The Complete Essays (120 page)

25. On not pretending to be ill

[Molière may have been thinking of this chapter when his Imaginary Invalid wondered: ‘Is there not some danger in pretending to be ill?’]

[A] There is an epigram of Martial’s – a good one, for there are all kinds in his book – in which he amusingly tells of Coelius who pretended to suffer from gout in order to avoid having to pay court to some of the Roman grandees, be present at their levees, wait upon them and join their followers. To make his excuse more plausible he would cover his legs with ointment, wrap them in bandages and in every way counterfeit the gait and appearance of sufferers from the gout. In the end Fortune favoured him by giving it to him:

Tantum cura potest et ars doloris,
Desiit fingere Cælius podagram
.

[So much can care and the art of pain! Coelius has no longer to feign to be gouty.]
¹

I have read somewhere in Appian [C] I think [A] a similar tale of a man who sought to escape from a declaration of outlawry by the Roman Triumvirate and to hide from his pursuers; he remained in hiding, took on a disguise, deciding in addition to pretend to be blind in one eye. When he was able to recover a little liberty and wanted to rid himself of the plaster which he had worn so long over his eye, he found that he had actually lost the sight of that eye while under the mask. It is possible that his power of sight had been weakened by not having being exercised for such a long time and that his visual powers had all transferred to the other eye: for we can plainly feel that when we cover one eye it transfers to its fellow some part of its activity so that the remaining eye grows and becomes swollen; similarly for that gouty man in Martial: lack of use, together with the heat of his ointments and bandages, may well have concentrated upon his leg some gouty humour.

Since I read in Froissart
²
of the vow taken by a troop of some young
English noblemen to keep their left eyes covered until they had crossed into France and achieved some great deed of arms against us, I have often been obsessed by the thought that it may have befallen them as it did to those others and that when they came back to greet the ladies for whose sake they had done such deeds they would all have become blind in one eye.

Mothers are right to scold their children when they play at being one-eyed, limping or squinting or having other such deformities; for, leaving aside the fact that their tender bodies may indeed acquire some bad habit from this, it seems to me that Fortune (though I do not know how) delights in taking us at our word: I have heard of many examples of people falling ill after pretending to be so.

[C] Whether riding or walking I have always been used to burdening my hand with a cane or stick, even affecting an air of elegance by leaning on it with a distinguished look on my face. Several people have warned me that one day Fortune may change this affectation into a necessity. I comfort myself with the thought that, if so, I would be the first of my tribe to get the gout!

[A] But let us stretch out this chapter and stick on to it a different coloured patch concerned with blindness. Pliny tells of a man who, never having been ill before, dreamt he was blind and woke up next morning to find that he was.
³
The force of imagination could well have contributed to that, as I have said elsewhere, and Pliny seems to share that opinion: but it is more likely that the dream was produced by the same internal disturbances as his body experienced and which deprived him of his sight; if they want to, the doctors will find their cause…

Now let us add another closely similar account which Seneca gives in one of his letters.
⁴
‘You know Harpasté, my wife’s female idiot,’ he wrote to Lucilius. ‘She is staying in my house as I have inherited the burden of looking after her. I loathe such freaks; if I ever want to laugh at a fool I do not have to look far: I can laugh at myself. She has suddenly become blind. It may seem incredible but it is true that she does not realize she is blind: she keeps begging her keeper to take her away; she thinks that my house is too dark. What in her we laugh at I urge you to believe to apply to each one of us. No one realizes he is miserly; no one realizes he is covetous. At least the blind do ask for a guide: we wander off alone. “I am not an ambitious man,” we say, “but you can live in Rome no other way. I am no spendthrift, but it costs a lot merely to live in Rome.” “It is not my fault if I
get angry or if I have had not yet definitely settled down: it is the fault of my youth.” Let us not go looking elsewhere for our evils: they are at home in us, rooted in our inward parts. We make the cure harder precisely because we do not realize we are ill. If we do not soon start to dress our wounds, when shall we ever cure them and their evils? Yet Philosophy provides the sweetest of cures: other cures are enjoyed only after they have worked: this one cures and gives joy all at once.’

That is what Seneca says; he carried me off my subject, but there is profit in the change.

26. On thumbs

[Renaissance etymologies are often very fanciful, but in the case of the French and Latin words for thumb
(pouce, pollex)
philologists today continue to accept the derivations advanced by Montaigne and his contemporaries. Our own word ‘thumb’ derives also, it seems, from. Sanskrit word meaning ‘the strong one’.]

[A] Tacitus relates that it was the custom among certain Barbarian kings to make a treaty binding by pressing their right hands together and interlocking their thumbs until they had squeezed the blood to their tips, whereupon they lightly pricked them with a needle and sucked each other’s blood.
¹

Doctors say that our thumb is our master-finger and that our French word for it,
pouce
, derives from the Latin verb
pollere
[to excel in strength].
²
The Greeks called it
anticheir
, ‘another hand’, so to speak. And the Latins seem occasionally to use it to mean the whole of the hand:

Sed nec vocibus excitata blandis,
Molli pollice nec rogata, surgit
.    
[Neither sweet words of persuasion nor the help of her thumb can get it erect.]

In Rome it was a sign of approval to turn your thumbs and twist them downwards –

Fautor utroque tuum laudabit pollice ludum
[Your fans admire your play by turning down both their thumbs]

–and of disapproval to raise them and extend them outwards:

converso pollice vulgi
Quemlibet occidunt populariter
.

[when the mob twist their thumbs round, anyone at all is slaughtered to their acclaim.]
³

The Romans exempted from war-service those who had injured thumbs since they could no longer firmly grasp their weapons. Augustus confiscated the estates of a Roman knight who had craftily cut off the thumb of two of his sons to stop them being mobilized into the army. Before that, during the Italian Wars, the Senate had sentenced Caius Vatienus to life imprisonment and confiscated all his estates for having deliberately cut off his left thumb to get out of an expedition. Some general or other (I cannot remember his name) cut off the thumb of his defeated enemies after winning a naval engagement so as to deprive them of the means of fighting and of pulling on the oar.
⁴
[C] The Athenians did the same to the men of Aegina to deprive them of their naval superiority.
⁵
[B] In Sparta the schoolmaster punished his pupils by biting their thumbs.

27. On cowardice, the mother of cruelty

[Montaigne returns to the theme of cruelty (of. ‘On conscience’, II, 5; ‘On cruelty’, II, 11; and ‘On coaches’, III, 6.) He loathed torture, then widely practised as a justifiable means of interrogation, being accepted as such by Roman Law, and like many, including Michel de l’Hôpital and French kings at least from Charles IX, disliked duelling. Montaigne’s opinion that torture, or indeed anything beyond straightforward execution, amounted to cruelty caused some disquiet in the Vatican, but Montaigne held his ground.]

[A] I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty. [B] And I have learned from experience that that harsh rage of wicked inhuman minds is usually accompanied by womanish weakness. I have known the cruellest of men to cry easily for the most frivolous of causes. The Tyrant Alexander of Pheres could not bear to hear tragedies performed in the amphitheatre for fear that the citizens might see him, who had without pity put many to death every day, blubbering over the misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache.
¹
Can it be a weakness in their soul which makes such men susceptible to every extreme? [A] Valour (which acts only to overcome resistance) –

Nec nisi bellantis gaudet cervice juvenci
[And which takes no delight in killing even a bull unless unless it resists]
²
–

stops short when it sees the enemy at its mercy. But pusillanimity, so as to join in the festivities even though it could not have any role in the first act, chooses its role in the second: that of blood and slaughter. Murders after victory are normally done by the common people and the men in charge of the baggage-train; and what makes us, witness so many unheard of cruelties in these people’s wars of ours is that the common riff-raff become used to war and swagger about, up to their arms in blood, hacking at a body lying at their feet since they can conceive of no other valour:

[B]
Et lupus et turpes instant morientibus ursi,
Et quæcunque minor nobilitate fera est
,

[The wolves and base bears fall on the dying, and so do all the more ignoble beasts,]
³

[A] like the cowardly curs which, in our homes, snap and tear at the skins of wild beasts which they would not dare to attack in the field.

What is it that makes all our quarrels end in death nowadays? Whereas our fathers knew degrees of vengeance we now begin at the end and straightway talk of nothing but killing. What causes that, if not cowardice? Everyone knows that there is more bravery in beating an enemy than in finishing him off; more contempt in making him bow his head than in making him die; that, moreover, the thirst for vengeance is better slaked and satisfied by doing so, since the only intention is to make it felt. That is why we do not attack a stone or an animal if it hurts us, since they are incapable of feeling our revenge. To kill a man is to shield him from our attack.

[B] And just as Bias cried out to a wicked man, ‘I know you will be punished sooner or later, but I am afraid afraid I shall never live to see it’; and just as he sympathized with the Orchomenians because the chastisement of Lyciscus’ treachery against them came at a time when there was nobody left who had suffered by it whom such chastisement would have gratified the most: vengeance is at its most wretched when it is wreaked upon someone who has lost the means of feeling it; for, as the one who seeks revenge wishes to see it if he is to enjoy it, the one who receives it must see it too if he is to suffer the pain and be taught a lesson.
⁴

[A] ‘He’ll be sorry for it,’ we say. Do we really think he is sorry for it once we have shot him through the head? Quite the contrary: if we look closely we will find him cocking a snook as he falls: he does not even hold it against us. That is a long way from feeling sorry! [C] And we do him one of the kindest offices of this life, which is to let him die quickly and painlessly. [A] He is at rest while we have to scuttle off like rabbits, running away from the officers of the watch who are on our trail. Killing is all right for preventing some future offence but not for avenging one already done. [C] It is a deed more of fear than of bravery; it is an act of caution rather than of courage; of defence rather than of attack. [A] It
is clear that by acting thus we give up both the true end of vengeance and all care for our reputation: we show we are afraid that if we let the man live he will do it again. [C] By getting rid of him you act not against him but against yourself.

In the Kingdom of Narsinga their way of doing things would be no use to us. There, not only soldiers but even artisans settle their quarrels with their swords; their king never denies the field to any who would fight a duel, and, and in the case of men of quality he honours it with his presence and bestows a golden chain on the victor. But the very first man who wants that chain can dispute it with the wearer who, by having rid himself of one duel, finds himself with several more on his hands.
⁵

[A] If we had thought that we had for ever overcome our enemy by valour and could dominate him as we pleased, we would be sorry indeed if he were to escape: he does that when he dies. We do want to beat him, but with more security than honour, [C] and we seek not so much glory through our quarrel but the end of that quarrel.

For a man of honour Asinius Pollio also made a similar mistake: he wrote invectives against Plancus but waited until he died before he published them. That was like poking out your tongue to a blind man, shouting insults at a deaf one or hitting a man who cannot feel it, rather than risking his resentment. And they said of him that only the shades should shadow-box with the dead. Anyone who waits to see an author dead before attacking his writings, what does he reveal except that he is both weak and quarrelsome?
⁶
Aristotle was told that someone had spoken ill of him: ‘Let him do worse,’ he replied, ‘let him scourge me – as long as I am not there!’

[A] Our fathers were content to avenge an insult by a denial avenge a denial by a slap in the face; and so on in due order. They were valiant enough not to be afraid of an enemy who was outraged but living. We tremble with fear while we see him still on his feet. As proof of that, is it not one of our beautiful practices today to hound to death not only the man who has offended us but also the man we have offended?

[B] It is also a reflection of our cowardice which has brought into our single combats the practice of our being accompanied by seconds – and thirds and fourths. Once upon a time there were duels: nowadays there are clashes and pitched battles. The first men who introduced such practices
were afraid of acting on their own, [C]
‘cum in se cuique minimum fidutiæ esset’
[since neither had the slightest confidence in himself].
⁷
[B] For it is natural that company of any sort brings comfort and solace in danger. Once upon a time there third parties were brought in to guard against rule-breaking and foul play [C] and also to bear witness to the result of the duel; [B] but now that it has come to such a pass that anyone who is invited along involves himself in the quarrel, he can no longer remain a spectator for fear that it was from lack of engagement or of courage. Apart from the injustice and baseness of such an action which engages in the defence of your honour some other might or valour than your own, I find it derogatory to anyone who does fully trust in himself to go and confound his fortune with that of another. Each of us runs risks enough for himself without doing so for another: each has enough to do to defend his life on behalf of his own valour without entrusting so dear a possession into the hands of third parties. For unless it be not expressly agreed to the contrary, the four of them form one party under bond. If your second is downed you are faced, by the rules, with two to contend with; you may say that that is unfair. And indeed it is – like charging well-armed against a man who has only the stump of his sword, or when you are still sound against a man who is already grievously wounded. However, when you have won such advantages in battle you can exploit them without dishonour. Inequality and disproportion weigh in our consideration only at the outset, when battle is joined: thereafter you can rail against Fortune! And even if you find yourself one against three after your two companions have been killed, they do you no more wrong than I would do if, in the wars with a similar advantage, I were to strike a blow with my sword at one of the enemy whom I found attacking one of our men. The nature of our alliances entails that when we have group against group (as when our Duke of Orleans challenged Henry, King of England, one hundred against one hundred; [C] or three hundred against three hundred like the Argives against the Spartans; or three against three like the Horatii against the Curatii),
⁸
[B] whatever crowd there may be on either side they are regarded as one man. And whenever you have companions the chance of the outcome is confused and uncertain.

I have a private interest to declare in this discussion: for my brother the Seigneur de Matecoulom was summoned to Rome to act as second for a gentleman he hardly knew, who was the defender, having been challenged
by another. By chance he found himself face to face with a man who was closer and better known to him (I would like to see somebody justify these ‘laws of honour’ which are so often opposed in hostility to the laws of reason). Having dispatched his opponent and seeing the two principals in the quarrel still unharmed on their feet, he went to the relief of his companion. What less could he do? Ought he to have remained quiet and watched the man defeated, if such was his lot, for whose defence he had come to Rome? All he had achieved so far was of no avail: the quarrel had still to be decided. The courtesy which you yourself can and must show to your enemy when you have reduced him to a sorry state and have him at a great disadvantage, I cannot see how you can show it when it concerns somebody else, when you are but the second, when the quarrel is not yours. He could neither be just nor courteous at the expense of the one to whom he had lent his support. So he was released from prison in Italy by the swift formal request of our King.

What a stupid nation we are. We are not content with letting the world know of our vices and follies by repute, we go to foreign nations in order to show them to them by our presence! Put three Frenchmen in the Libyan deserts and they will not be together for a month without provoking and clawing each other: you would say that one of the aims of these journeys is expressly to make spectacles of ourselves before foreigners – especially those who take delight in our misfortunes and laugh at them.

We go to Italy to learn fencing, [C] and then put it into practice at the expense of our lives before we have learnt how. [B] Yet, by the rules of instruction, theory should come before practice: we betray that we are mere apprentices:

Primitica juvenum miseræ, bellique futuri
Dura rudimenta
.

[Wretched first fruits of mere youth: harsh training for the future wars.]
⁹

I know that fencing is an art [C] which achieves what it sets out to do: in the duel in Spain between two Princes who were cousins german, the elder, says Livy, easily overcame the reckless force of the younger by strategy and skill with his weapons.
¹⁰
And as I myself know from experience it is an art [B] which has raised the hearts of some above their natural measure; yet that is not really valour since it draws its support from
skill and has some other foundation than itself. The honour of combat consists in rivalry of heart not of expertise; that is why I have seen some of my friends who are past masters in that exercise choosing for their duels weapons which deprived them of the means of exploiting their advantage and which depend entirely on fortune and steadfastness, so that nobody could attribute their victory to their fencing rather than to their valour. When I was a boy noblemen rejected a reputation for fencing as being an insult; they learned to fence in secret as some cunning craft which derogated from true inborn virtue:

Non schivar, non parar, non ritirarsi
Voglion costor, ne qui destrezza ha parte.
Non danno i colpi finti, hor pieni, hor scarsi:
Toglie l’ira e il furor l’uso de l’arte.
Odi le spade horribilmente urtarsi
A mezzo il ferro; il pie d’orma non parte:
Sempre è il pie fermo, è la man sempre in moto;
Ne scende taglio in van, ne punta à voto
.