Selections from the Essays of Montaigne Michel De Montaigne

Family, childhood and education

Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, close to Bordeaux. The family was very wealthy. His great-grandfather, Ramon Felipe Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant - and had bought the estate in 1477, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time, and had also been the mayor of Bordeaux.[5]

Although there were several families bearing the patronym "Eyquem" in Guyenne, his father's family is thought to have had some degree of Marrano (Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) origins,[7] while his mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, was a convert to Protestantism.[8] His maternal grandfather, Pedro López,[9] from Zaragoza, was from a wealthy Marrano (Sephardic Jewish) family, that had converted to Catholicism.[10][11][12][13] His maternal grandmother, Honorette Dupuy, was from a Catholic family in Gascony, France.[14]

During a great part of Montaigne's life his mother lived near him, and even survived him; but she is mentioned only twice in his essays. Montaigne's relationship with his father however is frequently reflected upon and discussed in his essays.[10]

Montaigne's education began in early childhood, and followed a pedagogical plan, that his father had developed, refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, in order to, according to the elder Montaigne, "draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help".[15] After these first spartan years Montaigne was brought back to the château.

Another objective was for Latin to become his first language. The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus, who could not speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin, and they also were given strict orders always to speak to the boy in Latin. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words he employed; and thus they acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than the more traditional books.[16]

The atmosphere of the boy's upbringing engendered in him a spirit of "liberty and delight" - that he would later describe as making him "relish...duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint". His father had a musician wake him every morning, playing one instrument or another;[17] and an epinettier (with a zither) was the constant companion to Montaigne and his tutor, playing tunes to alleviate boredom and tiredness.

Around the year 1539 Montaigne was sent to study at a highly regarded boarding school in Bordeaux, the College of Guienne, then under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan, where he mastered the whole curriculum by his thirteenth year. He finished the first phase of his educational studies at the College of Guienne in 1546.[18] He then began his study of law (his alma mater remains unknown, since there are no certainties about his activity from 1546 to 1557)[19] and entered a career in the local legal system.

Career and marriage

Montaigne was a counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux, and in 1557 he was appointed counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux, a high court. From 1561 to 1563 he was courtier at the court of Charles IX, and he was present with the king at the siege of Rouen (1562). He was awarded the highest honour of the French nobility, the collar of the Order of Saint Michael.[20]

While serving at the Bordeaux Parlement, he became a very close friend of the humanist poet Étienne de La Boétie, whose death in 1563 deeply affected Montaigne. It has been suggested by Donald M. Frame - in his introduction to The Complete Essays of Montaigne - that because of Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate", after losing Étienne, he began the Essais as a new "means of communication", and that "the reader takes the place of the dead friend".[21]

Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565, probably in an arranged marriage. She was the daughter and niece of wealthy merchants of Toulouse and Bordeaux. They had six daughters, but only the second-born, Léonor, survived infancy.[22] He wrote very little about the relationship with his wife, and little is known about their marriage. Of his daughter Léonor he wrote: "All my children die at nurse; but Léonore, our only daughter, who has escaped this misfortune, has reached the age of six and more, without having been punished, the indulgence of her mother aiding, except in words, and those very gentle ones."[23] His daughter married François de la Tour and later Charles de Gamaches. She had a daughter by each.[24]

Writing

Following the petition of his father, Montaigne started to work on the first translation of the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond's Theologia naturalis, which he published a year after his father's death in 1568 (in 1595 Sebond's Prologue was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum because of its declaration that the Bible is not the only source of revealed truth). Montaigne also published a posthumous edition of the works of his friend, Boétie.[25]

In 1570 he moved back to the family estate, the Château de Montaigne, which he had inherited. He thus became the Lord of Montaigne. Around this time he was seriously injured in a riding accident on the grounds of the château when one of his mounted companions collided with him at speed, throwing Montaigne from his horse and briefly knocking him unconscious.[26] It took weeks or months for him to recover, and this close brush with death apparently affected him greatly, as he discussed it at length in his writings over the following years. Not long after the accident he relinquished his magistracy in Bordeaux, his first child was born (and died a few months later), and by 1571 he had retired from public life completely, to the tower of the château – his so-called "citadel" – where he almost totally isolated himself from every social and family affair. Locked up in his library, which contained a collection of some 1,500 volumes, he began work on the writings that would later be compiled into his Essais ("Essays"), first published in 1580. On the day of his 38th birthday, as he entered this almost ten-year period of self-imposed reclusion, he had the following inscription placed on the crown of the bookshelves of his working chamber:

In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.[27]

• Château de Montaigne, a house built on the land once owned by Montaigne's family. His original family home no longer exists, although the tower in which he wrote still stands.
• The Tour de Montaigne (Montaigne's tower), where Montaigne's library was located, remains mostly unchanged since the sixteenth century.

Travels

During this time of the Wars of Religion in France, Montaigne, a Roman Catholic,[28] acted as a moderating force,[29] respected both by the Catholic King Henry III and the Protestant Henry of Navarre, who later converted to Catholicism.

In 1578 Montaigne, whose health had always been excellent, started suffering from painful kidney stones, a tendency he inherited from his father's family. Throughout this illness he would have nothing to do with doctors or drugs.[5] From 1580 to 1581 Montaigne traveled in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, partly in search of a cure, establishing himself at Bagni di Lucca, where he took the waters. His journey was also a pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto, to which he presented a silver relief (depicting him, his wife, and their daughter, kneeling before the Madonna) considering himself fortunate that it should be hung on a wall within the shrine.[30] He kept a journal, recording regional differences and customs[31] - and a variety of personal episodes, including the dimensions of the stones he succeeded in expelling. This was published much later, in 1774, after its discovery in a trunk, that is displayed in his tower.[32]

During a visit to the Vatican that Montaigne described in his travel journal, the Essais were examined by Sisto Fabri, who served as Master of the Sacred Palace under Pope Gregory XIII. After Fabri examined Montaigne's Essais, the text was returned to him on 20 March 1581. Montaigne had apologized for references to the pagan notion of "fortuna", as well as for writing favorably of Julian the Apostate and of heretical poets, and was released to follow his own conscience in making emendations to the text.[33]

Later career

While in the city of Lucca in 1581 he learned that, like his father before him, he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He thus returned and served as mayor. He was re-elected in 1583 and served until 1585, again moderating between Catholics and Protestants. The plague broke out in Bordeaux toward the end of his second term in office, in 1585. In 1586 the plague and the French Wars of Religion prompted him to leave his château for two years.[5]

Montaigne continued to extend, revise, and oversee the publication of the Essais. In 1588 he wrote its third book - and also met Marie de Gournay, an author, who admired his work, and later edited and published it. Montaigne later referred to her as his adopted daughter.[5]

When King Henry III was assassinated in 1589, Montaigne, despite his aversion to the cause of The Reformation, was anxious to promote a compromise, that would end the bloodshed, and gave his support to Henry of Navarre, who would go on to become King Henry IV. Montaigne's position associated him with the politiques, the establishment movement that prioritised peace, national unity, and royal authority over religious allegiance.[34]

Death

Montaigne died of quinsy at the age of 59 in 1592 at the Château de Montaigne. In his case the disease "brought about paralysis of the tongue",[35] especially difficult for one who once said: "the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation. I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose, I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice."[36] Remaining in possession of all his other faculties, he requested Mass, and died during the celebration of that Mass.[37]

He was buried nearby. Later his remains were moved to the church of Saint Antoine at Bordeaux. The church no longer exists. It became the Convent des Feuillants, which also has disappeared.[38]