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

He fulminates against the brutal methods of most schools. “Away with violence and compulsion!” If you enter a school in lesson time, he says, “you hear nothing but cries, both from tortured boys and from masters drunk with rage.” All this achieves is to put children off learning for life.

Often, books need not be used at all. One learns dancing by dancing; one learns to play the lute by playing the lute. The same is true of thinking, and indeed of living. Every experience can be a learning opportunity: “a page’s prank, a servant’s blunder, a remark at table.” The child should learn to question everything: to “pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust.” Traveling is useful; so is socializing, which teaches the child to be open to others and to adapt to anyone he finds around him. Eccentricities should be ironed out early, because they make it difficult to get on with others. “I have seen men flee from the smell of apples more than from harquebus fire, others take fright at a mouse, others throw up at the sight of cream, and others at the plumping of a feather bed.” All this stands in the way of good relationships and of good living. It can be avoided, for young human beings are malleable.

Or at least, they are malleable up to a point. Montaigne soon changes tack. Whatever you do, he says, you cannot really change inborn disposition. You can guide it or train it, but not get rid of it. In another essay he wrote, “There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a pattern all his own, a ruling pattern, which struggles against education.”

Pierre, one imagines, had a less fatalistic view of human nature, for he thought that the young Micheau could be molded, and that the experiment was worth the trouble. With his usual can-do attitude, he set out to build and develop his son just as he set out to build and develop his estate.

Alas, as with other projects, Pierre left the job unfinished, or so Montaigne believed. At the age of about six, the boy was abruptly removed from his unconventional hothouse and sent off to school like everyone else. All his life, he remained convinced that this was his fault: that some sign of his recalcitrance — his “ruling pattern”—had made his father give up. Or perhaps Pierre had merely caved in to convention, now that his original advisers were no longer around. It seems more likely that Pierre had always intended to send Micheau to school at a certain stage. Not understanding the plan, Montaigne read in a criticism of himself that was probably not there. The whole multistage progression, from peasant family to Latin nursery to school, amounted to a recipe for producing a perfect gentleman, independent of mind yet able to mold himself to society when necessary. Thus, in 1539, Montaigne joined other boys his age at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux.

He would be a pupil there for a decade, until at least 1548, and to some extent would adjust to it, but at first it was a severe shock to his system. For a start, he had to get used to a city existence after the freedom of a boy’s life in the countryside. Bordeaux was some forty miles away from his home, several hours’ journey even on a fast horse. The trip was slowed further by the necessity of crossing the Dordogne on the way: a ferry picked travelers up from gentle green hills and vineyards, and dropped them in the heart of Bordeaux’s commercial district — a different world.

Walled and claustrophobic, clustered tightly around the river, sixteenth-century Bordeaux was not at all like the city of today. Its old streets were ripped out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to be replaced by boulevards and big creamy buildings which now give it a slightly abstract quality. In Montaigne’s day, there was nothing creamy about it. It was populous, having about twenty-five thousand residents, and very busy. Its river was full of shipping. Its banks were equipped for the unloading of cargo: mainly wine, as well as a richly aroma’d mixture of preserved fish, salt, and timber.

The mood changed once one reached the Collège de Guyenne itself, which was set in a tranquil area of the city away from the commercial center and surrounded by elms. It was an excellent school, though Montaigne spoke ill of it. Its curriculum and methods sound formidable to a modern sensibility. Everything revolved around the rote study of Latin, the one subject in which Montaigne enjoyed an advantage so great that his teachers must have marveled at him. Both teachers and pupils were expected to converse in it. Just as in Montaigne’s own home, the school was full of awkward, stilted speech — but there the similarity ended. Here no gentle music was played; there was no emphasis on pleasure and, most shockingly of all, no assumption that little Micheau was the center of the universe.

Instead, he now had to fit in with everyone else. Classes began early in the morning with minute dissection of literary examples, usually from writers like Cicero who were least likely to appeal to young readers’ tastes. In the afternoons, they studied grammar in the abstract, without recourse to examples. In the evenings, texts were read out together with analyses dictated by the teacher, which the boys were expected to memorize and spout back on request.

At first, Montaigne’s mastery of Latin got him quickly promoted to classes beyond his age group. But the bad influence of his less privileged classmates gradually destroyed his easy command of the language, so that — according to him — he left the school knowing less of it than when he arrived.

In fact, the Collège was relatively adventurous and open minded, and some aspects of school life amused Montaigne more than he liked to admit. In the older classes, students competed in feats of oratory and debate, all in Latin of course, and with less attention to what they said than to how they said it. From these, Montaigne picked up rhetorical skills and critical habits of thought which he would use all his life. It was probably also here that he first encountered the idea of using “commonplace books”: notebooks in which to write down snippets one encountered in one’s reading, setting them in creative juxtaposition. In later years, as a teenager, Montaigne studied more interesting subjects, including philosophy — not, unfortunately, the kind he liked, which dealt with the question of how to live, but mostly Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. Some light relief was also allowed. A new teacher at the school, Marc-Antoine Muret, wrote and directed plays; Montaigne starred in one. He turned out to be a natural on stage, having (he wrote) an unexpected “assurance in expression and flexibility in voice and gesture.”

All this occurred during a difficult period for the Collège. In 1547, the forward-thinking principal, André Gouvéa, was forced out by conservative political factions. He left for Portugal, taking his best teachers with him. The following year, upheavals broke out in Bordeaux itself: the salt-tax riots, which would cause such stress to Montaigne’s father during his term as mayor. The southwest had traditionally been exempt from this tax. Now, suddenly, the new king Henri II tried to impose it, with inflammatory results.

Crowds of rebels assembled to protest, and for five days from August 17 to August 22, 1548, mobs roamed the streets setting fire to tax collectors’ houses. Some attacked the homes of anyone who looked rich, until the disorder threatened to turn into a general peasant uprising. A few tax collectors were killed. Their bodies were dragged through the streets and covered in heaps of salt to underline the point. In one of the worst incidents, Tristan de Moneins, the town’s lieutenant-general and governor — thus the king’s official representative — was lynched. He had shut himself up in the city’s massive royal citadel, the Château Trompette, but a crowd gathered outside and howled for him to come out. Perhaps thinking to earn their respect by facing up to them, he ventured forth, but it was a mistake. They beat him to death.