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

News of the king’s death was greeted with jubilation in Paris. In Rome, even Pope Sixtus V praised Clément’s action. Navarre agreed, at last, to revert to Catholicism. At first, some Catholics still refused to recognize him, especially members of the Paris parlement , who insisted that Bourbon was their king. For a while, there were two different realities, depending on which side you were on. But slowly, patiently, Navarre won out. He became the undisputed king of France as Henri IV: the monarch who would eventually find a way of ending the civil wars and imposing unity, mostly through sheer power of personality. He was the king the politiques had always hoped for.

Having always had a friendly relationship with Navarre, Montaigne would now find himself drawn again into a semi-official role as adviser to Henri IV — an astonishingly outspoken adviser, as it turned out. Montaigne wrote to Henri to offer his services, as etiquette demanded; Henri responded on November 30, 1589, by summoning Montaigne to Tours, the temporary location of his court. The letter either traveled very slowly, or Montaigne let it sit on the mantelpiece for a long while, for his answer is dated January 18, 1590—too late to obey the command. Allegiance was all right in theory, but Montaigne was determined not to travel, especially as his health was now worse than ever. He explained to the king that, alas, the letter had been delayed; he repeated his congratulations, and said that he looked forward to seeing the king win further support.

This part of the letter was conventional enough, but then Montaigne added some tougher advice. Still speaking with formal deference, he told the new king that he should have been less indulgent recently to the soldiers in his army. He should impose his authority but, at the same time, make conquests through “clemency and magnanimity,” since these are better lures for winning people over than threats. The king must be strong, but he must also show trust in people, and be loved rather than feared.

He wrote another letter on September 2, after Henri had again asked Montaigne to travel, this time to go to see Matignon. He offered to pay Montaigne’s expenses. But, again, Montaigne waited for a leisurely six weeks before replying, then claimed to have only just received the letter. He had in fact written to Matignon three times already, proposing to visit him, he said, but Matignon had not sent an answer. Perhaps, suggested Montaigne, Matignon wished to spare him the dangers and length of the journey, considering “the length and hazard of the roads.” The hint is clear: Henri IV ought to show the same consideration. Montaigne also took umbrage at the offer of money.

I have never received any gift whatsoever from the liberality of kings, any more than I have asked it or deserved it; and I have received no payment for the steps I have taken in their service, of which Your Majesty has had partial knowledge. What I have done for your predecessors I will do still more willingly for you. I am, Sire, as rich as I wish to be. When I have exhausted my purse with Your Majesty in Paris, I will make bold to tell you so.

This seems an astonishingly assertive way to talk to a king — but Montaigne was aging and ill (he had a fever at the time), and he had been close to the king for long enough to speak openly. In the Essays , he wrote: “I look upon our kings simply with a loyal and civic affection, which is neither moved nor removed by private interest … This is what makes me walk everywhere head high, face and heart open.” His letter to Henri IV shows that he was as good as his word. Indeed, he comes across in both letters exactly as he does in the Essays: blunt, unimpressed by power, and determined to preserve his freedom.

Montaigne may have detected the first signs of what was to become a feature of Henri IV’s reign: the king’s tendency to make a cult of himself. He was strong, which was what the country needed after its series of feeble and self-indulgent kings, but he was not subtle. Short speeches and quick, decisive action were his style. Instead of washing regularly and using forks to eat with, like Henri III, he was filthy, the way a real man should be, and reportedly stank like rotting meat. He had charisma. Montaigne liked the idea of a strong king, but he had no love for mystique. In the Essays , he wrote of Henri IV with judicious approval rather than mindless devotion; similar reservations come across in his letters. And he won this particular battle, for he never did travel to join Henri IV.

In early 1595, too late for Montaigne to know about it, Henri IV successfully managed to start a war against an external enemy, Spain, and thus begin to drain off the energies of the civil wars, which ended at last in 1598. France started to build up a real collective identity, though still a fragile one, mostly centered on the person of Henri himself. Many were passionately loyal to him, but others hated him just as passionately. He too was eventually assassinated, stabbed to death by the fanatical Catholic François Ravaillac in 1610.

Among his contributions to history was the Edict of Nantes, proclaimed on April 13, 1598, which guaranteed freedom of conscience and some freedom of worship to both sides of the religious divide. Unlike earlier conciliatory treaties, this one succeeded, for a while. From being the land worst afflicted by religious differences, France became the first Western European country formally to recognize two different forms of Christianity. In a speech to parlement on February 7, 1599, Henri made it clear that the edict was not based on a weak desire to please, as previous ones had been, and should not be taken as a license to cause trouble. “I shall nip in the bud all factions and all seditious preaching; and I shall behead all those who encourage it.”

Imposed so forcefully, with the kind of forthright confidence Montaigne would have appreciated, the Edict of Nantes endured for almost a century, until 1685, when its revocation sent a wave of Huguenot refugees to England and other places. Among these were many Montaigne readers, including Pierre Coste, the man whose samizdat edition of the Essays would eventually sneak back home across the Channel and promote a revolutionary new Montaigne to his troubled countrymen.

STRANGELY, THROUGHOUT THE century leading up to Montaigne’s rebranding by Coste in 1724—a period in which the Essays had a hard time in France — the English never ceased to admire him. They were the first outside France to adopt Montaigne, and they came to consider him almost one of their own. Something in the English mentality put them instantly on the same wavelength; forever more they continued to chime harmoniously on that wavelength in apparent indifference to intellectual changes going on elsewhere.

It seems worth pausing the story of Montaigne’s “afterlife” for a moment (running alongside the main life story, and currently suspended in the mid-nineteenth century, a chapter ago) to take a quick tour through several hundred years of his fortunes on the other side of the Channel — a place to which he seems never to have thought of traveling, and where he would have been most surprised to find himself taken in as a refugee, especially since it was a Protestant country.

Religion was one of the reasons why many English readers, from the late seventeenth century on, felt so free to enjoy Montaigne. It was of no concern to English Protestants when the Church put his book on the Index . It even allowed them to enjoy the pleasant feeling of getting one up on Catholics and, more gratifyingly still, on the French. The latter could be portrayed as a people unable to recognize their own best writers, especially after the French Académie began imposing rigorous standards of classical elegance on all its literature. A “free and unruly” writer (as Montaigne described himself) had no place in the new French aesthetics, but the English language welcomed him like a prodigal son. As the exuberant and anarchic home of Chaucer and Shakespeare, English seemed the right language for such an author. Lord Halifax, a dedicatee of one seventeenth-century edition, observed that to translate Montaigne “is not only a valuable acquisition to us, but a just censure of the critical impertinence of those French scribblers who have taken pains to make little cavils and exceptions to lessen the reputation of this great man, whom nature hath made too big to confine himself to the exactness of a studied style.” And the essayist William Hazlitt managed to squeeze Montaigne, as well as Rabelais, into a piece called “On Old English Writers and Speakers.” He justified their inclusion thus: “But these we consider as in a great measure English, or as what the old French character inclined to, before it was corrupted by courts and academies of criticism.”