The Complete Essays (165 page)

Tam multae scelerum facies
.
[Our wickedness has assumed so many faces.]

Secondly, that there is always gain in changing a bad condition for an uncertain one, and that the ills of others do not need to sting us as our own do.

And I do not want to omit that I am never such an enemy of France that I fail to look kindly on Paris: Paris has had my heart since boyhood. And as happens with all incomparable things, the more beautiful the other towns I have seen the more the beauty of Paris gains power over my affections. I love her for herself, more when left alone than overloaded with extra ornaments. I love her tenderly, warts, stains and all. That great city alone makes me. Frenchman,
⁸¹
a city great in citizens, great in its happy choice of site, but great above all and incomparable in the variety and diversity of its attractions; it is the glory of France and one of the world’s great splendours. God drive our divisions far from her! When entire and united she is safe from other violence. The worst of all decisions, by my counsel, would be one which brought discord to her. I fear nothing for her but herself. And I certainly fear for her more than for any part of our State. While she endures I shall not lack a lair in which I can die at bay, one enough to make me lose all regret for any other.

Not because Socrates said it but because it truly corresponds to my humour (and is perhaps not free from excess): I reckon all men my fellow-citizens,
⁸²
embracing. Pole as I do. Frenchman, placing a national bond after the common universal one. I do not particularly hanker after the sweetness of my native soil. Acquaintances which are entirely new and
entirely mine seem to me to be worth just as much as the other common kind, casually based on neighbourhood. Those loving relationships which are purely our own achievement normally outweigh those to which we are bound by ties of place or blood. Nature brought us forth free and unbound: we imprison ourselves in particular confines, like those kings of Persia who bind themselves to drink no water but that of the river Choaspes, foolishly renouncing their right to use all other waters, making, so far as they are concerned, all the rest of the world a desert.
⁸³

[C] When Socrates was near his end he judged that a sentence of exile was for him worse than a sentence of death. As far as I can tell I could never be so broken in, nor so narrowly accustomed to my part of the world, as to say that. Those heaven-marked lives have many traits which I embrace more with esteem than emotion. They also have other traits so soaring and inordinate that I cannot even do so with esteem, since I am quite unable to conceive them. That was a very delicate humour in a man who considered the whole world his city! It is true that he despised travel and had hardly set foot outside Attic territory. And what about his sparing his friends’ money with which they would have saved his life, and his refusal to escape from prison through the intercession of anyone at all, so as not to disobey the laws at a time when they were highly corrupt? Those examples fall into my first category: there are others to be found in that great man which fall into my second one. Many such examples surpass my power of action, but some surpass even my power of judgement.

[B] In addition to such reasons, travel seems to me to be an enriching experience. It keeps our souls constantly exercised by confronting them with things new and unknown; and (as I have often said) I know of no better school for forming our life than ceaselessly to set before it the variety found in so many other lives, [C] concepts and customs, [B] and to give it a taste of the perpetual diversity of the forms of human nature. The body is neither idle nor exhausted by it: the moderate exercise keeps it in good trim. Even suffering from the stone as I do, I can stay in the saddle, without dismounting, for eight or ten hours at I stretch:

Vires ultra sortemque senectae
.
[strength beyond the lot of old age.]
⁸⁴

No weather is inimical to me except the harsh heat of a blazing sun (for those parasols which Italy has used since the Ancient Romans put more weight on your arm than they take off your head). [C] I would love to know how hard it was for the Persians, so long ago at the very birth of luxury, to produce at will cool winds, as Xenophon says they did, and patches of shade.
⁸⁵

[B] I take to rain and mud like a duck. I change of air and weather does not disturb me: to me all climates are the same. The only things which do batter me are such internal disturbances as I produce within me – and they occur less during my travels.

It is hard to get me moving, but once I have started I will go on as far as you like. I resist little expeditions [C] as much as [B] big ones,
⁸⁶
and equipping myself for a day-trip or a visit to a cousin [C] as much as [B] for a real journey. I have learned to do each day’s journey in the Spanish style, all at one go, a long but reasonable day. When it is extremely hot I travel by night, from sunset to sunrise. (The other way – stopping to eat
en route
, in chaos and haste over your post-house dinner – is disagreeable, especially when the days are drawing in.) My horses are all the better for it. No horse which can get through the first day’s journey with me has ever let me down. I water them everywhere, merely taking the precaution of having enough road left for them to work it off. My own reluctance to get up allows my retinue to breakfast at leisure before we set off. I myself never dine very late. Appetite comes to me only with eating;
⁸⁷
except at table I never feel hungry.

Some complain at my delight in continuing this practice as a man married and old.
⁸⁸
They are wrong. The best time to leave our family is after we have set it on course to proceed without us, after we can leave behind such order as does not belie its former character. It is far more imprudent to go off if you leave your home in charge of a protectress who is less reliable and who may take less trouble to provide for your needs. The most useful science and the most honourable occupation for a wife is home-management. I am aware of more than one wife who is mean but of
few who are good managers. Yet to be one is a wife’s chief virtue, the one that we should look for first as the only dowry which may either save our households or ruin them. [C] There is no need to lecture me on the subject: experience has taught me to seek one virtue above all others in a married woman: the virtue of sound housekeeping. [B] I enable my wife to do this properly when, by my absence, I leave the government of my house in her hands. It irritates me to see in many a household my lord coming home about noon, all grimy and tetchy from business worries, while my lady is still in her dressing-room, dolling herself up and doing her hair. That is for queens – and I am not sure even then. It is unjust and absurd that our wives should be maintained in idleness
⁸⁹
by our sweat and toil. [C] As far as it lies with me, nobody shall have a more serene enjoyment of my goods than I do, one more quit and more quiet. [B] Though the husbands provide the matter, Nature herself wills that the wives provide the form.
⁹⁰

As for the duties of conjugal love which are thought to be infringed by such absences, I do not believe that they are. On the contrary: such intercourse can easily be cooled by too continuous a presence and impaired by assiduity: every other woman seems charming then! Everyone knows that seeing each other all the time cannot provide the same pleasure as is given by alternately going away and coming together. [C] Such intervals fill me with fresh love for my family and restore me to a more agreeable use of my home. Alternation sharpens my appetite for both home and travel. [B] Loving affection, as I know, has arms long enough to stretch from one end of the world to the other and meet – especially conjugal love, for it comports a continuous exchange of duties which reawaken our memory of the tie. The Stoics say that there are such great bonds of interdependence and interconnection between the wise, that he who dines in France nourishes his fellow in Egypt and that, wherever he may be, if he merely raises a finger to help, all the wise men on this habitable earth feel the benefit.
⁹¹

Enjoyment – possession – belongs mainly to the mind. [C] It more ardently embraces whatever it goes a-seeking than anything we actually
hold, and it does so more continuously. Note how you spend your time every day: you will find that you are most absent from the one you love when he is present: your attentiveness is released by the fact that he is there; that gives your thoughts freedom to go absent at any time, on any pretext.

[B] Outwards from Rome I control and govern my household and the good things I have left there. Just as when I am there, I know within an inch or two how my walls, my trees or my rents are growing or declining:

Ante oculos errat domus, errat forma locorum
.
[Before my eyes there floats a vision of my home and the places I have left.]
⁹²

If we only enjoy things when we touch them, then goodbye to our golden sovereigns when they are in our money-chests – and to our sons when they are out hunting. We want them nearer. They are in our grounds: is that ‘far’? Is half a day’s journey ‘far’? How about ten leagues? Is that ‘far’ or ‘near’? If near, how about eleven leagues, twelve, thirteen and so on, pace by pace? Truly, if any wife can lay down for her husband how many paces make ‘far’ and how many paces make ‘near’, my counsel is to make him stop half-way –

excludat jurgia finis.
Utor pemisso, caudœque pilos ut equinœ
Paulatim vello, et demo unum, demo etiam unum,
Dum cadat elusus ratione ruentis acervi

[‘Let us set limits and end this domestic strife!’… Yes, but I take whatever you allow and (like plucking hair after hair, one by one, from my horse’s tail) I take yard after yard until you are cheated by my accumulated sophisms]’
⁹³

– and let those wives dare to call Philosophy to their aid. But someone will object that Philosophy can only judge very vaguely where the middle point lies: she can descry neither of the limits linking too much and too little, long and short, light and heavy, since she can recognize neither their end nor beginning: [C]
‘Rerum natura nullam nobis dedit cognitionem finium.’
[Nature has given us no faculty which can know the boundaries of anything.]

[B] Are they not still the wives and beloveds of the dead who are not
at the end of this world but in the next? Our arms enfold not only our absent ones but also those who have died or are yet to be. When we married each other we did not contract to be ever attached to each other’s tails like some little creatures or other we know of,
⁹⁴
[C] or doggy-fashion, like those bewitched couples of Karenty.
⁹⁵
Moreover a wife should not have her eyes so hungrily fixed on her husband’s foreparts that when the need arises she cannot bear to see his backside.

[B] Perhaps this jest from a most excellent portrayer of wives’ humours would not be out of place here to describe the cause of their complaints:

Uxor, si cesses, aut te amare cogitat,
Aut tete amari, aut potare, aut animo obsequi,
Et tibi bene esse soli, cum sibi sit male
.

[You are late coming home. Your wife assumes that you are in love with somebody, or somebody with you, that you are getting drunk and having a good time without her while she feels miserable.]
⁹⁶

Or would it not be, perhaps, because they like opposing and thrive on contradiction, happy enough if they can make you unhappy?

In a truly loving relationship – which I have experienced – rather than drawing the one I love to me I give myself to him.
⁹⁷
Not merely do I prefer to do him good than to have him do good to me, I would even prefer that he did good to himself rather than to me: it is when he does good to himself that he does most good to me. If his absence is either pleasant or useful to him, then it delights me far more than his presence. And it is not strictly absence when there are means of keeping in touch. In former times I found advantages and pleasure in our being far apart. By going our separate ways we possessed life more fully and widely. It was for me that he lived, and saw and enjoyed things: and I for him – more fully than if he had been there. When we were together part of us remained idle: we were merged into one. Geographical separation rendered more rich the union of our wills. That insatiable hunger for physical presence reveals a certain weakness in the enjoyment of our souls.

As for my old age, which they cite against me, it is on the contrary for youth to be enslaved by common opinions and to restrain itself for someone else. Youth has plenty enough to provide for itself and others: we have too much to do to provide for ourselves. As natural pleasures fail us, let us support ourselves by artificial ones. It is unfair to forgive youth for pursuing its pleasures, while forbidding old age even to look for any. [C] when I was young I veiled my playful passions behind wisdom: now I am old, I disperse my gloomy ones by excess. Though Plato’s laws forbid foreign travel before forty or fifty so as to make it more useful and instructive, I would more readily subscribe to the second article in those same laws, which prohibits it after sixty.
⁹⁸