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

In reality, his detachment is likely to have been less extreme than he pretended. His written notes of his children’s deaths are plain but poignant. And he could be eloquent about fatherly grief in the Essays —just not his own. His essay on sadness, written in the mid-1570s when he had already lost several children, dwells on stories of paternal bereavement in literature. He also wrote feelingly about the ancient story of Niobe, who, after losing seven sons and then seven daughters, wept so much that she changed into a waterfall of stone—“to represent that bleak, dumb, and deaf stupor that benumbs us when accidents surpassing our endurance overwhelm us.” Whether or not it was losing his children that gave Montaigne this sensation, he surely knew what it felt like.

Montaigne failed in the main responsibility of a nobleman, which was to have a male heir to ensure the succession. But he did have one healthy child, Léonor, and he became fond of her as she grew beyond infancy. Born in 1571, she must have been conceived not long after his ceremonial retirement in 1570. This made her the child of his midlife crisis and of his spiritual rebirth; perhaps it gave her that extra shot of life force. The sole survivor, she lived until 1616, marrying twice and having two daughters of her own.

While she was growing up, her father gave her over mostly to the female domain, as he was supposed to. “The government of women has a mysterious way of proceeding; we must leave it to them,” he wrote, in a tone that suggests someone tiptoeing away from a place where he was not wanted. Indeed, when he once overheard something he thought was bad for Léonor, he did not intervene because he knew he would be waved aside with derision. She was reading a book aloud to her governess; the word fouteau came up in the text — meaning beech, but reminiscent of foutre , meaning fuck. The innocent child thought nothing of it, but her flustered governess shushed her. Montaigne felt that this was a mistake: “The company of twenty lackeys could not have imprinted in her imagination in six months the understanding and use and all the consequences of those wicked syllables as did this good old woman by her reprimand and interdict.” But he kept silent.

He described Léonor as seeming younger than she was, even once she was of an age to marry. She was “of a backward constitution, slight and soft.” He thought this was his wife’s doing: she had sequestered the girl too much. But Montaigne also agreed to give Léonor an easy, pleasant upbringing like his own; he wrote that they had both decided she should be punished by nothing more than stern words, and even then, “very gentle ones.”

Despite his assertion that he had little to do with nursery life, other passages in the Essays do give us a charming picture of Montaigne en famille . He describes playing games together, including games of chance played for small amounts: “I handle the cards and keep score for a couple of pennies just as for double doubloons.” And they amused themselves with word puzzles. “We have just now at my house been playing a game to see who could find the most things that meet at their two extremes,” such as the term “sire” as a title for the king and as a way of addressing lowly tradesmen, or “dames” for women of the highest quality and those of the lowest. This is not a cold, detached Montaigne, despiser of females and ignorer of children, but a family man, trying his best to play the genial patriarch in a home full of women who regard him most of the time with little more than exasperation.

Montaigne deserved some of this: he was, as he admitted, useless around the house. He preferred to leave its management to his wife, who, like his mother, was skilled in such affairs. He liked Françoise’s willingness to take on such responsibility when he went away on his travels or for work; he would probably have been happy to have her do the same when he was there as well. Not being able to do this was one of the main reasons he was generally so glad to leave. “It is pitiful to be in a place where everything you see involves and concerns you,” he wrote.

Looking after the estate must have had its onerous side. “There is always something that goes wrong,” he complained. The main business to be managed was the production of wine, of which the estate could produce tens of thousands of liters in a good year. Not all years were good. Severe weather ruined the harvests in 1572, 1573, and 1574—the years in which Montaigne wrote his first essays. Another bad patch occurred in 1586, when soldiers roamed the nearby countryside, causing havoc. Montaigne managed to recoup some of the losses by using his influence with parlement in Bordeaux to sell what little remained of his wine, which shows that he could tackle difficulties when he needed to. His overall grasp of the business may be gauged, however, by his admission that he did not know, until a late stage in life, what was meant by “fermenting wine.”

Montaigne did what he had to, but he confessed that he did not enjoy it, and that therefore he kept it to a minimum. This was why he made no attempt to expand or build on the estate. Pierre had undertaken such projects for the pleasure and challenge of the job — but that was Pierre. He was the sort of man who would today keep himself busy with DIY work, and probably leave half of it unfinished. If his type seems familiar, so too does the Montaigne type, whose two mottoes would surely be “Anything for a quiet life” and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

When he did get an urge to do something, he could apply himself to it with energy. “I stand up well under hard work; but I do so only if I go to it of my own will, and as much as my desire leads me to it.” He hated exerting himself doing things that bored him. In eighteen years of running the estate, he wrote, he had never managed to study a title deed or scrutinize a contract properly. He was a mass of inabilities and reluctances:

I cannot reckon, either with counters or with a pen; most of our coins I do not know; nor do I know the difference between one grain and another, either in the ground or in the barn, unless it is too obvious, and I can scarcely distinguish the difference between the cabbages and lettuces in my garden. I do not even understand the names of the chief household implements or the roughest principles of agriculture, which children know. I know still less of the mechanical arts, of trade and merchandise, of the diversity and nature of fruits, wines, and foods, and of how to train a bird, or doctor a horse or dog. And since I must make my shame complete, not a month ago I was caught ignorant that leaven was used to make bread.

Montaigne runs through his negative catechism of failings in the same way as he later ran through the list of things absent from the lives of the “cannibals” of Brazil: servants, magistrates, contracts, and private property, but, by the same token, also lying, poverty, treachery, envy, and greed. It could be a blessing to lack such things.

It was not that Montaigne did not want to learn. In principle he approved of practical know-how, admiring all that was concrete and specific. But he could not help his own lack of interest, and any feeling of compulsion only made him more resistant. Some of this went back to the gentle lutes of his childhood: “Having had neither governor nor master forced on me to this day, I have gone just so far as I pleased, and at my own pace. This has made me soft and useless for serving others, and no good to anyone but myself.” This passage reveals some of his true motivation: it was his life he wanted to live. Being impractical made him free. “Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art,” was the way he summed up his character. He was ruled by “freedom and laziness.”