The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  let my sister take the pattern for a girdle

  she will make for me to offer to my love;

  So may your beauty and your speckled hues be for

  ever honoured above all other snakes.

  This opening couplet serves as the song’s refrain. Now I know enough about poetry to make the following judgement: not only is there nothing ‘barbarous’ in this conceit but it is thoroughly anacreontic.31 Their language incidentally is [C] a pleasant one with an agreeable sound [A] and has terminations32 rather like Greek.

  Three such natives, unaware of what price in peace and happiness they would have to pay to buy a knowledge of our corruptions, and unaware that such commerce would lead to their downfall – which I suspect to be already far advanced – pitifully allowing themselves to be cheated by their desire for novelty and leaving the gentleness of their regions to come and see ours, were at Rouen at the same time as King Charles IX.33 The King had a long interview with them: they were shown our manners, our ceremonial and the layout of a fair city. Then someone asked them what they thought of all this and wanted to know what they had been most amazed by. They made three points; I am very annoyed with myself for forgetting the third, but I still remember two of them. In the first place they said (probably referring to the Swiss Guard) that they found it very odd that all those full-grown bearded men, strong and bearing arms in the King’s entourage, should consent to obey a boy rather than choosing one of themselves as a Commander; secondly – since they have an idiom in their language which calls all men ‘halves’ of one another – that they had noticed that there were among us men fully bloated with all sorts of comforts while their halves were begging at their doors, emaciated with poverty and hunger: they found it odd that those destitute halves should put up with such injustice and did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.

  I had a very long talk with one of them (but I used a stupid interpreter who was so bad at grasping my meaning and at understanding my ideas that I got little joy from it). When I asked the man (who was a commander among them, our sailors calling him a king) what advantage he got from his high rank, he told me that it was to lead his troops into battle; asked how many men followed him, he pointed to an open space to signify as many as it would hold – about four or five thousand men; questioned whether his authority lapsed when the war was over, he replied that he retained the privilege of having paths cut for him through the thickets in their forests, so that he could easily walk through them when he visited villages under his sway.

  Not at all bad, that. – Ah! But they wear no breeches…

  32. Judgements on God’s ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence

  [The theme that God’s counsel is a secret which Man should not try to scan was a common one in the Renaissance. Montaigne applies that dogma to the ups and downs of the Wars of Religion: we cannot say that God is on the side of the victors in battle. Montaigne asserts that even the pagan Indians of the New World know that better than warring Christians do.]

  [A] The real field and subject of deception are things unknown: firstly because their very strangeness lends them credence; second, because they cannot be exposed to our usual order of argument, so stripping us of the means of fighting them. [C] Plato says that this explains why it is easier to satisfy people when talking of the nature of the gods than of the nature of men: the ignorance of the hearers provides such hidden matters with a firm broad course for them to canter along in freedom.1 [A] And so it turns out that nothing is so firmly believed as whatever we know least about, and that no persons are more sure of themselves than those who tell us tall stories, such as alchemists and those who make prognostications: judicial astrologers, chiromancers, doctors and ‘id genus omne’ [all that tribe].2 To which I would add if I dared that crowd of everyday chroniclers and interpreters of God’s purposes who claim to discover the causes of everything that occurs and to read the unknowable purposes of God by scanning the secrets of His will; the continual changes and clash of events drive them from corner to corner and from East to West, but they still go on chasing the tennis-ball and sketching black and white with the same crayon. [B] In one Indian tribe they have a laudable custom: when they are worsted in a skirmish or battle they publicly beseech the Sun their god for pardon for having done wrong, attributing their success or failure to the divine mind, to which they submit their own judgement and discourse.

  [A] For a Christian it suffices to believe that all things come from God, to accept them with an acknowledgement of His holy unsearchable wisdom and so to take them in good part, under whatever guise they are sent to him. What I consider wrong is our usual practice of trying to support and confirm our religion by the success or happy outcome of our undertakings. Our belief has enough other foundations without seeking sanction from events: people who have grown accustomed to such plausible arguments well-suited to their taste are in danger of having their faith shaken when the turn comes for events to prove hostile and unfavourable. As in the religious wars which we are now fighting, after those who had prevailed at the battle of La Rochelabeille had had a great feast-day over the outcome, exploiting their good fortune as a sure sign of God’s approval for their faction, they then had to justify their misfortunes at Moncontour and Jarnac as being Fatherly scourges and chastisements:3 they would soon have made the people realize (if they did not have them under their thumb) that that is getting two kinds of meal from the same bag and blowing hot and cold with the same breath. It would be better to explain to the people the real foundations of truth.

  That was a fine naval engagement which we won against the Turk a few months ago, led by Don John of Austria: yet at other times it has pleased God to make us witness other such battles which cost us dear.4

  In short it is hard to bring matters divine down to human scales without their being trivialized. Supposing someone sought to explain why Arius and Leo his Pope (who were the main proponents of the Arian heresy) both died at different times of deaths so strange and similar, for they both had to leave the debates because of pains in their stomach and go to the lavatory, where both promptly died; and supposing they emphasized God’s vengeance by insisting on the nature of the place where this happened: well, they could add the example of the death of Heliogabalus who was also killed in a privy. Why, Irenaeus himself met the same fate.5

  [C] God wishes us to learn that the good have other things to hope for and the wicked other things to fear than the chances and mischances of this world, which his hands control according to his hidden purposes: and so he takes from us the means of foolishly exploiting them. Those who desire to draw advantage from them by human reason delude themselves. For every hit which they make, they suffer two in return. St Augustine amply proved that against his opponents: the arms which decide that wrangle are not those of reason but of memory.6

  [A] We must be content with the light which the Sun vouchsafes to shed on us by its rays: were a man to lift up his eyes to seek a greater light in the Sun itself, let him not find it strange if he is blinded as a penalty for his presumption. [C] ‘Quis hominum potest scire consilium dei? aut quis poterit cogitare quid velit dominus?’ [For what man can know the counsel of God: or who shall conceive what the Lord willeth?]7

  33. On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of one’s life

  [This chapter shows how Christianity in early times was closer to Stoicism than many realized. The anecdote of St Hilary derives from the Annales d’Aquitaine of Jean Bouchet (a friend of Rabelais and a fluent moral poet and historian of the generation before Montaigne).]

  [A] I had already noted that the majority of ancient opinions agree on the following: that it is time to die when living entails more ill than good, and that preserving our life to our anguish or prejudice is to infringe the very laws of Nature – as these old precepts put it:

  [Either a quiet life or a happy death.

  It is good to die for those who find life a burden.

  Better not to live than to live
in wretchedness.]1

  But to carry contempt for death to the point of using it to dissuade us from honours, riches, great offices and the rest of what we call Fortune’s goods and favours, as if reason did not already have cause enough to persuade us to abandon them without adding this fresh attack, is something I had never seen enjoined or practised until I happened upon a passage in Seneca; in it he advises Lucilius, a man of power and of great authority in the Emperor’s court, to renounce his life of pomp and pleasure and to withdraw from such worldly ambition into a solitary life, tranquil and philosophical. When Lucilius cited some of the difficulties, Seneca said: ‘My counsel is that either you should quit that life or life itself; I do indeed advise you to adopt the easier course of slipping the bonds which you have wrongly tied rather than breaking them, providing that you do break them if you cannot do otherwise. No man is such a coward that he would not rather make one fall than to be forever on the brink.’2

  I would have found that counsel in keeping with the asperity of the Stoics, but it is rather odd that Seneca could borrow it from Epicurus, who on this subject writes to Idomeneus in the very same way.3 Nevertheless I think I have noted a similar precept among our own people, but with Christian moderation. St Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers and a famous enemy of the Arian heresy, was in Syria when he was told that his only daughter Abra, whom he had left overseas with her mother, was being courted by some of the most notable lords of the land since she was very well brought up, a maiden fair, rich and blooming. He wrote to her (as we know) that she should get rid of her love of the pleasures and favours that were being offered her, saying that he had found for her during his journey a Suitor who was far greater and more worthy, a Bridegroom of very different power and glory, who would vouchsafe her a present of robes and jewels of countless price. His aim was to make her lose the habit and taste of worldly pleasures and to wed her to God; but since the most sure and shortest way seemed to him that his daughter should die, he never ceased to beseech God in his prayers, vows and supplications that he should take her from this world and call her to Himself. And so it happened: soon after his return she did die, at which he showed uncommon joy. He seems to have outstripped those others in that he had immediate recourse to a means which they keep in reserve; and besides it concerned his only daughter.

  But I would not omit the end of this story: when St Hilary’s wife heard from him how the death of their daughter had been brought about by his wish and design, and how much happier she was to have quitted this world than to have remained in it, she too took so lively a grasp on that eternal life in Heaven that she besought her husband, with the utmost urgency, to do the same for her. Soon after, when God took her to Himself in answer to both their prayers, the death was welcomed with open arms and with an uncommon joy which both of them shared.4

  34. Fortune is often found in Reason’s train

  [The Roman censor was not too happy about Montaigne’s writing about Fortune (as distinct from Providence) – strangely so, since fickle Fortune and Fortune’s Wheel were centuries-old commonplaces. (The word Fortune itself occurs some 350 times in the Essais. Montaigne explains why he finds it right to use words such as Fortune and Destiny in I, 56, ‘On prayer’.)]

  [A] The changeableness of Fortune’s varied dance means that she must inevitably show us every kind of face. Has any of her actions ever been more expressly just than the following? The Duke of Valentinois decided to poison Adrian the Cardinal of Corneto, to whose home in the Vatican he and his father Pope Alexander VI were coming to dine; so he sent ahead a bottle of poisoned wine with instructions to the butler to look after it carefully. The Pope, chancing to arrive before his son, asked for a drink; that butler, who thought that the wine had been entrusted to him merely because of its quality, served it to him; then the Duke himself, arriving just in time for dinner and trusting that nobody would have touched his bottle, drank some too, so that the father died suddenly while the son, after being tormented by a long illness, was reserved for a worse and different fortune.1

  Sometimes it seems that Fortune is literally playing with us. The Seigneur d’Estrées (who was then ensign to Monseigneur de Vendôme) and the Seigneur de Licques (a lieutenant in the forces of the Duke of Aerschot) were both suitors of the sister of the Sieur de Fouquerolle – despite their being on opposite sides, as often happens with neighbours on the frontier. The Seigneur de Licques was successful. However, on his very wedding-day and, what is worse, before going to bed, the bridegroom desired to break a lance as a tribute to his new bride and went out skirmishing near St Omer; there, he was taken prisoner by the Seigneur d’Estrées who had proved the stronger. To exploit this advantage to the full, d’Estrées compelled the lady –

  Conjugis ante coacta novi dimittere collum,

  Quam veniens una atque altera rursus hyems

  Noctibus in longis avidum saturasset amorem.

  [Forced to release her embrace of her young husband before the long nights of a couple of winters had sated her eager love]2 –

  personally to beg him, of his courtesy, to surrender his prisoner to her. Which he did, the French nobility never refusing anything to the ladies…

  [C] Was the following not Fate apparently playing the artist? The Empire of Constantinople was founded by Constantine son of Helena: many centuries later it was ended by another Constantine son of Helena!

  [A] Sometimes it pleases Fortune to rival our Christian miracles. We hold that when King Clovis was besieging Angoulême, by God’s favour the walls collapsed of themselves; Bouchet borrows from some other author an account of what happened when King Robert was laying siege to a certain city: he slipped off to Orleans to celebrate the festival of St Aignan; while he was saying his prayers, at a certain point in the Mass the walls of the besieged city collapsed without being attacked.3 But Fortune produced quite opposite results during our Milanese wars: for after Captain Renzo had mined a great stretch of the wall while besieging the town of Arona for us French it was blown right up in the air, only to fall straight back on to its foundations all in one piece so that the besieged were no worse off.4

  Sometimes Fortune dabbles in medicine. Jason Phereus was given up by his doctors because of a tumour on the breast; wishing to rid himself of it even by death, he threw himself recklessly into battle where the enemy was thickest; he was struck through the body at precisely the right spot, lancing his tumour and curing him.

  Did Fortune not surpass Protogenes the painter in mastery of his art? He had completed a portrait of a tired and exhausted dog; he was pleased with everything else but could not paint its foaming slaver to his own satisfaction; irritated against his work, he grabbed a sponge and threw it at it, intending to blot everything out since the sponge was impregnated with a variety of paints: Fortune guided his throw right to the mouth of the dog and produced the effect which his art had been unable to attain.5

  Does she not sometimes direct our counsels and correct them? Queen Isabella of England had to cross over to her kingdom from Zealand with her army to come to the aid of her son against her husband; she would have been undone if she had landed at the port she had intended, for her enemies were awaiting her there; but Fortune drove her unwillingly to another place, where she landed in complete safety.6 And that Ancient who chucked a stone at a dog only to hit his stepmother and kill her could he not have rightly recited this verse:7

  ‘Fortune has better counsel than we do.’8 [C] Icetes had bribed two soldiers to murder Tomoleon during his stay in Adrana in Sicily. They chose a time when he was about to make some sacrifice or other; they mingled with the crowd; just as they were signalling to each other that the time was right for their deed, along comes a third soldier who landed a mighty sword-blow on the head of one of them and then ran away. His companion, believing he was discovered and undone, ran to the altar begging for sanctuary and promising to reveal all the truth. Just as he was giving an account of the conspiracy the third man was caught and was being dragged and manhandled through t
he crowd towards Timoleon and the more notable members of the congregation: he begged for mercy, saying that he had rightly killed his father’s murderer, immediately proving by witnesses which good luck had conveniently provided that his father had indeed been murdered in the town of the Leontines by the very man against whom he had taken his revenge. He was granted ten Attic silver-pounds as a reward for his good luck in saving the life of the Father of the Sicilian People while avenging the death of his own father. Such fortune surpasses in rightness the right-rules of human wisdom.9

  [B] To conclude. Does not the following reveal a most explicit explicit granting of her favour as well as her goodness and singular piety? The two Ignatii, father and son, having been proscribed by the Roman Triumvirate, nobly decided that their duty was to take each other’s life and so frustrate the cruelty of those tyrants. Sword in hand they fell on each other. Fortune guided their sword-points, made both blows equally mortal and honoured the beauty of such a loving affection by giving them just enough strength to withdraw their forearms from the wounds, blood-stained and still grasping their weapons, and to clasp each other, there as they lay, in such an embrace that the executioners cut off both their heads at once, allowing their bodies to remain nobly entwined together, wound against wound, lovingly soaking up each other’s life-blood.10

  35. Something lacking in our civil administrations

  [Montaigne’s father had sound ideas on practical charity and on running a household. The link between the two parts of this short chapter is the word polices (polity: civil administration) which applies both to the running of a country and the running of an estate. Montaigne shows the breadth of his charity, Sebastian Castalio being in bad odour because of his translation of the Bible and for his use of Lutheran works to preach religious tolerance.]