How to Live (37 page)

Churches played an important part in Montaigne’s tour, not because he was addicted to prayer, but because he was so curious about their practices. He observed the Protestant churches of Germany with as much interest as the Catholic ones of Italy. In Augsburg, he witnessed the christening of a child.
On the way out (having already been unmasked as a stranger) he asked many questions about the process. In Italy, he visited synagogues, and “had quite a talk with them about their ceremonies.” He also observed a Jewish circumcision, in a private house.

Odd events and human narratives of all kinds appealed to him. In the early stages of the trip, in Plombières-les-Bains in Lorraine, he met a soldier who had a half-white beard and one white eyebrow.
The man told Montaigne that both had changed color in a single day when his brother died, because he wept for hours with a hand covering one side of his face. Nearby, in Vitry-le-François, he was regaled with stories about seven or eight girls in the area who had “plotted together” to dress and live as men. One married a woman and lived with her for several months—“to her satisfaction, so they say”—until someone reported the case to the authorities and she was hanged. Another story in the same region concerned a man named Germain who had been a girl until the age of twenty-two, when a set of “virile instruments” popped out one day as he leaped over an obstacle. A folk song arose in the town, warning girls not to open their legs too wide when they jumped in case the same thing happened to them.

Montaigne was fascinated by differences in eating habits—always an obvious point of cultural comparison for any traveler. In Switzerland, goblets were refilled with wine from a distance using a long-beaked vessel, and, after the meat course, everyone tossed their plates into a basket in the middle of the table. People ate with knives, “hardly ever put their hands into
the dish,” and had minuscule napkins only six inches square, despite their liking for messy sauces and soups. More strangeness awaited in Swiss bedrooms: “Their beds are raised so high that commonly you climb into them by steps; and almost everywhere they have little beds under the big ones.”

Everything engaged Montaigne’s attention, or that of his secretary, who was writing at his direction. At an inn in Lindau, a cage full of birds ran along one entire wall of the dining room, with alleyways and brass wires so that the birds could hop from one end of the room to the other. In Augsburg, they met a group taking two ostriches on leashes as presents to the duke of Saxony. Montaigne also noticed, in that city, that “they dust their glassware with a hair-duster attached to the end of a stick.” And he was intrigued by the city’s multiple remote-controlled gates, which closed off chambers in turn like locks in a canal, so that aggressors could not force their way through.

Everywhere they went, they visited fashionable fountains and water gardens, good for hours of sadistic entertainment. In the gardens of the Fugger family in Germany, a wooden walkway leading between two fishponds concealed brass jets primed to spray unsuspecting ladies and gentlemen as they passed.
Elsewhere in the same garden, you could press a button to shoot a spout of water into the face of anyone who looked at a particular fountain. A Latin sign in the garden read, “You were looking for trifling amusements; here they are; enjoy them.” Apparently Montaigne’s party did.

Great art seemed to impress Montaigne less, or at least he says little about it, only occasionally commenting on such works as the “very beautiful and excellent statues by Michelangelo” in Florence.
The
Essays
also contain little about visual art. He filled his tower with frescos, so must have had some taste for pictures, yet he seems to have had little desire to write about them—although the paint was barely dry on so much Renaissance art throughout Italy.

This omission was held against him by some later readers of the journal, especially the Romantics, who became its first audience, for the manuscript turned up in a trunk at the château only in 1772.
Readers fell on the discovery with excitement, but emerged disappointed with what they found
there. Along with a better appreciation of art, eighteenth-century readers would have liked sublime gushings about the beauty of the Alps, and melancholy meditations on the ruins of Rome. Instead, they got a record of Montaigne’s urinary blockages interspersed with closely observed, piquant, but non-sublime details about the inns, food, technology, manners, and social practices at each stop. People were less than enthralled to learn, from the secretary, that “the water that Monsieur de Montaigne drank on Tuesday caused him three stools,” and that two days later another dose of spa water was effective “both in front and behind.”
They were no happier when Montaigne himself took over the diary-writing and told them that he had voided a stone “as big and long as a pine nut, but as thick as a bean at one end, and having, to tell the truth, exactly the shape of a prick.” The only thing which Swiss and German readers, at least, could enjoy was the fact that the journal was also full of compliments about their lands, especially the well-designed stoves of the Swiss.

The muted response to the work by its first audience seems to have set the tone for its reception ever since; it has always been regarded as a poor cousin to the
Essays
. Yet it makes for a better read than any number of overblown Romantic travelogues, precisely because it remains so tied to detail. It has little beds under big beds, messy Swiss sauces, room-sized birdcages, circumcisions, sex changes, and ostriches: what’s not to like?

Another appealing feature of the journal is that it allows the secretary to give us a portrait of Montaigne from the outside—a portrait which turns out to be remarkably consistent with the self-reflective Montaigne of the
Essays
. The reader sees Montaigne exerting himself to shake off all national prejudices, just as one might expect him to. He seems enthusiastic and full of curiosity, but sometimes also selfish, dragging his grumbling entourage off to places they could see no point in visiting. There is even the odd hint that he waffled too much in formal orations, despite (or perhaps because of) his lack of interest in them. In Basel, after Montaigne was subjected to “a long welcoming speech” at dinner, the secretary writes that he gave an equally “long reply.” And in Schaffhausen, Montaigne was presented with a gift of wine—“not without several ceremonious speeches on both sides.”

There were fewer demands on Montaigne’s oratorical powers once they reached Italy, which they did on October 28, 1580. Yet, the closer they came
to it, the more he questioned how much he really wanted to go there. This was
the
great destination, the center of European culture; Venice and Rome had called to him all his life.
But he now discovered that he preferred less well known places. Had Montaigne had his way, remarked the secretary as they reached the Alps, he might have turned towards Poland or Greece instead, perhaps just to prolong the whole trip. But he met with opposition, and so agreed to follow the Italy route like everyone else. He soon recovered. “I never saw him less tired or complaining less of his pains,” wrote the secretary now, “for his mind was so intent on what he encountered, both on the road and at his lodgings, and he was so eager on all occasions to talk to strangers, that I think this took his mind off his ailment.”

Venice, one of their first major Italian stops, confirmed his fears about overpopular tourist destinations. As the secretary put it, he found it slightly less wonderful than people said it would be. Still, he explored it with no lack of zest, hiring a gondola and meeting all the interesting people he could find, and he was won over by Venice’s bizarre geography, its cosmopolitan population, and its government as an independent republic. It seemed to have some special political magic that other places lacked, engaging in conflicts only when it had something to gain, and maintaining a just government within its own boundaries. Montaigne was also impressed by the way the city’s courtesans lived in dignity and luxury, openly maintained by noblemen and respected by all. He met one of the most famous, Veronica Franco, who had recently survived trial at the hands of the Inquisition and had published a book of correspondence, the
Lettere familiari e diversi
, which she personally presented to Montaigne.

After Venice, they traveled through Ferrara, where Montaigne met Tasso, then Bologna, where they watched a fencing demonstration, and Florence, where they visited trick gardens with seats that squirted water at your bottom when you sat down.
In another garden, the party “had the very amusing experience” of being squirted with water from “an infinite number of tiny holes,” so as to form a shower so fine it was almost a mist.

They carried on, getting ever closer to Rome. On the last day before reaching the city, November 3, 1580, Montaigne was so excited that, for once, he made everyone get up three hours before dawn to travel the last few miles. The road through the outskirts was not promising, all humps and
clefts and potholes, but as they went on they glimpsed the first few ruins, and, at last, the great city itself.

The thrill palled a little as they waited to get through the bureaucracy at the gate; their baggage was searched “down to the smallest articles.” The officials spent an inordinate amount of time examining Montaigne’s books. Rome was the domain of the Pope himself: thought crimes were taken seriously here. They confiscated a book of hours, simply because it was published in Paris rather than Rome, and some Catholic theological works which Montaigne had picked up in Germany. He considered himself lucky that he was not carrying anything more incriminating. Having been unprepared for such a rigorous inspection, he could easily have had truly heretical books on him, since, as the secretary remarked, he was of such an “inquiring nature.”

Also taken away for examination was a copy of his own
Essays
. This was not returned to him until March, four months later, and it came back with suggested amendments marked in it. The word “fortune” was flagged up in several places, with other odds and ends. But a Church official later told him that the objections were not serious, and that the French friar who had made them was not even particularly competent. “It seemed to me that I left them well pleased with me,” wrote Montaigne in the journal. He duly ignored all the suggestions. Some writers have made much of Montaigne’s defiance of the Inquisition, but he did not have to be a Galileo to stand his ground.

Still, these encounters got Montaigne off to a bad start with Rome; he felt its atmosphere was intolerant. Yet it was also cosmopolitan.
To be a Roman was to be a citizen of the world, which was what Montaigne wanted to be. He accordingly sought Roman citizenship, an honor which was granted towards the end of his four-and-a-half-month stay. This pleased him so much that he transcribed the document in its entirety in a chapter about vanity in the
Essays
. He realized that “vanity” was the right category, but he did not care. “At all events I received much pleasure in having obtained it.”

Rome was so vast and varied that there seemed no limit to the things you could do there. Montaigne could hear sermons or theological disputations.
He could visit the Vatican library and, being granted access to areas that had been closed even to the French ambassador, see precious manuscript
copies of works by his heroes Seneca and Plutarch. He could watch a circumcision, visit gardens and vineyards, and talk to prostitutes. He tried to learn all the latter’s trade secrets, but learned only that they charged a great deal even for conversation, which presumably
was
one of their secrets.

Besides the prostitutes, Montaigne also had an audience with the current octogenarian Pope, Gregory XIII.
The secretary described the ritual in detail. First Montaigne and one of his young traveling companions entered the room where the Pope was seated, and knelt to receive a benediction. They sidled along the wall, then cut across towards him; halfway there, they stopped for another benediction. Then they knelt on a velvet carpet at the Pope’s feet, beside the French ambassador, who was presenting them. The ambassador knelt too, and pulled back the Pope’s robe to expose his right foot, shod in a red slipper with a white cross. The visitors each bent towards this foot and kissed it; Montaigne noted that the Pope lifted his toes a little to make the kiss easier. After this almost erotic performance, the ambassador covered the papal foot again, and rose to deliver a speech about the visitors. The Pope blessed them and said a few words, urging Montaigne to continue in his devotion to the Church. Then he rose to signal their dismissal; they retraced their route across the room in reverse, never turning their backs, and stopping twice to kneel for more benedictions. At last they backed out of the door, and the performance was over. Montaigne had his secretary note, later, that the Pope had spoken with a Bologna accent—“the worst idiom in Italy.” He was “a very handsome old man, of middle height, erect, his face full of majesty, a long white beard, more than eighty years old, as healthy and vigorous for his age as anyone can wish, without gout, without colic, without stomach trouble”—quite different from poor suffering Montaigne, and having a sort of family resemblance to God himself. He seemed “of a gentle nature, not very passionate about the affairs of the world,” which is either very like or very unlike God, depending on your point of view. Gentle or not, this was the same Pope who had once struck medals and commissioned paintings to celebrate the St. Bartholomew’s massacre.

There was no forgetting that Rome was the Pope’s city. Montaigne often saw him conducting ceremonies and taking part in processions. In Holy Week, he watched thousands of people pouring towards St.
Peter’s,
carrying torches and scourging themselves with ropes, some as young as twelve or thirteen years old. They were accompanied by men carrying wine, which they sipped and blew over the ends of the scourges to wet the cords and separate them when they became clotted with blood. “This is an enigma that I do not yet well understand,” wrote Montaigne. The penitents were cruelly wounded, yet they seemed neither to feel pain nor to be entirely serious about what they were doing. They drank plenty of wine themselves and performed the rite “with such nonchalance that you see them talk with one another about other matters, laugh, yell in the street, run, and jump.” As he deduced, most of them were doing it for money: the pious rich had paid them to go through the penance process for them. This mystified him even more: “What do those who hire them do it for, if it is only a counterfeit?”