How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  (illustration credit i14.5b)

  Eventually leaving Rome on April 19, 1581, Montaigne crossed the Apennines and headed for the great pilgrimage site of Loreto, joining the crowd pouring in procession behind banners and crucifixes. He left votive figures in the church there, for himself and for his wife and daughter. Then he continued up the Adriatic coast and back across the mountains to a spa at La Villa, where he stayed for over a month to try the waters. As was expected of a visiting nobleman, he hosted parties for locals and fellow guests, including a dance “for the peasant girls” in which he participated himself “so as not to appear too reserved.” He returned to La Villa after a detour to Florence and Lucca, and stayed through the height of the summer, from August 14 to September 12, 1581. His pain from the stone was bad, and he came down with toothache, a heaviness in the head, and aching eyes. He suspected that these were the fault of the waters, which ravaged his upper half even as they helped the bottom half, assuming that they even did that. “I began to find these baths unpleasant.”

  Then, unexpectedly, he was called away. Montaigne, who claimed to want only a quiet life and the chance to pursue his “honest curiosity” around Europe, was issued with a long-distance invitation which he could not refuse.

  15. Q. How to live? A. Do a good job, but not too good a job

  MAYOR

  THE LETTER ARRIVED for Montaigne at the La Villa baths, bearing the full weight of remote authority. Signed by all the jurats of Bordeaux—the six men who governed it alongside its mayor—it informed him that he had been elected, in his absence, to be the next mayor of the city. He must return immediately to fulfill his duties.

  This was flattering, but, according to Montaigne, it was the last thing he wanted to hear. The responsibilities would be more onerous than those of a magistrate. Demands would be made on his time. There would be speeches and ceremonies—all the things he had least enjoyed about his progress through Italy. He would need his diplomatic skills, for the mayor’s job would mean managing the different religious and political factions in town, and liaising between Bordeaux and an unpopular king. It also meant he had to cut his trip short.

  Disillusioned though he was with the spa life, he felt no desire to go home. By now, he had been away for fifteen months—a long time, but not long enough to satisfy him. He seems now to have tried to eke out as many remaining weeks as he could. He did not refuse the jurats’ request, but neither did he hurry back to see them. First, he traveled back down to Rome, at a leisurely pace, stopping in Lucca for a while and trying some other baths on the way. One wonders why he went to Rome at all, since it meant going over two hundred miles in the wrong direction. Perhaps he was hoping to get advice on whether he could extricate himself from the task. If so, the answer was discouraging. Arriving in Rome on October 1, he found a second letter from the Bordeaux jurats, this time more peremptory. He was now “urgently requested” to return.

  In the next edition of the Essays, he emphasized how little he had sought such an appointment, and how strenuously he had tried to avoid it. “I excused myself,” he wrote—but the reply came back that this made no difference, since the “king’s command” figured in the matter. The king even wrote him a personal letter, obviously intended to be forwarded to him abroad, though Montaigne received it only when he got back to his estate:

  Monsieur de Montaigne, because I hold in great esteem your fidelity and zealous devotion to my service, it was a pleasure to me to understand that you were elected mayor of my city of Bordeaux; and I have found this election very agreeable and confirmed it, the more willingly because it was made without intrigue and in your remote absence. On the occasion of which my intention is, and I order and enjoin you very expressly, that without delay or excuse you return as soon as this is delivered to you and take up the duties and services of the responsibility to which you have been so legitimately called. And you will be doing a thing that will be very agreeable to me, and the contrary would greatly displease me.

  It seemed almost a punishment for being so little given to political ambition—assuming that Montaigne’s protestations of reluctance were true.

  His lack of haste in getting home certainly does not suggest a greed for power. Still taking his time, he meandered towards France via Lucca, Siena, Piacenza, Pavia, Milan, and Turin, taking around six weeks to make the journey. As he crossed into French territory, he switched back from Italian to French in the journal, and when at last he reached his estate he recorded his arrival together with a note that his travels had lasted “seventeen months and eight days”—a rare case of his getting a precise figure correct. In his Beuther diary, he also wrote a note under the date November 30: “I arrived in my house.” He then presented himself to the officials of Bordeaux, obedient and ready for duty.

  Montaigne would be the city’s mayor for four years, from 1581 to 1585. It was a demanding job, but not an entirely thankless one. It came with honors and trappings of all kinds: he had his own offices, a special guard, mayoral robes and chain, and pride of place at public functions. The only thing he lacked was a salary. Yet he was more than a figurehead. Together with the jurats, he had to select and appoint other town officials, decide civic laws, and judge court cases—a task Montaigne found especially difficult to fulfill to his own high standards of evidence. Above all, he had to play the politics game, with care. He had to speak for Bordeaux before the royal authorities, while conveying royal policy downwards to the jurats and other notables of the city, many of whom were set on resistance.

  The previous mayor, Arnaud de Gontault, baron de Biron, had upset many people, so another of Montaigne’s early tasks was to smooth over the damage. Biron had governed strictly but irresponsibly; he had allowed resentment to develop between various factions, and had alienated Henri of Navarre, the powerful prince of nearby Béarn—a person with whom it was important to maintain good relations. Even Henri III himself had taken offense at Biron’s obvious sympathy for the Catholic Leaguists, who were still rebelling against royal authority. Contemplating Biron makes it apparent why the city chose Montaigne to succeed him: they now had a new mayor known for his moderation and diplomatic skills, the very qualities Biron lacked. In particular, although Montaigne was affiliated with the despised politiques, he knew how to get on with everyone. He was known as a man who would listen thoughtfully to all sides, whose Pyrrhonian principle was to lend his ears to everyone and his mind to no one, while maintaining his own integrity through it all.

  It helped that the years of Montaigne’s mayoralty were also technically years of peace. The wars halted from 1580 to 1585, a period spanning Montaigne’s traveling years as well as his time in office. But this peace was not easy either, and, as usual, everyone was unhappy with the limited degree of tolerance extended to Protestant worship. Bordeaux was a divided city: its own Protestant minority numbered about one seventh of the population, and it was surrounded by Protestant lands, but it had a powerful Leaguist faction too. It was hard to manage the place at the best of times. These were not the best of times, though they were by no means the worst either, as Montaigne would have been quick to point out.

  He shared responsibility for maintaining peace and loyalty with the king’s lieutenant-general in the area, a man named Jacques de Goyon, comte de Matignon. An experienced diplomat, eight years older than Montaigne, Matignon may have reminded him somewhat of La Boétie. They did not become intimate friends, but they got on well. Both had a talent for dealing delicately with extremists, and they were men of principle. During the St. Bartholomew’s massacres, Matignon had distinguished himself by being one of the few officials to protect Huguenots in his areas of responsibility, Saint-Lô and Alençon. Calm and firm, he was the right personality for the situation in Guyenne at the moment. So was Montaigne, though he lacked two crucial things: experience and enthusiasm.

  Montaigne was anxious to forestall any expectation that he might be a copy of his own father, ruining his health with work. He remembered seeing Pierre worn
out by business trips, “his soul cruelly agitated by this public turmoil, forgetting the sweet air of his home.” Montaigne’s own enthusiasm for traveling declined now that, like his father, he was supposed to do it out of duty. But he could not avoid it, and he did make several trips to Paris, notably in August 1582, when he went to obtain confirmation of the privileges at last fully restored to Bordeaux following the long-ago salt-tax riots. Towards the end of his second term, he became even more peripatetic. Documents show him at Mont-de-Marsan, at Pau, at Bergerac, at Fleix, and at Nérac. He also commuted regularly between Bordeaux and his own château, where, happily, much of his work could be done. While there, he could carry on with his own projects too, and his second, corrected edition of the Essays came out in 1582, the year after he took office.

  Even if he did not exactly treat it as a full-time job, Montaigne must have performed well in his first term, for he was reelected on August 1, 1583. He could not help feeling pride in this, for it was unusual to be voted in for two terms. “This was done in my case, and had been done only twice before.” It did meet opposition, especially from a rival who wanted to be mayor himself: Jacques d’Escars, sieur de Merville, governor of the city’s Fort du Hâ. Montaigne did not give in to him, which suggests that he felt more commitment to the job than he had initially professed.

  Perhaps he had a change of heart because he had discovered how much of an aptitude he had for political work. With Matignon, he was now responsible for keeping communication going between the officials of the king, the Leaguist rebels in Bordeaux, and the Protestant Henri of Navarre, who wielded more power than ever in the region. Increasingly, through his second term, Montaigne played the role of go-between. He built up particularly good relations with the king’s officials and with the Navarre camp. The Leaguists became more difficult, since they rejected compromise with anyone and still seemed determined to maneuver Montaigne out of his job and take over Bordeaux themselves.

  The most dramatic rebellion came from the baron de Vaillac, Leaguist governor of the city’s Château Trompette. In April 1585, Matignon and Montaigne heard that he was planning a full-scale political coup in the city. They must have debated how to deal with the threat: whether to face up to it aggressively, or make overtures and try to win Vaillac over. It was one of those loggerhead scenes, again. In this case, they decided that bold opposition combined with a willingness to offer mercy was the best response. Presumably with the active collaboration of Montaigne, Matignon invited Vaillac and his men into the parlement, then had the exit blocked as soon as the conspirators were inside. Matignon offered the trapped Vaillac a choice between arrest, with a probable death sentence, or giving up his rights even to the Trompette fortress and leaving Bordeaux for good. Vaillac chose the latter. He went into exile, but from just outside the city walls he set about building up League forces as if preparing to attack. That was always the risk of showing your enemies mercy.

  Several anxious days followed. On May 22, 1585, Montaigne wrote to Matignon saying that he and other officials in the city were watching the gates, knowing that men were assembled outside. Five days later he wrote that Vaillac was still in the area. Every day brought fifty urgent alarms, he said.

  I have spent every night either around the town in arms or outside of town at the port, and before your warning I had already kept watch there one night on the news of a boat loaded with armed men which was due to pass. We saw nothing.

  In the end, there was no attack. Perhaps, seeing the preparations for defense, Vaillac slunk away, proving that Montaigne and Matignon’s blend of aggression and sympathy could prevail after all. In any case, the crisis passed. Yet the build-up to war in the region continued, as it did throughout France, and the League continued to resist Montaigne’s efforts to establish a middle ground.

  Many who knew Montaigne during this period admired his work. The magistrate and historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou wrote that he had “learned many things from Michel de Montaigne, a man free in spirit and foreign to factions, who … had great and certain knowledge of our affairs, and especially of those of his own Guienne.” The politician Philippe Duplessis-Mornay praised Montaigne’s calmness and wrote of him as a person who neither stirred up trouble nor was readily stirred himself.

  As generally happened when contemporaries recorded impressions of Montaigne, this fits remarkably well with his assessment of himself. He wrote that his terms in office were characterized most of the time by “order” and by “gentle and mute tranquillity”. He had enemies, but he had good friends too. And the solution to the Vaillac crisis suggests that he was capable of decisive action when it was necessary, unless this decisiveness all came from Matignon.

  Some did apparently feel that Montaigne was too lax and disengaged, for a certain defensiveness on this point comes across in the Essays, in which Montaigne admits that he was accused of showing “a languishing zeal.” He looked to some like a typical politique, a person who refused to commit himself in any direction. This was clearly true, and Montaigne owned up to it; the difference is that his opponents considered it a bad thing. For modern Stoics and Skeptics such as himself, it was not bad at all. Stoicism encouraged wise detachment, while Skeptics held themselves back on principle. Montaigne’s politics flowed from his philosophy. People complain that his terms as mayor passed without much trace, he wrote. “That’s a good one! They accuse me of inactivity in a time when almost everyone was convicted of doing too much.” With “innovation” (that is, Protestantism) having caused such mayhem, surely it was commendable to have kept a city in a mostly uneventful state for so long. And Montaigne had long since learned that much of what passed for passionate public commitment was just showing off. People involve themselves because they want to have an air of consequence, or to advance their private interests, or simply to keep busy so that they don’t have to think about life.

  One of Montaigne’s problems was that he was so honest about his choices. Other people, far less conscientious than he, were praised because they pretended to be committed and energetic. Montaigne warned his employers that this would not happen with him: he would give Bordeaux what duty commanded, no more and no less, and there would be no playacting.

  Montaigne here sounds remarkably like another great truth-teller in Renaissance literature: Cordelia, the daughter in Shakespeare’s King Lear who refuses to wax on insincerely about her love for her father as her greedy sisters do to win his favor. Like her, Montaigne remains honest and thus comes across as gruff and indifferent. Cordelia might well have said of herself, as Montaigne did:

  I mortally hate to seem a flatterer, and so I naturally drop into a dry, plain, blunt way of speaking … I honor most those to whom I show least honor … I offer myself meagerly and proudly to those to whom I belong. And I tender myself least to those to whom I have given myself most; it seems to me that they should read my feelings in my heart, and see that what my words express does an injustice to my thought.

  It seems a rebellious position, but Montaigne and Cordelia were not really at odds with their late Renaissance world in this. The virtues of sincerity and naturalness were much admired. Also, by emphasizing his plain-speaking, Montaigne was usefully distancing himself from the accusation constantly made against politiques: that they were men of masks and silver tongues who could not be trusted. At times, in the Essays, Montaigne can sound like the nightmare vision of a politique, equivocal, oversophisticated, secular, and elusive. It did him no harm to be blunt once in a while.

  And, by the same kind of twist that made the lack of door locks a good security feature, Montaigne’s rough honesty proved a formidable diplomatic talent. It opened more doors than the labyrinthine deceptions of his colleagues ever could. Even when dealing with the most powerful princes in the land—perhaps especially then—he looked them straight in the face. “I frankly tell them my limits.” His openness made other people open up as well; it drew them out, he said, like wine and love.

  As to the political difficulties o
f being caught between sides, Montaigne typically belittled these. It is not really difficult to get on when caught between two hostile parties, he wrote; all you have to do is to behave with a temperate affection towards both, so that neither thinks he owns you. Don’t expect too much of them, and don’t offer too much either. One could sum up Montaigne’s policy by saying that one should do a good job, but not too good a job. By following this rule, he kept himself out of trouble and remained fully human. He did only what was his duty; and so, unlike almost everyone else, he did do his duty.

  He realized that not everyone understood his way of conducting himself. Where his attitude really caused problems was not with his contemporaries but with posterity. Cordelia’s choice is vindicated within the play: there is no doubt about her genuine love for her father. Montaigne, on the other hand, has suffered image problems connected with his mayoralty ever since. He knew the dangers of writing too unassumingly about his actions in the Essays: “When all is said and done, you never speak about yourself without loss. Your self-condemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited.” Perhaps the old rule against writing about yourself had something going for it after all.

  MORAL OBJECTIONS

  Montaigne’s circumscribed sense of where his duty lay became most apparent in June 1585, when Bordeaux suffered a heat wave rapidly followed by an outbreak of plague: a particularly destructive combination. The epidemic lasted until December, and during those few months more than 14,000 people died in the city, almost a third of its population. More people were killed than in the St. Bartholomew’s massacres across the whole country, yet, as often happens with epidemics occurring in time of war, it left little trace on historical memory. In any case, plague was common. So frequent were outbreaks in the sixteenth century that it is easy to forget how catastrophic they were, each time, for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in them.