Essays — Commentary

In brief

In February 1571, on his thirty-eighth birthday, Michel de Montaigne gave up his post in the Bordeaux courts and retired to his family estate in Périgord, with a library in a tower. His mind “creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters” that he began to write them down, “hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself” (Book I, ch. 8). What he wrote he called essais: attempts, tests, weighings. The first two books appeared at Bordeaux in 1580, a third came with the Paris edition of 1588, and a further edition enlarged from his last notes was published in 1595, three years after his death. There are 107 chapters, on thumbs and cannibals, coaches and kidney stones, how to die and what to do about an erection that fails.

The subject under all of them is announced in the note to the reader: “Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book” (To the Reader). It sounds like vanity and he calls it that. The surprise is how much of the world comes in by that door.

The argument

The Essays have no thesis in the ordinary sense, and Montaigne says why at the start of Book III’s second essay: “Others form man; I only report him.” The world is in motion, he himself is in motion, so “I do not paint its being, I paint its passage” (Book III, ch. 2). A few lines on comes the claim that justifies the whole enterprise: “every man carries the entire form of human condition.” If so, an honest report on one ordinary man is moral philosophy, and needs no heroes.

That is his quarrel with the ancients he loves. He begins among the Stoics. An early essay opens on Cicero’s saying “that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die”, and recommends thinking about death constantly (Book I, ch. 19). Then he is thrown from his horse and nearly killed, and finds that dying felt close to pleasant: he “took a pleasure in languishing and letting myself go” (Book II, ch. 6). By the last book, after plague and civil war, he has watched peasants die without any philosophy, and the rehearsal looks like wasted effort: “If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will, at the time, fully and sufficiently instruct you” (Book III, ch. 12). Pierre Villey made this a march from Stoic to sceptic to follower of nature. Later readers find it too tidy, and they are right: Montaigne kept adding to the early essays to the end, so the stages lie on top of each other.

The centre of the scepticism is the “Apology for Raimond Sebond”, some 75,000 words here, which sets out to defend a Catalan theologian and ends by dismantling human reason. “When I play with my cat who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?” His motto is a question, “What do I know?” (Book II, ch. 12). Of witch trials he writes that it is “setting a man’s conjectures at a very high price upon them to cause a man to be roasted alive” (Book III, ch. 11). It also made him a conservative who stayed a Catholic and obeyed custom, because nobody could prove a change would be better. That is where the book is most open to attack.

The final chapter turns the argument into a way of life. “We are great fools. ‘He has passed his life in idleness,’ say we.” Its last pages say that “when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech” (Book III, ch. 13).

The shape of the book

Book I has 57 chapters, many short and built from examples out of Plutarch and the chronicles. Book II has 37, with the giant “Apology” at its middle; “Of Thumbs” runs to under 350 words. Book III has only 13, and “Of Vanity” and “Of Experience” each pass 24,000 words. As he goes on, the anecdotes thin, the essays lengthen, and titles stop predicting subjects: “Of Coaches” turns into a lament for Mexico and Peru.

The plan of Book I is hidden in “Of Friendship”. A painter, he says, puts his best picture in the middle of a wall and fills the space around it with grotesques. “And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies” (Book I, ch. 27). The picture was to be La Boétie’s Voluntary Servitude. When Protestant pamphleteers printed it as a call against the crown, he dropped it and put twenty-nine of his friend’s sonnets there. Those too came out in his last revision, leaving the heading alone (Book I, ch. 28). So the book is arranged round a gap the size of a dead man.

A, B and C

Montaigne wrote in Book II, “I never correct my first by any second conceptions” (Book II, ch. 37). That is half true. He rarely retracted, but he added all the time, and modern editors mark three strata. A is the text of 1580. B is what he added for the Paris edition of 1588, including all of Book III. C is what he wrote from 1588 until his death in September 1592, published in 1595. Read with the letters, the book shows an older man interrupting a younger one, often in the same sentence.

The C layer survives in his hand. The Bordeaux copy is a 1588 edition whose margins hold about 1,300 corrections and additions, now in the municipal library there. The most famous sentence in the book was built there. Asked why he loved La Boétie, he says in print only that it cannot be expressed; in the margin he adds “because it was he”, and later, in different ink, “because it was I”.

It is also a puzzle. The 1595 edition differs from it in many places, which suggests Marie de Gournay worked from a second annotated copy, now lost. For two centuries readers mostly had her text. In the twentieth century the Bordeaux copy displaced it, through the municipal edition of Strowski and Gébelin (1906 to 1933) and Villey’s of 1922, later revised by Saulnier. The Pléiade edition of 2007 went back to 1595. Neither is simply what Montaigne meant, since he never finished. The numbering differs too: the 1595 text moved one essay from fourteenth place in Book I to fortieth, so chapters 14 to 39 of Book I here are one lower than in Frame or Screech, and this “Of Cannibals” is their I.31.

The voice

Emerson’s praise remains the best: “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” The prose moves by association and leaves its joints showing. “Upon Some Verses of Virgil” is an old man’s long essay on sex, which concludes, against much he has said elsewhere, “that males and females are cast in the same mould” (Book III, ch. 5).

The candour has a boundary. “Of Friendship” dismisses “the ordinary talent of women” as unequal to friendship. Of the children who died he writes “I lost two or three at nurse” (Book I, ch. 40). Five of his six daughters died young, so the vagueness is itself evidence of what he could bear to look at. The sentence that sums up the method is a late addition: “I have no more made my book than my book has made me” (Book II, ch. 18).

Of Cannibals

“Of Cannibals” shows what doubt can do. Montaigne had in his house a man who lived for ten or twelve years in Villegaignon’s French colony in Brazil, and from him he describes the Tupinambá: their food, poems, wars, and the ritual eating of prisoners. He grants the horror and turns it round. “I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.” Europeans who torture the living have no standing: “I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead” (Book I, ch. 30).

The end is the best of it. Three Tupi men at Rouen, where the boy king Charles IX then was, are asked what struck them most. They wonder why armed guards obey a child, and why men “full and crammed with all manner of commodities” are not attacked by their “halves” begging at the door. The essay closes on a shrug aimed at his readers: “All this does not sound very ill, and the last was not at all amiss, for they wear no breeches.” This is a noble savage drawn from hearsay, and still remarkable for its date. “Of Coaches” returns to it in anger: “So many cities levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearl and pepper” (Book III, ch. 6).

The stone and the office

Kidney stones began around 1578, when he was forty-five. His father had “died wonderfully tormented with a great stone in his bladder”, and he had dreaded the disease from childhood (Book II, ch. 37). The stone set him travelling in 1580 and 1581 to the spas of Germany and Italy, keeping a journal not printed until the eighteenth century; in Rome the papal censor examined the Essays and left the changes to his conscience. Pain becomes a form of knowledge in the last essay: he asks what can match the moment when, “by the voiding of a stone”, health returns as by a flash of lightning (Book III, ch. 13).

He was at the baths near Lucca in September 1581 when he learned he had been elected Mayor of Bordeaux, his father’s old post. He served two terms, to 1585, moderating between Catholics and Protestants. His account of it holds a famous sentence: “The Mayor of Bordeaux and Montaigne have ever been two by very manifest separation” (Book III, ch. 10). When plague struck the city at the end of his term, he wrote to the town council declining to enter for the handover, asking whether the election was worth “the risk I should run by going into the town” (Letter XI). Readers still argue over that letter. Plague then reached his own estate, and he led his household from refuge to refuge (Book III, ch. 12).

The people

Étienne de La Boétie

La Boétie was a Bordeaux magistrate, poet and classicist, and his friend for just four years. “We were halves throughout”, Montaigne writes; everything since, compared with those years, is “nothing but smoke, an obscure and tedious night” (Book I, ch. 27). When La Boétie died in August 1563, Montaigne sat with him through the illness and described it to his father (Letter I). The dying man left him his library. My own guess is that the essays are talk meant for the one reader he trusted, and go on because that reader is gone.

Marie de Gournay

Marie de Gournay (1565 to 1645) taught herself Latin, read the Essays at about eighteen, and sought out the author in Paris in 1588. He stayed with her family and she became his adopted daughter, his fille d’alliance. His widow sent her an annotated copy, and she produced the edition of 1595 and went on correcting it. She was an author in her own right, whose Equality of Men and Women (1622) makes the case the essays only glance at. A passage in Book II praises her lavishly, as “my adopted daughter; and certainly beloved by me more than paternally” (Book II, ch. 17). It is not in the Bordeaux copy, and scholars have long disputed its warrant.

Readers and critics

Pascal took much from Montaigne and could not forgive him: the Pensées speak of Montaigne’s foolish plan to paint himself, his “sot projet”. The Church put the Essays on the Index in 1676. Nietzsche thought that such a man’s writing had added to the joy of living on this earth, Flaubert told a correspondent to read him in order to live, and Emerson made him the type of the sceptic in Representative Men (1850). Virginia Woolf’s essay in The Common Reader (1925) ends on the motto, “Que scais-je?”. Erich Auerbach gave him a chapter of Mimesis, “L’Humaine Condition”, and Jean Starobinski’s Montaigne in Motion is the subtlest modern study.

Afterlives

Bacon’s Essays took the title in 1597, and the English essay runs on from there. Shakespeare read Florio’s translation of 1603: Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth in The Tempest, Act II, scene 1, follows “Of Cannibals” closely, as Edward Capell noticed in the eighteenth century. Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live (2010) brought him a new audience.

How to read it

Know what this English is. The free complete text is Charles Cotton’s translation of 1685–6 as revised by William Carew Hazlitt in 1877, all 107 chapters, with a Life and sixteen letters: Project Gutenberg #3600. Gutenberg also has it in separate volumes, but this file is the whole.
Know its weaknesses. Cotton is brisk, but Hazlitt’s preface says that he kept “inserting paragraphs and words” and left parts out, and Hazlitt mended this by collating one nineteenth-century French edition (preface). It does not mark the A, B and C layers, it uses the old chapter order, and some errors remain: Cotton has the “Parliament” of Bordeaux electing the mayor, where the same file’s Life has “The gentlemen of Bordeaux”. Bracketed notes sit in the text, and transcription slips survive.
Buy Frame or Screech for serious reading. Donald Frame’s translation (1957) marks the layers and is plain and careful. M. A. Screech’s (1991) also marks them, adds the 1595 variants, and keeps the quotations in the original beside a literal English. John Florio’s of 1603 is the one Shakespeare knew, exuberant and free. Gutenberg’s catalogue shows no complete Florio; Greenblatt and Platt’s selection, Shakespeare’s Montaigne, is a good way in.
Do not start at the start. Book I opens with its thinnest chapters. Try “Of Friendship”, “Of Cannibals”, “Of Repentance”, then “Of Experience”, and take the “Apology” last, in pieces.