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

Except, perhaps, for having a more soldierly bearing than his son, Pierre was physically of the same stamp. Montaigne describes him as “a small man, full of vigor, and straight and well-proportioned in stature,” with “an attractive face, inclining to brown.” He was fit, and kept himself that way. He liked to exercise his biceps using canes filled with lead, and he wore shoes with leaded soles to train him for running and jumping. The latter was a particular talent. “Of his vaulting, he has left some small miracles in people’s memory,” wrote Montaigne. “I have seen him, past sixty, put our agility to shame: leap into the saddle in his furred gown, do a turn over the table on his thumb, hardly ever go up to his room without taking three or four steps at a time.”

This Father William figure had other fine qualities, all more characteristic of his generation than of Montaigne’s. He was serious; he took care over the neatness of his appearance and dress, and showed “conscientiousness and scrupulousness” in all things. His sporting talents and gallant manners made him popular with women: Montaigne describes him as “very well suited to the service of the ladies, both by nature and by art.” It was probably to amuse female company that he sprang over tables. As for real sexual escapades, Pierre gave his son inconsistent messages. On the one hand, he related stories “of remarkable intimacies, especially of his own, with respectable women, free from any suspicion.” On the other, “he solemnly swore that he had come to his marriage a virgin.” Montaigne seemed unconvinced by the virginity claim, noting only, “and yet he had taken a very long part in the Italian wars.”

After his return from Italy and his marriage, Pierre began a political career in Bordeaux. He was elected jurat and provost in 1530, then deputy mayor in 1537, and finally mayor in 1554. This period saw difficult times in the city: a new local tax on salt in 1548 inspired riots, which “France” punished by stripping Bordeaux of many legal rights. As mayor, Pierre did what he could to restore its fortunes, but the privileges came back slowly. The stress damaged his health. Just as his tales of war atrocities may have put Montaigne off the military life, so the sight of Pierre’s exhaustion encouraged him to keep more distance from the job when he too became mayor of Bordeaux some thirty years later.

Pierre had some brilliant ideas, including one for a sort of sixteenth-century eBay: he proposed that each town should set up a place where anyone could advertise what they wanted: “I want to sell some pearls; I want to buy some pearls. So-and-so wants company to go to Paris; so-and-so is looking for a servant with such-and-such qualifications; so-and-so wants a master; so-and-so a workman; one man this, another man that.” It sounds sensible, but for some reason nothing came of the plan.

Another good idea of Pierre’s was keeping a journal in which he recorded everything that happened on the estate: the comings and goings of servants, and financial and agricultural data of all kinds. He encouraged his son to do the same. Montaigne started, in a fit of good intentions after Pierre’s death, but did not keep it up: only one fragment survives. “I think I am a fool to have neglected it,” he wrote in the Essays . He did manage to maintain another record begun by his father, using a printed calendar called the Ephemeris , by the German writer Michel Beuther. This survives almost in full, minus a few leaves, and is filled with notes by Montaigne and others in his family. Each date in the year has its own page, combining a printed summary of events from history with a blank area for adding remarks year by year. Montaigne used his Beuther to record births, travels, and notable visits over his lifetime. He kept it quite faithfully, but with a tendency to get dates, ages, and other such precise information wrong.

His wife’s complaints notwithstanding, Pierre apparently adored hard work of all kinds, none more so than developing the estate. Perhaps what irritated her was his preference for spending on improvements rather than on buying new property, together with the habit of starting more things than he finished. Pierre’s abandonment of the trading-post idea may have been more in character than it seems. On Pierre’s death, Montaigne inherited a lot of half-completed jobs on the estate, which he always felt he should see through, but never did. Work left at the building-site stage is very annoying; perhaps inaction was Montaigne’s way of dealing with it, just as overt exasperation was Antoinette’s.

Some of the abandoned work may have been a sign that Pierre’s energies were in decline, for, from the age of sixty-six, he suffered regular debilitating attacks of kidney stones. Montaigne often saw his father doubled over in agony during the last few years of his life. He never forgot the shock of witnessing the first attack, which struck Pierre without warning and knocked him unconscious from sheer pain. He fell into his son’s arms as he passed out. It was probably a similar episode, or complications ensuing from one, that finally killed him. He died on June 18, 1568, at the age of seventy-four.

By this time, Pierre had replaced his first will, so implicitly critical of his son’s abilities, with a new one which gave Montaigne the task of looking after his younger brothers and sisters and serving them as a replacement father. “He must take my place and represent me to them,” was how he put it. Montaigne did take his father’s place, and he did not always find it an easy one to occupy.

In the Essays , he comes across as a kind of negative image of Pierre. Praise for his father is often followed by an assertion that he himself is completely different. Having described how Pierre loved to build up the estate, Montaigne gives us an almost comically exaggerated picture of his own lack of either skill or interest in such work. Whatever he has done, “completing some old bit of wall and repairing some badly constructed building,” has been in honor of Pierre’s memory rather than for his own satisfaction, he says. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would warn, “One should not try to surpass one’s father in diligence; that makes one sick.” On the whole Montaigne did not try, and thus he kept himself sane.

Inadequate as he felt himself to be in the practical skills of life, he knew the advantage he had when it came to literature and learning. Pierre’s knowledge of books was as limited as his love of them was boundless. Typically for his generation, in Montaigne’s view, he made books the object of a cult and went to great lengths to seek out their authors, “receiving them at his house like holy persons” and “collecting their sayings and discourses like oracles.” Yet he showed little critical understanding. All right, so Pierre could bounce over the table on one manly thumb, Montaigne seems to say, but in matters of the intellect he was an embarrassment. He worshiped books without understanding them. His son would always try to do the opposite.

Montaigne was right in thinking this characteristic of Pierre’s contemporaries. French nobles of the early 1500s loved everything clever and Italianate; they distanced themselves from their own predecessors’ defiantly crass attitude to scholarship. What Montaigne neglected to observe was that he himself was just as typical of his era in rejecting the book-learning fetish. The fathers filled their sons with literature and history, trained them in critical thinking, and taught them to bandy around classical philosophies like juggling balls. By way of thanks, the sons dismissed it all as valueless and adopted a superior attitude. Some even tried to revive the older anti-scholarly tradition, as if it were a radical departure never thought of before.