The Complete Essays (15 page)

9. On liars

[Quintilian had said that a liar had better have a good memory: hence Montaigne’s concern with memory before turning to lying – a vice particularly loathed by gentlemen and which Montaigne would discourage even in diplomatists.]

[A] There is nobody less suited than I am to start talking about memory. I can hardly find a trace of it in myself; I doubt if there is any other memory in the world as grotesquely faulty as mine is! All my other endowments are mean and ordinary: but I think that, where memory is concerned, I am most singular and rare, worthy of both name and reputation! [B] Apart from the natural inconvenience which I suffer because of this – [C] for memory is so necessary that Plato was right to call it a great and mighty goddess
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– [B] in my part of the world they actually say a man ‘has no memory’ to mean that he is stupid. When I complain that my memory is defective they either correct me or disbelieve me, as though I were accusing myself of being daft. They see no difference between memory and intelligence. That makes my case worse than it is.

But they do me wrong. Experience shows us that it is almost the contrary: an outstanding memory is often associated with weak judgement. They also do me another wrong: I am better at friendship than at anything else, yet the very words used to acknowledge that I have this affliction are taken to signify ingratitude; they judge my affection by my memory and turn a natural defect into a deliberate one. ‘We begged him to do this,’ they say, ‘and he has forgotten.’ ‘He has forgotten his promise.’ ‘He has forgotten his friends.’ ‘He never remembered – even for my sake – to say this, to do that or not to mention something else.’ I certainly do forget things easily but I simply do not treat with indifference any charge laid on me by my friends. Let them be satisfied with my misfortune, without turning it into precisely the kind of malice which is the enemy of my natural humour.

I find ways of consoling myself. First, by arguing that [C] a poor memory is an evil which has enabled me to correct a worse one which might easily have arisen in me: ambition. A bad memory is an intolerable defect for anyone concerned with worldly affairs.

Moreover, Nature (as is shown by several similar examples of her ways of compensating) has strengthened other faculties of mine as this one has grown weaker. If, thanks to memory, other people’s discoveries and opinions had been kept ever before me, I would readily have reached a settled mind and judgement by following other men’s footsteps, failing as most people do to exercise my own powers.

Then again [B] I talk less; it is always easier to draw on the storehouse of memory than to find something original to say. [C] (If my memory had stood fast, I would have deafened my friends with my chatter, as the subjects themselves would have stimulated such gifts as I do have for arranging and exploiting them, and that would have encouraged and attracted my powers of argument.) [B] That it is pitiful I assay by the touchstone of some of my nearest and dearest: the more their memory furnishes them with full and ready matter the deeper they dig back when they tell us about it; they weigh it down with irrelevant circumstances, so that even if their story is interesting they smother the interest, and if it is boring you are cursing either their good memory or their bad judgement.

[C] Once you are off, it is hard to cut it short and stop talking. Nothing tells you more about a horse than a pronounced ability to pull up short. I have even known men who can speak pertinently, who want to stop their gallop but who do not know how to do so. While looking for a way of bringing their hoofs together they amble on like sick men, dragging out trivialities.

Old men are particularly vulnerable: they remember the past but forget that they have just told you! I have known several amusing tales become boring in one gentleman’s mouth: his own people have had their fill of it a hundred times already.
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[B] A second advantage is that (as some Ancient writer put it) I remember less any insults received. [C] I would need an Official Reminder like Darius: in order not to forget an insult suffered at the hands of the Athenians he made a page intone three times in his car as he sat at table: ‘Remember the Athenians, Sire.’
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[B] Books and places which I look at again always welcome me with a fresh new smile.

[A] It is not for nothing that it is said that he who does not feel his memory to be strong enough has no business lying.
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I am well aware that grammarians make a distinction between ‘to tell an untruth’ and ‘to lie’; they assert that ‘to tell an untruth’ is to say something false which one thinks to be true, and that the definition of
mentiri
[to lie] in Latin (the source of
mentir
in French) implies something like, ‘to go against the testimony of one’s knowledge’, and so only applies to those who speak at variance with what they know. They are the people I am talking about.
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That kind of person either makes up the whole story or else disguises and pollutes some source of truth. When it is a case of disguising and changing something, you can normally hobble liars by making them tell the same tale several times over; since the real facts were lodged in their memory first, they make a deep imprint by means of awareness and knowledge; it is hard for those facts not to spring to mind and to dislodge the falsehoods (which cannot gain so settled and firm a footing there); hard too for the circumstances as they first learned them, by continually flowing into their minds, not to make them lose all memory of the false additions and distortions.

When the whole thing has been made up, liars might seem to have less reason to be afraid of getting things wrong, since there is no counter-impression to rival their falsehoods. Yet since such a lie is insubstantial and hard to get a grip on, it can easily slip out of a memory not extremely reliable.

[B] Experience has often shown me that – amusingly so, at the expense of those kinds of men whose profession it is never to utter a word without trimming it to suit whatever business is being negotiated at the time, thereby pleasing the great ones with whom they are speaking. Such men are prepared to make their honour and conscience slaves to present circumstances: but circumstances are liable to frequent change, and their words must vary with them. They are obliged to call the very same thing first grey then yellow, saying one thing to this man, quite another to another. If the persons who receive such contrary advice happen to compare their haul, what becomes of their fine diplomacy?

Apart from that, they can be like a silly horse casting its own shoe; for what memory could ever suffice them, enabling them to remember all the various moulds they have invented for the same subject matter? In my time I have known several men who hankered after a reputation for this fine sort of prudence: they never can see that to have a reputation for it renders it ineffectual.

Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. I find that people normally waste time quite inappropriately punishing children for innocent misdemeanours, tormenting them for thoughtless actions which lead nowhere and leave no trace. It seems to me that the only faults which we should vigorously attack as soon as they arise and start to develop are lying and, a little below that, stubbornness. Those faults grow up with the children. Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up. That is why some otherwise decent men are abject slaves to it. One of my tailors is a good enough fellow, but I have never heard him once speak the truth, not even when it would help him if he did so.

If a lie, like truth, had only one face we could be on better terms, for certainty would be the reverse of what the liar said. But the reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits. The Pythagoreans make good to be definite and finite; evil they make indefinite and infinite. Only one flight leads to the bull’s-eye: a thousand can miss it.

I cannot guarantee that I could bring myself to tell a solemn, bare-faced lie, even to ward off some obvious and immense danger. One of the old Church Fathers says that even a dog we do know is better company than a man whose language we do not know.
‘Ut externus alieno non sit hominis vice’
. [Just as any foreigner is not fully human.] How much less companionable than silence is the language of falsehood.
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[A] Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, had an ambassador, Francesco Taverna, widely renowned for his knowledge of how to yap. King Francis I used to boast how he cornered him like a hare. Taverna’s mission was to try and justify his lord to the King’s Majesty over an action of great consequence, which was as follows.

The King wished to maintain some sources of confidential intelligence in
Italy (from which he had recently been driven) and especially in the Duchy of Milan; so he decided to keep a reliable man there, close to the Duke and virtually as ambassador but ostensibly as a private individual who pretended to be in Milan for his own affairs, since the Duke was far more dependent on the Emperor (especially since he was negotiating a marriage contract for his niece, the daughter of the King of Denmark, now Dowager Duchess of Lorraine). Without greatly harming his cause he could not let it openly be known that he was having any dealings or negotiations with the French.

A young Milanese nobleman, one of the King’s equerries, was considered the right man for the mission. His name was Merveille. He was dispatched with secret credentials and documents as an ambassador, but for appearances’ sake and as a disguise he also had letters of recommendation to the Duke concerning his ‘private business’. He stayed so long in the Ducal court that some knowledge of this reached the Emperor who, we think, was the cause of what soon happened: namely, that the Duke arranged to have Merveille beheaded in the middle of the night; he had been charged with some murder or other and the trial had lasted only a couple of days.
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Signor Francesco arrived, duly prepared with a long distorted account of this event, for the King had written to all the rulers of Christendom, as well as to the Duke himself, demanding satisfaction.

He was granted an audience one morning; he proceeded to lay the foundations of his case and had drawn up several plausible reasons covering the affair, alleging that his lord had never considered our man Merveille to be anything but a private nobleman, one of his own subjects who had business in Milan and whose mode of life had suggested nothing else. He particularly denied any knowledge of his being on the establishment of the King’s household, or even of his being known to the King, let alone taking him for an ambassador.

The King, for his part, plied the ambassador with a variety of questions and objections; he rounded upon him on every side and then cornered him, the point being, ‘Why had the execution been carried out secretly, by night?’ The wretched man, nonplussed but trying to be polite, replied that ‘if such an execution had been carried out in daylight, why, the Duke – out of respect for his Majesty – would have been quite upset…’ We can all imagine how he struggled to get up after coming such a cropper as that, under the very ample nose of Francis I.

Pope Julius II sent an ambassador to the King of England to rouse his
animosity against King Francis. The ambassador having been heard out, the King of England in his reply dwelt on the difficulties he could see in making all the preparations which would be essential if war were to be waged against so mighty a monarch. He cited some of the reasons. The ambassador answered, most inappropriately, that he too had thought of them and had pointed them out to the Pope.

These words were so different from the case he had just put forward (which was to urge the English to go to war immediately) that the King of England began to suspect (what he later found to be actually true) that the private inclinations of the ambassador leant towards the French. The Pope, being informed of this, confiscated his property and the man all but lost his life.
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10. On a ready or hesitant delivery

[Montaigne considers ‘readiness’ to speak in public, both in the sense of speaking easily and of being ready with a prepared text. These senses are contained in the Latin word
promptus
which lies behind his French term for ‘ready’ speech:
prompt.]

[A]
Onc ne furent à tous toutes grâces données
.
[It never was, that to every man was every gift vouchsafed.]
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We can see that in the case of the gift of speaking well: some have such a prompt facility and (as we say) such ease in ‘getting it out’, that they are always ready anywhere: others, more hesitant, never speak without thinking and working it all out beforehand. Just as the rule given to ladies is to take up sports and exercises which show off their charms, so too, if I had to give similar advice where these two qualities are concerned, it seems to me that nowadays, when eloquence is mainly professed by preachers and barristers, the hesitant man had better be a preacher and the other man a barrister. Since the duties of a preacher allow him as much time as he wishes to make things ready, he runs an uninterrupted race from point to point, whereas the exigencies of a barrister require him to enter the fray at a moment’s notice; the unforeseeable replies of the opposite party can throw him off his stride into a situation where a new decision has to be made in full course. Yet in that meeting between Pope Clement and King Francis at Marseilles the reverse applied:
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Monsieur Poyet, a man whose whole life had been nurtured at the Bar and who was highly regarded, had the duty of making the oration before the Pope; he had given it long thought and (so it was said) had brought it from Paris already prepared; but on the very day that it was to be delivered the Pope (fearing that something might be addressed to him which could give offence to the other princes’ ambassadors who were in attendance) conveyed to the King the topic which seemed most proper to that time and place – unfortunately a totally different one from
what Monsieur Poyet had toiled over; his oration was now useless and he had to be quickly ready with another. But as he realized that he was incapable of doing that, My Lord the Cardinal Du Bellay had to take on the task.

[B] The role of a barrister is more demanding than that of a preacher, and yet in France at least we can find more tolerable barristers, in my opinion, than tolerable preachers.

[A] It seems that it is, rather, the property of Man’s wit to act readily and quickly, while the property of the judgement is to be slow and poised. But there is the same measure of oddness in the man who is struck dumb if he has no time to prepare his speech and the man who cannot take advantage and speak better when he does have time. They say that Severus Cassius spoke better when he had not thought about it beforehand: that he owed more to Fortune than to hard work: that it was good for him to be interrupted, his opponents being afraid of provoking him, lest anger made him redouble his eloquence.
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I know from experience the kind of character which gets nowhere unless it is allowed to run happy and free and which by nature is unable to keep up vehemently and laboriously practising anything beforehand. We say that some books ‘stink of lamp-oil’, on account of the harshness and roughness which are stamped on writings in which toil has played a major part.
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In addition, a soul worrying about doing well, straining and tensely drawn towards its purpose, is held at bay – like water which cannot find its way through the narrow neck of an open gutter because of the violent pressure of its overflowing abundance. Moreover the particular character which I am speaking of does not want to be driven and spurred on by strong passions such as Cassius’ anger (for such an activity would be too violent): it wants not to be shaken about but aroused; it wants to be warmed and awakened by events which are external, fortuitous and immediate. Leave it to act by itself and it will drag along and languish. Its life and its grace consist in activity.

[B] I cannot remain fixed within my disposition and endowments. Chance plays a greater part in all this than I do. The occasion, the company, the very act of using my voice, draw from my mind more than what I can find there when I exercise it and try it out all by
myself. [A] And that is why the spoken word is worth more than the written – if a choice can be made between things of no value.
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[C] This, too, happens in my case: where I seek myself I cannot find myself: I discover myself more by accident than by inquiring into my judgement. Suppose something subtle springs up as I write – I mean, of course, something which would be blunt in others but is acute in me. (Enough of these courtesies! When we say such things we all mean them to be taken in proportion to our abilities.) Later, I miss the point so completely that I do not know what I meant to say (some outsider has often rediscovered the meaning before I do). If every time that happened I were to start scraping out words with my eraser I would efface the whole of my
Essays
. Yet, subsequently, chance may make what I wrote clearer than the noon-day sun: it will be my former hesitations which then astonish me.