On the whole, though, this sort of game-playing was rare for him, and he preferred to emphasize his honesty and openness in all matters, as well as his dull-wittedness at enigmas and puzzles. That could all be part of the game. But if he really was a thoroughgoing trickster, then one has to doubt almost every word he says in the book: a dizzying prospect. There are other unsettling implications. If La Boétie did not write On Voluntary Servitude, then he was not the man Montaigne made him out to be in the Essays. He existed, all right, but with no clear features: a cipher for Montaigne’s own cleverness. And if he did not have exceptional capabilities—if he was not the kind of man who would write the Servitude—why did Montaigne love him so much? He must have had a reason for feeling so strongly, and apparently it wasn’t La Boétie’s good looks, unless he was lying about that too.
If one takes their love story seriously, the conspiracy theory becomes almost unthinkable. For Montaigne to ascribe the Servitude to La Boétie as a cover for himself would be to play fast and free with La Boétie’s memory—a memory he evidently worshiped to the point of idolatry. It is surprising that he revealed La Boétie’s authorship of a work currently being burned in the public square of Bordeaux, but if La Boétie was not the author, it would be more than surprising; it would be a total betrayal, an act almost of hatred. There is nothing in any of Montaigne’s writings about La Boétie (including remarks made in a travel journal never meant for publication) to suggest that he felt this way.
The intensity of their affection also provides a convincing explanation for why the two men’s writing styles were so similar. Montaigne and La Boétie shared everything: they blended into one another, not as a writer blends into his pseudonym, but as two writers develop their ideas in partnership—often arguing, often disagreeing, yet constantly absorbing. Over their few years together, Montaigne and La Boétie must have talked from morning to night: about habit, about the need to reject received ideas and to change points of view, about tyranny, and about personal freedom. At first, La Boétie’s ideas would have been more clearly articulated; later, probably, Montaigne would have overtaken him, pursuing thoughts about custom and perspective in directions La Boétie would not have thought of. It all eventually found its way into the Essays, which became a monument to La Boétie in more ways than one. The two minds wove themselves so closely together that, with the best critical tools in the world, you could not pick them apart.
Neither man had any reason to think they could not go on like this for decades, becoming ever more successful and celebrated in their modernized Athens. But young Socrates was about to be called home from the feast.
LA BOéTIE: DEATH AND MOURNING
It began on Monday, August 9, 1563. La Boétie had spent the day in the open air on the estate of François de Péruse d’Escars, the man who had rebelled against Lagebâton in the Bordeaux parlement. That evening La Boétie was supposed to dine with Montaigne, but as he was about to leave d’Escars’s house he came down with stomach pains and diarrhea. He sent Montaigne a message saying that he felt ill: would Montaigne come to see him instead? Montaigne did. Our knowledge of everything that followed comes from a long narrative Montaigne later wrote in the form of a letter to his father, and which he eventually published.
Arriving at the d’Escars home, Montaigne found his friend in pain. La Boétie told him that he had caught a chill after being outside all day, but it looked worse than that. Both men may already have thought of the possibility of plague, which was then spreading in this area and in Bordeaux, as well as in Agenais, which La Boétie had recently visited for work. If La Boétie had not already caught the plague there was a danger that he might develop it now, in his weakened state. Montaigne advised him to move to a less infected region, and to stay with his own sister and brother-in-law, the Lestonnacs. But La Boétie did not feel well enough to travel. In reality, it was too late: he almost certainly already had the plague.
Montaigne left, but the next morning La Boétie’s wife sent for him, saying that her husband was getting worse. Montaigne returned and, at La Boétie’s request, spent the night there: “He asked me, with more affection and insistence than ever about anything else, to be with him as much as I could. This touched me considerably.” He stayed the following night too. La Boétie’s condition continued to worsen. On Saturday, he admitted that his illness was contagious and unpleasant—a hint that he now realized it was the plague. He again asked Montaigne to stay, but not for more than brief periods, so that he would be at less risk. Montaigne did not obey this second part. “I did not leave him again,” he wrote.
On Sunday La Boétie was overcome with weakness and suffered hallucinations. When the crisis passed, he said “that he had seemed to be in some great confusion of all things and had seen nothing but a thick cloud and a dense fog in which everything was pell-mell and without order.” Montaigne reassured him: “Death has nothing worse about it than that, my brother,” to which La Boétie replied that, indeed, nothing could be worse than that. From this point on, he admitted to Montaigne, he lost hope of a cure.
He decided to set his affairs in order, asking Montaigne to watch his wife and uncle in case grief got the better of them. When La Boétie was ready, Montaigne summoned the family into the room. They “composed their faces as well as they could” and sat around the bed. La Boétie told them what he intended to leave in his will, specifying that most of his book collection should go to Montaigne. Afterwards he called for a priest. La Boétie had collected himself so carefully for his deathbed speeches that Montaigne felt a moment of hope, but, once the effort was over, his friend deteriorated again.
A few hours later, still at La Boétie’s bedside, Montaigne told him that he “blushed for shame” to see him showing more courage in the face of his own death than he, Montaigne, was able to find in witnessing it. He promised to remember his example when his own time came. Yes, said La Boétie, that was a good thing to do. He reminded Montaigne of the many enlightening talks they had already had on such subjects. This experience was, he said, “the true object of our studies, and of philosophy.”
Taking Montaigne by the hand, he assured him that he had done many things in life that had been more painful and difficult. “And when all is said,” he went on, “I had been prepared for it for a very long time and had known my lesson all by heart.” Like Montaigne at this stage, he had followed the ancients’ advice and rehearsed his death well. After all, he went on, still echoing the wisdom of the sages, he had lived healthily and happily for long enough. There was no need for regrets. Had he not already made it to a good age? “I was soon to be thirty-three,” he said. “God granted me this grace, that all my life up to now has been full of health and happiness. In view of the inconstancy of things human, that could hardly last any longer.” Old age would only have brought him pain, and might have made him miserly; it was better to have avoided this. Montaigne looked distressed; La Boétie reminded him that he must be strong. “What, my brother, do you want to put fear into me? If I felt fear, who but you should take it away from me?”
La Boétie was dying the perfect Stoic death, full of courage and rational wisdom. Montaigne was expected to do his part: to help his friend to maintain this courage, and then to act as witness, recording the details so others could learn from the story. Perhaps, in doing so, he improved on reality slightly, to make La Boétie sound nobler and braver than he was. Perhaps not; La Boétie’s sense of the classical virtues went so deep that he may genuinely have been capable of emulating his philosophical heroes almost to the end. As Montaigne wrote of him, “His mind was modeled in the pattern of other ages than this.”
But Montaigne himself was a different creature, and, as his account goes on, more and more of his real self comes through: his skepticism, his eye for the awkward detail, and his determination to tell things as they were. There are even moments of irreverence. Writing about La Boétie’s farewell speeches later that day, he comments, “The whole room was full of wails and tears, which n
evertheless did not interrupt the train of his speeches, which were a little long.”
The next morning, Monday, La Boétie slipped in and out of consciousness, being revived with vinegar and wine each time. He reproached Montaigne: “Don’t you see that from now on all the help you give me serves only to prolong my pain?” After one such spell, he temporarily lost his vision. The lamentations of the people around him, whom he could not see, horrified him. “My Lord, who is tormenting me so? Why do they take me out of that great pleasant rest that I am in? Leave me alone, I beg you.”
A sip of wine restored his faculties, but he was now slipping away. “All his extremities, even his face, were already icy with cold, with a death sweat that ran down all along his body; and hardly any sign of a pulse could be detected any longer.”
On Tuesday he received the last rites, and asked the priest, his uncle, and Montaigne to pray for him. Two or three times he called out, once saying, “All right! All right! Let it come when it will, I’m waiting for it, strong and firm of foot.”
In the evening, “having nothing left but the likeness and shadow of a man,” he hallucinated again, this time with visions which he described to Montaigne as “marvelous, infinite, and ineffable.” He tried to comfort his wife, saying that he had a story to tell her. “But I am going off,” he said. Then, seeing her alarm, he corrected himself: “I am going off to sleep.”
She left the room. La Boétie said to Montaigne, “My brother, stay close to me, please.” There were still many other people around; Montaigne writes of them as “all the company.” Nothing was ever done alone in the Renaissance, least of all dying. La Boétie’s wife was, it seems, the only person actually sent away.
Now, the dying man became agitated. He tossed violently in the bed. He began to make strange requests. As Montaigne wrote:
He began to entreat me again and again with extreme affection to give him a place; so that I was afraid his judgment was shaken. Even when I had remonstrated with him very gently that he was letting the illness carry him away and that these were not the words of a man in his sound mind, he did not give in at first and repeated even more strongly: “My brother, my brother, do you refuse me a place?” This until he forced me to convince him by reason and tell him that since he was breathing and speaking and had a body, consequently he had his place. “True, true,” he answered me then, “I have one, but it is not the one I need; and then when all is said, I have no being left.”
It was hard to know how to respond to these words. Montaigne tried to comfort him: “God will give you a better one very soon,” he said.
“Would that I were there already,” said La Boétie. “For three days now I have been straining to leave.”
Over the next hours he often called out, wrote Montaigne, “simply to know whether I was near him.” He always was.
From its conventional beginnings, Montaigne’s account has by now become both moving and eerie. He seems to be recording what was really said and done, regardless of the philosophical meaning. La Boétie himself had moved beyond imitating models. With his talk of needing a place, he seemed to be speaking almost without awareness, as Montaigne would be when he raved and tore at his doublet a few years later.
By two in the morning he was able to rest, which seemed a good sign. Montaigne left the room to tell La Boétie’s wife. Both were pleased at the improvement. But an hour or so later, when Montaigne was back in the room, La Boétie became restless again. He spoke Montaigne’s name once or twice. Then he exhaled a single sigh, and stopped breathing. La Boétie was dead—“at about three o’clock on the Wednesday morning, August 18th, 1563, after living 32 years, 9 months, and 17 days,” as Montaigne recorded.
This, then, was death at close quarters—probably Montaigne’s first such intimate encounter with the death of someone he loved deeply. The physical reality was shocking, especially since it came from such a terrifying disease, though Montaigne says nothing of any personal fear of infection. Among the thoughts likely to have gone through his mind is the one that would later come back to him in the light of his own experience: the hope that death might be a tranquil affair for the person undergoing it, however little it looked that way from outside. He and La Boétie had discussed this question once: Montaigne thought it could be the case, but La Boétie disagreed. Now Montaigne must fervently have hoped that it was he who was right. It would be better to think that La Boétie had felt nothing but bliss while his body sweated and struggled. When Montaigne came to write about his own loss of consciousness later, one can almost see him taking up that old argument again—asking his friend, “See, you didn’t suffer, did you?” and hoping that La Boétie would reply, “No.”
Although he transmuted his sorrow into literature, Montaigne’s grief was overwhelming, and it seemed to become greater with time. After La Boétie died, everything was “nothing but dark and dreary night.” Traveling in Italy nearly eighteen years later, he wrote in his private diary: “This same morning, writing to Monsieur d’Ossat, I was overcome by such painful thoughts about Monsieur de La Boétie, and I was in this mood so long, without recovering, that it did me much harm.” He also wrote in the Essays about how he longed for a true companion in Italy—someone whose ways harmonized with his own, and who liked to do the things he liked to do. “I have missed such a man extremely on all my travels.”
No pleasure has any savor for me without communication. Not even a merry thought comes to my mind without my being vexed at having produced it alone without anyone to offer it to.
He never ruled out the possibility of finding someone to reprise La Boétie’s role. Seneca had advised this: a wise man should be so good at making new friends that he can replace an old one without skipping a beat. Sometimes, in the Essays, Montaigne seems to issue a come-hither call to candidates: he hopes his book will please “some worthy man” who will seek him out. Yet he did not really feel that anyone could replace the original. He was forever disappointed:
Is it not a stupid humor of mine to be out of tune with a thousand to whom I am joined by fortune, whom I cannot do without, only to cling to … a fantastic desire for something I cannot recapture?
Whenever Montaigne sounds cool or detached from other people, as he sometimes does, one has to remember La Boétie. People should not, he writes, be “joined and glued to us so strongly that they cannot be detached without tearing off our skin and some part of our flesh as well.” These are the words of a man who knows what it feels like to be flayed in this way.
In life, Montaigne apparently rebelled against La Boétie’s improving influence at times, but now no trace remained of this. With La Boétie safely dead, Montaigne could surrender to him unreservedly—and he could do what La Boétie had begged him to do: give him a place.
First he absorbed many of La Boétie’s books into his library, making room for his friend among his own most treasured possessions. Then he wrote about La Boétie’s death, rescuing as much as he could remember of the young philosopher’s testament to posterity. He prepared a stack of La Boétie’s writings for publication. Finally, when he retired, he made his friend the guiding spirit of his own new career. Alongside the main inscription about his retirement, he added another to his library wall: it is now worn and hard to decipher, but seems to consecrate all his future “studious work” to the memory of La Boétie, “the sweetest, dearest, and most intimate friend” the sixteenth century could produce. La Boétie was to watch over everything Montaigne did in his library: he would be his literary guardian angel.
By dying, La Boétie changed from being Montaigne’s real-life, flawed companion to being an ideal entity under Montaigne’s control. He became less a person than a sort of philosophical technique. Seneca had advised his followers to use their friends in this way. Having found some admirable man, he said, one should visualize him as an ever-present audience, in order to hold oneself to his exalted standards. If you would live for yourself, he wrote, you should live for others—above all for your chosen friend.
Montaigne was willing to try any trick of this kind, if it promised consolation. As he wrote in one of his dedications to La Boétie’s posthumous books: “He is still lodged in me so entire and so alive that I cannot believe that he is so irrevocably buried or so totally removed from our communication.” Letting La Boétie live on within himself was a way of fulfilling his friend’s dying wish, and easing his own loneliness. Meanwhile, he used techniques of distraction and diversion to get himself through the immediate shock of loss. Best of all, he discovered the therapeutic benefits of writing. By passing on La Boétie’s death narrative and farewell to the world in written form, he helped himself to relive the scene, and thus outlive it. He never fully got over La Boétie, but he learned to exist in the world without him, and, in so doing, to change his own life. Writing about La Boétie eventually led him to write the Essays: the best philosophical trick of all.
6. Q. How to live? A. Use little tricks
LITTLE TRICKS AND THE ART OF LIVING
A BOUT ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHERS, Montaigne was usually dismissive: he disliked their pedantries and abstractions. But he showed an endless fascination for another tradition in philosophy: that of the great pragmatic schools which explored such questions as how to cope with a friend’s death, how to work up courage, how to act well in morally difficult situations, and how to make the most of life. These were the philosophies he turned to in times of grief or fear, as well as for guidance in dealing with more minor everyday irritations.
The three most famous such systems of thought were Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism: the philosophies collectively known as Hellenistic because they had their origins in the era when Greek thought and culture spread to Rome and other Mediterranean regions, from the third century BC onwards. They differed in details, but were so close in essentials as to be hard to distinguish much of the time. Like everyone else, Montaigne mixed and matched them according to his needs.
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