The Complete Essays (39 page)

28. On affectionate relationships

[This chapter, ‘De l’amitié’, is traditionally called ‘On friendship’. But in Renaissance French
amitié
includes many affectionate relationships, ranging from a father’s love for his child (or for his brain-child) to the friendly services of a doctor or lawyer, to that conjugal love felt by Montaigne for his wife, and to that rarest of lasting friendships which David shared with Jonathan, Roland with Oliver or Montaigne with La Boëtie. Several terms are needed in English to render these different senses; they include friendship, loving-friendship, benevolence, affection, affectionate relationships and love. The basic meaning of
amitié
is rooted in
aimer (
to love
);
but it often excluded
amour,
love between the sexes, and always
folle amour (
‘mad love’
)
which was sexual and extramarital. The first syllable of
amitié
was fully nasalized in Renaissance French: it therefore sounds like
âme (
soul). Since ancient times philosophy had classified love between the sexes as at least primarily an affair of the other, lower, part of Man: the body; some Renaissance Platonists were concerned to modify this stark dichotomy between soul-love and body-love. Much was written on
parfaite amitié,
a ‘perfect’ loving relationship which could arise between a man and a woman in which physical love was relegated to a vital but second place. Montaigne does not underplay the role of sexual love (cf. III, 5, ‘On some lines of Virgil’, and III, 3, ‘On three kinds of social intercourse’); but despite Classical precedent he does wonder whether a fully sexual love plus a fully soul-centred
amitié
could not bind an exceptional man to an exceptional woman. If it could, then it would engage the whole individual person, body and soul. That would indeed be ‘perfect love’
, parfaite amitié.
Male homosexual love, which did from Socratic times claim to do just that, does not disturb nor preoccupy Montaigne: he dismisses it as ‘justly abhorrent to our manners’ and as a parody of heterosexual love. But philosophical homosexuality shows
, mutatis mutandis,
what the love of man and woman could ideally be: a marriage of bodies
and
souls
.

Montaigne’s main concern is with the very special loving-friendship which he shared with Etienne de La Boëtie. La Boëtie’s youthful treatise
De la Servitude volontaire (On Willing Slavery)
which praised the polity of the Republic of Venice at the expense of monarchy was used seditiously after his death by those who had taken up arms against their King in the Wars of Religion. Montaigne is at pains to show that a rare and exemplary friendship has ever been consonant with loyalty to the State and that both he and La Boëtie were loyal to each other and, therefore, loyal to their country.]

[A] I was watching an artist on my staff working on a painting when I felt a desire to emulate him. The finest place in the middle of a wall he selects for a picture to be executed to the best of his ability; then he fills up
the empty spaces all round it with
grotesques
, which are fantastical paintings whose attractiveness consists merely in variety and novelty. And in truth what are these
Essays
if not monstrosities and
grotesques
botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?

Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne
.

[A fair woman terminating in the tail of a fish.]
¹

I can manage to reach the second stage of that painter but I fall short of the first and better one: my abilities cannot stretch so far as to venture to undertake a richly ornate picture, polished and fashioned according to the rules of art. So I decided to borrow. ‘painting’ from Etienne de La Boëtie, which will bring honour to the rest of the job: I mean the treatise to which he gave the title
On Willing Slavery
but which others, not knowing this, very appropriately baptised afresh as
Against One
.
²
He wrote it, while still very young,
³
as a kind of essay against tyrants in honour of freedom. It has long circulated among men of discretion – not without great and well-merited esteem, for it is a noble work, as solid as may be. Yet it is far from being the best he was capable of. If, at the age when I knew him when he was more mature, he had conceived a design such as mine and written down his thoughts, we would now see many choice works bringing us close to the glory of the Ancients; for, particularly where natural endowments are concerned, I know nobody who can compare with him. Yet nothing of his survives apart from this treatise – and even that is due to accident: I do not think he ever saw it again once he let go of it – and some
Considerations
on that
Edict of January
which our civil wars have made notorious: I may [C] perhaps [A] still find a place for it elsewhere.
⁴
That is all I have been able to recover of his literary remains, [C] I the heir to whom, with death on his lips, he so lovingly willed his books and
his papers – [A] apart from the slim volume of his works which I have had published already.

Yet I am particularly indebted to that treatise, because it first brought us together: it was shown to me long before I met him and first made me acquainted with his name; thus preparing for that loving-friendship between us which as long as it pleased God we fostered so perfect and so entire that it is certain that few such can even be read about, and no trace at all of it can be found among men of today. So many fortuitous circumstances are needed to make it, that it is already something if Fortune can achieve it once in three centuries. There seems to be nothing for which Nature has better prepared us than for fellowship – [C] and Aristotle says that good lawgivers have shown more concern for friendship than for justice.
⁵
[A] Within a fellowship the peak of perfection consists in friendship; for [C] all forms of it which are forged or fostered by pleasure or profit or by public or private necessity are so much the less beautiful and noble – and therefore so much the less ‘friendship’ – in that they bring in some purpose, end or fruition other than the friendship itself. Nor do those four ancient species of love conform to it: the natural, the social, the hospitable and the erotic.
⁶

[A] From children to fathers it is more a matter of respect; friendship, being fostered by mutual confidences, cannot exist between them because of their excessive inequality; it might also interfere with their natural obligations: for all the secret thoughts of fathers cannot be shared with their children for fear of begetting an unbecoming intimacy; neither can those counsels and admonitions which constitute one of the principal obligations of friendship be offered by children to their fathers. There have been peoples where it was the custom for children to kill their fathers and others for fathers to kill their children to avoid the impediment which each can constitute for the other: one depends naturally on the downfall of the other.
⁷

There have been philosophers who held such natural bonds in contempt – witness [C] Aristippus: when he was being pressed about the affection which he owed to his children since they had sprung from him, he began to spit, saying that that sprang from him too, and that we also engender lice and worms.
⁸
[A] And there was that other one whom Plutarch sought to reconcile with his brother but who retorted: ‘He matters no more to me for coming out of the same hole.’
⁹

The name of brother is truly a fair one and full of love: that is why La Boëtie and I made a brotherhood of our alliance. But sharing out property or dividing it up, with the wealth of one becoming the poverty of the other, can wondrously melt and weaken the solder binding brothers together. Brothers have to progress and advance by driving along the same path in the same convoy: they needs must frequently bump and jostle against each other. Moreover, why should there be found between them that congruity and affinity which engender true and perfect friendship? Father and son can be of totally different complexions: so can brothers. ‘He is my son, he is my kinsman, but he is wild, wicked or daft!’ And to the extent that they are loving relationships commanded by the law and the bonds of nature, there is less of our own choice, less ‘willing freedom’.
¹⁰
Our ‘willing freedom’ produces nothing more properly its own than affection and loving-friendship. It is not that I have failed to assay all that the other kind can afford, having had the best father who ever was, and the most indulgent even into extreme old age, and coming as I do from a family renowned and exemplary from generation to generation in the matter of brotherly harmony:

[B]
et ipse
Notus in fratres animi paterni
.

[And myself known for my fatherly concern for my brothers.]
¹¹

[A] You cannot compare with friendship the passion men feel for women, even though it is born of our own choice, nor can you put them in the same category. I must admit that the flames of passion –

neque enim est dea nescia nostri
Que dulcem curis miscet amaritiem

[for I am not unacquainted with that goddess who mingles sweet bitterness with love’s cares]
¹²
–

are more active, sharp and keen. But that fire is a rash one, fickle, fluctuating and variable; it is a feverish fire, subject to attacks and relapses, which only gets hold of a corner of us. The love of friends is a general universal warmth, temperate moreover and smooth, a warmth which is constant and at rest, all gentleness and evenness, having nothing sharp nor keen. What is more, sexual love is but a mad craving for something which escapes us:

Come segue la lepre il cacciatore
Al freddo, al caldo, alla montagna, al lito;
Ne piu l’estima poi che presa vede,
Et sol dietro a chi fugge affretta il piede
.

[Like the hunter who chases the hare through heat and cold, o’er hill and dale, yet, once he has bagged it, he thinks nothing of it; only while it flees away does he pound after it.]
¹³

As soon as it enters the territory of friendship (where wills work together, that is) it languishes and grows faint. To enjoy it is to lose it: its end is in the body and therefore subject to satiety. Friendship on the contrary is enjoyed in proportion to our desire: since it is a matter of the mind, with our souls being purified by practising it, it can spring forth, be nourished and grow only when enjoyed. Far below such perfect friendship those fickle passions also once found a place in me – not to mention in La Boëtie, who confesses to all too many in his verses. And so those two emotions came into me, each one aware of the other but never to be compared, the first maintaining its course in a proud and lofty flight, scornfully watching the other racing along way down below.

As for marriage, apart from being a bargain where only the entrance is free (its duration being fettered and constrained, depending on things outside our will), it is a bargain struck for other purposes; within it you soon have to unsnarl hundreds of extraneous tangled ends, which are enough to break the thread of a living passion and to trouble its course, whereas in friendship there is no traffic or commerce but with itself. In
addition, women are in truth not normally capable of responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn. And indeed if it were not for that, if it were possible to fashion such a relationship, willing and free, in which not only the souls had this full enjoyment but in which the bodies too shared in the union – [C] where the whole human being was involved – it is certain
¹⁴
[A] that the loving-friendship would be more full and more abundant. But there is no example yet of woman attaining to it [C] and by the common agreement of the Ancient schools of philosophy she is excluded from it.