How to Live (50 page)

All along the way, there have been those who thought he wrote too much about his urinary system, those who thought he needed help with his writing style, and those who found him too cozy; as well as those who found a sage in him, or a second self so close that they were unsure whether they were reading the
Essays
or writing it themselves.

Many of these disparate readings have been transformations of the three great Hellenistic traditions, as transmitted—and altered—by Montaigne. This is natural, since those traditions were the foundation of his thought, and their lines of influence run through the whole of European culture. They can hardly be separated from each other even in their earliest origins; in Montaigne’s modernized version they became more entangled than ever. They are held together above all by their shared pursuit of
eudaimonia
or human flourishing, and by their belief that the best way of attaining it is through equanimity or balance:
ataraxia
. These principles bind them to Montaigne, and through him to all the later readers who come to the
Essays
looking for companionship, or for a practical, everyday wisdom they can
use
.

Modern readers who approach Montaigne asking what he can do for them are asking the same question he himself asked of Seneca, Sextus, and Lucretius—and the same question they asked of
their
predecessors. This is what Virginia Woolf’s chain of minds really means: not a scholarly tradition, but a series of self-interested individuals puzzling over their own lives, yet doing it cooperatively. All share a quality that can simply be thought of as “humanity”: the experience of being a thinking, feeling being who must get on with an ordinary human life—though Montaigne willingly extended the union of minds to embrace other species too.

This is why, for Montaigne, even the most ordinary existence tells us all we need to know:

Indeed, that is just what a common and private life is: a life of the richest stuff imaginable.

Montaigne was so often in poor health in his last few years that he seemed to pass half his time in the borderlands between life and death—that zone he had briefly visited in his prime, after his riding accident. He was not yet old, being only in his late fifties, but he knew that his kidney-stone attacks could kill him at any time, and sometimes he longed for it, so great was the agony.
But these days the stone did not grab him by the ruff like a bullying strongman and pull him up close to death’s tyrannical face. It enticed him “artfully and gently,” leaving him plenty of time to think between attacks. Death looked friendly, just as the Stoics said it should be.

What he had first realized after his fall into unconsciousness was now amply confirmed: nature does everything for you, and there is no need to trouble your head about anything. It leads us by the hand, he wrote, as if “down a gentle and virtually imperceptible slope, bit by bit.”
We hardly need to look where we are going. By making him ill, nature gave him what he had sought for so long:
ataraxia
, and thus
eudaimonia
. The greatest moments of well-being he had known in life came immediately after an attack, when the stone passed through. There was physical relief, but also a liberating spiritual lightness.

He even came to find a similar pleasure in the midst of the attacks themselves. They were still painful, but he learned to delight in their few compensations, including the glow of satisfaction he felt on seeing admiration in other people’s eyes:

Only he knew the truth: that it was easier to joke and keep up conversations in the grip of pain than an observer could ever guess. As his earlier near-death experience had intimated, one’s outward appearance might bear no relation to what was going on in one’s inner world. This time he really was in agony, unlike the moments when he had been ripping at his doublet. Yet he still felt the same insouciance of soul. The experience seemed to touch him lightly.

He drew a similar lesson from the fact of aging in general. It was not that age automatically conferred wisdom. On the contrary, he thought the old were more given to vanities and imperfections than the young. They were inclined to “a silly and decrepit pride, a tedious prattle, prickly and unsociable humors, superstition, and a ridiculous concern for riches.”
But this was the twist, for it was in the adjustment to such flaws that the value of aging lay. Old age provides an opportunity to recognize one’s fallibility
in a way youth usually finds difficult. Seeing one’s decline written on body and mind, one accepts that one is limited and human. By understanding that age does
not
make one wise, one attains a kind of wisdom after all.

Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it.

Even philosophy needs to be “thickened and obscured” before it can be applied to real life.
“There is no need to light up affairs so deeply and so subtly.” Nothing is to be gained from living like Tasso, blinding oneself with one’s own brilliance. It is better to be moderate, modest, and a little vague. Nature will take care of the rest.

All through these last years, mellower than ever, Montaigne continued to work on the
Essays
. He remained at home, but still wrote letters, including several to Henri IV.
And he saw friends, writers, and former colleagues from Bordeaux and elsewhere, among them Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony. His daughter, Léonor, now grown up, married François de la Tour on May 27, 1590, in a ceremony at the Montaigne estate.
The following year, Montaigne became a grandfather, when Léonor gave birth to a daughter named Françoise on March 31, 1591. Still he kept writing, adding his last fancies and anecdotes, including his final thoughts on the art of living in harmony with ordinariness and imperfection. He looked more and more like a man who had learned how to live; or perhaps it was just his usual nonchalance, developed to a more masterly degree than ever.

A
N ATTACK OF
the stone assailed Montaigne in early September of 1592. He had been through this many times before, and probably took it in his stride at first. But this time, as he had always known might happen, severe complications ensued. Instead of the stone passing through and giving him that rush of relief and joy, it stayed where it was. Then an infection set in.

His whole body began to swell. Before long, the inflammation spread to his throat. This produced a condition known as “cynanche,” taking its name from the Greek for a leash or noose used to strangle a dog or other animal—a name that gives a vivid sense of how unpleasant it was. As it grew, Montaigne’s throat closed ever more tightly, until he had to struggle for every breath.

The cynanche in turn led to a quinsy, a serious throat infection, still considered potentially fatal today if left untreated. It would have needed a course of antibiotics, but no such thing was available for Montaigne. From now on, with his throat swollen, he could not speak, but he remained fully conscious and was able to communicate his wishes to those around him by writing notes.

Three days went by after the quinsy set in. Montaigne sat propped in his bed, while his family and servants gathered to watch and wait. The room became the setting for the kind of overcrowded deathbed scene he had always hoped to avoid. Such rituals made death worse than it needed to be; they did nothing but terrify the dying man and everyone around him. The doctors and preachers bending over the bed; the grief-stricken visitors; the “pale and weeping servants; a darkened room; lighted candles; … in short, everything horror and fright around us”—it was all very remote from the simple, even absent-minded death he would have preferred. Yet, now that it came to it, he did not attempt to make the crowd go away.

Once it became obvious that no hope of recovery remained, he wrote his
last testament and final wishes. One local writer, Bernard Automne, asserted that during these last days Montaigne “got up out of bed in his nightshirt,” and had his valets and other minor beneficiaries of his will called in, so he could pay them their bequests in person. Maybe this is true, although it does not fit well with the descriptions of him lying paralyzed. No account of his last hours is completely reliable; all are secondhand. But one, at least, should be fairly accurate: it was written by Montaigne’s old friend Étienne Pasquier based on what he heard from Françoise, who remained at her husband’s side throughout. Unlike La Boétie all those years ago, Montaigne did not send his wife away from his deathbed.

(illustration credit i20.1)

With the will arranged, Montaigne had a last mass said in his room. He could now barely breathe. According to Pasquier, he rose up in bed while the priest was speaking, “with a desperate effort, hands clasped,” to commend his own spirit to God. It was a final act of Catholic convention: a brief acknowledgment to God in the life of this joyfully secular man.

Shortly afterwards, the last small channel of air in his throat closed. A stroke may have carried him off, or he may simply have suffocated. Surrounded by family, friends, and servants, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne died on September 13, 1592, at the age of fifty-nine.

Montaigne’s death must have been distressing to watch—the struggle for air, the desperate effort, the hideous swelling—and he seemed to be fully aware of what was going on, another thing he had hoped to avoid. But perhaps it did not feel so distressing to him. On the day of his riding accident, he had thrashed around vomiting blood while his soul floated in pleasure; the same thing could have happened at the end too. He may have felt only the sensation of his life being gently detached from his lips: that slender thread being cut at last.

Étienne Pasquier and another friend, Pierre de Brach, composed their hearsay accounts of the scene for their contemporaries, making Montaigne’s death an exemplary Stoic one.
They performed the same service for his memory as he had done for La Boétie’s. Montaigne had lived happily, wrote Pierre de Brach in a letter to Justus Lipsius; now, he had died happily, and well. The only ones to feel pain would be his survivors, who would be for ever deprived of his agreeable company.

The first job those survivors had to handle was the funeral ceremony, along with a rather gruesome dismantling of Montaigne’s body. As a note in the family’s Beuther
Ephemeris
recorded:

It was not unusual to separate out the body parts for burial, though it does seem a strange choice to put only the heart, rather than the whole body, in the little twelfth-century church on the estate. That would have made a peaceful resting place: he could have lain alongside his own father as well as the tiny skeletons of so many of his own children.

Instead, the remains of his remains went to the church of the Feuillant
Order, an odd decision, again, and apparently not the original one. The first plan had been to bury him in the cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux; its canons authorized this on December 15, 1592. That would have placed him among members of Françoise’s family, rather than his own. But she changed her mind, either because she herself was a devotee of the Feuillants, or because he was: he had expressed admiration for them in the
Essays
. The decision was certainly good for the monks. In return for housing Montaigne’s body and saying regular masses for his soul, they received a generous rent which they used to fund a paint job on the building’s interior. They gave him a magnificent tomb, which survives; it shows him lying in
full knight’s armor with his hands drawn out of his gauntlets and joined in prayer. Epitaphs in Greek and Latin cover the sides of the tomb, praising his Christian Pyrrhonism, his adherence to the laws and religion of his ancestors, his “gentle ways,” his judgment, his honesty, and his bravery.
The Latin text ends, movingly: