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

One radical theory has come and gone from circulation a few times in recent years. As remarked, On Voluntary Servitude has features so Montaignelike that it could almost be his own writing. It talks about habit, nature, perspective, and friendship — four themes that resound throughout the Essays . It emphasizes inner freedom as a path to political resistance: a Montaignean position. The work is filled with examples from classical history, just like the Essays . It feels like an Essay . It is persuasive, entertaining, and digression-prone. The author often goes off at some tangent — say, into a discussion of the Pléiade group of sixteenth-century poets — before coming to with a remark such as, “But to return to our purpose, which I had almost lost,” or “But to return from where, I don’t know how, I had lost the thread of my discussion.” This playful pretense at disorganization seems unusual in a young man’s literary exercise, but it fills the piece with life and spontaneity. The author talks to us as if we were sitting together over a glass of wine, or had bumped into each other on a Bordeaux street corner. The suspicion dawns: could Montaigne, rather than La Boétie, have been the author of On Voluntary Servitude?

But it must have been by La Boétie, comes the reply; copies of the manuscript were being passed around Bordeaux. Yet none of today’s surviving copies is in La Boétie’s hand — all were made by others — and the only clear source we have for the “passed around” story is Montaigne himself. It is also Montaigne who identifies the author as La Boétie, and Montaigne who talks of it as a student piece. Perhaps the teenage Rimbaud here was the hothead given to rushing in and out of parlement chambers, not the prematurely judicious La Boétie. Or perhaps it was not the work of a young man at all: that would explain a few anachronistic references in the text. Perhaps, as some enthusiastic conspiracy theorists suggest, Montaigne wrote the piece much later and inserted the anachronisms to tip off smart readers to the deception.

The first person to try attributing On Voluntary Servitude to Montaigne, in 1906, was the maverick Montaignist Arthur-Antoine Armaingaud, a man with a record of making outrageous suggestions and sitting back to watch the feathers fly. Almost no one agreed with Armaingaud at the time, and few do now, but his hypothesis has won over a new generation of mavericks, notably Daniel Martin and David Lewis Schaefer. Schaefer is keen to find a revolutionary underbelly in Montaigne on principle, as was Armaingaud, while Daniel Martin has a general penchant for approaching the book like a cryptic crossword full of clues. “Removing On Voluntary Servitude from the Essays would be like removing the flute from a symphony orchestra,” he writes.

The idea of Montaigne writing a radical, proto-anarchist tract, then whipping up a dust storm of false information and hiding hints where only the sharp-eyed could spot them, appeals on several levels. Like all conspiracy theories, it offers the thrill of fitting the pieces together, and it makes Montaigne glamorous: a one-man revolutionary cell and a master of intrigue.

Occasional signs can be found in the Essays that Montaigne was capable of playing the slyboots when he wanted to. Once, he used an elaborate trick to help a friend who suffered from impotence and was afraid a spell had been cast on him. Instead of reasoning him out of it, Montaigne gave the friend a robe and a magical-looking coin engraved with “celestial figures.” He told him to perform a series of rituals with this medallion whenever he was about to have sex, first laying it over his kidneys, then tying it around his waist, then lying down with his partner and pulling the robe over both of them. The trick worked. Montaigne felt a bit guilty, even though he had done it for his friend’s benefit. Yet this shows that he could practice deception if he felt the situation called for it, or if the psychology of the case fascinated him enough.

On the whole, though, this sort of game-playing was rare for him, and he preferred to emphasize his honesty and openness in all matters, as well as his dull-wittedness at enigmas and puzzles. That could all be part of the game. But if he really was a thoroughgoing trickster, then one has to doubt almost every word he says in the book: a dizzying prospect. There are other unsettling implications. If La Boétie did not write On Voluntary Servitude , then he was not the man Montaigne made him out to be in the Essays . He existed, all right, but with no clear features: a cipher for Montaigne’s own cleverness. And if he did not have exceptional capabilities — if he was not the kind of man who would write the Servitude —why did Montaigne love him so much? He must have had a reason for feeling so strongly, and apparently it wasn’t La Boétie’s good looks, unless he was lying about that too.

If one takes their love story seriously, the conspiracy theory becomes almost unthinkable. For Montaigne to ascribe the Servitude to La Boétie as a cover for himself would be to play fast and free with La Boétie’s memory — a memory he evidently worshiped to the point of idolatry. It is surprising that he revealed La Boétie’s authorship of a work currently being burned in the public square of Bordeaux, but if La Boétie was not the author, it would be more than surprising; it would be a total betrayal, an act almost of hatred. There is nothing in any of Montaigne’s writings about La Boétie (including remarks made in a travel journal never meant for publication) to suggest that he felt this way.

The intensity of their affection also provides a convincing explanation for why the two men’s writing styles were so similar. Montaigne and La Boétie shared everything: they blended into one another, not as a writer blends into his pseudonym, but as two writers develop their ideas in partnership — often arguing, often disagreeing, yet constantly absorbing . Over their few years together, Montaigne and La Boétie must have talked from morning to night: about habit, about the need to reject received ideas and to change points of view, about tyranny, and about personal freedom. At first, La Boétie’s ideas would have been more clearly articulated; later, probably, Montaigne would have overtaken him, pursuing thoughts about custom and perspective in directions La Boétie would not have thought of. It all eventually found its way into the Essays , which became a monument to La Boétie in more ways than one. The two minds wove themselves so closely together that, with the best critical tools in the world, you could not pick them apart.

Neither man had any reason to think they could not go on like this for decades, becoming ever more successful and celebrated in their modernized Athens. But young Socrates was about to be called home from the feast.

It began on Monday, August 9, 1563. La Boétie had spent the day in the open air on the estate of François de Péruse d’Escars, the man who had rebelled against Lagebâton in the Bordeaux parlement . That evening La Boétie was supposed to dine with Montaigne, but as he was about to leave d’Escars’s house he came down with stomach pains and diarrhea. He sent Montaigne a message saying that he felt ill: would Montaigne come to see him instead? Montaigne did. Our knowledge of everything that followed comes from a long narrative Montaigne later wrote in the form of a letter to his father, and which he eventually published.

Arriving at the d’Escars home, Montaigne found his friend in pain. La Boétie told him that he had caught a chill after being outside all day, but it looked worse than that. Both men may already have thought of the possibility of plague, which was then spreading in this area and in Bordeaux, as well as in Agenais, which La Boétie had recently visited for work. If La Boétie had not already caught the plague there was a danger that he might develop it now, in his weakened state. Montaigne advised him to move to a less infected region, and to stay with his own sister and brother-in-law, the Lestonnacs. But La Boétie did not feel well enough to travel. In reality, it was too late: he almost certainly already had the plague.