The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [C] Pheraulas had experienced both kinds of fortune: he found that an increase in goods did not mean an increased appetite for eating, drinking, sleeping or lying with his wife; on the other hand he did find that the importunate cares of running his estates pressed heavy on his shoulders (as it does on mine); he decided to make one of his loyal friends happy – a poor young man always on the track of riches: he made him a present of all his own wealth, which was extremely great, as well as of everything which was daily accruing to him from the generosity of his good master Cyrus and also from the wars: the condition he made was that the young man should undertake to maintain him and feed him as an honoured guest and friend. Thus they lived thereafter in great happiness, both equally pleased with the change in their circumstances.68

  That is a course I would heartily love to imitate! And I greatly praise the lot of an old Bishop whom I know to have so purely and simply entrusted his purse, his revenue and his expenditures to a succession of chosen servants, that he has let many long years flow by, as ignorant as an outsider of the financial affairs of his own household.69 Trust in another’s goodness is no light testimony to one’s own: that is why God looks favourably on it. And where that Bishop is concerned I know no household which is run more smoothly nor more worthily than his.

  Blessed is the man who has ordered his needs to so just a measure that his riches suffice them without worrying him or taking up his time, and without the spending and the gathering breaking into his other pursuits which are quiet, better suited and more to his heart.

  [B] So ease or indigence depend on each man’s opinion: wealth, fame and health all have no more beauty and pleasure than he who has them lends to them. [C] For each man good or ill is as he finds. The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so: in that way alone does belief endow itself with true reality.

  Neither good nor ill is done to us by Fortune: she merely offers us the matter and the seeds: our soul, more powerful than she is, can mould it or sow them as she pleases, being the only cause and mistress of our happy state or our unhappiness. [B] Whatever comes to us from outside takes its savour and its colour from our internal attributes, just as our garments warm us not with their heat but ours, which they serve to preserve and sustain. Shelter a cold body under them and it will draw similar services from them for its coldness: that is how we conserve snow and ice.70 [A] Study to the lazy, like abstinence from wine to the drunkard, is torture; frugal living to the seeker after pleasure, like exercise to the languid idle man, is torment: so too for everything else. Things are not all that painful nor harsh in themselves: it is our weakness, our slackness, which makes them so. To judge great and lofty things we need a mind which is like them: otherwise we attribute to them the viciousness which belongs to ourselves. A straight oar seems bent in water. It is not only seeing which counts: how we see counts too.71

  Come on then. There are so many arguments persuading men in a variety of ways to despise death and to endure pain: why do we never find a single one which applies to ourselves? Thoughts of so many different kinds have persuaded others: why cannot we each find the one that suits our own disposition? If a man cannot stomach a strong purgative and root out his malady, why cannot he at least take a lenitive and relieve it? [C] ‘Opinio est quædam effeminata ac levis, nec in dolore magis, quam eadem in voluptate: qua, cum liquescimus fluimusque mollitia, apis aculeum sine clamore ferre non possumus. Totum in eo est, ut tibi imperes.’ [As much in pain as in pleasure, our opinions are trivial and womanish: we have been melted and dissolved by wantonness; we cannot even endure the sting of a bee without making a fuss. Above all we must gain mastery over ourselves.]72 [A] We cannot evade Philosophy by immoderately pleading our human frailty and the sharpness of pain: Philosophy is merely constrained to [C] have recourse to her unanswerable counter-plea: [A] ‘Living in necessity is bad: but at least there is no necessity that you should go on doing so.’73 [C] No one suffers long, save by his own fault. If a man has no heart for either living or dying; if he has no will either to resist or to run away: what are we to do with him?

  15. One is punished for stubbornly defending a fort without a good reason

  [A brief consideration of the limits placed on stubborn bravery by the rules of contemporary warfare. Exceptionally, all Montaigne’s examples are modern ones, with no reference to antiquity.]

  [A] Like all other virtues valour has its limits: overstep them, and you tread the path of vice; consequently a man may go right through the dwelling-place of valour into rashness, stubbornness and madness if he does not know where those boundaries lie: yet at their margins they are not easy to pick out. From this consideration was born the custom observed in warfare of punishing even by death those who stubbornly persist in the defence of a fort when, by the very rules of war, it cannot be sustained. Otherwise if there were hope of escaping punishment whole armies would be held up by chicken-coops. At the siege of Pavia, My Lord the Constable de Montmorency was required to cross the Ticino and to take up position in the suburbs of San Antonio: he was delayed by a tower at the foot of a bridge which stubbornly held out until battered down: he hanged every man inside. Another time he accompanied My Lord the Dauphin on his Transalpine expedition. The castle at Villano was taken by force and all the defenders hacked to pieces by the soldiers in their frenzy, excepting only the Captain and his ensign; for the same reason he ordered both of them to be strangled to death by hanging. Captain Martin Du Bellay, when Governor of Turin in the same territory, similarly hanged Captain Saint-Bony after all his men had been massacred at the taking of his fort.1 Yet judgements about the strength or weakness of a fort depend upon estimates of the relative strength of the attacking forces. A man could justly be obstinate when faced with a couple of culverins who would be out of his mind if he resisted thirty cannons. And where you have to take into account the greatness of the conquering prince, the reputation he has and the respect due to him, there is a risk of the balance being weighted in his favour; that is why some have so great an opinion of themselves and of their resources that they deem it unreasonable that anyone whatsoever be thought worthy of resisting them: when any are found doing so they put them all to the sword… while their fortune lasts. That can be seen in the form of defiance and the summonses to surrender used by Eastern potentates2 and their successors today: they are proud, arrogant and full of barbaric assertiveness. [C] And in the regions where the Portuguese first penetrated into the Indies they discovered lands where it is universally held to be an inviolable law that an enemy defeated in the presence of the King or his Viceroy is excluded from any consideration of ransom or mercy.3

  [B] Above all, then, you must avoid (if you can!) falling into the hands of a judge who is your enemy, victorious and armed.

  16. On punishing cowardice

  [Renaissance Jurisconsults such as Tiraquellus were concerned to temper the severity of the Law by examining motives and human limitations. Montaigne does so here in a matter of great concern to gentlemen in time of war.]

  [A] I once heard a prince, a very great general, maintain that a soldier should not be condemned to death for cowardice: he was at table, being told about the trial of the Seigneur de Vervins who was sentenced to death for surrendering Boulogne.

  In truth it is reasonable that we should make a great difference between defects due to our weakness and those due to our wickedness. In the latter we deliberately brace ourselves against reason’s rules, which are imprinted on us by Nature; in the former it seems we can call Nature herself as a defence-witness for having left us so weak and imperfect. That is why a great many1 people believe that we can only be punished for deeds done against our conscience: on that rule is partly based the opinion of those who condemn the capital punishment of heretics and misbelievers as well as the opinion that a barrister or a judge cannot be arraigned if they fail in their duty merely from ignorance.

  Where cowardice is concerned the usual way is, certainly, to punish it by disgrac
e and ignominy. It is said that this rule was first introduced by Charondas the lawgiver, and that before his time the laws of Greece condemned to death those who had fled from battle, whereas he ordered that they be made merely to sit for three days in the market-place dressed as women:2 he hoped he could still make use of them once he had restored their courage by this disgrace – [C] ‘Suffundere malis hominis sanguinem quam effundere.’ [Make the blood of a bad man blush not gush.]3

  [A] It seems too that in ancient times the laws of Rome condemned deserters to death: Ammianus Marcellinus tells how the Emperor Julian condemned ten of his soldiers to be stripped of their rank and then suffer death, ‘following,’ he said, ‘our Ancient laws’. Elsewhere however Julian for a similar fault condemned others to remain among the prisoners under the ensign in charge of the baggage.4 [C] Even the harsh sentences decreed against those who had fled at Cannae and those who in that same war had followed Gnaeus Fulvius in his defeat did not extend to death.

  Yet it is to be feared that disgrace, by making men desperate, may make them not merely estranged but hostile.

  [A] When our fathers were young the Seigneur de Franget, formerly a deputy-commander in the Company of My Lord Marshal de Châtillon, was sent by My Lord Marshal de Chabannes to replace the Seigneur Du Lude as Governor of Fuentarabia; he surrendered it to the Spaniards. He was sentenced to be stripped of his nobility, both he and his descendants being pronounced commoners, liable to taxation and unfit to bear arms. That severe sentence was executed at Lyons. Later all the noblemen who were at Guyse when the Count of Nassau entered it suffered a similar punishment; and subsequently others still.5

  Anyway, wherever there is a case of ignorance so crass and of cowardice so flagrant as to surpass any norm, that should be an adequate reason for accepting them as proof of wickedness and malice, to be punished as such.

  17. The doings of certain ambassadors

  [War and diplomacy, both noble subjects, dominate this chapter; topics are introduced, such as how to read history, which are later developed in ‘On books’ (II, 10) where the Du Bellays are further criticized. The folly of detailed laws and instructions is treated in ‘On experience’ (III, 13).]

  [A] On my travels, in order to be ever learning something from my meetings with other people (which is one of the best of all schools), I observe the following practice: always to bring those with whom I am talking back to the subjects they know best.

  [A1] Basti al nocchiero ragionar de’ venti,

  Al bifolco dei tori, e le sue piaghe

  Conti’l guerrier, conti’l pastor gli armenti.

  [Let the sailor talk but of the winds, the farmer of oxen, the soldier of his own wounds and the herdsman of his cattle.]1

  [A] For the reverse usually happens, everyone choosing to orate about another’s job rather than his own, reckoning to increase his reputation by so doing; witness the reproof Archidamus gave to Periander: that he was abandoning an excellent reputation as a good doctor to acquire the reputation of a bad poet.2 [C] Just observe how Caesar spreads himself when he tells us about his ingenuity in building bridges and siege-machines: in comparison he is quite cramped when he talks of his professional soldiering, his valour or the way he conducts his wars. His exploits are sufficient proof that he was an outstanding general: he wants to be known as something rather different: a good engineer.

  The other day a professional jurist was taken to see a library furnished with every sort of book including many kinds of legal ones. He had nothing to say about them. Yet he stopped to make blunt comments, like an expert, on a defence-work fixed to the head of a spiral staircase in that library; yet hundreds of officers and soldiers came across it every day without comment or displeasure.

  The elder Dionysius, as befitted his fortune, was a great leader in battle, but he strove to become mainly famed for his poetry – about which he knew nothing.

  [A] Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus.

  [The lumbering ox yearns for the saddle: the nag yearns for the plough.]3

  [C] Follow that way and nobody achieves anything worthwhile. [A] So we should always lead4 architects, painters, cobblers and so on to talk of their own business.

  While on this subject, when reading history (which is anybody’s business) I habitually turn my attention to the authors: if they are persons whose only profession is writing I chiefly learn points of style and language from them; if they are doctors I most readily believe them when they tell us about the climate, the health and humours of princes, of wounds and illnesses; when they are jurisconsults you should concentrate on legal controversies, laws, the bases of systems of government and the like; when Theologians, on Church affairs, ecclesiastical censures, dispensations and marriages; when courtiers, on manners and ceremonial; if warriors, on whatever concerns war and chiefly on detailed accounts of the exploits at which they were actually present; when ambassadors, on intrigues, understandings or negotiations, and how they were conducted – matters with which the Seigneur de Langey was fully conversant: that is why I noted and weighed in his Mémoires something I would have skipped over in another’s:5 he first gave an account of the remarkable formal statement made by the Emperor Charles V before the Roman Consistory Court in the presence of our ambassadors the Bishop of Mâcon and the Seigneur Du Velly; included in it were several outrageous remarks addressed to us French: among other things he declared that, if his own officers and soldiers had been no more loyal or skilled in warfare than our King’s were, then he would have put a halter round his own neck and gone and begged our King for mercy. (It seems he may have to some extent really meant this, for he uttered the same words two or three times in the course of his life.) He then challenged the King to single combat, with sword or poniard, in a boat, wearing only a doublet. Continuing his account the Seigneur de Langey added that when the two ambassadors sent their dispatch to the King, they reported the greater part of all this inaccurately and even hid the first two articles from him.

  Now I found it very odd that an ambassador should have the power to choose what he should tell his sovereign, especially in a matter of such moment, coming from such a person and spoken before so large an assembly. It would seem to me that the duty of a servant is fully and faithfully to report events just as they occurred, so that his master can be free to arrange, judge and select for himself. To alter the truth and hide it from someone out of fear that he might take it otherwise than he should and be driven to make an unwise decision (meanwhile leaving him ignorant of his own affairs) would seem to belong to the monarch not the subject, to a responsible schoolmaster not to him who should consider himself not merely subordinate in authority but also in wisdom and counsel. Anyway, even in petty affairs such as mine I would not care to be served that way.

  [C] Under some pretext or other we are always ready to withdraw our obedience and to usurp the mastery. Everyone so naturally aspires to freedom and authority that, to a superior, no quality should be dearer in those who serve him than simple, straightforward obedience.

  The right to command is corrupted when we obey at our discretion not from subordination. Publius Crassus (the one the Romans considered to be ‘five-times blessed’) was Consul in Asia when he wrote to a Greek engineer ordering him to bring him the larger of two ship’s masts which he had seen in Athens in order to use it in a siege-engine he wanted to make. The engineer, on the strength of his scientific knowledge, permitted himself to decide to bring the smaller one which, by the rules of his art, was the more suitable. Crassus listened to his arguments patiently, then had him soundly flogged, judging that the interests of discipline outweighed those of his machine.6

  Nevertheless we should consider on the other hand that so strict an obedience is appropriate only to precise orders previously given. The charge of ambassadors leaves them with a freer hand, much depending directly on their own judgement; they do not merely carry out their Master’s will, they form that will and dress it by their counsel. In my time I have seen persons in aut
hority criticized for having obeyed the King’s dispatches to the letter rather than adapting them to changing local circumstances. Men of judgement still condemn the practice of the kings of Persia who used to break down their orders into such detail that their agents and representatives had to refer back for rulings on the most trivial matters; such delays, over so wide an empire, often proved strikingly prejudicial to their affairs.

  As for Crassus, when he wrote to a specialist and actually told him what the mast was to be used for, did he not seem to be entering into a discussion about his intentions, inviting him to use his own discretion?

  18. On fear

  [Montaigne discusses fear, partly in the light of his own experience in war, partly from exempla. He sees it as often leading to mad, ecstatic behaviour: it was indeed to be classed as a case of rapture or of madness, the frightened man being ‘beside himself’.]

  [A] Obstupui, steteruntque comae, et vox faucibus haesit.