How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell

No wonder Montaigne has sometimes been described as the first writer of the Baroque period, although he predated it; less anachronistically, he has been called a Mannerist writer. Mannerist art, flourishing just before Baroque, was even more elaborate and anarchic, featuring optical illusions, misshapes, clutter, and odd angles of all kinds, in a violent rejection of the classical ideals of poise and proportion which had dominated the Renaissance. Montaigne, who described his Essays as “grotesques” and as “monstrous bodies … without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental,” sounds the very type of the Mannerist. According to the classical principles put forward by Horace, one should not even mention monsters in one’s art, because they are so ill-made, yet Montaigne compares his entire book to one. Montaigne, the political conservative, proved himself a literary revolutionary from the start, writing like no one else and letting his pen follow the natural rhythms of conversation instead of formal lines of construction. He omitted connections, skipped steps of reasoning, and left his material lying in solid chunks, coupé or “cut” like freshly chopped steaks. “I do not see the whole of anything,” he wrote.