, is the thought of the loss both you
and that poor man and woman there (referring to his uncle and wife) must
sustain; for I love them with my whole heart, and I feel certain that
they will find it very hard to lose me. I should also regret it on
account of such as have, in my lifetime, valued me, and whose
conversation I should like to have enjoyed a little longer; and I
beseech you, my brother, if I leave the world, to carry to them for me
an assurance of the esteem I entertained for them to the last moment of
my existence. My birth was, moreover, scarcely to so little purpose but
that, had I lived, I might have done some service to the public; but,
however this may be, I am prepared to submit to the will of God, when it
shall please Him to call me, being confident of enjoying the
tranquillity which you have foretold for me. As for you, my friend, I
feel sure that you are so wise, that you will control your emotions, and
submit to His divine ordinance regarding me; and I beg of you to see
that that good man and woman do not mourn for my departure
unnecessarily."
He proceeded to inquire how they behaved at present. "Very well,"
said I, "considering the circumstances." "Ah!" he replied, "that is, so
long as they do not abandon all hope of me; but when that shall be the
case, you will have a hard task to support them." It was owing to his
strong regard for his wife and uncle that he studiously disguised from
them his own conviction as to the certainty of his end, and he prayed me
to do the same. When they were near him he assumed an appearance of
gaiety, and flattered them with hopes. I then went to call them. They
came, wearing as composed an air as possible; and when we four were
together, he addressed us, with an untroubled countenance, as follows:
"Uncle and wife, rest assured that no new attack of my disease, or fresh
doubt that I have as to my recovery, has led me to take this step of
communicating to you my intentions, for, thank God, I feel very well and
hopeful; but taught by observation and experience the instability of all
human things, and even of the life to which we are so much attached, and
which is, nevertheless, a mere bubble; and knowing, moreover, that my
state of health brings me more within the danger of death, I have
thought proper to settle my worldly affairs, having the benefit of your
advice." Then addressing himself more particularly to his uncle, "Good
uncle," said he, "if I were to rehearse all the obligations under which
I lie to you, I am sure that I never should make an end. Let me only say
that, wherever I have been, and with whomsoever I have conversed, I have
represented you as doing for me all that a father could do for a son;
both in the care with which you tended my education, and in the zeal
with which you pushed me forward into public life, so that my whole
existence is a testimony of your good offices towards me. In short, I am
indebted for all that I have to you, who have been to me as a parent;
and therefore I have no right to part with anything, unless it be with
your approval."
There was a general silence hereupon, and his uncle was prevented
from replying by tears and sobs. At last he said that whatever he
thought for the best would be agreeable to him; and as he intended to
make him his heir, he was at liberty to dispose of what would be his.
Then he turned to his wife. "My image," said he (for so he often
called her, there being some sort of relationship between them), "since
I have been united to you by marriage, which is one of the most weighty
and sacred ties imposed on us by God, for the purpose of maintaining
human society, I have continued to love, cherish, and value you; and I
know that you have returned my affection, for which I have no sufficient
acknowledgment. I beg you to accept such portion of my estate as I
bequeath to you, and be satisfied with it, though it is very inadequate
to your desert."
Afterwards he turned to me. "My brother," he began, "for whom I have
so entire a love, and whom I selected out of so large a number, thinking
to revive with you that virtuous and sincere friendship which, owing to
the degeneracy of the age, has grown to be almost unknown to us, and now
exists only in certain vestiges of antiquity, I beg of you, as a mark of
my affection to you, to accept my library: a slender offering, but given
with a cordial will, and suitable to you, seeing that you are fond of
learning. It will be a memorial of your old companion."
Then he addressed all three of us. He blessed God that in his
extremity he had the happiness to be surrounded by those whom he held
dearest in the world, and he looked upon it as a fine spectacle, where
four persons were together, so unanimous in their feelings, and loving
each other for each other's sake. He commended us one to the other; and
proceeded thus: "My worldly matters being arranged, I must now think of
the welfare of my soul. I am a Christian; I am a Catholic. I have lived
one, and I shall die one. Send for a priest; for I wish to conform to
this last Christian obligation." He now concluded his discourse, which
he had conducted with such a firm face and with so distinct an
utterance, that whereas, when I first entered his room, he was feeble,
inarticulate in his speech, his pulse low and feverish, and his features
pallid, now, by a sort of miracle, he appeared to have rallied, and his
pulse was so strong that for the sake of comparison, I asked him to feel
mine.
I felt my heart so oppressed at this moment, that I had not the power
to make him any answer; but in the course of two or three hours,
solicitous to keep up his courage, and, likewise, out of the tenderness
which I had had all my life for his honour and fame, wishing a larger
number of witnesses to his admirable fortitude, I said to him, how much
I was ashamed to think that I lacked courage to listen to what he, so
great a sufferer, had the courage to deliver; that down to the present
time I had scarcely conceived that God granted us such command over
human infirmities, and had found a difficulty in crediting the examples
I had read in histories; but that with such evidence of the thing before
my eyes, I gave praise to God that it had shown itself in one so
excessively dear to me, and who loved me so entirely, and that his
example would help me to act in a similar manner when my turn came.
Interrupting me, he begged that it might happen so, and that the
conversation which had passed between us might not be mere words, but
might be impressed deeply on our minds, to be put in exercise at the
first occasion; and that this was the real object and aim of all
philosophy.
He then took my hand, and continued: "Brother, friend, there are many
acts of my life, I think, which have cost me as much difficulty as this
one is likely to do; and, after all, I have been long prepared for it,
and have my lesson by heart. Have I not lived long enough? I am just
upon thirty-three. By the grace of God, my days so far have known
nothing but health and happiness; but in the ordinary course of our
unstable human affairs, this could not have lasted much longer; it would
have become time for me to enter on graver avocations, and I should thus
have involved myself in numberless vexations, and, among them, the
troubles of old age, from which I shall now be exempt. Moreover, it is
probable that hitherto my life has been spent more simply, and with less
of evil, than if God had spared me, and I had survived to feel the
thirst for riches and worldly prosperity. I am sure, for my part, that I
now go to God and the place of the blessed." He seemed to detect in my
expression some inquietude at his words; and he exclaimed, "What, my
brother, would you make me entertain apprehensions? Had I any, whom
would it become so much as yourself to remove them?"
The notary, who had been summoned to draw up his will, came in the
evening, and when he had the documents prepared, I inquired of La Boetie
if he would sign them. "Sign them," cried he; "I will do so with my own
hand; but I could desire more time, for I feel exceedingly timid and
weak, and in a manner exhausted." But when I was going to change the
conversation, he suddenly rallied, said he had but a short time to live,
and asked if the notary wrote rapidly, for he should dictate without
making any pause. The notary was called, and he dictated his will there
and then with such speed that the man could scarcely keep up with him;
and when he had done, he asked me to read it out, saying to me, "What a
good thing it is to look after what are called our riches." 'Sunt haec,
quoe hominibus vocantur bona'. As soon as the will was signed, the
chamber being full, he asked me if it would hurt him to talk. I
answered, that it would not, if he did not speak too loud. He then
summoned Mademoiselle de Saint Quentin, his niece, to him, and addressed
her thus: "Dear niece, since my earliest acquaintance with thee, I have
observed the marks of, great natural goodness in thee; but the services
which thou rendered to me, with so much affectionate diligence, in my
present and last necessity, inspire me with high hopes of thee; and I am
under great obligations to thee, and give thee most affectionate thanks.
Let me relieve my conscience by counselling thee to be, in the first
place, devout, to God: for this doubtless is our first duty, failing
which all others can be of little advantage or grace, but which, duly
observed, carries with it necessarily all other virtues. After God, thou
shouldest love thy father and mother—thy mother, my sister, whom I
regard as one of the best and most intelligent of women, and by whom I
beg of thee to let thy own life be regulated. Allow not thyself to be
led away by pleasures; shun, like the plague, the foolish familiarities
thou seest between some men and women; harmless enough at first, but
which by insidious degrees corrupt the heart, and thence lead it to
negligence, and then into the vile slough of vice. Credit me, the
greatest safeguard to female chastity is sobriety of demeanour. I
beseech and direct that thou often call to mind the friendship which was
betwixt us; but I do not wish thee to mourn for me too much—an
injunction which, so far as it is in my power, I lay on all my friends,
since it might seem that by doing so they felt a jealousy of that
blessed condition in which I am about to be placed by death. I assure
thee, my dear, that if I had the option now of continuing in life or of
completing the voyage on which I have set out, I should find it very
hard to choose. Adieu, dear niece."
Mademoiselle d'Arsat, his stepdaughter, was next called. He said to
her: "Daughter, you stand in no great need of advice from me, insomuch
as you have a mother, whom I have ever found most sagacious, and
entirely in conformity with my own opinions and wishes, and whom I have
never found faulty; with such a preceptress, you cannot fail to be
properly instructed. Do not account it singular that I, with no tie of
blood to you, am interested in you; for, being the child of one who is
so closely allied to me, I am necessarily concerned in what concerns
you; and consequently the affairs of your brother, M. d'Arsat, have ever
been watched by me with as much care as my own; nor perhaps will it be
to your disadvantage that you were my step-daughter. You enjoy
sufficient store of wealth and beauty; you are a lady of good family; it
only remains for you to add to these possessions the cultivation of your
mind, in which I exhort you not to fail. I do not think necessary to
warn you against vice, a thing so odious in women, for I would not even
suppose that you could harbour any inclination for it—nay, I believe
that you hold the very name in abhorrence. Dear daughter, farewell."
All in the room were weeping and lamenting; but he held without
interruption the thread of his discourse, which was pretty long. But
when he had done, he directed us all to leave the room, except the women
attendants, whom he styled his garrison. But first, calling to him my
brother, M. de Beauregard, he said to him: "M. de Beauregard, you have
my best thanks for all the care you have taken of me. I have now a thing
which I am very anxious indeed to mention to you, and with your
permission I will do so." As my brother gave him encouragement to
proceed, he added: "I assure you that I never knew any man who engaged
in the reformation of our Church with greater sincerity, earnestness,
and single-heartedness than yourself. I consider that you were led to it
by observing the vicious character of our prelates, which no doubt much
requires setting in order, and by imperfections which time has brought
into our Church. It is not my desire at present discourage you from this
course, for I would have no one act in opposition to his conscience; but
I wish, having regard to the good repute acquired by your family from
its enduring concord—a family than which none can be dearer to me; a
family, thank God! no member of which has ever been guilty of dishonour
—in regard, further, to the will of your good father to whom you owe so
much, and of your, uncle, I wish you to avoid extreme means; avoid
harshness and violence: be reconciled with your relatives; do not act
apart, but unite. You perceive what disasters our quarrels have brought
upon this kingdom, and I anticipate still worse mischiefs; and in your
goodness and wisdom, beware of involving your family in such broils; let
it continue to enjoy its former reputation and happiness. M. de
Beauregard, take what I say in good part, and as a proof of the
friendship I feel for you. I postponed till now any communication with
you on the subject, and perhaps the condition in which you see me
address you, may cause my advice and opinion to carry greater
authority." My brother expressed his thanks to him cordially.
On the Monday morning he had become so ill that he quite despaired of
himself; and he said to me very pitifully: "Brother, do not you feel
pain for all the pain I am suffering? Do you not perceive now that the
help you give me has no other effect than that of lengthening my
suffering?"
Shortly afterwards he fainted, and we all thought him gone; but by
the application of vinegar and wine he rallied. But he soon sank, and
when he heard us in lamentation, he murmured, "O God! who is it that
teases me so? Why did you break the agreeable repose I was enjoying? I
beg of you to leave me." And then, when he caught the sound of my voice,
he continued: "And art thou, my brother, likewise unwilling to see me at
peace? O, how thou robbest me of my repose!" After a while, he seemed to
gain more strength, and called for wine, which he relished, and declared
it to be the finest drink possible. I, in order to change the current of
his thoughts, put in, "Surely not; water is the best." "Ah, yes," he
returned, "doubtless so;—(Greek phrase)—." He had now become, icy-cold
at his extremities, even to his face; a deathly perspiration was upon
him, and his pulse was scarcely perceptible.
This morning he confessed, but the priest had omitted to bring with
him the necessary apparatus for celebrating Mass. On the Tuesday,
however, M. de la Boetie summoned him to aid him, as he said, in
discharging the last office of a Christian. After the conclusion of
Mass, he took the sacrament; when the priest was about to depart, he
said to him: "Spiritual father, I implore you humbly, as well as those
over whom you are set, to pray to the Almighty on my behalf; that, if it
be decreed in heaven that I am now to end my life, He will take
compassion on my soul, and pardon me my sins, which are manifold, it not
being possible for so weak and poor a creature as I to obey completely
the will of such a Master; or, if He think fit to keep me longer here,
that it may please Him to release my present extreme anguish, and to
direct my footsteps in the right path, that I may become a better man
than I have been." He paused to recover breath a little; priest was
about to go away, he called him back and proceeded: "I desire to say,
besides, in your hearing this: I declare that I was christened and I
have lived, and that so I wish to die, in the faith which Moses preached
in Egypt; which afterwards the Patriarchs accepted and professed in
Judaea; and which, in the course of time, has been transmitted to France
and to us." He seemed desirous of adding something more, but he ended
with a request to his uncle and me to send up prayers for him; "for
those are," he said, "the best duties that Christians can fulfil one for
another." In the course of talking, his shoulder was uncovered, and
although a man-servant stood near him, he asked his uncle to re-adjust
the clothes. Then, turning his eyes towards me, he said, "Ingenui est,
cui multum debeas, ei plurimum velle debere."
M. de Belot called in the afternoon to see him, and M. de la Boetie,
taking his hand, said to him: "I was on the point of discharging my
debt, but my kind creditor has given me a little further time." A little
while after, appearing to wake out of a sort of reverie, he uttered
words which he had employed once or twice before in the course of his
sickness: "Ah well, ah well, whenever the hour comes, I await it with
pleasure and fortitude." And then, as they were holding his mouth open
by force to give him a draught, he observed to M. de Belot: "An vivere
tanti est?"
As the evening approached, he began perceptibly to sink; and while I
supped, he sent for me to come, being no more than the shadow of a man,
or, as he put it himself, 'non homo, sed species hominis'; and he said
to me with the utmost difficulty: "My brother, my friend, please God I
may realise the imaginations I have just enjoyed." Afterwards, having
waited for some time while he remained silent, and by painful efforts
was drawing long sighs (for his tongue at this point began to refuse its
functions), I said, "What are they?" "Grand, grand!" he replied. "I have
never yet failed," returned I, "to have the honour of hearing your
conceptions and imaginations communicated to me; will you not now still
let me enjoy them?" "I would indeed," he answered; "but, my brother, I
am not able to do so; they are admirable, infinite, and unspeakable." We
stopped short there, for he could not go on. A little before, indeed, he
had shown a desire to speak to his wife, and had told her, with as gay a
countenance as he could contrive to assume, that he had a story to tell
her. And it seemed as if he was making an attempt to gain utterance;
but, his strength failing him, he begged a little wine to resuscitate
it. It was of no avail, for he fainted away suddenly, and was for some
time insensible. Having become so near a neighbour to death, and hearing
the sobs of Mademoiselle de la Boetie, he called her, and said to her
thus: "My own likeness, you grieve yourself beforehand; will you not
have pity on me? take courage. Assuredly, it costs me more than half the
pain I endure, to see you suffer; and reasonably so, because the evils
which we ourselves feel we do not actually ourselves suffer, but it
certain sentient faculties which God plants in us, that feel them:
whereas what we feel on account of others, we feel by consequence of a
certain reasoning process which goes on within our minds. But I am going
away" —That he said because his strength was failing him; and fearing
that he had frightened his wife, he resumed, observing: "I am going to
sleep. Good night, my wife; go thy way." This was the last farewell he
took of her.
After she had left, "My brother," said he to me, "keep near me, if
you please;" and then feeling the advance of death more pressing and
more acute, or else the effect of some warm draught which they had made
him swallow, his voice grew stronger and clearer, and he turned quite
with violence in his bed, so that all began again to entertain the hope
which we had lost only upon witnessing his extreme prostration.
At this stage he proceeded, among other things, to pray me again and
again, in a most affectionate manner, to give him a place; so that I was
apprehensive that his reason might be impaired, particularly when, on my
pointing out to him that he was doing himself harm, and that these were
not of the words of a rational man, he did not yield at first, but
redoubled his outcry, saying, "My brother, my brother! dost thou then
refuse me a place?" insomuch that he constrained me to demonstrate to
him that, as he breathed and spoke, and had his physical being,
therefore he had his place. "Yes, yes," he responded, "I have; but it is
not that which I need; and, besides, when all is said, I have no longer
any existence." "God," I replied, "will grant you a better one soon."
"Would it were now, my brother," was his answer. "It is now three days
since I have been eager to take my departure."
Being in this extremity, he frequently called me, merely to satisfy
him that I was at his side. At length, he composed himself a little to
rest, which strengthened our hopes; so much so, indeed, that I left the
room, and went to rejoice thereupon with Mademoiselle de la Boetie. But,
an hour or so afterwards, he called me by name once or twice, and then
with a long sigh expired at three o'clock on Wednesday morning, the 18th
August 1563, having lived thirty-two years, nine months, and seventeen
days.
II.—To Monseigneur, Monseigneur de MONTAIGNE.
[This letter is prefixed to Montaigne's translation of the "Natural
Theology" of Raymond de Sebonde, printed at Paris in 1569.]
In pursuance of the instructions which you gave me last year in your
house at Montaigne, Monseigneur, I have put into a French dress, with my
own hand, Raymond de Sebonde, that great Spanish theologian and
philosopher; and I have divested him, so far as I could, of that rough
bearing and barbaric appearance which you saw him wear at first; that,
in my opinion, he is now qualified to present himself in the best
company. It is perfectly possible that some fastidious persons will
detect in the book some trace of Gascon parentage; but it will be so
much the more to their discredit, that they allowed the task to devolve
on one who is quite a novice in these things. It is only right,
Monseigneur, that the work should come before the world under your
auspices, since whatever emendations and polish it may have received,
are owing to you. Still I see well that, if you think proper to balance
accounts with the author, you will find yourself much his debtor; for
against his excellent and religious discourses, his lofty and, so to
speak, divine conceptions, you will find that you will have to set
nothing but words and phraseology; a sort of merchandise so ordinary and
commonplace, that whoever has the most of it, peradventure is the worst
off.
Monseigneur, I pray God to grant you a very long and happy life. From
Paris, this 18th of June 1568. Your most humble and most obedient son,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
III.—To Monsieur, Monsieur de LANSAC,
—[This letter appears to belong to 1570.]—Knight of the King's Order,
Privy Councillor, Sub-controller of his Finance, and Captain of the Cent
Gardes of his Household.
MONSIEUR,—I send you the OEconomics of Xenophon, put into French by
the late M. de la Boetie,—[Printed at Paris, 8vo, 1571, and reissued,
with the addition of some notes, in 1572, with a fresh title-page.]—a
present which appears to me to be appropriate, as well because it is the
work of a gentleman of mark,—[Meaning Xenophon.]—a man illustrious in
war and peace, as because it has taken its second shape from a personage
whom I know to have been held by you in affectionate regard during his
life. This will be an inducement to you to continue to cherish towards
his memory, your good opinion and goodwill. And to be bold with you,
Monsieur, do not fear to increase these sentiments somewhat; for, as you
had knowledge of his high qualities only in his public capacity, it
rests with me to assure you how many endowments he possessed beyond your
personal experience of him. He did me the honour, while he lived, and I
count it amongst the most fortunate circumstances in my own career, to
have with me a friendship so close and so intricately knit, that no
movement, impulse, thought, of his mind was kept from me, and if I have
not formed a right judgment of him, I must suppose it to be from my own
want of scope. Indeed, without exaggeration, he was so nearly a prodigy,
that I am afraid of not being credited when I speak of him, even though
I should keep much within the mark of my own actual knowledge. And for
this time, Monsieur, I shall content myself with praying you, for the
honour and respect we owe to truth, to testify and believe that our
Guienne never beheld his peer among the men of his vocation. Under the
hope, therefore, that you will pay him his just due, and in order to
refresh him in your memory, I present you this book, which will answer
for me that, were it not for the insufficiency of my power, I would
offer you as willingly something of my own, as an acknowledgment of the
obligations I owe to you, and of the ancient favour and friendship which
you have borne towards the members of our house. But, Monsieur, in
default of better coin, I offer you in payment the assurance of my
desire to do you humble service.
Monsieur, I pray God to have you in His keeping. Your obedient
servant, MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
IV.—To Monsieur, Monsieur de MESMES, Lord of Roissy and Malassize,
Privy
Councillor to the King.
MONSIEUR,—It is one of the most conspicuous follies committed by men,
to employ the strength of their understanding in overturning and
destroying those opinions which are commonly received among us, and
which afford us satisfaction and content; for while everything beneath
heaven employs the ways and means placed at its disposal by nature for
the advancement and commodity of its being, these, in order to appear of
a more sprightly and enlightened wit, not accepting anything which has
not been tried and balanced a thousand times with the most subtle
reasoning, sacrifice their peace of mind to doubt, uneasiness, and
feverish excitement. It is not without reason that childhood and
simplicity have been recommended by holy writ itself. For my part, I
prefer to be quiet rather than clever: give me content, even if I am not
to be so wide in my range. This is the reason, Monsieur, why, although
persons of an ingenious turn laugh at our care as to what will happen
after our own time, for instance, to our souls, which, lodged elsewhere,
will lose all consciousness of what goes on here below, yet I consider
it to be a great consolation for the frailty and brevity of life, to
reflect that we have the power of prolonging it by reputation and fame;
and I embrace very readily this pleasant and favourable notion original
with our being, without inquiring too critically how or why it is.
Insomuch that having loved, beyond everything, the late M. de la Boetie,
the greatest man, in my judgment, of our age, I should think myself very
negligent of my duty if I failed, to the utmost of my power, to prevent
such a name as his, and a memory so richly meriting remembrance, from
falling into oblivion; and if I did not use my best endeavour to keep
them fresh. I believe that he feels something of what I do on his
behalf, and that my services touch and rejoice him. In fact, he lives in
my heart so vividly and so wholly, that I am loath to believe him
committed to the dull ground, or altogether cast off from communication
with us. Therefore, Monsieur, since every new light I can shed on him
and his name, is so much added to his second period of existence, and,
moreover, since his name is ennobled and honoured by the place which
receives it, it falls to me not only to extend it as widely as I can,
but to confide it to the keeping of persons of honour and virtue; among
whom you hold such a rank, that, to afford you the opportunity of
receiving this new guest, and giving him good entertainment, I decided
on presenting to you this little work, not for any profit you are likely
to derive from it, being well aware that you do not need to have
Plutarch and his companions interpreted to you—but it is possible that
Madame de Roissy, reading in it the order of her household management
and of your happy accord painted to the life, will be pleased to see how
her own natural inclination has not only reached but surpassed the
theories of the wisest philosophers, regarding the duties and laws of
the wedded state. And, at all events, it will be always an honour to me,
to be able to do anything which shall be for the pleasure of you and
yours, on account of the obligation under which I lie to serve you.
Monsieur, I pray God to grant you a long and happy life. From
Montaigne, this 30th April 1570. Your humble servant, MICHEL DE
MONTAIGNE.
V.—To Monsieur, Monsieur de L'HOSPITAL, Chancellor of France
MONSEIGNEUR,—I am of the opinion that persons such as you, to whom
fortune and reason have committed the charge of public affairs, are not
more inquisitive in any point than in ascertaining the character of
those in office under you; for no society is so poorly furnished, but
that, if a proper distribution of authority be used, it has persons
sufficient for the discharge of all official duties; and when this is
the case, nothing is wanting to make a State perfect in its
constitution. Now, in proportion as this is so much to be desired, so it
is the more difficult of accomplishment, since you cannot have eyes to
embrace a multitude so large and so widely extended, nor to see to the
bottom of hearts, in order that you may discover intentions and
consciences, matters principally to be considered; so that there has
never been any commonwealth so well organised, in which we might not
detect often enough defect in such a department or such a choice; and in
those systems, where ignorance and malice, favouritism, intrigue, and
violence govern, if any selection happens to be made on the ground of
merit and regularity, we may doubtless thank Fortune, which, in its
capricious movements, has for once taken the path of reason.
This consideration, Monseigneur, often consoled me, when I beheld M.
Etienne de la Boetie, one of the fittest men for high office in France,
pass his whole life without employment and notice, by his domestic
hearth, to the singular detriment of the public; for, so far as he was
concerned, I may assure you, Monseigneur, that he was so rich in those
treasures which defy fortune, that never was man more satisfied or
content. I know, indeed, that he was raised to the dignities connected
with his neighbourhood—dignities accounted considerable; and I know
also, that no one ever acquitted himself better of them; and when he
died at the age of thirty-two, he enjoyed a reputation in that way
beyond all who had preceded him.
But for all that, it is no reason that a man should be left a common
soldier, who deserves to become a captain; nor to assign mean functions
to those who are perfectly equal to the highest. In truth, his powers
were badly economised and too sparingly employed; insomuch that, over
and above his actual work, there was abundant capacity lying idle which
might have been called into service, both to the public advantage and
his own private glory.
Therefore, Monseigneur, since he was so indifferent to his own fame
(for virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together), and
since he lived in an age when others were too dull or too jealous to
witness to his character, I have it marvellously at heart that his
memory, at all events, to which I owe the good offices of a friend,
should enjoy the recompense of his brave life; and that it should
survive in the good report of men of honour and virtue. On this account,
sir, I have been desirous to bring to light, and present to you, such
few Latin verses as he left behind. Different from the builder, who
places the most attractive, portion of his house towards the street, and
to the draper, who displays in his window his best goods, that which was
most precious in my friend, the juice and marrow of his genius, departed
with him, and there have remained to us but the bark and the leaves.
The exactly regulated movements of his mind, his piety, his virtue,
his justice, his vivacity, the solidity and soundness of his judgment,
the loftiness of his ideas, raised so far above the common level, his
learning, the grace which accompanied his most ordinary actions, the
tender affection he had for his miserable country, and his supreme and
sworn detestation of all vice, but principally of that villainous
traffic which disguises itself under the honourable name of justice,
should certainly impress all well-disposed persons with a singular love
towards him, and an extraordinary regret for his loss. But, sir, I am
unable to do justice to all these qualities; and of the fruit of his own
studies it had not entered into his mind to leave any proof to
posterity; all that remains, is the little which, as a pastime, he did
at intervals.
However this may be, I beg you, sir, to receive it kindly; and as our
judgment of great things is many times formed from lesser things, and as
even the recreations of illustrious men carry with them, to intelligent
observers, some honourable traits of their origin, I would have you form
from this, some knowledge of him, and hence lovingly cherish his name
and his memory. In this, sir, you will only reciprocate the high opinion
which he had of your virtue, and realise what he infinitely desired in
his lifetime; for there was no one in the world in whose acquaintance
and friendship he would have been so happy to see himself established,
as in your own. But if any man is offended by the freedom which I use
with the belongings of another, I can tell him that nothing which has
been written or been laid down, even in the schools of philosophy,
respecting the sacred duties and rights of friendship, could give an
adequate idea of the relations which subsisted between this personage
and myself.
Moreover, sir, this slender gift, to make two throws of one stone at
the same time, may likewise serve, if you please, to testify the honour
and respect which I entertain for your ability and high qualities; for
as to those gifts which are adventitious and accidental, it is not to my
taste to take them into account.
Sir, I pray God to grant you a very happy and a very long life. From
Montaigne, this 30th of April 1570.—Your humble and obedient servant,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
VI.—To Monsieur, Monsieur de Folx, Privy Councillor, and Ambassador
of His Majesty to the Signory of Venice.
—[ Printed before the 'Vers Francois' of Etienne de la Boetie, 8vo,
Paris, 1572.]
SIR,—Being on the point of commending to you and to posterity the
memory of the late Etienne de la Boetie, as well for his extreme virtue
as for the singular affection which he bore to me, it struck me as an
indiscretion very serious in its results, and meriting some coercion
from our laws, the practice which often prevails of robbing virtue of
glory, its faithful associate, in order to confer it, in accordance with
our private interests and without discrimination, on the first comer;
seeing that our two principal guiding reins are reward and punishment,
which only touch us properly, and as men, through the medium of honour
and dishonour, forasmuch as these penetrate the mind, and come home to
our most intimate feelings: just where animals themselves are
susceptible, more or less, to all other kinds of recompense and corporal
chastisement. Moreover, it is well to notice that the custom of praising
virtue, even in those who are no longer with us, impalpable as it is to
them, serves as a stimulant to the living to imitate their example; just
as capital sentences are carried out by the law, more for the sake of
warning to others, than in relation to those who suffer. Now,
commendation and its opposite being analogous as regards effects, we
cannot easily deny the fact, that although the law prohibits one man
from slandering the reputation of another, it does not prevent us from
bestowing reputation without cause. This pernicious licence in respect
to the distribution of praise, has formerly been confined in its area of
operations; and it may be the reason why poetry once lost favour with
the more judicious. However this may be, it cannot be concealed that the
vice of falsehood is one very unbecoming in gentleman, let it assume
what guise it will.
As for that personage of whom I am speaking to you, sir he leads me
far away indeed from this kind of language; for the danger in his case
is not, lest I should lend him anything, but that I might take something
from him; and it is his ill-fortune that, while he has supplied me, so
far as ever a man could, with just and obvious opportunities for
commendation, I find myself unable and unqualified to render it to him
—I, who am his debtor for so many vivid communications, and who alone
have it in my power to answer for a million of accomplishments,
perfections, and virtues, latent (thanks to his unkind stars) in so
noble a soul. For the nature of things having (I know not how) permitted
that truth, fair and acceptable—as it may be of itself, is only embraced
where there are arts of persuasion, to insinuate it into our minds, I
see myself so wanting, both in authority to support my simple testimony,
and in the eloquence requisite for lending it value and weight, that I
was on the eve of relinquishing the task, having nothing of his which
would enable me to exhibit to the world a proof of his genius and
knowledge.
In truth, sir, having been overtaken by his fate in the flower of his
age, and in the full enjoyment of the most vigorous health, it had been
his design to publish some day works which would have demonstrated to
posterity what sort of a man he was; and, peradventure, he was
indifferent enough to fame, having formed such a plan in his head, to
proceed no further in it. But I have come to the conclusion, that it was
far more excusable in him to bury with him all his rare endowments, than
it would be on my part to bury also with me the knowledge of them which
I had acquired from him; and, therefore, having collected with care all
the remains which I found scattered here and there among his papers, I
intend to distribute them so as to recommend his memory to as many
persons as possible, selecting the most suitable and worthy of my
acquaintance, and those whose testimony might do him greatest honour:
such as you, sir, who may very possibly have had some knowledge of him
during his life, but assuredly too slight to discover the perfect extent
of his worth. Posterity may credit me, if it chooses, when I swear upon
my conscience, that I knew and saw him to be such as, all things
considered, I could neither desire nor imagine a genius surpassing his.
I beg you very humbly, sir, not only to take his name under your
general protection, but also these ten or twelve French stanzas, which
lay themselves, as of necessity, under shadow of your patronage. For I
will not disguise from you, that their publication was deferred, upon
the appearance of his other writings, under the pretext (as it was
alleged yonder at Paris) that they were too crude to come to light. You
will judge, sir, how much truth there is in this; and since it is
thought that hereabout nothing can be produced in our own dialect but
what is barbarous and unpolished, it falls to you, who, besides your
rank as the first house in Guienne, indeed down from your ancestors,
possess every other sort of qualification, to establish, not merely by
your example, but by your authoritative testimony, that such is not
always the case: the more so that, though 'tis more natural with the
Gascons to act than talk, yet sometimes they employ the tongue more than
the arm, and wit in place of valour.
For my own part; sir, it is not in my way to judge of such matters;
but I have heard persons who are supposed to understand them, say that
these stanzas are not only worthy to be presented in the market-place,
but, independently of that, as regards beauty and wealth of invention,
they are full of marrow and matter as any compositions of the kind,
which have appeared in our language. Naturally each workman feels
himself more strong in some special part his art, and those are to be
regarded as most fortunate, who lay hands on the noblest, for all the
parts essential to the construction of any whole are not equally
precious. We find elsewhere, perhaps, greater delicacy phrase, greater
softness and harmony of language; but imaginative grace, and in the
store of pointed wit, I do not think he has been surpassed; and we
should take the account that he made these things neither his occupation
nor his study, and that he scarcely took a pen in his hand more than
once a year, as is shown by the very slender quantity of his remains.
For you see here, sir, green wood and dry, without any sort of
selection, all that has come into my possession; insomuch that there are
among the rest efforts even of his boyhood. In point of fact, he seems
to have written them merely to show that he was capable of dealing with
all subjects: for otherwise, thousands of times, in the course of
ordinary conversation, I have heard things drop from him infinitely more
worthy of being admired, infinitely more worthy of being preserved.
Such, sir, is what justice and affection, forming in this instance a
rare conjunction, oblige me to say of this great and good man; and if I
have at all offended by the freedom which I have taken in addressing
myself to you on such a subject at such a length, be pleased to
recollect that the principal result of greatness and eminence is to lay
one open to importunate appeals on behalf of the rest of the world.
Herewith, after desiring you to accept my affectionate devotion to your
service, I beseech God to vouchsafe you, sir, a fortunate and prolonged
life. From Montaigne, this 1st of September 1570.—Your obedient servant,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
VII.—To Mademoiselle de MONTAIGNE, my Wife.
—[Printed as a preface to the "Consolation of Plutarch to his Wife,"
published by Montaigne, with several other tracts by La Boetie, about
1571.]
MY WIFE,—You understand well that it is not proper for a man of the
world, according to the rules of this our time, to continue to court and
caress you; for they say that a sensible person may take a wife indeed,
but that to espouse her is to act like a fool. Let them talk; I adhere
for my part the custom of the good old days; I also wear my hair as it
used to be then; and, in truth, novelty costs this poor country up to
the present moment so dear (and I do not know whether we have reached
the highest pitch yet), that everywhere and in everything I renounce the
fashion. Let us live, my wife, you and I, in the old French method. Now,
you may recollect that the late M. de la Boetie, my brother and
inseparable companion, gave me, on his death-bed, all his books and
papers, which have remained ever since the most precious part of my
effects. I do not wish to keep them niggardly to myself alone, nor do I
deserve to have the exclusive use of them; so that I have resolved to
communicate them to my friends; and because I have none, I believe, more
particularly intimate you, I send you the Consolatory Letter written by
Plutarch to his Wife, translated by him into French; regretting much
that fortune has made it so suitable a present you, and that, having had
but one child, and that a daughter, long looked for, after four years of
your married life it was your lot to lose her in the second year of her
age. But I leave to Plutarch the duty of comforting you, acquainting you
with your duty herein, begging you to put your faith in him for my sake;
for he will reveal to you my own ideas, and will express the matter far
better than I should myself. Hereupon, my wife, I commend myself very
heartily to your good will, and pray God to have you in His keeping.
From Paris, this 10th September 1570.—Your good husband,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
VIII.—To Monsieur DUPUY,
—[This is probably the Claude Dupuy, born at Paris in 1545, and one
of the fourteen judges sent into Guienne after the treaty of Fleix in
1580. It was perhaps under these circumstances that Montaigne addressed
to him the present letter.]—the King's Councillor in his Court and
Parliament of Paris.
MONSIEUR,—The business of the Sieur de Verres, a prisoner, who is
extremely well known to me, deserves, in the arrival at a decision, the
exercise of the clemency natural to you, if, in the public interest, you
can fairly call it into play. He has done a thing not only excusable,
according to the military laws of this age, but necessary and (as we are
of opinion) commendable. He committed the act, without doubt,
unwillingly and under pressure; there is no other passage of his life
which is open to reproach. I beseech you, sir, to lend the matter your
attentive consideration; you will find the character of it as I
represent it to you. He is persecuted on this crime, in a way which is
far worse than the offence itself. If it is likely to be of use to him,
I desire to inform you that he is a man brought up in my house, related
to several respectable families, and a person who, having led an
honourable life, is my particular friend. By saving him you lay me under
an extreme obligation. I beg you very humbly to regard him as
recommended by me, and, after kissing your hands, I pray God, sir, to
grant you a long and happy life. From Castera, this 23d of April 1580.
Your affectionate servant, MONTAIGNE.
IX.—To the Jurats of Bordeaux.
—[Published from the original among the archives of the town of
Bordeaux, M. Gustave Brunet in the Bulletin du Bibliophile, July 1839.]
GENTLEMEN,—I trust that the journey of Monsieur de Cursol will be of
advantage to the town. Having in hand a case so just and so favourable,
you did all in your power to put the business in good trim; and matters
being so well situated, I beg you to excuse my absence for some little
time longer, and I will abridge my stay so far as the pressure of my
affairs permits. I hope that the delay will be short; however, you will
keep me, if you please, in your good grace, and will command me, if the
occasion shall arise, in employing me in the public service and in
yours. Monsieur de Cursol has also written to me and apprised me of his
journey. I humbly commend myself to you, and pray God, gentlemen, to
grant you long and happy life. From Montaigne, this 21st of May 1582.
Your humble brother and servant, MONTAIGNE.
X.—To the same.
—[The original is among the archives of Toulouse.]
GENTLEMEN,—I have taken my fair share of the satisfaction which you
announce to me as feeling at the good despatch of your business, as
reported to you by your deputies, and I regard it as a favourable sign
that you have made such an auspicious commencement of the year. I hope
to join you at the earliest convenient opportunity. I recommend myself
very humbly to your gracious consideration, and pray God to grant you,
gentlemen, a happy and long life. From Montaigne, this 8th February
1585. Your humble brother and servant, MONTAIGNE.
XI.—To the same.
GENTLEMEN,—I have here received news of you from M. le Marechal. I
will not spare either my life or anything else for your service, and
will leave it to your judgment whether the assistance I might be able to
render by my presence at the forthcoming election, would be worth the
risk I should run by going into the town, seeing the bad state it is in,
—[This refers to the plague then raging, and which carried off 14,000
persons at Bordeaux.]—particularly for people coming away from so fine
an air as this is where I am. I will draw as near to you on Wednesday as
I can, that is, to Feuillas, if the malady has not reached that place,
where, as I write to M. de la Molte, I shall be very pleased to have the
honour of seeing one of you to take your directions, and relieve myself
of the credentials which M. le Marechal will give me for you all:
commending myself hereupon humbly to your good grace, and praying God to
grant you, gentlemen, long and happy life. At Libourne, this 30th of
July 1585. Your humble servant and brother, MONTAIGNE.
XII.
—["According to Dr. Payen, this letter belongs to 1588. Its
authenticity has been called in question; but wrongly, in our opinion.
See 'Documents inedits', 1847, p. 12."—Note in 'Essais', ed. Paris,
1854, iv. 381. It does not appear to whom the letter was addressed.]
MONSEIGNEUR,—You have heard of our baggage being taken from us under
our eyes in the forest of Villebois: then, after a good deal of
discussion and delay, of the capture being pronounced illegal by the
Prince. We dared not, however, proceed on our way, from an uncertainty
as to the safety of our persons, which should have been clearly
expressed on our passports. The League has done this, M. de Barrant and
M. de la Rochefocault; the storm has burst on me, who had my money in my
box. I have recovered none of it, and most of my papers and cash—[The
French word is hardes, which St. John renders things. But compare
Chambers's "Domestic Annals of Scotland," 2d ed. i. 48.]—remain in their
possession. I have not seen the Prince. Fifty were lost . . . as for the
Count of Thorigny, he lost some ver plate and a few articles of
clothing. He diverged from his route to pay a visit to the mourning
ladies at Montresor, where are the remains of his two brothers and his
grandmother, and came to us again in this town, whence we shall resume
our journey shortly. The journey to Normandy is postponed. The King has
despatched MM. De Bellieure and de la Guiche to M. de Guise to summon
him to court; we shall be there on Thursday.
From Orleans, this 16th of February, in the morning [1588-9?].—Your
very humble servant, MONTAIGNE.
XIII.—To Mademoiselle PAULMIER.
—[This letter, at the time of the publication of the variorum edition
of 1854, appears to have been in private hands. See vol. iv. p. 382.]
MADEMOISELLE,—My friends know that, from the first moment of our
acquaintance, I have destined a copy of my book for you; for I feel that
you have done it much honour. The courtesy of M. Paulmier would deprive
me of the pleasure of giving it to you now, for he has obliged me since
a great deal beyond the worth of my book. You will accept it then, if
you please, as having been yours before I owed it to you, and will
confer on me the favour of loving it, whether for its own sake or for
mine; and I will keep my debt to M. Paulmier undischarged, that I may
requite him, if I have at some other time the means of serving him.
XIV.—To the KING, HENRY IV.
—[The original is in the French national library, in the Dupuy
collection. It was first discovered by M. Achille Jubinal, who printed
it with a facsimile of the entire autograph, in 1850. St. John gives the
date wrongly as the 1st January 1590.]
SIRE, It is to be above the weight and crowd of your great and
important affairs, to know, as you do, how to lend yourself, and attend
to small matters in their turn, according to the duty of your royal
dignity, which exposes you at all times to every description and degree
of person and employment. Yet, that your Majesty should have deigned to
consider my letter, and direct a reply to be made to it, I prefer to
owe, less to your strong understanding, than to your kindness of heart.
I have always looked forward to your enjoyment of your present fortune,
and you may recollect that, even when I had to make confession of itto
my cure, I viewed your successes with satisfaction: now, with the
greater propriety and freedom, I embrace them affectionately. They serve
you where you are as positive matters of fact; but they serve us here no
less by the fame which they diffuse: the echo carries as much weight as
the blow. We should not be able to derive from the justice of your cause
such powerful arguments for the maintenance and reduction of your
subjects, as we do from the reports of the success of your undertaking;
and then I have to assure your Majesty, that the recent changes to your
advantage, which you observe hereabouts, the prosperous issue of your
proceedings at Dieppe, have opportunely seconded the honest zeal and
marvellous prudence of M. the Marshal de Matignon, from whom I flatter
myself that you do not receive day by day accounts of such good and
signal services without remembering my assurances and expectations. I
look to the next summer, not only for fruits which we may eat, but for
those to grow out of our common tranquillity, and that it will pass over
our heads with the same even tenor of happiness, dissipating, like its
predecessors, all the fine promises with which your adversaries sustain
the spirits of their followers. The popular inclinations resemble a
tidal wave; if the current once commences in your favour, it will go on
of its own force to the end. I could have desired much that the private
gain of the soldiers of your army, and the necessity for satisfying
them, had not deprived you, especially in this principal town, of the
glorious credit of treating your mutinous subjects, in the midst of
victory, with greater clemency than their own protectors, and that, as
distinguished from a passing and usurped repute, you could have shown
them to be really your own, by the exercise of a protection truly
paternal and royal. In the conduct of such affairs as you have in hand,
men are obliged to have recourse to unusual expedients. It is always
seen that they are surmounted by their magnitude and difficulty; it not
being found easy to complete the conquest by arms and force, the end has
been accomplished by clemency and generosity, excellent lures to draw
men particularly towards the just and legitimate side. If there is to be
severity and punishment, let it be deferred till success has been
assured. A great conqueror of past times boasts that he gave his enemies
as great an inducement to love him, as his friends. And here we feel
already some effect of the favourable impression produced upon our
rebellious towns by the contrast between their rude treatment, and that
of those which are loyal to you. Desiring your Majesty a happiness more
tangible and less hazardous, and that you may be beloved rather than
feared by your people, and believing that your welfare and theirs are of
necessity knit together, I rejoice to think that the progress which you
make is one towards more practicable conditions of peace, as well as
towards victory!
Sire, your letter of the last of November came to my hand only just
now, when the time which it pleased you to name for meeting you at Tours
had already passed. I take it as a singular favour that you should have
deigned to desire a visit from so useless a person, but one who is
wholly yours, and more so even by affection than from duty. You have
acted very commendably in adapting yourself, in the matter of external
forms, to your new fortunes; but the preservation of your old affability
and frankness in private intercourse is entitled to an equal share of
praise. You have condescended to take thought for my age, no less than
for the desire which I have to see you, where you may be at rest from
these laborious agitations. Will not that be soon at Paris, Sire? and
may nothing prevent me from presenting myself there!—Your very humble
and very obedient servant and subject, MONTAIGNE.
From Montaigne, this 18th of January 1590.
XV.—To the same.
—[ This letter is also in the national collection, among the Dupuy
papers. It was first printed in the "Journal de l'Instruction Publique,"
4th November 1846.]
SIRE,—The letter which it pleased your majesty to write to me on the
20th of July, was not delivered to me till this morning, and found me
laid up with a very violent tertian ague, a complaint very common in
this part of the country during the last month. Sire, I consider myself
greatly honoured by the receipt of your commands, and I have not omitted
to communicate to M. the Marshal de Matignon three times most
emphatically my intention and obligation to proceed to him, and even so
far as to indicate the route by which I proposed to join him secretly,
if he thought proper. Having received no answer, I consider that he has
weighed the difficulty and risk of the journey to me. Sire, your Majesty
dill do me the favour to believe, if you please, that I shall never
complain of the expense on occasions where I should not hesitate to
devote my life. I have never derived any substantial benefit whatever
from the bounty of kings, which I have neither sought nor merited; nor
have I had any recompense for the services which I have performed for
them: whereof your majesty is in part aware. What I have done for your
predecessors I shall do still more readily for you. I am as rich, Sire,
as I desire to be. When I shall have exhausted my purse in attendance on
your Majesty at Paris, I will take the liberty to tell you, and then, if
you should regard me as worthy of being retained any longer in your
suite, you will find me more modest in my claims upon you than the
humblest of your officers.
Sire, I pray God for your prosperity and health. Your very humble and
very obedient servant and subject, MONTAIGNE.
From Montaigne, this 2d of September 1590.
XVI.—To the Governor of Guienne.
MONSEIGNEUR,—I have received this morning your letter, which I have
communicated to M. de Gourgues, and we have dined together at the house
of M.[the mayor] of Bourdeaux. As to the inconvenience of transporting
the money named in your memorandum, you see how difficult a thing it is
to provide for; but you may be sure that we shall keep as close a watch
over it as possible. I used every exertion to discover the man of whom
you spoke. He has not been here; and M. de Bordeaux has shown me a
letter in which he mentions that he could not come to see the Director
of Bordeaux, as he intended, having been informed that you mistrust him.
The letter is of the day before yesterday. If I could have found him, I
might perhaps have pursued the gentler course, being uncertain of your
views; but I entreat you nevertheless to feel no manner of doubt that I
refuse to carry out any wishes of yours, and that, where your commands
are concerned, I know no distinction of person or matter. I hope that
you have in Guienne many as well affected to you as I am. They report
that the Nantes galleys are advancing towards Brouage. M. the Marshal de
Biron has not yet left. Those who were charged to convey the message to
M. d'Usee say that they cannot find him; and I believe that, if he has
been here, he is so no longer. We keep a vigilant eye on our gates and
guards, and we look after them a little more attentively in your
absence, which makes me apprehensive, not merely on account of the
preservation of the town, but likewise for your oven sake, knowing that
the enemies of the king feel how necessary you are to his service, and
how ill we should prosper without you. I am afraid that, in the part
where you are, you will be overtaken by so many affairs requiring your
attention on every side, that it will take you a long time and involve
great difficulty before you have disposed of everything. If there is any
important news, I will despatch an express at once, and you may conclude
that nothing is stirring if you do not hear from me: at the same time
begging you to bear in mind that movements of this kind are wont to be
so sudden and unexpected that, if they occur, they will grasp me by the
throat, before they say a word. I will do what I can to collect news,
and for this purpose I will make a point of visiting and seeing men of
every shade of opinion. Down to the present time nothing is stirring. M.
de Londel has seen me this morning, and we have been arranging for some
advances for the place, where I shall go to-morrow morning. Since I
began this letter, I have learnt from Chartreux that two gentlemen,
describing themselves as in the service of M. de Guise, and coming from
Agen, have passed near Chartreux; but I was not able to ascertain which
road they have taken. They are expecting you at Agen. The Sieur de
Mauvesin came as far as Canteloup, and thence returned, having got some
intelligence. I am in search of one Captain Rous, to whom . . . wrote,
trying to draw him into his cause by all sorts of promises. The rumour
of the two Nantes galleys ready to descend on Brouage is confirmed as
certain; they carry two companies of foot. M. de Mercure is at Nantes.
The Sieur de la Courbe said to M. the President Nesmond that M. d'Elbeuf
is on this side of Angiers, and lodges with his father. He is drawing
towards Lower Poictou with 4000 foot and 400 or 500 horse, having been
reinforced by the troops of M. de Brissac and others, and M. de Mercure
is to join him. The report goes also that M. du Maine is about to take
the command of all the forces they have collected in Auvergne, and that
he will cross Le Foret to advance on Rouergue and us, that is to say, on
the King of Navarre, against whom all this is being directed. M. de
Lansac is at Bourg, and has two war vessels, which remain in attendance
on him. His functions are naval. I tell you what I learn, and mix up
together the more or less probable hearsay of the town with actual
matter of fact, that you may be in possession of everything. I beg you
most humbly to return directly affairs may allow you to do so, and
assure you that, meanwhile, we shall not spare our labour, or (if that
were necessary) our life, to maintain the king's authority throughout.
Monseigneur, I kiss your hands very respectfully, and pray God to have
you in His keeping. From Bordeaux, Wednesday night, 22d May
(1590-91).—Your very humble servant,
MONTAIGNE.
I have seen no one from the king of Navarre; they say that M. de
Biron has seen him.
THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.
—[Omitted by Cotton.]—
READER, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset forewarn
thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other
than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all
either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any
such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my
kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do
shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and
humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the
knowledge they had of me. Had my intention been to seek the world's
favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties: I
desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and
ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint.
My defects are therein to be read to the life, and any imperfections and
my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me. If I had
lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet
liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly
have painted myself quite fully and quite naked. Thus, reader, myself am
the matter of my book: there's no reason thou shouldst employ thy
leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.
From Montaigne, the 12th June 1580—[So in the edition of 1595; the
edition of 1588 has 12th June 1588]
From Montaigne, the 1st March 1580.
—[See Bonnefon, Montaigne, 1893, p. 254. The book had been
licensed for the press on the 9th May previous. The edition of 1588
has 12th June 1588;]—
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