Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

That final coda—“though I don’t know”—is pure Montaigne. One must imagine it appended, in spirit, to almost everything he ever wrote. His whole philosophy is captured in this paragraph. Yes, he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way so we may as well relax and live with it.

If his father’s background was murky, a more significant secret apparently lurked in the family of his mother, Antoinette de Louppes de Villeneuve. Her ancestors were merchants; they were also immigrants from Spain, which, in the context of the time, strongly suggests that they were Jewish refugees. Like many others, they converted to Christianity under duress, and left following the persecution of Jews on the peninsula in the late fifteenth century.

Montaigne may not have realized that he was of Jewish origin, if indeed he was. He showed no more than mild interest in the subject, mentioning Jews only occasionally in the Essays , usually either neutrally or with sympathy, but never in a way that suggested he felt personally involved. Traveling in Italy later in life, he visited synagogues and witnessed a circumcision, but he did all this with the same curiosity he showed for everything else he came across: Protestant church services, executions, brothels, trick fountains, rock gardens, and unusual furniture.

He also expressed a wry skepticism about the “conversions” of some recent refugees — reasonably enough, since the act was not done by choice. If, as some have speculated, this was meant as a subtle dig at his mother’s family, it would not be surprising. In his political life, he suffered constant difficulties from some of her relatives in Bordeaux. He even seems to have had trouble getting on with Antoinette herself.

Montaigne’s mother was undoubtedly a strong character, but convention kept her powerless and frustrated. She married young, as women usually did, and probably had little choice in the matter. Pierre Eyquem was considerably older than her: in the marriage document, of January 15, 1529, he is described as thirty-three, while she is only “of age.” This could mean anything between twelve and twenty-five; since she managed to have the last of her children over thirty years after the wedding, she must have been at the young end of this range. Two babies were born before Michel, though neither survived. She was very likely still a teenager when he came along, yet by then she had been married for four years.

If there was anything childish or demure about her as a bride, that soon vanished. Legal documents surviving from various periods of her life create a picture of someone fierce, opinionated, and very able. Her husband’s first will, of 1561, left the task of managing the household to her rather than to his eldest son, though he later changed this. In 1561, Pierre Eyquem either lacked faith in Micheau (nearly twenty-eight at the time) or had an exceptionally high opinion of his wife — which would be impressive in an era when women were barely considered capable of rational thought.

The second will, of September 22, 1567, showed more trust in his son, but by now Pierre seemed to feel the need to use the document to command his wife to love her children, and to tell them to respect and honor her. He apparently feared that she and her eldest son would not live together amicably, for he ordered Montaigne to find accommodation for her elsewhere if living at the family estate did not work out. Antoinette did stay with him and his family for a long time after her husband’s death — until about 1587—but not very convivially. Another legal document drawn up between mother and son on August 31, 1568, asserted Antoinette’s right to receive “all filial honor, respect, and service,” as well as servants to attend her and a hundred livres tournois a year for petty cash. She, in turn, had to acknowledge his “command and mastery” of the château and estate. The contract implies that Antoinette felt poorly looked after, while Montaigne wanted to stop her meddling.

Things got worse. Antoinette’s own will, written on April 19, 1597—five years after her son’s death, for she outlived him — stated that she did not wish to be buried on the estate, and virtually cut Montaigne’s one child Léonor out of the inheritance. She complained that her original dowry should have gone on buying more property, yet did not, and she added: “I worked for a period of forty years in the house of Montaigne with my husband in such a way that by my work, care, and management the said house has been greatly increased in value, improved, and enlarged.” Her son Montaigne enjoyed the benefit of this throughout his life, as did Léonor, who thus became quite “rich and opulent” enough and needed nothing more. Finally, Antoinette remarked that she knew herself to be “of an age easy to circumvent”; she was probably around eighty. It seems that she feared a challenge to the will on grounds of senility.

Reading the frequent confessions of indolence and ineptitude that fill Montaigne’s book, it is easy to see why Antoinette thought the estate was neglected during the time he was in charge of it. He found practical affairs a bore and avoided them as much as possible. It is more surprising that she should make the same complaint against her husband Pierre, for he does not come across in the Essays that way at all. Montaigne makes his father sound like a dynamo of a man, devoted to his duties and always at work on home improvements — restless and interventionist to a fault.

Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne was a fifteenth-century man, just — he was born on September 29, 1495. Everything about him proclaimed his remoteness from his son’s world. Following noble tradition, he took up the profession of war, being the first in his family to do so. Michel did not follow him in this. As a nobleman he was obliged to carry a sword, but there is no indication in the Essays that he unsheathed it very often. One contemporary, Brantôme, described Montaigne as “dragging” the sword around town and suggested that he confine himself to carrying a pen. No such aspersions could have been cast on Pierre, who rushed off at the first opportunity to join France’s wars in Italy.

French forces had been regularly attacking and conquering states on the peninsula since 1494, and would continue doing so until 1559, when the Peace of Câteau Cambrésis stopped France’s foreign invasions and thus opened the way to its real sixteenth-century catastrophe: the civil wars. The Italian adventures were less damaging, but they were expensive and mostly pointless, as well as traumatic for those involved. Pierre plunged into battle some time around 1518. Apart from a brief interlude the year after that, he remained away from home until early 1529, when he came back to get married.

Sixteenth-century warfare was a messy business, a matter less of battlefield glamour than of hypothermia, fever, hunger, disease, and infected sword cuts and gunshot wounds for which there was little effective treatment. Above all, there were sieges, in which civilians and soldiers alike were starved into surrender. Pierre may have been involved in sieges of Milan and Pavia in 1522, and perhaps also in a disastrous siege of Pavia in 1525, which ended with French soldiers being slaughtered in large numbers and the French king being taken prisoner. In later life Pierre would regale his family with hair-raising stories of his war experiences, including accounts of whole villages of starving people committing suicide en masse for lack of a better way out. If Montaigne grew up to prefer dragging a pen to a sword, perhaps this was why.

The Italian wars may have been unedifying in one way, but in the literal sense of offering an education, they were highly improving for the French. Between sieges, Frenchmen encountered exciting ideas about science, politics, philosophy, pedagogy, and fashionable manners. The high Italian Renaissance had petered out by now, but Italy was still by far the most advanced civilization in Europe. French soldiers learned new ways of thinking about almost everything, and when they came home they brought their discoveries with them. Pierre was certainly one of this breed of Italianized Frenchmen, influenced by their travels and by their own charismatic, modernizing king François I. Later kings gave up on François’s Renaissance ideal, and during the civil wars almost everyone lost faith in the future altogether — but in Pierre’s youth that disillusionment was a long way off. The ideals were still new enough to be exciting.