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

The thrill palled a little as they waited to get through the bureaucracy at the gate; their baggage was searched “down to the smallest articles.” The officials spent an inordinate amount of time examining Montaigne’s books. Rome was the domain of the Pope himself: thought crimes were taken seriously here. They confiscated a book of hours, simply because it was published in Paris rather than Rome, and some Catholic theological works which Montaigne had picked up in Germany. He considered himself lucky that he was not carrying anything more incriminating. Having been unprepared for such a rigorous inspection, he could easily have had truly heretical books on him, since, as the secretary remarked, he was of such an “inquiring nature.”

Also taken away for examination was a copy of his own Essays . This was not returned to him until March, four months later, and it came back with suggested amendments marked in it. The word “fortune” was flagged up in several places, with other odds and ends. But a Church official later told him that the objections were not serious, and that the French friar who had made them was not even particularly competent. “It seemed to me that I left them well pleased with me,” wrote Montaigne in the journal. He duly ignored all the suggestions. Some writers have made much of Montaigne’s defiance of the Inquisition, but he did not have to be a Galileo to stand his ground.

Still, these encounters got Montaigne off to a bad start with Rome; he felt its atmosphere was intolerant. Yet it was also cosmopolitan. To be a Roman was to be a citizen of the world, which was what Montaigne wanted to be. He accordingly sought Roman citizenship, an honor which was granted towards the end of his four-and-a-half-month stay. This pleased him so much that he transcribed the document in its entirety in a chapter about vanity in the Essays . He realized that “vanity” was the right category, but he did not care. “At all events I received much pleasure in having obtained it.”

Rome was so vast and varied that there seemed no limit to the things you could do there. Montaigne could hear sermons or theological disputations. He could visit the Vatican library and, being granted access to areas that had been closed even to the French ambassador, see precious manuscript copies of works by his heroes Seneca and Plutarch. He could watch a circumcision, visit gardens and vineyards, and talk to prostitutes. He tried to learn all the latter’s trade secrets, but learned only that they charged a great deal even for conversation, which presumably was one of their secrets.

Besides the prostitutes, Montaigne also had an audience with the current octogenarian Pope, Gregory XIII. The secretary described the ritual in detail. First Montaigne and one of his young traveling companions entered the room where the Pope was seated, and knelt to receive a benediction. They sidled along the wall, then cut across towards him; halfway there, they stopped for another benediction. Then they knelt on a velvet carpet at the Pope’s feet, beside the French ambassador, who was presenting them. The ambassador knelt too, and pulled back the Pope’s robe to expose his right foot, shod in a red slipper with a white cross. The visitors each bent towards this foot and kissed it; Montaigne noted that the Pope lifted his toes a little to make the kiss easier. After this almost erotic performance, the ambassador covered the papal foot again, and rose to deliver a speech about the visitors. The Pope blessed them and said a few words, urging Montaigne to continue in his devotion to the Church. Then he rose to signal their dismissal; they retraced their route across the room in reverse, never turning their backs, and stopping twice to kneel for more benedictions. At last they backed out of the door, and the performance was over. Montaigne had his secretary note, later, that the Pope had spoken with a Bologna accent—“the worst idiom in Italy.” He was “a very handsome old man, of middle height, erect, his face full of majesty, a long white beard, more than eighty years old, as healthy and vigorous for his age as anyone can wish, without gout, without colic, without stomach trouble”—quite different from poor suffering Montaigne, and having a sort of family resemblance to God himself. He seemed “of a gentle nature, not very passionate about the affairs of the world,” which is either very like or very unlike God, depending on your point of view. Gentle or not, this was the same Pope who had once struck medals and commissioned paintings to celebrate the St. Bartholomew’s massacre.

There was no forgetting that Rome was the Pope’s city. Montaigne often saw him conducting ceremonies and taking part in processions. In Holy Week, he watched thousands of people pouring towards St. Peter’s, carrying torches and scourging themselves with ropes, some as young as twelve or thirteen years old. They were accompanied by men carrying wine, which they sipped and blew over the ends of the scourges to wet the cords and separate them when they became clotted with blood. “This is an enigma that I do not yet well understand,” wrote Montaigne. The penitents were cruelly wounded, yet they seemed neither to feel pain nor to be entirely serious about what they were doing. They drank plenty of wine themselves and performed the rite “with such nonchalance that you see them talk with one another about other matters, laugh, yell in the street, run, and jump.” As he deduced, most of them were doing it for money: the pious rich had paid them to go through the penance process for them. This mystified him even more: “What do those who hire them do it for, if it is only a counterfeit?”

Montaigne also witnessed an exorcism. The possessed man, who seemed almost comatose, was held down at the altar while the priest beat him with his fists, spat in his face, and shouted at him. Another day, he saw a man hanged: a famous robber and bandit named Catena, whose victims had included two Capuchin monks. Apparently he had promised to spare their lives if they denied God; they did so, risking the loss of their eternal souls, but Catena killed them anyway. Of all the twists Montaigne had yet encountered on the kind of scene that so fascinated him — the vanquished individual who begs for mercy, the victor who decides whether to grant it — this was probably the most unpleasant. At least Catena himself had the courage to die bravely. He made not a sound as he was seized and strangled; then his body was cut into quarters with swords. The crowd were more agitated by the violence done to the dead body, howling at every blow of the sword, than by the execution itself: another phenomenon which puzzled Montaigne, who thought living cruelty more disturbing than anything that could be done to a corpse.

All these were the marvels of modern Rome, but that was not why most sixteenth-century tourists of a humanistic disposition came to the city. They came to absorb the aura of the ancients, and none was more susceptible to this aura than Montaigne, who was almost a native himself. Latin was, after all, his first language; Rome was his home country.

The classical city was very much in evidence all around them, though, for the most part, Montaigne and his secretary did not so much walk in the Romans’ footsteps as far above them. So much earth and rubble had built up over the centuries that the ground level had risen by several meters. What remained of the ancient buildings was buried like boots in mud. Montaigne marveled at the realization that he was often on the tops of old walls, something that became obvious only in spots where rain erosion or the wheel ruts uncovered glimpses of them. “It has often happened,” he wrote with a shiver of glee, “that after digging deep down into the ground people would come merely down to the head of a very high column which was still standing down below.”