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

There was a tiredness and a sourness in Montaigne’s generation, along with a rebellious new form of creativity. If they were cynical, it is easy to see why: they had to watch the ideals that had guided their upbringing turn into a grim joke. The Reformation, hailed by some earlier thinkers as a blast of fresh air beneficial even to the Church itself, became a war and threatened to ruin civilized society. Renaissance principles of beauty, poise, clarity, and intelligence dissolved into violence, cruelty, and extremist theology. Montaigne’s half-century was so disastrous for France that it took another half-century to recover from it — and in some ways recovery never came, for the turmoil of the late 1500s stopped France from building a major New World empire like those of England and Spain, and kept it inward-looking. By the time of Montaigne’s death, France was economically feeble, and ravaged by disease, famine, and public disorder. No wonder young nobles of his generation ended up as exquisitely educated misanthropes.

Montaigne had some of this anti-intellectual streak in him. He grew up to feel that the only hope for humanity lay in the simplicity and ignorance of the peasantry. They were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else. To this extent, he returned to the cult of ignorance: a slap in the face for Pierre.

But nothing is ever quite the same the second time around. And no one could be less like the medieval nobles than Montaigne, with his essaying and venturing, and his appending of uncertain codas to everything he wrote. His way of adding “though I don’t know,” implicitly or explicitly, to almost every thought he ever had sets him very far apart from the old ways. The ideals of his father survived in him after all, but in mutant form: softened, darkened, and with the certainty knocked out of them.

Perhaps this willingness to question certainties and prejudices just ran in the family. Amid the religious divide, the Eyquems were well known—“famous,” said Montaigne — for their freedom from sectarian disharmony. Most remained Catholics, but several converted to Protestantism, causing remarkably little upset in the process. When one young Protestant Eyquem showed signs of extremism, Montaigne’s friend La Boétie advised him to desist, “out of respect for the good reputation that the family you belong to has acquired by continual concord — a family that is as dear to me as any family in the world: Lord, what a family! from which there has never come any act other than that of a worthy man.”

This admirable clan was also a fairly large one. Montaigne had seven brothers and sisters, not counting the two who were born before him and who died, leaving him the eldest. The age gap between the remaining siblings was considerable; at its widest, it would have felt like a generational divide, for Montaigne was already twenty-seven when his youngest brother, Bertrand, was born.

So far as is known, none of the younger siblings received as much attention or as exceptional an education as little Micheau. The daughters probably had the normal female education, which is to say almost none at all. Even the other sons were treated more conventionally, so far as is known. The only well-documented child in the family is Michel de Montaigne — and he was not merely educated. He was made the object of an almost unprecedented pedagogic experiment.

The unusual treatment began soon after his birth, when Micheau was sent to live with a humble family in a nearby village. Having a peasant wet-nurse was normal enough, but Montaigne’s father wanted his son to absorb an understanding of commoners’ ways along with their breast-milk, so that he would grow up comfortable with the people who most needed a seigneur ’s help. Instead of bringing a nurse to the baby, therefore, he sent the baby to the nurse, and left him there long enough to be weaned. Even at the christening, Pierre had “people of the lowliest class” hold the infant over the font. From the start, Montaigne had the impression at once of being a peasant among peasants, and of being very special and different. This is the mixture of feelings that would stay with him for life. He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary.

The village plan had one downside which Pierre is unlikely to have considered. Living with strangers, Micheau must have failed to “bond” (as we might now say) with his real parents. This would apply to some extent to any wet-nursed child, but most would have contact with their mothers the rest of the time. Montaigne apparently did not. If twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas have any validity (and perhaps they don’t: mother — child bonding might prove as transient a fad as wet-nursing), such deprivation in the crucial first months of life would have affected Montaigne’s relationship with his mother for ever. According to Montaigne’s own assessment, however, the scheme worked beautifully, and he advised his readers, where possible, to do the same. Let your children “be formed by fortune under the laws of the common people and of nature,” he said.

However old he was when he was restored to the château — perhaps he was one or two — the break with his adoptive family must have been abrupt indeed, for the second element of his experimental education would prove totally incompatible with the first. Back in his family home, little peasant Micheau was now to be brought up as a native speaker of Latin.

Until now, the language he had heard most, in his foster home, would have been the local Périgord dialect. If he was old enough to eat his hosts’ food, he was old enough for his ear to become attuned to their language, although he was too young to speak it. He now had to leap from this to Latin, bypassing the language in which he would one day write: French. This was an astounding project for anyone even to think of, let alone put into effect, and it presented a practical difficulty. Pierre himself had minimal command of Latin; his wife and the servants knew none at all. Even in the wider world, a supply of native Latin speakers could no longer be found. How did Pierre think he was going to bring Montaigne up to be fluent in the language of Cicero and Virgil?

The solution he found was a two-part one. Step one was to engage a tutor who, though no native, did have near-flawless Latin. Pierre found a German named Dr. Horst, whose greatest qualification was having good Latin but almost no French, never mind Périgordian, so that he and young Micheau could communicate in only one way. Thus, from an early age—“before the first loosening of my tongue,” as Montaigne put it — Dr. Horst or (in Latin) Horstanus became the most important person in his life.

Step two was to ban everyone else in the household from speaking to Micheau in any living language. If they wanted to tell the boy to eat his breakfast, they had to do it using the Latin imperative and appropriate case-endings. They all duly set about learning a little, including Pierre himself, who worked to brush up his schoolboy knowledge. Thus, as Montaigne wrote, everyone benefited.

My father and mother learned enough Latin in this way to understand it, and acquired sufficient skill to use it when necessary, as did also the servants who were most attached to my service. Altogether, we Latinized ourselves so much that it overflowed all the way to our villages on every side, where there still remain several Latin names for artisans and tools that have taken root by usage. As for me, I was over six before I understood any more French or Périgordian than Arabic.