Essays of Michel de Montaigne - 092

retire from all other company to enjoy the Muses: nor only with the
knowledge of philosophy, to teach his soul to be contented with itself,
and bravely to subsist without outward conveniences, when fate would have
it so; he was, moreover, so careful as to learn to cook, to shave
himself, to make his own clothes, his own shoes and drawers, to provide
for all his necessities in himself, and to wean himself from the
assistance of others. A man more freely and cheerfully enjoys borrowed
conveniences, when it is not an enjoyment forced and constrained by need;
and when he has, in his own will and fortune, the means to live without
them. I know myself very well; but ‘tis hard for me to imagine any so
pure liberality of any one towards me, any so frank and free hospitality,
that would not appear to me discreditable, tyrannical, and tainted with
reproach, if necessity had reduced me to it. As giving is an ambitious
and authoritative quality, so is accepting a quality of submission;
witness the insulting and quarrelsome refusal that Bajazet made of the
presents that Tamerlane sent him; and those that were offered on the part
of the Emperor Solyman to the Emperor of Calicut, so angered him, that he
not only rudely rejected them, saying that neither he nor any of his
predecessors had ever been wont to take, and that it was their office to
give; but, moreover, caused the ambassadors sent with the gifts to be put
into a dungeon. When Thetis, says Aristotle, flatters Jupiter, when the
Lacedaemonians flatter the Athenians, they do not put them in mind of the
good they have done them, which is always odious, but of the benefits
they have received from them. Such as I see so frequently employ every
one in their affairs, and thrust themselves into so much obligation,
would never do it, did they but relish as I do the sweetness of a pure
liberty, and did they but weigh, as wise: men should, the burden of
obligation: ‘tis sometimes, peradventure, fully paid, but ‘tis never
dissolved. ‘Tis a miserable slavery to a man who loves to be at full
liberty in all reapects. Such as know me, both above and below me in
station, are able to say whether they have ever known a man less
importuning, soliciting, entreating, and pressing upon others than I.
If I am so, and a degree beyond all modern example, ‘tis no great wonder,
so many parts of my manners contributing to it: a little natural pride,
an impatience at being refused, the moderation of my desires and designs,
my incapacity for business, and my most beloved qualities, idleness and
freedom; by all these together I have conceived a mortal hatred to being
obliged to any other, or by any other than myself. I leave no stone
unturned, to do without it, rather than employ the bounty of another in
any light or important occasion or necessity whatever. My friends
strangely trouble me when they ask me to ask a third person; and I think
it costs me little less to disengage him who is indebted to me, by making
use of him, than to engage myself to him who owes me nothing. These
conditions being removed, and provided they require of me nothing if any
great trouble or care (for I have declared mortal war against all care),
I am very ready to do every one the best service I can. I have been very
willing to seek occasion to do people a good turn, and to attach them to
me; and methinks there is no more agreeable employment for our means.
But I have yet more avoided receiving than sought occasions of giving,
and moreover, according to Aristotle, it is more easy., My fortune has
allowed me but little to do others good withal, and the little it can
afford, is put into a pretty close hand. Had I been born a great person,
I should have been ambitious to have made myself beloved, not to make
myself feared or admired: shall I more plainly express it? I should more
have endeavoured to please than to profit others. Cyrus very wisely, and
by the mouth of a great captain, and still greater philosopher, prefers
his bounty and benefits much before his valour and warlike conquests;
and the elder Scipio, wherever he would raise himself in esteem, sets a
higher value upon his affability and humanity, than on his prowess and
victories, and has always this glorious saying in his mouth: “That he has
given his enemies as much occasion to love him as his friends.” I will
then say, that if a man must, of necessity, owe something, it ought to be
by a more legitimate title than that whereof I am speaking, to which the
necessity of this miserable war compels me; and not in so great a debt as
that of my total preservation both of life and fortune: it overwhelms me.
I have a thousand times gone to bed in my own house with an apprehension
that I should be betrayed and murdered that very night; compounding with
fortune, that it might be without terror and with quick despatch; and,
after my Paternoster, I have cried out,
“Impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit!”
[“Shall impious soldiers have these new-ploughed grounds?”
--Virgil, Ecl., i. 71.]
What remedy? ‘tis the place of my birth, and that of most of my
ancestors; they have here fixed their affection and name. We inure
ourselves to whatever we are accustomed to; and in so miserable a
condition as ours is, custom is a great bounty of nature, which benumbs
out senses to the sufferance of many evils. A civil war has this with it
worse than other wars have, to make us stand sentinels in our own houses.
“Quam miserum, porta vitam muroque tueri,
Vixque suae tutum viribus esse domus!”
[“‘Tis miserable to protect one’s life by doors and walls, and to be
scarcely safe in one’s own house.”--Ovid, Trist., iv. I, 69.]
‘Tis a grievous extremity for a man to be jostled even in his own house
and domestic repose. The country where I live is always the first in
arms and the last that lays them down, and where there is never an
absolute peace:
“Tunc quoque, cum pax est, trepidant formidine belli....
Quoties Romam fortuna lacessit;
Hac iter est bellis.... Melius, Fortuna, dedisses
Orbe sub Eco sedem, gelidaque sub Arcto,
Errantesque domos.”
[“Even when there’s peace, there is here still the dear of war when
Fortune troubles peace, this is ever the way by which war passes.”
--Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 67.]
[“We might have lived happier in the remote East or in the icy
North, or among the wandering tribes.”--Lucan, i. 255.]
I sometimes extract the means to fortify myself against these
considerations from indifference and indolence, which, in some sort,
bring us on to resolution. It often befalls me to imagine and expect
mortal dangers with a kind of delight: I stupidly plunge myself headlong
into death, without considering or taking a view of it, as into a deep
and obscure abyss which swallows me up at one leap, and involves me in an
instant in a profound sleep, without any sense of pain. And in these
short and violent deaths, the consequence that I foresee administers more
consolation to me than the effect does fear. They say, that as life is
not better for being long, so death is better for being not long. I do
not so much evade being dead, as I enter into confidence with dying. I
wrap and shroud myself into the storm that is to blind and carry me away
with the fury of a sudden and insensible attack. Moreover, if it should
fall out that, as some gardeners say, roses and violets spring more
odoriferous near garlic and onions, by reason that the last suck and
imbibe all the ill odour of the earth; so, if these depraved natures
should also attract all the malignity of my air and climate, and render
it so much better and purer by their vicinity, I should not lose all.
That cannot be: but there may be something in this, that goodness is more
beautiful and attractive when it is rare; and that contrariety and
diversity fortify and consolidate well-doing within itself, and inflame
it by the jealousy of opposition and by glory. Thieves and robbers, of
their special favour, have no particular spite at me; no more have I to
them: I should have my hands too full. Like consciences are lodged under
several sorts of robes; like cruelty, disloyalty, rapine; and so much the
worse, and more falsely, when the more secure and concealed under colour
of the laws. I less hate an open professed injury than one that is
treacherous; an enemy in arms, than an enemy in a gown. Our fever has
seized upon a body that is not much the worse for it; there was fire
before, and now ‘tis broken out into a flame; the noise is greater, not
the evil. I ordinarily answer such as ask me the reason of my travels,
“That I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek.” If they
tell me that there may be as little soundness amongst foreigners, and
that their manners are no better than ours: I first reply, that it is
hard to be believed;
“Tam multa: scelerum facies!”
[“There are so many forms of crime.”--Virgil, Georg., i. 506.]
secondly, that it is always gain to change an ill condition for one that
is uncertain; and that the ills of others ought not to afflict us so much
as our own.
I will not here omit, that I never mutiny so much against France, that I
am not perfectly friends with Paris; that city has ever had my heart from
my infancy, and it has fallen out, as of excellent things, that the more
beautiful cities I have seen since, the more the beauty of this still
wins upon my affection. I love her for herself, and more in her own
native being, than in all the pomp of foreign and acquired
embellishments. I love her tenderly, even to her warts and blemishes.
I am a Frenchman only through this great city, great in people, great in
the felicity of her situation; but, above all, great and incomparable in
variety and diversity of commodities: the glory of France, and one of the
most noble ornaments of the world. May God drive our divisions far from
her. Entire and united, I think her sufficiently defended from all other
violences. I give her caution that, of all sorts of people, those will
be the worst that shall set her in discord; I have no fear for her, but
of herself, and, certainly, I have as much fear for her as for any other
part of the kingdom. Whilst she shall continue, I shall never want a
retreat, where I may stand at bay, sufficient to make me amends for
parting with any other retreat.
Not because Socrates has said so, but because it is in truth my own
humour, and peradventure not without some excess, I look upon all men as
my compatriots, and embrace a Polander as a Frenchman, preferring the
universal and common tie to all national ties whatever. I am not much
taken with the sweetness of a native air: acquaintance wholly new and
wholly my own appear to me full as good as the other common and
fortuitous ones with Four neighbours: friendships that are purely of our
own acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communication
of climate or of blood oblige us. Nature has placed us in the world free
and unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits, like the kings of
Persia, who obliged themselves to drink no other water but that of the
river Choaspes, foolishly quitted claim to their right in all other
streams, and, so far as concerned themselves, dried up all the other
rivers of the world. What Socrates did towards his end, to look upon a
sentence of banishment as worse than a sentence of death against him, I
shall, I think, never be either so decrepid or so strictly habituated to
my own country to be of that opinion. These celestial lives have images
enough that I embrace more by esteem than affection; and they have some
also so elevated and extraordinary that I cannot embrace them so much as
by esteem, forasmuch as I cannot conceive them. That fancy was singular
in a man who thought the whole world his city; it is true that he
disdained travel, and had hardly ever set his foot out of the Attic
territories. What say you to his complaint of the money his friends
offered to save his life, and that he refused to come out of prison by
the mediation of others, in order not to disobey the laws in a time when
they were otherwise so corrupt? These examples are of the first kind for
me; of the second, there are others that I could find out in the same
person: many of these rare examples surpass the force of my action, but
some of them, moreover, surpass the force of my judgment.
Besides these reasons, travel is in my opinion a very profitable
exercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and
unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school
wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity
of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a
perpetual variety of forms of human nature. The body is, therein,
neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it in
breath. I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am,
without alighting or being weary, eight or ten hours together:
“Vires ultra sorternque senectae.”
[“Beyond the strength and lot of age.”--AEneid, vi. 114.]
No season is enemy to me but the parching heat of a scorching sun; for
the umbrellas made use of in Italy, ever since the time of the ancient
Romans, more burden a man’s arm than they relieve his head. I would fain
know how it was that the Persians, so long ago and in the infancy of
luxury, made ventilators where they wanted them, and planted shades, as
Xenophon reports they did. I love rain, and to dabble in the dirt, as
well as ducks do. The change of air and climate never touches me; every
sky is alike; I am only troubled with inward alterations which I breed
within myself, and those are not so frequent in travel. I am hard to be
got out, but being once upon the road, I hold out as well as the best.
I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitous
to equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbour, as for
the longest voyage. I have learned to travel after the Spanish fashion,
and to make but one stage of a great many miles; and in excessive heats
I always travel by night, from sun set to sunrise. The other method of
baiting by the way, in haste and hurry to gobble up a dinner, is,
especially in short days, very inconvenient. My horses perform the
better; never any horse tired under me that was able to hold out the
first day’s journey. I water them at every brook I meet, and have only a
care they have so much way to go before I come to my inn, as will digest
the water in their bellies. My unwillingness to rise in a morning gives
my servants leisure to dine at their ease before they set out; for my own
part, I never eat too late; my appetite comes to me in eating, and not
else; I am never hungry but at table.
Some of my friends blame me for continuing this travelling humour, being
married and old. But they are out in’t; ‘tis the best time to leave a
man’s house, when he has put it into a way of continuing without him, and
settled such order as corresponds with its former government. ‘Tis much
greater imprudence to abandon it to a less faithful housekeeper, and who
will be less solicitous to look after your affairs.
The most useful and honourable knowledge and employment for the mother of
a family is the science of good housewifery. I see some that are
covetous indeed, but very few that are good managers. ‘Tis the supreme
quality of a woman, which a man ought to seek before any other, as the
only dowry that must ruin or preserve our houses. Let men say what they
will, according to the experience I have learned, I require in married
women the economical virtue above all other virtues; I put my wife to’t,
as a concern of her own, leaving her, by my absence, the whole government
of my affairs. I see, and am vexed to see, in several families I know,
Monsieur about noon come home all jaded and ruffled about his affairs,
when Madame is still dressing her hair and tricking up herself, forsooth,
in her closet: this is for queens to do, and that’s a question, too: ‘tis
ridiculous and unjust that the laziness of our wives should be maintained
with our sweat and labour. No man, so far as in me lie, shall have a
clearer, a more quiet and free fruition of his estate than I. If the
husband bring matter, nature herself will that the wife find the form.
As to the duties of conjugal friendship, that some think to be impaired
by these absences, I am quite of another opinion. It is, on the
contrary, an intelligence that easily cools by a too frequent and
assiduous companionship. Every strange woman appears charming, and we
all find by experience that being continually together is not so pleasing
as to part for a time and meet again. These interruptions fill me with
fresh affection towards my family, and render my house more pleasant to
me. Change warms my appetite to the one and then to the other. I know
that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of
the world to the other, and especially this, where there is a continual
communication of offices that rouse the obligation and remembrance. The
Stoics say that there is so great connection and relation amongst the
sages, that he who dines in France nourishes his companion in Egypt; and
that whoever does but hold out his finger, in what part of the world
soever, all the sages upon the habitable earth feel themselves assisted
by it. Fruition and possession principally appertain to the imagination;
it more fervently and constantly embraces what it is in quest of, than
what we hold in our arms. Cast up your daily amusements; you will find
that you are most absent from your friend when he is present with you;
his presence relaxes your attention, and gives you liberty to absent
yourself at every turn and upon every occasion. When I am away at Rome,
I keep and govern my house, and the conveniences I there left; see my
walls rise, my trees shoot, and my revenue increase or decrease, very
near as well as when I am there:
“Ante oculos errat domus, errat forma locorum.”
[“My house and the forms of places float before my eyes”
--Ovid, Trist, iii. 4, 57.]
If we enjoy nothing but what we touch, we may say farewell to the money
in our chests, and to our sons when they are gone a hunting. We will
have them nearer to us: is the garden, or half a day’s journey from home,
far? What is ten leagues: far or near? If near, what is eleven, twelve,
or thirteen, and so by degrees. In earnest, if there be a woman who can
tell her husband what step ends the near and what step begins the remote,
I would advise her to stop between;
“Excludat jurgia finis . . . .
Utor permisso; caudaeque pilos ut equinae
Paulatim vello, et demo unum, demo etiam unum
Dum cadat elusus ratione ruentis acervi:”
[“Let the end shut out all disputes . . . . I use what is
permitted; I pluck out the hairs of the horse’s tail one by one;
while I thus outwit my opponent.”--Horace, Ep., ii, I, 38, 45]
and let them boldly call philosophy to their assistance; in whose teeth
it may be cast that, seeing it neither discerns the one nor the other end
of the joint, betwixt the too much and the little, the long and the
short, the light and the heavy, the near and the remote; that seeing it
discovers neither the beginning nor the end, it must needs judge very
uncertainly of the middle:
“Rerum natura nullam nobis dedit cognitionem finium.”
[“Nature has green to us no knowledge of the end of things.”
--Cicero, Acad., ii. 29.]
Are they not still wives and friends to the dead who are not at the end
of this but in the other world? We embrace not only the absent, but
those who have been, and those who are not yet. We do not promise in
marriage to be continually twisted and linked together, like some little
animals that we see, or, like the bewitched folks of Karenty,--[Karantia,
a town in the isle of Rugen. See Saxo-Grammaticus, Hist. of Denmark,
book xiv.]--tied together like dogs; and a wife ought not to be so
greedily enamoured of her husband’s foreparts, that she cannot endure to
see him turn his back, if occasion be. But may not this saying of that
excellent painter of woman’s humours be here introduced, to show the
reason of their complaints?
“Uxor, si cesses, aut to amare cogitat,
Aut tete amari, aut potare, aut animo obsequi;
Et tibi bene esse soli, cum sibi sit male;”
[“Your wife, if you loiter, thinks that you love or are beloved; or
that you are drinking or following your inclination; and that it is
well for you when it is ill for her (all the pleasure is yours and
hers all the care).”
--Terence, Adelph., act i., sc. I, v. 7.]
or may it not be, that of itself opposition and contradiction entertain
and nourish them, and that they sufficiently accommodate themselves,
provided they incommodate you?
In true friendship, wherein I am perfect, I more give myself to my
friend, than I endeavour to attract him to me. I am not only better
pleased in doing him service than if he conferred a benefit upon me,
but, moreover, had rather he should do himself good than me, and he most
obliges me when he does so; and if absence be either more pleasant or
convenient for him, ‘tis also more acceptable to me than his presence;
neither is it properly absence, when we can write to one another: I have
sometimes made good use of our separation from one another: we better
filled and further extended the possession of life in being parted.
He--[La Boetie.]--lived, enjoyed, and saw for me, and I for him, as
fully as if he had himself been there; one part of us remained idle, and
we were too much blended in one another when we were together; the
distance of place rendered the conjunction of our wills more rich. This
insatiable desire of personal presence a little implies weakness in the
fruition of souls.
As to what concerns age, which is alleged against me, ‘tis quite
contrary; ‘tis for youth to subject itself to common opinions, and to
curb itself to please others; it has wherewithal to please both the
people and itself; we have but too much ado to please ourselves alone.
As natural conveniences fail, let us supply them with those that are
artificial. ‘Tis injustice to excuse youth for pursuing its pleasures,
and to forbid old men to seek them. When young, I concealed my wanton
passions with prudence; now I am old, I chase away melancholy by debauch.
And thus do the platonic laws forbid men to travel till forty or fifty
years old, so that travel might be more useful and instructive in so
mature an age. I should sooner subscribe to the second article of the
same Laws, which forbids it after threescore.
“But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey.”
What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it
my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me;
I only walk for the walk’s sake. They who run after a benefit or a hare,
run not; they only run who run at base, and to exercise their running.
My design is divisible throughout: it is not grounded upon any great
hopes: every day concludes my expectation: and the journey of my life is
carried on after the same manner. And yet I have seen places enough a
great way off, where I could have wished to have stayed. And why not,
if Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Zeno, Antipater, so many sages of the
sourest sect, readily abandoned their country, without occasion of
complaint, and only for the enjoyment of another air. In earnest, that
which most displeases me in all my travels is, that I cannot resolve to
settle my abode where I should best like, but that I must always propose
to myself to return, to accommodate myself to the common humour.
If I feared to die in any other place than that of my birth; if I thought
I should die more uneasily remote from my own family, I should hardly go
out of France; I should not, without fear, step out of my parish; I feel
death always pinching me by the throat or by the back. But I am
otherwise constituted; ‘tis in all places alike to me. Yet, might I have
my choice, I think I should rather choose to die on horseback than in
bed; out of my own house, and far from my own people. There is more
heartbreaking than consolation in taking leave of one’s friends; I am
willing to omit that civility, for that, of all the offices of
friendship, is the only one that is unpleasant; and I could, with all my
heart, dispense with that great and eternal farewell. If there be any
convenience in so many standers-by, it brings an hundred inconveniences
along with it. I have seen many dying miserably surrounded with all this
train: ‘tis a crowd that chokes them. ‘Tis against duty, and is a
testimony of little kindness and little care, to permit you to die in
repose; one torments your eyes, another your ears, another your tongue;
you have neither sense nor member that is not worried by them. Your
heart is wounded with compassion to hear the mourning of friends, and,
perhaps with anger, to hear the counterfeit condolings of pretenders.
Who ever has been delicate and sensitive, when well, is much more so when
ill. In such a necessity, a gentle hand is required, accommodated to his
sentiment, to scratch him just in the place where he itches, otherwise
scratch him not at all. If we stand in need of a wise woman--[midwife,
Fr. ‘sage femme’.]--to bring us into the world, we have much more need
of a still wiser man to help us out of it. Such a one, and a friend to
boot, a man ought to purchase at any cost for such an occasion. I am not
yet arrived to that pitch of disdainful vigour that is fortified in
itself, that nothing can assist or disturb; I am of a lower form; I
endeavour to hide myself, and to escape from this passage, not by fear,
but by art. I do not intend in this act of dying to make proof and show
of my constancy. For whom should I do it? all the right and interest I
have in reputation will then cease. I content myself with a death
involved within itself, quiet, solitary, and all my own, suitable to my
retired and private life; quite contrary to the Roman superstition, where
a man was looked upon as unhappy who died without speaking, and who had
not his nearest relations to close his eyes. I have enough to do to
comfort myself, without having to console others; thoughts enough in my
head, not to need that circumstances should possess me with new; and
matter enough to occupy me without borrowing. This affair is out of the
part of society; ‘tis the act of one single person. Let us live and be
merry amongst our friends; let us go repine and die amongst strangers; a
man may find those, for his money, who will shift his pillow and rub his
feet, and will trouble him no more than he would have them; who will
present to him an indifferent countenance, and suffer him to govern
himself, and to complain according to his own method.
I wean myself daily by my reason from this childish and inhuman humour,
of desiring by our sufferings to move the compassion and mourning of our
friends: we stretch our own incommodities beyond their just extent when
we extract tears from others; and the constancy which we commend in every
one in supporting his adverse fortune, we accuse and reproach in our
friends when the evil is our own; we are not satisfied that they should
be sensible of our condition only, unless they be, moreover, afflicted.
A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief. He who
makes himself lamented without reason is a man not to be lamented when
there shall be real cause: to be always complaining is the way never to
be lamented; by making himself always in so pitiful a taking, he is never
commiserated by any. He who makes himself out dead when he is alive, is
subject to be thought living when he is dying. I have seen some who have