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

Thus, “without artificial means, without a book, without grammar or precept, without the whip, and without tears,” Montaigne learned a Latin as fine as that spoken by his tutor, and with a more natural flow than Horst could have managed. When he later encountered other teachers, they complimented him on a Latin that was both technically perfect and down-to-earth.

Why did Pierre do it? This is one of those moments when the half-millennium gap between ourselves and our subject suddenly yawns at our feet. Most people today would think it crazy to separate parent and child for the sake of a dead language. But in the Renaissance, the prize was considered worth the sacrifice. Command of beautiful and grammatically perfect Latin was the highest goal of a humanistic education: it unlocked the door to the ancient world — considered the locus of all human wisdom — as well as to much of modern culture, since most scholars still wrote Latin. It offered entry to a good career: Latin was essential for legal and civil service. The language bestowed an almost magical blessing on anyone who spoke it. If you spoke well, you must be able to think well. Pierre wanted to give his son the best advantage imaginable: a link both to the lost paradise of antiquity and to a successful personal future.

The way Pierre wanted Micheau to learn it also exemplified the ideals of the time. Most boys learned their Latin through painful effort at school, but the Romans had not done this: they spoke it as naturally as they breathed air. It was because moderns had to learn the language artificially that they were unable ever to match the ancients in wisdom or greatness of soul — or so went the theory.

It was anything but a cruel experiment, at least in obvious respects. The new theories of education emphasized that learning should be pleasurable, and that the only motivation children needed was their inborn desire for knowledge. When he was a little older, Montaigne would learn Greek in a spirit of fun too. “We volleyed our conjugations back and forth,” he recalled, “like those who learn arithmetic and geometry by such games as checkers and chess.” His Greek did not stick: he later admitted to having little knowledge of the language. But, in general, the hedonistic approach to education did make a difference to him. Having been guided early in life by his own curiosity alone, he grew up to be an independent-minded adult, following his own path in everything rather than deferring to duty and discipline — an outcome perhaps more far-reaching than his father had bargained for.

Other aspects of Montaigne’s early life were governed by similar principles of ease. It was thought that “it troubles the tender brains of children to wake them in the morning with a start,” so Pierre had his son charmed out of bed like a cobra every day by the plangent sound of a lute or other musical instrument. Corporal punishment was almost unknown to him; in his entire boyhood, he was only twice struck with a rod, and then very gently. It was an education of “wisdom and tact.”

Pierre had got his ideas from his beloved scholar friends, and perhaps also from people he met in Italy, though the main ideologue to whom such an approach can be traced was a Dutchman, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had written on education while based in Italy two decades earlier. Montaigne wrote that the scheme had been born from his father’s having made “all the inquiries a man can make, among men of learning and understanding.” Typically for Pierre, it was at once a scholarly notion and a flighty one. It certainly bore the mark of Pierre, rather than Antoinette, and one would give a lot to know what she thought about the project. If Montaigne’s peasant fostering had already set him apart from her, this stage of his education emphasized that separation even further. They were now living in the same house, but linguistically and culturally they were on different planets. She is unlikely to have become very proficient in Latin, although Montaigne says she learned some for his benefit. According to him, Pierre’s skills remained rudimentary too. If the experiment was genuinely as rigorous as his account implies (a big if), both parents now had only a stilted and unnatural way of talking to their son. Even Horst could not speak to him in a fully spontaneous manner, however profound his knowledge. So much for “naturalness.” One suspects — and hopes — that the rules were broken from time to time. Yet Montaigne mentions nothing of that. Nor does he seem to think that the experiment was anything less than a huge success.

In terms of making him a native Latinist, it did bear fruit in these early years, but the seeds of that fruit did not germinate further. Eventually, through lack of practice, he ended up on the same level as any other well-educated young nobleman. The language lurked deep within him, though. When his father fainted from a kidney-stone attack, decades later, Montaigne exclaimed in Latin as he caught him in his arms.

More lasting were the effects of Montaigne’s education on his personality. As happens with much early life experience, it benefited him in exactly the areas where it also damaged him. It set him apart from his household and from his whole contemporary world. This gave him independence of mind, but may have inclined him to a certain detachment in relationships. It gave him great expectations, since he grew up in the company of the greatest writers of antiquity rather than the provincial French of his neighborhood. Yet it also cut off other, more conventional, ambitions, because it led him to question everything that other people strove for. The young Montaigne was unique. He did not need to compete; he barely needed to exert himself. He grew up constrained by some of the most bizarre limits ever imposed on a child, and at the same time had almost unlimited freedom. He was a world unto himself.

In the end he acquired good French, though never the restrained, immaculate version subsequent centuries liked to insist upon in their writers. He wrote idiosyncratically; some would accuse him of sounding like an undisciplined yokel. Still, French was his language of choice — not Latin. In the Essays he gives an odd reason for this. French could not be expected to last as long as the classical languages, he said; thus, his writings were doomed to ephemerality, and he could write in any way he liked without worrying about his reputation. The fact that it was not frozen in rigid perfection appealed to him on principle: if it was flawed, there was less pressure to use it impeccably.

Montaigne usually disliked idealistic schemes, but in this case he approved of his father’s experiment. When he wrote about education himself, his ideas emerged as a more moderate version of Pierre’s — which were too extreme ever to have much appeal to anyone else. The contemporary Montaignesque writer Tabourot des Accords did suggest that a group of gentlemen might pool resources to bring up their children in a sort of Latin commune, since it was too hard to manage alone, but there is no sign that this was actually done.

Less bizarre aspects of the sixteenth century’s “child centered” education did flourish through the years, all the way to the present. In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau made a cult of bringing up children in the light of nature; he borrowed some of his ideas from Montaigne, and especially from the uncharacteristically prescriptive essay Montaigne wrote about education.

He had to be prescriptive, for the essay “Of Education” was more or less commissioned from him by a neighbor, the pregnant Diane de Foix, comtesse de Gurson, who wanted Montaigne’s opinion on how she should give her child (assuming it was a boy) the best start in life. Montaigne’s advice shows how pleased he was with his own early experiences. First, he said, she should restrain her maternal instincts sufficiently to bring in an outsider to be her son’s mentor instead; parents are too much at the mercy of their emotions. They cannot stop worrying about whether the boy might catch a cold in the rain, or be thrown from his horse, or have his skin cut in fencing practice. A tutor can be tougher. On the other hand, he must not be allowed to be cruel. Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one.