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

Montaigne once remarked that certain books “become all the more marketable and public by being suppressed.” To some extent, this happened to him: the suppression of his book in France gave it an irresistible aura. In the century to come, it enhanced his appeal to rebellious Enlightenment philosophers and even to full-blown revolutionaries.

But, on the whole, censorship did his posthumous sales more harm than good. It confined him to a limited audience in France, while in some other countries he continued to appeal to a wider range of taste — rebels and pillars of the community alike. Astonishingly, the Essays would stay on the Index for almost two hundred years, until May 27, 1854. It was a long exile, and one that outlived the genuine frisson of alarm he provoked in the late seventeenth century.

Pascal’s remark, “It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there,” could be intoned like a mantra through the whole of the story to come. The centuries go on; each new reader finds his or her own self in the Essays and thus adds to the accumulation of its possible meanings. In Descartes’s case, what he found were two nightmare figures from his own psyche: a demon resistant to logic, and an animal that could think. He shrank from both. Pascal and Malebranche saw the prospect of their own seduction on a bed of Skeptic ease, and they too fled in horror.

The libertins , seeing the same things, responded with an amused smile and a raised eyebrow. They too recognized themselves in Montaigne. Their much later descendant, Nietzsche, would do the same, and would also return Montaigne to his philosophical homeland: to the heart of the three great Hellenistic philosophies, with their investigation of the question of how to live.

THE FLESH-AND-BLOOD Montaigne, back in the 1560s, was still getting on with that very question. He used all three of the Hellenistic philosophical traditions to manage his life and to help himself recover from the loss of La Boétie. He successfully merged his Skepticism with loyalty to Catholic dogma — a combination no one yet questioned. He finished his first major literary project, the translation of Raymond Sebond, and he worked on the dedications for La Boétie’s books and his own published letter describing his friend’s death. Another change occurred during this period too: he got married, and became the head of a family.

Montaigne seems, in general, to have been attractive to women. At least some of the appeal must have been physical: he makes ironic remarks about women who claim to love men only for their minds. “I have never yet seen that for the sake of our beauty of mind, however wise and mature that mind may be, they were willing to grant favors to a body that was slipping the least little bit into decline.” Yet his intelligence, his humor, his amiable personality, and even his tendency to get swept away by ideas and talk too loudly, probably all contributed to his charm. So, perhaps, did the air of emotional inaccessibility hanging over him after La Boétie’s death. It presented a challenge. In reality, when he liked someone, the aloofness soon disappeared: “I make advances and I throw myself at them so avidly, that I hardly fail to attach myself and to make an impression wherever I land.”

Montaigne liked sex, and indulged in a lot of it throughout his life. It was only in late middle age that both his performance and his desire declined, as well as his attractiveness — all facts he bemoaned in his final Essays . It is depressing to be rejected, he said, but even worse to be accepted out of pity. And he hated to be troublesome to someone who did not want him. “I abhor the idea of a body void of affection being mine.” This would be like making love to a corpse, as in the story of the “frantic Egyptian hot after the carcass of a dead woman he was embalming and shrouding.” A sexual relationship must be reciprocal. “In truth, in this delight the pleasure I give tickles my imagination more sweetly than that which I feel.”

He was realistic about the extent to which he made the earth move for his lovers, however. Sometimes a woman’s heart is not really in it: “Sometimes they go to it with only one buttock.” Or perhaps she is fantasizing about someone else: “What if she eats your bread with the sauce of a more agreeable imagination?”

Montaigne understood that women know more about sex than men usually think, and indeed that their imagination leads them to expect better than they get. “In place of the real parts, through desire and hope, they substitute others three times life-size.” He tutted over irresponsible graffiti: “What mischief is not done by those enormous pictures that boys spread about the passages and staircases of palaces! From these, women acquire a cruel contempt for our natural capacity.” Does one conclude that Montaigne had a smallish penis? Yes, indeed, because he confessed later in the same essay that nature had treated him “unfairly and unkindly,” and he added a classical quotation:

“Even the matrons — all too well they know—

Look dimly on a man whose member’s small.”

He showed no shame about revealing such things: “Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it.” It also seemed unfair to him that poets had more license simply because they wrote in verse. He quoted two examples from contemporaries:

“May I die if your crack is more than a faint line.”

“A friendly tool contents and treats her well.”

Amid the varied adventures of his friendly tool, nevertheless, Montaigne also did what all dutiful noblemen must do, particularly heirs to great estates: he got himself a wife.

Her name was Françoise de La Chassaigne, and she came from a family greatly respected in Bordeaux. The marriage, which took place on September 23, 1565, would have been arranged in collaboration between the two families. This was traditional, and even the spouses’ ages were more or less what custom decreed. Montaigne noted that his own age (thirty-three, he says, though he was thirty-two), was close to the ideal recommended by Aristotle, which Montaigne thought was thirty-five (actually it was thirty-seven). If he was slightly too young, his wife was a little older than usual: she was born on December 13, 1544, which made her just under twenty-one on her wedding day. At that age she could still expect to have many childbearing years ahead of her. Unfortunately, children were to bring the couple mostly disappointment and sorrow. And, despite his being over a decade older than his wife, Montaigne very decidedly seems to have done what many men do: he married his mother. The choice would not make him particularly happy.

He does not mention Françoise often in the Essays; when he does, he makes her sound like Antoinette, only louder. “Wives always have a proclivity for disagreeing with their husbands,” he wrote. “They seize with both hands every pretext to go contrary to them.” He was probably thinking of Françoise both here and in another passage, where he wrote that there was no point in raging uselessly at servants:

I admonish … my family not to get angry in the air, and to see to it that their reprimand reaches the person they are complaining about: for ordinarily they are yelling before he is in their presence and continue yelling for ages after he has left … No one is punished or affected by it, except someone who has to put up with the racket of their voice.

One can imagine Montaigne putting his hands over his ears, and heading off to his tower.