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

Fortunately, it was not usually difficult to find an excuse to be somewhere else. As he had done since he was twenty-four, Montaigne worked as a magistrate in Bordeaux, the regional capital some thirty miles away — so there were always reasons to go there. Then there were the far-flung vineyards of the Montaigne property itself, scattered in separate parcels around the countryside for miles, and useful for visits if he felt so inclined. He also made occasional calls on the neighbors who lived in other châteaus of the area; it was important to stay on good terms. All these tasks formed excellent justifications for a ride through the woods on a sunny day.

Out on the forest paths, Montaigne’s thoughts could wander as widely as he wished, although even here he was invariably accompanied by servants and acquaintances. People rarely went around alone in the sixteenth century. But he could spur his horse away from boring conversations, or turn his mind aside in order to daydream, watching the light glinting in the canopy of trees over the forest path. Was it really true, he might wonder, that a man’s semen came from the marrow of the spinal column, as Plato said? Could a remora fish really be so strong that it could hold back a whole ship just by fastening its lips on it and sucking? And what about the strange incident he had seen at home the other day, when his cat gazed intently into a tree until a bird fell out of it, dead, right between her paws? What power did she have? Such speculations were so absorbing that Montaigne sometimes forgot to pay full attention to the path and to what his companions were doing.

On this occasion, he was progressing calmly through the woods with a group of other mounted men, all or most of them his employees, some three or four miles from the château. It was an easy ride and he was expecting no trouble, so he had chosen a placid horse of no great strength. He was wearing ordinary clothes: breeches, a shirt, a doublet, probably a cloak. His sword was at his side — a nobleman never went anywhere without one — but he wore no armor or other special protection. Yet there were always dangers outside town or château walls: robbers were common, and France was presently suspended in a lawless state between two outbreaks of civil war. Groups of unemployed soldiers roamed the countryside, looking for any loot they could get in lieu of wages lost during the peace interlude. Despite his anxieties about death in general, Montaigne usually remained calm about such specific risks. He did not flinch from every suspicious stranger as others did, or jump out of his skin at hearing unidentified sounds in the woods. Yet the prevailing tension must have got to him too, for when a great weight slammed into him from behind, his first thought was that he had been attacked deliberately. It felt like a shot from an arquebus, the rifle-like firearm of the day.

He had no time to wonder why anyone should fire a weapon at him. The thing struck him “like a thunderbolt”: his horse was knocked down, and Montaigne himself went flying. He hit the ground hard, meters away, and instantly lost consciousness.

There lay the horse bowled over and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword, which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having no more motion or feeling than a log.

The arquebus idea came to him later; in fact, there was no weapon involved. What had happened was that one of Montaigne’s servants, a muscular man riding behind him on a powerful horse, had goaded his mount into a full gallop along the path—“in order to show his daring and get ahead of his companions,” as Montaigne surmised. He somehow failed to notice Montaigne in his way, or perhaps miscalculated the width of the path and thought he could pass. Instead, he “came down like a colossus on the little man and little horse.”

The rest of the riders stopped in consternation. Montaigne’s servants dismounted and tried to revive him; he remained unconscious. They picked him up and, with difficulty, started carrying his limp body back towards the castle. On the way, he came back to life. His first feeling was that he had been hit on the head (and his loss of consciousness suggests that this was right), yet he also started coughing, as if he had received a blow to the chest. Seeing him struggling for air, his men lifted him into a more upright position, and did their best to carry him at that awkward angle. Several times, he threw up lumps of clotted blood. This was an alarming symptom, but the coughing and vomiting helped to keep him awake.

As they approached the castle, he regained his wits more and more, yet he still felt as if he were slipping towards death, not emerging into life. His vision remained blurred; he could barely make out the light. He became aware of his body, but what he saw was hardly comforting, for his clothes were spattered with the blood he had been throwing up. He just had time to wonder about the arquebus before drifting back into semi-oblivion.

During what followed, as witnesses later told him, Montaigne thrashed about. He ripped at his doublet with his nails, as if to rid himself of a weight. “My stomach was oppressed with the clotted blood; my hands flew to it of their own accord, as they often do where we itch, against the intention of our will.” It looked as if he were trying to rip his own body apart, or perhaps to pull it away from him so his spirit could depart. All this time, however, his inward feelings were tranquil:

It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep.

The servants continued to carry him towards the house, in this state of inward languor and outward agitation. His family noticed the commotion and ran out to him—“with the outcries customary in such cases,” as he later put it. They asked what had happened. Montaigne was able to give answers, but not coherent ones. He saw his wife picking her way awkwardly over the uneven path and considered telling his men to give her a horse to ride. You would think that all this must have come from “a wide-awake soul,” he wrote. Yet, “the fact is that I was not there at all.” He had traveled far away. “These were idle thoughts, in the clouds, set in motion by the sensations of the eyes and ears; they did not come from within me ”—chez moi , a term usually meaning “at home.” All his actions and words were somehow produced by the body alone. “What the soul contributed was in a dream, touched very lightly, and merely licked and sprinkled, as it were, by the soft impression of the senses.” Montaigne and life, it seemed, were about to part company with neither regret nor formal farewells, like two drunken guests leaving a feast too dazed to say goodbye.

His confusion continued after he was carried indoors. He still felt as if he were borne aloft on a magic carpet instead of being heaved around by servants’ hands. He suffered no pain, and no concern at the sight of those around him in emergency mode. All he felt was laziness and weakness. His servants put him to bed; he lay there, perfectly happy, not a thought in his head apart from that of how pleasurable it was to rest. “I felt infinite sweetness in this repose, for I had been villainously yanked about by those poor fellows, who had taken the pains to carry me in their arms over a long and very bad road.” He refused all medicines, sure that he was destined just to slip away. It was going to be “a very happy death.”