How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  The Huguenot congregation fought back; they had long expected trouble and were ready to defend themselves. They forced the soldiers out and barricaded the barn door, then climbed out on scaffolding over the roof to pelt Guise’s men with stones, piled there in case of need. The soldiers fired their arquebuses, and managed to reenter the barn. The Protestants now fled for their lives; many fell from the roof or were shot down as they ran. About thirty died, and over a hundred were wounded.

  The consequences were dramatic. The national Protestant leader, Louis I de Bourbon, prince de Condé, urged Protestants to rise up to save themselves from further attacks. Many took up arms and, in response, Catholics did the same—both sides being driven more by fear than hatred. Catherine de’ Medici, acting on behalf of the twelve-year-old Charles IX, ordered an inquiry into Vassy, but it fizzled out as public inquiries do, and by now it was too late. Leaders of both sides converged on Paris with crowds of their supporters. As the duc de Guise entered the city, he happened to pass a Protestant procession led by Condé; the two men exchanged cold salutes with the pommels of their swords.

  One observer, a lawyer and friend of Montaigne’s named Étienne Pasquier, remarked in a letter that all anyone could talk about after the Vassy massacre was war. “If it was permitted to me to assess these events, I would tell you that it was the beginning of a tragedy.” He was right. Increasing clashes between the two sides escalated into outright battles, and these became the first of the French civil wars. It was savage but short, ending the following year when the duc de Guise was shot, leaving the Catholics temporarily without a leader and reluctantly willing to conclude a treaty. But there was no feeling of resolution, and neither side was happy. A second war would be set off on September 30, 1567, by another massacre, this time of Catholics by Protestants, at Nîmes.

  The wars are generally described in the plural, but it makes at least as much sense to consider them a single long war with interludes of peace. Montaigne and his contemporaries often referred to outbreaks of fighting as “troubles.” The consensus is that there were eight of these, and it may be convenient to summarize them here to get a sense of how much of Montaigne’s life was conditioned by war:

  First Trouble (1562–63). Started by the massacre of Protestants inVassy, ended by the peace of Amboise.

  Second Trouble (1567–68). Started by a massacre of Catholics in

  Nîmes, ended by the Peace of Longjumeau.

  Third Trouble (1568–70). Started by new anti-Protestant legislation, ended by the peace of Saint-Germain.

  Fourth Trouble (1572–73). Started by the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres of Protestants in Paris and elsewhere, ended by the Peaceof La Rochelle.

  Fifth Trouble (1574–76). Started by fighting in Poitou and Saintonge, ended by the “Peace of Monsieur.”

  Sixth Trouble (1576–77). Started by anti-Protestant legislation at the Estates-General of Blois, ended by the Peace of Poitiers.

  Seventh Trouble (1579–80). Started by Protestants seizing La Fère in Normandy, ended by the Peace of Fleix.

  Eighth Trouble (1585–98). By far the longest and worst: started by Leaguist agitation, ended by the Treaty of Vervins and the Edict of Nantes.

  Each followed the pattern established by the first and second wars. A period of peace would be interrupted by a sudden massacre or provocation. Battles, sieges, and general misery would ensue, until signs of weakness on one side or another led to a peace treaty. This would leave everyone dissatisfied, but would stay roughly in place until another provocation—and so the pattern cycled on. Even the last treaty did not please everyone. Nor were there always two clearly defined opponents. At least three factions were involved in most of the troubles, driven by desire for influence over the throne. These were wars of religion, like those brewing in other European countries during this period, but they were just as much wars of politics.

  The end of one foreign conflict had made the civil wars possible in the first place, and the beginning of another would ultimately bring them to a close, after Henri IV declared war on Spain in 1595. The beneficial effect of this act was well understood at the time. During the final “trouble,” Montaigne observed that many wished for something like this. The violence needed draining out, like pus from an infection. He had mixed feelings about the ethics of the method: “I do not believe that God would favor so unjust an enterprise as to injure and pick a quarrel with others for our own convenience.” But it was what France needed, and what it got at last, from Henri IV, the first clever king it had had for years.

  That was still a long way off in the 1560s, when no one dreamed that the horror could go on so long. Montaigne’s years in parlement spanned the first three troubles; even during periods of peace, there was much political tension. By the time the third war ended, he had had enough and was on his way to retirement from public life. Until then, his position in Bordeaux placed him in the thick of it, amid a particularly complex community. Bordeaux was a Catholic city, but surrounded by Protestant territories and with a significant Protestant minority, which did not hesitate to indulge in icon-smashing and other aggressive acts.

  In one especially violent confrontation, on the night of June 26, 1562—a few months after the Vassy massacre—a Protestant mob attacked the city’s Château Trompette, bastion of government power. The riot was quelled, but, as with the salt-tax riots, the punishment proved worse than the crime. To teach a lesson to a city that seemed incapable of running its own affairs, the king sent in a new lieutenant-general named Blaise Monluc, and ordered him to “pacify” the troublesome area.

  Monluc understood “pacification” to mean “mass slaughter.” He set to work hanging Protestants in large numbers without trial, or having them broken on the wheel. After one battle at the village of Terraube, he ordered so many of its residents killed and thrown in the well that you could put your hand in from above and touch the top of the pile. Writing his memoirs years later, he reminisced about one rebel leader who begged him personally for mercy after Monluc’s soldiers captured him. Monluc responded by grabbing the man’s throat and throwing him against a stone cross so violently that the stone was smashed and the man died. “If I had not acted thus,” wrote Monluc, “I would have been mocked.” In another incident, a Protestant captain who had served under Monluc himself in Italy, many years earlier, hoped that his former comrade would spare his life for old times’ sake. On the contrary, Monluc made a point of having him killed at once, and explained that he did this because he knew how brave the man was: he could never be anything other than a dangerous enemy. These were the kinds of scene that would recur frequently in Montaigne’s essays: one person seeks mercy, and the other decides whether or not to grant it. Montaigne was fascinated by the moral complexity involved. What moral complexity? Monluc would have said. Killing was always the right solution: “One man hanged is more effective than a hundred killed in battle.” Indeed, so many executions took place in the area that the supply of gallows equipment ran low: carpenters were commissioned to make more scaffolds, wheels for breaking limbs, and stakes for burning. When the scaffolds were full, Monluc used trees, and boasted that his travels through Guyenne could be traced in bodies swinging by the roadside. By the time he had finished, he said, nothing stirred in the whole region. All who survived kept their silence.

  Montaigne knew Monluc, though mainly in later life, and took more interest in his private personality than his public deeds—especially his failings as a father and the regrets that tormented him after he lost a son, who died in his prime. Monluc confessed to Montaigne that he realized too late that he had never treated the boy with anything other than coldness, although in reality he loved him a great deal. This was partly because he had followed an unfortunate fashion in parenting, which advocated emotional frigidity in dealings with one’s children. “That poor boy saw nothing of me but a scowling and disdainful countenance,” Monluc would say. “I constrained and tortured myself to maintain this vain mask.” The talk of mask
s is apt, since, in 1571—around the time of Montaigne’s retirement—Monluc was disfigured by an arquebus shot. For the rest of his life, he never went out without covering his face to conceal the scars. One can imagine the disconcerting effect of an actual mask on top of the inexpressive mask-like face of a cruel man whom few people dared to look in the eye.

  (illustration credit i4.3)

  Throughout the troubled 1560s, Montaigne often went to Paris on parlement business, and apparently remained away through much of 1562 and early 1563, though he popped back to Bordeaux almost as readily as a modern car driver or train passenger might. He was certainly in the area in August 1563 when his friend Étienne de La Boétie died. And he must have been in Bordeaux in December 1563, for a strange incident occurred then, the most noteworthy of Montaigne’s few appearances in the city records.

  The previous month, an extremist Catholic named François de Péruse d’Escars had launched a direct challenge to the parlement’s moderate president, Jacques-Benoît de Lagebâton, marching into the chambers and accusing him of having no right to govern. Lagebâton successfully faced him down, but d’Escars challenged him again the following month, and in response Lagebâton produced a list of the court members he believed to be in cahoots with d’Escars, probably working for him for pay. Surprisingly, among these names appear those of Montaigne and of the recently deceased Étienne de La Boétie. One would have expected to find both firmly on Lagebâton’s side: La Boétie had been working actively for the chancellor L’Hôpital, of whom Lagebâton was a follower, and Montaigne too expressed admiration for that faction in his Essays. On the other hand, d’Escars was a family friend, and La Boétie had been at d’Escars’s home when he came down with the illness which would kill him. This was suspicious, and perhaps Montaigne came under scrutiny by association.

  All the accused had a right to defend themselves before parlement—a chance for Montaigne to use his rhetorical skills again. Of them all, he was the speaker who made the biggest impression. “He expressed himself with all the vivacity of his character,” reads the note in the records. He finished his speech by stating “that he named the whole Court,” then he flounced off.

  The court called him back and ordered him to explain what he meant by this. He replied that he was no enemy of Lagebâton, who was a friend of his and of everyone in his family. But—and there was clearly a “but” coming—he knew that accused persons were traditionally allowed to make counter-claims against their accuser, so he wished to take advantage of this right. Again, he left everyone puzzled, but the implication was that it was Lagebâton who was guilty of some impropriety. Montaigne made no further explanation. Pressed to withdraw the remark, he did, and there the matter ended. The accusations apparently came to nothing serious, and were quietly forgotten.

  It remains an enigmatic incident, but it certainly shows us a different Montaigne from the cool, measured writer of the Essays, or his own portrait of his youthful self a-slumber over his books. This is a man known for “vivacity” and given to rushing in and out of rooms, making accusations which he cannot substantiate, and jabbering so wildly that no one is sure what he means to say. Montaigne does admit, in the Essays, that “by my nature I am subject to sudden outbursts which, though slight and brief, often harm my affairs.” The last part of this makes one wonder if he damaged his career in parlement with his intemperate words, on other occasions if not on this one.

  Even more surprising than meeting the hot-headed side of young Montaigne is seeing him bracketed with the bigots and extremists. His political allegiances were complicated; it is not always easy to guess where he will come out on any particular topic. But this case may have had more to do with personal loyalties than conviction. His own family had connections on both sides of the political divide, and he had to stay on good terms with them all. Perhaps the strain of this conflict made him volatile. The accusation was also an insult—to himself and, more seriously, to La Boétie, who was no longer around to offer any defense. Lagebâton was querying the honor of the most honorable man Montaigne had ever known: the person he probably loved most in his entire life, and whom he had just lost. A response of helpless rage is understandable.

  Slowness and forgetfulness were good responses to the question of how to live, so far as they went. They made for good camouflage, and they allowed room for thoughtful judgments to emerge. But some experiences in life brought forth a greater passion, and called for a different sort of answer.

  5. Q. How to live? A. Survive love and loss

  LA BOÉTIE: LOVE AND TYRANNY

  MONTAIGNE WAS IN his mid-twenties when he met Étienne de La Boétie. Both were working at the Bordeaux parlement, and each had heard a lot about the other in advance. La Boétie would have known of Montaigne as an outspoken, precocious youngster. Montaigne had heard of La Boétie as the promising author of a controversial manuscript in local circulation, called De la Servitude volontaire (“On Voluntary Servitude”). He read this first in the late 1550s, and later wrote of his gratitude to it, because it brought him to its author. It started a great friendship: one “so entire and so perfect that certainly you will hardly read of the like … So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries.”

  Although the two young men were curious about each other, they somehow did not meet for a long time. In the end the encounter happened by chance. Both were at the same feast in the city; they got talking, and found themselves “so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together” that, from that moment on, they became best friends. They had only six years, about a third of which was spent apart, since both were sometimes sent to work in other cities. Yet that short period bound them to each other as tightly as a lifetime of shared experience.

  Reading about Montaigne and La Boétie, you often get the impression that the latter was much older and wiser than the former. In reality La Boétie was only a couple of years Montaigne’s senior. He was neither dashing nor handsome, but one has the impression that he was intelligent and warmhearted, with an air of substance. Unlike Montaigne, he was already married when they met, and he held a higher position in the parlement. Colleagues knew him both as a writer and as a public official, whereas Montaigne had yet to write anything except legal reports. La Boétie attracted attention and respect. If you were to tell their Bordeaux acquaintances of the early 1560s that he is now remembered mainly for being Montaigne’s friend rather than the other way around, they would probably refuse to believe you.

  Some of La Boétie’s air of maturity may have come from his having been orphaned at an early age. He was born on November 1, 1530, in the market town of Sarlat, about seventy-five miles from the Montaigne estate, in a fine, steep, richly ornamented building which survives today. This house had been built just five years earlier by La Boétie’s father, another hyperactive parent, who then died when his son was ten years old. His mother died, too, so La Boétie was left alone. An uncle who shared the name of Étienne de La Boétie took him in and apparently gave the boy a fashionable humanist education, though a less radical one than Montaigne’s.

  Like Montaigne, La Boétie went on to study law. Some time around 1554, he married Marguerite de Carle, a widow who already had two children (one of whom would marry Montaigne’s younger brother Thomas de Beauregard). In May of the same year—two years before Montaigne started in Périgueux—La Boétie took up office at the Bordeaux parlement. He was probably one of those Bordeaux officials who looked askance at the better paid Périgueux men when they arrived.

  La Boétie’s career in the Bordeaux parlement was a very good one. The strange accusations of 1563 aside, he was generally the kind of man who inspires confidence. He was given sensitive missions, and often entrusted with work as a negotiator—as Montaigne would later be. For the moment, La Boétie was probably thought the more reliable figure. He had the required air of gravity, and a better attitude to hard work and duty. The differences were significa
nt, but the two men locked into each other like pieces in a puzzle. They shared important things: subtle thinking, a passion for literature and philosophy, and a determination to live a good life like the classical writers and military heroes they had grown up admiring. All this brought them together, and set them apart from their less adventurously educated colleagues.

  La Boétie is now known mainly through Montaigne’s eyes—the Montaigne of the 1570s and 1580s, who looked back with sorrow and longing for his lost friend. This created a nostalgic fog through which one can only squint to try to make out the real La Boétie. Of Montaigne as seen by La Boétie, a clearer picture is available, for La Boétie wrote a sonnet making it clear what he thought Montaigne needed by way of self-improvement. Instead of a perfect Montaigne frozen in memory, the sonnet captures a living Montaigne in the process of transition. It is by no means certain that this flawed character will ever make anything of himself, especially if he continues to waste his energies partying and flirting with pretty women.

  Although La Boétie speaks to Montaigne like a fondly disapproving uncle, he adorns his poem with less familial emotions: “You have been bound to me, Montaigne, both by the power of nature and by virtue, which is the sweet allurement of love.” Montaigne writes in the same way in the Essays, saying that the friendship seized his will and “led it to plunge and lose itself in his,” just as it seized the will of La Boétie and “led it to plunge and lose itself in mine.” Such talk was not unconventional. The Renaissance was a period in which, while any hint of real homosexuality was regarded with horror, men routinely wrote to each other like lovestruck teenagers. They were usually in love less with each other than with an elevated ideal of friendship, absorbed from Greek and Latin literature. Such a bond between two well-born young men was the pinnacle of philosophy: they studied together, lived under each other’s gaze, and helped each other to perfect the art of living. Both Montaigne and La Boétie were fascinated by this model, and were probably on the lookout for it when they met. The shortness of their time together spared them disillusionment. In his sonnet, La Boétie expressed the hope that his and Montaigne’s names would be paired for all eternity, like those of other “famous friends” throughout history; he got his wish.