The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [B] I have absolutely no other passion but love to keep me going. What covetousness, ambition, quarrels and lawsuits do for men who, like me, have no other allotted task, love would do more suitably: it would restore me to vigilance, sober behaviour, graceful manners and care about my person; love would give new strength to my features so that the distortions of old age, pitiful and misshapen, should not come and disfigure them; [C] it would bring me back to wise and healthy endeavours by which I could make myself better esteemed and better loved, banishing from my mind all sense of hopelessness about itself and about its application, while bringing it to know itself again: [B] it would divert me away from a thousand painful thoughts, [C] from a thousand melancholy sorrows [B] which idleness burdens us with in old age, [C] as does the poor state of our health; [B] it would, at least in dream, restore some heat to my blood – this blood of mine which Nature is foresaking; it would lift up my chin and unbuckle my sinews [C] as well as the vigour and exhilaration of the soul [B] for this poor fellow who is on his way out, rushing towards disintegration.

  But I am well aware that love is a good thing very hard to recover. Our tastes have, through weakness, become more delicate and, through experience, more discriminating. We demand more when we have less to offer: we want the maximum of choice just when we least deserve to find favour. Realizing we are thus, we are less bold and more suspicious; knowing our own circumstances – and theirs – nothing can assure us we are loved.

  I feel shame for myself to be found among fresh-green, boiling youth

  Cujus in indomito constantior inguine nervus,

  Quam nova collibus arbor inhæret.

  [in whose indomitable groin there is a tendon firmer far than a young tree planted on the hillside.]169

  Why should we go and show our wretchedness among such eager joy,

  Possint ut juvenes visere fervidi,

  Multo non sine risu,

  Dilapsam in cineres facem?

  [so that burning youth, not without many a laugh, may see our nuptial torch decayed into ashes?]

  They have strength and reason on their side; let us make room for them; we can hold out no longer.

  [C] That sprig of budding beauty will not suffer itself to be handled by hands benumbed, nor seduced by purely material means. For, as that ancient philosopher replied to one who was laughing at him for being unable to win the favour of some tendril he was pursuing: ‘My friend, the hook will not bite when the curd is so fresh.’170

  [B] Now love is a commerce which requires inter-relationship and reciprocity. We can show our appreciation of the other pleasures we receive by recompenses of a different nature: this one can only be repaid in the same coin. [C] Truly in this one the pleasure that I give stimulates my imagination more sweetly than the pleasure I receive. [B] A man who can receive pleasure when he gives none at all is in no wise generous: it is a base soul which will owe the lot and is pleased to nurse contacts with women who do all the paying. There is no beauty nor grace nor intimacy so exquisite that a gentleman should want them at that price. If they can only do us a good turn out of pity, then I would dearly prefer not to live at all than to live on charity. Would that I had the right to ask it of them in the style which I have seen beggars use in Italy: ‘Fate ben per voi’ [Do a good turn for yourself]; [C] or in the manner which Cyrus adopted to exhort his soldiers: ‘He who loves himself, let him follow me.’171

  [B] Someone will say to me: ‘Go back again to women who are now in the same state as you are: fellowship in the same misfortune will make them easier to get.’ What absurd and dull terms for a truce!

  Nolo

  Barbam vellere mortuo leoni!

  [I have no desire to pluck hairs from a dead lion’s beard!]172

  [C] One of the reproaches and accusations that Xenophon makes about Meno is that in his love-affairs he only got on the job with partners past their bloom.173 The sight of a young couple appropriately united in a tender embrace – or even the contemplation of it in imagination – contains I believe more sensual pleasure than being the second partner in a sad misshapen union. [B] I leave that fanciful appetite to the Emperor Galba who devoted himself only to tough and ancient flesh – or to that other pitiful wretched man:

  O ego di’ faciant talem te cernere possim,

  Charaque mutatis oscula ferre comis,

  Amplectique meis corpus non pingue lacertis!

  [O would the gods let me see you as you are, tenderly kiss your fading hair and clasp your withered body in my embrace!]174

  [C] And I count among the principal forms of ugliness all beauties due to artifice and constraint. A young lad of Chio called Hemon, hoping that fine clothes would procure him that handsomeness which Nature had denied him, came to the philosopher Arcesilaus and asked him if a philosopher could ever find himself in love. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘provided it be not with a dishonest dressed-up beauty such as yours.’175 An ugly old age when openly avowed is in my opinion less old and less ugly than one smoothed out and painted over.

  [B] Shall I say it, on condition that you do not jump down my throat? Love never seems to me to be properly and naturally seasonable except in the age nearest boyhood:

  Quem si puellarum insereres choro,

  Mille sagaces falleret hospites

  Discrimen obscurum, solutis

  Crinibus ambiguoque vultu.

  [A youth such that, if you put him among a band of maidens, those who knew him not, for all their perspicacity, would fail to pick him out with his flowing hair and his hermaphrodite’s face.]176

  [C] Nor handsomeness, either. For Plato himself noted that Homer prolongs it until there is a shadow of a beard on the chin, but remarks that such a flower is rare. (We all know why Dion the Sophist jokingly called the mossy beards of adolescence Aristogitons and Harmodians!)177

  [B] I find love already out of place in adult manhood let alone in old age.

  Importunus enim transvolat aridas

  Quercus.

  [For Cupid disdainfully flies past the withered oak.]178

  [C] Queen Margaret of Navarre (just like a woman) greatly extends the privileges of women when she ordains that it is time for them to change the title beautiful for good after they have reached thirty.179

  [B] The shorter the tenancy we grant to Cupid in our lives the better off we are. Look at his deportment! And his chin is as smooth as a boy’s! Who is unaware that in Cupid’s school you do everything contrary to good order? There the novices are the professors: study, practice and experience lead to failure. [C] ‘Amor ordinem nescit.’ [Cupid knows no order.]180 [B] The way Cupid conducts things is most in fashion when mingled with ingenuousness and awkwardness; mistakes and failures lend it charm and grace; provided it is sorrowful and yearning, it little matters whether it shows prudence. See how Cupid stumbles along, tripping over merrily; to guide him by art and wisdom is to clamp him in the stocks: you constrain his divine freedom when you lay hairy calloused hands upon him.

  Moreover I often hear women portraying a relationship as being entirely of the mind, disdaining to take into consideration the interests which our senses have in it.181 Everything helps in this case, but I should add that though I have often found that we men have overlooked weaknesses in their minds on account of the beauty of their bodies, I have yet to see one woman willing, on account of the beauty of a man’s mind, however mature and wise, to lend a helping hand to his body once it has even begun to decline. Why is not one of them ever moved by desire for that noble [C] Socratic [B] bargain of body for mind, [C] purchasing at the price of her thighs a philosophical relationship and procreation through the soul – the highest price she could ever get for them!182

  Plato decrees in his laws that a man who has achieved some signal and useful exploit in a war may not, for the duration of that conflict, irrespective of his age or ugliness, be refused a kiss or any other of love’s favours from anyone he pleases.183 Can what he finds so just in commendation of a warrior’s worth not also be used to commend
worth of another kind? And why is no woman ever moved [B] to win, before her fellow-women do, the glory of a love so chaste? Yes, I do indeed say chaste:

  nam si quando ad prælia ventum est,

  Ut quondam in stipulis magnus sine viribus ignis

  Incassum furit.

  [for when it comes to the clinch, its frenzied love serves no purpose; like burning stubble: lots of flame but no force.]184

  We do not rank among our worst vices those whose fire is smothered in our minds.

  To bring to an end these infamous jottings which I have loosed in a diarrhoea of babble – a violent and at times morbid diarrhoea –

  Ut missum sponsi furtivo muntre malum

  Procurrit casto virginis e gremio,

  Quod miseræ oblitæ molli sub veste locatum,

  Dum adventu matris prosilit, excutitur,

  Atque illud prono præceps agitur decursu;

  Huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor

  [as when an apple, secretly given by her admirer breaks loose from the chaste bosom of a maiden as she starts to her feet on hearing her mother’s footstep, forgetting she had concealed it beneath her flowing robes; it lies there on the ground while a blush suffuses her troubled face and betrays her fault]185

  – I say that male and female are cast in the same mould: save for education and custom the difference between them is not great. [C] In The Republic Plato summons both men and women indifferently to a community of all studies, administrations, offices and vocations both in peace and war;186 and Antisthenes the philosopher removed any distinction between their virtue and our own.187

  [B] It is far more easy to charge one sex than to discharge the other. As the saying goes: it is the pot calling the kettle smutty.

  6. On coaches

  [A favourite chapter, linking the ideas of fantastic luxury, generosity and princely magnificence with fantastic cruelty, vulgarity and ostentation. Coaches (which for Montaigne means all sorts of wheeled vehicles including Roman chariots) were the symbols of luxury. They are contrasted with the simplicity of those American Indian cultures which had never invented the wheel, had no horses and used gold for its beauty alone. Their simplicity emphasized the horrors of the Spanish conquest of Peru, with its naked cruelty and avarice.

  Montaigne’s three main sources are a work of Pietro Crinito, De honesta disciplina; another, by Justus Lipsius, De amphitheatro; a third by Francisco Lopez de Gomara, one of the Conquistadores, whom he read in the French translation by J. Fumée: Histoire générale des Indes.]

  [B] It is very easy to prove that, when great authors write about causes, they not only marshal those which they reckon to be true but also those which they do not believe, provided that they have some [C] originality and [B] beauty.1 If what they say is ingenious they think that their words are sufficiently useful and true. We cannot be sure of the mastercause, so we pile cause upon cause, hoping that it may happen to be among them:

  namque unam dicere causam

  Non satis est, verum plures, unde una tamen sit.

  [since it suffices not to give one single cause, many must be given, one of which only may be true.]2

  You ask me: ‘What is the origin of our custom of saying Bless you when people sneeze?’ Well, we break three sorts of wind: the one which issues lower down is very dirty; the one which issues from the mouth comports an element of reproach for gluttony; and the third is sneezing, to which, since it issues from the head and is blameless, we give that honourable greeting.

  Do not mock such subtle reasoning: it is (so they say) from Aristotle…3

  I came across, in Plutarch I think (and he is of all the authors I know the one who has best blended art with nature and judgement with erudition), the explanation that the vomiting from the stomach which befalls men on sea-voyages is to be attributed to fear.4 (He had already found some reason or other to prove that fear can produce such an effect.) Now I am very subject to seasickness and I know that that cause does not apply to me; and I know it not by argument but compelling experience. I shall not cite what I have been told, that animals, especially pigs, which have no conception of danger, get seasick; nor what one of my acquaintances has told me about himself: he is much subject to it yet on two or three occasions when he was obsessed by fear during a great storm the desire to vomit disappeared –[C] as it did to that man in Antiquity: ‘Pejus vexabar quam ut periculum mihi succurreret.’ [I was too shaken for the danger to occur to me.]5[B] Though many occasions for being afraid have arisen (if you count death as one) I have never felt, on water nor anywhere else, such fear as to confuse or to daze me. Fear can arise from lack of judgement as well as from lack of courage. All such dangers as I have encountered have been with my eyes open, with my sight free, sound and whole: besides, to feel fear you also need to have courage. Once when I did have to flee, I was able to manage my flight well and, compared with others, to maintain some order because I did so [C] if not without fear nevertheless [B] without ecstatic terror; fear was aroused, but not the kind which is thunderstruck or insane. The souls of great men can go far beyond that, showing us retreats which were not merely tranquil and sane but marked by pride.

  Here let me quote the flight which Alcibiades relates: it concerns Socrates, his companion in arms:6 ‘I came across him (he said) after the rout of our army; he and Laches were the last to retreat. I could watch him at leisure and in safety, since I was on a good horse while he was on foot; that is the way we had fought. I noted first his presence of mind and the resolve which he showed in contrast with Laches; next it was his confident walk, in no ways different from his usual one; then the controlled and steady eyes with which he weighed and evaluated what was going on about him, staring now at some who were friends, now at others who were foes, encouraging the friends and showing the others that he was a man to sell his life-blood very dear should any assay to take it from him. That saved them, for you do not willingly attack men like that: you hunt the fearful.’

  There you have the testimony of a great Captain, teaching us (what we can assay every day) that nothing casts us into dangers so much as a rash hunger to get out of them: [C] ‘Quo timoris minus est, eo minus ferme periculi est.’ [As a rule, where you feel less fear you experience less danger.]7

  [B] People today are wrong to say ‘That man is frightened of dying,’ when they really mean that he dwells on it and anticipates it. Anticipation equally concerns whatever affects us, for good or evil. In some ways, weighing and evaluating a danger is the opposite of being thrown into amazement by it. I do not think I am strong enough to sustain the violent onslaught of fear nor of any other passion which disturbs the mind. If ever I were once to be vanquished and thrown to the ground by it I would never wholly get up again; should anything make my soul lose her footing I could never set her back straight in place again. She is ever probing and feeling herself too vigorously and examining herself too deeply; consequently she would never allow the wound which had pierced her to grow together and become strong. It is a good thing for me that no malady has so far overthrown her. Each onslaught against me I confront and oppose equipped in full armour, so the first to get the better of me would leave me without resources. There is no question of doing anything twice: let the storm once breach my dyke anywhere and all of me is open, irremediably drowned. [C] Epicurus asserts that no wise man can become the opposite of wise.8 I know something about that judgement the other way round: no man who has been a real fool once will ever be really wise again!

  [B] God sends us cold according to our garment; he sends me emotions according to my means of sustaining them. Nature, having exposed me on one flank has covered me on the other: having stripped me of fortitude she has equipped me with an inability to feel and with blunted balanced powers of anticipation.

  Now I cannot put up for long with coach, litter or boat (and could do so less still in my youth). I loathe all means of conveyance but the horse, both for town and country. But litters I can tolerate less than coaches; and for the same reason I can b
etter tolerate being thrown about on a rough sea – which produces fear – than I can the motion experienced during calm weather. Just as I cannot suffer a rickety chair under me, similarly I cannot suffer that slight jerk made by the oars as they pull the boat from under us without it somehow disturbing my brain and my stomach. Now, when sail or current bears us smoothly along or when we are towed, the unified motion in no wise bothers me; what upsets me is that series of broken movements, the more so when it is slow. I cannot describe its characteristics any other way. Doctors have prescribed binding a towel as a compress round the lower part of my belly; I have never assayed it, being used to fighting against my defects and vanquishing them by myself.

  [C] If my memory were adequately furnished with them I would not regret time spent listing here the infinite variety of historical examples of the applications of coaches to the service of war, varying as they do from nation to nation and century to century; they are, it seems to me, most effective and very necessary. It seems a marvel to me that we have forgotten all about it. I will merely say this: quite recently in our fathers’ time the Hungarians put them to excellent use against the Turks; in each coach a soldier with a round buckler was stationed beside a musketeer, together with a number of harquebuses in racks, already loaded. They clad the sides of each coach with rows of shields rather like a frigate. They drew up a line in front of their troops consisting of three thousand such coaches; after the cannon had played their part they either sent them ahead towards the enemy who had to swallow that salvo as a foretaste of what was to come (no slight advantage), or else they threw them against the enemy squadrons to break them up and open a way through. In addition there was the help they could give in covering the flanks of their troops when marching through ticklish country or in speedily defending an encampment by turning it into a fort.9