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

The sensitivity of the affair meant that both the Leaguists and Navarre’s Protestant followers had every reason to want to stop Montaigne ever reaching Paris. Indeed, almost everyone seemed to dislike this mission of reconciliation and moderation. Even the English ambassador feared it, for England wished to remain influential over Navarre and did not want him reconverting to Catholicism. The only people who could have felt happy were the king, Catherine de’ Medici, and a scattering of politiques , ever hopeful for the future of a united France.

It is no wonder, then, that Montaigne’s trip did not go smoothly. Shortly after leaving home, while traveling through the forest of Villebois just southeast of Angoulême, his party was ambushed and held up by armed robbers. This was not the incident in which he was freed because of his honest face: that had evidently been a more random attack. This time the motive was political — or such, at least, was his belief. Writing to Matignon about it afterwards, Montaigne said that he suspected the perpetrators were Leaguists wanting to thwart any agreement between their two enemies. Under threat of violence, in the middle of the forest, he was forced to hand over his money, the fine clothes in his coffers (presumably intended for his appearance at the royal court), and his papers, which no doubt included secret documents from the Navarre camp. It was fortunate that they did not finish the job by killing him. Instead he survived and, one presumes, delivered his message safely. Yet, once again, despite all that Montaigne had risked, and despite all the excitement about him, nothing came out of the deal. And things were about to get worse.

The trouble began when the duc de Guise, still the most dangerous of the king’s enemies, arrived in the capital in May 1588, shortly after Montaigne. Henri III had banned Guise from the city, so this was an open challenge to royal authority, but Guise knew he had the backing of Paris’s rebellious parliamentarians. The king should have responded by having Guise arrested. Instead he did nothing even when Guise called on him in person. The new Pope, Sixtus V, reportedly later commented of this meeting, “Guise was a reckless fool to put himself in the hands of a King whom he was insulting; the King was a coward to let him go untouched.” It was another of those delicate balances: here, a stronger party had to decide how far to push a challenge, while the weaker had to decide whether to bow his head or offer resistance.

Henri III proceeded to make the wrong decision three times over. First he did nothing when he should have done something. Then, to compensate, he overreacted. On the night of May 11, he posted royal troops all over the city as if getting ready for all-out battle, possibly even a massacre of Guise’s supporters. In alarm and fury, crowds of Leaguists poured out and blocked off streets, ready to defend themselves. What followed became known as the “Day of the Barricades.”

Henri III now made his third mistake. He retreated in a panic, showing the very combination of weakness and excess that Montaigne considered disastrous, especially when dealing with a mob. The king pleaded with Guise to calm his supporters; Guise rode through the streets, supposedly to comply with the request but actually stirring up the crowds further. Riots ensued. “I have never seen such a furious debauch of the people,” Montaigne’s friend Étienne Pasquier wrote in a letter afterwards. It looked like another St. Bartholomew, but there was less killing and, this time, there was a specific goal, which was achieved quickly. By the end of the next day, Pasquier said, “everything had become so quiet again that you would have said it had been a dream.” It was not a dream: Paris awoke to a changed reality. The king had fled his city. Slipping out so quietly that hardly anyone noticed, he had gone to Chartres and left Paris to Guise.

Having abandoned his city without a fight, Henri III was now a king in exile. He had virtually abdicated, though his supporters still recognized him as their monarch. Guise ordered him to accept the cardinal de Bourbon as his successor; Henri had no choice but to agree. There was no shortage of people ready to point out to him how this disaster had occurred. He had missed his one chance to take Guise out of the picture, either by arresting him or, more conclusively, by having him killed. Montaigne, still a loyal monarchist, joined the king in Charters. When Henri later moved on to Rouen, Montaigne went too. It is not surprising; the alternative would have been to remain with the Leaguists in Paris, or to back out entirely and go home. He did neither, but eventually he did part company with the king and returned to Paris in July 1588. He was ill at the time, being stricken by gout or rheumatism: an attack so bad that he was bedridden during part of his stay.

He would have expected to be left unmolested there, having probably gone for nothing more seditious than a meeting with his publishers — he had recently finished work on his final volume. But Paris was not the right place for anyone associated with the king. While Montaigne was resting in bed one afternoon, still very unwell, armed men burst in and seized him on League orders. The motive may have been revenge for a recent incident in Rouen, when Henri III had ordered the arrest of a Leaguist in similar circumstances: that at least was Montaigne’s theory, as he recorded it in his Beuther diary. They took him, mounted on his own horse, to the Bastille, and locked him up.

In the Essays , Montaigne had written of his horror of captivity:

No prison has received me, not even for a visit. Imagination makes the sight of one, even from the outside, unpleasant to me. I am so sick for freedom, that if anyone should forbid me access to some corner of the Indies, I should live distinctly less comfortably.

To be thrown into the Bastille, especially while ill, was a shock. Yet Montaigne had reason to hope that he would not be there for too long — and he wasn’t. After five hours, Catherine de’ Medici came to the rescue. She too was now in Paris, hoping as usual to sort out the crisis by getting everyone talking, beginning with Guise, with whom she was in conversation when the news of Montaigne’s arrest arrived. She immediately asked Guise to arrange for Montaigne’s release. With evident reluctance, he complied.

Guise’s orders went off to the commander of the Bastille, but even this did not suffice at first. The commander insisted on having confirmation from the prévôt des marchands , Michel Marteau, sieur de La Chapelle, who in turn sent his message of consent via another powerful man, Nicolas de Neufville, seigneur de Villeroy. Thus, in the end, it took four powerful people to get Montaigne freed. His own understanding of it was that he was “released by an unheard-of favor” and only after “much insistence” from Catherine de’ Medici. She must have liked him; the duc de Guise probably didn’t, but even he could see that Montaigne deserved special consideration.

Montaigne stayed in Paris for just a short while after this. The pain in his joints receded, but another illness struck him soon after. It was probably an attack of kidney stones, a condition from which he still suffered with little respite, and which he had so often feared might kill him. On this occasion, it nearly did. His friend Pierre de Brach described the episode some years later, in a highly Stoic-flavored letter to Justus Lipsius:

When we were together in Paris a few years ago, and the doctors despairing of his life and he hoping only for death, I saw him, when death stared him in the face from close up, push her well away by his disdain for the fear she brings. What fine arguments to content the ear, what fine teachings to make the soul wise, what resolute firmness of courage to make the most fearful secure, did that man then display! I never heard a man speak better, or better resolved to do what the philosophers have said on this point, without the weakness of his body having beaten down any of the vigor of his soul.