The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Ense maritali nemo confossus adulter

  Purpureo stygias sanguine tinxit aquas.

  [There, never did adulterer stain with his blood the waters of Styx while he lay pierced by a husband’s sword.]70

  Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Cato and other fine men were all cuckolds and knew it: they never made a commotion about it. In those days there was only one man who died of distress over it: Lepidus; and he was a fool:71

  Ah! tum te miserum malique fati,

  Quem attractis pedibus, patente porta,

  Percurrent mugilesque raphanique.

  [Ah! You wretched man caught out on the job! They will bind your legs together and stuff mullet and Greek radishes up your back passage.]

  But when that god in our poet72 surprised one of his comrades lying with his wife he was satisfied with exposing them both to shame;

  atque aliquis de Diis non tristibus optat

  Sic fieri turpis!

  [but one of the other gods, not the most severe, wished he was shamed as well!]

  And that did not stop him from being inflamed by the sweet kisses she gave him as she lamented that, for so little a thing, she had begun to doubt his love for her:

  Quid causas petis ex alto, fiducia cessit

  Quo tibi, diva, mei?

  [Why, my goddess, do you seek such far-fetched arguments? Have you lost your faith in your husband?]73

  More. She begs him a favour for one of her bastards –

  Arma rogo genitrix nato

  [I, a mother for her son, am begging you for his armour]

  –and it is generously granted to her, Vulcan speaking honourably of Aeneas:

  Arma acri facienda viro.

  [Arms must be forged for such a man.]

  Humane kindness surpassing humankind! And I do agree that we can leave such excessive bounty to the gods.

  Nec divis homines componier æquum est

  [Nor is it right to compare men to deities.]74

  As for the confounding of children, [C] apart from the fact that the gravest of lawgivers want it and legislate for it in their republics,75 [B] it does not affect the women, yet it is precisely in them that jealous passion is somehow more at home.

  Sæpe etiam Juno, maxima cælicolum,

  Conjugis in culpa flagravit quotidiana.

  [Even Juno, the greatest goddess among the dwellers in heaven, feels the scourge of jealousy over her consort’s daily wrongs.]76

  When jealousy seizes hold of the feeble, defenceless souls of such women it is pitiful to see how it bowls them over and cruelly tyrannizes them. It slips into them, under the title of loving affection: but as soon as it gets possession of them, those same causes which served as a basis for benevolence now serve as a basis for deadly hatred. [C] Of all the spiritual illnesses, jealousy is the one which has more things which feed it and fewer things which cure it. [B] The manly virtue, the health, the merit and the reputation of their husbands then kindle the flames of their wives’ maleficent frenzy:

  Nullæ sunt inimicitiæ, nisi amoris, acerbæ.

  [No hatreds so bitter than those of love.]77

  it is a feverish passion which turns all that is beautiful in them ugly and corrupts what is good; in a jealous woman, no matter how chaste and thrifty she may be as a wife, there, there is nothing which does not reek of bitterness and savagery. It is an insane perturbation which drives them to the other extreme, to the contrary of what causes it.

  An interesting example of this was a man called Octavius in Rome. After lying with Pontia Posthumia, his delight in it so increased his love that he persistently begged her to marry him. When he could not win her over, his extreme love hurled him headlong into deeds of most cruel and mortal hatred; and he killed her.78

  Similarly the regular symptoms of this kind of love-sickness are domestic discord, plottings and conspiracies –

  notumque furens quid fæmina possit

  [we all know what a woman’s rage can do]79

  –and a fury which is all the more gnawing for being compelled to justify itself by loving affection.

  Now the duty of chastity is wide-ranging. What is it that we want women to bridle? Their wills? But the will is a seductive and active quality: it is too quick to let itself be restrained. Supposing their dreams sometimes so hold them in pawn that they cannot redeem them? It is not in their power to protect themselves from sexual desire and lust – not even perhaps in the power of Chastity herself: she is a woman. So if our sole concern is with their will, where do we stand? Just think of the press of assignations if a man were to have the privilege of being borne on wings (with no eyes to see him and no tongue to gossip) to the lap of every woman who would have him!

  [C] The Scythian women used to poke out the eyes of all their slaves and prisoners of war in order to avail themselves of them more freely and secretly.80

  Oh, what a mad advantage lies in the opportune moment! If anyone were to ask me what is the first quality needed in love I would reply: knowing how to seize an opportunity. It is the second and the third as well. It is the factor which can achieve anything. I have often lacked good fortune but also occasionally lacked initiative. God help those who can mock me for it! In our days you need to be more inconsiderate – which our young men justify under the pretence of ardour; but if women looked into it closely they would find that it arises rather from lack of respect. I myself devoutly feared to give offence and am always inclined to respect whomever I love. Besides in this sort of business if you remove the respect you dowse the lustre. I like a lover to play the timid youth serving his lady. Not in this situation precisely but in other ones, I do have something of that awkward shyness which Plutarch speaks of;81 the course of my life has been in varying ways bespattered and harmed by it. It is a quality which ill becomes my overall character: but then, what are we but dissension and discord?

  I am as sensitive about giving a refusal as receiving one, and my eyes show it. It so weighs on me to weigh on others that when duty forces me to assay the intentions of a man in in a matter of doubt which could cost him some bother I hold back back and skimp it. But if it concerns my own interests – [C] though Homer says truly that in a beggar shyness is a stupid virtue82 – [B] I usually charge a third person to blush in my stead. I find it equally difficult to deny those who ask a service of me: I have occasionally had the will to refuse but not the capacity.

  It is therefore madness to assay restraining [C] so blazing [B] a desire, so natural to women. And when I hear them boasting that their very wills are coldly chaste and virginal I laugh at them: that really is backing away too far. It may still not be credible, but there is at least some appearance of plausibility in the case of a toothless old hag or a young girl wasted by consumption. But women who are still alive and breathing worsen the terms of the bargain by saying so, since ill-advised excuses serve as accusations. Like one of the gentlemen in my neighbourhood who was suspected of impotence:

  Languidior tenera cui pendens sicula beta

  Nunquam se mediam sustulit ad tunicam.

  [whose tiny dagger, drooping like a flabby parsnip, never stuck halfway up his underwear.]83

  Two or three days after his wedding, to prove his masculinity he went about boasting that he had ridden his wife twenty times the previous night. That was cited later to convict him of absolute ignorance and to annul the marriage.

  Besides, those women are saying nothing worthwhile: for where there is no struggle there is neither continence nor virtue. ‘That is true,’ they should say, ‘but I have no intention of giving way.’ The very saints put it thus.

  I am of course talking of women who seriously boast of their cold chastity and indifference, who keep a straight countenance and want us to believe what they say. For when they put on a studied countenance (with eyes which belie their looks) and make their profession with cant phrases which imply the contrary to what they say, I like that. I am the obedient servant of naïve frankness: nevertheless I cannot refrain from saying that, unless it
is absolutely innocent and childlike, it does not become a lady and is inappropriate to courtship: it at once slips into provocativeness. Women’s affectations and grimaces deceive only idiots. Lying is then in the seat of honour: it is a diversion which brings us to the right truth through the wrong door.

  Now if we cannot bridle their thoughts, what is it we want from women? Action? But plenty of their actions which corrupt chastity escape the knowledge of others:

  Illud sæpe facit quod sine teste facit.

  [She often does it without testes to testify.]84

  Such actions as we fear the least are perhaps the most to be feared: silent sins are the worst:

  Offendor mæcha simpliciore minus.

  [A straightforward whore offends me less.]

  [C] And then there are actions by which women can lose their maidenheads without their maidenhood – and, what is more, without their knowing it: ‘Obstetrix, virginis cujusdam integritatem manu velut explorans, sive malevolentia, sive inscitia, sive casu, dum inspicit, perdidit.’ [Sometimes the obstetrician while examining with her fingers whether the hymen is intact, has ruptured it – by ignorance or malice or bad luck.]85 Some maidens have lost their maidenhead while feeling for it: others have ruptured it while out riding.

  [B] We could never delimit precisely what are the actions we forbid to them. We must frame our law in vague general terms.

  The very ideal which men forge of their chastity is ridiculous: among the most extreme models of it that I know are Fatua the wife of Faunus, who after her wedding never let herself be seen by any man whatever, and the wife of Hiero, who never realized that her husband’s breath stank, thinking that it was a quality common to all men.86

  To satisfy us they have to be invisible and insensate.

  So now let us admit that the crucial clement in judging this duty in women lies mainly in the intention. There have been husbands who have suffered adultery not only without feeling reproach or hostility for their wives but specifically bound to acknowledge their virtue. Many a woman who loved her honour more than her life has nevertheless prostituted herself to the insane lusts of a deadly enemy in order to save her husband’s life, doing for him what she would never have done for herself. This is not the place to dwell on such exempta. They are too splendid and sublime to be rehearsed in the light of this chapter: let us keep them for a nobler place.

  [C] But to give some examples here which do shine with a more vulgar vulgar light, are there not wives who daily lend their bodies to others solely to help on their husbands – and with their express command and pandering? In ancient times, for ambition’s sake, Phaulius of Argos offered his wife to King Philip;87 so too when Galba was entertaining Maecenas to dinner he noticed that his wife and his guest were beginning to ogle and to make signs and advances to each other, so he slipped down on his cushions and acted like a man torn heavy with sleep in order, for hospitality’s sake, to lend a hand to their arrangements. And he let this be known, not without some elegance: for when the wine-steward ventured to reach out for the wine-jars on the table he shouted: ‘Can you not see, you dolt, that I have only fallen asleep for Maecenas?’

  [B] A woman may behave loosely yet have a will which which she has reformed more than another whose conduct is hidden by a more orderly appearance: just as we know of women who complain that they were dedicated to chastity before the age of discretion, I know of some who sincerely complain that, before the age of discretion, they were dedicated to debauchery. Vicious parents may be the cause, or the force of necessity which is a cruel counsellor.

  In the East Indies, although chastity is singularly valued there, custom suffers a married woman to give herself to any man who presents her with an elephant – and not without glory for being so highly prized.88

  [C] A man of good family, Phaedo the philosopher, when his country of Elis was captured, professionally prostituted his youthful beauty (as long as it lasted) to anyone who would pay for it, so as to earn his living.89 And Solon, they say, was the first legislator in Greece to give women the right to provide for the necessities of life at the expense of their modesty, a practice which Herodotus however says was accepted earlier by several polities.

  [B] Then what do we hope to gain from such painful disquiet: for however justified the jealousy we still have to see whether that passion enraptures us to any purpose! Is there one man who believes that he is clever enough to buckle up his women?

  Pone seram, cohibe; sed quis custodiet ipsos

  Custodes? Cauta est, et ab illis incipit uxor!

  [Lock her up; shut her in. But who will guard your guardians? Your wife is clever: she will start with them!]

  In so ingenious a century any occasion will suffice.

  Curiosity is always a fault; here it is baleful. It is madness to want to find out about an ill for which there is no treatment except one which makes it worse and exacerbates it; one the shame of which is spread abroad and augmented chiefly by our jealousy; one which to avenge means hurting our children rather than curing ourselves. You wither and die while hunting for such hidden truth. How wretched are those husbands in my days who manage to find out!

  If the man who warns you of it does not also at once supply a remedy and his help, his warning is noxious, deserving your dagger more than if he called you a liar. We mock the husband who cannot put things right no less than the one who knows nothing about it. Cuckoldry has an indelible stamp: once a man is branded with it he has it for ever; chastising cuckoldry emphasizes it more than the defect. A fine thing to tear our private misfortunes from the shadow of doubt and trumpet them abroad like tragedians on the trestles – especially misfortunes which hurt only when they are related. Marriages and wives are called good not because they are good but because they are not talked about.

  We should use our ingenuity to avoid making such useless discoveries which torture us. It was the custom of the Romans when returning home from a journey to send a messenger ahead to announce their arrival to their womenfolk so as not to take them unawares. That is why There is a certain people where the priest welcomes the bride and opens the proceedings on the wedding-night to remove from the groom any doubts and worries about whether she came to him virgin or already blighted by an affaire.90

  ‘Yes. But people talk!’ I know some a hundred men who are cuckolds yet honoured and not unrespected. A decent man is sympathized with for it, not discredited by it. See to it that your misfortune is smothered by your virtue, so that good folk curse the cause of it and the man who wrongs you trembles to think of it.

  And then who is never gossiped about for this, from the least to the greatest?

  Tot qui legionibus imperitavit,…

  Et melior quam tu multis fuit, improbe, rebus!

  [Even the general who commanded all those legions… and was a far better man than you, you reprobate!]91

  When so many honourable men have been included in this opprobrium in your presence, do you think you are spared elsewhere?

  ‘But even the ladies will laugh at me!’ Well, what do they laugh at nowadays more readily than a peaceful, orderly marriage? [C] Each one of you has cuckolded somebody: and Nature is ever like, alternating and balancing accounts. [B] The frequency of this misfortune ought by now to have limited its bitter taste: why, it will soon be customary.

  In addition that wretched misery is one you cannot even tell anyone about:

  Fors etiam nostris invidit questibus aures.

  [Even Fortune refuses to listen to our woes.]92

  For what friend can you dare to confide your worries to? Even if he does not laugh at you, will he not be put on the track and shown how to join in the kill?

  [C] Wise men keep secret both the sweets of marriage and its bitternesses. For a talkative man like me, of all the distressing disadvantages of marriage one of the principal is the fact that custom has made it indecorous and obnoxious to discuss with anyone whatever all that we know and feel about it.

  [B] It would be a waste of time to give wom
en the same advice in order to make jealousy distasteful to them. Their essence is so pickled in suspicion, vanity and curiosity that you must not hope to do so by legitimate means. They often cure this infirmity by a species of well-being which is more to be feared than the malady. Just as there are magic spells which can only remove an evil by loading it on to someone else, so too wives readily pass this fever of jealousy on to their husbands, once they themselves have lost it.

  All the same, to tell the truth, I do not know whether one can ever suffer anything worse than their jealousy: it is the most dangerous of their characteristics, as the head is of the anatomy. Pittacus said that every man has his curse: his was his wife’s bad temper; if it were not for that he would think himself entirely happy. Seeing that so just, so wise, so valiant, so great a man should should feel the whole state of his life corrupted by it, it must indeed be a grievous clog.93 So what are we to do about it, little men like us!

  [C] The Senate of Marseilles94 was right to accede to the request of a husband for permission to kill himself so as to escape his wife’s petulance, for it is an evil which can never be removed except by removing the whole limb: you can make no worthwhile arrangement with it except by fleeing from it or putting up with it: both are fraught with difficulties. [B] That man knew what he was talking about, it seems to me, who said that a good marriage marriage needs a blind wife and a deaf husband husband.95