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

Each culture, in doing these things, takes itself as the standard. If you live in a country where teeth are blackened, it seems obvious that ebony ivories are the only beautiful ones. Reciting diversities helps us to break free of this, if only for brief moments of enlightenment. “This great world,” writes Montaigne, “is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.” After running through such a list, we look back upon our own existence differently. Our eyes are opened to the truth that our customs are no less weird than anyone else’s.

Some of Montaigne’s initial interest in such leaps of perspective went back to his observation of the Tupinambá visitors’ amazement in Rouen. Watching them watching the French was an awakening, like Virginia Woolf’s on the hillside. The encounter stimulated in Montaigne what became a lifelong interest in the New World — an entire hemisphere unknown to Europeans until a few decades before his own birth, and still so surprising that it hardly seemed real.

By the time Montaigne was born, most Europeans had come around to the acceptance that America really did exist and was not a fantasy. Some people had taken up eating hot peppers and chocolate, and a few smoked tobacco. The cultivation of potatoes was under way, although their vaguely testicular shape still made people think they were good only as an aphrodisiac. Returning travelers passed on tales of cannibalism and human sacrifice, or of fabulous fortunes in gold and silver. As life in Europe became more difficult, many considered emigrating, and colonies sprouted like mold spores along the eastern coasts. Most were Spanish, but the French also tried their luck. In Montaigne’s youth, France looked well placed to prosper in the new colonial adventure. It had a strong fleet, and well-equipped international ports from which to sail — Bordeaux foremost among them.

Several French expeditions were launched in the middle of the century, but they ran into difficulties one by one. French colonists had a particular tendency to undo their enterprises through religious conflict, which they imported with them. The first French settlement in Brazil, founded by Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon near the present site of Rio de Janeiro in the 1550s, was so weakened by its Catholic — Protestant divisions that it succumbed to invasion by the Portuguese. In the 1560s, a mainly Protestant French colony in Florida fell victim to the Spanish. By this time, full civil war had broken out in the French homeland, and the money and organization for major voyages were hard to find. France missed its place in the first great bonanza overseas, the one that made the fortunes of England and Spain. By the time it recovered and tried again later, it was too late to recover the advantage in full.

Like many of his generation, Montaigne had a fascination with all things American combined with cynicism about colonial conquest. He treasured what he remembered of his conversation with the Tupinambá—who had traveled to France in one of Villegaignon’s returning ships — and collected South American memorabilia for his cabinet of curiosities in the tower: “specimens of their beds, of their ropes, of their wooden swords, and the bracelets with which they cover their wrists in combats, and of the big canes, open at one end, by whose sound they keep time in their dances.” Much of this probably came from a household servant who had lived for a time in the Villegaignon colony. The same man introduced Montaigne to sailors and merchants who could further feed his curiosity. He was himself “a simple, crude fellow,” but Montaigne believed this made him an excellent witness, for he was not tempted to embroider or overinterpret what he reported.

Besides conversation, Montaigne also read everything he could get hold of on the subject. His library included French translations of López de Gómara’s Historia de las Indias and Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias , as well as more recent French originals, notably two great rival accounts of the Villegaignon colony by the Protestant Jean de Léry and the Catholic André Thevet. Of the two, he much preferred Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578), which observed Tupinambá society with sympathy and precision. As befitted a Protestant puritan, Léry admired the Tupinambá preference for going naked rather than adorning themselves with ruffs and furbelows as the French did. He observed that very few of their elderly people had white hair, and suspected it was because they did not wear themselves out with “mistrust, avarice, litigation, and squabbles.” And he thought highly of their courage in war. The Tupinambá fought bloody battles with magnificent swords, but only for honor, never for conquest or greed. Such encounters usually ended with a feast at which the main course was prisoners of war. Léry himself attended one such event; that night he woke in his hammock to see a man looming over him brandishing a roasted human foot in what seemed to be a threatening manner. He leaped up in fright, to the merriment of the crowd. Later, it was explained to him that the man was only being a generous host and offering him a taste. Léry’s faith in his friends was restored. He felt safer among them, he said, than he did at home “among disloyal and degenerate Frenchmen.” Indeed, he was destined to witness equally gruesome scenes in the French civil wars, when he became stranded in the hilltop town of Sancerre during a winter siege at the end of 1572 and saw townspeople eating human flesh to survive.

Montaigne read Léry avidly, and, in writing up his own Tupinambá encounter in “Of Cannibals,” followed Léry’s practice of drawing out the contrast with France and the implications for European assumptions of superiority. A later chapter, “Of Coaches,” also noted how the gilded gardens and palaces of the Incas and Aztecs put European equivalents to shame. But the simple Tupinambá appealed to Montaigne far more. He described them with a list of desirable negatives:

This is a nation … in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon — unheard of.

Such “negative enumeration” was a well-established rhetorical device in classical literature, long predating the New World encounter. It even turns up in four-thousand-year-old Sumerian cuneiform texts:

It was only natural that it should recur in Renaissance writing about the New World. The tradition would continue: in the nineteenth century Herman Melville described the happy valley of Typee in the Marquesas as a place where there were “no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honor … no poor relations … no destitute widows … no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum up all in one word — no money!” The idea was that people were happier when they lived uncluttered lives close to nature, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Stoics had made much of this “Golden Age” fantasy: Seneca fantasized about a world in which property was not hoarded, weapons were not used for violence, and no sewage pipes polluted the streams. Without houses, people even slept better, for there were no creaking timbers to wake them with a start in the middle of the night.