The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [A] My late father, a man of a decidedly clear judgement, based though it was only on his natural gifts and his own experience, said to me once that1 he had wished to set a plan in motion leading to the designation of a place in our cities where those who were in need of anything could go and have their requirements registered by a duly appointed official; for example: [C] ‘I want to sell some pearls’; or ‘I want to buy some pearls.’ [A] ‘So-and-so wants to make up a group to travel to Paris’; ‘So-and-so wants a servant with the following qualifications’; ‘So-and-so seeks an employer’; ‘So-and-so wants a workman’; each stating his wishes according to his needs.

  It does seem that this means of mutual advertising would bring no slight advantage to our public dealings; for at every turn there are bargains seeking each other but, because they cannot find each other, men are left in extreme want.

  I have just learnt something deeply shameful to our times; under our very eyes two outstanding scholars have died for want of food, Lilius Gregorius Giraldus in Italy and Sebastian Castalio in Germany; and I believe that there are hundreds of people who would have invited them to their houses on very favourable terms [C] or sent help to them where they were, [A] if only they had known.2

  The world is not so completely corrupt that we cannot find even one man who would not gladly wish to see his inherited wealth able to be used (as long as Fortune lets him enjoy it) to provide shelter for great men who are renowned for some particular achievement but who have been reduced to extreme poverty by their misfortunes; he could at least give them enough assistance that it would be unreasonable for them not to be satisfied.

  [C] In his administration of his household affairs my father had a rule which I can admire but in no ways follow. In addition to keeping a record of household accounts entrusted to the hands of a domestic bursar (making entries for small bills and payments or transactions which did not need the signature of a lawyer) he told the man who acted as his secretary to keep a diary covering any noteworthy event and the day-to-day history of his household. It is very pleasant to consult, once time begins to efface memories; it is also useful for clearing up difficulties. When was such-and-such a job begun? When was it finished? Who called at Montaigne with their retinues? How many came to stay? It notes our journeys, absences, marriages and deaths, the receipt of good or bad news; changes among our chief servants – things like that: an ancient custom which I would like to be revived by each denizen in his own den. I think I am a fool to have neglected it.

  36. On the custom of wearing clothing

  [In this chapter Montaigne makes a pun on the French taste for bigarures, which means, as Cotgrave explains it in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1632) both a medley of ‘sundry colours mingled together’ and a discourse ‘running odly and fantastically, from one matter to another’. This chapter is an example of such a colourful medley, hopping from thoughts on Man’s natural nakedness to examples of extraordinary cold.]

  [A] Whichever way I want to go I find myself obliged to break through some barrier of custom, so thoroughly has she blocked all our approaches. During this chilly season I was chatting about whether the habit of those newly discovered peoples of going about stark naked was forced on them by the hot climate, as we say of the Indians and the Moors, or whether it is the original state of mankind. Since the word of God says that ‘everything under the sun’ is subject to the same law,1 in considerations such as these, where a distinction has to be made between natural laws and contrived ones, men of understanding regularly turn for advice to the general polity of the world: nothing can be counterfeit there. Now, since everything therein is exactly furnished with stitch and needle for maintaining its being, it is truly unbelievable that we men alone should have been brought forth in a deficient and necessitous state, a state which can only be sustained by borrowings from other creatures. I therefore hold that just as plants, trees, animals and all living things are naturally equipped with adequate protection from the rigour of the weather –

  Proptereaque fere res omnes aut corio sunt,

  Aut seta, aut conchis, aut callo, aut cortice tectæ

  [Wherefore virtually everything is protected by hides, silks, shells, tough skin or bark]2

  – so too were we; but like those who drown the light of day with artificial light, we have drowned our natural means with borrowed ones. It can easily be seen that custom makes possible things impossible for us: for some of the peoples who have no knowledge of clothing live under much the same climate as ourselves – and even we leave uncovered the most delicate parts of our bodies: [C] our eyes, mouth, nose, ears and, in the case of our peasants and forebears, the chest and the belly. If we had been endowed at birth with undergarments and trousers there can be no doubt that Nature would have armed those parts of us which remained exposed to the violence of the seasons with a thicker skin, as she has done for our fingertips and the soles of our feet.

  [C] Why should this seem so hard to believe? The gulf between the way I dress and the way my local peasant does is wider than that between him and a man dressed only in his skin. In Turkey especially many go about naked for the sake of their religion.3

  [A] In midwinter somebody or other asked one of our local tramps who was wearing nothing but a shirt yet remained as merry as a man swaddled up to his ears in furs how he could stand it. ‘You, Sir,’ he replied, ‘have your face quite uncovered: myself am all face!’

  The Italians tell a tale about (I think it was) the Duke of Florence’s jester. He was poorly clad; his master asked him how he managed to stand the cold, which he himself found very troublesome. ‘Do as I do,’ he said, ‘and you won’t feel the cold either. Pile on every stitch you’ve got!’

  Even when very old, King Massinissa could not be persuaded to wear anything on his head, come cold, wind or rain.4 [C] And the same is told about the Emperor Severus.

  Herodotus says that both he and others noted that, of those who were left dead in the battles between the Egyptians and the Persians, the Egyptians had by far the harder cranium: that was because the Persians always kept their heads covered first with boys’ caps and then with turbans, whereas the Egyptians went close-cropped and bareheaded from childhood.5

  [A] And King Agesilaus wore the same clothes, summer and winter, until he was decrepit. According to Suetonius, Caesar always led his armies, normally bare-headed and on foot, in sunshine as in rain. The same is said of Hannibal:

  tum vertice nudo

  Excipere insanos imbres cælique ruinam.

  [Bare-headed he withstood the furious rainstorms and the cloudbursts.]6

  [C] A Venetian just back from the Kingdom of Pegu where he had spent a long time writes that the men and women there cover all the rest of their body, but always go barefoot even on their horses. And Plato enthusiastically advises that, for the health of our entire body, we should give no other covering to head or foot than what Nature has put there.7

  [Al] The man whom the Poles elected King after our own monarch8 (and he is truly one of the greatest of princes) never wears gloves and never fails to wear the same hat indoors, no matter what the winter weather.

  [B] Whereas I cannot bear to go about with my buttons undone or my jacket unlaced, the farm-labourers in my neighbourhood would feel shackled if they did not do so. Varro maintains that when mankind was bidden to remain uncovered in the presence of gods and governors it was for our health’s sake and to help us to endure the fury of the seasons rather than out of reverence.9

  [A] While on the subject of cold, since the French are used to a medley of colours – not me though: I usually wear black and white like my father – let me switch subject and add that Captain Martin Du Bellay relates how he saw it freeze so hard during the Luxembourg expedition that the wine-ration had to be hacked at with axes, weighed out to the soldiers and carried away in baskets.10 Ovid is but a finger’s breadth from that:

  Nudaque consistunt formam servantia testæ

  Vina, nec hausta meri, sed
data frusta bibunt.

  [The naked wine stands straight upright, retaining the shape of the jar: they do not swallow draughts of wine but chunks of it.]11

  [B] It freezes so hard in the swampy distributaries of Lake Maeotis that in the very same spot where Mithridates’ lieutenant fought dry-shod against his enemies and defeated them, he defeated them again, when summer came, in a naval engagement.

  [C] In their battle against the Carthaginians near Placentia, the Romans were at a great disadvantage since they had to charge while their blood was nipped and their limbs stiff with the cold, whereas Hannibal had caused fires to be lit throughout his camp to warm his soldiers and had also distributed an embrocation oil to his troops to rub in, thaw out their muscles and limber up, while clogging their pores against the penetrating blasts of the prevailing bitter wind.

  The Greeks’ homeward retreat from Babylon is famous for the hardships and sufferings they had to overcome. One was their encountering a dreadful snowstorm in the Armenian mountains; they lost all their bearings in that country and its roads; they were so suddenly beset that, with most of their mule-train dead, they went one whole day and night without food or drink; many of them met their deaths or were blinded by the hailstones and the glare of the snow; many had frostbitten limbs and many others remained conscious but were frozen stiff and unable to move.12

  Alexander came across a people where they bury their fruit trees in winter to protect them from the frost.13

  [B] While on the subject of clothing, the King of Mexico changed four times a day and never wore the same clothes twice; his cast-off garments were constantly used for gifts and rewards; similarly no pot, plate, kitchen-ware or table-ware was ever served him twice.14

  37. On Cato the Younger

  [Cato the Younger was a philosophical and moral hero for many Renaissance Christians despite his having preferred suicide to ignominy. (In Dante he is Beatrice’s guide to the Heavenly regions.) Montaigne protests against those who reduce the ‘forms’ (the souls) of great men to their own mean level: the condign reaction to greatness of soul is not a niggling desire to diminish but that kind of ecstasy produced by wonder and amazement – admiratio. Poetry, conceived much as Plato conceived it in his dialogue Io (a source of Ronsard’s theories too), is playing its rightful role when, by its beauty, it stuns the reader, performer or listener into just such a condign ecstasy of amazement. At least at this stage in the Essays, Montaigne sees the ascetic Christian Feuillants and Capuchins – heroes of Christian virtue – as remaining within the general form of Man.]

  [A] I do not suffer from that common failing of judging another man1 [C] by me: I can easily believe that others have qualities quite distinct from my own. Just because I feel that I am pledged to my individual form, I do not bind all others to it as everyone else does: I can conceive and believe that there are thousands of different ways of living and, contrary to most men, I more readily acknowledge our differences than our similarities. I am as ready as you may wish to relieve another human being of my attributes and basic qualities and to contemplate him simply as he is, free from comparisons and sculpting him after his own model. I am not sexually continent, but that does not stop me from sincerely acknowledging the continence of the Feuillants and Capuchins nor from thinking well of their way of life: in thought, I can readily put myself in their place. Indeed I love and respect them all the more for being different from me.2 My one desire is that each of us should each be judged apart and that conclusions about me should not be drawn from routine exempla.

  [A] My own weakness in no way affects the opinion which I should have of the strength and vigour of those who merit it. [C] ‘Sunt qui nihil laudent, nisi quod se imitari posse confidunt.’ [There are those who praise nothing except what they are sure they can match.]3 [A] I crawl in earthy slime but I do not fail to note, way up in the clouds, the matchless height of certain heroic souls. It means a great deal to me to have my judgement rightly controlled even if my actions cannot be so, and to maintain at least that master-part of me free from corruption.4 Even when my legs let me down it is something that my will is sound. At least in our latitudes, the century we live in is so leaden that [C] it lacks not only the practice of virtue but the very idea of it:5 [A] virtue seems to be no more than scholastic jargon:

  [Al] virtutem verba putant, ut

  Lucum ligna:

  [they think that virtue is but a word and that sacred groves are mere matchwood.]6

  [C] ‘Quam vereri deberent, etiam si percipere non possent.’ [Even if they cannot understand it, they should revere it.]7 It is a gewgaw to hang up in a display-case, or to have dangling from your tongue just as an earring dangles from your ear.

  [A] Virtuous actions are no longer there to be recognized: those which have the face of virtue do not have her essence, since we are led to do them from profit, reputation, fear, custom and other similar motives. Such justice, valour and graciousness as we practise then can be termed so in the view of others from the face they put on in public, but they are by no means virtuous to the doer: a different end was aimed at; [C] there was a different motivation. [A] Virtue acknowledges nothing which is not done by her and for her alone.

  [C] When, following their custom, the victors in that great battle of Potidaea (which the Greeks under Pausanias won against Mardonius and the Persians)8 had to divide the glory of that exploit among themselves, they awarded pre-eminence in valour on the field to the Spartan people. Then, when those excellent judges of virtue, the Spartans, had to decide which of their men should individually hold the honour of having done best that day, they decided that Aristodemus had the most courageously exposed himself to risk: yet they never awarded him the prize because his valour had been spurred on by his wish to purge himself of the reproach he had incurred in the battle of Thermopylae and by a desire to die bravely to atone for his past disgrace.

  [A] Our judgements follow the depravity of our morals and remain sick. I note that the majority of ingenious men in my time are clever at besmirching the glory of the fair and great-souled actions of ancient times, foisting some base interpretation on them and devising frivolous causes and occasions for them. [B] What great subtlety! Why, show me the most excellent and purest deed there is and I can go and furnish fifty vicious but plausible motives for it! What a variety of concepts, God knows, can be foisted on to our inner wills if anyone wishes to work on them in detail! [C] Such men are clever in their denigration, yet not so much maliciously as heavily and clumsily. The same pains that they take to detract from those great reputations I would readily take to lend a shoulder to enhance them. Those rare persons who have been hand-picked by the wise to be exemplary to us all I will not hesitate, on my part, to load with honour, insofar as my material allows, by interpreting their characteristics favourably. But we must believe that, for all our striving, our thoughts fall well below what the great deserve. It is the duty of good men to depict virtue as beautiful as possible; and it would not be inappropriate if our emotions should make us ecstatic under the influence of souls so august. What these people do, on the contrary, [A] they do, as I have just said, either out of malice or from that defect which reduces what they believe to what they can grasp, or else (as I am inclined to think) because their perception is not strong and clear enough to comprehend the splendour of virtue in her native purity, since they have not trained it to do so. Plutarch states that some men in his time attributed the death of Cato the Younger to his fear of Caesar; this rightly incensed him – by which one can judge how more indignant he would have been at those who attributed it to ambition.9 [C] Idiots! Cato would rather have done a fair and noble deed which brought him shame than to do it for glory. [A] That great man was truly a model which Nature chose to show how far human virtue and fortitude can reach.

  But I am not up to treating so rich a subject here. I simply wish to make verses from five Latin poets rival each other in their praise of Cato, [C] both in the interest of Cato and secondarily in their own.

 
; Now a well-educated boy ought to find the first two feeble compared to the third; the third, more young and vigorous but ruined by its own excessive power; he ought to reckon that there is room for two or three degrees of ingenuity before we reach the fourth, at which point he will clasp his hands in wonder. When he comes to the final one, which far outdistances the others, by a distance that he will swear no human wit can cover, he will be thunderstruck and moved to ecstasy.

  Here is something of a marvel: we now have far more poets than judges and connoisseurs of poetry. It is far easier to write poetry than to appreciate it. At a rather low level you can judge it by the rules of art: but good, enrapturing, divine poetry is above reason and rules. Whoever can distinguish its beauties with a firm and settled gaze does not in fact see it all, no more than we can see the brilliance of a flash of lightning. It does not exercise our judgement, it ravishes it and enraptures it; the frenzy which sets its goads in him who knows how to discern it also strikes a third person who hears him relate and recite it, just as a magnet not only attracts a needle but also pours into it the faculty of attracting others. It can more easily be seen in the theatre that the sacred inspiration of the Muses, having first seized the poet with anger, grief or hatred and driven him outside himself whither they will, then affects the actor through the poet and then, in succession, the entire audience – needle hanging from needle, each attracting the next one in the chain.10