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

Montaigne did not have the luxury of traveling solo, following personal whim alone. He was a nobleman of substance, and was expected to support an unwieldy entourage of servants, acquaintances, and hangers-on, from whom he tried to escape as often as possible. The group included four youngsters who came for the educational experience. One was his own youngest brother, Bertrand de Mattecoulon, still only twenty; the others were the young husband of one of his sisters and a neighbor’s teenage son with a friend. As the voyage went on, each of these would peel away to take up various pursuits. The most ill-fated was Mattecoulon, who stayed in Rome to study fencing and there killed a man in a duel; Montaigne had to get him rescued from prison.

Traveling was itself something of an extreme sport at the time, not much less dangerous than dueling. Roads on established pilgrim routes could be good, but others were rough. You always had to be ready to change your plans on hearing reports of plague ahead, or of gangs of highwaymen. Montaigne once altered his route to Rome because of a warning about armed robberies on the road he had intended to take. Some people hired escorts, or traveled in convoy. Montaigne was already in a large group, which helped, but that could attract unwelcome attention too.

There were other irritations. Officials had to be bribed, especially in Italy, which was known for corruption and bureaucratic excess. Throughout Europe, the gates to cities were heavily guarded; you had to arrive with the correct passports, travel and baggage permits, plus properly attested letters stating that you had not recently been through a plague area. City checkpoints often issued a pass to stay at a particular hotel, the proprietor of which had to countersign it. It must have been like traveling in the Communist world at the height of the Cold War, but with greater lawlessness and danger.

Then there were the discomforts of the journey itself. Most traveling was done on horseback. You could go by carriage, but the seats were usually harder on the buttocks than saddles. Montaigne certainly preferred to ride. He would buy and sell horses on the way, or hire them for short stretches. River transport was another option, but Montaigne suffered from seasickness and avoided it. In general, riding gave him the freedom he craved; surprisingly, he also found a saddle the most comfortable place to be during a kidney-stone attack.

What he loved above all about his travels was the feeling of going with the flow. He avoided all fixed plans. “If it looks ugly on the right, I take the left; if I find myself unfit to ride my horse, I stop.” He traveled as he read and wrote: by following the promptings of pleasure. Leonard Woolf, roaming Europe with his wife over three centuries later, would describe how she too cruised along like a whale sieving the ocean for plankton, cultivating a “passive alertness” which brought her a strange mingling of “exhilaration and relaxation.” Montaigne was the same. It was an extension of his everyday pleasure in letting himself “roll relaxedly with the rolling of the heavens,” as he luxuriously put it, but with the added delight that came from seeing everything afresh and with full attention, like a child.

He did not like to plan, but he did not like to miss things either. His secretary, accompanying him and (for a while) keeping his journal for him, remarked that people in the party complained about Montaigne’s habit of straying from the path whenever he heard of extra things he wanted to see. But Montaigne would say it was impossible to stray from the path: there was no path. The only plan he had ever committed himself to was that of traveling in unknown places. So long as he did not repeat a route, he was following this plan to the letter.

The one limit to his energy was that he never liked to start out too early. “My laziness in getting up gives my attendants time to dine at their ease before starting.” This accorded with his usual habit, for he always had trouble getting under way in the mornings. On the whole, however, he made a point of shaking up his habits while traveling. Unlike other travelers, he ate only local food and had himself served in the local style. At one point in the trip he regretted that he had not brought his cook with him — not because he missed home cooking, but because he wanted the cook to learn new foreign recipes.

He blushed to see other Frenchmen overcome with joy whenever they met a compatriot abroad. They would fall on each other, cluster in a raucous group, and pass whole evenings complaining about the barbarity of the locals. These were the few who actually noticed that locals did things differently. Others managed to travel so “covered and wrapped in a taciturn and incommunicative prudence, defending themselves from the contagion of an unknown atmosphere” that they noticed nothing at all. In the journal, the secretary observed how far Montaigne himself would err in the other direction, showering exaggerated praise on whichever country they were in while having nary a good word to say for his own. “In truth there entered into his judgment a bit of passion, a certain scorn for his country,” wrote the secretary, and added his own speculation that Montaigne’s aversion from all things French came from “other considerations”—perhaps a reference to the wars.

His adaptability extended to language. In Italy, he spoke in Italian and even kept his journal in that language, taking over from the secretary. He imitated the chameleon, or octopus, and tried to pass incognito wherever possible — or what he thought was incognito. In Augsburg, wrote the secretary, “Monsieur de Montaigne, for some reason, wanted our party to dissemble and not tell their ranks; and he walked unattended all day long through the town.” It did not work. Sitting on a pew in freezing air in Augsburg’s church, Montaigne found his nose running and unthinkingly took out a handkerchief. But handkerchiefs were not used in this area, so he blew his cover along with his nose. Was there a bad smell around? the local people wondered. Or was he afraid of catching something? In any case, they had already guessed he was a stranger: his style of dressing gave him away. Montaigne found this irksome. For once, “he had fallen into the fault that he most avoided, that of making himself noticeable by some mannerism at variance with the taste of those who saw him.”

Churches played an important part in Montaigne’s tour, not because he was addicted to prayer, but because he was so curious about their practices. He observed the Protestant churches of Germany with as much interest as the Catholic ones of Italy. In Augsburg, he witnessed the christening of a child. On the way out (having already been unmasked as a stranger) he asked many questions about the process. In Italy, he visited synagogues, and “had quite a talk with them about their ceremonies.” He also observed a Jewish circumcision, in a private house.

Odd events and human narratives of all kinds appealed to him. In the early stages of the trip, in Plombières-les-Bains in Lorraine, he met a soldier who had a half-white beard and one white eyebrow. The man told Montaigne that both had changed color in a single day when his brother died, because he wept for hours with a hand covering one side of his face. Nearby, in Vitry-le-François, he was regaled with stories about seven or eight girls in the area who had “plotted together” to dress and live as men. One married a woman and lived with her for several months—“to her satisfaction, so they say”—until someone reported the case to the authorities and she was hanged. Another story in the same region concerned a man named Germain who had been a girl until the age of twenty-two, when a set of “virile instruments” popped out one day as he leaped over an obstacle. A folk song arose in the town, warning girls not to open their legs too wide when they jumped in case the same thing happened to them.