When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing With Me? Part 1

When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?

Montaigne and being in touch with life.

by Saul Frampton.

Preface.

Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, reached up to the ceiling of his library and scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before. His library was on the third floor of a round tower standing on a corner of the n.o.ble house of Montaigne in Perigord. From his windows he could see into his garden, his courtyard, his vineyards, and into most parts of his house. The house stood on a hill a few miles north of the Dordogne, some thirty miles east of Bordeaux.

Circling Montaigne were his books, a thousand of them, arranged on five shelves on all sides. Through them he leafed 'without order, without plan', getting up from his chair to stroll around the room, sixteen paces in diameter, giving him a circular walk of about fifty paces in circ.u.mference. Above his head, cla.s.sical and biblical quotations curled across the joists and beams of his ceiling, like vines round the branches of a tree.

The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer. It was a sentiment he had previously held dear to. Like most thinkers of his time, Montaigne followed a Christian and a Stoic philosophy, where life was seen as preparation for the afterlife and the task of philosophy was to harden oneself against the vicissitudes of fortune. And of misfortune, Montaigne had experience at close hand. His first-born daughter had died at the age of only two months (the first of five to die in infancy). His younger brother had been killed, absurdly, tragically, by a blow from a tennis ball. His best friend, Etienne de La Boetie, had died of the plague in his early thirties. And his father, whom he adored, had recently suffered a prolonged and agonizing death from a kidney stone. Moreover, violent religious warfare was spreading across the country, setting light to Montaigne's region, pitting Catholic against Protestant, father against son, ma.s.sacre against murder. There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer. It was a sentiment he had previously held dear to. Like most thinkers of his time, Montaigne followed a Christian and a Stoic philosophy, where life was seen as preparation for the afterlife and the task of philosophy was to harden oneself against the vicissitudes of fortune. And of misfortune, Montaigne had experience at close hand. His first-born daughter had died at the age of only two months (the first of five to die in infancy). His younger brother had been killed, absurdly, tragically, by a blow from a tennis ball. His best friend, Etienne de La Boetie, had died of the plague in his early thirties. And his father, whom he adored, had recently suffered a prolonged and agonizing death from a kidney stone. Moreover, violent religious warfare was spreading across the country, setting light to Montaigne's region, pitting Catholic against Protestant, father against son, ma.s.sacre against murder.

And so in a Latin inscription he had made on the wall of his library after resigning from his job as a magistrate and retiring to his house, Montaigne had declared his intention to hide himself away, and crawl unburthened towards death: In the year of Christ 1571, aged thirty-eight, on the eve of the beginning of March, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, worn out with the slavery of the court and of public service, and whilst still intact, retires to the bosom of the learned Muses, where in peace and security he hopes, if fate allows him, to pa.s.s what may be left of his life already more than half spent, consecrating this ancestral dwelling and sweet retreat to his liberty, tranquillity and repose.

The choice of his birthday expressed a melancholy fatalism: that this was the beginning of his cessation. And so Montaigne, soon to be pained with the illness that had killed his father, had retired to this round tower, to this third-floor room, to pa.s.s away, undisturbed, the little that 'may be left of his life'.

Montaigne is now renowned as the author of the Essays Essays, perhaps, alongside the plays of Shakespeare and Don Quixote Don Quixote, one of the most important literary works of the Renaissance. In it he attempts to essayer essayer or 'test' an amazing variety of topics, ranging from warfare to idleness, from drunkenness to thumbs. Begun a couple of years after Montaigne's retirement, yet continually added to over the twenty years up to his death, the or 'test' an amazing variety of topics, ranging from warfare to idleness, from drunkenness to thumbs. Begun a couple of years after Montaigne's retirement, yet continually added to over the twenty years up to his death, the Essays Essays represent an amazing compendium of Renaissance beliefs and att.i.tudes. represent an amazing compendium of Renaissance beliefs and att.i.tudes.

But Montaigne's erasing of the words of Lucretius from the ceiling of his library also marks an amazing reversal in Montaigne's outlook over the course of his writing a s.h.i.+ft from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life.

Deeply influenced by the death of his father and the steadfastly stoical death of his friend La Boetie, Montaigne had initially retired with death uppermost on his mind: 'To Philosophize is to Learn to Die,' as he declares in the t.i.tle of one of his first essays. But over the course of his writing, Montaigne turns his back on this pessimism and embraces a new philosophy, in which it is 'living happily, not...dying happily, that is the source of human happiness'. Like James Stewart's character in It's A Wonderful Life It's A Wonderful Life, Montaigne begins to reject despair and feel the texture of the simple fabric of existence. And, with this, his essays grow from simple distractions into a way of replaying, rewinding, and reliving his life as he lives it: 'I want to increase it in weight; I want to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I seize it...The shorter my possession of life, the more deeply and fully I must make use of it.'

And Montaigne's writing overflows with life. In over a hundred essays and around half a million words he records every thought, every taste and sensation that crosses his mind. He writes essays on sleep and on sadness, on smells and friends.h.i.+p, on children and s.e.x and death. And, as a final testament, he writes an essay on experience, in which he contemplates the wonder of human existence itself.

And in the text of the Essays Essays and his and his Travel Journal Travel Journal (recounting his trip to Italy), Montaigne explores the pains, paradoxes and pleasures of being. He asks whether you should jump or duck at the bang of an arquebus, or whether to stand still or run at the enemy. He tells how Plato says you shouldn't drink before you are eighteen, should drink moderately until forty, but after then get drunk as often as possible. He notes the beauty of the prost.i.tutes of Florence ('nothing special') and the Italians' love of large b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He loses his wallet; he pokes himself in the eye. He goes sledging down Mont Cenis. He goes to Pisa and meets the learned Doctor Burro, who presents him with a book on the ebb and flow of the sea. (recounting his trip to Italy), Montaigne explores the pains, paradoxes and pleasures of being. He asks whether you should jump or duck at the bang of an arquebus, or whether to stand still or run at the enemy. He tells how Plato says you shouldn't drink before you are eighteen, should drink moderately until forty, but after then get drunk as often as possible. He notes the beauty of the prost.i.tutes of Florence ('nothing special') and the Italians' love of large b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He loses his wallet; he pokes himself in the eye. He goes sledging down Mont Cenis. He goes to Pisa and meets the learned Doctor Burro, who presents him with a book on the ebb and flow of the sea.

Yet amidst these infinite interests there remains a heart to Montaigne's enquiry: his own experience of himself. For Montaigne stands at the watershed of the two great intellectual movements of the past millennium: the darkened vaulting of medieval Christendom and the monstrous progeny of seventeenth-century science. In both of these, everyday life is, in a sense, relegated: in science into mechanism and matter; in religion into transitoriness and sin. Montaigne is like a man standing on a platform, waiting between these two trains. Yet during this silence, in the s.p.a.ce of perhaps a few decades around the end of the sixteenth century, life begins to unfurl. For what Montaigne discovers is the power of the ordinary and the unremarkable, the value of the here-and-now. And central to this is the idea that each and every one of us and he takes himself as the primary example has a particular particular way of viewing the world. He says that he sees himself as 'a very ordinary person, except in this regard, way of viewing the world. He says that he sees himself as 'a very ordinary person, except in this regard, that I consider myself so that I consider myself so'.

Montaigne's writing could thus be said to be the first sustained representation of human consciousness in Western literature. This is not to say that people had been unconscious in the periods before, or that accounts of individual lives had not been written, such as by Augustine or Abelard. But no one had paid such attention to the actual experience of living, or seen life as providing a moral lesson in justifying political and religious tolerance and providing a reason to continue to live. The Christian Stoicism of the sixteenth century saw the body and the senses as something to overcome, something which we should become indifferent to, and life as something that could be easily relinquished, provided the moral and theological price was right. But Montaigne rejects this indifference and over the course of his essays finds the reason for living in the very experience of living itself. He ponders the odour of his doublet, the itching in his ear. He savours the wine and the water of the towns he visits ('smell of sulphur, a little saltiness'). He thinks that parasols burden the arm more than they relieve his head and notes the outcome of various enemas 'farted endlessly'. He tickles himself. He dreams that he dreams. He even has himself awoken from sleep, 'so that I might gain a glimpse of it'.

For Montaigne, life is to be lived actively and not pa.s.sively, a vitality that led even Nietzsche not one to hand out compliments to proclaim: 'That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth...If I were set the task, I could endeavour to make myself at home in the world with him.'

But there is another reason for listening to this sixteenth-century Gascon n.o.bleman.

Modern philosophy and some would say the modern world starts some thirty years after Montaigne when Descartes sequesters himself in a small stove-heated room and asks himself what he considers to be the most fundamental philosophical question: what can we believe with certainty certainty? The answer Descartes arrives at thinking in the form of the maxim Cogito ergo sum Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), has been a hobby-horse for philosophers ever since. And the edifice that Descartes and other seventeenth-century philosophers build around it the huge gla.s.s-and-steel cathedral of Reason is one that has eclipsed Montaigne's more modest tower. As a result, he has silently slipped below our intellectual horizons: an eccentric provincial essayist, albeit one often confused with the Enlightenment political theorist Montesquieu. (I think, therefore I am), has been a hobby-horse for philosophers ever since. And the edifice that Descartes and other seventeenth-century philosophers build around it the huge gla.s.s-and-steel cathedral of Reason is one that has eclipsed Montaigne's more modest tower. As a result, he has silently slipped below our intellectual horizons: an eccentric provincial essayist, albeit one often confused with the Enlightenment political theorist Montesquieu.

But Montaigne can be seen to offer an alternative philosophy to that of Descartes, a more human-centred conception that lays no claim to absolute certainty, but that is also free from what some have seen as the implications of such claims: the totalitarian political movements of the twentieth century, and the individualist anomie of modern Western life.

For at the heart of Descartes' philosophy is the intellectual principle of division, an attempt to offer clarity in a world made uncertain by religious and political unrest. He thus states as part of his 'method' that intellectual problems should be 'divided' into 'as many parts as possible' and that we should accept as true only that which we can perceive 'very clearly and distinctly distinctly' i.e. separate from other things. And this principle provides the foundation for his division of mind and body: he sees the mind as all 'one and the same', whereas he 'cannot think of any Corporeal or extended being which I cannot easily divide into Parts'. For Descartes, true knowledge thus amounts to a singular unambiguous vision: he uses the metaphor of a city designed by one 'single master', rather than evolving naturally and haphazardly through the work of 'different hands'.

Montaigne, by contrast, operates with an older, less cutting-edge, yet perhaps more venerable intellectual instinct: that of proximity proximity. Rather than defining and dividing things, Montaigne wants to bring them together, get near to them, close to them, not least to himself. And rather than searching for certainties that divide him from the commonality, Montaigne see the principle of trust as of far greater importance; as he says at the start of his essays: 'You have here a book of good faith good faith'. For Montaigne, human relations are the primal scene of knowledge: if trust is restored, agreement, tolerance, and hence truth will follow; the search for constancy and certainty strikes him as merely obstinacy in another guise. And here the differences in their characters and circ.u.mstances are revealing: Descartes on foreign soil, escaping into a small, isolated, stuffy room, stoically immune to 'pa.s.sions' or 'cares' (a recent biography describes him as a 'a reclusive, cantankerous, and oversensitive loner'). Montaigne, by contrast, writing at the centre of the French Wars of Religion, and as a seigneur and a negotiator between the warring factions trying desperately to heal 'these divisions and subdivisions by which we are today torn apart'.

For in the midst of these wars Montaigne begins to see such conflict as fuelled by the search for political and religious certainty. And whereas some saw the unfeeling Stoicism of the ancients as an ideal, a moral philosophy that Descartes endorsed, Montaigne begins to see it as exacerbating the divisiveness of his time, cutting off men's awareness of themselves and their understanding of others, resulting in an acceptance and, indeed, an appet.i.te for murder and gratuitous cruelty.

Montaigne therefore decides to look more locally for his morality, beginning by examining or essaying essaying himself. And what he discovers is the imperceived experience of existence imperceived because of centuries of Christian moralizing, but also because its ever-presentness has rendered it invisible. Whereas Descartes' division of mind and body separates him from other bodies and other people, Montaigne sees his own relations.h.i.+p to his body as opening a gateway to 'the universal pattern of the human', and as a consequence society at large. Self-knowledge thus leads us into ourselves, but then out of ourselves into others: we need to get to know ourselves before we can understand our fellow man a logical paradox from a modern perspective, but not for Montaigne. himself. And what he discovers is the imperceived experience of existence imperceived because of centuries of Christian moralizing, but also because its ever-presentness has rendered it invisible. Whereas Descartes' division of mind and body separates him from other bodies and other people, Montaigne sees his own relations.h.i.+p to his body as opening a gateway to 'the universal pattern of the human', and as a consequence society at large. Self-knowledge thus leads us into ourselves, but then out of ourselves into others: we need to get to know ourselves before we can understand our fellow man a logical paradox from a modern perspective, but not for Montaigne.

Montaigne's essays thus bring with them an acceptance of variation and difference, but a difference built around our similarities in the first place. He sees travel as a way 'to rub and polish our brains through contact with others' and writes in Italian when in Italy and in French when he returns to France. He collects Brazilian love songs from the New World, making him perhaps the first fan of world music. He admires the Turks' provision of hospitals for animals and wonders whether elephants have a religion. In short, Montaigne's scepticism arrives at sympathy rather than certainty, seeing our most obstinate beliefs as simply grounded in habit. And with this Montaigne's essays grow out of their stoical adolescence their obsession with battlefields and military tactics and instead begin to explore the mindset of friends and enemies, animals and cannibals, Catholics, Protestants and Jews even asking himself: 'When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?'

But, most of all, Montaigne develops a philosophy based on the things that lie around him: nourished by our natural capacities, uncontaminated by the artificial additives of Stoicism, dogmatism and doubt. Rather than seeking sanctuary in the cathedral of Reason, Montaigne combs the sh.o.r.eline where death claws at life, and builds a shelter from what he finds there. It is formed of sand and seash.e.l.ls, of friends.h.i.+p and s.e.x, of dancing, sleeping, watermelons and wine. It takes as its subjects a fall from his horse, the bang of an arquebus, his dog, his cat, his kidney stones and the sights and sounds that surround him. But it is also composed of himself and his book: a book, he says, that is 'consubstantial with its author, concerned only with myself, an integral part of my life', with which he paces out his days 'hand in hand'. Rather than reaching above ourselves in a search for certainty, Montaigne shows us where we already stand. And instead of seeking for truths beyond the human, he poses a simpler but far more important philosophical problem: 'Have I wasted my time?'

'We are never at home, we are always beyond ourselves.' Montaigne's writing is an attempt to return home, to come close to himself, to shadow himself as he climbs the stairs to his library and sits in his chair. But from there he reaches out to the reader in a gesture that is quintessentially social, introducing himself to ourselves, though not simply in terms of his thoughts but in terms of his house and his vineyards, his books and his writing, his handshake, his smile, and his chestnut-brown hair. We are, he says, 'marvellously corporeal', and our sense of life increases as we see this mirrored in the proximity of others a truth he discovers within himself, but then expands to take in friends and family, servants and neighbours, Germans, Italians even other creatures and finally invokes in the intimacy between ourselves as readers and himself.

All the time reminding us that if you value a friend, you should meet with them; if you are fond of your children, eat with them; if there is someone you love, stand close to them, be near to them. And if you want to get back in touch with life as Flaubert wrote to a depressed correspondent 'read Montaigne...He will calm you...You will love him, you will see.'

1.

Waking to the Sound of a Spinet

(ill.u.s.trations credit 1.1)

Springing from the flanks of the Puy de Sancy in the mountains of the Auvergne, the Dordogne curls intestinally through the broad belly of France. It swells at the tributes of the Cere and the Vezere before sliding westward towards Bordeaux and the large estuary of the Gironde, where in a final peristalsis it meets with the sea. It gives life to the region, brought boats for the wine, and in Roman times gave a literal meaning to this old land of waters: Aquitaine.

Montaigne was born between eleven o'clock and noon on 28 February 1533. It was a fairly eventful year. Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn and was excommunicated by the Pope for his insolence. A daughter, Elizabeth, would follow soon after. Atahualpa, the last Emperor of the Incas, was strangled by his Spanish captors, despite paying a ransom of a room full of gold. And in France, just as the Protestant theologian John Calvin was leaving, Catherine de' Medici arrived as the wife of Henry II, bringing with her a taste for artichokes and aspics, sweetbreads, truffles and custard, thus helping to put French cuisine on the map and giving her something to chew on as she pondered the next twist and turn in the battle between Protestants and Catholics as the century unravelled.

Montaigne was christened 'Michel Eyquem de Montaigne' Eyquem being the surname that he was to drop, Montaigne the name of the n.o.ble chateau in which he was born. His family owed its fortune to the propitious location of Bordeaux as a port for the fruits of this fertile region. Between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries Aquitaine (or Gascony or Guyenne as it was variously called) had been English, following the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry Plantagenet, the heir to the English throne. English rule had ended in 1453 when John Talbot was cut down at the battle of Castillon, a few miles south of Montaigne, thereby bringing an end to the Hundred Years War. But during this time Bordeaux had grown fat with the profits from the English taste for Gascony's light-coloured wine: clairet clairet, or claret.

The English defeat had initially been disastrous for the economy, but trade gradually recovered. And after a lifetime trading wine, herring and blue woad-dye, and trading-up in terms of marrying a wealthy wife, in 1477 Montaigne's great-grandfather, the Bordeaux merchant Raymond Eyquem, bought the house and estate of Montaigne, its vines, mills and woods, for 900 francs. There is a marvellous story about Raymond on the day of completion entering the house with the vendor, the vendor leaving the house, and Raymond barricading the door and cracking open a bottle of wine. You can still visit the chateau. It stands a couple of miles north of the Dordogne on a windy plateau above a vine-covered hill (the name Montaigne means mount or mountain). The original house burnt down in 1885, and was replaced by a neo-Renaissance copy, but miraculously Montaigne's tower survived. (We can get a sense of how the house originally looked from early-nineteenth-century ill.u.s.trations like the one at the beginning of this chapter.) As owner of his n.o.ble house, Raymond and his descendants enjoyed the t.i.tle of Seigneur or Lord of Montaigne. The role of seigneur essentially derived from feudal times in that as well as his own personal demense he owned the t.i.tle to the lands around him. Annually he received a recognitive rent or cens cens from his tenants. And if a tenant sold a piece of land, the seigneur received a sum of up to 25 per cent of the price, or had the option of buying the land himself and reorganizing and maximizing his leases was something that Montaigne's father, Pierre, was very effective in doing. And Montaigne, in turn, was to harvest the fruits of these investments in being the third generation to have his hands unsullied by trade, earning him the right to consider himself a true member of the n.o.bility. from his tenants. And if a tenant sold a piece of land, the seigneur received a sum of up to 25 per cent of the price, or had the option of buying the land himself and reorganizing and maximizing his leases was something that Montaigne's father, Pierre, was very effective in doing. And Montaigne, in turn, was to harvest the fruits of these investments in being the third generation to have his hands unsullied by trade, earning him the right to consider himself a true member of the n.o.bility.

The seigneur exercised the right of 'common oven' over his tenants, requiring them to use his flour mills, and also his wine presses, and taking a cut as his due. And this economic power was reflected in his social standing in the local community. He was ent.i.tled to carry a sword and be first to receive communion. And at the chateau he would hear and pa.s.s judgement on the squabbles of his tenants errant ploughs and wayward cows grazing where they shouldn't.

The seigneurie of Montaigne was carefully built up during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, by Raymond and then his son, Grimon, and then his son Pierre, Montaigne's father. Pierre became the first in the family to take up the aristocratic occupation of bearing arms, the traditional role of the n.o.bility, whose privileges, such as their tax-free status, descended from their military service to the King. Pierre fought in the wars between France and Italy in the early sixteenth century, and upon returning from Italy in 1528 at the age of thirty-three married Antoinette de Louppes (or Lopez) from another wealthy Bordeaux merchant family, possibly of Spanish Jewish descent. Two years later he, like his father, became first jurat and provost of Bordeaux, rising to become mayor in 1554, a position that Montaigne was also to occupy.

Montaigne clearly adored his father, describing him as 'the best father that there ever was, and the most indulgent, even in his very old age'. He possessed the sort of eccentric vigour that most beloved fathers have, providing an admirable but not too intimidating act to follow. He made himself dumb-bells from canes filled with lead, and some shoes with leaded soles 'to make him lighter in running and jumping'. Even when he was past sixty he could vault over a table, climb stairs four steps at a time, and leap into the saddle in his furred gown. Montaigne tells how he was also, in his own way, interested in writing. He wrote a diary of his time in the Italian wars (something Montaigne was to imitate in his own journal of his trip to Italy), and he also kept a book in which every occurrence, no matter how trivial, was recorded; as Montaigne recalls: 'Our journeys our absences; marriages, deaths; the receiving of happy or unhappy news; the change of the princ.i.p.al servants such matters. An ancient custom, that I think would be good to revive, each in his own house. And I think I am a fool to have neglected it.'

About his mother, Antoinette, Montaigne says little, and his relations.h.i.+p with her seems to have been rather cool. There is evidence of her unhappiness with the distribution of the family's wealth in her will. And it has been suggested that Montaigne found her less interesting than her swashbuckling husband, coming as she did from more mercantile stock. But she was alive when Montaigne wrote, which perhaps inhibited him, and in fact outlived him, living all the time in the chateau. One wonders whether Montaigne's tower gave him an escape from not only the naggings of politics and parliament, but also pressures closer to home.

Pierre and Antoinette had two sons who died in infancy before Michel was born, which may help to explain his father's indulgence towards him. But Michel became the eldest of eight siblings Thomas (1534), Pierre (1535) Jeanne (1536), Arnaud (1541), Leonor (1552), Marie (1555) and Bertrand-Charles (1560) a brood that made the early deaths of five of his six daughters perhaps even harder to bear. Of his sisters, Jeanne became a Protestant but had a daughter, Jeanne de Lestonnac, who founded the Company of Mary Our Lady and was later canonized by the Catholic Church. Leonor, who was almost twenty years younger than Montaigne, married a councillor at the Bordeaux parliament and had a daughter, also called Jeanne. Marie married in 1579 but died childless soon after.

Of his brothers, Thomas, who was only a year younger than Montaigne also became a Protestant, and it was at their sister Jeanne's house that Montaigne's friend La Boetie died, taking the time to upbraid Thomas for his Protestant opinions. Montaigne notes in an aside the fate of Thomas's estate in the Medoc, the long tongue of land that samples the Atlantic north of Bordeaux: 'By the seash.o.r.e, my brother, the Seigneur d'Arsac, sees an estate he had there, buried under the sands which the sea spews before it; where the tops of some houses can no longer be seen; where his rents and domains are converted into pitiful barren pasturage.'

Pierre Jr was the seigneur of La Brousse near Montravel, a couple of miles to the south-east. Montaigne mentions him as a travelling companion during the civil wars, but he didn't marry and left few traces: an order for a suit of armour, his name in a book. It was his younger brother, Arnaud, who died when he was twenty-seven after being hit in the head by a tennis ball (heavier and more solid in those days). His death had an uncomfortable aftermath, however, in that a gold chain of Arnaud's was found amongst Montaigne's wife's possessions, leading some to suppose a relations.h.i.+p between the two. Others see it as a rather unseemly squabble over the deceased brother's property (the chain was eventually given to their mother, Antoinette, who claimed it as her own). Whether this incident was a symptom or the cause of Montaigne's slightly formal conduct towards his wife we shall never know. The youngest son, Bertrand-Charles, was seigneur of Mattecoulon, three miles to the north. He accompanied Montaigne on his travels to Italy and was clearly of a combative temperament, striking someone who insulted the Virgin Mary and killing a man in a duel.

But the Montaigne family's attentions were clearly lavished on their first-born son, Michel, or Michou as he was affectionately called. Montaigne's father seems to have been quite progressive by sixteenth-century standards. He didn't beat his son, and he thought children should not be woken violently from sleep 'in which they are plunged more deeply than we are'. Young Michel was thus gently roused by the music of an epinette, an early form of spinet, remarking, 'I was never without a man to do this for me.' Due to the popularity of humanistic ideas at the time, he was also brought up to speak only Latin. Whilst he was still 'at nurse', a tutor named Horsta.n.u.s was appointed to instruct him in the language, and the servants were forbidden from speaking French within earshot. According to Montaigne, a Latin isogloss thus grew up around the chateau, 'where there still remain Latin names for artisans and tools that have taken root by usage'. He says he was six years old before he 'understood any more French or Perigordian than Arabic' and 'knew the location of the Capitol before that of the Louvre, and the Tiber before the Seine'. And later in life, when his father, wracked by the pain of a kidney stone, fainted into his arms, he says it was a Latin swear word that escaped his lips.

But despite this pampering, Pierre insisted that his son should not consider himself separate from his Gascon inheritance. He was sent out to nurse as an infant and at his christening two local villagers held him over the font. This may look like a marvellous egalitarianism, but it was also intended as a rea.s.suring symbol of Michel's eventual responsibilities when he took over as seigneur often a time of great unease amongst the locals. Montaigne's early self thus seems to have been steeped in this exceptional upbringing, but also washed in the commonality of human experience, providing lessons that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

In 1539, at the age of six, Montaigne's humanistic education continued when he went to the College de Guyenne in Bordeaux, itself established in the year he was born and considered, according to Montaigne, to be the 'best in France'. Here the school day lasted from seven in the morning till nine at night, in an academic year that stretched for eleven months. At first, Latin instruction was through rote, with the teacher moving up through the benches in the cla.s.sroom until the whole cla.s.s were word-perfect. Then students moved on to reading and composition in both Latin and French. In the higher years they went on to study Cicero, Ovid and Lucan as well as history from Livy and Seneca. At the age of sixteen (or fourteen, depending on ability), philosophy was studied, mainly Aristotelian logic and physics and Greek mathematics. It was an elite education with a radically fas.h.i.+onable teacherly edge: Montaigne's schoolfriend Florimond de Raemond recalled how the staff refused to make the sign of a cross at the start of a lesson, describing it as 'mummery'.

During his time at the school Montaigne was fortunate enough to be taught by some of Europe's educational elite, such as the Scottish humanist George Buchanan, later tutor to Mary Queen of Scots and James I. Montaigne took part in plays written by Buchanan and was, it seems, a talented young actor. In 'advance of his age', he claims, he played the leading parts and was considered somewhat of a 'master-worker' of the dramatic arts. He observes, somewhat ruefully, that in antiquity the theatre was considered a perfectly respectable profession for an aristocratic young man to enter.

But to understand the broader aims of Montaigne's education, one needs to understand the importance of humanism as an intellectual force during the Renaissance. Originating in Italy in the late fourteenth century and sweeping across Europe in the two centuries after, humanism amounted to an attempt to imitate and revive the culture of antiquity which had been lost with the fall of the Roman Empire. It was this that provided the 'rebirth' central to the idea of Renaissance. At the heart of the movement was an emphasis on what was known as the studia humanitatis studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, literary studies and moral philosophy), as opposed to the (grammar, rhetoric, literary studies and moral philosophy), as opposed to the studia divinitatis studia divinitatis (theology and natural science) very broadly, a s.h.i.+ft from divinity and logic to language. Through their new linguistic prowess, humanists sought to recover the cla.s.sical past, but also exploit these rhetorical and oratorical skills in contemporary political and diplomatic life. (theology and natural science) very broadly, a s.h.i.+ft from divinity and logic to language. Through their new linguistic prowess, humanists sought to recover the cla.s.sical past, but also exploit these rhetorical and oratorical skills in contemporary political and diplomatic life.

At the intellectual heart of the movement was the belief that language i.e. speech was the defining characteristic of what it was to be human, the thing that separated us from animals. According to Cicero, 'Men most excel the beasts in this, that they can speak.' But the exciting implication of this was that by improving oneself linguistically through translation, textual scholars.h.i.+p, and commenting upon ancient texts one could improve oneself morally (in stark contrast to our spiritual state as inheritors of original sin). Man could therefore develop, move further away from animals, and even approach perfection through the pursuit of eloquence the central goal of humanist study, what the German humanist Johannes Santritter called 'the queen of all things'.

Montaigne's education thus reflects this ideal of an attainable perfection through eloquence. In cla.s.s he would have been expected to learn rhetorical figures and tropes, and examine letter-writing manuals for instance, On Copiousness On Copiousness by the Dutch humanist Erasmus, which gave 195 examples of the ways in which one might express pleasure at receiving a letter: 'Your letter has delighted me greatly', 'Your paper has imbued me with ineffable delight', 'What clover is to bees, what willow boughs are to goats, what honey is to the bear, your letter is to me'...and so on. by the Dutch humanist Erasmus, which gave 195 examples of the ways in which one might express pleasure at receiving a letter: 'Your letter has delighted me greatly', 'Your paper has imbued me with ineffable delight', 'What clover is to bees, what willow boughs are to goats, what honey is to the bear, your letter is to me'...and so on.

Pupils would then be expected to hone and rewrite their own compositions a process that we can see at work in Montaigne's life's work: the steadily acc.u.mulating versions of the Essays Essays. And through these exercises pupils were also drawn into the moral and political orbit of antiquity: rehearsing in their own strict cla.s.ses the cla.s.sical and Stoic lessons that made one into a man.

'Yet for all that,' Montaigne reflects, 'it was still a school.' And he remains mindful of the downside to this heady cultural optimism, in terms of the unrealistic expectations that it raised. Despite his precocity in Latin, Montaigne felt he gained little from his studies: he says his father reaped 'no fruit' from his investment because of his own 'sterile and unsuitable soil'. And during his schooldays, Montaigne felt himself toiling under an uncomfortable yoke of learning. He clearly found school rather boring, leaving at the age of thirteen. And in an essay 'Of the Education of Children' he berates the teaching establishment for their s.a.d.i.s.tic tendencies 'intoxicated with their own rage' and criticizes the 'torture' and 'hard labour' that const.i.tutes the essential part of education's necessary demolition of the will.

Asking himself what he was fit for when he was younger, Montaigne answers: 'For nothing.' He describes himself as the dullest and slowest not only of his brothers but of all the boys in his region. And despite his admiration for his father, he reveals that 'he who left me in charge of my house predicted that I would ruin it'. Proof of this is given in the will that his father made in 1561, naming his wife as the inheritor of his estate; only later, in 1567, did he change it to name his eldest son. And Montaigne's apparent lack of promise is shown in the fact that our knowledge of him dissipates in the years immediately after his schooling, where he spent his time possibly studying law in Paris or Toulouse. He was saved when an uncle stooped to his aid, securing for him a post in the newly created Court at Perigueux in 1554, which a few years later would merge with the parliament at Bordeaux.

2.

Because It Was Him; Because It Was Me

(ill.u.s.trations credit 2.1)

Perhaps the most famous of all Montaigne's essays is that 'Of Friends.h.i.+p', dealing with his relations.h.i.+p with Etienne de La Boetie. For five years he says he enjoyed the 'sweet companions.h.i.+p' of his friend; the days following his death being 'nothing more than smoke, nothing more than a dark and dreary night'.

Montaigne worked at the Bordeaux parliament for thirteen tedious years, dealing with mainly complex civil legal cases in the Chambre des Enquetes (chamber of pet.i.tions) rather than the more important cases in the Grand' Chambre. But his boredom was alleviated by the friends.h.i.+p he struck up with La Boetie, a fellow counselor and a precocious humanist and author of a treatise against tyranny. Their friends.h.i.+p lasted from 1558 until La Boetie's death in 1563; yet Montaigne's grief for his friend never ends. His most famous sentence describing the essence of their affection was composed over the two decades between the time he first started writing the essays around 1572 and his final additions to the text up to twenty years later. At first he writes, 'If pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed.' But then he adds the phrase: 'except by saying: because it was him; because it was me', with each part of the addition being written in a different pen. And this agrees with the pattern of increasing openness and emotional honesty we see in Montaigne's writing as it matures over time. In 1580 he describes the fact that most of his children had died in infancy: 'but one single daughter who has escaped that misfortune, is more than six years old, and has never been guided or chastised for her childish faults'. But returning to the line again in the years before he dies, Montaigne encircles her name within the arms of his sentence: 'but Leonor Leonor, one single daughter ...'

La Boetie influenced the Essays Essays in a number of important ways. He left Montaigne his books and papers, which served as the foundation of his library. He provided a Stoic model to which Montaigne initially attempted to adhere. And his death created an absence that Montaigne attempted to fill with writing. He says that he would have preferred to have written letters rather than essays, yet lacked an addressee: 'a certain relations.h.i.+p to lead me on, to sustain me, and raise me up. For I cannot talk to the wind.' Relaxing in a spa in Italy some eighteen years after La Boetie's death, Montaigne was suddenly overcome with grief for his dead friend: 'and felt like that for so long, without recovering, that it caused me much pain'. in a number of important ways. He left Montaigne his books and papers, which served as the foundation of his library. He provided a Stoic model to which Montaigne initially attempted to adhere. And his death created an absence that Montaigne attempted to fill with writing. He says that he would have preferred to have written letters rather than essays, yet lacked an addressee: 'a certain relations.h.i.+p to lead me on, to sustain me, and raise me up. For I cannot talk to the wind.' Relaxing in a spa in Italy some eighteen years after La Boetie's death, Montaigne was suddenly overcome with grief for his dead friend: 'and felt like that for so long, without recovering, that it caused me much pain'.

Etienne de La Boetie was born in 1530 at Sarlat, thirty miles east of Montaigne on the Dordogne. His family was well connected: his father was a.s.sistant to the Governor of Perigord and his mother the sister of the president of the Bordeaux parliament. Orphaned at an early age, he was educated by his uncle, a priest, before entering the university of Orleans to study law. There, he was taught by the future Protestant martyr Du Bourg and it was probably during this period that he wrote his famous discourse against tyranny, On Voluntary Servitude On Voluntary Servitude. It was a treatise probably inspired by the ferment surrounding the suppression of the salt tax riots in Bordeaux in 1548, but it also looks forward to Enlightenment ideas of natural liberty, fraternity and freedom from subjection. Men are dulled, says La Boetie, by custom and ideology into an acceptance of tyrannical rule. Yet through solidarity and pa.s.sive resistance they can achieve its overthrow. In this sense On Voluntary Servitude On Voluntary Servitude stood as an antidote to Machiavelli's stood as an antidote to Machiavelli's The Prince The Prince (1513), which had argued for the necessity of autocratic rule to maintain power. La Boetie, more idealistically, senses the incipient power and rights of the people: Montaigne says La Boetie would rather have been born at Venice (a republic) than at Sarlat. But although the text of (1513), which had argued for the necessity of autocratic rule to maintain power. La Boetie, more idealistically, senses the incipient power and rights of the people: Montaigne says La Boetie would rather have been born at Venice (a republic) than at Sarlat. But although the text of On Voluntary Servitude On Voluntary Servitude was widely circulated Montaigne says that he had read it before they met it was only published posthumously, in 1574. was widely circulated Montaigne says that he had read it before they met it was only published posthumously, in 1574.

After graduation La Boetie became a counselor at the Bordeaux parliament, where his talents were soon recognized. He was entrusted with a mission to Henry II to pet.i.tion for regular payments to the court, and he became a respected political negotiator: at Agen to the south-west of Bordeaux he arranged that Protestants should be allowed access to churches when they weren't being otherwise used. And during this time he also made his mark as a humanist, translating Xenophon and Plutarch from Greek into French.

In 1557 Montaigne joined the Bordeaux parliament and soon became aware of his future friend, as La Boetie soon became aware of him, and when they finally encountered each other, Montaigne recorded: We sought each another before we met, from reports we had each heard of the other...And at our first meeting, which happened by chance at a great feast and town gathering, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that moment on nothing could be as close as we were to one another...

They soon became inseparable: a pair of wealthy, well-connected men about town, La Boetie even dedicating three Latin poems to his younger, more hedonistic friend, praising his 'fiery energy', but upbraiding him for his sensual desire.

But in August 1563 La Boetie died. We know the details of his death from a letter that Montaigne wrote to his father, telling of his final days and published at the end of his posthumous edition of his friend's works in 1572.

On Monday 9 August La Boetie was taken ill with stomach pains, having recently returned from a mission to Agen to the south-east of Bordeaux, where plague as well as religious unrest was rife. Montaigne tells how he had invited him to dinner, but on hearing his friend was unwell went to see him and found him 'much changed' suffering from dysentery and stomach cramps, yet blaming himself for exercising the day before whilst wearing only a doublet and silk s.h.i.+rt. Montaigne encouraged him to get away from Bordeaux all the same, for the houses round about were also visited by the plague, and to go to Germignan, six miles away, to stay with his sister, Jeanne de Lestonnac. Besides, he added, a journey on horseback can sometimes help with such complaints.

The next day, however, Montaigne received word from La Boetie's wife that he had deteriorated during the night. She called a physician and an apothecary but urged Montaigne to come. La Boetie was overjoyed to see his friend and persuaded Montaigne to stay. Montaigne left the following day but went to see him again on Thursday, and again found his condition worrying. He was rapidly losing blood and was very weak. Montaigne went away but returned again on Sat.u.r.day and after that never left his side.

On Sunday La Boetie lost consciousness for a while and when he came to said that he had seemed to be in a 'thick cloud and dense fog' but felt no pain. He continued to sicken, and called for his wife and uncle to be brought into the room, so that they might hear what he had set down in his will. Montaigne said that this would alarm them and then La Boetie broached the subject that was quickly becoming unignorable: And then he asked whether we hadn't been somewhat alarmed by his fainting. 'It is nothing, my brother,' I told him: 'these accidents happen with such illnesses.' 'True, my brother,' he said, 'it would be nothing, even if it should happen to be the thing you most fear.' 'For you,' I replied, 'it might be a good thing, but the loss would be mine, being thereby deprived of so great, so wise, and so resolute a friend, the like of which I would never be able to find again.'

La Boetie then thanked his uncle for bringing him up and told his wife that he had willed her 'such portion of my estate as I give to you, and be contented with it, though it is very inadequate to your merits'.

He then turned to Montaigne: 'My brother,' he said, 'for whom I have so entire a love, and whom I chose from so many men, thinking to renew with you that virtuous and sincere friends.h.i.+p which, due to the vices of the age, has grown to be almost unknown to us, and which now only exists in certain traces in our memory of antiquity, I beg you, as a sign of my affection, to accept my library...a slender offering, but offered in good will, and appropriate to you, given the affection you have for letters. It will be a memorial of your old companion.'

Montaigne responded by praising La Boetie for his 'admirable fort.i.tude', and for providing a philosophical model that he vowed to emulate 'when my turn came', all of which, he insisted was, 'the real object of our studies and of philosophy'. La Boetie then took Montaigne by the hand, saying that his death would in a sense be a deliverance from the vexations of life, confident in the fact that he would meet G.o.d in the 'abode of the blessed'. Montaigne described him as 'a soul full of repose, tranquillity and a.s.surance', 'steadfast' and full of 'eloquence' to the end.

Eventually, however, the illness overwhelmed him to the extent that they had to force his mouth open to make him drink, La Boetie asking pitifully but stoically: 'An vivere tanti est?' (Is life worth so much?). Finally, he called for Montaigne, saying: 'My brother...stay close to me, please.' But at this point a discordant note enters Montaigne's account perhaps the real feelings and terrified panic of a dying man? La Boetie becomes deranged, appealing to Montaigne: 'My brother, my brother, do you refuse me a place?'

But then, finally: he began to rest a little, which revived us in our hopes, so much so that I left the room and rejoiced at this with Madame de La Boetie. But an hour or so later, he spoke my name once or twice, and then, heaving a long sigh to himself, he gave up his soul, at three o'clock on the Wednesday morning, the 18th of August 1563, after having lived thirty-two years, nine months, and seventeen days.

Montaigne's letter is clearly a moving testament to his friend. But the question that inevitably raises itself is to what extent was there more than friends.h.i.+p at stake that is to say, was it a platonic relations.h.i.+p or a romantic one?

The idea that the two men's relations.h.i.+p was a h.o.m.os.e.xual one is by no means implausible, but neither is it necessarily the case: Montaigne later adds to his essay a reference to: 'that other Greek licence...justly abhorred by our conscience', meaning h.o.m.os.e.xuality, a crime one of his schoolmasters, Marc-Antoine Muret, was accused of, for which he was forced to flee France. And Montaigne talks about friends.h.i.+p as holding everything in common: 'wills, thought, opinions, possessions, wives, children, honour, and life'. So his conception of friends.h.i.+p was not necessarily inimical to marriage, and La Boetie was married at the time that they were friends (although, of course, this in itself doesn't rule out a relations.h.i.+p between them, even an unconsummated one).

But what we as modern readers perhaps fail to recognize in the intensity of Montaigne's friends.h.i.+p with La Boetie is the influence of cla.s.sical ideas of friends.h.i.+p, which descended from Aristotle and Cicero and which saw friends.h.i.+p as a relations.h.i.+p of distinct significance in the words of Aristotle, the existence of 'one soul in two bodies'. In the cla.s.sical sense, friends.h.i.+p was special because it was free from the vested interests of family and marriage: i.e. one gained nothing tangible from it, such as inherited wealth or children. And this idea often combined with a Stoic impulse in the sense that true friends.h.i.+p was most clearly manifested after after death, when one's affections stood no chance of being reciprocated. Jean-Jacques Boissard's death, when one's affections stood no chance of being reciprocated. Jean-Jacques Boissard's Emblemes Latins Emblemes Latins (1588) thus includes an emblem ent.i.tled 'Perfect is the friends.h.i.+p that lives after death', which shows two friends sitting either side of a vine-covered tree. One of them is dressed as a Roman solder, the other wearing the gown of a dying man. The accompanying text explains: (1588) thus includes an emblem ent.i.tled 'Perfect is the friends.h.i.+p that lives after death', which shows two friends sitting either side of a vine-covered tree. One of them is dressed as a Roman solder, the other wearing the gown of a dying man. The accompanying text explains: The friend his naked, poor and fragile friend embraces: And grows affection where affliction grows: Small is the virtue that a.s.sists the living, Of a weak friends.h.i.+p, but that which stays The same after death, achieves perfection.

But perhaps the most famous representation of this humanistic idea of friends.h.i.+p is provided by Hans Holbein's The Amba.s.sadors The Amba.s.sadors, which was painted in April 1533, a few months after Montaigne was born. Jean de Dinteville was the French amba.s.sador to the English court and his friend Georges de Selve was Bishop of Lavaur and also a humanist scholar, having translated Plutarch's series of dual biographies, Parallel Lives Parallel Lives. The portrait was painted during a visit Selve paid to Dinteville in London, just before he left to take up the position of amba.s.sador to Venice. So the painting, probably commissioned by Selve, was a record, despite their impending separation, of their friends.h.i.+p, one doc.u.ment describing Selve as Dinteville's 'intime ami'.

But scholars have been intrigued by the symbols of division in the painting. On the lower shelf there is a lute with a broken string (a traditional symbol of discord), some flutes (a.s.sociated with war), a terrestrial globe centred on Rome and opposite it a copy of a Lutheran hymnal; dividers; and a mathematics textbook, Peter Apian's A New and Thorough Instruction in all Mercantile Calculations A New and Thorough Instruction in all Mercantile Calculations of 1527, itself opened to an entry on division. of 1527, itself opened to an entry on division.

What the painting therefore seems to be saying is that humanist friends.h.i.+p has the power to rise above social and political conflict and here we are reminded of the tense negotiations around Henry VIII's divorce, negotiations of which Dinteville, as amba.s.sador, would have been well aware. And it is perhaps no accident that art historians have interpreted the two figures in an almost marital pose: male, humanistic friends.h.i.+p being seen to transcend the trouble and strife of matrimony.

But this message is further complicated by the astronomical clocks on top of the table. When looked at in detail it emerges that they all show contradictory times: the pillar dial showing a time of 9 a.m. on 10 April, or 3 p.m. on 15 August; the polyhedral dial and the celestial globe showing times of 10.30 a.m. and 2.40 p.m., respectively. What this suggests is that despite our instinctive desire to see the painting as a record of a specific time and location, as if it were a photograph, it has in fact an altogether more ambitious meaning. What we begin to realize is that that Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve are peering at us from outside time outside time.

Dinteville and Selve are thus pictured in the true colours of the afterlife, their friends.h.i.+p rising above political and religious division, but also beyond death itself. And it is this that helps to explain the strange anamorphic skull that spills across the bottom of the picture. Traditionally, a skull would have been included in a picture to represent the transience of human existence; but here this message is reversed: it is the friends.h.i.+p of Dinteville and Selve that is more real, more long-lasting than death, with the result that death itself becomes ephemeral as if pa.s.sing at speed across the plane of the painting. The mortal world thus exists in another dimension, almost as if it were from a different painting that had been leaned up against this one (something a busy painter like Holbein must have seen often). And if we look more closely at the painting we soon become aware of its more general lack of moorings: the floor recedes into the darkness of s.p.a.ce; the curtain reveals only a crucifix at the top left-hand side. The only sure coordinate is the friends.h.i.+p between Dinteville and Selve, which knits them together across the vast interstices of eternity. As they look down upon us from their immortal perspective, they can no longer discern the skull at the bottom of the picture: they can no longer see Death (and of course the dark irony of the painting is that as we slowly decline our heads towards the floor, the rest of us can).

Montaigne's letter describing La Boetie's death thus represents a dual portrait similar to Holbein's, intended to capture Montaigne and La Boetie's shared sense of Christian and Stoic resolve: of friends.h.i.+p perfected by death. And after La Boetie's death, Montaigne fulfils one of the traditional roles of friends.h.i.+p to selflessly, stoically, complete your friend's work, seeing through the press La Boetie's Oeuvres Oeuvres, the final fruits of his humanistic prowess.