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

Montaigne, the political conservative, proved himself a literary revolutionary from the start, writing like no one else and letting his pen follow the natural rhythms of conversation instead of formal lines of construction. He omitted connections, skipped steps of reasoning, and left his material lying in solid chunks, coupé or “cut” like freshly chopped steaks. “I do not see the whole of anything,” he wrote.

Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view.

This last part is unquestionably true. Already he skates into his early chapters from oblique directions, and the tendency becomes even more extreme with the essays of the 1580s. “Of Coaches” begins by talking about authors, goes on to a bit about sneezing, and arrives at its supposed subject of coaches two pages later — only to race off again almost immediately and spend the rest of its time discussing the New World. “Of Physiognomy” comes to the subject of physiognomy in the form of a sudden observation about the ugliness of Socrates twenty-two pages into an essay that (in Donald Frame’s English translation) runs only to twenty-eight pages in total. The English writer Thackeray joked that Montaigne could have given every one of his essays the title of another, or could have called one “Of the Moon” and another “Of Fresh Cheese”: it would have made little difference. Montaigne admitted that his titles had little obvious connection with the contents—“often they only denote it by some sign.” Yet he also said that, if the title seems random or the thread of his logic seems lost, “some words about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient.” The “words in the corner” often hide his most interesting themes. He tucks them into exactly those parts of the text that seem most destructively to be breaking up the flow, muddying the waters and making his arguments impossible to follow.

Montaigne’s Essays initially presented itself as a fairly conventional work: a bunch of blossoms plucked from the garden of the great classical authors, together with fresh considerations on diplomacy and battlefield ethics. Yet, once its pages were opened, they metamorphosed like one of Ovid’s creatures into a freak held together by just one thing: the figure of Montaigne. One could hardly defy convention more comprehensively than this. Not only was the book monstrous, but its only point of unity was the thing that should have been vanishing modestly into the background. Montaigne is the book’s massive gravitational core; and this core becomes stronger as the book goes on through its subsequent variants, even as it becomes ever more heavily laden with extra limbs, ornaments, baggage, and jumbled body parts.

The 1570s were Montaigne’s first great writing decade, but the 1580s would be his big decade as an author. The coming ten years doubled the size of the Essays , and took Montaigne from being a nonentity to being a star. At the same time, the 1580s removed him from his quiet position in rural Guyenne, sent him on a long trip around Switzerland, Germany, and Italy as a feted celebrity, and made him mayor of Bordeaux. They enhanced Montaigne’s stature as a public figure as well as a literary one. They ruined his health, exhausted him, and made him a man who would be remembered.

THE SUCCESS OF Montaigne’s first edition of the Essays in 1580 must have changed his way of thinking about life. The acclaim knocked him out of his routine, and perhaps gave him the feeling that it was time to engage with the world again. Although he says little about this in the Essays , it may now have occurred to him that an interesting diplomatic career beckoned, and that the best way into it was a bout of international networking. He was also keen to get away from the domestic constraints of the estate, which could be left in his wife’s capable hands. Montaigne had always wanted to travel, so as to discover the “perpetual variety of the forms of our nature.” Even as a boy, he had felt a great “honest curiosity” about the world — about “a building, a fountain, a man, the field of an ancient battle, the place where Caesar or Charlemagne passed”—everything. Now he imagined walking in the footsteps of his classical heroes, while at the same time exploring the variety of the present world, where he could “rub and polish” his brains by contact with strangers.

Another, less glamorous, reason for traveling existed too. From his father, Montaigne had inherited a propensity to attacks of kidney stones. Having seen Pierre literally pass out from the pain, he was more terrified of this illness than any other. Now, in his mid-forties, he found out for himself what this particular form of torture was like.

Kidney stones form when calcium or other minerals build up in the system and create lumps and crystals which block the flow of urine. They often splinter, creating jagged shards. Whole or split, they must pass through, and, as they do, they produce a sensation that feels like being sliced open from the inside. They also cause general discomfort around the kidneys, stabbing pains in the abdomen and back, and sometimes nausea and fever. Even once they are passed, that is not the end, for they often recur throughout life. In Montaigne’s day, they carried a real danger of death each time, either from simple blockage or from infection.

Today, stones can be broken up using sound waves to make the passage easier, but in Montaigne’s time one could only hope that the spheres, spikes, needles and burrs would find their own way to the exit. He would try to sluice them out by refraining from urinating for as long as he could, to build up pressure; this was painful and dangerous in itself, but sometimes it worked. He tried other remedies, though he usually distrusted all forms of medicine. Once, he took “Venetian turpentine, which they say comes from the mountains of Tyrol, two large doses done up in a wafer on a silver spoon, sprinkled with one or two drops of some good-tasting syrup.” The only effect was to make his urine smell like March violets. The blood of a billy-goat fed on special herbs and wine was supposed to be efficacious. Montaigne tried this, rearing the goat at his estate, but he abandoned the idea on noticing calculi very similar to his own in the goat’s organs after it was killed. He did not see how one faulty urinary system could cure another.

The most common remedy for kidney stones was the use of spa waters and thermal baths. Montaigne went along with this too; at least it was a natural method, unlikely to do harm. The spas were often set in attractive environments, and the company was interesting. He tried a couple in France in the late 1570s; the illness returned after each visit, but he was willing to try more. This therefore became another reason to travel, for the resorts of Switzerland and Italy were famous. It had the virtue of being the kind of reason he could easily quote to his wife and friends.

And so, in the summer of 1580, the renowned forty-seven-year-old author left his vines and set off to cure his ailment and see the world, or at least selected areas of the European world. The trip would keep him away until November 1581: seventeen months. He began with trips around parts of France, apparently on business and perhaps collecting instructions for political errands on the journey. It was now that he had his audience with Henri III, and presented him with his Essays . After this he turned east and crossed over into German lands, then towards the Alps and Switzerland, and finally to Italy. Had he had his way, the trip might have been longer and he might have ended up anywhere. At one point, he fancied going to Poland. Instead, he contented himself with the more common goal of Rome — great pilgrimage site for every good Catholic and every Renaissance intellectual.