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

The Church was with Aristotle, the doctors, and the kings of Persia in this. Confessors’ manuals of the time show that a husband who engaged in sinful practices with his wife deserved a heavier penance than if he had done the same things with someone else. By corrupting his wife’s senses, he risked ruining her eternal soul — a betrayal of his responsibility to her. If a married woman must pick up licentious habits, it was better to get them from someone who had no such duty. As Montaigne observed, most women seemed to prefer that option anyway.

Montaigne is amusingly wry on the subject of women, but he can also sound conventional. Unlike some contemporaries, however, he does not seem to have considered wives mere breeding cows. His ideal marriage would be a true meeting of minds as well as bodies; it would be even more complete than an ideal friendship. The difficulty was that, unlike friendship, marriage was not freely chosen, so it remained in the realm of constraint and obligation. Also, it was hard to find a woman capable of an exalted relationship, because most of them lacked intellectual capacity and a quality he called “firmness.”

Montaigne’s opinion on women’s spiritual flaccidity can be disheartening enough to make one come over quite floppy oneself. George Sand confessed that she was “wounded to the heart” by it — the more so because she found Montaigne an inspiration in other respects. Yet one has to remember what most women were like in the sixteenth century. They were woefully uneducated, often illiterate, and they had little experience of the world. A few noble families hired private tutors for daughters, but most taught vapid accomplishments, as in Victorian times: Italian, music, and some arithmetic for household management. Classical education, the only kind considered worth having, was almost always absent. The few truly learned women of the sixteenth century were vanishingly rare exceptions, like Marguerite de Navarre, author of the collection of stories known as the Heptameron , or the poet Louise Labé, who (assuming she really existed, and was not a pseudonym for a group of male poets as one recent hypothesis suggests) urged other women to “lift their minds a little above their distaffs and spindles.”

France did have a feminist movement in the sixteenth century. It formed one side of the “querelle des femmes,” a fashionable quarrel among intellectual men who formulated arguments for and against women: were they, in general, a good thing? Those in favor seemed to have more success than those against, but such arch debate made little difference to women’s lives.

Montaigne is often dismissed as anti-feminist, but had he taken part in this querelle , he would probably have been on the pro-woman side. He did write, “Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them.” And he believed that, by nature, “males and females are cast in the same mold.” He was very conscious of the double standard used to judge male and female sexual behavior. Aristotle notwithstanding, Montaigne suspected that women had the same passions and needs as men, yet they were condemned far more when they indulged them. His usual perspective-shifting habits also made it apparent to him that his view of women must be as partial and unreliable as women’s views of men. His feelings on the whole subject are encapsulated in his observation: “We are in almost all things unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours.”

Given such injustice, it is not surprising that he decided his own best policy at home was to absent himself from the female realm as much as possible. He let them enjoy their kind of domesticity, while he enjoyed his. In an essay on solitude, he wrote:

We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.

The phrase about the “back shop,” or “room behind the shop” as it is sometimes translated — the arrière boutique —appears again and again in books about Montaigne, but it is rarely kept within its context. He is not writing about a selfish, introverted withdrawal from family life so much as about the need to protect yourself from the pain that would come if you lost that family. Montaigne sought detachment and retreat so that he could not be too badly hurt, but in doing so he also discovered that having such a retreat helped him establish his “real liberty,” the space he needed to think and look inward.

He certainly had reason to work at Stoic detachment. Having lost his friend, his father, and his brother in short order, Montaigne was now to lose almost all of his children — all daughters. He noted the sad sequence of births and deaths in his diary, the Beuther Ephemeris:

June 28, 1570: Thoinette. Montaigne wrote, “This is the first child of my marriage,” but later added, “And died two months later.”

September 9, 1571: Léonor was born — the only survivor.

July 5, 1573: Unnamed daughter. “She lived only seven weeks.”

December 27, 1574: Unnamed daughter. “Died about three months later, and was hastily baptized under pressure of necessity.”

May 16, 1577: Unnamed daughter; died after a month.

February 21, 1583: “We had another daughter who was named Marie, baptised by the sieur de Jaurillac councillor of parlement , her uncle, and my daughter Léonor. She died a few days later.”

Montaigne wrote that he had lost most of the children “without grief, or at least without repining,” because they were so young. People generally did try not to get too attached to children while they were in early infancy, because the likelihood of their dying was great, but Montaigne seemed exceptionally good at staying aloof. It was an affliction he did not feel deeply, he admitted. He even wrote, in the mid-1570s, of having lost “two or three” children, as if uncertain of the figure, though this could just be his usual habit of vagueness about numbers. It is very much like his way of dating his riding accident, which he said happened “during our third civil war, or the second (I do not quite remember which).” In his dedication to his wife in the Plutarch translation, he gets the details even more startlingly wrong, writing that their first daughter had died “in the second year of her life,” although she died at two months. This was probably a slip of the pen rather than of the mind. Or was it? One has the feeling, with Montaigne, that anything is possible.

There were other disasters in life that he knew would not bother him as much as they should:

I see enough other common occasions for affliction which I should scarcely feel if they happened to me, and I have disdained some, when they came to me, to which the world has given such an atrocious appearance that I wouldn’t dare boast of my indifference to them to most people without blushing.

One wonders if he was contemplating the possible death of his wife, here, or perhaps of his mother. If so, he had no such luck in either case. Or perhaps he was thinking back to the death of his father, or wondering what it would be like if his castle were sacked in the wars, or his lands burned. He seems to have found almost anything manageable other than the death of La Boétie: that was the one thing that knocked him off balance and made him unwilling to become so attached again.