How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

by Sarah Bakewell

These were the kinds of scene that would recur frequently in Montaigne’s essays: one person seeks mercy, and the other decides whether or not to grant it. Montaigne was fascinated by the moral complexity involved. What moral complexity? Monluc would have said. Killing was always the right solution: ‘One man hanged is more effective than a hundred killed in battle.’ Indeed, so many executions took place in the area that the supply of gallows equipment ran low: carpenters were commissioned to make more scaffolds, wheels for breaking limbs, and stakes for burning. When the scaffolds were full, Monluc used trees, and boasted that his travels through Guyenne could be traced in bodies swinging by the roadside. By the time he had finished, he said, nothing stirred in the whole region. All who survived kept their silence.