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

Montaigne’s death must have been distressing to watch — the struggle for air, the desperate effort, the hideous swelling — and he seemed to be fully aware of what was going on, another thing he had hoped to avoid. But perhaps it did not feel so distressing to him. On the day of his riding accident, he had thrashed around vomiting blood while his soul floated in pleasure; the same thing could have happened at the end too. He may have felt only the sensation of his life being gently detached from his lips: that slender thread being cut at last.

Étienne Pasquier and another friend, Pierre de Brach, composed their hearsay accounts of the scene for their contemporaries, making Montaigne’s death an exemplary Stoic one. They performed the same service for his memory as he had done for La Boétie’s. Montaigne had lived happily, wrote Pierre de Brach in a letter to Justus Lipsius; now, he had died happily, and well. The only ones to feel pain would be his survivors, who would be for ever deprived of his agreeable company.

The first job those survivors had to handle was the funeral ceremony, along with a rather gruesome dismantling of Montaigne’s body. As a note in the family’s Beuther Ephemeris recorded:

His heart was placed in the church of Saint Michel, and Françoise de la Chassaigne madame de Montaigne, his widow, had his body taken to Bordeaux and interred in the church of the Feuillants, where she had a raised tomb built for him, and bought the rights for this from the church.

It was not unusual to separate out the body parts for burial, though it does seem a strange choice to put only the heart, rather than the whole body, in the little twelfth-century church on the estate. That would have made a peaceful resting place: he could have lain alongside his own father as well as the tiny skeletons of so many of his own children.

Instead, the remains of his remains went to the church of the Feuillant Order, an odd decision, again, and apparently not the original one. The first plan had been to bury him in the cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux; its canons authorized this on December 15, 1592. That would have placed him among members of Françoise’s family, rather than his own. But she changed her mind, either because she herself was a devotee of the Feuillants, or because he was: he had expressed admiration for them in the Essays . The decision was certainly good for the monks. In return for housing Montaigne’s body and saying regular masses for his soul, they received a generous rent which they used to fund a paint job on the building’s interior. They gave him a magnificent tomb, which survives; it shows him lying in full knight’s armor with his hands drawn out of his gauntlets and joined in prayer. Epitaphs in Greek and Latin cover the sides of the tomb, praising his Christian Pyrrhonism, his adherence to the laws and religion of his ancestors, his “gentle ways,” his judgment, his honesty, and his bravery. The Latin text ends, movingly:

Françoise de la Chassaigne, left a prey, alas, to perpetual mourning, has erected this monument to the memory of this husband whom rightly she regrets. He had no other wife; she will have had no other husband.

His body, minus the heart, was laid in this tomb at last on May 1, 1594, a year and a half after his death. He had already had to wait a long time for his eternal rest — and it was not to be eternal at all. About a decade later, work began on enlargements to the church and alterations to its layout. This would have left Montaigne’s tomb stranded a long way from the new altar, in breach of the agreement with Françoise. She sued the Feuillants, and won. They were obliged to move the tomb, in 1614, to a prime position in the new chapel.

There he lay, and the decades went by peacefully until the French Revolution came along some nine generations later. The new secular state abolished the Feuillants along with other religious orders, and confiscated their property, including the church and everything in it. This was during a time when Montaigne was being held up as a hero of the Enlightenment — a freethinking philosophe , someone worthy of honor by the revolutionary regime. It seemed wrong to leave him where he was. So it was ordered in 1800 that he be disinterred and reburied in the hall of monuments in Bordeaux’s great new secular temple: the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts. The precious remains were extracted and conveyed with portentous solemnity to the new location, accompanied by cavalry in procession and saluted all the way with brass fanfares.

Two and a half years later, an antiquary working through records at the same Bordeaux Académie made an embarrassing discovery. The body that had been moved was not Montaigne’s. It was that of his nephew’s wife, a woman named Marie de Brian who had been buried in the same tomb along with other members of the family. Quietly, with no brass or cavalry this time, she was retrieved from the hall of monuments and returned to her original place. Montaigne remained where he had been all the time, untouched, in the original tomb. The man who so disliked building work, idealistic “innovation,” and unnecessary upheavals had, after all, remained undisturbed by the Revolution, which had swept over his head like a wave over a deep sea bed.

Then, in May 1871, a fire destroyed the church. The tomb remained mostly undamaged, but it now sat unprotected amid the church’s gaping ruins for almost a decade. In December 1880, officials opened it to assess the state of the revered relic, and found that the lead shell around Montaigne’s remains had crumbled to bits. They sorted out the fragments, and made a new oak coffin for him. The restored tomb then spent five years in temporary quarters in the Depository of the Charterhouse, before being installed on March 11, 1886 in the entrance hall of a new building at the University of Bordeaux, containing the faculties of theology, science, and literature. Today, it is at the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux, where it can be seen on proud display.

There could hardly have been a more appropriate set of posthumous adventures for someone so attuned to the flux of the world, and so aware of how all human endeavors become muddled by error. Even after he died, something seemed to keep pulling Montaigne back into the stream of life rather than leaving him frozen in perfect remembrance. And his real legacy has nothing to do with his tomb at all. It is found in the turbulent fortunes of the Essays , his endlessly evolving second self. They remained alive, and, for Montaigne, it was always life that mattered. Virginia Woolf was especially fond of quoting this thought from his last essay: it was as close as Montaigne ever came to a final or best answer to the question of how to live.

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

Either this is not an answer at all, or it is the only possible answer. It has the same quality as the answer given by the Zen master who, when asked, “What is enlightenment?” whacked the questioner on the head with a stick Enlightenment is something learned on your own body: it takes the form of things happening to you. This is why the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics taught tricks rather than precepts. All philosophers can offer is that blow on the head: a useful technique, a thought experiment, or an experience — in Montaigne’s case, the experience of reading the Essays . The subject he teaches is simply himself, an ordinary example of a living being.

Although the Essays present a different facet to every eye, everything in them is united in that one figure: Montaigne. This is why readers return to him in a way they do to few others of his century, or indeed to most writers of any epoch. The Essays are his essays. They test and sample a mind that is an “I” to itself, as all minds are.