Montaigne as a boy stands well revealed in the essay “On the Education of Children”. Independent and tenacious but slow to move, he was in danger of doing not wrong, but nothing at all-a reproach he was to hear all his life. Secure in the intelligent love of the father he loved dearly in return, he spent a boyhood generally happy but marred by his first seven years of formal education. These gave him his first real taste of folly and injustice: and from what he tells us of his mind at the time, he may well even then have judged much as he did later the inanity and severity that could come of knowledge and authority misapplied. No matter what his father did, “It was still school.”
Montaigne’s Catholicism must have been the result of a real decision. When this came, we do not know, nor even just when his brother and sister-or possibly two sisters-were converted to Protestantism. But his father was presumably concerned about the matter by the time Montaigne was thirteen, for it was no later than that his friend Bunel gave him Sebond’s “Book of Creatures, or Natural Theology” as a support for Catholics against heresy. Many young nobles in the fifteen-forties and fifties, for love of adventure and many other reasons, had at least a mild flirtation with the new could. Montaigne himself was somewhat drawn to it in its days of adversity and at one time tended to scout certain points of Catholic doctrine. His independence of mind takes one wonder what were his exact reasons for remaining in the fold. The Protestants had not yet done the harm that he was to emphasize later. Earlier it may have been intellectual conviction, premonition of trouble to come, scepticism about new ideas, allegiance to the faith of his father, or some combination of these and perhaps still other motives. We can only conjecture which one were dominant. But in a family so divided, Montaigne’s decision was an important one.
From thirteen to twenty-one, from schoolboy to fledgling magistrate, Montaigne is almost lost from sight. We have a better picture, fragmentary but suggestive, of his sixteen years in the courts of Perigueux and Bordeaux; that their due precedence was long denied and often challenged, even when at last acknowledged; and that on one such occasion Montaigne spoke out for the first time, to point out that their precedence had already been recognized in fact. We sense from the Essay how much he learned in the Parlement: the board experience of human behaviour, especially of sham and cussedness, the “capacity to sift the truth,” weighing evidence and probing into motivation, the conviction that however undemonstrable the standard, things were either right or wrong, and that thoughtful investigation and understanding must lead ultimately to right judgment.
More conspicuous than the profit was the vexation. It was bad enough to be confined mainly to reporting and not judging; it was worse that even this had to be based not on equity but on the interpretation of a cumbersome and often unfair body of law. The Essays are full of Montaigne” direct comments.
Consider the form of this justice that governs us: it is a true testimony of human imbecility, so full it is of contradiction and error…Poor devils are sacrificed to the forms of justice…How many condemnations I have seen which were more criminal than the crime…
Now laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws…They are often made by fools, more often by people who, in their hatred of equality, are wanting equity; but always be men, vain and irresolute authors.
There is nothing so grossly and widely and ordinarily defective as the laws. Whoever obeys them because they are just does not obey them for just the right reason.
Here is at least one source of Montaigne’s constant vexation with ceremony, of his awareness of human injustice, and most important, of his scepticism. It did not take Sextus Empiricus to teach him the vanity of the human intellect; he had learned it for sixteen hard years.
The outstanding characteristic of the young Montaigne as seen by his older self is independence. Brought up to freedom and adaptability, he “loves to give his freedom elbow room in all directions. He hates to feel indebted, or even to ask favours, because of “a little natural pride, inability to take refusal, contraction of my desires and designs, inability in all sorts of affairs, and my most favourite qualities-idleness freedom.” Almost equally he hates to involve himself unnecessary or excessively. Few things grip him, and he has cultivated this inborn trait: temperamentally incapable of solicitude, he would lend his blood as readily as his care. By nature and by reason he is frank. He would rather be importunate and indiscreet than a dissimulating flatterer. Even in his amours he is wholly honest, indeed blunt, in his approaches. Impatient of any constraint, he learns better from contrast than example, from good fortune than bad. Even the constraint of habit he has rained himself to avoid. Never that he can remember has he taken advice-nor often given it. He sees the illusions of age as well as those of youth. Impatient as a youngster when people competing with him would not try their hardest, he has always wanted to be treated as a man and felt that he should be. Too much is made of mere seniority he thinks in us to show, we have shown it at twenty.
Not all his traits of temperament are easy to assort. As is natural, he seems somewhat less phlegmatic early than late. He takes little trouble, he tells us, to correct his natural inclinations. Rather gay than melancholy, his native good spirits is tinged with seriousness but not sadness. He is lively; his legs are full of quicksilver; it is a good sermon that can keep him still and attentive. He is impetuous: even in his later years he eats greedily and sometimes bites his fingers in the process once, when challenged in the Parlement, he replies with what the official report describes as “all the vivacity of his character.” Though not an ambitions man, he is by no means free from ambitions as indeed he is never to be. Even his study as a youth, he says, is for ostentation, as are certain purchases of books. He is neither truly gregarious nor a pure solitary: his nature is outgoing and communicative. Altogether, his best quality of temperament is a full firm vigour.
Not a big man but solid, lively and full of health, a touch of pride showing in certain gestures, he is careless with money, gay and debonair, imaginative, a lover of poetry, of adornment, of excitement and variety. In short, a typical well-adjusted young man setting out to conquer the world and enjoy it. The splendour of the court draws him again and again in his twenties. Judging by the volume of his confidences on his youth, he is drawn most of all to the pursuit of women.
His attitude toward them is not completely simple. Like so many of the ancients and of his own contemporaries, he generally regards them as potentially decorative lightweights, incapable either of good sense or of mental or spiritual elevation. True friendship is beyond their reach; their love is nothing but sexual gratification. Constitutionally enslaved either to passion or to prudery, they have been denied by nature the freedom that allows some men to attain the dignity of fully human living. The essay “Of Three Good Women” (II:35), which is pointedly followed by “Of the Most Excellent Men,” and the goodness of the three heroines consists simply in great devotion to their husbands.
Yet Montaigne likes them and wants to be liked by them. The several essays that he dedicates to women; their society is one of the three associations that he enjoys. And his most licentious essay, “on Some Verses of Virgil,” written, he says, so that women will take his book from their salons into their boudoirs, concludes that men have been unfair to them and kept them from their rightful equality. His usually attitude in the Essays, which is mainly that of his fifties, is the affectionate condescension of maturity toward the chard and folly of adolescence.
In his youth his dominant feeling apparently is frank desire. He says he cannot remember when he was a virgin: can imagine chastity but has never practiced it. He has suffered the flame and pangs of love. Though he has avoided paid amours, he has not escaped a bout or two of venereal disease. No professional ladies’ man, always perfectly frank in his affairs, he will not stoop to deceit. Sexual intercourse he greatly enjoys as a healthy, natural and therefore legitimate function. If he seems to treat it rather like eating, at least he finds it much more exciting.
Altogether, it is a lively young magistrate that the Essays fondly evoke. Yet his liveliness is not giddy. Even as later he fights the illusions of age, so now he fights those of youth. While his passions disport, his judgment remains as uncommitted observer. Looking back later on his youthful amours, he finds that he had himself pretty well in hand and would do not better now if exposed to such strong temptation. He is prudent in concealment when necessary. By an effort he can oppose his passion with diversion and reason: he can recognize the face of vice under the mask of pleasure. Independent above all, he vigorously and successfully fights any bondage to love. “In his business, I did not wholly let myself go; I enjoyed it, but I did not forget myself; I kept in its entirely that bit of sense and discretion that nature gave me, to the advantage of may partners and to mine: a bit of emotion, but no folly.”
Besides judgment and self-control, another serious trait marks the young Montaigne. Whatever he did, he says, death was never far from his thoughts. We can only guess at the cause of this near obsession. Certainly it is not uncommon in youth, to whose long, long thoughts the limits as well as the possibilities of life often seem closer and more real than they do later. Montaigne does not let death worry him, but he feels its nearness constantly:
There is nothing with which I have at all ages more occupied my mind than with images of death. Even in the most licentious season of my age…amid ladies and games, someone would think me involved in digesting some jealousy by myself, or the uncertainty of some hope, while I was thinking about I don’t remember whom, who had been overtaken a few days before by a hot fever and by death, on leaving a similar feast, his head full of idleness, love, and a happy time, like myself; and that the same chance was hanging from my ear….I did not wrinkly my forehead any more over that thought than any other…Otherwise for my part I would have been in continual fear and frenzy; for never did a man so distrust his life, never did a man set less faith in his duration.
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