The Complete Essays (17 page)

13. Ceremonial at the meeting of kings

[Here Montaigne still considers his
Essays
as a
‘rhapsodie’ (
that is, a ‘confused medley’ of disparate pieces strung together
).
His term also suggests that there is an element of extravagant irrationality involved in his work.]

[A] No topic is so vain that it does not deserve a place in this confused medley of mine.

Our normal rules lay down that it would be a marked discourtesy towards an equal and even more so towards the great if we were to fail to be at home after he has warned that he must pay us a visit. Indeed Queen Margaret of Navarre asserts in this connection that it would be impolite for a nobleman to leave his house even (as is frequently done) to go and meet the person who is paying the visit, no matter how great he may be – since it is more civil and more respectful to wait to receive him when he does arrive – if for no other reason, for fear of mistaking the road he will come by: it suffices that we accompany him when he takes his leave.

[B] Personally I often neglect both these vain obligations: in my home I have cut out all formalities. Does anyone take offence? What of it? It is better that I offend him once than myself all the time – that would amount to servitude for life! What is the use in fleeing from the slavery of the Court if we then go and drag it back to our lairs?

[A] The normal rule governing all our interviews is that it behoves the lesser to arrive at the appointment first, since it is the privilege of the more prominent to keep others waiting. Yet at the meeting arranged between Pope Clement and King Francis at Marseilles, the King first made all necessary arrangements and then withdrew from the town, allowing the Pope two or three days to effect his entry and to rest before he then returned to find him.
¹

It was the same at the entry of Pope and Emperor into Bologna: the Emperor made arrangements for the Pope to be there first, himself arriving afterwards.
²

It is said to be the normal courtesy when princes such as these arrange a conference that the greatest should arrive at the appointed place before all the others, and especially before the one on whose territory the meeting takes place. We incline to explain this as a way of showing that it is the greater whom the lesser are coming to visit: they call on him, not he on them.

[C] Not only does every country have its own peculiar forms of politeness but so does every city and every profession. From childhood I was quite carefully trained in etiquette and I have always lived in sufficiently good company not to be ignorant of the rules of our French variety: I could even teach it. I like to keep to those rules, but not so abjectly as to constrict my daily life. Some forms of politeness are bothersome; provided they are omitted with discretion and not out of ignorance, there is no loss of elegance. I have often seen men rude from an excess of politeness, men boring you with courtesies.

Nevertheless to know how to be elegantly at ease with people is a useful accomplishment: like grace and beauty, it encourages the hesitant beginnings of fellowship and intimacy; as a result it opens the way to our learning from the examples of others and to ourselves providing and showing an example, if it is worth noting and passing on.

14. That the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have
of them

[The [A] text of this chapter
(
in which Montaigne reflects on standard philosophical arguments, especially Stoic paradoxes on pain and death
)
seems to date from about 1572. Later additions make it more personal and, after his own experience of pain and distress, weaken the force of the Classical commonplaces. Already in germ here are arguments developed in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’ and the final chapter, ‘On experience’. The moral concerns are restricted to the domain of philosophy, a domain in which revealed religion properly has no part to play.]

[A] There is an old Greek saying that men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them.
¹
If that assertion could be proved to be always true everywhere it would be an important point gained for the comforting of our wretched human condition. For if ills can only enter us through our judgement it would seem to be in our power either to despise them or to deflect them towards the good: if the things actually do throw themselves on our mercy why do we not act as their masters and accommodate them to our advantage? If what we call evil or torment are only evil or torment insofar as our mental apprehension endows them with those qualities then it lies within our power to change those qualities. And if we did have such a choice and were free from constraint we would be curiously mad to pull in the direction which hurts us most, endowing sickness, poverty or insolence with a bad and bitter taste when we could give them a pleasant one, Fortune simply furnishing us with the matter and leaving it to us to supply the form. Let us see whether a case can be made for what we call evil not being an evil in itself or (since it amounts to the same) whether at least it is up to us to endow it with a different savour and aspect.

If the original essence of the thing which we fear could confidently
lodge itself within us by its own authority it would be the same in all men. For all men are of the same species and, in varying degrees, are all furnished with the same conceptual tools and instruments of judgement. But the diversity of the opinion which we have of such things clearly shows that they enter us only by means of compromises: one man in a thousand may perhaps lodge them within himself in their true essence, but when the others do so they endow them with a new and contrary essence.

Our main enemies are held to be death, poverty and pain. Yet everyone knows that death, called the dreadest of all dreadful things, is by others called the only haven from life’s torments, our natural sovereign good, the only guarantor of our freedom, the common and ready cure of all our ills;
²
some await it trembling and afraid: others [C] bear it more easily than life.
³
[B] One man complains that death is too available:
⁴

Mors, utinam pavidos vita subducere nolles,
Sed virtus te sola daret
.

[O Death! Would that thou didst scorn to steal the coward’s life; would that only bravery could win thee.]

But leaving aside such boasting valour, Theodorus replied to Lysimachus who was threatening to kill him, ‘Quite an achievement, that, matching the force of a poisonous fly!’
⁵
We find that most of the philosophers either deliberately went to meet death or else hastened and helped it along. [A] And how many of the common people
⁶
can we see, led forth not merely to die but to die a death mixed with disgrace and grievous torments, yet showing such assurance (some out of stubbornness, others from a natural simplicity) that we may perceive no change in their normal behaviour: they settle their family affairs and commend themselves to those they love, singing their hymns, preaching and addressing the crowd – indeed even including a few jests and drinking the health of their acquaintances every bit as well as Socrates did. When one man was being led to the gallows he asked not to be taken through such-and-such a street: there was a tradesman there who might arrest him for an old debt!
Another asked the executioner not to touch his throat: he was ticklish and did not want to burst out laughing! When the confessor promised another man that he would sup that day at table with Our Lord, he said, ‘You go instead: I’m on a fast.’ Yet another asked for a drink; when the executioner drank of it first, he declined to drink after him – ‘for fear of the pox’! And everybody knows that tale of the man of Picardy who was on the scaffold when they showed him a young woman who was prepared to marry him to save his life (as our laws sometimes allow): he gazed at her, noticed that she had a limp, and said, ‘Run up the noose: she’s lame!’ A similar story is told of a man in Denmark, who was condemned to be beheaded: they offered him similar terms, but he refused the young woman they brought because she had sagging jowls and a pointed nose.
⁷
In Toulouse when a man-servant was accused of heresy, the only justification he would give for his belief was to refer to that of his master, a young undergraduate who was in gaol with him: he preferred to die rather than accept that his master could be mistaken. When King Louis XI took Arras, many of the citizens let themselves be hanged rather than cry ‘Long live the King.’
⁸

[C] Even today in the Kingdom of Narsinga the wives of their priests are buried alive with their dead husbands. All other wives are burned alive at their husbands’ funeral, not merely with constancy but with gaiety. And when they cremate the body of their dead king, all his wives and concubines, his favourites and a multitude of dignatories and servants of every kind, trip so lightly towards the pyre to cast themselves into it with their master that they apparently hold it an honour to be his comrades in death.
⁹

[A] Among the lowly souls of Fools, some have been found who refused to give up clowning even in death. When the hangman sent one of them swinging from the rope he cried out his regular catch-phrase: ‘Let her run with the wind.’ Another jester lay dying on a palliasse in front of the fire; the doctor asked him where it hurt: ‘Between that bench and this fire,’ he replied. And when the priest was about to administer the last rites and was fumbling about to anoint his feet (which were all twisted up and retracted), ‘You will find them,’ he said, ‘at the end of my legs!’ When exhorted to charge someone to intercede with God, he inquired, ‘Is anyone going to see Him?’ When the other replied, ‘You will soon, if God so wishes,’ he exclaimed: ‘Now, if I could only get there by tomorrow
evening, I…’ – ‘Just think about your intercessions,’ continued the other; ‘You will be there soon enough.’ – ‘In that case I had better wait,’ he said, ‘and deliver my intercessions in person.’
¹⁰

I have heard my father tell how places were taken and retaken so many times in our recent wars in Milan that the people became weary of so many changes of fortune and firmly resolved to die: a tally of at least twenty-five heads of family took their own lives in one single week. That incident was similar to what occurred in the city of the Xanthians who, besieged by Brutus, rushed out headlong, men, women and children, with so furious an appetite for death that to achieve it they omitted nothing that is usually done to avoid it; Brutus was able to save but a tiny number.
¹¹

[C] Any opinion is powerful enough for somebody to espouse it at the cost of his life. The first article in that fair oath that Greece swore – and kept – in the war against the Medes was that every man would rather exchange life for death than Persian laws for Greek ones. In the wars of the Turks and the Greeks how many men can be seen preferring to accept the cruellest of deaths rather than to renounce circumcision for baptism?

That is an example which all religions are capable of. When the Kings of Castile banished the Jews from their lands, King John of Portugal sold them sanctuary in his territories at eight crowns a head, on condition that they would have to leave by a particular day when he would provide vessels to transport them to Africa. The day duly arrived after which they were to remain as slaves if they had not obeyed: but too few ships were provided; those who did get aboard were treated harshly and villanously by the sailors who, apart from many other indignities, delayed them at sea, sailing this way and that until they had used up all their provisions and were forced to buy others from them at so high a price and over so long a period that they were set ashore with the shirts they stood up in. When the news of this inhuman treatment reached those who had remained behind, most resolved to accept slavery; a few pretended to change religion. When Emmanuel, [’95] John’s successor, [C] came to the throne he first set them all free; then he changed his mind, giving them time to void his kingdom and assigning three ports for their embarkation. When the good-will he had shown in granting them their freedom had failed to convert them to Christianity, he hoped (said Bishop Osorius, the best Latin historian of our times) that they would be brought to it by the hardship of
having to expose themselves as their comrades had done to thievish seamen and of having to abandon a land to which they had grown accustomed and where they had acquired great wealth, in order to cast themselves into lands foreign and unknown. But finding his hopes deceived and the Jews determined to make the crossing, he withdrew two of the ports he had promised in order that the length and difficulty of the voyage would make some of them think again – or perhaps it was to pile them all together in one place so as the more easily to carry out his design, which was to tear all the children under fourteen from their parents and to transport them out of sight and out of contact, where they could be taught our religion. This deed is said to have produced a dreadful spectacle, as the natural love of parents and children together with their zeal for their ancient faith rebelled against this harsh decree: it was common to see fathers and mothers killing themselves or – an even harsher example – throwing their babes down wells out of love and compassion in order to evade that law. Meanwhile the allotted time ran out: they had no resources, so returned to slavery. Some became Christians: even today a century later few Portuguese trust in their sincerity or in that of their descendants, even though the constraints of custom and of long duration are as powerful counsellors as any other.
¹²
Cicero says:
‘Quoties non modo ductores nostri sed universi etiam exercitus ad non dubiam mortem concurrerunt?’
[How often have not only our generals but entire armies charged to their death?]
¹³
[B] I witnessed one of my friends energetically pursuing death with a real passion, rooted in his mind by many-faceted arguments which I could not make him renounce; quite irrationally, with a fierce, burning hunger, he seized upon the first death which presented itself with a radiant nimbus of honour.

[A] In our own times there are many examples of even children killing themselves for fear of some slight setback. (In this connection one of the Ancients said, ‘What shall we not go in fear of if we fear what cowardice itself has chosen for its refuge?’)
¹⁴
If I were to thread together a long list of
people of all sorts, of both sexes and of all schools of thought, who even in happier times have awaited death with constancy or have willingly sought it – not merely to fly from the ills of this life but in some cases simply to fly from a sense of being glutted with life and in others from hope of a better mode of being elsewhere – I would never complete it: they are so infinite in number that, in truth, I would find it easier to list those who did fear death. One case only: the philosopher Pyrrho happened to be aboard ship during a mighty storm; to those about him whom he saw most terrified he pointed out an exemplary pig, quite unconcerned with the storm; he encouraged them to imitate it.
¹⁵
Dare we conclude that the benefit of reason (which we praise so highly and on account of which we esteem ourselves to be lords and masters of all creation) was placed in us for our torment? What use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the calm and repose which we would enjoy without it and if it makes our condition worse than that of Pyrrho’s pig? Intelligence was given us for our greater good: shall we use it to bring about our downfall by fighting against the design of Nature and the order of the Universe, which require each creature to use its faculties and resources for its advantage?

Fair enough, you may say: your rule applies to death, but what about want? And what have you to say about pain which [C] Aristippus, Hieronymus and
¹⁶
[A] the majority of sages judge to be the [C] ultimate [A] evil?
¹⁷
Even those who denied this in words accepted it in practice: Possidonius was tormented in the extreme by an acutely painful illness; Pompey came to see him and apologized for having picked on so inappropriate a time for hearing him discourse on philosophy: ‘God forbid,’ said Possidonius, ‘that pain should gain such a hold over me as to hinder me from expounding philosophy or talking about it.’ And he threw himself into the theme of contempt for pain. Meanwhile pain played her part and pressed hard upon him. At which he cried, ‘Pain, do your worst! I will never say you are an evil!’
¹⁸
A great fuss is made about this story, but what does it imply about his contempt for pain? He is arguing about words: if those stabbing pangs do not trouble him, why does he break off what he was saying? Why does he think it so important not to
call
pain an evil?