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

Matignon apparently did stay, but Montaigne had not been in the city to begin with. He was at home when the plague began, getting ready to travel in for a handover ceremony; his mayoralty was now over, and he was about to be succeeded by Matignon himself. The first of August 1585 was his last official date, so, when Matignon’s letter was written on July 30, Montaigne had two days to go. His only task during those two days was apparently to attend the ceremony to mark the election of Matignon. Under present conditions, however, that event would be almost entirely unattended, if it took place at all.

Montaigne now had to decide whether he should go to Bordeaux for the handover or not. His own estate was unaffected by the disease; if he went to Bordeaux now, he would be entering a plague zone purely for the sake of form. What, really, did duty require? Unsure what to do, he traveled as far as Libourne, nearer to the city but outside the danger area. From there, he wrote to the few remaining jurats in town, asking for their advice. “I will spare neither my life nor anything else,” he wrote. But he added: “I will leave you to judge whether the service I can render you by my presence at the coming election is worth my risking going into the city in view of the bad condition it is in.” Meanwhile, he would wait in the château of Feuillas, just across the river from the city. From Feuillas, he wrote again the following day, repeating his question: what did they recommend?

The jurats’ reply, if there was one — if indeed any of them were still there — does not survive. The only certain thing is the outcome, which is that Montaigne did not go to Bordeaux. It seems that they either told him to stay away, or did not answer. Someone must have been at work in the parlement , for about this time a new order came into force: it stated that no one who was not already in the city should enter it. Had Montaigne insisted on going in, he would have been contravening this order. Evidently he cleared the matter with his conscience, and returned to his estate. By now, those two days had passed, so his mayoralty was officially over. Instead of ending with a gratifying ceremonial and speeches of thanks, it had petered out in confusion.

No one in Montaigne’s own century seems to have commented harshly on his decision. The trouble began two hundred and seventy years later, when nineteenth-century antiquarians discovered the relevant letters in the Bordeaux City Archives, published them, and exposed Montaigne to the judgment of a very different world — a world of stark new ideas about heroism and self-sacrifice.

The researcher responsible for the find, Arnaud Detcheverry, commented that Montaigne’s letters displayed his well-known tendency to “nonchalant Epicureanism,” and this set the tone for other critics’ comments. The early biographer Alphonse Grün thought Montaigne showed a lack of courage in remaining on the safe side of the river. In a lecture course on Grün’s book, Léon Feugère said that Montaigne “had the misfortune to forget his duty in the most serious situation.” For him, the story discredited Montaigne’s entire Essays . If the book’s author failed at such a moment, how could one trust what he said about how to live? The incident exposed the Essays’ deepest philosophical failing: their “absolute absence of decision.” Other writers agreed. The chronicler Jules Lecomte dismissed Montaigne and his entire philosophy with one word: “coward!”

What they all seemed to find intolerable was not just a lack of personal courage — after all, Montaigne had stayed for over a week by the bed of a man dying from the plague — but his failure to fulfill his public duties. Montaigne’s cool calculations and written inquiries seemed odious to a generation whose new moral strictness still preserved the lingering whiff of Romanticism. The latter made them feel that one should be prepared to make any sacrifice, however pointless. The former made them long for Montaigne to sacrifice himself in the name of work.

The source of the problem, just as in the seventeenth century, was a distaste for his Skepticism. Nineteenth-century readers were disturbed by it in a way few had been since Pascal. They did not mind Montaigne doubting facts, but they did not like him applying Skepticism to everyday life and showing emotional detachment from agreed standards. The Skeptic epokhe , or “I hold back,” seemed to show an untrustworthiness in his nature. It sounded very much like the greatest bugbear of the new era: nihilism.

Nihilism, for the late nineteenth century, meant godlessness, pointlessness, and meaninglessness. It could be used as code for atheism, but it suggested something even worse: the abandonment of all moral standards. In the end, “nihilist” became almost synonymous with “terrorist.” Nihilists were people who, having no God, threw bombs and advocated the destruction of the existing social order. They were a kind of revolutionary wing to the Skeptics’ party, or Skeptics turned bad. If they took charge, nothing would be preserved and nothing could be taken for granted.

In the face of this, it suddenly became an urgent task for his remaining defenders to prove, not just that Montaigne had acted reasonably during the plague outbreak, but that he was not a great Skeptic after all. He was, rather, a conservative moralist and a good Christian. One influential critic, Émile Faguet, devoted a series of articles to showing how negligible a role Skepticism played in the Essays . Another, Edme Champion, thought Skeptical elements could be detected, but not the kind of destructive Skepticism that “denied” or “annihilated” everything.

The debate took on more significance because, as it happened, the Essays had just come off the Index in France. It was removed in 1854, just a year or two after the discovery of the first plague letter, though certainly not as a consequence of it. It was a long overdue decision. Despite Church condemnation, Montaigne was now canonical in France and had become the object of a new industry of literary and biographical research. The lifting of the ban raised his profile and opened the way for a larger readership, while intensifying the question of his moral acceptability.

And for many, he became once again what he had been for Pascal and Malebranche: a trickster who was bad for the soul. Guillaume Guizot, who in 1866 called Montaigne a great “seducer,” did his best to arm readers against such seduction. Having once fallen under Montaigne’s spell himself, he now wrote to guide victims out of the web, like a deprogrammed former cultist who devotes his life to helping others escape.

He listed the dangers in Montaigne, each of which matched up to a specific character defect. Montaigne was weak-willed. He was egotistical. He was not as much of a Christian as he claimed to be. He withdrew from public life for purely selfish reasons, in order to spend more time in contemplation — and not even religious contemplation, which might have been forgivable. When this introspection turned up faults, he did not try to correct them; he accepted himself as he was. He was godless and irresponsible. He is not the kind of writer we need: “He will not make us into the kind of men our times require.”

The historian Jules Michelet, one of the toughest critics Montaigne ever had, thought that all this could be blamed on Montaigne’s having received too free an education, one designed to produce a merely “feeble and negative” idea of a human being, rather than a hero or a good citizen. Those plangent musical awakenings in his childhood had a lot to answer for. Michelet pictured the adult Montaigne as an invalid who isolated himself in his tower to “watch himself dream”—the inevitable consequence of a decadent, undisciplined upbringing. Over in England, the theologian Richard William Church concluded an otherwise admiring study by opining that Montaigne had too overwhelming a sense of “the nothingness of man, of the smallness of his greatest plans and the emptiness of his greatest achievements”—all a clear indication of nihilism. This made it impossible for him to believe in “the idea of duty, the wish for good, the thought of immortality.” In general, he showed “indolence and want of moral tone.”