The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos

  Matura virgo, et frangitur artubus

  Jam nunc, et incestos amores

  De tenero meditatur ungui.

  [The marriageable maiden loves to learn the steps of the Ionic dance; she twists her limbs and from a tender age trains herself for unchaste loves.]46

  Just let them dispense with a little ceremony and become free to develop their thoughts: in knowledge of such things we are babes compared with them. Just listen to them describing our pursuit of them and our rendezvous with them. They will soon show you that we contribute nothing but what they have known and already assimilated independently of us. [C] Could Plato be right when he said that in a former existence girls had been lascivious boys!47

  [B] I happened to be one day in a place where my ear could unsuspectedly catch part of what they were saying to each other. I wish. I could tell you! ‘By our Lady,’ I said, ‘let us go, after this, and study the language of Amadis and tales in Boccaccio and Aretino so as to appear sophisticated.’ What a good use of our time! There is no word, no exemplary tale and no stratagem which women do not know better than our books do. The doctrines which nature, youth and good health (those excellent schoolmasters) ceaselessly inspire in their souls are born in their veins:

  Et mentem Venus ipsa dedit.

  [Venus herself inspired their frenzy.]48

  They do not need to learn them: they give birth to them.

  Nec tantum niveo gavisa est ulla columbo

  Compar, vel si quid dicitur improbius,

  Oscula mordenti semper decerpere rostro,

  Quantum præcipue multivola est mulier.

  [Never did white dove nor any more lascivious bird which you could name invite love’s kisses with its pecking beak as much as a woman yearning for a host of men.]49

  If the ferocity of their desires were not somewhat reined in by that fear for their honour with which all women are endowed, we would all be laughing-stocks. The whole movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation. It is a substance infused through everything; it is the centre towards which all things turn. We can still read some of the ordinances made by that wise Rome of old to regulate love-affairs, as well as Socrates’ precepts for the education of courtesans.50

  Nec non libelli Stoici inter sericos

  Jacere pulvillos amant.

  [And there are little books which love to lie strewn about in silken cushions: some of them are Stoic ones.]

  There are enactments among Zeno’s Laws covering penetration and opening up for deflowering.51 [C] I wonder what was the drift of that book by Strato the philosopher entitled On carnal knowledge;52 what did Theophrastus treat of in those books of his which bore the titles The Lover and On Love-affairs; and what did Aristippus treat in his work On Antique Delights? What was Plato’s intention in his long and vivid descriptions of the most controversial love-affairs of the day? Then there are The Book of the Love-maker by Demetrius Phalereus; Cliniasor, or the Lover Raped, by Heraclides of Pontus; On Marriage: or How to make Children, and another, On Master and Lover, by Antisthenes; On Amorous Exploits by Ariston; two by Cleanthes, The Art of Loving and On Love; Lovers’ Dialogues by Sphaerus; The Fable of Jupiter and Juno, intolerably pornographic, by Chrysippus, with his Fifty Lecherous Letters. And I am not counting the writings of philosophers who followed the Epicurean School. [B] In bygone days fifty gods were tied to this job; and a nation was discovered who kept male and female prostitutes in their temples all ready to be enjoyed, so as to lull to sleep the lusts of those who came to worship there. [C] ‘Nimirum propter continentiam incontinentia necessaria est; incendium ignibus extinguitur.’ [Sexual excesses are doubtless needed for sexual restraint, as fire is doused by fire.]53

  [B] In most parts of the world that member of our male bodies was turned into a god.54 In a single province some peeled off the skin and consecrated part of it as an oblation while others offered up their sperm and consecrated it. In another province the youths bored holes through it in public, prised gaps between the flesh and the skin and then threaded through them the longest thickest skewers which they could stand. They afterward made a bonfire of those skewers as an offering to their gods, and if they were stunned by the violence of the ferocious pain they were reckoned unchaste and lacking in vigour. Elsewhere the revered symbol of the most hallowed magistrate was the sexual organ; and in many processions an effigy of it was borne in pomp, in honour of a variety of gods. During the feast of Bacchus the ladies of Egypt wore such an effigy about their necks; it was of wood, exquisitely fashioned and as big and heavy as each could manage. In addition the statue of their god had a carved member which was bigger than the rest of his body. The married women near my place twist their headscarves into the shape of one to revel in the enjoyment they derive from it; then on becoming widows they push it back and bury it under their hair. The wisest of the Roman matrons were granted the honour of offering crowns of flowers to the god Priapus; when their maidens came to marry, they were required to squat over its less decent parts.55

  I even wonder whether I have not seen in my own lifetime practices recalling similar devotions: what was the sense of that silly flap on our fathers’ flies which you can still see worn by our Swiss guards?56 Why do we parade our genitals even now behind our loose-breeches, and, what is worse, cheat and deceive by exaggerating their natural size? [C] I would like to believe that such styles of clothing were invented in better and more moral times so that people should in fact not be deceived, each man gallantly rendering in public an account of his endowments; the more primitive peoples do still display it somewhere near its real size. In those days they supplied details of man’s working member just as we give the measurements of our arm or foot.

  [B] That fine fellow who when I was young castrated so many beautiful ancient statues in his City so as not to corrupt our gaze,57 [C] following the counsel of that other fellow in Antiquity:

  –Flagitii principium est nudare inter cives corpora

  [Baring the body among our citizens is the beginning of shameful deeds] –

  [B] ought to have recalled that (as in the mysteries of the Bona Dea in which all signs of the male were banned) nothing is achieved unless you also geld horses, donkeys and finally everything in nature:

  Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque,

  Et genus æquoreum, pecudes, pictæque volucres,

  In furias ignemque ruunt.

  [All species on earth, both man and brute, and dwellers in the sea, and flocks and painted birds, all dash madly into the flames of desire.]58

  [C] The gods, says Plato, have furnished men with a rebellious and tyrannical member which tries to force everything to submit to its appetite like an animal on the rampage. So too the women have an animal, avid and greedy: if you deny it in due season, it becomes frenzied and can brook no delay; its own raging madness is inhaled into their bodies; it stops all respiration by blocking up the tubes, so causing hundreds of kinds of illness which last until after it has drawn inwards with its breath the product of our common desire and scattered it broadcast, planting it in the ground of the womb.59

  [B] Now that that lawgiver of mine60 ought also to have recalled that it is perhaps a more chaste and fruitful practice to bring women to learn early what the living reality is rather than to allow them to make conjectures according to the licence of a heated imagination: instead of our organs as they are their hopes and desires lead them to substitute extravagant ones three times as big. [C] And one man I know lost out by exposing his somewhere while they were still unready to perform their most serious task.

  [B] What great harm is done by those graffiti of enormous genitals which boys scatter over the corridors and staircases of our royal palaces! From them arise a cruel misunderstanding of our natural capacities. [C] Who knows whether that explains why Plato decreed (following the practice of other states with sound institutions) that both men and women, old and young, should appear naked before each other during exercise
s in the gymnasia?61 [B] Those Indian women who see their men in the nude have at least cooled off their visual senses.

  [C] The women of that great Kingdom of Pegu wear below the belt nothing but a kirtle slit in the front and so tight that, no matter what formal decency they may seek to preserve, they reveal everything they have got with every step they take. They maintain that this fashion was created in order to attract the men to them and to distract them from that taste for males to which that nation has entirely surrendered. Yet it could be said that they lose more than they gain and that a complete hunger is more cruel than one where at least the eyes are satisfied.62 [B] Livia said, moreover, that to a moral woman a naked man means no more than a statue. [C] And the women of Sparta, who as wives were more virginal than our daughters, saw every day the young men of their city take everything off for their exercises; they themselves were not very particular about keeping their thighs covered as they went about, believing, says Plato, that they were sufficiently veiled with virtue without needing a ‘virtue-guard’.63 Yet Saint Augustine is our witness for there once having been men who attributed such wonderful powers of temptation to nudity that they doubted whether, at the General Resurrection, women would rise again as women rather than in our sex so as not to go on tempting us in that blessed state!64

  [B] In short we bait and lure women by every means. We are constantly stimulating and overheating their imagination. And then we gripe about it.

  Let us admit it: there is hardly one of us who is not more afraid of the disgrace which comes to him from his wife’s immorality than from his own; hardly one who is not so amazingly charitable that he worries more about his dear wife’s conscience than he does about his; hardly one who would not rather commit theft and sacrilege – or that his wife were a murderer or a heretic – than to have her be no chaster than he is.

  And our women would much rather volunteer to go and earn their fees in the law-courts or their reputations on the battlefield than to have to mount so difficult a guard in the midst of idle pleasures. Our women can see, can they not, that there is no merchant, no barrister, no soldier who does not drop what he is doing so as to hurry and get on with ‘the job’ – no porter or cobbler either, however weary with toil or faint with hunger.

  Num tu, que tenuit dives Achæmenes,

  Aut pinguis Phrygiæ Mygdonias opes,

  Permutare velis crine Licinniæ,

  Plenas aut Arabum domos,

  Dum fragrantia detorquet ad oscula

  Cervicem, aut facili sævitia negat,

  Quæ poscente magis gaudeat eripi,

  Interdum rapere occupet?

  [Would you really exchange – even for all the wealth of Achaemenes or all the riches of Mygdon, King of fertile Phrygia, or the treasure-boxes of Araby – a single one of Licinnia’s tresses when she bends her neck towards you for a fragrant kiss or when, with sweet severity, she denies what she in fact desires far more than you do, and will soon be snatching from you?]65

  [C] We do not weigh the vices fairly in our estimation. Both men and women are capable of hundreds of kinds of corrupt activities more damaging than lasciviousness and more disnatured. But we make things into vices and weigh them not according to their nature but our self-interest: that is why they take on so many unfair forms. The ferocity of men’s decrees about lasciviousness makes the devotion of women to it more vicious and ferocious than its characteristics warrant, and engages it in consequences which are worse than their cause.

  [B] I am not even sure that the campaigns of Caesar and Alexander surpass the stern resolve of a beautiful young woman, brought up our way, in the light of society’s social norms and battered by numerous examples to the contrary, who, in the midst of hundreds of unending and forceful suitors yet remains pure. No attaining so bristles with difficulties as her abstaining; nor is any more active. I think it easier to keep on a suit of armour all your life than to keep a maidenhead. And so the vow of virginity is the noblest of all the vows and also the harshest. [C] As Saint Jerome says, ‘Diaboli virtus in lumbis est.’ [The Devil’s power is in the loins.]66

  [B] We have certainly assigned to the ladies the most exacting and arduous of human duties and we let them have all the glory. It ought to serve them as a singular goad to help them stubborn it out that this is a subject in which they can challenge that vain pre-eminence in virtue and valour which men claim over them and can trample it underfoot. If they take care over it, they will find that not only are they most highly thought of but also better loved. No gentleman abandons his suit because he is refused, provided that the refusal is based on chastity not on preference for another. In vain do we swear oaths and make menaces and lamentations. We lie. We love them all the better for it. There is no lure like wise conduct when not brusque and glowering. There is cowardice and a lack of feeling in stubbornly continuing despite loathing and contempt: but when up against a constant and virtuous resolve mingled with an appreciative good-will it is an exercise fit for a noble and magnanimous soul.

  They can, Up to a point, show their appreciation of our courtship and make us realize that in all honour they do not disdain us. [C] For that rule which ordains that they must detest us because we worship them and hate us because we love them is indeed cruel, if only for the hardship it causes. Why should ladies not lend an ear to our requests and offers of service provided we do not go beyond the bounds of propriety, and why do we go on assuming that their doing so suggests some inner licentiousness of thought? A Queen in our own days wittily said that to exclude such advances was a sign of frailty and an indication of one’s own levity, adding that no lady who had not been tempted could boast of her chastity.

  [B] The boundaries of honour are by no means so narrowly drawn. There are means of being relaxed and showing some initiative without infringing them. Along its frontiers there is a stretch of neutral territory where a woman is free to show some discretion. If a man has been able to pursue her honour and to bring it to bay in its own corner of its fortress, then he is a silly fellow if he is not satisfied with his fortune. The prize of victory is valued for its difficulty. Do you want to know what impact your courtship and your merits have had on her heart? Measure it by her morals. Some women grant much who grant little: it is entirely in relation to the will of the one who grants it that we judge her gratitude for a kindness. The other attributes which apply to love’s favours are fortuitous and are deaf and dumb. That little which one lady grants you costs her more than it costs her companions to grant you her all. If rarity is worth esteeming in anything it must be so in this case: do not consider the smallness of the favour but the small number of those who receive it. Money is valued according to its stamp and hallmark. Whatever some men may be brought to say by frustration and bad judgement at the height of their distress, truth and virtue always regain the advantage.

  I have known ladies whose reputation was unjustly compromised over a long period but who, without careful planning, were later restored to the unanimous esteem of mankind by their constancy alone. Everybody is sorry and denies what he once believed. After being young women who were just a little suspect they now hold the foremost rank among good and honoured noblewomen. When someone said to Plato, ‘They are all gossiping about you,’ he said, ‘Let them. I will so live that I will compel them to change their style.’67 But apart from the fear of God and the winning of the prize of so rare a glory (which must incite women to protect themselves) the corrupt state of our century drives them to do so; and if I were in their place there is nothing I would not do rather than commit my reputation to such dangerous hands. In my day the pleasure of telling of an affair (a pleasure scarcely less delightful than having one) was conceded only to such as had one single faithful friend; nowadays the most usual talk at table and when men get together turns to boasting about favours received and the secret bounties of the ladies, who really do show abject baseness of mind to allow such tender gifts to be thus cruelly hunted, grabbed and plundered by men so ungrateful, so indiscreet and so
inconstant.

  It is our exaggerated and improper harshness towards this vice which gives birth to jealousy, the most vain and turbulent distemper which afflicts our human souls:

  Quis vetat apposito lumen de lumine sumi?

  [Whatever stops us lighting one torch from another’s light?]68

  Dent licet, assidue, nil tarmen inde perit.

  [They can go on giving, on and on: they lose nothing in the process.]

  Jealousy and Envy her sister seem to me to be the most absurd of the bunch. About envy I can say virtually nothing: that passion which is portrayed as so powerful and violent has no hold on me (and I thank her for it). As for Jealousy, I know her – by sight at least. Beasts can feel it too. When the shepherd Crastis fell in love with a nanny-goat her billy charged him while he lay asleep, butting his head and smashing it.69

  We have raised the temperature of jealousy’s fevered climax, following in that some of the Barbarian nations. The better educated nations have been touched by jealousy – that is reasonable – but not caught away by it: