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

Among the many things for which he admired the philosopher Socrates was his having perfected the art of living with an aggressive wife. Montaigne presented this as a tribulation almost as great as the one Socrates suffered at the hands of the Athenian parliament, when it condemned him to death by hemlock. He hoped to emulate Socrates’s policy of forbearance and humor, and liked the reply he gave when Alcibiades asked him how he stood the nagging. One gets used to it, said Socrates, as those who live close to a mill do to the sound of the water-wheel turning. Montaigne also liked the way Socrates adapted the experience as a philosophical “trick” for his own spiritual improvement, using his wife’s bad temper for practice in the art of enduring adversity.

As well as forcefulness, Françoise had staying power. She would outlive Montaigne by nearly thirty-five years, dying on March 7, 1627, at the age of eighty-two. She also survived all her children, including the only one to make it beyond infancy into adulthood. Montaigne’s mother survived him too. One almost gets the impression that, between them, they drove him into an early grave.

Some of the best information about Françoise’s character dates from her old age, long after Montaigne’s time. By then, she had become very pious. Her daughter’s second husband, Charles de Gamaches, described her as observing fasts every Friday and for half of Lent, even at seventy-seven years old. She kept up an intense correspondence with a spiritual adviser, Dom Marc-Antoine de Saint-Bernard; several letters survive. He sent her gifts of oranges and lemons; she sent him quince marmalade and hay. She often wrote to him about her money worries and legal affairs. Her last letter shows relief over some business deal: “By this God has given me a means of supporting this house of my late husband and my children.” The tone is sometimes passionate: “Truly I do not know whether I would not rather choose to die than to know that you are going away.” On the other hand, she feared for her adviser’s safety if he traveled to visit her: “I would rather die than have you take the road in this miserable weather.” As a young woman, she was probably less fretful, but her preoccupation with matters of money and law may have been a constant. At the very least, one can venture to state that she was more alert to practical concerns than Montaigne. This was not difficult: so was almost everyone, if his own account is to be believed.

Françoise and her husband usually spent their days in separate parts of the château complex. Montaigne went to his tower and she went to hers, at the other end of the boundary wall: the “Tour de Madame.” (After being converted into a pigeon loft in the early nineteenth century, the tower collapsed, and does not survive today.) This left the main building as the domain of Montaigne’s mother, who remained there through most of her son’s marriage, until about 1587. It looks as if the towers were adapted as retreats partly so the young couple could get away both from each other and from her. In his writing, Montaigne remains silent about his mother’s presence in their lives; when he mentions playing card games with his family in the evenings, he gives no indication that Granny was playing too.

This image of a family dispersed around the property is a sad one. But there must have been days when spirits were lighter, and in any case, nowhere on the estate would have felt solitary or empty. People were always around: servants, employees, guests and their entourages, sometimes children. Montaigne himself did not brood in his tower like a Gormenghast earl: he liked to be out walking. “My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it.” And separation of male and female lifestyles was normal. Husband and wife were expected to have different realms; new or modernized properties were often designed with this in mind. In 1452, Leon Battista Alberti recommended in his De re aedificatoria (On Building), “The husband and wife must have separate bedrooms, not only to ensure that the husband be not disturbed by his wife, when she is about to give birth or is ill, but also to allow them, even in summer, an uninterrupted night’s sleep.” The only differences in the Montaigne household were that an entire outdoor gallery divided their “rooms,” and that his tower was also his workplace.

Was it a good marriage, by the standards of the time? Some commentators have seen it as disastrous; others as typical of its era and even good. On balance, it does not seem to have been a terrible relationship, merely a mildly unsatisfactory one. It is probably best summed up, as Montaigne’s biographer Donald Frame suggested, by the remark in the Essays: “Whoever supposes, to see me look sometimes coldly, sometimes lovingly, on my wife, that either look is feigned, is a fool.”

Genuine affection is implied in Montaigne’s decision to dedicate one of his earliest publications to Françoise: La Boétie’s translation of the letter written by Plutarch to his own wife following the death of their child. Uxorious dedications were not fashionable; they could be seen as quaint and rustic. Montaigne remarks defiantly, “Let us let them talk … You and me, my wife, let us live in the old French way.” His dedication has a warm tone, and he even says, “I have, so I believe, none more intimate than you,” which puts her on a level close to La Boétie’s.

Whatever affection he felt for Françoise probably built up after marriage rather than before. He had entered into wedlock like an unresisting prisoner being put into handcuffs. “Of my own choice, I would have avoided marrying Wisdom herself, if she had wanted me. But say what we will, the custom and practice of ordinary life bears us along.” He did not really mind having such business arranged for him: he often felt that other people had better sense than he did anyway. But he still needed persuasion, being in an “ill-prepared and contrary” state of mind. Had he been free to choose, he would not have been the marrying kind at all. “Men with unruly humors like me, who hate any sort of bond or obligation, are not so fit for it.” Later, he made the best of things, and even attempted to remain faithful — with, he said, more success than he had expected. He became contented, in a way, as he discovered was often the case with developments one would rather have avoided. “For not only inconvenient things, but anything at all, however ugly and vicious and repulsive, can become acceptable through some condition or circumstance.”

Fortunately, Françoise herself was by no means ugly or repulsive. Montaigne seems to have found her attractive enough — or so his friend Florimond de Raemond asserted in a marginal note on a copy of the Essays . The problem lay more in the principle of being obliged to have regular sex with someone, for Montaigne never liked feeling boxed in. He fulfilled his conjugal duties reluctantly, “with only one buttock” as he would have said, doing what was necessary to beget children. This, too, comes from Florimond de Raemond’s marginal note, which, in full, reads:

I have often heard the author say that although he, full of love, ardor, and youth, had married his very beautiful and very lovable wife, yet the fact is that he had never played with her except with respect for the honor that the marriage bed requires, without ever having seen anything but her hands and face uncovered, and not even her breast, although among other women he was extremely playful and debauched.

This sounds appalling to a modern reader, but it was conventional enough. For a husband to behave as an impassioned lover to his wife was thought morally wrong, because it might turn her into a nymphomaniac. Minimal, joyless intercourse was the proper sort for marriage. In an essay almost entirely about sex, Montaigne cites the wisdom of Aristotle: “A man … should touch his wife prudently and soberly, lest if he caresses her too lasciviously the pleasure should transport her outside the bounds of reason.” The physicians warned, too, that excessive pleasure could make sperm curdle inside the woman’s body, rendering her unable to conceive. It was better for the husband to bestow ecstasy elsewhere, where it did not matter what damage it caused. “The kings of Persia,” relates Montaigne, “used to invite their wives to join them at their feasts; but when the wine began to heat them in good earnest and they had to give completely free rein to sensuality, they sent them back to their private rooms.” They then brought on a more suitable set of women.