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

Those who take Montaigne as a hero, or as a supportive companion, would argue that he did not advocate a “do-as-thou-wilt” approach to social duty. Instead, he thought that the solution to a world out of joint was for each person to get themselves back in joint: to learn “how to live,” beginning with the art of keeping your feet on the ground. You can indeed find a message of inactivity, laziness, and disengagement in Montaigne, and probably also a justification for doing nothing when tyranny takes over, rather than resisting it. But many passages in the Essays seem rather to suggest that you should engage with the future; specifically, you should not turn your back on the real historical world in order to dream of paradise and religious transcendence. Montaigne provides all the encouragement anyone could need to respect others, to refrain from murder on the pretense of pleasing God, and to resist the urge that periodically makes humans destroy everything around them and “set back life to its beginnings.” As Flaubert told his friends, “Read Montaigne … He will calm you.” But, as he also added: “Read him in order to live.”

THROUGH THE 1570s, with their alternating episodes of peace and war, Montaigne got on with life, and with his book. He spent much of the decade writing and tinkering with his first crop of essays, then published them in 1580 at the press of local Bordeaux publisher Simon Millanges.

Millanges was an interesting choice. He had only been established in the city for a few years — for about as long as Montaigne had been writing. Montaigne would have had little difficulty finding a Parisian publisher; he had dealt with them before, and the value of a work like the Essays would not have escaped them. Even in its first edition, it was unique, yet it slotted neatly into the established marketing genres of classical miscellanies and commonplace books. It had that perfect commercial combination: startling originality and easy classification. Yet Montaigne insisted on staying with a local man, either because of a personal connection or as a matter of Gascon principle.

This first version of Montaigne’s book was quite different from the one usually read now. It filled only two fairly small volumes and, although the “Apology” was already outsized, most chapters remained relatively simple. They often oscillated between rival points of view, but they did not wash around like vast turbulent rivers or fan out into deltas, as later essays did. Some of them even kept to their supposed point. Yet they were already suffused with Montaigne’s curious, questioning, restless personality, and they often opened up puzzles or quirks in human behavior. Contemporary readers had an eye for quality; the work at once found an enthusiastic audience.

Millanges’s first edition was probably small, perhaps around five or six hundred copies, and it soon sold out. Two years later he issued another edition with a few changes. Five years later, in 1587, this edition was revised again and republished in Paris by Jean Richer. By now it had become the fashionable reading for the French nobility of the early 1580s. In 1584, the bibliographer La Croix du Maine held up Montaigne as the one contemporary author worth classing with the ancients — just four years after his publication by a modest press in Bordeaux. Montaigne himself wrote that the Essays did better than he had expected, and that it became a sort of coffee-table book, popular with ladies: “a public article of furniture, an article for the parlor.”

Among its admirers was Henri III himself. When Montaigne traveled through Paris later in 1580, he presented the king with a copy, as was conventional. Henri told him that he liked the book, to which Montaigne is said to have replied, “Sir, then Your Majesty must like me”—because, as he always maintained, he and his book were the same.

This, in fact, should have been an obstacle to its success. By writing so openly about his everyday observations and inner life, Montaigne was breaking a taboo. You were not supposed to record yourself in a book, only your great deeds, if you had any. The few Renaissance autobiographies so far written, such as Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita sua and Girolamo Cardano’s De vita propria , had been left unpublished largely for this reason. St. Augustine had written about himself, but as a spiritual exercise and to document his search for God, not to celebrate the wonders of being Augustine.

Montaigne did celebrate being Montaigne. This disturbed some readers. The classical scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger was especially annoyed about Montaigne’s revelation, in his later edition of 1588, that he preferred white wine to red. (Actually Scaliger was oversimplifying. Montaigne tells us that he changed his tastes from red to white, then back to red, then to white again.) Pierre Dupuy, another scholar, asked, “Who the hell wants to know what he liked?” Naturally it annoyed Pascal and Malebranche too; Malebranche called it “effrontery,” and Pascal thought Montaigne should have been told to stop.

Only with the coming of Romanticism was Montaigne’s openness about himself not merely appreciated, but loved. It especially charmed readers on the other side of the Channel. The English critic Mark Pattison wrote in 1856 that Montaigne’s supposed egotism made him come as vividly to life on the page as a character in a novel. And Bayle St. John observed that all true “relishers of Montaigne” loved his inconsequential “twaddling,” because it made his character real and enabled readers to find themselves in him. The Scottish critic John Sterling contrasted Montaigne’s way of writing about himself with the more socially acceptable tradition of memoirs by public figures attending only to the boring “din and whirl” of external events. Montaigne gave us “the very man”: the “kernel” of himself. In the Essays , “the inward is that which is clearest.”

Even in his 1580 version, Montaigne was fascinated by his inner world. It was not in some adventurous late chapter, but in his first edition that he wrote:

I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself.

The image is intensely physical. One sees Montaigne rolling about in himself like a puppy in long grass. When he is not rolling, he folds . “I refold my gaze inward” would be a more literal translation of the first sentence of this passage: je replie ma veue au dedans . He seems constantly to turn back on himself, thickening and deepening, fold upon fold. The result is a sort of baroque drapery, all billowing and turbulence. No wonder Montaigne has sometimes been described as the first writer of the Baroque period, although he predated it; less anachronistically, he has been called a Mannerist writer. Mannerist art, flourishing just before Baroque, was even more elaborate and anarchic, featuring optical illusions, misshapes, clutter, and odd angles of all kinds, in a violent rejection of the classical ideals of poise and proportion which had dominated the Renaissance. Montaigne, who described his Essays as “grotesques” and as “monstrous bodies … without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental,” sounds the very type of the Mannerist. According to the classical principles put forward by Horace, one should not even mention monsters in one’s art, because they are so ill-made, yet Montaigne compares his entire book to one.