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

Montaigne left, but the next morning La Boétie’s wife sent for him, saying that her husband was getting worse. Montaigne returned and, at La Boétie’s request, spent the night there: “He asked me, with more affection and insistence than ever about anything else, to be with him as much as I could. This touched me considerably.” He stayed the following night too. La Boétie’s condition continued to worsen. On Saturday, he admitted that his illness was contagious and unpleasant — a hint that he now realized it was the plague. He again asked Montaigne to stay, but not for more than brief periods, so that he would be at less risk. Montaigne did not obey this second part. “I did not leave him again,” he wrote.

On Sunday La Boétie was overcome with weakness and suffered hallucinations. When the crisis passed, he said “that he had seemed to be in some great confusion of all things and had seen nothing but a thick cloud and a dense fog in which everything was pell-mell and without order.” Montaigne reassured him: “Death has nothing worse about it than that, my brother,” to which La Boétie replied that, indeed, nothing could be worse than that. From this point on, he admitted to Montaigne, he lost hope of a cure.

He decided to set his affairs in order, asking Montaigne to watch his wife and uncle in case grief got the better of them. When La Boétie was ready, Montaigne summoned the family into the room. They “composed their faces as well as they could” and sat around the bed. La Boétie told them what he intended to leave in his will, specifying that most of his book collection should go to Montaigne. Afterwards he called for a priest. La Boétie had collected himself so carefully for his deathbed speeches that Montaigne felt a moment of hope, but, once the effort was over, his friend deteriorated again.

A few hours later, still at La Boétie’s bedside, Montaigne told him that he “blushed for shame” to see him showing more courage in the face of his own death than he, Montaigne, was able to find in witnessing it. He promised to remember his example when his own time came. Yes, said La Boétie, that was a good thing to do. He reminded Montaigne of the many enlightening talks they had already had on such subjects. This experience was, he said, “the true object of our studies, and of philosophy.”

Taking Montaigne by the hand, he assured him that he had done many things in life that had been more painful and difficult. “And when all is said,” he went on, “I had been prepared for it for a very long time and had known my lesson all by heart.” Like Montaigne at this stage, he had followed the ancients’ advice and rehearsed his death well. After all, he went on, still echoing the wisdom of the sages, he had lived healthily and happily for long enough. There was no need for regrets. Had he not already made it to a good age? “I was soon to be thirty-three,” he said. “God granted me this grace, that all my life up to now has been full of health and happiness. In view of the inconstancy of things human, that could hardly last any longer.” Old age would only have brought him pain, and might have made him miserly; it was better to have avoided this. Montaigne looked distressed; La Boétie reminded him that he must be strong. “What, my brother, do you want to put fear into me? If I felt fear, who but you should take it away from me?”

La Boétie was dying the perfect Stoic death, full of courage and rational wisdom. Montaigne was expected to do his part: to help his friend to maintain this courage, and then to act as witness, recording the details so others could learn from the story. Perhaps, in doing so, he improved on reality slightly, to make La Boétie sound nobler and braver than he was. Perhaps not; La Boétie’s sense of the classical virtues went so deep that he may genuinely have been capable of emulating his philosophical heroes almost to the end. As Montaigne wrote of him, “His mind was modeled in the pattern of other ages than this.”

But Montaigne himself was a different creature, and, as his account goes on, more and more of his real self comes through: his skepticism, his eye for the awkward detail, and his determination to tell things as they were. There are even moments of irreverence. Writing about La Boétie’s farewell speeches later that day, he comments, “The whole room was full of wails and tears, which nevertheless did not interrupt the train of his speeches, which were a little long.”

The next morning, Monday, La Boétie slipped in and out of consciousness, being revived with vinegar and wine each time. He reproached Montaigne: “Don’t you see that from now on all the help you give me serves only to prolong my pain?” After one such spell, he temporarily lost his vision. The lamentations of the people around him, whom he could not see, horrified him. “My Lord, who is tormenting me so? Why do they take me out of that great pleasant rest that I am in? Leave me alone, I beg you.”

A sip of wine restored his faculties, but he was now slipping away. “All his extremities, even his face, were already icy with cold, with a death sweat that ran down all along his body; and hardly any sign of a pulse could be detected any longer.”

On Tuesday he received the last rites, and asked the priest, his uncle, and Montaigne to pray for him. Two or three times he called out, once saying, “All right! All right! Let it come when it will, I’m waiting for it, strong and firm of foot.”

In the evening, “having nothing left but the likeness and shadow of a man,” he hallucinated again, this time with visions which he described to Montaigne as “marvelous, infinite, and ineffable.” He tried to comfort his wife, saying that he had a story to tell her. “But I am going off,” he said. Then, seeing her alarm, he corrected himself: “I am going off to sleep.”

She left the room. La Boétie said to Montaigne, “My brother, stay close to me, please.” There were still many other people around; Montaigne writes of them as “all the company.” Nothing was ever done alone in the Renaissance, least of all dying. La Boétie’s wife was, it seems, the only person actually sent away.

Now, the dying man became agitated. He tossed violently in the bed. He began to make strange requests. As Montaigne wrote:

He began to entreat me again and again with extreme affection to give him a place; so that I was afraid his judgment was shaken. Even when I had remonstrated with him very gently that he was letting the illness carry him away and that these were not the words of a man in his sound mind, he did not give in at first and repeated even more strongly: “My brother, my brother, do you refuse me a place?” This until he forced me to convince him by reason and tell him that since he was breathing and speaking and had a body, consequently he had his place. “True, true,” he answered me then, “I have one, but it is not the one I need; and then when all is said, I have no being left.”

It was hard to know how to respond to these words. Montaigne tried to comfort him: “God will give you a better one very soon,” he said.

“Would that I were there already,” said La Boétie. “For three days now I have been straining to leave.”

Over the next hours he often called out, wrote Montaigne, “simply to know whether I was near him.” He always was.

From its conventional beginnings, Montaigne’s account has by now become both moving and eerie. He seems to be recording what was really said and done, regardless of the philosophical meaning. La Boétie himself had moved beyond imitating models. With his talk of needing a place, he seemed to be speaking almost without awareness, as Montaigne would be when he raved and tore at his doublet a few years later.

By two in the morning he was able to rest, which seemed a good sign. Montaigne left the room to tell La Boétie’s wife. Both were pleased at the improvement. But an hour or so later, when Montaigne was back in the room, La Boétie became restless again. He spoke Montaigne’s name once or twice. Then he exhaled a single sigh, and stopped breathing. La Boétie was dead—“at about three o’clock on the Wednesday morning, August 18th, 1563, after living 32 years, 9 months, and 17 days,” as Montaigne recorded.