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

by Sarah Bakewell

Montaigne very decidedly seems to have done what many men do: he married his mother. The choice would not make him particularly happy.

I admonish … my family8 not to get angry in the air, and to see to it that their reprimand reaches the person they are complaining about: for ordinarily they are yelling before he is in their presence and continue yelling for ages after he has left … No one is punished or affected by it, except someone who has to put up with the racket of their voice.

Montaigne presented this as a tribulation almost as great as the one Socrates suffered at the hands of the Athenian parliament, when it condemned him to death by hemlock. He hoped to emulate Socrates’s policy of forbearance and humour, and liked the reply he gave when Alcibiades asked him how he stood the nagging. One gets used to it, said Socrates, as those who live close to a mill do to the sound of the water-wheel turning.

Montaigne also liked the way Socrates9 adapted the experience as a philosophical ‘trick’ for his own spiritual improvement, using his wife’s bad temper for practice in the art of enduring adversity.

Montaigne himself did not brood in his tower like a Gormenghast earl: he liked to be out walking. ‘My thoughts fall asleep12 if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it.’

Had he been free to choose, he would not have been the marrying kind at all. ‘Men with unruly humours like me, who hate any sort of bond or obligation, are not so fit for it.’ Later, he made the best of things, and even attempted to remain faithful – with, he said, more success than he had expected. He became contented, in a way, as he discovered was often the case with developments one would rather have avoided. ‘For not only inconvenient things, but anything at all, however ugly and vicious and repulsive, can become acceptable through some condition or circumstance.’

Fortunately, Françoise herself was by no means ugly or repulsive. Montaigne seems to have found her attractive enough – or so his friend Florimond de Raemond asserted in a marginal note on a copy of the Essays. The problem lay more in the principle of being obliged to have regular sex with someone, for Montaigne never liked feeling boxed in.

Montaigne is often dismissed as anti-feminist, but had he taken part in this querelle, he would probably have been on the pro-woman side. He did write, ‘Women are not wrong22 at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them.’ And he believed that, by nature, ‘males and females are cast in the same mould’. He was very conscious of the double standard used to judge male and female sexual behaviour. Aristotle notwithstanding, Montaigne suspected that women had the same passions and needs as men, yet they were condemned far more when they indulged them.

We should have wife, children, goods,23 and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.

The phrase about the ‘back shop’, or ‘room behind the shop’ as it is sometimes translated – the arrière boutique – appears again and again in books about Montaigne, but it is rarely kept within its context. He is not writing about a selfish, introverted withdrawal from family life so much as about the need to protect yourself from the pain that would come if you lost that family. Montaigne sought detachment and retreat so that he could not be too badly hurt, but in doing so he also discovered that having such a retreat helped him establish his ‘real liberty’, the space he needed to think and look inward.

I see enough other common occasions for affliction26 which I should scarcely feel if they happened to me, and I have disdained some, when they came to me, to which the world has given such an atrocious appearance that I wouldn’t dare boast of my indifference to them to most people without blushing.

One wonders if he was contemplating the possible death of his wife, here, or perhaps of his mother. If so, he had no such luck in either case. Or perhaps he was thinking back to the death of his father, or wondering what it would be like if his castle were sacked in the wars, or his lands burned. He seems to have found almost anything manageable other than the death of La Boétie: that was the one thing that knocked him off balance and made him unwilling to become so attached again.

When he did get an urge to do something, he could apply himself to it with energy. ‘I stand up well32 under hard work; but I do so only if I go to it of my own will, and as much as my desire leads me to it.’ He hated exerting himself doing things that bored him. In eighteen years of running the estate, he wrote, he had never managed to study a title deed or scrutinise a contract properly. He was a mass of inabilities and reluctances:

I cannot reckon,33 either with counters or with a pen; most of our coins I do not know; nor do I know the difference between one grain and another, either in the ground or in the barn, unless it is too obvious, and I can scarcely distinguish the difference between the cabbages and lettuces in my garden. I do not even understand the names of the chief household implements or the roughest principles of agriculture, which children know. I know still less of the mechanical arts, of trade and merchandise, of the diversity and nature of fruits, wines, and foods, and of how to train a bird, or doctor a horse or dog. And since I must make my shame complete, not a month ago I was caught ignorant that leaven was used to make bread.

It was not that Montaigne did not want to learn. In principle he approved of practical know-how, admiring all that was concrete and specific. But he could not help his own lack of interest, and any feeling of compulsion only made him more resistant. Some of this went back to the gentle lutes of his childhood: ‘Having had neither governor nor master35 forced on me to this day, I have gone just so far as I pleased, and at my own pace. This has made me soft and useless for serving others, and no good to anyone but myself.’ This passage reveals some of his true motivation: it was his life he wanted to live. Being impractical made him free. ‘Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art,’ was the way he summed up his character. He was ruled by ‘freedom and laziness’.

‘Nothing costs me dear37 except care and trouble,’ wrote Montaigne: ‘I seek only to grow indifferent and relaxed.’

THERE ARE PRIVATE, retiring, and inward natures,’ writes Montaigne. His is not one of them. My essential pattern1 is suited to communication and revelation. I am all in the open and in full view, born for company and friendship.

He loves to mingle. Conversation is something he enjoys more than any other pleasure. He depends on it so much that he would rather lose his sight than his hearing or speech, for talk is better than books.

Any conversation is good, so long as it is kind-spirited and friendly. Social grace of this kind should be encouraged in children from an early age, to bring them out of their private worlds. ‘Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgement by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose.’

Montaigne loved open debate. ‘No propositions astonish me,3 no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers with my own.’ He liked being contradicted, as it opened up more interesting conversations and helped him to think – something he preferred to do through interaction rather than staring into the fire like Descartes.

For Montaigne, ‘relaxation and affability’ were not merely useful talents; they were essential to living well.5 He tried to cultivate what he called a ‘gay and sociable wisdom’ – a phrase that calls to mind a famous definition of philosophy, by Nietzsche, as the ‘gay’ or ‘joyful’ science.

Among the small but endlessly abundant and therefore very effective things that science ought to heed more than the great, rare things, is goodwill6 [Wohlwollen]. I mean those expressions of a friendly disposition in interactions, that smile of the eye, those handclasps, the ease which usually envelops nearly all human actions. Every teacher, every official brings this ingredient to what he considers his duty. It is the continual manifestation of our humanity, its rays of light, so to speak, in which everything grows … Good nature, friendliness, and courtesy of heart … have made much greater contributions to culture than those much more famous expressions of this drive, called pity, charity and self-sacrifice.

I have seen no more evident monstrosity10 and miracle in the world than myself. We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself.

Cruelty nauseated Montaigne: he could not help himself. He hated it cruelly23, as he wrote, making a point of the paradox. His revulsion was instinctive, as much a part of him as the openness written all over his face.

He was not the only writer of his time to oppose either hunting or torture. What is unusual in Montaigne is his reason for it: his visceral rapport with others. When speaking to the Brazilian Indians in Rouen, he was struck by how they spoke of men as halves of one another, wondering at the sight of rich Frenchmen gorging themselves while their ‘other halves’ starved on their doorstep. For Montaigne, all humans share an element of their being, and so do all other living things. ‘It is one and the same nature25 that rolls its course.’ Even if animals were less similar to us than they are, we would still owe them a duty of fellow-feeling, simply because they are alive.

I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time. He indulges his dog because he can imaginatively share the animal’s point of view: he can feel how desperate the dog is to banish boredom and get his human friend’s attention.

Looked at casually, day-old puppies are little, blind, squirming, undifferentiated objects or things. I put one of them in the bucket of water, and instantly an extraordinary, a terrible thing happened. This blind, amorphous thing began to fight desperately for its life, struggling, beating the water with its paws. I suddenly saw that it was an individual, that like me it was an ‘I’, that in its bucket of water it was experiencing what I would experience and fighting death, as I would fight death if I were drowning in the multitudinous seas. It was I felt and feel a horrible, an uncivilized thing to drown that ‘I’ in a bucket of water.

On a global scale, no single creature can be of much importance, he wrote, yet in another way these ‘I’s are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognises them can offer hope for the future.

Writing about consciousness, the psychologist William James29 had a similar instinct. We understand nothing of a dog’s experience: of ‘the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts’. They understand nothing of ours, when for example they watch us stare interminably at the pages of a book. Yet both states of consciousness share a certain quality: the ‘zest’ or ‘tingle’ which comes when one is completely absorbed in what one is doing. This tingle should enable us to recognise each other’s similarity even when the objects of our interest are different. Recognition, in turn, should lead to kindness. Forgetting this similarity is the worst political error, as well as the worst personal and moral one.

This eerie, almost hallucinatory moment gave Woolf a sense of how both she and the hare would look to someone who did not view them through eyes dulled by habit. It enabled her to de-familiarise the familiar – a mental trick, rather like those used by the Hellenistic philosophers when they imagined looking down on human life from the stars. Like many such tricks, it works by helping one pay proper attention. Habit makes everything look bland; it is sleep-inducing. Jumping to a different perspective is a way of waking oneself up again. Montaigne loved this trick, and used it constantly in his writing.

His favourite device was simply to run through lists of wildly divergent customs2 from all over the world, marvelling at their randomness and strangeness.

Each culture, in doing these things, takes itself as the standard. If you live in a country where teeth are blackened, it seems obvious that ebony ivories are the only beautiful ones. Reciting diversities helps us to break free of this, if only for brief moments of enlightenment. ‘This great world,’3 writes Montaigne, ‘is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognise ourselves from the proper angle.’ After running through such a list, we look back upon our own existence differently. Our eyes are opened to the truth that our customs are no less weird than anyone else’s.

This is a nation9 … in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon – unheard of.

The tradition would continue: in the nineteenth century Herman Melville described the happy valley of Typee11 in the Marquesas as a place where there were ‘no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honour … no poor relations … no destitute widows … no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum up all in one word – no money!’ The idea was that people were happier when they lived uncluttered lives close to nature, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Stoics12 had made much of this ‘Golden Age’ fantasy: Seneca fantasised about a world in which property was not hoarded, weapons were not used for violence, and no sewage pipes polluted the streams. Without houses, people even slept better, for there were no creaking timbers to wake them with a start in the middle of the night.

Montaigne understood the appeal of the fantasy, and shared it. Like wild fruit,13 he wrote, wild people retain their full natural flavour.

Montaigne, like Léry, could be accused of romanticising the peoples of the New World. But he understood too much about the complexity of human psychology to really want to wipe half of it out in order to live like wild fruit. He also recognised that American cultures could be just as stupid and cruel as European ones.

If one reverses chronology and imagines Montaigne settling down in his armchair to read Rousseau, it is intriguing to wonder how far he would have followed this before tossing the book from him. In the early stages of this passage, he might have felt enchanted: here was a writer with whom he was in perfect harmony. A few paragraphs later, one imagines him faltering and frowning. ‘Though I don’t know …’ he might murmur, as the wave of Rousseau’s rhetoric keeps swelling. Montaigne would want to pause and examine it all from alternative angles. Does society really make us callous? he would ask. Are we not better in company? Is man really born free; is he not filled with weaknesses and imperfections from the start? Do sociability and slavery go together? And by the way, could anyone really throw a stone powerfully enough to kill something at a distance without a slingshot?

Montaigne is saved from flights of primitivist fantasy by his tendency to step aside from whatever he says even as he is saying it. His ‘though I don’t know’ always intervenes. Moreover, his overall purpose is different from Rousseau’s. He does not want to show that modern civilisation is corrupt, but that all human perspectives on the world are corrupt and partial by nature.

The works do differ, and not just because the Confessions is a narrative, tracing a life from childhood on rather than capturing everything at once as the Essays does. There is also a difference of purpose. Rousseau wrote the book because he considered himself so exceptional, both in brilliance and sometimes in wickedness, that he wanted to capture himself before this unique combination of features was lost to the world.

Montaigne, by contrast, saw himself as a thoroughly ordinary man in every respect, except for his unusual habit of writing things down. He ‘bears the entire form of the human condition’,24 as everyone does, and is therefore happy to cast himself as a mirror for others – the same role he bestows on the Tupinambá. That is the whole point of the Essays. If no one could recognise themselves in him, why would anyone read him?

As Nietzsche could have warned Montaigne: Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober, and consequently ugly-looking.

Actually, in this situation, it was Montaigne who was playing the rebel. By singing the praises of moderation and equanimity, and doubting the value of poetic excess, Montaigne was bucking the trend of his own time as much as that of the Romantics. Renaissance8 readers fetishised extreme states: ecstasy was the only state in which to write poetry, just as it was the only way to fight a battle and the only way to fall in love. In all three pursuits, Montaigne seems to have had an inner thermostat which switched him off as soon as the temperature rose beyond a certain point.

This was why he so admired Epaminondas, the one classical warrior who kept his head when the sound of clashing swords rang out, and why he valued friendship more than passion. ‘Transcendental humours frighten me,’9 he said. The qualities he valued were curiosity, sociability, kindness, fellow-feeling, adaptability, intelligent reflection, the ability to see things from another’s...

Montaigne distrusts godlike ambitions: for him, people who try to rise above the human manage only to sink to the subhuman.

Mediocrity, for Montaigne, does not mean the dullness that comes from not bothering to think things through, or from lacking the imagination to see beyond one’s own viewpoint. It means accepting that one is like everyone else, and that one carries the entire form of the human condition. This could not be further removed from Rousseau and his feeling that he is set apart from all humanity. For Montaigne: There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

Our zeal does wonders when it is seconding our leaning towards hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion. Against the grain, toward goodness, benignity, moderation, unless as by a miracle some rare nature bears it, it will neither walk nor fly.

‘There is no hostility that exceeds Christian hostility,’ he even wrote at one point. In place of the figure of the burning-eyed Christian zealot, he preferred to contemplate that of the Stoic sage: a person who behaves morally, moderates his emotions, exercises good judgement and knows how to live.

Whoever considers as in a painting the great picture of our mother Nature in her full majesty; whoever reads such universal and constant variety in her face; whoever finds himself there, and not merely himself, but a whole kingdom, as a dot made with a very fine brush; that man alone estimates things according to their true proportions.

Montaigne reminded his contemporaries of the old Stoic lesson: to avoid feeling swamped by a difficult situation, try imagining your world from different angles or at different scales of significance. This is what the ancients did when they looked down on their troubles from above, as upon a commotion in an ant colony.