The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Experta latus, madidoque simillima loro

  Inguina, nec lassa stare coacta manu,

  Deserit imbelles thalamos.

  [She deserts his impotent bed after exploring his thighs and his prick which, like a damp leather thong, refuses an erection to her exhausted hand.]147

  It is not enough to have the will to drive straight up: in law impotence and an inability to consummate annul a marriage –

  Et querendum aliunde foret nervosius illud,

  Quod posset zonam solvere virgineam

  [You had to look elsewhere for a more sinewy one, capable of unsealing her maidenly girdle]148

  – so why should a proportionately more wanton and active sexual skill not do so,

  si blando nequeat supresse labori?

  [if it proves unequal to its pleasant task?]149

  But it is most unwise (is it not?) to bring our inadequacy and our weaknesses to a place where what we would leave behind is a good reputation and a good impression. For the little that I need nowadays –

  ad unum

  Mollis opus

  [limp, even for one go]

  – I would not embarrass any lady whom I should hold in reverence and awe:

  Fuge suspicari,

  Cujus heu denum trepidavit aetas,

  Claudere lustrum.

  [Suspect not a man whose life has staggered to its fiftieth year.]150

  Nature ought to be satisfied with making that age pitiful without making it ridiculous as well. I hate to see old age with an inch of paltry vigour which arouses it three times a week dashing about and bragging with the same vehemence as if it had a good day’s legitimate work in its belly. Straw on fire!151 Truly. [C] And I am always shocked when its lively and quivering fire is promptly quenched and frozen cold. That appetite was meant for the flower of beauteous youth. [B] Just to see, try relying on old age to further that tireless, full constant and great-souled ardour that is in you! It will leave you stranded halfway there! Venture to cede it to some gawky gentle dazzled youth, still quaking before his wand and blushing at it,

  Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro

  Si quis ebur, vel mista rubent ubi lilia multa

  Alba rosa

  [like Indian ivory stained blood-red, or even as white lilies arranged among red roses reflect their hue.]152

  Any man who can without dying of shame await the morning which brings disdain from a pair of lovely eyes, conscious of his flaccidity and irrelevance,

  Et taciti fecere tamen convitia vultus,

  [her silent features eloquent with loud reproach,]

  has never known the happy pride of turning them glazed and dim by the vigorous exercises of a fulfilled and active night. When I have found a woman discontented with me I have not immediately gone and railed at her fickleness: I have asked myself, rather, whether I would be right to rail against Nature.

  Si non longa satis, si non bene mentula crassa,

  [Should my cock be not long enough nor good and thick,]153

  then Nature has indeed treated me unlawfully and unjustly –

  Nimirium sapiunt, videntque parvam

  Matronae quoque mentulam illibenter

  [Even good matrons know all too well and do not gladly see a tiny cock]

  – [C] and inflicted the most enormous injury. Every one of my members, each as much as another, makes me myself: and none makes me more properly a man than that one. I owe to the public my portrait complete.

  The wisdom to be found in my account lies in truth, in frankness and in essentials – entirely; it disdains to count among its real duties those little made-up rules based on provincial custom; it is natural, unvarying, universal; its daughters are indeed courtesy and respect, but they are bastard ones. Apparent defects we shall get the better of all right once we have got the better of those which are of the essence. After we have finished with the latter here, we will fall upon the others – if we find we still need to do so. For there is a danger that we will think up imaginary new duties so as to excuse our neglect of our natural ones and to jumble them up together.

  That can be shown: you can see that wherever peccadillos are treated as crimes, crimes are treated as peccadillos; that among the peoples whose laws of politeness are fewest and slackest, the more basic laws, those common to all, are best observed since the countless multitude of those other obligations smother our concern, weaken it and disperse it. Applying ourselves to petty things diverts us from the pressing ones. Oh what an easy, favoured route such superficial men follow compared with ours! Such things are but shadowy pretences with which we bedaub each other and repay our mutual debts; but we cannot repay with them, but increase rather, the debt owed to that Great Judge who rips our tattered rags from off our pudenda and really sees us through and through, right down to our innermost and most secret filth. Our maidenly bashfulness would be useful and fitting if it could order that Judge not to uncover us!

  To sum up: whoever could make Man grow out of an over-nice dread of words would do no great harm to this world. Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom: whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind. I address no apologies to myself; were I to do so I would apologize for those apologies more than anything else. My apology is addressed to those of certain kinds of temperament (who are I believe numerically greater than those siding with me). I would like to please everyone, even though it is a difficult thing ‘esse unum hominem accommodatum ad tantam morum ac sermonum et voluntatum varietatem’ [for one single man to conform to so great a variation in manners, speech and intentions];154 so out of consideration for them I will add this: that they cannot justifiably complain that I am putting words into the mouths of authors accepted with approval for many centuries, nor can they deny me, because I lack verse, the freedom enjoyed by some of the greatest clerical cocks-of-the-walk of our own days. Here are two examples:

  Rimula, dispeream, ni monogramma tua est;

  [Strike me dead if your slit is more than one sketchy line;]155

  and:

  Un vit d’amy la contente et bien traicte.

  [A lover’s cock services and delights her.]

  And what about all the others?

  I like modesty. It is not my judgement which makes me choose this shocking sort of talk: Nature chose it for me. I am no more praising it than I am praising any behaviour contrary to the accepted norms; but I am defending it, lessening the indictment by citing individual and general considerations.

  Let us get on.

  Similarly, [B] from what do you derive that sovereign authority you assume over any ladies who, to their own cost, grant you their favours –

  Si furtiva dedit nigra munuscula nocte

  [If she gives you some little stolen present in the black of night]156

  – so that you immediately invest yourselves with rights, cold disapproval and husbandly authority? It is a covenant freely entered into: why do you not stick to it if you want to hold them to it? [C] Voluntary agreements grant no prescriptive rights.

  [B] It was not good form, but nevertheless true, that in my day I kept this bargain (as far as its nature allows) as conscientiously as any other one, and with a sort of justice, since I never showed more affection to the woman than I felt, portraying to them in all simplicity its decline, its flourishing period and its birth, its accesses of fever and its relapses. We do not go about such things with an even stride. I was so mean with my promises that I think I kept more than I ever vowed or owed. They found faithfulness there, even to the extent of my serving their inconstancy – and I mean inconstancy admitted and at times repeated. I never broke with one of them as long as I was held there even by the tail-end of a thread. And no matter what occasions they gave me, I never broke it off even for hatred or disdain: for such intimacies still oblige me to show some kindness even when acquired by the most discreditable of covenants. I did sometimes show my choler and a somewhat undiscerning impatience at the high point of their tric
kery, their evasions and our quarrels, but then I am by complexion subject to sudden distempers which, despite being short and light, are often prejudicial to my affairs. If they wanted to make an assay of my freedom of judgement, I never baulked at giving them bitingly paternal advice and lancing them where it hurts. If I left them any room to complain of me, it is rather for having found me to be, by modern standards, a ridiculously scrupulous lover. I kept my word in cases where anyone at all would have readily released me from it: women yielded in those days while saving their reputations by terms of surrender which they would readily have allowed their conqueror to infringe. In the interests of their honour I have more than once made my pleasure strike its sails at the point of a climax, and, when reason urged me, I have even armed them against me, so well indeed that they acted more safely and soberly by my rules, once they had frankly accepted them, than they would have done by their own.

  [C] As far as in me lay I personally assumed all the risks of our assignations so as to take the load off them; and I managed our intrigues in the most difficult and unforeseeable of ways, for they are the least open to suspicion and, in my opinion, the most practical. Assignations are most overt when they seem the most covert. What is least feared is least protected, least observed; it is easy to dare what nobody thinks you will: the difficulty makes it easy.

  [B] No man’s advances were ever more saucily genital. The way of courting I have described is more in harmony with the rules: but does anyone know better than I do how ridiculous it appears to folk nowadays and how unsuccessful it is! Yet I shall never be brought to gainsay it: I have nothing more to lose by it now,

  me tabula sacer

  Votiva paries indicat uvida

  Suspendisse potenti

  Vestimenta maris Deo.

  [As is shown by my votive tablet, I have hung up my dripping garments on the temple wall and dedicated them to the god of the sea.]157

  It is time, now, to talk of this openly. But as I might say to someone now, ‘You are raving mad, my friend: love in these days of yours has nothing to do with fidelity and loyalty’ –

  hæc si tu postules

  Ratione certa facere, nihilo plus agas,

  Quam si des operam, ut cum ratione insanias

  [if you try to reduce all this to rational rules you will simply give yourself the task of going rationally insane]

  – so, on the other hand, if I had to start again, I would certainly adopt the same course and the same method, however fruitless that might prove for me. [C] Inexpertise and silliness are praiseworthy in an activity which deserves no praise. [B] The further I go from others’ humours in this, the nearer I draw to my own.

  Incidentally, I never allowed all of myself to be totally devoted to this business. I took delight in it but I never forgot me: both in the ladies’ service and in mine I conserved, in its entirety, such little sense and discretion as Nature had allotted me: some passion but no raging madness. My conscience was compromised by it so far as to include lasciviousness and licentiousness, though never ingratitude, treachery, wickedness or cruelty. These are prices which I would not pay for the pleasures of this vice: I was happy to pay its proper honest price: [C] ‘Nullum inter se vitium est.’158 [No vice is self-enclosed.] I have a virtually equal loathing of all cowering torpid idleness and all prickly painful bustle. One cuts into me, the other knocks me senseless: and I am no more fond of cuts than of bruises, of slashing blows than of blunt ones. In these affairs, when I was more fit for them, I found a just moderation between those two extremes. Love is a lively emotion, light-hearted and alert: I was neither confused nor afflicted by it but I was thrown into a heat by it and troubled. There you must stop: it is harmful only for fools.

  When a youth asked Panaetius the philosopher whether it became a wise man to be in love, ‘Let us leave aside the wise,’ he replied, ‘neither you nor I are that; but let us not pledge ourselves to an activity so violent and disturbing, one which makes us the slave of another and despicable to ourselves.’159 He was telling the truth when he said that something so intrinsically impulsive should not be entrusted to a man’s soul if it has no means of withstanding its assaults and of disproving by its deeds the assertion of Agesilaus, that wisdom and love cannot live together.160

  It is a vain pastime, it is true, indecorous, shaming and wrong; but I reckon that, treated in this fashion, it is health-bringing and appropriate for loosening up a sluggish mind and body; as a doctor I would order it for a man of my mould and disposition as readily as any other prescription so as to liven him up and keep him in trim until he is well on in years and to postpone the onset of old age. While we are still only in its outskirts, while there is still life in our pulse,

  Dum nova canities, dum prima et recta senectus,

  Dum superest Lachesi quod torqueat, et pedibus me

  Porto meis, nullo dextram subeunte bacillo,

  [while the hair is but newly grey, while old age is still fresh and erect, while there is still some yarn for Lachesis to spin, while I can stand on my own feet without leaning on a stick,]161

  we have need of being stirred and thrilled by some such perturbation as that: just think how it restored youth, vigour and merriness to wise Anacreon. And Socrates, when older than I am, said, in talking of someone he loved, ‘When we touched shoulders and brought our heads together while looking at the same book I felt, I can assure you, a sudden jab in my shoulder like an insect’s sting: it went on irritating for five whole days and poured into my mind a ceaseless longing.’162 – A mere touch, by chance, on the shoulder, was enough to warm and disturb a soul chilled and enervated by age, a soul which was foremost among all human souls in its re-formation.163 [C] And why not? Socrates was a man: he never wanted to be, or to seem to be, anything else.

  [B] Philosophy does not do battle against such pleasures as are natural, provided that temperance accompanies them:164 [C] she teaches moderation in such things not avoidance; [B] her powers of resistance are used against bastard unnatural pleasures. She says that the body’s desires must not be augmented by the mind and cleverly warns us [C] not to seek to stimulate our hunger by sating it, not to seek to stuff our bellies instead of filling them, as well as to avoid any enjoyment which brings us to penury, all meats which increase hunger and all drinks that increase thirst, [B] just as165 in the service of love she orders us to take a person who simply satisfies the needs of the body and who does not disturb the soul; the soul must not make love its concern, but follow nakedly along, accompanying the body.166

  But am I not right to think that these precepts – which are by my standard nevertheless a trifle rigorous167 – concern a body which is functioning properly, and that for a broken-down body (as for a prostrate stomach) we are allowed to use the art of medicine to prop it up and put a little heat into it by means of our imagination so as to restore its appetite and joy, since, left to itself, it has lost them for good? May we not say that there is nothing in us during this earthly prison either purely corporeal or purely spiritual and that it is injurious to tear a living man apart; and that it seems reasonable that we should adopt towards the enjoyment of pleasure at least as favourable an attitude as we do towards pain? Pain for example was vehement to the point of perfection in the Soul of the saints doing penance; the body naturally took part in it by right of the links binding it to her; yet it could have had little part in the cause.168 But the saints were by no means content that the body should ‘follow nakedly along, accompanying’ the afflicted soul: they afflicted such horrifying punishment on it as was proper to it, in order that both body and soul should emulate each other, plunging the whole man into pain, most salutary when most atrocious.

  [C] So, in the parallel case of bodily pleasures, is it not unjust to chill the Soul towards them and to maintain that she should be dragged towards them as to some compelling obligation or some slavish need? It is for the Soul, rather, to keep them warm like a broody hen and, since she has the responsibility of governing them, to come forward and
welcome them; just as in my opinion it is also her duty in the case of such pleasures as are proper to her to inject and pour into the body every sense-impression which their attributes allow and to see that they are made sweet to it and salutary. For it is, as they say, right that the body should never follow its appetites to the prejudice of the Soul. Why is it not right, then, that the Soul should not follow hers to the prejudice of the body?