The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [A] In this noble relationship, the services and good turns which foster those other friendships do not even merit being taken into account: that is because of the total interfusion of our wills. For just as the friendly love I feel for myself is not increased – no matter what the Stoics may say – by any help I give myself in my need, and just as I feel no gratitude for any good turn I do to myself: so too the union of such friends, being truly perfect, leads them to lose any awareness of such services, to hate and to drive out from between them all terms of division and difference, such as good turn, duty, gratitude, request, thanks and the like. Everything is genuinely common to them both: their wills, goods, wives, children, honour and lives; [C] their correspondence is that of one soul in bodies twain, according to that most apt definition of Aristotle’s,28 [A] so they can neither lend nor give anything to each other. That is why those who make laws forbid gifts between husband and wife, so as to honour marriage with some imagined resemblance to that holy bond, wishing to infer by it that everything must belong to them both, so that there is nothing to divide or to split up between them. In the kind of friendship I am talking about, if it were possible for one to give to the other it is the one who received the benefaction who would lay an obligation on his companion. For each of them, more than anything else, is seeking the good of the other, so that the one who furnishes the means and the occasion is in fact the more generous, since he gives his friend the joy of performing for him what he most desires. [C] When Diogenes the philosopher was short of money he did not say that he would ask his friends to give him some but to give him some back!29 [A] And to show how this happens in practice I will cite an example – a unique one – from Antiquity.

  Eudamidas, a Corinthian, had two friends: Charixenus, a Sicyonian, and Aretheus, also a Corinthian. As he happened to die in poverty, his two friends being rich, he made the following testament: ‘To Aretheus I bequeath that he look after my mother and maintain her in her old age; to Charixenus, that he see that my daughter be married, providing her with the largest dowry he can; and if one of them should chance to die I appoint the survivor to substitute for him.’ Those who first saw his will laughed at it; but, when those heirs learned of it, they accepted it with a unique joy. One of them, Charixenus, did die five days later; the possibility of substitution was thus opened in favour of Aretheus, and he looked after the mother with much care; then, of five hundred weight of silver in his possession, he gave two and a half for the marriage of his only daughter and two and a half for the daughter of Eudamidas, celebrating their weddings on the same day.30

  This example is a most full one, save for one circumstance: there was more than one friend. For the perfect friendship which I am talking about is indivisible: each gives himself so entirely to his friend that he has nothing left to share with another: on the contrary, he grieves that he is not two-fold, three-fold or four-fold and that he does not have several souls, several wills, so that he could give them all to the one he loves.

  Common friendships can be shared. In one friend one can love beauty; in another, affability; in another, generosity; in another, a fatherly affection; in another, a brotherly one; and so on. But in this friendship love takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway: that cannot possibly be duplicated. [C] If two friends asked you to help them at the same time, which of them would you dash to? If they asked for conflicting favours, who would have the priority? If one entrusted to your silence something which it was useful for the other to know, how would you get out of that? The unique, highest friendship loosens all other bonds. That secret which I have sworn to reveal to no other, I can reveal without perjury to him who is not another: he is me. It is a great enough miracle for oneself to be redoubled: they do not realize how high a one it is when they talk of its being tripled. The uttermost cannot be matched. If anyone suggests that I can love each of two friends as much as the other, and that they can love each other and love me as much as I love them, he is turning into a plural, into a confraternity, that which is the most ‘one’, the most bound into one. One single example of it is moreover the rarest thing to find in the world.

  [A] The rest of that story conforms well what I was saying: for Eudamidas bestows a grace and favour on his friends when he makes use of them in his necessity. He left them heirs to his own generosity, which consists in putting into their hands the means of doing him good. And there is no doubt that the force of loving-friendship is more richly displayed in what he did than in what Aretheus did. To sum up, these are deeds which surpass the imagination of anyone who has not tasted them; [C] they make me wondrously honour the reply of that young soldier when Cyrus inquired of him how much he would take for a horse which had enabled him to win the prize in the races: ‘Would he sell it for a kingdom?’ – ‘No, indeed, Sire; but I would willingly give it away to gain a friend, if I could find a man worthy of such an alliance.’31 Not badly put, that, ‘If I could find’; for you can easily find men fit for a superficial acquaintanceship. But for our kind, in which we are dealing with the innermost recesses of our minds with no reservations, it is certain that all of our motives must be pure and sure to perfection.

  In those alliances which only get hold of us by one end, we need simply to provide against such flaws as specifically affect that end. It cannot matter to me what the religion of my doctor or my lawyer is: that consideration has nothing in common with the friendly services which they owe to me. And in such commerce as arises at home with my servants I act the same way: I make few inquiries about the chastity of my footman: I want to know if he is hard-working; I am less concerned by a mule-driver who gambles than by one who is an idiot, or by a cook who swears than by one who is incompetent. It is not my concern to tell the world how to behave (plenty of others do that) but how I behave in it:

  Mihi sic usus est; tibi, ut opus est facto, face.

  [This is what I do: do what serves you.]32

  For the intimate companionship of my table I choose the agreeable not the wise; in my bed, beauty comes before virtue; in social conversation, ability – even without integrity. And so on.

  [A] Just as that philosopher33 playing with his children and riding astride a hobby-horse told the man who surprised him at it not to make comments before he had children of his own, judging that the emotions which would then arise in his soul would make him a good judge of such behaviour: so too I could wish that I were speaking to people who had assayed what I am talking about; but realizing how far removed from common practice is such a friendship – and how rare it is – I do not expect to find one good judge of it. For the very writings which Antiquity have left us on this subject seem weak to me compared to what I feel. In this case the very precepts of philosophy are surpassed by the results:

  Nil ego contulerim jucundo sanus amico.

  [Whilst I am in my right mind, there is nothing I will compare with a delightful friend.]34

  In Antiquity Menander pronounced a man to be happy if he had merely encountered the shadow of a friend.35 He was certainly right to say so, especially if he had actually tasted friendship. For in truth if I compare all the rest of my life – although by the grace of God I have lived it sweetly and easily, exempt (save for the death of such a friend) from grievous affliction in full tranquillity36 of mind, contenting myself with the natural endowments which I was born with and not going about looking for others – if I compare it, I say, to those four years which it was vouchsafed to me to enjoy in the sweet companionship and fellowship of a man like that, it is but smoke and ashes, a night dark and dreary.

  Since that day when I lost him,

  quern semper acerbum,

  Semper honoratum (sic, Dii, voluistis) habebo,

  [which I shall ever hold bitter to me, though always honour (since the gods ordained it so),]37

  I merely drag wearily on. The very pleasures which are proffered me do not console me: they redouble my sorrow at his loss. In everything we were halves: I feel I am stealing his share from h
im:

  Nec fas esse ulla me voluptate hic frui

  Decrevi, tantisper dum ille abest meus particeps.

  [Nor is it right for me to enjoy pleasures, I decided, while he who shared things with me is absent from me.]38

  I was already so used and accustomed to being, in everything, one of two, that I now feel I am no more than a half:

  [B] Illam meæ si partem animæ tulit

  Maturior vis, quid moror altera,

  Nec charus æque, nec superstes

  Integer? Ille dies utramque

  Duxit ruinant.

  [Since an untimely blow has borne away a part of my soul, why do I still linger on less dear, only partly surviving? That day was the downfall of us both.]39

  [A] There is no deed nor thought in which I do not miss him – as he would have missed me; for just as he infinitely surpassed me in ability and virtue so did he do so in the offices of friendship:

  Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus

  Tam chari capitis?…

  O misero frater adempte mihi!

  Omnia tecum una perierunt gaudia nostra,

  Quæ tuus in vita dulcis alebat amor.

  Tu mea, tu moriens fregisti commoda, frater;

  Tecum una tota est nostra sepulta anima,

  Cujus ego interitu tota de mente fugavi

  Hœc studia atque omnes delicias animi.

  Alloquar? audiero nunquam tua verba loquentem?

  Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior,

  Aspiciam posthac? At certe semper amabo.

  [What shame or limit should there be to grief for one so dear?…How wretched I am, having lost such a brother With you died all our joys, which your sweet love fostered when you were alive. You, brother, have destroyed my happiness by your death: all my soul is buried with you. Because of your loss I have chased all thoughts from my mind and all pleasures from my soul… Shall I never speak to you, never hear you talking of what you have done? Shall I never see you again, my brother, dearer than life itself? But certainly I shall love you always.]40

  Let us hear a while this [C] sixteen-year-old [A] boy.41

  Having discovered that this work of his has since been published to an evil end by those who seek to disturb and change the state of our national polity without worrying whether they will make it better, and that they have set it among works of their own kidney, I have gone back on my decision to place it here. And so that the author’s reputation should not be harmed among those who cannot know his opinions or his actions, I tell them that this subject was treated by him in his childhood purely as an exercise; it is a commonplace theme, pawed over in hundreds and hundreds of books. I have no doubt that he believed what he wrote, for he was too conscientious to tell untruths even in a light-hearted work. And I know, moreover, that if he had had the choice he would rather have been born in Venice than in Sarlat. Rightly so. But he had another maxim supremely imprinted upon his soul: to obey, and most scrupulously submit to, the laws under which he was born. There never was a better citizen, one more devoted to his country’s peace or more opposed to the disturbances and novelties of his time. He would have used his abilities to snuff them out, not to provide materials to stir them up. The mould of his mind was cast on the model of centuries different from ours.

  So instead of that serious work I will substitute another one, more gallant and more playful, which he wrote in the same season of his life.42

  29. Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de La Boëtie

  [This chapter was designed to introduce sonnets by Montaigne’s especial friend La Boëtie, the subject of the previous chapter, and did indeed do so in all editions published during Montaigne’s lifetime. All the previous allusions which lead us to expect them here are kept, not least the promise to print them in compensation for his decision to omit the text of De la Servitude volontaire. In the Bordeaux copy Montaigne simply struck them all out – leaving his own text as ‘grotesques’ surrounding an absent masterpiece. No attempt is made to conceal the omission: the gaps are like blank columns in a censored newspaper. Montaigne had just defended his friend, and himself, from suspicion of seditious republicanism. His respect for the magistrature would have led him to consent to the excision (if pressure was in fact put on him) but not to change his loyalty or his judgement. His action can be compared to his refusing (III, 10) to concede ‘to the magistrature itself the right to condemn a book (his own Essais) for having classed a heretic (Beza) among the best poets of this century’.

  Montaigne had published some Sonnets of La Boëtie in 1572 (Fédéric Morel, Paris) and dedicated them to the Count de Foix. The sonnets which were printed here do not figure in them. This chapter is dedicated to Diane, wife of the Count of Grammont and Guiche (a good friend of his) and subsequently mistress of the protestant Henry of Navarre (the future King Henry IV). She was surnamed Corisande d’Andoins from a character in Amadis de Gaule, a vast many-volumed novel in which she delighted.]

  [A] To Madame de Grammont, Countess of Guiche

  Madame, I am offering you nothing of mine, either because it is yours already or else because I deem none of it worthy of you. But I have wanted these verses, wherever they may be read, to be headed by your name because it would honour them to have the great Corisande d’Andoins to guide them on their way. This gift seemed appropriate to you, inasmuch as there are few ladies in France who are better judges of poetry or who can more rightly take advantage of it. And since not one of them can sing poetry more vividly or more animatedly than you can with that tuneful voice so full and fair with which Nature has endowed you among a million other graces, these verses deserve that you, madame, should encourage them: for you will share my opinion that none have come out of Gascony which are better contrived or more refined, or which bear witness of deriving from a richer hand. You must not feel jealous because you have merely received the remainder of what I have already had printed, dedicated to your good kinsman, Monsieur de Foix, for these have something more indescribably lively and overflowing, having been written in his verdant youth in the heat of a fair and noble passion which I will one day, Madame, whisper in your ear. The others were written later for his wife when he was courting her; somehow they already have the cooler savour of marriage. Personally I am one who holds that poetry is never more gay than when treating a subject unruly and wanton.

  [C] These verses can be found elsewhere.1

  30. On moderation

  [Moderation is a Classical virtue. This chapter is a vital step in Montaigne’s thought, especially in the light of his later comments marked by [C]. It continues his reflections on love and marriage, moving from banter to seriousness. It examines why it is that the clergy and the doctors (whose duty is to cure souls and bodies) seek their remedies through pain and bitter medicines. Both remedies are often immoderate, in some ways akin to the ghastly sacrifices of the Incas, which also show how little most men value the gifts of Nature, including the gift of life and the natural pleasures.]

  [A] It is as though our very touch bore infection: things which in themselves are good and beautiful are corrupted by our handling of them. We can seize hold even of Virtue in such a way that our action makes her vicious if we clasp her in too harsh and too violent an embrace. Those who say that Virtue knows no excess (since she is no longer Virtue if there is excess within her) are merely playing with words.

  Insani sapiens nomen ferat, æquus iniqui,

  Ultra quam satis est virtutem si petal ipsam

  [The name of ‘insane’ is borne by the Sage and the name of ‘unjust’ is borne by the Just, if in their strivings after Virtue herself they go beyond what is sufficient.]1

  That is a subtle observation on the part of philosophy: you can both love virtue too much and [B] behave with excess [A] in an action which itself is just. The [B] Voice [A] of God adapts itself fittingly to that bias: ‘Be not more wise than it behoveth, but be ye soberly wise.’2

  [C] I have seen one of our great noblemen harm the reputation of his religion by showi
ng himself religious beyond any example of men of his rank.3

  I like natures which are temperate and moderate. Even when an immoderate zeal for the good does not offend me it still stuns me and makes it difficult for me to give it a Christian name. Neither Pausanias’ mother (who made the first accusation against her son and who brought the first stone to wall him up for his death) nor Posthumius (the Dictator who had his own son put to death because he had been carried away by youthful ardour and had fought – successfully – slightly ahead of his unit) seem ‘just’ to me: they seem odd.4 I neither like to advise nor to imitate a virtue so savage and so costly: the archer who shoots beyond his target misses it just as much as the one who falls short; my eyes trouble me as much when I suddenly come up into a strong light as when I plunge into darkness.

  Callicles says in Plato5 that, at its extremes, philosophy is harmful; he advises us not to go more deeply into it than the limits of what is profitable: taken in moderation philosophy is pleasant and useful, but it can eventually lead to a man’s becoming vicious and savage, contemptuous of religion and of the accepted laws, an enemy of social intercourse, an enemy of our human pleasures, useless at governing cities, at helping others or even at helping himself – a man whose ears you could box with impunity. What he says is true, for in its excesses philosophy enslaves our native freedom and with untimely subtleties makes us stray from that beautiful and easy path that Nature has traced for us.