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

What he had first realized after his fall into unconsciousness was now amply confirmed: nature does everything for you, and there is no need to trouble your head about anything. It leads us by the hand, he wrote, as if “down a gentle and virtually imperceptible slope, bit by bit.” We hardly need to look where we are going. By making him ill, nature gave him what he had sought for so long: ataraxia , and thus eudaimonia . The greatest moments of well-being he had known in life came immediately after an attack, when the stone passed through. There was physical relief, but also a liberating spiritual lightness.

Is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full …?

He even came to find a similar pleasure in the midst of the attacks themselves. They were still painful, but he learned to delight in their few compensations, including the glow of satisfaction he felt on seeing admiration in other people’s eyes:

There is pleasure in hearing people say about you: There indeed is strength, there indeed is fortitude! They see you sweat in agony, turn pale, turn red, tremble, vomit your very blood, suffer strange contractions and convulsions, sometimes shed great tears from your eyes, discharge thick, black, and frightful urine, or have it stopped up by some sharp rough stone that cruelly pricks and flays the neck of your penis; meanwhile keeping up conversation with your company with a normal countenance, jesting in the intervals with your servants.

Only he knew the truth: that it was easier to joke and keep up conversations in the grip of pain than an observer could ever guess. As his earlier near-death experience had intimated, one’s outward appearance might bear no relation to what was going on in one’s inner world. This time he really was in agony, unlike the moments when he had been ripping at his doublet. Yet he still felt the same insouciance of soul. The experience seemed to touch him lightly.

I am already growing reconciled to this colicky life: I find in it food for consolation and hope.

He drew a similar lesson from the fact of aging in general. It was not that age automatically conferred wisdom. On the contrary, he thought the old were more given to vanities and imperfections than the young. They were inclined to “a silly and decrepit pride, a tedious prattle, prickly and unsociable humors, superstition, and a ridiculous concern for riches.” But this was the twist, for it was in the adjustment to such flaws that the value of aging lay. Old age provides an opportunity to recognize one’s fallibility in a way youth usually finds difficult. Seeing one’s decline written on body and mind, one accepts that one is limited and human. By understanding that age does not make one wise, one attains a kind of wisdom after all.

Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it.

Our being is cemented with sickly qualities … Whoever should remove the seeds of these qualities from man would destroy the fundamental conditions of our life.

Even philosophy needs to be “thickened and obscured” before it can be applied to real life. “There is no need to light up affairs so deeply and so subtly.” Nothing is to be gained from living like Tasso, blinding oneself with one’s own brilliance. It is better to be moderate, modest, and a little vague. Nature will take care of the rest.

All through these last years, mellower than ever, Montaigne continued to work on the Essays . He remained at home, but still wrote letters, including several to Henri IV. And he saw friends, writers, and former colleagues from Bordeaux and elsewhere, among them Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony. His daughter, Léonor, now grown up, married François de la Tour on May 27, 1590, in a ceremony at the Montaigne estate. The following year, Montaigne became a grandfather, when Léonor gave birth to a daughter named Françoise on March 31, 1591. Still he kept writing, adding his last fancies and anecdotes, including his final thoughts on the art of living in harmony with ordinariness and imperfection. He looked more and more like a man who had learned how to live; or perhaps it was just his usual nonchalance, developed to a more masterly degree than ever.

AN ATTACK OF the stone assailed Montaigne in early September of 1592. He had been through this many times before, and probably took it in his stride at first. But this time, as he had always known might happen, severe complications ensued. Instead of the stone passing through and giving him that rush of relief and joy, it stayed where it was. Then an infection set in.

His whole body began to swell. Before long, the inflammation spread to his throat. This produced a condition known as “cynanche,” taking its name from the Greek for a leash or noose used to strangle a dog or other animal — a name that gives a vivid sense of how unpleasant it was. As it grew, Montaigne’s throat closed ever more tightly, until he had to struggle for every breath.

The cynanche in turn led to a quinsy, a serious throat infection, still considered potentially fatal today if left untreated. It would have needed a course of antibiotics, but no such thing was available for Montaigne. From now on, with his throat swollen, he could not speak, but he remained fully conscious and was able to communicate his wishes to those around him by writing notes.

Three days went by after the quinsy set in. Montaigne sat propped in his bed, while his family and servants gathered to watch and wait. The room became the setting for the kind of overcrowded deathbed scene he had always hoped to avoid. Such rituals made death worse than it needed to be; they did nothing but terrify the dying man and everyone around him. The doctors and preachers bending over the bed; the grief-stricken visitors; the “pale and weeping servants; a darkened room; lighted candles; … in short, everything horror and fright around us”—it was all very remote from the simple, even absent-minded death he would have preferred. Yet, now that it came to it, he did not attempt to make the crowd go away.

Once it became obvious that no hope of recovery remained, he wrote his last testament and final wishes. One local writer, Bernard Automne, asserted that during these last days Montaigne “got up out of bed in his nightshirt,” and had his valets and other minor beneficiaries of his will called in, so he could pay them their bequests in person. Maybe this is true, although it does not fit well with the descriptions of him lying paralyzed. No account of his last hours is completely reliable; all are secondhand. But one, at least, should be fairly accurate: it was written by Montaigne’s old friend Étienne Pasquier based on what he heard from Françoise, who remained at her husband’s side throughout. Unlike La Boétie all those years ago, Montaigne did not send his wife away from his deathbed.

With the will arranged, Montaigne had a last mass said in his room. He could now barely breathe. According to Pasquier, he rose up in bed while the priest was speaking, “with a desperate effort, hands clasped,” to commend his own spirit to God. It was a final act of Catholic convention: a brief acknowledgment to God in the life of this joyfully secular man.

Shortly afterwards, the last small channel of air in his throat closed. A stroke may have carried him off, or he may simply have suffocated. Surrounded by family, friends, and servants, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne died on September 13, 1592, at the age of fifty-nine.