How to Live (27 page)

Montaigne deserved some of this: he was, as he admitted, useless around the house. He preferred to leave its management to his wife, who, like his mother, was skilled in such affairs. He liked Françoise’s willingness to take on such responsibility when he went away on his travels or for work; he would probably have been happy to have her do the same when he was there as well. Not being able to do this was one of the main reasons he was generally so glad to leave. “It is pitiful to be in a place where everything you see involves and concerns you,” he wrote.

Looking after the estate must have had its onerous side. “There is always something that goes wrong,” he complained. The main business to be managed was the production of wine, of which the estate could produce tens of thousands of liters in a good year. Not all years were good. Severe weather ruined the harvests in 1572, 1573, and 1574—the years in which Montaigne wrote his first essays. Another bad patch occurred in 1586, when soldiers roamed the nearby countryside, causing havoc. Montaigne managed to recoup some of the losses by using his influence with
parlement
in Bordeaux to sell what little remained of his wine, which shows that he could tackle difficulties when he needed to. His overall grasp of the business may be gauged, however, by his admission that he did not know, until a late stage in life, what was meant by “fermenting wine.”

Montaigne did what he had to, but he confessed that he did not enjoy it, and that therefore he kept it to a minimum. This was why he made no attempt to expand or build on the estate. Pierre had undertaken such projects for the pleasure and challenge of the job—but that was Pierre. He was the sort of man who would today keep himself busy with DIY work, and probably leave half of it unfinished. If his type seems familiar, so too does the Montaigne type, whose two mottoes would surely be “Anything for a quiet life” and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

When he did get an urge to do something, he could apply himself to it with energy. “I stand up well 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 scrutinize a contract properly. He was a mass of inabilities and reluctances:

Montaigne runs through his negative catechism of failings in the same way as he later ran through the list of things absent from the lives of the “cannibals” of Brazil: servants, magistrates, contracts, and private property, but, by the same token, also lying, poverty, treachery, envy, and greed.
It could be a blessing to lack such things.

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 master 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.”

He knew that there was a price to be paid, apart from that of being berated by his wife. People often took advantage of his ignorance. Yet it seemed to him better to lose money occasionally than to waste time tracking every penny and watching his servants’ tiniest movements.
In any case, other
people were swindled too, however much they tried to prevent it. His favorite example of foolishness was a neighbor, the powerful Germain-Gaston de Foix, marquis de Trans, who became a miser and domestic tyrant in old age. His family and servants let him rant, and put up with his tightly rationed issues of food, while all the time helping themselves behind his back. “Everybody is living it up in various corners of his house, gaming, spending, and exchanging stories about his vain anger and foresight.” Still, added Montaigne on second thought, it did not matter, since the old man was convinced that he wielded absolute power in the house, and was therefore as happy as such a person could ever be.

“Nothing costs me dear except care and trouble,” wrote Montaigne.
“I seek only to grow indifferent and relaxed.” One can imagine Pascal’s blood pressure going up on reading this line. What Montaigne claimed to want most for his old age was a son-in-law who would take all his responsibilities away. In reality, had he been patronized and pandered to by an outsider, his love of independence would probably have surged up in protest—and he does follow this remark about the son-in-law with a flurry of contrary statements:

He was not thinking of household management when he wrote this: the subject is his commitments later in life to France’s new king, Henri IV, who seemed to want Montaigne at his beck and call. Montaigne would resist this with a determination verging on insolence—which was very much his attitude to more homely demands. Laziness was only half of his self-description; freedom was the other half. He even fantasized about becoming like Hippias of Elis, a Greek Sophist philosopher of the fifth century
BC
, who learned to be self-sufficient, teaching himself to cook, shave, make his
own clothes and shoes—everything he needed.
It was a fine idea. Still: a self-sufficient Montaigne, mending his doublet with needle and thread, digging his garden, baking bread, tanning leather for his boots? Even Montaigne himself must have found this hard to picture.

As usual, he let the whole topic lie amid contradiction and a spirit of compromise. If his protestations of incompetence failed to save him from a particular responsibility, he would knuckle down and do the job anyway, and probably more conscientiously than he liked to admit.

Nietzsche wrote of certain “free-spirited people” who are perfectly satisfied “with a minor position or a fortune that just meets their needs; for they will set themselves up to live in such a way that a great change in economic conditions, even a revolution in political structures, will not overturn their life with it.”
He adds that such a person will tend to have “cautious and somewhat shortwinded” relationships with those around him. This sounds so much like Montaigne’s home arrangement that you almost wonder if Nietzsche was thinking of him, especially when he adds that this person “must trust that the genius of justice will say something on behalf of its disciple and protégé, should accusatory voices call him poor in love.”

In Montaigne’s case, his own voice was the first to pronounce this awful accusation. Others have taken this as encouragement to repeat it ever since, in a harsh tone, and without either Montaigne’s or Nietzsche’s sense of irony. But nothing in Montaigne’s writing, or his character, was ever so straightforward. However much he tries to persuade us that he is cold and detached, other images rise up before the mind’s eye: Montaigne springing to his feet in
parlement
to plunge into hot debate, Montaigne deep in passionate conversation with La Boétie, even Montaigne playing games for pennies with his wife and daughter by the fireside. Some of his answers to the question of how to live are indeed chilly: mind your own business, preserve your sense of self, stay out of trouble, and keep your room behind the shop. But there is another which is almost the exact opposite. It is …

“T
HERE ARE PRIVATE
, retiring, and inward natures,” writes Montaigne. His is not one of them.

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. There is no need for it to be of a serious nature: what he likes best is “the sharp, abrupt repartee which good spirits and familiarity introduce among friends, bantering and joking wittily and keenly with one another.” 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 judgment 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, 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. His friend Florimond de Raemond described his conversation as “the sweetest and most enriched with graces.” Yet when Montaigne was not feeling sweet, or when he was carried away by the topic of a discussion, he could be vociferous. His passion led him to say things that were indiscreet, and he encouraged others to do the same. Freedom of expression was the law of his house. At the Montaigne estate, he said, there was never any “waiting on people and escorting them here and
away, and other such troublesome prescriptions of our code of manners (oh, what a servile and bothersome practice!).” Guests behaved as they pleased, and those who craved solitude could also go and do their own thing for as long as they liked, without causing offense.

As well as banishing formal etiquette, Montaigne discouraged tedious small talk.
Self-conscious solo performances bored him too. Some of his friends could keep a group rapt for hours with anecdotes, but Montaigne preferred a natural give and take. At official dinners away from home, where the talk was merely conventional, his attention would wander; if someone suddenly addressed him, he would often make inappropriate replies, “unworthy of a child.” He regretted this, for easy conversation in trivial situations was valuable: it opened the path to deeper relationships, and to the more pleasant evenings where one could joke and laugh at ease.

For Montaigne, “relaxation and affability” were not merely useful talents; they were essential to living well.
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. Nietzsche, like the
libertins
, agreed with Montaigne that a humane, sociable understanding was what mattered, although Nietzsche himself found it difficult. His relationships were often traumatic. Yet, in a touching passage of his early book
Human All Too Human
, he wrote:

To Montaigne, most of the time, friendly goodwill came easily. This was fortunate, for he had much need of it both at home and in his professional life. He had to get on well with colleagues in Bordeaux; later, his work required him to charm diplomats, kings, and fearsome warlords further afield. He often had to establish a rapport with opponents blinded by religious fanaticism. Around the estate, too, it was important to socialize with the neighbors—not always easy. They appear from time to time in the
Essays
, often with colorful stories attached: the miserly marquis de Trans, whose family the Foix were very powerful in the region; a Jean de Lusignan, who tired himself by organizing too many parties for his grown-up children; François de La Rochefoucauld, who believed that blowing one’s nose into a handkerchief was a disgusting practice and that it was nicer to use just fingers.
Some noblewomen of the area became dedicatees of individual chapters: Diane de Foix, comtesse de Gurson; Marguerite de Gramond; and Mme d’Estissac, whose son later accompanied Montaigne to Italy. Above all, Montaigne befriended the woman who became the mistress of Henri de Navarre (later to be Henri IV): Diane d’Andouins, comtesse de Guiche et de Gramont, usually known as “Corisande” after a character in one of her favorite chivalric novels.