The Complete Essays (20 page)

That is how I dropped into a third way of life which – and I say what I really feel – is far more enjoyable, certainly, and also more orderly: I make my income and my expenditure run along in tandem: sometimes one pulls ahead, sometimes the other, but only drawing slightly apart. I live from day to day, pleased to be able to satisfy my present, ordinary needs: extraordinary ones could never be met by all the provision in the world.

[C] And it is madness to expect that Fortune will ever supply us with enough weapons to use against herself. We have to fight with our own weapons: fortuitous ones will let us down at the crucial moment. [B] If I do save up now, it is only because I hope to use the money soon – not to purchase lands [C] that I have no use for [B] but to purchase pleasure. [C]
‘Non esse cupidum pecunia est, non esse emacem vectigal est.’
[Not to want means money: not to spend means income.]
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[B] I have no fear, really, that I shall lack anything: nor [C] have I any wish for more.
‘Divitiarum fructus est in copia, copiam declarat satietas.’
[The fruit of riches consists in abundance: abundance is shown by having enough.] [B] I particularly congratulate myself that this amendment of life should have come to me at an age which is naturally inclined to avarice, so ridding me of a vice
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– the most ridiculous of all human madnesses – which is so common among the old.

[C] Pheraulas had experienced both kinds of fortune: he found that an increase in goods did not mean an increased appetite for eating, drinking, sleeping or lying with his wife; on the other hand he did find that the importunate cares of running his estates pressed heavy on his shoulders (as it does on mine); he decided to make one of his loyal friends happy – a poor young man always on the track of riches: he made him a present of all his own wealth, which was extremely great, as well as of everything which was daily accruing to him from the generosity of his good master Cyrus and also from the wars: the condition he made was that the young man should undertake to maintain him and feed him as an honoured guest and friend. Thus they lived thereafter in great happiness, both equally pleased with the change in their circumstances.
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That is a course I would heartily love to imitate! And I greatly praise the lot of an old Bishop whom I know to have so purely and simply entrusted his purse, his revenue and his expenditures to a succession of chosen
servants, that he has let many long years flow by, as ignorant as an outsider of the financial affairs of his own household.
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Trust in another’s goodness is no light testimony to one’s own: that is why God looks favourably on it. And where that Bishop is concerned I know no household which is run more smoothly nor more worthily than his.

Blessed is the man who has ordered his needs to so just a measure that his riches suffice them without worrying him or taking up his time, and without the spending and the gathering breaking into his other pursuits which are quiet, better suited and more to his heart.

[B] So ease or indigence depend on each man’s opinion: wealth, fame and health all have no more beauty and pleasure than he who has them lends to them. [C] For each man good or ill is as
he
finds. The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so: in that way alone does belief endow itself with true reality.

Neither good nor ill is done to us by Fortune: she merely offers us the matter and the seeds: our soul, more powerful than she is, can mould it or sow them as she pleases, being the only cause and mistress of our happy state or our unhappiness. [B] Whatever comes to us from outside takes its savour and its colour from our internal attributes, just as our garments warm us not with their heat but ours, which they serve to preserve and sustain. Shelter a cold body under them and it will draw similar services from them for its coldness: that is how we conserve snow and ice.
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[A] Study to the lazy, like abstinence from wine to the drunkard, is torture; frugal living to the seeker after pleasure, like exercise to the languid idle man, is torment: so too for everything else. Things are not all that painful nor harsh in themselves: it is our weakness, our slackness, which makes them so. To judge great and lofty things we need a mind which is like them: otherwise we attribute to them the viciousness which belongs to ourselves. A straight oar seems bent in water. It is not only seeing which counts: how we see counts too.
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Come on then. There are so many arguments persuading men in a variety of ways to despise death and to endure pain: why do we never find a single one which applies to ourselves? Thoughts of so many different kinds have persuaded others: why cannot we each find the one that suits
our own disposition? If a man cannot stomach a strong purgative and root out his malady, why cannot he at least take a lenitive and relieve it? [C]
‘Opinio est quædam effeminata ac levis, nec in dolore magis, quam eadem in voluptate: qua, cum liquescimus fluimusque mollitia, apis aculeum sine clamore ferre non possumus. Totum in eo est, ut tibi imperes.’
[As much in pain as in pleasure, our opinions are trivial and womanish: we have been melted and dissolved by wantonness; we cannot even endure the sting of a bee without making a fuss. Above all we must gain mastery over ourselves.]
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[A] We cannot evade Philosophy by immoderately pleading our human frailty and the sharpness of pain: Philosophy is merely constrained to [C] have recourse to her unanswerable counter-plea: [A] ‘Living in necessity is bad: but at least there is no necessity that you should go on doing so.
^’
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[C] No one suffers long, save by his own fault. If a man has no heart for either living or dying; if he has no will either to resist or to run away: what
are
we to do with him?

15. One is punished for stubbornly defending a fort without a good reason

[A brief consideration of the limits placed on stubborn bravery by the rules of contemporary warfare. Exceptionally, all Montaigne’s examples are modern ones, with no reference to antiquity.]

[A] Like all other virtues valour has its limits: overstep them, and you tread the path of vice; consequently a man may go right through the dwelling-place of valour into rashness, stubbornness and madness if he does not know where those boundaries lie: yet at their margins they are not easy to pick out. From this consideration was born the custom observed in warfare of punishing even by death those who stubbornly persist in the defence of a fort when, by the very rules of war, it cannot be sustained. Otherwise if there were hope of escaping punishment whole armies would be held up by chicken-coops. At the siege of Pavia, My Lord the Constable de Montmorency was required to cross the Ticino and to take up position in the suburbs of San Antonio: he was delayed by a tower at the foot of a bridge which stubbornly held out until battered down: he hanged every man inside. Another time he accompanied My Lord the Dauphin on his Transalpine expedition. The castle at Villano was taken by force and all the defenders hacked to pieces by the soldiers in their frenzy, excepting only the Captain and his ensign; for the same reason he ordered both of them to be strangled to death by hanging. Captain Martin Du Bellay, when Governor of Turin in the same territory, similarly hanged Captain Saint-Bony after all his men had been massacred at the taking of his fort.
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Yet judgements about the strength or weakness of a fort depend upon estimates of the relative strength of the attacking forces. A man could justly be obstinate when faced with a couple of culverins who would be out of his mind if he resisted thirty cannons. And where you have to take into account the greatness of the conquering prince, the reputation he has and the respect due to him, there is a risk of the balance being weighted in his
favour; that is why some have so great an opinion of themselves and of their resources that they deem it unreasonable that anyone whatsoever be thought worthy of resisting them: when any are found doing so they put them all to the sword… while their fortune lasts. That can be seen in the form of defiance and the summonses to surrender used by Eastern potentates
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and their successors today: they are proud, arrogant and full of barbaric assertiveness. [C] And in the regions where the Portuguese first penetrated into the Indies they discovered lands where it is universally held to be an inviolable law that an enemy defeated in the presence of the King or his Viceroy is excluded from any consideration of ransom or mercy.
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[B] Above all, then, you must avoid (if you can!) falling into the hands of a judge who is your enemy, victorious and armed.

16. On punishing cowardice

[Renaissance Jurisconsults such as Tiraquellus were concerned to temper the severity of the Law by examining motives and human limitations. Montaigne does so here in a matter of great concern to gentlemen in time of war.]

[A] I once heard a prince, a very great general, maintain that a soldier should not be condemned to death for cowardice: he was at table, being told about the trial of the Seigneur de Vervins who was sentenced to death for surrendering Boulogne.

In truth it is reasonable that we should make a great difference between defects due to our weakness and those due to our wickedness. In the latter we deliberately brace ourselves against reason’s rules, which are imprinted on us by Nature; in the former it seems we can call Nature herself as a defence-witness for having left us so weak and imperfect. That is why a great many
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people believe that we can only be punished for deeds done against our conscience: on that rule is partly based the opinion of those who condemn the capital punishment of heretics and misbelievers as well as the opinion that a barrister or a judge cannot be arraigned if they fail in their duty merely from ignorance.

Where cowardice is concerned the usual way is, certainly, to punish it by disgrace and ignominy. It is said that this rule was first introduced by Charondas the lawgiver, and that before his time the laws of Greece condemned to death those who had fled from battle, whereas he ordered that they be made merely to sit for three days in the market-place dressed as women:
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he hoped he could still make use of them once he had restored their courage by this disgrace – [C]
‘Suffundere malis hominis sanguinem quam effundere.’
[Make the blood of a bad man blush not gush.]
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[A] It seems too that in ancient times the laws of Rome condemned deserters to death: Ammianus Marcellinus tells how the Emperor Julian
condemned ten of his soldiers to be stripped of their rank and then suffer death, ‘following,’ he said, ‘our Ancient laws’. Elsewhere however Julian for a similar fault condemned others to remain among the prisoners under the ensign in charge of the baggage.
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[C] Even the harsh sentences decreed against those who had fled at Cannae and those who in that same war had followed Gnaeus Fulvius in his defeat did not extend to death.

Yet it is to be feared that disgrace, by making men desperate, may make them not merely estranged but hostile.

[A] When our fathers were young the Seigneur de Franget, formerly a deputy-commander in the Company of My Lord Marshal de Châtillon, was sent by My Lord Marshal de Chabannes to replace the Seigneur Du Lude as Governor of Fuentarabia; he surrendered it to the Spaniards. He was sentenced to be stripped of his nobility, both he and his descendants being pronounced commoners, liable to taxation and unfit to bear arms. That severe sentence was executed at Lyons. Later all the noblemen who were at Guyse when the Count of Nassau entered it suffered a similar punishment; and subsequently others still.
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Anyway, wherever there is a case of ignorance so crass and of cowardice so flagrant as to surpass any norm, that should be an adequate reason for accepting them as proof of wickedness and malice, to be punished as such.