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

Montaigne’s trick of absorbing La Boétie into himself, as a kind of ghost or secret sharer in all he did, might seem to run counter to his plan of distracting himself from grief. But in its way, it was a form of diversion: it led him away from thoughts of loss towards a new way of thinking about his present life. A split opened up between his own point of view and the one he imagined La Boétie might take, so that, at any moment, he could slip from one to the other. Perhaps this is what gave him the idea that, as he wrote elsewhere, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves.”

Montaigne himself remarked that he might not have written the Essays had this space not been opened in himself. Had he had “someone to talk to,” he said, he might only have published letters, a more conventional literary format. Instead, he had to stage his and La Boétie’s dialogue within himself. The modern critic Anthony Wilden has compared this maneuver to the master/slave dialectic in the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel: La Boétie became Montaigne’s imaginary master, commanding him to work, while Montaigne became the willing slave who sustained them both through the labor of writing. It was a form of “voluntary servitude.” Out of it emerged the Essays , almost as a by-product of Montaigne’s trick for managing sorrow and solitude.

La Boétie’s death certainly did leave Montaigne with some literary slavery of a more down-to-earth kind, in the form of his stack of unpublished manuscripts. These were not particularly unusual or original, with the exception of On Voluntary Servitude (assuming that this was indeed La Boétie’s work), but they deserved better than being left to crumble to dust. Whether because La Boétie had asked him to, or on his own initiative, Montaigne now became his friend’s posthumous editor — a demanding role, which gave a push to his own literary career.

Rather surprisingly, considering his well-ordered character, La Boétie’s manuscripts seem to have been in a higgledy-piggledy state. In one of his dedications to the published work, Montaigne talks of having “assiduously collected everything complete that I found among his notebooks and papers scattered here and there.” It was a formidable task, but he found many things worth publishing, including La Boétie’s sonnets. There were also translations of classical texts, such as the letter of consolation from Plutarch to his wife on the death of their child, and the first ever French version of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus , a treatise on the art of good estate and land management — a subject of relevance to Montaigne, who was just about to resign from Bordeaux.

Having sorted out the manuscripts, Montaigne saw a collected edition of them through the press. He traveled to Paris to liaise with publishers and to promote the result. For each of La Boétie’s pieces he courted a suitable patron, crafting graceful and sycophantic dedications to influential people including Michel de L’Hôpital and various Bordeaux notables — as well as to his own wife, in the case of the Plutarch letter. Conventional though the “dedicatory epistle” genre was, his letters are lively and personal. He also appended an even more personal piece of writing to the book: his account of La Boétie’s death. The whole undertaking confirms the sense that he was now in a literary partnership with La Boétie’s memory, and that the two of them could expect a great future together. It taught Montaigne a lot about the world of publishing and about what fashionable Parisians liked to read, information that would come in useful.

The account of La Boétie’s death appeared in the form of a letter to Montaigne’s own father: a strange choice. Perhaps Pierre had urged him to write it. He had certainly done this once before. Around 1567, he had given his son a very challenging literary commission indeed, which had also done its part in turning him into a writer.

This early request seems to have been Pierre’s attempt to shake his son out of a continuing tendency to idleness; it was another of those “tricks,” inflicted for its victim’s benefit. Even in his mid-thirties, Montaigne still had something of the sulky teenager about him. He was dissatisfied with his career as magistrate, disinclined to the life of a courtier, snooty about the law, and indifferent to building and property development. Moreover, despite his interest in literature, he showed no signs of writing much. Pierre may now have guessed that he himself did not have long to live, and he probably felt that Montaigne needed preparing for the responsibilities that would soon descend on him. He needed a challenge.

Micheau wanted to write: very well, let him write! Pierre handed him a 500-page folio volume, written by a Catalan theologian over a century earlier, in stilted Latin, and said, “Translate this into French for me when you get a moment, will you, son?”

This would have been a good way of putting Montaigne off literary endeavors for life; perhaps that was what Pierre was trying to do. As good luck would have it, however, the book was more than just long and boring. It also promoted a brand of theology that Montaigne found abhorrent. This woke him out of his slumbers. More than the work on La Boétie’s manuscripts, and perhaps more even than the crafting of the letter describing his friend’s dying moments, his father’s translation task lit the spark that one day blazed up into the Essays .

The book was called Theologia naturalis, sive liber creaturarum (Natural Theology, or Book of Creatures). Its author, Raymond Sebond, had written it in 1436, though it was not published until 1484: still well before Montaigne’s time, and Pierre’s. It had been given to Pierre by one of the bookish friends he liked to cultivate, but the Latin was too difficult for him, so he put it away in a pile of papers. Years later, he looked through the pile. Something about the book, perhaps its dense, stubborn inscrutability, put him in mind of his errant son.

Pierre’s decision to put it away when he did, and retrieve it when he did, may have been connected to the fact that it went first out of favor with the Church, then back in again. Theologia naturalis was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1558, but taken off in 1564, because it promoted a distinctive style of “rational” theology about which the Church kept changing its mind. The debate centered on the claim that truths of religion could be proved through rational arguments, or by examination of evidence found in nature. Sebond thought they could be so proved: this put him at the opposite extreme both from Montaigne and, for a while, from the Church. Montaigne inclined more towards a position known as Fideism, which placed no reliance at all on human reason or endeavor, and denied that humans could attain knowledge of religious truths except through faith. Montaigne may not have felt a great desire for faith, but he did feel a strong aversion to all human pretension — and the result was the same.

Thus Montaigne found himself with the job of translating 500 pages of theological argumentation designed to prove an assertion he deplored. “It was a very strange and a new occupation for me,” he wrote. In the Essays , he tried to make it sound as though he had approached it in a casual way. “Being by chance at leisure at the time,” he said, “and being unable to disobey any command of the best father there ever was, I got through it as best I could.” But it must have been a major project, taking a year or more to complete. He probably surprised himself by how much he got out of it. It stimulated him as grit stimulates an oyster. The whole time he was writing, he must have been thinking, “But … but …,” and even “No! No!” It forced him to analyze his own ideas. Even if he didn’t question the text deeply at the time, he certainly did when he was commissioned a few years later (probably by Marguerite de Valois, the king’s sister and wife of the Protestant Henri de Navarre) to write an essay defending the book; that is, to defend a work he considered indefensible.