The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [it is indeed beautiful, I think, to die in battle.]112

  It is for a mind [C] weak [B] and base beyond all measure to be afraid of risks shared in common with a crowd of others, or not to dare to do what men of so many kinds of soul may dare. The comradeship gives confidence to the very boys. Others may surpass you in knowledge, grace, force or fortune: in that case you can put the responsibility for it on to a third party: but if you yield to them in fortitude of soul you alone are responsible. Death is more abject, lingering and painful in bed than in combat: fevers and catarrhs are as painful and as mortal as volleys from harquebuses. Any man who could bear with valour the mischances of ordinary life would have no need to be more courageous on becoming a soldier. [C] ‘Vivere, mi Lucili, militare est.’ [To live, my dear Lucilius, is to do battle.]113

  I cannot recall ever having had scabies, but scratching is one of the most delightful of Nature’s bounties: and it is always ready to hand! But its neighbour, inconveniently close, is regret for having done it. I mainly practise it on my ears, which from time to time itch inside.

  [B] I was born with all my senses114 intact and virtually perfect. My stomach is as sound as you could wish; my head is, too: both usually remain so during my bouts of fever. The same applies to my respiration. I have exceeded [C] recently, by six years, that fiftieth birthday [B] which115 some peoples have not unreasonably laid down as termination of life, one so just that nobody was permitted to go beyond it: yet I still have periods of reprieve which, despite being short and variable, are so flawless that they lack nothing of that pain-free health of my youth. I am not referring to liveliness and vigour: it is not reasonable that they should accompany me beyond their limits:

  Non hæc amplius est liminis, aut aquæ

  Cælestis, patiens latus.

  [No longer can I endure waiting on my mistress’s doorstep in the pouring rain.]116

  It is my face which gives the game away first; [C] so do my eyes: [B] all changes in me begin there, appearing rather more grim than they are in practice. I often find my friends pitying me before I am aware of any cause. My looking-glass never strikes me with terror, because even in my youth I would often take on a turbid complexion and a look which boded ill without much happening, with the result that the doctors, who could find no cause in my body which produced that outward deterioration, attributed it to my mind and to some secret passion gnawing away within me. They were in error. My body and I would have got on rather better if it had behaved secundum me, as did my Soul which was then not only free from turbidity but, better still, full of joy and satisfaction – as she usually is, half because of her complexion and half by design.

  Nec vitiant artus ægræ contagïa mentis.

  [The illnesses of my mind do not affect my joints.]117

  I maintain that this disposition of my Soul has repeatedly helped up my body after its falls: my body is often knocked low whereas she, even when not merry, is at least calm and tranquil. I once had a quartan fever for four or five months which put me right out of countenance, yet my mind still went not merely peacefully but happily on her way. Once the pain has gone I am not much depressed by weakness or lassitude. I know of several bodily afflictions which are horrifying even to name but which I fear less than hundreds of current disturbances and distresses of the mind. I have decided never again to run: it is enough for me if I can drag myself along. Nor do I lament the natural decline which has me in its grip:

  Quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus?

  [In the Alps is anyone surprised to find goitres?]118

  – no more do I lament that my lifespan is not as long and massive as an oak’s. I have no cause to complain of my thought-processes: few thoughts in my life have ever disturbed even my sleep, except when concerned with desire (which woke me up without distressing me). I do not dream much: when I do it is of grotesque things and of chimeras usually produced by pleasant thoughts, more laughable than sad. And although I maintain that dreams are loyal interpreters of our inclinations, there is skill in classifying them and understanding them.

  [C] Res quæ in vita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, vident

  Quæque agunt vigilantes, agitantque, ea sicut in somno accidunt

  Minus mirandum est.

  [It is no miracle that men should find again in their dreams things which occupy them in their lives, things which they think about, worry about, gaze upon and do when they are awake.]119

  Plato further adds that it is wisdom’s task to extract from them information telling of future events. I know nothing about that except the wondrous experiences related by Socrates, Xenophon and Aristotle – great men of irreproachable authority.120 The history books tell us that the Atlantes never dream;121 they add that they never eat anything which has been slaughtered, a fact which I mention because it may explain why they do not dream, since Pythagoras prescribed a certain preparatory diet designed to encourage dreams.122 My dreams are weak things: they occasion no twitching of the body, no talking in my sleep. I have known in my time some who have been astonishingly troubled by them. Theon the philosopher walked while he dreamed (as did the manservant of Perides, on the tiles of the very roof-ridge of his house).123

  [B] At table I rarely exercise a choice, tackling the first and nearest dish; I do not like shifting about from one taste to another. I dislike a multitude of dishes and courses as much as any other multitude. I can be easily satisfied with a few items and loathe the opinion of Favorinus124 that during a feast any dish you are enjoying should be whipped away from you and a new one always brought in instead, and also that it is a wretched supper at which the guests are not stuffed with rumpsteaks exclusively taken from a variety of birds – only the fig-pecker bird being worth eating whole. I frequently eat salted meats but prefer my bread unsalted: the baker in my own kitchen (contrary to local custom) serves no other at my table. When I was a boy I often had to be punished for refusing precisely those things which are usually best liked at that age: sweets, jams and pastries. My tutor opposed this hatred of fancy foods as being itself a kind of fancy. And indeed, no matter what it applies to, it is nothing but finicking over your food: rid a boy of a fixed private love of coarse-bread, bacon or garlic and you rid him of self-indulgence. There are men who groan and suffer for want of beef or ham in the midst of partridge! Good for them: that is to be a gourmet among gourmets: it is a weak ill-favoured taste which finds insipid those ordinary everyday foods, [C] ‘per quae luxuria divitiarum taedio ludit’ [by the which luxury escapes from the boredom of riches].125 [B] The essence of that vice consists in failing to enjoy what others do and in taking anxious care over your diet,

  Si modica cænare times olus omne patella.

  [If you jib at an herb salad on a modest platter].

  There is certainly a difference, in that it is better to shackle your appetite to whatever is easier to obtain: but such shackling is still a vice. I once called a relation of mine self-indulgent because he had forgotten, during a period in our galleys, how to undress at night and sleep in our beds.

  If I had any sons I would readily wish them a fate like mine: God gave me a good father (who got nothing from me apart from my acknowledgement of his goodness – one cheerfully given); from the cradle he sent me to be suckled in some poor village of his, keeping me there until I was weaned – longer in fact, training me for the lowliest of lives among the people: [C] ‘Magna pars libertatis est bene moratus venter.’ [Freedom consists, for a large part, in having a good-humoured belly.]126

  [B] Never assume responsibility for such upbringing yourself and even less allow your wives to do so: let boys be fashioned by fortune to the natural laws of the common people; let them become accustomed to frugal and severely simple fare, so that they have to clamber down from austerity rather than scrambling up to it. My father’s humour had yet another goal: to bring me closer to the common-folk and to the sort of men who need our help; he reckoned that I should be brought to look kindly on the man who holds out his hand to me rath
er than on one who turns his back on me and snubs me. And the reason why he gave me godparents at baptism drawn from people of the most abject poverty was to bind and join me to them. His plan has not turned out too badly. I like doing things for lowly people, either because there is more glory in it or else from innate sympathy (which can work wonders with me). [C] The party I condemn in these wars of ours I would condemn more severely when it is flourishing and successful: it can almost reconcile me to it when I see it [B] wretched and overwhelmed.127 How I love to reflect on that beautiful humour of Chelonis who was both daughter and wife of Kings of Sparta: while her husband Cleombrotus had the edge over her father Leonidas she was a good daughter, rallying to her father in his wretched exile and defying the victor. Then fortune veered about, did it not? Whereupon, as fortune changed she changed her mind, ranging herself courageously beside her husband, whom she followed no matter where his downfall drove him, having, it seems, no preference between them but leaping to the support of whichever party needed her more and to whom she could better show pity.128 My nature is to follow the example of Flaminius (who lent his support to those who needed him, not to those who could help him) rather than that of Pyrrhus (who had the characteristic of being humble before the great and arrogant before the common-folk).

  Long sittings at table [C] irritate me and [B] disagree with me, since, lacking restraint (doubtless because I formed the habit as a boy), I go on eating as long as I am there. That is why at home [C] (even though our meals are among the shorter ones) [B] I like to come in [C] a little [B] after the others, following the fashion of Augustus, although I do not imitate him in leaving before the others. On the contrary: I like to stay on a long time afterwards listening to the conversation, provided that I do not join it since I find it as tiring and painful to talk on a full stomach as I find it a healthy and pleasant exercise to argue and bellow before a meal. [C] The ancient Greeks and Romans were more reasonable than we are: unless some other quite unusual task intervened they assigned to eating (which is one of the chief activities of our lives) several hours a day and the best part of the night, eating and drinking less hurriedly than we do who gallop through everything; they extended both the leisureliness of this natural pleasure and its conviviality by interspersing it with various social duties both useful and pleasant.

  [B] Those who [C] ought to take care of me, could, [B] at little cost129 to themselves, cheat me of whatever they think harmful to me, for in such matters I neither want what is not there nor notice its absence: but they also waste their breath if they lecture me on abstaining from whatever is served. The result is that when I resolve to diet you have to put me apart from the other diners, serving me precisely what is sufficient for a moderate snack; for if I sit down at table I forget my resolution. When I order my servants to change the way they are serving up a dish they know that that means my appetite is gone and that I will not touch any. I prefer to eat rare any flesh that lends itself to it. I like it to be well-hung, even in many cases until it starts to smell high. Generally speaking toughness is the only quality which irritates me (towards all others I am as indifferent and long-suffering as anyone), so much so that, contrary to the usual whim, I find even some fish too fresh and firm. That is nothing to do with my teeth which have always been exceedingly good and which only now are starting to be threatened by old age. Since boyhood I learned to rub them on my napkin, both on rising and before and after meals.

  God shows mercy to those from whom he takes away life a little at a time: that is the sole advantage of growing old; the last death which you die will be all the less total and painful: it will only be killing off half a man, or a quarter. Look: here is a tooth which has just fallen out with no effort or anguish: it had come to the natural terminus of its time. That part of my being, as well as several other parts, are already dead: others are half-dead, including those which were, during the vigour of my youth, the most energetic and uppermost. That is how I drip and drain away from myself. What animal-stupidity it would be if my intellect took for the whole of that collapse the last topple of an already advanced decline. I hope that mine will not.

  [C] To tell the truth the principal consolation I draw from thoughts of my death is that it will be right and natural: from this day forth I could not beg or hope from Destiny any but a wrongful favour. People convince themselves that in former times man’s lifespan, like his height, was bigger. Yet Solon, who belongs to those times, cuts off our extreme limit at three score years and ten.130 I, who have in all things so greatly honoured that [excellent Mean] of former ages and who have taken moderation as the most perfect measure, should I aspire to an immoderate and enormously protracted old age? Anything which goes against the current of Nature is capable of being harmful, but everything which accords with her cannot but be pleasant: ‘Omnia quae secundum naturam fiunt, sunt habenda in bonis.’ [Everything that happens in accordance with Nature must be counted among the things which are good.]131 That is why Plato says that deaths caused by wounds and illnesses may be termed violent, but the death which, as Nature leads us toward her, takes us by surprise is of all deaths the lightest to bear and to some extent enjoyable. ‘Vitam adolescentibus vis aufert, senibus maturitas.’ [Life is wrenched from young men: from old men it comes from ripeness.]

  [B] Everywhere death intermingles and merges with our life: our decline anticipates its hour and even forces itself upon our very progress. I have portraits of myself aged twenty-five and thirty-five. I compare them with my portrait now: in how many ways is it no longer me! How far, far more different from them is my present likeness than from what I shall be like in death. It is too much an abuse of Nature to [C] flog132 [B] her along so far that she is, for us, compelled to give up and abandon our guidance, our eyes, teeth, legs and so on to the mercy of remedies not our own but such as we can beg, relinquishing us, since she is weary of following us, into the hands of that ‘Art’.

  I am not over-fond of salads nor of any fruit except melons. My father loathed all kinds of sauces: I love them all. Overeating distresses me, but I am not aware that any food as such definitely disagrees with me, any more than I take note of full or crescent moons or of spring or autumn. There are fickle inexplicable changes which occur in us: for example I first of all found that radishes agreed with me; then they did not; now they do again. I have found my stomach and my tastes varying like this over several foods: I have replaced white wine by red, then red by white. I delight in fish, so that my days of abstinence are days of plenty and my fast-days are feast-days. I believe what some say: that fish is more easily digestible than flesh. It goes against my conscience to eat flesh on fish-days and against my preference to mix fish and flesh: there seems to be too wide a difference between them.

  Since I was a young man I have occasionally gone without my dinner, either to whet my appetite for the next day (for, while Epicurus went without food or ate little in order to accustom his sense of enjoyment to do without abundance, I on the contrary do so in order to train it to profit from abundance and to make merry with it); or so as to husband my strength in the service of some physical or mental activity (since both grow cruelly sluggish within me through repletion: and I loathe above all that silly yoking together of so sane and merry a goddess as Venus with that little belching dyspeptic Bacchus, all blown up by the fumes of his wine);133 or else to cure a sick stomach, or for want of appropriate company (since with that same Epicurus I say that we should be less concerned with what we eat than with whom we eat,134 and I approve of Chilo’s refusal to promise to come to a banquet at Periander’s before finding out who the other guests were). No recipe is so pleasing to me, no sauce so appetizing, as those which derive from the company.

  I believe it is healthier to eat more leisurely, less, and at shorter intervals. But I would give precedence to appetite and hunger: I would find no pleasure in dragging through three or four skimped meals a day on doctor’s orders: [C] who could assure me that at suppertime I would find again that frank appetite I ha
ve this morning? Especially we old men should seize the first opportune moment which comes along. Let us leave the prognostics of propitious times to the scribblers of almanacks and to the doctors.135 [B] The ultimate benefit of my feeling well is pleasure: let us cling to the first pleasure which is present and known. I refuse to stick for long to any prescriptions limiting my diet. A man who wants a regimen which serves him must not allow it to go on and on; for we become conditioned to it; our strength is benumbed by it; after six months you will have so degraded your stomach that it will have profited you nothing: you will merely have lost your freedom to do otherwise without harm.

  My legs and thighs I cover no more in winter than in summer, wearing simple silken hose. I did let myself go, keeping my head warmer to help my rheum and my stomach warmer to help my stone, but within a day or two my ailments grew used to this and showed contempt for such routine provisions: so I moved on from a cap to a head-scarf and then from a bonnet to a fur hat. The padding of my doublet now only serves as decoration: it is pointless unless I add a layer of rabbit-fur or vulture-skin136 and wear a skull-cap under my hat. Follow that gradation and you will go a long way! I will not do so and would willingly countermand what I have already done if only I dared. ‘Are you feeling some fresh discomfort? Well, then, that reform of yours did you no good: you have grown used to it. Find another.’ Thus are men undermined when they allow themselves to become encumbered with restricted diets and to cling to them superstitiously. They need to go farther and farther on, and then farther still. There is no end to it.

  For both work and pleasure’s sake it is far more convenient to do as the ancients did: go without lunch and, so as not to break up the day, put off the feast until the time comes to return home and rest. I used to do that once, but I have subsequently found from experience that, on the contrary, it is better for my health’s sake to eat at lunchtime, since digestion is better when you are awake.