The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [I stood dumb with fear; my hair stood on end and my voice stuck in my throat.]1

  I am not much of a ‘natural philosopher’ – that is the term they use; I have hardly any idea of the mechanisms by which fear operates in us; but it is a very odd emotion all the same; doctors say that there is no emotion which more readily ravishes our judgement from its proper seat. I myself have seen many men truly driven out of their minds by fear, and it is certain that, while the fit lasts, fear engenders even in the most staid of men a terrifying confusion.

  I leave aside simple folk, for whom fear sometimes conjures up visions of their great-grandsires rising out of their graves still wrapped in their shrouds, or else of chimeras, werewolves or goblins; but even among [C] soldiers,2 [A] where fear ought to be able to find very little room, how many times have I seen it change a flock of sheep into a squadron of knights in armour; reeds or bulrushes into men-at-arms and lancers; our friends, into enemies; a white cross into a red one.

  When Monsieur de Bourbon captured Rome, a standard-bearer who was on guard at the Burgo San Pietro was [C] seized by [A] such terror3 at the first alarm that he leapt through a gap in the ruins and rushed out of the town straight for the enemy still holding his banner; he thought he was running into the town, but at the very last minute he just managed to see the troops of Monsieur de Bourbon drawing up their ranks ready to resist him (it was thought that the townsfolk were making a sortie); he realized what he was doing and headed back through the very same gap out of which he had just made a three-hundred-yards’ dash into the battlefield.

  But the standard-bearer of Captain Juille was not so lucky when Saint-Pol was taken from us by Count de Bures and the Seigneur de Reu; for fear had made him so distraught that he dashed out of the town, banner and all, through a gun-slit and was cut to pieces by the attacking soldiers. There was another memorable case during the same siege, when fear so strongly seized the heart of a certain nobleman, freezing it and strangling it, that he dropped down dead in the breach without even being wounded.4

  [C] Such fear can sometimes take hold of a great crowd. [B] In one of the engagements between Germanicus and the Allemani two large troops of soldiers took fright and fled opposite ways, one fleeing to the place which the other had just fled from.5

  [A] Sometimes fear as in the first two examples puts wings on our heels; at others it hobbles us and nails our feet to the ground, as happened to the Emperor Theophilus in the battle which he lost against the Agarenes; we read that he was so enraptured and so beside himself with fear, that he could not even make up his mind to run away: [B] ‘adeo pavor etiam auxilia formidat’ [so much does fear dread even help].6 [A] Eventually Manuel, one of the foremost commanders of his army, shook him and pulled him roughly about as though rousing him from a profound sleep, saying, ‘If you will not follow me I will kill you; the loss of your life matters less than the loss of the Empire if you are taken prisoner.’

  [C] Fear reveals her greatest power when she drives us to perform in her own service those very deeds of valour of which she robbed our duty and our honour. In the first pitched battle which the Romans lost to Hannibal during the consulship of Sempronius, an army of ten thousand foot-soldiers took fright, but seeing no other way to make their cowardly escape they fought their way through the thick of the enemy, driving right through them with incredible energy, slaughtering a large number of Carthaginians but paying the same price for a shameful flight as they should have done for a glorious victory.7

  It is fear that I am most afraid of. In harshness it surpasses all other mischances. [’95] What emotion could ever be more powerful or more appropriate than that felt by the friends of Pompey who were aboard a ship with him and witnessed that horrible massacre of his forces? Yet even that emotion was stifled by their fear of the Egyptian sails as they began to draw nearer; it was noticed that his friends had no time for anything but urging the sailors to strive to save them by rowing harder; but after they touched land at Tyre their fear left them and they were free to turn their thoughts to the losses they had just suffered and to give rein to those tears and lamentations which that stronger emotion of fear had kept in abeyance.

  Tum pavor sapientiam omnem mihi ex animo expectorat.

  [Then fear banishes all wisdom from my heart.]8

  [C] Men who have suffered a good mauling in a military engagement, all wounded and bloody as they are, can be brought back to the attack the following day; but men who have tasted real fear cannot be brought even to look at the enemy again. People with a pressing fear of losing their property or of being driven into exile or enslaved also lose all desire to eat, drink or sleep, whereas those who are actually impoverished, banished or enslaved often enjoy life as much as anyone else. And many people, unable to withstand the stabbing pains of fear, have hanged themselves, drowned themselves or jumped to their deaths, showing us that fear is even more importunate and unbearable than death.

  The Greeks acknowledged another species of fear over and above that fear caused when our reason is distraught; it comes, they say, from some celestial impulsion, without any apparent cause.9 Whole peoples have been seized by it as well as whole armies. Just such a fear brought wondrous desolation to Carthage: nothing was heard but shouts and terrified voices; people were seen dashing out of their houses as if the alarm had been sounded; they began attacking, wounding and killing each other, as though they took each other for enemies come to occupy their city. All was disorder and tumult until they had calmed the anger of their gods with prayer and sacrifice.

  Such outbursts are called ‘Panic terrors’.10

  19. That we should not be deemed happy till after our death

  [A preoccupation with death was expected from melancholics: in Montaigne’s case this was heightened by the deaths of La Boëtie and his own father, as well as by the murderous Wars of Religion. ‘Death’ is considered in the sense of the act of dying, not as the state of the soul in the after-life. As such it is the concern of philosophy not of religion. ‘Happiness’ in this context includes notions of blessedness and of good fortune. The influence of Stoic commonplaces is clear but not exclusively important; in [B] the aim is less a noble death than a quiet one.]

  [A] Scilicet ultima semper

  Expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus

  Ante obitum nemo, supremaque funera debet.

  [You must always await a man’s last day: before his death and last funeral rites, no one should be called happy.]1

  There is a story about this which children know; it concerns King Croesus: having been taken by Cyrus and condemned to death, he cried out as he awaited execution, ‘O Solon, Solon!’ This was reported to Cyrus who inquired of him what it meant. Croesus explained to him that Solon had once given him a warning which he was now proving true to his own cost: that men, no matter how Fortune may smile on them,2 can never be called happy until you have seen them pass through the last day of their life, on account of the uncertainty and mutability of human affairs which lightly shift from state to state, each one different from the other. That is why Agesilaus replied to someone who called the King of Persia happy because he had come so young to so great an estate, ‘Yes: but Priam was not wretched when he was that age.’3 Descendants of Alexander the Great, themselves kings of Macedonia, became cabinet-makers and scriveners in Rome; tyrants of Sicily became schoolteachers in Corinth.4 A conqueror of half the world, a general of numerous armies, became a wretched suppliant to the beggarly officials of the King of Egypt: that was the cost of five or six more months of life to Pompey the Great.5 And during our fathers’ lifetime Ludovico Sforza, the tenth Duke of Milan, who for so long had been the driving force in Italy, was seen to die prisoner at Loches – but (and that was the worst of it) only after living there ten years. [C] The fairest Queen, widow of the greatest King in Christendom, has she not just died by the hand of the executioner?6 [A] There are hundreds of other such examples. For just as storms and tempests seem to rage against the haughty arrogant height of ou
r buildings, so it could seem that there are spirits above us, envious of any greatness here below.

  Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quædam

  Obterit, et pulchros fasces sævasque secures

  Proculcare, ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur.

  [Some hidden force apparently topples the affairs of men, seeming to trample down the resplendent fasces and the lictor’s unyielding axe, holding them in derision.]7

  Fortune sometimes seems precisely to lie in ambush for the last day of a man’s life in order to display her power to topple in a moment what she had built up over the length of years, and to make us follow Laberius and exclaim: ‘Nimirum hoc die una plus vixi, mihi quam vivendum fuit.’ [I have lived this day one day longer than I ought to have lived.]8

  The good counsel of Solon could be taken that way. But he was a philosopher: for such, the favours and ill graces of Fortune do not rank as happiness or unhappiness and for them great honours and powers9 are non-essential properties, counted virtually as things indifferent. So it seems likely to me that he was looking beyond that, intending to tell us that happiness in life (depending as it does on the tranquillity and contentment of a spirit well-born and on the resolution and assurance of an ordered soul) may never be attributed to any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play, which is indubitably the hardest.10 In all the rest he can wear an actor’s mask: those fine philosophical arguments may be only a pose, or whatever else befalls us may not assay us to the quick, allowing us to keep our countenance serene. But in that last scene played between death and ourself there is no more feigning; we must speak straightforward French; we must show whatever is good and clean in the bottom of the pot:

  Nam veræ voces tum demum pectore ab into

  Ejiciuntur, et eripitur persona, manet res

  [Only then are true words uttered from deep in our breast. The mask is ripped off: reality remains.]11

  That is why all the other actions in our life must be tried on the touchstone of this final deed. It is the Master-day, the day which judges all the others; it is (says one of the Ancients)12 the day which must judge all my years now past. The assay of the fruits of my studies is postponed unto death. Then we shall see if my arguments come from my lips or my heart.

  [B] I note that several men by their death have given a good or bad reputation to their entire life. Scipio, Pompey’s father-in-law, redeemed by a good death the poor opinion people had had of him until then. And when asked which of three men he judged most worthy of honour, Chabrias, Iphicrates or himself, Epaminondas replied, ‘Before deciding that you must see us die.’13 (Indeed Epaminondas would be robbed of a great deal if anyone were to weigh his worth without the honour and greatness of his end.)

  In my own times three of the most execrable and ill-famed men I have known, men plunged into every kind of abomination, died deaths which were well-ordered and in all respects perfectly reconciled: such was God’s good pleasure.

  [C] Some deaths are fine and fortunate. I knew a man14 whose thread of life was progressing towards brilliant preferment when it was snapped; his end was so splendid that, in my opinion, his great-souled search after honour held nothing so sublime as that snapping asunder: the goal he aimed for he reached before he had even set out; that was more grand and more glorious than anything he had wished or hoped for. As he fell he surpassed the power and reputation towards which his course aspired.

  [B] When judging another’s life I always look to see how its end was borne: and one of my main concerns for my own is that it be borne well – that is, in a quiet and [C] muted [B] manner.15

  20. To philosophize is to learn how to die

  [Montaigne comes to terms with his melancholy, now somewhat played down. He remains preoccupied with that fear of death – fear that is of the often excruciating act of dying – which in older times seems to have been widespread and acute. His treatment is rhetorical but not impersonal. The [C] text may be influenced by the advice of the Vatican censor. The philosophical presuppositions of this chapter are largely overturned at the end of the Essays (in III, 13, ‘On experience’). Montaigne is on the way to discovering admirable qualities in common men and women. His starting-point here is Socratic: philosophy (by detaching the soul from the body) is a ‘practising of death’; [C] introduces an Epicurean concern with pleasure.]

  [A] Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die.1 That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps it is because all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion; which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying.

  In truth, either reason is joking or her target must be our happiness; all the labour of reason must be to make us live well, and at our ease, as Holy [C] Scripture [A] says.2 All the opinions in the world reach the same point, [C] that pleasure is our target [A] even though they may get there by different means; otherwise we would throw them out immediately, for who would listen to anyone whose goal was to achieve for us [C] pain and suffering?3

  In this case the disagreements between the schools of philosophy are a matter of words. ‘Transcurramus solertissimas nugas.’ [Let us skip quickly through those most frivolous trivialities.]4 More stubbornness and prickliness are there than is appropriate for so dedicated a vocation, but then, no matter what role a man may assume, he always plays his own part within it.

  Even in virtue our ultimate aim – no matter what they say – is pleasure. I enjoy bashing people’s ears with that word which runs so strongly counter to their minds. When pleasure is taken to mean the most profound delight and an exceeding happiness it is a better companion to virtue than anything else; and rightly so. Such pleasure is no less seriously pleasurable for being more lively, taut, robust and virile. We ought to have given virtue the more favourable, noble and natural name of pleasure not (as we have done) a name derived from vis (vigour).5

  There is that lower voluptuous pleasure which can only be said to have a disputed claim to the name not a privileged right to it. I find it less pure of lets and hindrances than virtue. Apart from having a savour which is fleeting, fluid and perishable, it has its vigils, fasts and travails, its blood and its sweat; it also has its own peculiar sufferings, which are sharp in so many different ways and accompanied by a satiety of such weight that it amounts to repentance.6

  Since we reckon that obstacles serve as a spur to that pleasure and as seasoning to its sweetness (on the grounds that in Nature contraries are enhanced by their contraries) we are quite wrong to say when we turn to virtue that identical obstacles and difficulties overwhelm her, making her austere and inaccessible, whereas (much more appropriately than for voluptuous pleasure) they ennoble, sharpen and enhance that holy, perfect pleasure which virtue procures for us. A man is quite unworthy of an acquaintance with virtue who weighs her fruit against the price she exacts; he knows neither her graces nor her ways. Those who proceed to teach us that the questing after virtue is rugged and wearisome whereas it is delightful to possess her can only mean that she always lacks delight.7 (For what human means have ever brought anyone to the joy of possessing her?) Even the most perfect of men have been satisfied with aspiring to her – not possessing her but drawing near to her. The contention is wrong, seeing that in every pleasure known to Man the very pursuit of it is pleasurable: the undertaking savours of the quality of the object it has in view; it effectively constitutes a large proportion of it and is consubstantial with it. There is a happiness and blessedness radiating from virtue; they fill all that appertains to her and every approach to her, from the first way in to the very last barrier.

  Now one of virtue’s main gifts is a contempt for death, which is the means of furnishing our life with easy tranquillity, of giving us a pure and friendly taste for it; without it every other pleasure is snuffed out. [A] That is why all rules meet and con
cur in this one clause.8 [C] It is true that they all lead us by common accord to despise pain, poverty and the other misfortunes to which human lives are subject, but they do not do so with the same care. That is partly because such misfortunes are not inevitable. (Most of Mankind spend their lives without tasting poverty; some without even experiencing pain or sickness, like Xenophilus the musician, who lived in good health to a hundred and six.) It is also because, if the worse comes to worse, we can sheer off the bung of our misfortunes whenever we like: death can end them.9 But, as for death itself, that is inevitable.

  [B] Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium

  Versatur urna, serius ocius

  Sors exitura et nos in æter-

  Num exitium impositura cymbæ.

  [All of our lots are shaken about in the Urn, destined sooner or later to be cast forth, placing us in everlasting exile via Charon’s boat.]10

  [A] And so if death makes us afraid, that is a subject of continual torment which nothing can assuage. [C] There is no place where death cannot find us – even if we constantly twist our heads about in all directions as in a suspect land: ‘Quae quasi saxum Tantalo semper impendet.’ [It is like the rock for ever hanging over the head of Tantalus.]11 [A] Our assizes often send prisoners to be executed at the scene of their crimes. On the way there, take them past fair mansions and ply them with good cheer as much as you like –

  [B]… non Siculæ dapes

  Dulcem elaborabunt saporem,

  Non avium cytharæque cantus

  Somnum reducent –