The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [A] The affection which we bear towards our wives is entirely legitimate: yet Theology nevertheless puts reins on it and restrains it. Among the reasons which Saint Thomas Aquinas6 cites in condemnation of marriages between relatives who are within the forbidden affinities I think I once read the following: There is a risk that the love felt for such a wife might be immoderate; for if the marital affection between them is full and entire (as it ought to be) and then you add on to it the further affection proper among kinsfolk, there is no doubt that such an over-measure would ravish such a husband beyond the limits of reason.7

  Those sciences which govern the morals of mankind, such as [C] Theology and [A] philosophy, make everything their concern: no activity is so private or so secret as to escape their attention or their jurisdiction. [C] Only mere beginners criticize their freedom to do so: they are like the kind of women whose organs are as accessible as you wish for copulation but who are too bashful to show them to the doctor. [A] On behalf of these sciences I therefore want to teach husbands the following8 – [C] if, that is, there are any who are still too eager: [A] even those very pleasures which they enjoy when lying with their wives are reproved if not kept within moderation; you can fall into licence and excess in this as in matters unlawful.9 [C] All those shameless caresses which our first ardour suggests to us in our sex-play are not only unbecoming to our wives but harmful to them when practised on them. At least let them learn shamelessness from some other hand! They are always wide enough awake when we need them. Where this is concerned what I have taught taught has been natural and uncomplicated.

  [A] Marriage is a bond both religious and devout: that is why the pleasure we derive from it must be serious, restrained and intermingled with some gravity; its sensuousness should be somewhat wise and dutiful. Its chief end is procreation, so there are those who doubt whether it is right to seek intercourse when we have no hope of conception, as when the woman is pregnant or too old.10 [C] For Plato that constitutes a kind of of homicide. [B] There are whole peoples, [C] including the Mahometans, [B] who abominate intercourse with women who are pregnant, and others still during monthly periods. Zenobia admitted her husband for a single discharge; once that was over she let him run wild throughout her pregnancy, giving him permission to begin again only once it was over. There was a fine and noble-hearted marriage for you!11

  [C] It was from some yearning sex-starved poet that Plato borrowed his story about Jupiter’s making such heated advances to his wife one day that he could not wait for her to lie on the bed but tumbled her on the floor, forgetting the great and important decisions which he had just reached with the other gods in his celestial Court and boasting that he had enjoyed it as much as when, hidden from her parents, he had first taken her maidenhead.12

  [A] The kings of Persia did invite their wives as guests to their festivities, but once the wine had seriously inflamed them so that they had to let their lust gallop free, they packed them off to their quarters so as not to make them accomplices of their immoderate appetites, sending instead for other women whom they were not bound to respect.13

  [B] It is not every pleasure or favour that is well lodged in people of every sort. Epaminondas had a dissolute boy put in prison: Pelopidas, for his own purposes, begged for his freedom; Epaminondas refused but granted it to one of his whores who also begged for it, saying that it was a favour due to I mistress but not to a captain. [C] Sophocles, when I Praetor with Pericles, happened to see a handsome youth go by: ‘What a handsome boy,’ said he to Pericles. ‘That’, said Pericles, ‘would be all right coming from anyone but a Praetor, who must not only have pure hands but pure eyes.’14

  [A] When the wife of the Emperor Aelius Verus complained of his permitting himself [C] affairs with [A] other women,15 he replied that he acted thus for reasons of conscience, marriage being a term of honour and dignity not of wanton and lascivious lust. [C] And our old Church authors make honourable mention of a wife who rejected her husband since she had no wish to be a partner to his lascivious and immoderate embraces.16

  [A] In short there is no pleasure, however proper, which does not become a matter of reproach when excessive and intemperate.

  But, seriously though, is not Man a wretched creature? Because of his natural attributes he is hardly able to taste one single pleasure pure and entire: yet he has to go and curtail even that by arguments; he is not wretched enough until he has increased his wretchedness by art and assiduity.

  [B] Fortunae miseras auximus arte vias.

  [The wretched paths of Fortune we make worse by art.]17

  [C] Human wisdom is stupidly clever when used to diminish the number and sweetness of such pleasures as do belong to us, just as she employs her arts with diligence and fitness when she brings comb and cosmetics to our ills and makes us feel them less. If I had founded a school of philosophy I would have taken another route – a more natural one, that is to say a true, convenient and inviolate one; and I might have made myself strong enough to know when to stop.

  [A] Consider the fact that those physicians of our souls and bodies, as though plotting together, can find no other way to cure us and no other remedy for our illnesses of soul and body than by torment, pain and tribulation. Vigils, fasting, hair-shirts and banishments to distant solitary places, endless imprisonments, scourges and other sufferings have been brought in to that end: but only on condition that the suffering is real and should cause bitter pain, [B] and that there should not befall what happened to a man called called Gallio who was banished to the island of Lesbos: Rome was told that he was enjoying himself there and that what had been inflicted as a punishment was turning into a pleasure, at which he was ordered back to wife and home and commanded to stay put, so as to adapt the punishment to his real feelings.18 [A] For if a man’s health and happiness were made keener by fasting, or if he found fish more tasty than meat, it would cease to be a salutary prescription: just as drugs prescribed by the other kind of doctor have no affect on anyone who swallowed them with pleasure and enjoyment. The bitter taste and the hardship are attributes which make them work. A constitution which could regularly stand rhubarb would spoil its efficacity: to cure our stomachs it must be something which hurts it: and here the usual axiom that ‘contraries cure contraries’ breaks down;19 for in this case illness cures illness.

  [B] This notion is somewhat like that other very ancient one which was universally embraced by all religions and which leads us to think that we can please Heaven and Nature by our murders and our massacres.

  [C] Even in our fathers’ time Amurath, when he conquered the Isthmus, sacrificed six hundred Greek youths for the soul of his father, so that their blood might serve as a propitiation, expiating the sins of that dead man.20 [B] And in those new lands discovered in our own time, lands pure and virgin compared with ours, the practice is accepted virtually everywhere: all their idols are slaked with human blood, not without various examples of dreadful cruelty. Men are burned alive; when half-roasted they are withdrawn from the fire so that their hearts and entrails can be plucked out; others, even women, are flayed alive: their skin, all bloody, serves as a cloak to mask others; and there are no less examples of constancy and determination. For those wretches who are to be immolated, old men, women and children, beg for alms a few days beforehand as offertories at their sacrifice, and present themselves to the slaughter singing and dancing with the congregation. The ambassadors from the King of Mexico, to make Fernando Cortez realize the greatness of their master, first told him that he had thirty vassal-lords, each one of whom could muster a hundred thousand fighting men, and that he dwelt in the strongest fairest city under Heaven; they then added that he had fifty thousand men sacrificed to the gods every year. It is truly said that he cultivated war with some great neighbouring peoples not merely to train the youth of his country but chiefly to furnish prisoners of war for his sacrifices. In another place there was a town where they welcomed Cortez by sacrificing fifty men at the same time. And I will relate one more acc
ount: when Cortez had conquered some of these peoples they sent messengers to find out about him and to seek his friendship. They offered him three sorts of gifts in this wise: ‘Lord, here are five slaves; if thou art a fierce god who feedest on flesh and blood, eat them and we shall bring thee more. If thou art a kindly god, here are feathers and incense; if thou art human, accept these birds and these fruits.’21

  31. On the Cannibals

  [The cannibals mentioned in this chapter lived on the coasts of Brazil. Montaigne had read many accounts of the conquest of the New World, including Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del mondo novo (Venice, 1565) in the French translation by Urbain Chauveton, the very title of which emphasizes the dreadful treatment of the natives by the Conquistadores: A New History of the New World containing all that Spaniards have done up to the present in the West Indies, and the harsh treatment which they have meted out to those peoples yonder… Together with a short History of a Massacre committed by the Spaniards on some Frenchmen in Florida (two editions in 1579).

  Montaigne’s ‘primitivism’ (his respect for barbarous peoples and his admiration for much of their conduct, once their motives are understood) has little in common with the ‘noble savages’ of later centuries. These peoples are indeed cruel: but so are we. Their simple ways have much to teach us: they can serve as a standard by which we can judge Plato’s Republic, the myth of the Golden Age, the cruelty, the corruption and the culture of Europe, and show up that European insularity which condemns peoples as barbarous merely because their manners and their dress are different.]

  [A] When King Pyrrhus crossed into Italy, after noting the excellent formation of the army which the Romans had sent ahead towards him he said, ‘I do not know what kind of Barbarians these are’ (for the Greeks called all foreigners Barbarians) ‘but there is nothing barbarous about the ordering of the army which I can see!’ The Greeks said the same about the army which Flaminius brought over to their country, [C] as did Philip when he saw from a hill-top in his kingdom the order and plan of the Roman encampment under Publius Sulpicius Galba.1 [A] We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions; we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote.

  I have long had a man with me who stayed some ten or twelve years in that other world which was discovered in our century when Villegaignon made his landfall and named it La France Antartique.2 This discovery of a boundless territory seems to me worthy of reflection. I am by no means sure that some other land may not be discovered in the future, since so many persons, [C] greater than we are, [A] were wrong about this one! I fear that our eyes are bigger than our bellies, our curiosity more3 than we can stomach. We grasp at everything but clasp nothing but wind.

  Plato brings in Solon to relate that he had learned from the priests of the town of Saïs in Egypt how, long ago before the Flood, there was a vast island called Atlantis right at the mouth of the Straits of Gibraltar, occupying an area greater than Asia and Africa combined; the kings of that country, who not only possessed that island but had spread on to the mainland across the breadth of Africa as far as Egypt and the length of Europe as far as Tuscany, planned to stride over into Asia and subdue all the peoples bordering on the Mediterranean as far as the Black Sea. To this end they had traversed Spain, Gaul and Italy and had reached as far as Greece when the Athenians withstood them; but soon afterwards those Athenians, as well as the people of Atlantis and their island, were engulfed in that Flood.4

  It is most likely that that vast inundation should have produced strange changes to the inhabitable areas of the world; it is maintained that it was then that the sea cut off Sicily from Italy –

  [B] Hœc loca, vi quondam et vasta convulsa ruina,

  Dissiluisse ferunt, cum protinus utraque tellus

  Una foret.

  [Those places, they say, were once wrenched apart by a violent convulsion, whereas they had formerly been one single land.]5

  – [A] as well as Cyprus from Syria, and the island of Negropontus from the Boeotian mainland, while elsewhere lands once separated were joined together by filling in the trenches between them with mud and sand:

  sterilisque diu palus aptaque remis

  Vicinas urbes alit, et grave sentit aratrum.

  [Barren swamps which you could row a boat through now feed neighbouring cities and bear the heavy plough.]6

  Yet there is little likelihood of that island’s being the New World which we have recently discovered, for it was virtually touching Spain; it would be unbelievable for a flood to force it back more than twelve hundred leagues to where it is now; besides our modern seamen have already all but discovered that it is not an island at all but a mainland, contiguous on one side with the East Indies and on others with lands lying beneath both the Poles – or that if it is separated from them, it is by straits so narrow that it does not deserve the name of ‘island’ on that account.

  [B] It seems that large bodies such as these are subject, as are our own, to changes, [C] some natural, some [B] feverish.7 When I consider how my local river the Dordogne has, during my own lifetime, been encroaching on the right-hand bank going downstream and has taken over so much land that it has robbed many buildings of their foundation, I realize that it has been suffering from some unusual upset: for if it had always gone on like this or were to do so in the future, the whole face of the world would be distorted. But their moods change: sometimes they incline one way, then another: and sometimes they restrain themselves. I am not discussing those sudden floodings whose causes we know. By the coast-line in Médoc, my brother the Sieur d’Arsac can see lands of his lying buried under sand spewed up by the sea: the tops of some of the buildings are still visible: his rents and arable fields have been changed into very sparse grazing. The locals say that the sea has been thrusting so hard against them for some time now that they have lost four leagues of land. These sands are the sea’s pioneer-corps: [C] and we can see those huge shifting sand-dunes marching a half-league ahead in the vanguard, capturing territory.

  [A] The other testimony from Antiquity which some would make relevant to this discovery is in Aristotle – if that little book about unheard wonders is really his.8 He tells how some Carthaginians struck out across the Atlantic beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, sailed for a long time and finally discovered a large fertile island entirely clothed in woodlands and watered by great deep rivers but very far from any mainland; they and others after them, attracted by the richness and fertility of the soil, emigrated with their wives and children and started living there. The Carthaginian lords, seeing that their country was being gradually depopulated, expressly forbade any more to go there on pain of death and drove out those new settlers, fearing it is said that they would in time increase so greatly that they would supplant them and bring down their State.

  But that account in Aristotle cannot apply to these new lands either.

  That man of mine was a simple, rough fellow – qualities which make for a good witness: those clever chaps notice more things more carefully but are always adding glosses; they cannot help changing their story a little in order to make their views triumph and be more persuasive; they never show you anything purely as it is: they bend it and disguise it to fit in with their own views. To make their judgement more credible and to win you over they emphasize their own side, amplify it and extend it. So you need either a very trustworthy man or else a man so simple that he has nothing in him on which to build such false discoveries or make them plausible; and he must be wedded to no cause. Such was my man; moreover on various occasions he showed me several seamen and merchants whom he knew on that voyage. So I am content with what he told me, without inquiring what the cosmographers have to say about it.

  What we need is topographers who would make detailed accounts of the places which they had actually been to. But because they have the advantage of visiting Palestine, they want to enjoy the right of telling us tales about all the rest of the world! I wish everyone would write only about what he knows – not in this
matter only but in all others. A man may well have detailed knowledge or experience of the nature of one particular river or stream, yet about all the others he knows only what everyone else does; but in order to trot out his little scrap of knowledge he will write a book on the whole of physics! From this vice many great inconveniences arise.

  Now to get back to the subject, I find (from what has been told me) that there is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples, but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything! Those ‘savages’ are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are produced by Nature in her ordinary course: whereas it is fruit which we have artificially perverted and misled from the common order which we ought to call savage. It is in the first kind that we find their true, vigorous, living, most natural and most useful properties and virtues, which we have bastardized in the other kind by merely adapting them to our corrupt tastes. [C] Moreover, there is a delicious savour which even our taste finds excellent in a variety of fruits produced in those countries without cultivation: they rival our own. [A] It is not sensible that artifice should be reverenced more than Nature, our great and powerful Mother. We have so overloaded the richness and beauty of her products by our own ingenuity that we have smothered her entirely. Yet wherever her pure light does shine, she wondrously shames our vain and frivolous enterprises: