How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  His favorite device was simply to run through lists of wildly divergent customs from all over the world, marveling at their randomness and strangeness. His two essays “Of Custom” and “Of Ancient Customs” describe countries where women piss standing and men squatting, where children are nursed for up to twelve years, where it is considered fatal to nurse a baby on its first day, where hair grows on the right side of the body but is shaved completely off the left side, where one is supposed to kill one’s father at a certain age, where people wipe their rears with a sponge on a stick, and where hair is worn long in front and short behind instead of the other way around. Similar lists in the “Apology” run from Peruvians who elongate their ears to Orientals who blacken their teeth because they consider white ones inelegant.

  Each culture, in doing these things, takes itself as the standard. If you live in a country where teeth are blackened, it seems obvious that ebony ivories are the only beautiful ones. Reciting diversities helps us to break free of this, if only for brief moments of enlightenment. “This great world,” writes Montaigne, “is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.” After running through such a list, we look back upon our own existence differently. Our eyes are opened to the truth that our customs are no less weird than anyone else’s.

  Some of Montaigne’s initial interest in such leaps of perspective went back to his observation of the Tupinambá visitors’ amazement in Rouen. Watching them watching the French was an awakening, like Virginia Woolf’s on the hillside. The encounter stimulated in Montaigne what became a lifelong interest in the New World—an entire hemisphere unknown to Europeans until a few decades before his own birth, and still so surprising that it hardly seemed real.

  By the time Montaigne was born, most Europeans had come around to the acceptance that America really did exist and was not a fantasy. Some people had taken up eating hot peppers and chocolate, and a few smoked tobacco. The cultivation of potatoes was under way, although their vaguely testicular shape still made people think they were good only as an aphrodisiac. Returning travelers passed on tales of cannibalism and human sacrifice, or of fabulous fortunes in gold and silver. As life in Europe became more difficult, many considered emigrating, and colonies sprouted like mold spores along the eastern coasts. Most were Spanish, but the French also tried their luck. In Montaigne’s youth, France looked well placed to prosper in the new colonial adventure. It had a strong fleet, and well-equipped international ports from which to sail—Bordeaux foremost among them.

  Several French expeditions were launched in the middle of the century, but they ran into difficulties one by one. French colonists had a particular tendency to undo their enterprises through religious conflict, which they imported with them. The first French settlement in Brazil, founded by Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon near the present site of Rio de Janeiro in the 1550s, was so weakened by its Catholic–Protestant divisions that it succumbed to invasion by the Portuguese. In the 1560s, a mainly Protestant French colony in Florida fell victim to the Spanish. By this time, full civil war had broken out in the French homeland, and the money and organization for major voyages were hard to find. France missed its place in the first great bonanza overseas, the one that made the fortunes of England and Spain. By the time it recovered and tried again later, it was too late to recover the advantage in full.

  Like many of his generation, Montaigne had a fascination with all things American combined with cynicism about colonial conquest. He treasured what he remembered of his conversation with the Tupinambá—who had traveled to France in one of Villegaignon’s returning ships—and collected South American memorabilia for his cabinet of curiosities in the tower: “specimens of their beds, of their ropes, of their wooden swords, and the bracelets with which they cover their wrists in combats, and of the big canes, open at one end, by whose sound they keep time in their dances.” Much of this probably came from a household servant who had lived for a time in the Villegaignon colony. The same man introduced Montaigne to sailors and merchants who could further feed his curiosity. He was himself “a simple, crude fellow,” but Montaigne believed this made him an excellent witness, for he was not tempted to embroider or overinterpret what he reported.

  Besides conversation, Montaigne also read everything he could get hold of on the subject. His library included French translations of López de Gómara’s Historia de las Indias and Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, as well as more recent French originals, notably two great rival accounts of the Villegaignon colony by the Protestant Jean de Léry and the Catholic André Thevet. Of the two, he much preferred Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578), which observed Tupinambá society with sympathy and precision. As befitted a Protestant puritan, Léry admired the Tupinambá preference for going naked rather than adorning themselves with ruffs and furbelows as the French did. He observed that very few of their elderly people had white hair, and suspected it was because they did not wear themselves out with “mistrust, avarice, litigation, and squabbles.” And he thought highly of their courage in war. The Tupinambá fought bloody battles with magnificent swords, but only for honor, never for conquest or greed. Such encounters usually ended with a feast at which the main course was prisoners of war. Léry himself attended one such event; that night he woke in his hammock to see a man looming over him brandishing a roasted human foot in what seemed to be a threatening manner. He leaped up in fright, to the merriment of the crowd. Later, it was explained to him that the man was only being a generous host and offering him a taste. Léry’s faith in his friends was restored. He felt safer among them, he said, than he did at home “among disloyal and degenerate Frenchmen.” Indeed, he was destined to witness equally gruesome scenes in the French civil wars, when he became stranded in the hilltop town of Sancerre during a winter siege at the end of 1572 and saw townspeople eating human flesh to survive.

  Montaigne read Léry avidly, and, in writing up his own Tupinambá encounter in “Of Cannibals,” followed Léry’s practice of drawing out the contrast with France and the implications for European assumptions of superiority. A later chapter, “Of Coaches,” also noted how the gilded gardens and palaces of the Incas and Aztecs put European equivalents to shame. But the simple Tupinambá appealed to Montaigne far more. He described them with a list of desirable negatives:

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  This is a nation … in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon—unheard of.

  Such “negative enumeration” was a well-established rhetorical device in classical literature, long predating the New World encounter. It even turns up in four-thousand-year-old Sumerian cuneiform texts:

  Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion,

  There was no hyena, there was no lion,

  There was no wild dog, no wolf,

  There was no fear, no terror,

  Man had no rival.

  It was only natural that it should recur in Renaissance writing about the New World. The tradition would continue: in the nineteenth century Herman Melville described the happy valley of Typee in the Marquesas as a place where there were “no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honor … no poor relations … no destitute widows … no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum up all in one word—no money!” The idea was that people were happier when they lived uncluttered lives close to nature, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Stoics had made much of this “Golden Age” fantasy: Seneca fantasized about a world i
n which property was not hoarded, weapons were not used for violence, and no sewage pipes polluted the streams. Without houses, people even slept better, for there were no creaking timbers to wake them with a start in the middle of the night.

  Montaigne understood the appeal of the fantasy, and shared it. Like wild fruit, he wrote, wild people retain their full natural flavor. This was why they were capable of such bravery, for their behavior in war was untainted by greed. Even the Tupinambá cannibal rituals, far from being degrading, showed primitive people at their best. The victims displayed astonishing courage as they awaited their fate; they even defied their captors with taunts of their own. Montaigne was impressed by a song in which a doomed prisoner challenges his enemies to go ahead and eat their fill. As you do, sings the prisoner, remember that you are eating your own fathers and grandfathers. I have eaten them in the past, so it will be your flesh you will savor! This is another of those archetypal confrontation scenes: the defeated man is doomed, yet he shows Stoic firmness in the face of his enemy. This, it is implied, is what humans would always be capable of if they only followed their true nature.

  The prisoner’s song is one of two “cannibal songs” to appear in Montaigne’s Essays. The other, also from the Tupinambá, is a love lyric which he may have heard performed in Rouen in 1562, for he praises the sound of it: he describes Tupinambá as “a soft language, with an agreeable sound, somewhat like Greek in its endings.” In his prose translation, the song goes:

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  Adder, stay; stay, adder, that from the pattern of your coloring my sister may draw the fashion and the workmanship of a rich girdle that I may give to my love; so may your beauty and your pattern be forever preferred to all other serpents.

  Montaigne liked the simple elegance of this, by contrast with the over-refined European versifying of his day. In another essay, he wrote that such “purely natural poetry”—among which he counted the traditional villanelles of his own Guyenne as well as the songs brought back from the New World—rivaled the finest found in books. Even the classical poets could not compete.

  Montaigne’s “cannibal love song” went on to have an impressive little afterlife of its own, independent of the rest of the Essays. Chateaubriand borrowed it for his Mémoires d’outre-tombe, where he had an attractive North American girl sing something similar. It then migrated to Germany, where it flourished as a Lied throughout the eighteenth century—this in a country which otherwise took little early interest in Montaigne. The two cannibal songs, together with some complimentary remarks about German stoves, were the only fragments of Montaignalia to make much impact at all in that part of the world until Nietzsche’s time. “Adder, Stay” was translated by some of the best German Romantic poets: Ewald Christian von Kleist, Johann Gottfried Herder, and the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself—who produced both a Liebeslied eines Amerikanischen Wilden (“Love Song of an American Savage”) and a Todeslied eines Gefangenen (“Death Song of a Prisoner”). German Romantics especially favored songs about love and death, so it is not surprising that they took so eagerly to Montaigne’s transcriptions. What is striking is that they seized them from the text while ignoring almost everything else—but this is what all readers do, to a greater or lesser extent.

  Montaigne, like Léry, could be accused of romanticizing the peoples of the New World. But he understood too much about the complexity of human psychology to really want to wipe half of it out in order to live like wild fruit. He also recognized that American cultures could be just as stupid and cruel as European ones. Since cruelty was the vice he deplored most, it is significant that he made no attempt to gloss over its role in New World religions, some of which were bloodthirsty indeed. “They burn the victims alive, and take them out of the brazier half roasted to tear their entrails out. Others, even women, are flayed alive, and with their bloody skins they dress and disguise others.”

  He described such atrocities, but then pointed out that they seemed excessive mainly because Europeans were unfamiliar with them. Equally terrible practices were accepted nearer home, because of the power of habit. “I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts,” he wrote of the New World sacrifices, “but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own.” Montaigne wanted his readers to open their eyes and see. The peoples of South America were not just fascinating for their own sake. They made an ideal mirror, in which Montaigne and his countrymen could “recognize themselves from the proper angle,” and which woke them out of their self-satisfied dream.

  NOBLE SAVAGES

  Eighteenth-century German readers may have found little of interest in Montaigne other than his Volkslieder, but a new generation of French readers rediscovering him in the same period made more of his cannibals and mirrors than even Montaigne himself could have anticipated.

  They were encouraged in this by a sleek modern edition which appeared in 1724. The Essays were still outlawed in France—it had been fifty years since the ban—but now the country began receiving a stream of smuggled Montaigne texts from England, where the French Protestant exile Pierre Coste had put together an edition for the new century. Coste deliberately brought out Montaigne’s subversive side, not by interfering with the text but by adding extra paraphernalia, most dramatically La Boétie’s On Voluntary Servitude, which he included in full with the edition of 1727. This was the first time the Voluntary Servitude had been published at all since the Protestant tracts of the sixteenth century, and certainly the first time it had appeared joined to the Essays. It altered Montaigne by association, and gave him the aura of a political and personal rebel, the sort of writer whose calm philosophy might conceal more turbulent meanings. Coste helped to create a version of Montaigne still popular today: a secret radical, who conceals himself under a veil of discretion. In particular, Coste’s edition made Montaigne look like a free-thinking Enlightenment philosophe born two centuries too early. Eighteenth-century readers recognized themselves in him, as so many do, and they felt amazed that he had needed to wait so long before meeting the generation truly capable of understanding him.

  This new breed of “enlightened” reader responded passionately to his portrayal of the courageous Tupinambá. Montaigne’s cannibal Stoics aligned themselved with a new fantasy figure: that of the noble savage, an impossibly perfect being who united primitive simplicity with classical heroism, and who now became the object of a cult. Adherents of the cult kept hold of Montaigne’s sense that cannibals had their own sense of honor, and that they held up a mirror to European civilization. What they lost was Montaigne’s understanding that “savages” were also as flawed, cruel, and barbarous as anyone else.

  Among the writers to fall upon Montaigne’s Tupinambá with delight was Denis Diderot, a philosopher who became famous for his contributions to the era’s monumental compilation of knowledge, the Encyclopédie, as well as for countless philosophical novels and dialogues. Diderot read Montaigne early in his career, loved him, and paid him the compliment of quoting the Essays in his own writings—usually, but not always, with due credit. In his short Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, of 1796, Diderot wrote excitedly about the peoples of the South Pacific, recently encountered by Europeans, and thus his century’s equivalent to native Americans in Montaigne’s time. Like the Tupinambá, Pacific islanders seemed to lead a simple life, almost in a state of grace. Less palatable aspects of their culture were easy to ignore, because Europe knew little about them. This left plenty of room to make things up, notably the idea that the islanders enjoyed hedonistic sex with anyone they liked at any time. In the Supplément, Diderot had one of his Tahitian characters advise Europeans that they need only follow nature to be happy, for no other law applied. This was what his compatriots wanted to hear.

  The noble savage was raised to a more exalted level by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another writer influenced by Montaigne—his annotated copy of the Essays survives. Unlike Diderot, Rousseau took primiti
ve society to be something so perfect that it could not actually exist in any real part of the world, not even the Pacific. It functioned only as an ideal contrast to the mess that real societies had become. By definition, all existing civilization was corrupt.

  In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau imagines what man might have been like without the chains of civilization. “I see an animal … eating his fill under an oak tree, quenching his thirst at the first stream, making his bed at the base of the same tree that supplied his meal.” The earth gives this natural man everything he needs. It does not pamper him, but he needs no pampering. Harsh conditions from infancy have made him resistant to illness, and he is strong enough to fight off wild beasts unarmed. He has no axes, but he uses his muscles to break thick branches unaided. He has no slingshots or guns, but he can throw a stone powerfully enough to bring down any prey. He needs no horses, for he can run as fast as one. Only when civilization makes man “sociable and a slave” does he lose his manliness, learning to be weak and to fear everything around him. He also learns despair: no one ever heard of a “free savage” killing himself, says Rousseau. He even loses his natural tendency to be compassionate. If someone slits a person’s throat under a philosopher’s window, the philosopher is likely to put his hands over his ears and pretend not to hear; a savage would never do this. A natural man could not fail to heed the voice within that makes him identify with his fellows—a voice that sounds very much like the one which calls Montaigne to feel sympathy for all suffering fellow beings.