How to Live (25 page)

This marked the beginning of a dramatic decline in Montaigne’s fortunes in France. From their first publication in 1580 to 1669, new editions of the
Essays
had appeared every two or three years, together with popular reworkings by editors who often drew attention to the most Pyrrhonian passages. After the ban, this changed. The work in its full form could no longer be published or sold in full in Catholic countries; no French publisher would touch it. For years, it was available only in bowdlerized or foreign editions, the latter often in French and designed to be smuggled home for a nonconformist readership.

Montaigne once remarked that certain books “become all the more marketable and public by being suppressed.”
To some extent, this happened to him: the suppression of his book in France gave it an irresistible aura. In the century to come, it enhanced his appeal to rebellious Enlightenment philosophers and even to full-blown revolutionaries.

But, on the whole, censorship did his posthumous sales more harm than good. It confined him to a limited audience in France, while in some other countries he continued to appeal to a wider range of taste—rebels and pillars of the community alike. Astonishingly, the
Essays
would stay on the
Index
for almost two hundred years, until May 27, 1854. It was a long exile, and one that outlived the genuine
frisson
of alarm he provoked in the late seventeenth century.

Pascal’s remark, “It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there,” could be intoned like a mantra through the whole of the story to come.
The centuries go on; each new reader finds his or her own self in the
Essays
and thus adds to the accumulation of its possible meanings. In Descartes’s case, what he found were two nightmare figures from his own psyche: a demon resistant to logic, and an animal that could
think. He shrank from both. Pascal and Malebranche saw the prospect of their own seduction on a bed of Skeptic ease, and they too fled in horror.

The
libertins
, seeing the same things, responded with an amused smile and a raised eyebrow. They too recognized themselves in Montaigne. Their much later descendant, Nietzsche, would do the same, and would also return Montaigne to his philosophical homeland: to the heart of the three great Hellenistic philosophies, with their investigation of the question of how to live.

T
HE FLESH-AND-BLOOD
Montaigne, back in the 1560s, was still getting on with that very question. He used all three of the Hellenistic philosophical traditions to manage his life and to help himself recover from the loss of La Boétie. He successfully merged his Skepticism with loyalty to Catholic dogma—a combination no one yet questioned. He finished his first major literary project, the translation of Raymond Sebond, and he worked on the dedications for La Boétie’s books and his own published letter describing his friend’s death. Another change occurred during this period too: he got married, and became the head of a family.

Montaigne seems, in general, to have been attractive to women. At least some of the appeal must have been physical: he makes ironic remarks about women who claim to love men only for their minds. “I have never yet seen that for the sake of our beauty of mind, however wise and mature that mind may be, they were willing to grant favors to a body that was slipping the least little bit into decline.”
Yet his intelligence, his humor, his amiable personality, and even his tendency to get swept away by ideas and talk too loudly, probably all contributed to his charm. So, perhaps, did the air of emotional inaccessibility hanging over him after La Boétie’s death. It presented a challenge. In reality, when he liked someone, the aloofness soon disappeared: “I make advances and I throw myself at them so avidly, that I hardly fail to attach myself and to make an impression wherever I land.”

Montaigne liked sex, and indulged in a lot of it throughout his life. It was only in late middle age that both his performance and his desire declined, as well as his attractiveness—all facts he bemoaned in his final
Essays
. It is depressing to be rejected, he said, but even worse to be accepted out of pity.
And he hated to be troublesome to someone who did not want him. “I abhor the idea of a body void of affection being mine.” This would be like making love to a corpse, as in the story of the “frantic Egyptian hot
after the carcass of a dead woman he was embalming and shrouding.” A sexual relationship must be reciprocal. “In truth, in this delight the pleasure I give tickles my imagination more sweetly than that which I feel.”

He was realistic about the extent to which he made the earth move for his lovers, however. Sometimes a woman’s heart is not really in it: “Sometimes they go to it with only one buttock.” Or perhaps she is fantasizing about someone else: “What if she eats your bread with the sauce of a more agreeable imagination?”

Montaigne understood that women know more about sex than men usually think, and indeed that their imagination leads them to expect better than they get. “In place of the real parts, through desire and hope, they substitute others three times life-size.”
He tutted over irresponsible graffiti: “What mischief is not done by those enormous pictures that boys spread about the passages and staircases of palaces! From these, women acquire a cruel contempt for our natural capacity.” Does one conclude that Montaigne had a smallish penis? Yes, indeed, because he confessed later in the same essay that nature had treated him “unfairly and unkindly,” and he added a classical quotation:

He showed no shame about revealing such things: “Our life is part folly, part wisdom.
Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it.” It also seemed unfair to him that poets had more license simply because they wrote in verse. He quoted two examples from contemporaries:

Amid the varied adventures of his friendly tool, nevertheless, Montaigne also did what all dutiful noblemen must do, particularly heirs to great estates: he got himself a wife.

Her name was Françoise de La Chassaigne, and she came from a family greatly respected in Bordeaux.
The marriage, which took place on September 23, 1565, would have been arranged in collaboration between the two families. This was traditional, and even the spouses’ ages were more or less what custom decreed. Montaigne noted that his own age (thirty-three, he says, though he was thirty-two), was close to the ideal recommended by Aristotle, which Montaigne thought was thirty-five (actually it was thirty-seven). If he was slightly too young, his wife was a little older than usual: she was born on December 13, 1544, which made her just under twenty-one on her wedding day. At that age she could still expect to have many childbearing years ahead of her. Unfortunately, children were to bring the couple mostly disappointment and sorrow. And, despite his being over a decade older than his wife, Montaigne very decidedly seems to have done what many men do: he married his mother. The choice would not make him particularly happy.

He does not mention Françoise often in the
Essays;
when he does, he makes her sound like Antoinette, only louder. “Wives always have a proclivity for disagreeing with their husbands,” he wrote.
“They seize with both hands every pretext to go contrary to them.” He was probably thinking of Françoise both here and in another passage, where he wrote that there was no point in raging uselessly at servants:

One can imagine Montaigne putting his hands over his ears, and heading off to his tower.

Among the many things for which he admired the philosopher Socrates was his having perfected the art of living with an aggressive wife. 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 humor, 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 Socrates 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.

As well as forcefulness, Françoise had staying power. She would outlive Montaigne by nearly thirty-five years, dying on March 7, 1627, at the age of eighty-two. She also survived all her children, including the only one to make it beyond infancy into adulthood. Montaigne’s mother survived him too. One almost gets the impression that, between them, they drove him into an early grave.

Some of the best information about Françoise’s character dates from her old age, long after Montaigne’s time.
By then, she had become very pious. Her daughter’s second husband, Charles de Gamaches, described her as observing fasts every Friday and for half of Lent, even at seventy-seven years old.
She kept up an intense correspondence with a spiritual adviser, Dom Marc-Antoine de Saint-Bernard; several letters survive. He sent her gifts of oranges and lemons; she sent him quince marmalade and hay. She often wrote to him about her money worries and legal affairs. Her last letter shows relief over some business deal: “By this God has given me a means of supporting this house of my late husband and my children.” The tone is sometimes passionate: “Truly I do not know whether I would not rather choose to die than to know that you are going away.” On the other hand, she feared for her adviser’s safety if he traveled to visit her: “I would rather die than have you take the road in this miserable weather.” As a young woman, she was probably less fretful, but her preoccupation with matters of money and law may have been a constant. At the very least, one can venture to state that she was more alert to practical concerns than Montaigne. This was not difficult: so was almost everyone, if his own account is to be believed.

Françoise and her husband usually spent their days in separate parts of the château complex. Montaigne went to his tower and she went to hers, at the other end of the boundary wall: the “Tour de Madame.” (After being
converted into a pigeon loft in the early nineteenth century, the tower collapsed, and does not survive today.) This left the main building as the domain of Montaigne’s mother, who remained there through most of her son’s marriage, until about 1587. It looks as if the towers were adapted as retreats partly so the young couple could get away both from each other and from her. In his writing, Montaigne remains silent about his mother’s presence in their lives; when he mentions playing card games with his family in the evenings, he gives no indication that Granny was playing too.

This image of a family dispersed around the property is a sad one. But there must have been days when spirits were lighter, and in any case, nowhere on the estate would have felt solitary or empty. People were always around: servants, employees, guests and their entourages, sometimes children. Montaigne himself did not brood in his tower like a Gormenghast earl: he liked to be out walking. “My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down.
My mind will not budge unless my legs move it.” And separation of male and female lifestyles was normal. Husband and wife were expected to have different realms; new or modernized properties were often designed with this in mind. In 1452, Leon Battista Alberti recommended in his
De re aedificatoria
(On Building), “The husband and wife must have separate bedrooms, not only to ensure that the husband be not disturbed by his wife, when she is about to give birth or is ill, but also to allow them, even in summer, an uninterrupted night’s sleep.”
The only differences in the Montaigne household were that an entire outdoor gallery divided their “rooms,” and that his tower was also his workplace.

Was it a good marriage, by the standards of the time? Some commentators have seen it as disastrous; others as typical of its era and even good. On balance, it does not seem to have been a terrible relationship, merely a mildly unsatisfactory one. It is probably best summed up, as Montaigne’s biographer Donald Frame suggested, by the remark in the
Essays:
“Whoever supposes, to see me look sometimes coldly, sometimes lovingly, on my wife, that either look is feigned, is a fool.”

Genuine affection is implied in Montaigne’s decision to dedicate one of his earliest publications to Françoise: La Boétie’s translation of the letter written by Plutarch to his own wife following the death of their child. Uxorious dedications were not fashionable; they could be seen as quaint
and rustic. Montaigne remarks defiantly, “Let us let them talk … You and me, my wife, let us live in the old French way.”
His dedication has a warm tone, and he even says, “I have, so I believe, none more intimate than you,” which puts her on a level close to La Boétie’s.

Whatever affection he felt for Françoise probably built up after marriage rather than before. He had entered into wedlock like an unresisting prisoner being put into handcuffs. “Of my own choice, I would have avoided marrying Wisdom herself, if she had wanted me. But say what we will, the custom and practice of ordinary life bears us along.” He did not really mind having such business arranged for him: he often felt that other people had better sense than he did anyway. But he still needed persuasion, being in an “ill-prepared and contrary” state of mind. Had he been free to choose, he would not have been the marrying kind at all. “Men with unruly humors 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.”