How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  This Father William figure had other fine qualities, all more characteristic of his generation than of Montaigne’s. He was serious; he took care over the neatness of his appearance and dress, and showed “conscientiousness and scrupulousness” in all things. His sporting talents and gallant manners made him popular with women: Montaigne describes him as “very well suited to the service of the ladies, both by nature and by art.” It was probably to amuse female company that he sprang over tables. As for real sexual escapades, Pierre gave his son inconsistent messages. On the one hand, he related stories “of remarkable intimacies, especially of his own, with respectable women, free from any suspicion.” On the other, “he solemnly swore that he had come to his marriage a virgin.” Montaigne seemed unconvinced by the virginity claim, noting only, “and yet he had taken a very long part in the Italian wars.”

  After his return from Italy and his marriage, Pierre began a political career in Bordeaux. He was elected jurat and provost in 1530, then deputy mayor in 1537, and finally mayor in 1554. This period saw difficult times in the city: a new local tax on salt in 1548 inspired riots, which “France” punished by stripping Bordeaux of many legal rights. As mayor, Pierre did what he could to restore its fortunes, but the privileges came back slowly. The stress damaged his health. Just as his tales of war atrocities may have put Montaigne off the military life, so the sight of Pierre’s exhaustion encouraged him to keep more distance from the job when he too became mayor of Bordeaux some thirty years later.

  Pierre had some brilliant ideas, including one for a sort of sixteenth-century eBay: he proposed that each town should set up a place where anyone could advertise what they wanted: “I want to sell some pearls; I want to buy some pearls. So-and-so wants company to go to Paris; so-and-so is looking for a servant with such-and-such qualifications; so-and-so wants a master; so-and-so a workman; one man this, another man that.” It sounds sensible, but for some reason nothing came of the plan.

  Another good idea of Pierre’s was keeping a journal in which he recorded everything that happened on the estate: the comings and goings of servants, and financial and agricultural data of all kinds. He encouraged his son to do the same. Montaigne started, in a fit of good intentions after Pierre’s death, but did not keep it up: only one fragment survives. “I think I am a fool to have neglected it,” he wrote in the Essays. He did manage to maintain another record begun by his father, using a printed calendar called the Ephemeris, by the German writer Michel Beuther. This survives almost in full, minus a few leaves, and is filled with notes by Montaigne and others in his family. Each date in the year has its own page, combining a printed summary of events from history with a blank area for adding remarks year by year. Montaigne used his Beuther to record births, travels, and notable visits over his lifetime. He kept it quite faithfully, but with a tendency to get dates, ages, and other such precise information wrong.

  His wife’s complaints notwithstanding, Pierre apparently adored hard work of all kinds, none more so than developing the estate. Perhaps what irritated her was his preference for spending on improvements rather than on buying new property, together with the habit of starting more things than he finished. Pierre’s abandonment of the trading-post idea may have been more in character than it seems. On Pierre’s death, Montaigne inherited a lot of half-completed jobs on the estate, which he always felt he should see through, but never did. Work left at the building-site stage is very annoying; perhaps inaction was Montaigne’s way of dealing with it, just as overt exasperation was Antoinette’s.

  Some of the abandoned work may have been a sign that Pierre’s energies were in decline, for, from the age of sixty-six, he suffered regular debilitating attacks of kidney stones. Montaigne often saw his father doubled over in agony during the last few years of his life. He never forgot the shock of witnessing the first attack, which struck Pierre without warning and knocked him unconscious from sheer pain. He fell into his son’s arms as he passed out. It was probably a similar episode, or complications ensuing from one, that finally killed him. He died on June 18, 1568, at the age of seventy-four.

  By this time, Pierre had replaced his first will, so implicitly critical of his son’s abilities, with a new one which gave Montaigne the task of looking after his younger brothers and sisters and serving them as a replacement father. “He must take my place and represent me to them,” was how he put it. Montaigne did take his father’s place, and he did not always find it an easy one to occupy.

  In the Essays, he comes across as a kind of negative image of Pierre. Praise for his father is often followed by an assertion that he himself is completely different. Having described how Pierre loved to build up the estate, Montaigne gives us an almost comically exaggerated picture of his own lack of either skill or interest in such work. Whatever he has done, “completing some old bit of wall and repairing some badly constructed building,” has been in honor of Pierre’s memory rather than for his own satisfaction, he says. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would warn, “One should not try to surpass one’s father in diligence; that makes one sick.” On the whole Montaigne did not try, and thus he kept himself sane.

  Inadequate as he felt himself to be in the practical skills of life, he knew the advantage he had when it came to literature and learning. Pierre’s knowledge of books was as limited as his love of them was boundless. Typically for his generation, in Montaigne’s view, he made books the object of a cult and went to great lengths to seek out their authors, “receiving them at his house like holy persons” and “collecting their sayings and discourses like oracles.” Yet he showed little critical understanding. All right, so Pierre could bounce over the table on one manly thumb, Montaigne seems to say, but in matters of the intellect he was an embarrassment. He worshiped books without understanding them. His son would always try to do the opposite.

  Montaigne was right in thinking this characteristic of Pierre’s contemporaries. French nobles of the early 1500s loved everything clever and Italianate; they distanced themselves from their own predecessors’ defiantly crass attitude to scholarship. What Montaigne neglected to observe was that he himself was just as typical of his era in rejecting the book-learning fetish. The fathers filled their sons with literature and history, trained them in critical thinking, and taught them to bandy around classical philosophies like juggling balls. By way of thanks, the sons dismissed it all as valueless and adopted a superior attitude. Some even tried to revive the older anti-scholarly tradition, as if it were a radical departure never thought of before.

  There was a tiredness and a sourness in Montaigne’s generation, along with a rebellious new form of creativity. If they were cynical, it is easy to see why: they had to watch the ideals that had guided their upbringing turn into a grim joke. The Reformation, hailed by some earlier thinkers as a blast of fresh air beneficial even to the Church itself, became a war and threatened to ruin civilized society. Renaissance principles of beauty, poise, clarity, and intelligence dissolved into violence, cruelty, and extremist theology. Montaigne’s half-century was so disastrous for France that it took another half-century to recover from it—and in some ways recovery never came, for the turmoil of the late 1500s stopped France from building a major New World empire like those of England and Spain, and kept it inward-looking. By the time of Montaigne’s death, France was economically feeble, and ravaged by disease, famine, and public disorder. No wonder young nobles of his generation ended up as exquisitely educated misanthropes.

  Montaigne had some of this anti-intellectual streak in him. He grew up to feel that the only hope for humanity lay in the simplicity and ignorance of the peasantry. They were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else. To this extent, he returned to the cult of ignorance: a slap in the face for Pierre.

  But nothing is ever quite the same the second time around. And no one could b
e less like the medieval nobles than Montaigne, with his essaying and venturing, and his appending of uncertain codas to everything he wrote. His way of adding “though I don’t know,” implicitly or explicitly, to almost every thought he ever had sets him very far apart from the old ways. The ideals of his father survived in him after all, but in mutant form: softened, darkened, and with the certainty knocked out of them.

  THE EXPERIMENT

  Perhaps this willingness to question certainties and prejudices just ran in the family. Amid the religious divide, the Eyquems were well known—“famous,” said Montaigne—for their freedom from sectarian disharmony. Most remained Catholics, but several converted to Protestantism, causing remarkably little upset in the process. When one young Protestant Eyquem showed signs of extremism, Montaigne’s friend La Boétie advised him to desist, “out of respect for the good reputation that the family you belong to has acquired by continual concord—a family that is as dear to me as any family in the world: Lord, what a family! from which there has never come any act other than that of a worthy man.”

  This admirable clan was also a fairly large one. Montaigne had seven brothers and sisters, not counting the two who were born before him and who died, leaving him the eldest. The age gap between the remaining siblings was considerable; at its widest, it would have felt like a generational divide, for Montaigne was already twenty-seven when his youngest brother, Bertrand, was born.

  So far as is known, none of the younger siblings received as much attention or as exceptional an education as little Micheau. The daughters probably had the normal female education, which is to say almost none at all. Even the other sons were treated more conventionally, so far as is known. The only well-documented child in the family is Michel de Montaigne—and he was not merely educated. He was made the object of an almost unprecedented pedagogic experiment.

  The unusual treatment began soon after his birth, when Micheau was sent to live with a humble family in a nearby village. Having a peasant wet-nurse was normal enough, but Montaigne’s father wanted his son to absorb an understanding of commoners’ ways along with their breast-milk, so that he would grow up comfortable with the people who most needed a seigneur’s help. Instead of bringing a nurse to the baby, therefore, he sent the baby to the nurse, and left him there long enough to be weaned. Even at the christening, Pierre had “people of the lowliest class” hold the infant over the font. From the start, Montaigne had the impression at once of being a peasant among peasants, and of being very special and different. This is the mixture of feelings that would stay with him for life. He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary.

  The village plan had one downside which Pierre is unlikely to have considered. Living with strangers, Micheau must have failed to “bond” (as we might now say) with his real parents. This would apply to some extent to any wet-nursed child, but most would have contact with their mothers the rest of the time. Montaigne apparently did not. If twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas have any validity (and perhaps they don’t: mother–child bonding might prove as transient a fad as wet-nursing), such deprivation in the crucial first months of life would have affected Montaigne’s relationship with his mother for ever. According to Montaigne’s own assessment, however, the scheme worked beautifully, and he advised his readers, where possible, to do the same. Let your children “be formed by fortune under the laws of the common people and of nature,” he said.

  However old he was when he was restored to the château—perhaps he was one or two—the break with his adoptive family must have been abrupt indeed, for the second element of his experimental education would prove totally incompatible with the first. Back in his family home, little peasant Micheau was now to be brought up as a native speaker of Latin.

  Until now, the language he had heard most, in his foster home, would have been the local Périgord dialect. If he was old enough to eat his hosts’ food, he was old enough for his ear to become attuned to their language, although he was too young to speak it. He now had to leap from this to Latin, bypassing the language in which he would one day write: French. This was an astounding project for anyone even to think of, let alone put into effect, and it presented a practical difficulty. Pierre himself had minimal command of Latin; his wife and the servants knew none at all. Even in the wider world, a supply of native Latin speakers could no longer be found. How did Pierre think he was going to bring Montaigne up to be fluent in the language of Cicero and Virgil?

  The solution he found was a two-part one. Step one was to engage a tutor who, though no native, did have near-flawless Latin. Pierre found a German named Dr. Horst, whose greatest qualification was having good Latin but almost no French, never mind Périgordian, so that he and young Micheau could communicate in only one way. Thus, from an early age—“before the first loosening of my tongue,” as Montaigne put it—Dr. Horst or (in Latin) Horstanus became the most important person in his life.

  Step two was to ban everyone else in the household from speaking to Micheau in any living language. If they wanted to tell the boy to eat his breakfast, they had to do it using the Latin imperative and appropriate case-endings. They all duly set about learning a little, including Pierre himself, who worked to brush up his schoolboy knowledge. Thus, as Montaigne wrote, everyone benefited.

  My father and mother learned enough Latin in this way to understand it, and acquired sufficient skill to use it when necessary, as did also the servants who were most attached to my service. Altogether, we Latinized ourselves so much that it overflowed all the way to our villages on every side, where there still remain several Latin names for artisans and tools that have taken root by usage. As for me, I was over six before I understood any more French or Périgordian than Arabic.

  Thus, “without artificial means, without a book, without grammar or precept, without the whip, and without tears,” Montaigne learned a Latin as fine as that spoken by his tutor, and with a more natural flow than Horst could have managed. When he later encountered other teachers, they complimented him on a Latin that was both technically perfect and down-to-earth.

  Why did Pierre do it? This is one of those moments when the half-millennium gap between ourselves and our subject suddenly yawns at our feet. Most people today would think it crazy to separate parent and child for the sake of a dead language. But in the Renaissance, the prize was considered worth the sacrifice. Command of beautiful and grammatically perfect Latin was the highest goal of a humanistic education: it unlocked the door to the ancient world—considered the locus of all human wisdom—as well as to much of modern culture, since most scholars still wrote Latin. It offered entry to a good career: Latin was essential for legal and civil service. The language bestowed an almost magical blessing on anyone who spoke it. If you spoke well, you must be able to think well. Pierre wanted to give his son the best advantage imaginable: a link both to the lost paradise of antiquity and to a successful personal future.

  The way Pierre wanted Micheau to learn it also exemplified the ideals of the time. Most boys learned their Latin through painful effort at school, but the Romans had not done this: they spoke it as naturally as they breathed air. It was because moderns had to learn the language artificially that they were unable ever to match the ancients in wisdom or greatness of soul—or so went the theory.

  It was anything but a cruel experiment, at least in obvious respects. The new theories of education emphasized that learning should be pleasurable, and that the only motivation children needed was their inborn desire for knowledge. When he was a little older, Montaigne would learn Greek in a spirit of fun too. “We volleyed our conjugations back and forth,” he recalled, “like those who learn arithmetic and geometry by such games as checkers and chess.” His Greek did not stick: he later admitted to having little knowledge of the language. But, in general, the hedonistic approach to education did make a difference to him. Having been guided early in life by his own curiosity alone, he grew up to be an indepen
dent-minded adult, following his own path in everything rather than deferring to duty and discipline—an outcome perhaps more far-reaching than his father had bargained for.

  Other aspects of Montaigne’s early life were governed by similar principles of ease. It was thought that “it troubles the tender brains of children to wake them in the morning with a start,” so Pierre had his son charmed out of bed like a cobra every day by the plangent sound of a lute or other musical instrument. Corporal punishment was almost unknown to him; in his entire boyhood, he was only twice struck with a rod, and then very gently. It was an education of “wisdom and tact.”

  Pierre had got his ideas from his beloved scholar friends, and perhaps also from people he met in Italy, though the main ideologue to whom such an approach can be traced was a Dutchman, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had written on education while based in Italy two decades earlier. Montaigne wrote that the scheme had been born from his father’s having made “all the inquiries a man can make, among men of learning and understanding.” Typically for Pierre, it was at once a scholarly notion and a flighty one. It certainly bore the mark of Pierre, rather than Antoinette, and one would give a lot to know what she thought about the project. If Montaigne’s peasant fostering had already set him apart from her, this stage of his education emphasized that separation even further. They were now living in the same house, but linguistically and culturally they were on different planets. She is unlikely to have become very proficient in Latin, although Montaigne says she learned some for his benefit. According to him, Pierre’s skills remained rudimentary too. If the experiment was genuinely as rigorous as his account implies (a big if), both parents now had only a stilted and unnatural way of talking to their son. Even Horst could not speak to him in a fully spontaneous manner, however profound his knowledge. So much for “naturalness.” One suspects—and hopes—that the rules were broken from time to time. Yet Montaigne mentions nothing of that. Nor does he seem to think that the experiment was anything less than a huge success.