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

by Sarah Bakewell

This early request seems to have been Pierre’s attempt to shake his son out of a continuing tendency to idleness; it was another of those ‘tricks’, inflicted for its victim’s benefit. Even in his mid-thirties, Montaigne still had something of the sulky teenager about him. He was dissatisfied with his career as magistrate, disinclined to the life of a courtier, snooty about the law, and indifferent to building and property development. Moreover, despite his interest in literature, he showed no signs of writing much. Pierre may now have guessed that he himself did not have long to live, and he probably felt that Montaigne needed preparing for the responsibilities that would soon descend on him. He needed a challenge. Micheau wanted to write: very well, let him write! Pierre handed him a 500-page folio volume, written by a Catalan theologian over a century earlier, in stilted Latin, and said, ‘Translate this into French for me when you get a moment, will you, son?’