How to Live (32 page)

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Montaigne is obviously “no poet,” spat one such reader, Philarète Chasles.
Jules Lefèvre-Deumier deplored what he saw as Montaigne’s “stoic
indifference” to another man’s sufferings—which seems a misreading of Montaigne’s passage about Tasso. The real problem was that Romantics took sides. They identified with Tasso in this encounter, not with Montaigne, who represented the uncomprehending world they felt was always opposing them, too. As Nietzsche could have warned Montaigne:

Actually, in this situation, it was Montaigne who was playing the rebel. By singing the praises of moderation and equanimity, and doubting the value of poetic excess, Montaigne was bucking the trend of his own time as much as that of the Romantics. Renaissance readers fetishized extreme states: ecstasy was the only state in which to write poetry, just as it was the only way to fight a battle and the only way to fall in love.
In all three pursuits, Montaigne seems to have had an inner thermostat which switched him off as soon as the temperature rose beyond a certain point. This was why he so admired Epaminondas, the one classical warrior who kept his head when the sound of clashing swords rang out, and why he valued friendship more than passion. “Transcendental humors frighten me,” he said.
The qualities he valued were curiosity, sociability, kindness, fellow-feeling, adaptability, intelligent reflection, the ability to see things from another’s point of view, and “goodwill”—none of which is compatible with the fiery furnace of inspiration.

Montaigne even went so far as to claim that true greatness of the soul is to be found “in mediocrity”—a shocking remark and even, paradoxically, an extreme one.
Most moderns have been so trained to regard mediocrity as a poor, limited condition that it is hard to know what to think when he says this. Is he playing games with the reader again, as some suspect he does when he writes of having a bad memory and a slow intellect? Perhaps he is, to some extent, yet he seems to mean it too. Montaigne distrusts godlike ambitions. For him, people who try to rise above the human manage only to sink to the subhuman. Like Tasso, they seek to transcend the limits, and instead lose their ordinary human faculties. Being truly human means
behaving in a way that is not merely ordinary, but
ordinate
, a word the
Oxford English Dictionary
defines as “ordered, regulated; orderly, regular, moderate.” It means living appropriately, or
à propos
, so that one estimates things at their right value and behaves in the way correctly suited to each occasion.
This is why, as Montaigne puts it, living appropriately is “our great and glorious masterpiece”—grandiose language, but used to describe a quality that is anything but grandiose. Mediocrity, for Montaigne, does not mean the dullness that comes from not bothering to think things through, or from lacking the imagination to see beyond one’s own viewpoint. It means accepting that one is like everyone else, and that one carries the entire form of the human condition. This could not be further removed from Rousseau and his feeling that he is set apart from all humanity. For Montaigne:

He knew, all the same, that human nature does not always conform to this wisdom. Alongside the wish to be happy, emotionally at peace and in full command of one’s faculties, something else drives people periodically to smash their achievements to pieces. It is what Freud called the
thanatos
principle: the drive towards death and chaos. The twentieth-century author Rebecca West
described it thus:

West and Freud both had experience of war, and so did Montaigne: he could hardly fail to notice this side of humanity. His passages about
moderation and mediocrity must be read with one eye always to the French civil wars, in which transcendental extremism brought about subhuman cruelties on an overwhelming scale. The third “trouble” ended in August 1570, and a two-year peace ensued during the period when Montaigne lived on his estate and began work on the
Essays
. But, long before he had finished that work, the peace came to an abrupt and shocking end, with an event that could leave no one in doubt about the dark side of human nature.

L
IKE EARLIER PEACE
agreements, 1570’s Treaty of Saint-Germain displeased everyone. Protestants, always wanting more, thought its terms did not go far enough, as it granted them limited freedom of worship. Catholics thought it went too far; they were anxious that Protestants would take any concessions at all as encouragement. They feared that Protestants would press for an all-out revolution against the legitimate Catholic monarch, and start another war. They were right about there being another war, but wrong about who would be responsible.

Tensions kept rising, and reached a peak during celebrations held in Paris in August 1572 to mark a dynastic wedding between the Catholic Marguerite de Valois and the Protestant Henri de Navarre. The leaders of three main factions came to the ceremony in a grim mood: the moderate Catholic king Charles IX, the radical Protestant leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, and the extremist Catholic duc de Guise. Each faction was haunted by fear of the others. Inflammatory preachers raised the emotional temperature further among ordinary Parisians, urging them to rise up to prevent the wedding and wipe out the heretic leaders while they had the chance.

The marriage went ahead, on August 18, and four days of official festivities followed. No doubt many breathed a sigh of relief when they ended. But late on the final night, August 22, 1572, someone fired an arquebus at the Protestant leader Coligny as he walked back to his house from the Louvre palace, not killing him outright but breaking his arm.

News of the incident spread around town. The next morning, streams of Huguenots came to see Coligny, vowing revenge. Many of them believed (as most historians still do) that the king himself was behind the assassination attempt, together with his mother Catherine de’ Medici—the idea being to nip any potential Protestant rebellion in the bud by removing its leader. If true, this was a miscalculation on Charles’s part. The attack on
Coligny made Protestants angry. More dangerously still, it made Catholics fearful. Expecting Protestants to rise up in response to what had happened, they gathered around the city and prepared to defend themselves. The king was probably unnerved too, and may have reasoned that a dead rebel leader was less dangerous than a wounded one. Apparently on his orders, a royal guard broke into Coligny’s house and finished the botched job by killing the injured man in his bed. This was early on the morning of Sunday, August 24: St. Bartholomew’s Day.

The killers cut off Coligny’s head and dispatched it to the royal palace; it would eventually be embalmed and sent to Rome for the Pope to admire. Meanwhile the rest of the body was thrown out of the window to the street, where a Catholic crowd set fire to it and dragged it around the district. The body fell to pieces as it smoldered, but segments were paraded about and further mutilated for days.

The commotion at Coligny’s house caused further panic among Parisian Catholics as well as Protestants. Catholic gangs rushed onto the streets; they seized and killed any recognizable Protestants, and burst into houses where Protestants were known to live—and where many were sleeping peacefully, having no idea what was going on in the city. The mobs dragged them
outside, slit their throats or tore them to pieces, then set fire to their bodies or threw them in the river. The mayhem attracted larger and larger crowds, and fueled further atrocities. To pick just one reported incident, a man named Mathurin Lussault was killed when he made the mistake of answering his door; his son came down to investigate the noise and was stabbed too. Lussault’s wife, Françoise, tried to escape by leaping from her upstairs window into a neighbor’s courtyard. She broke both her legs. The neighbor helped her, but the attackers burst in and dragged her into the street by her hair. They cut off her hands to get her gold bracelets, then impaled her on a spit; later they dumped her body in the river. The hands, chewed by dogs, were still to be seen outside the building several days later. Similar scenes took place all over the city, and so many bodies were thrown into the Seine that it was said to run red with blood.

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Whatever Charles had intended by the original assassination—if indeed he was responsible—he can hardly have intended this. He now ordered his soldiers to suppress the violence, but it was too late. The killing went on for nearly a week through the districts of Paris, then spread around the rest of the country. In Paris alone, the massacres, which were known for ever more by the name of St. Bartholomew, left up to five thousand dead. By the end some ten thousand had been killed in France. Cities were sucked into the violence like fishing-boats into a tornado: Orléans, Lyon, Rouen, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and countless smaller towns.

It was a
furor
of the kind Montaigne detested even on a traditional battlefield, but here the victims were civilians.
On the whole, so were the killers; only in a few places were soldiers or officials involved. Bordeaux was one of these few. Nothing happened there until October 3, but when it did, it was apparently organized and approved by the fanatical Catholic mayor of the time, Charles de Montferrand, who produced a formal list of targets to be attacked. In most places, the bloodshed was done more chaotically and by people who would have been reasonable folk the rest of the time. In Orléans, the mob stopped at taverns between killings to celebrate, “accompanied by singing, lutes and guitars,” according to one historian. Some groups were composed mainly of women or children. Catholics interpreted the presence of the latter as a sign that God Himself was in favor of the massacres, for He had caused even innocents to take part. In general, many
thought that, since the killings were on no ordinary human scale, they must have been divinely sanctioned. They were not the result of human decisions; they were messages from God
to
humanity, portents of cosmic mayhem just as much as a blighted harvest or a comet in the sky. A medal made in Rome to commemorate the massacres showed the Huguenots struck down, not by fellow mortals, but by an armed angel shining with holy wrath. In general, the new Pope, Gregory XIII, seems to have been pleased with events in France. Apart from the medal, he commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint celebratory frescos in the Sala Regia of the Vatican. The French king likewise took part in processions of thanksgiving, and had two medals struck, one portraying himself as Hercules doing battle with the Hydra, the other depicting him on his throne surrounded by naked corpses and holding a palm frond to represent victory.

Once the Huguenots had collected themselves and gathered armies to fight back, all-out war broke out again. It would continue through the 1570s, with only occasional pauses. The St. Bartholomew’s events formed a dividing line. After this, the wars were more anarchic, and more driven by fanaticism. Besides ordinary battles, much misery was now caused by uncontrolled gangs of soldiers on the rampage, even during supposed peace interludes, when they had no masters and no pay. Peasants sometimes fled and lived wild in the forests rather than wait in town to be attacked and sometimes tortured for the fun of it. This was the state of nature with a
vengeance. In 1579, one provincial lawyer, Jean La Rouvière, wrote to the king to beg help for the rustic poor in his area—“miserable, martyrized, and abandoned men” who lived off the land as best they could, having lost all they had.
Among the horrors he had seen or heard of were tales of people