When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing With Me? Part 4

What therefore runs like a subterranean stream through the pages of the essay is the idea that all religion Christian and Amerindian alike is involved in a desire for contact with the other person's body, and through them oneself; a wors.h.i.+p that, through sublimation and 'culture', Christianity has perverted and made the source of doubt and pointless cruelty. But what is the bone of contention in Christianity the Eucharist is a source of solidarity in its unadulterated form, even in the ritualized song that a prisoner sings to his captors: That they should come boldly, and a.s.semble to dine off him: for they shall be eating their fathers and grandfathers, whose flesh has served to feed and nourish this body. These muscles, he says, this flesh and these veins are yours, poor fools that you are: can you not see that they still contain the substance of your ancestors' limbs? Savour them well, you will find that they have the taste of your own flesh.

These are words that echo the consecration of the host: 'this is my body', 'this is my blood'. But what is important is that the Amerindian version also contains the source of its own moderation. The description of their revenge thus amounts to a process of personal and bodily reintegration literally, incorporation not only among the victors, but also between the victors and the victims, who have themselves dined on their enemies' ancestors. The act of ingestion thus becomes mutual: in the act of eating, they are eaten, and themselves eat themselves. What Montaigne emphasizes is the relis.h.i.+ng and tasting of the body, to such an extent that the two fleshes become consubstantial: 'the taste of your own flesh'. Through the sampling of another's being they sample their own, and religiously and philosophically touch and taste taste base. base.

But what is perhaps most important for Montaigne is that the savouring savouring of this fact serves to satisfy and therefore moderate their appet.i.te it is this ritual aspect rather than the quant.i.ty of flesh that of this fact serves to satisfy and therefore moderate their appet.i.te it is this ritual aspect rather than the quant.i.ty of flesh that nourishes nourishes them (to use one of Montaigne's favourite words them (to use one of Montaigne's favourite words nourrir nourrir). And this ability to actively, consciously taste and savour, and hence be nourished, is at the heart of the difference between the Amerindians and Europeans for Montaigne. They eat meat and fish 'roasted without any other preparation' and eat on first rising, the one meal satisfying them for the rest of the day. Their wine is a laxative to those who are not used to it (i.e. it has the opposite effect of incorporation), but to them it is good for the stomach and 'very pleasant'. As a result of this proper satedness, they do not prospect beyond the bounds of what nature has laid out for them and live a life that stands as an inversion of consumer consumption, a vision of the original Amerindian dream: They do not struggle to conquer new territory, for they still enjoy that luxuriance that nature provides for them, without labour and pains, with all necessary things in such abundance, that they have no need to aggrandize their borders. They are still in that happy state of not desiring more than their natural necessities demand: anything beyond that is superfluous for them.

And it is this lack of bodily nourishment that lies at the heart of the bloodthirsty cruelty of the Europeans. The Amerindians have no need for torture or extortion: 'they ask of their prisoners no other ransom but a confession and acknowledgement of being conquered'. Their appet.i.tes are healthy, but not out of control. The idea of sinfulness seems to be unknown. Montaigne transcribes a song about a snake whose beautiful pattern is copied onto a girdle as a gift for a lover: 'Adder stay, stay adder, that my sister may use your colours as a pattern to fas.h.i.+on a rich girdle to give to my love.' In contrast to the Christian tradition, the serpent is a symbol of beauty and fidelity rather than s.e.xual temptation, the girdle perhaps symbolizing chast.i.ty. Montaigne goes on to describe their language as 'soft', agreeable to the ear, 'something like Greek in its endings'.

Of course, Montaigne never visited South America, and all his knowledge is from secondary, anecdotal accounts, so we cannot draw any real anthropological or historical knowledge from it. 'Of Cannibals' is an imaginative 'essay' which mingles travel narratives, sailors' anecdotes and apocryphal tales from the New World to ponder issues that are really Montaigne's own. And yet, like his thoughts about animals, it allows him to explore an alternative reality, where men even enemies are united by religion rather than divided by it, and through it manifest a desire albeit a cannibalistic one, but not a cruel one for each other.

And here we can see the way in which these thoughts on cannibals inform his description of the 'most ancient religious ceremony' of circ.u.mcision that he witnesses in Rome. There the mohel mohel takes some wine into his mouth and 'sucks the still bleeding glans of the boy and spits out the blood he has drawn from it'. This he does three times. He then dips his finger in the b.l.o.o.d.y gla.s.s and gives it to the boy to suck. The takes some wine into his mouth and 'sucks the still bleeding glans of the boy and spits out the blood he has drawn from it'. This he does three times. He then dips his finger in the b.l.o.o.d.y gla.s.s and gives it to the boy to suck. The mohel mohel then pa.s.ses the gla.s.s 'in the same state' i.e. still b.l.o.o.d.y to the mother and the other women present 'to drink up the remainder'. They finish off by inhaling some incense from a vessel that Montaigne likens to a ca.s.soulet a cooking pot. What Montaigne emphasizes is a similarly ordered economy of body and blood exchange, from rabbi to boy, from boy to mother and then to the other women, and finally from the boy to himself, who is given a b.l.o.o.d.y, wine-dipped finger to suck, giving him 'the taste' of his 'own flesh'. Whether Montaigne approves of all this is impossible to say in a later aside he describes circ.u.mcision as a punishment for s.e.x. But what is interesting is that the next entry in the journal describes the 'licentiousness' of the Christian Shrovetide celebrations, where naked old men and Jews are made to race against each other and are humiliated. And carnival, as Montaigne well knew, const.i.tutes a farewell to the flesh before the onset of Lent then pa.s.ses the gla.s.s 'in the same state' i.e. still b.l.o.o.d.y to the mother and the other women present 'to drink up the remainder'. They finish off by inhaling some incense from a vessel that Montaigne likens to a ca.s.soulet a cooking pot. What Montaigne emphasizes is a similarly ordered economy of body and blood exchange, from rabbi to boy, from boy to mother and then to the other women, and finally from the boy to himself, who is given a b.l.o.o.d.y, wine-dipped finger to suck, giving him 'the taste' of his 'own flesh'. Whether Montaigne approves of all this is impossible to say in a later aside he describes circ.u.mcision as a punishment for s.e.x. But what is interesting is that the next entry in the journal describes the 'licentiousness' of the Christian Shrovetide celebrations, where naked old men and Jews are made to race against each other and are humiliated. And carnival, as Montaigne well knew, const.i.tutes a farewell to the flesh before the onset of Lent carne-vale carne-vale.

At the end of his essay 'Of Cannibals', Montaigne reveals how he came across three Tupinamba Indians after the siege of Rouen in 1562 (Rouen enjoyed a monopoly on the importation of brazilwood from the New World). Just like he asks of his cat, Montaigne is interested in the question: What do they think of us? Tantalizingly, Montaigne says that he could remember only two of the three things they said. Firstly, they said that they wondered why so many men with big beards were ruled by a child (Charles IX was only twelve at the time). And: Secondly (they have a way of speaking of men as 'halves' of one another), that they had observed that they had seen men amongst us, full and gorged with all kinds of things, and that their halves were begging at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty.

Montaigne then managed to speak to one of the them alone, and asked what he gained from his status (he was the equivalent of a captain). He responded that he was allowed to lead from the front during war. But what about in peacetime? Then, he said, the villagers under his rule would clear paths through the undergrowth, so that he might gain access to their village more easily.

Montaigne then finishes with an ironic flourish: 'This is all very well, but hang on, they don't even wear trousers' meaning that we will forever judge others by our own habitual prejudices. But this sense of honour as manifested in an openness to the other person, in a gesture of welcoming them and meeting them half-way, is something that seems to strike a certain chord with Montaigne.

The highlight of his stay in Rome is his meeting with the Pope Pontifex Maximus, Episcopus Ecclesiae Catholicae Pontifex Maximus, Episcopus Ecclesiae Catholicae his secretary making a note of the elaborate ch.o.r.eography required in venerating G.o.d's plenipotentiary on earth, but at the end of the day, a man of flesh, and blood and feet: his secretary making a note of the elaborate ch.o.r.eography required in venerating G.o.d's plenipotentiary on earth, but at the end of the day, a man of flesh, and blood and feet: It is true that most people do not go straight towards him, cutting across the room, instead shuffling a little along the wall, and, after this detour, make straight for him. When they are half-way they again go down on one knee, and receive the second benediction. This done, they go towards him as far as a velvet carpet spread out at his feet, seven or eight feet further. At the edge of this carpet they get down on both knees. The amba.s.sador presenting them then got down on one knee, and turned back the Pope's robe from the right foot, on which there is a red slipper with a white cross upon it. Those who are on their knees drag themselves along in this posture up to his foot, and stoop down to the ground to kiss it. Monsieur de Montaigne said that he had slightly raised the end of his toe.

8.

The Philosopher's Stone

(ill.u.s.trations credit 8.1)

A few months later Montaigne found himself in slightly less formal surroundings, relaxing trouserlessly in the warm mineral baths at Bagni di Lucca. The final goal of his travels was to sample the thermal baths of Italy drinking and bathing in them as a treatment for the kidney stones that had plagued him over the past few years, and in April 1581 Montaigne set off from Rome for the baths in high spirits. Upon arriving, he inspected the rooms on offer before splas.h.i.+ng out on the finest one available: especially for the view, which commands...the whole of the little valley and the River Lima, and the mountains which shelter the same valley, all well-cultivated and green to the summit, filled with chestnut and olive trees and elsewhere with vines, that they plant all over the mountains and arrange in circles and terraces...From my room all night I listen to the gentle sound of the river.

He has a dining room, three bedrooms and a kitchen, and a fresh napkin every day, which he uses to clean his teeth. And he sets about taking the waters, bathing in a dark vaulted pool about half the size of his dining room at Montaigne, and recording in his journal the quant.i.ties of fluids in and fluids out. He even has a go with something called a doccia doccia, from which 'you receive hot water upon different parts of the body, and especially the head...in a continual spray'.

Spread around the mountainside are other baths, all having their own therapeutic powers: 'One cools, another warms, this one for one illness, that one for another, and thereabouts a thousand miracles; in short, there is no kind of illness that does not find its cure there.'

Montaigne's kidney stones had a profound effect upon his life. Seeing his father being 'grievously tormented' and fainting with pain in the seven years before his death contributed to his initial pessimism. He began to suffer in his kidneys about the time he was forty, not long after his retirement, but the stone's full force struck him at forty-five, two years before he published his first edition of the Essays Essays, plaguing him with its capricious misery. Of the surprises that life held in store, he wished that fate had allocated him something different: 'For he could not have chosen one of which I have had a greater horror since childhood...it is the one I dreaded most.' So when Montaigne first published the Essays Essays in 1580, he could be forgiven for thinking that he had only five years left to live another reason to travel to see the world: to literally see Rome and die. in 1580, he could be forgiven for thinking that he had only five years left to live another reason to travel to see the world: to literally see Rome and die.

Kidney stones (renal calculi) are most commonly formed from calcium oxalate crystals that occur in the urine and are deposited in the kidney in too great a quant.i.ty to disperse. Diet may be a cause, but a key factor is genetic predisposition, and Montaigne wonders why he had been bequeathed this hereditary time-bomb. He was conceived before his father suffered from the stone and he asks how, out of the small drop of sperm from which he was constructed, the knowledge of his future had been ordained. And why did he alone out his brothers and sisters suffer in this fas.h.i.+on?

It is, Montaigne says, 'the most sudden, the most painful, the most fatal and most incurable of all diseases', the symptoms occurring when larger stones become stuck in the urinary tract causing vomiting, fever and excruciating pain. He notes in his essay 'Of Suicide' Pliny's observation that it is the disease most likely to make men kill themselves, and wishes he could have the luck of the man mentioned by Cicero, who, having a wet dream, discharged a stone into his sheets. In contrast, he says, his curiously 'unwench' him, and diminish his natural get-up-and-go.

And the suffering can be prolonged. In Rome just before Christmas he spends the night pa.s.sing gravel and a stone that took six hours to travel through his p.e.n.i.s. His travels are interrupted by days of immobility, which vexes Montaigne for whom life is nothing if not movement almost as much as the pain.

But on the condition and its management Montaigne considers himself something of an expert. He takes a keen interest in treatments and cures, and consults the latest papers on mineral therapies Bacci's De thermis De thermis (1571), Donati's (1571), Donati's De acquis lucensibus De acquis lucensibus (1580). And he is flattered when at the baths some medical men call on him to ask for a second opinion. But, in truth, the sixteenth-century body was still a mysterious codex that had yet to be properly unrolled. One gentleman swears by the medicinal effects of a mysterious green gemstone carried about him, obtained from a monk who had travelled in India. In Baden, they believe in the curative powers of bathing after scarifying, soaking in waters turned incarnadine with blood. The Cremona merchant with dementia tells Montaigne how he is perplexed by the behaviour of his flatulence, how it rushes out of his ears during the night. He advises Montaigne that the best way to get the bowels moving is to moisten some coriander seeds in one's mouth and then insert them into one's a.n.u.s (important to remember which way round). Montaigne tries, but is deflated at the outcome: 'a lot of wind, of which I was quite full; of matter, little'. (1580). And he is flattered when at the baths some medical men call on him to ask for a second opinion. But, in truth, the sixteenth-century body was still a mysterious codex that had yet to be properly unrolled. One gentleman swears by the medicinal effects of a mysterious green gemstone carried about him, obtained from a monk who had travelled in India. In Baden, they believe in the curative powers of bathing after scarifying, soaking in waters turned incarnadine with blood. The Cremona merchant with dementia tells Montaigne how he is perplexed by the behaviour of his flatulence, how it rushes out of his ears during the night. He advises Montaigne that the best way to get the bowels moving is to moisten some coriander seeds in one's mouth and then insert them into one's a.n.u.s (important to remember which way round). Montaigne tries, but is deflated at the outcome: 'a lot of wind, of which I was quite full; of matter, little'.

Montaigne therefore resorts to his own dispensations. He takes short showers, and bathes and drinks and bathes again, shocking local opinion. He puts his groin under the water spout and feels, as he thinks, the wind escaping from his genitals, his right t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e slowly going down. And in the progress of the stone he witnesses the mysteries of microcosm and macrocosm, the larger being recapitulated by the small: On the 24th, in the morning, I pa.s.sed a stone which stopped in the pa.s.sage. From that moment until dinner I held back my urine, to increase the urge. Then, not without pain and blood, both before and after, I pa.s.sed it. It was of the size and length of a pine-nut, but big at one end like a bean. To tell the truth, in was exactly the same shape as a p.r.i.c.k.

He wonders what will follow. And he varies his treatment to try and second guess his illness. He bathes, drinks five pounds of water and goes on an invigorating two-mile walk; but again to no avail 'farted endlessly'.

One evening the pain of trapped wind is so unbearable that he calls for Captain Paulino, who, like many proprietors at the baths, doubles as a complementary therapist. He requests an enema, almost as one might order a c.o.c.ktail from the loungebar of a luxury five-star hotel: which was very comfortably administered to me at sundown, made of oil, chamomile and aniseed, and nothing else, according to the prescription of the apothecary alone. Captain Paulino delivered it to me with such skill that, feeling the wind rus.h.i.+ng out against it, he stopped and drew back, and then continued very gradually so that I absorbed the whole thing without trouble. He did not need to remind me to retain it as long as I could, for it did not move my bowels at all. I was in this state for three hours, and then tried by myself to void it.

But the general prognosis is not good. Generally, drinking water is beneficial for kidney stones, in that it dilutes the urine, separating the calcium crystals, and Montaigne observes others whose health does seem restored. But he himself continues to suffer, and the heavy draughts of water seem to bring on other complications: he gets a toothache (which the doctor puts down to flatulence), and migraines which affect his sight. He tries to bathe his eyes, dunking his head in the water, but 'felt no effect from it, either good or bad'. He becomes increasingly aware of the disagreements in medical opinion: Donati saying that that it is better to eat little and drink more, Franciotti saying the opposite. 'What a vain thing is medicine!' exclaims Montaigne: 'It is a stupid habit to measure how much you p.i.s.s.' And towards the end of his stay he begins to feel that the waters may be the source as much as the solution to his problems: For myself, if I judge correctly about these waters, they do neither much harm nor much good; they are weak and insipid stuff, and it is to be feared that they heat the kidneys more than they purge them.

And at the beginning of September 1581 he 'began to find these baths unpleasant'. He falls into a melancholy mood, not dissimilar to that that which he experienced upon first arriving, when he recalled the memory of his friend: when writing to Monsieur d'Ossat, I fell into such distressing thoughts about Monsieur de La Boetie, and felt like that for so long, without recovering, that it caused me much pain.

He speaks to a local man, who says that the baths have killed more than they have healed, and on the night of 4 September Montaigne reaches rock bottom, the agonies of toothache augmenting the pain of the stone. It attacks his jaw, spreading to his head, such that he sweats and s.h.i.+vers and is incapable of standing. In the middle of the night he calls for Captain Paulino, who prescribes aqua vitae aqua vitae (ethanol) which gives him some relief when he holds it in his mouth. But as he drifts off into sleep, exhausted, it trickles down his throat, causing him to choke. 'It was', he says, 'the cruellest night I ever remember having spent.' (ethanol) which gives him some relief when he holds it in his mouth. But as he drifts off into sleep, exhausted, it trickles down his throat, causing him to choke. 'It was', he says, 'the cruellest night I ever remember having spent.'

But in the face of this suffering, the baths bring other benefits, ones that work on the spirit as much as anything else. For the next day, as he lies cradling his aching jaw, Montaigne records a rather touching scene: On the Tuesday morning all the gentlemen who were at the baths came to see me in bed. I had a small mastic plaster put on the pulse on my left temple. On this day I suffered little. At night they put a hot poultice on the cheek and the left side of my head. I slept free from pain...

It is curiously affecting to see this sixteenth-century n.o.bleman, a scion of the n.o.bility of the sword, a student of the Stoic strictures of the ancients, being solicitously visited in his sickbed by his fellow n.o.blemen because of a toothache. And at the baths Montaigne finds society, companions.h.i.+p one might even say friends. His fellow-bathers spoil him with wine and provisions. He visits the village of Menabbio where he dines with Signor Santo, a wealthy soldier, taking with him a gift of fish. And back at the baths he is invited out for an evening, to a ball: where several gentlewomen were gathered, well dressed but of ordinary beauty, although they were among the best looking of Lucca. In the evening Signor Ludovico de Ferrari of Cremona, whom I know well, sent me a present of some boxes of very good quince jelly, scented, and some limes, and some oranges of an extraordinary size.

Moreover, on returning to the baths for a second visit after an excursion to Florence, he experiences a reception similar to that which he would hope to receive at Montaigne: Great were the welcomes and caresses I received from all these people. Indeed, I might have thought I had returned to my own house. I took up the same room that I had the first time, at a price of twenty scudi a month, and on the same terms.

And he goes off for his first dip of the morning 'not only healthy, but in all round good spirits'.

Companions.h.i.+p thus helps to take Montaigne out of himself. But it has to be said that this bonhomie is also helped by the rather relaxed, s.e.xy ambience of the baths. At the beginning of his trip Montaigne copies down the rules on the walls of the bathhouse at Plombieres. They state that not only is it forbidden to swear, quarrel, bear arms or give the lie, but also: All prost.i.tutes and immodest girls are forbidden to enter the said baths, or to approach the same within five hundred paces...[and] all persons are forbidden to use towards the ladies, gentlewomen and other women and girls, frequenting the said baths, any lascivious or immodest language; to touch their persons indecorously; or to enter or quit the said baths disrespectfully, contrary to public propriety...

One is reminded of those signs on public swimming pools that outlawed 'acrobatics, gymnastics, diving' but also, rather quaintly, 'smoking and petting'. Montaigne copies the entire proclamation down at great length.

But in its rather officious tone, it could be said that the sign perhaps protests a little too much. For in a contemporary guide to the same baths, Jean Le Bon's Short Description of the Properties of the Baths of Plombieres Short Description of the Properties of the Baths of Plombieres (1576), we see a different picture, mingling propriety with a slightly more t.i.tillating undertone: (1576), we see a different picture, mingling propriety with a slightly more t.i.tillating undertone: On the morning that you take a bath, the man enters with culottes or pants, the women with a blouse of fairly thick cloth (too much undone reveals that which the bath does not wish to see). One bathes pell-mell, as some play instruments, some eat, some doze, others dance in such a way that the company is never bored, and never feels time beginning to drag.

And in a Renaissance painting of the baths at Bourbon l'Archambaut, things seem to be getting a little steamy. In their defence, it has to be said that the baths at Bagni di Lucca did have a separate area for women. But the policing of such divisions is obviously rather lax, as Montaigne himself goes and bathes in the women's section one morning, and quotes a local rhyme suggesting that such divisions can never really overcome the attraction of the s.e.xes:

(ill.u.s.trations credit 8.2) Chi vuol che la sua donna impregni, Mandila al bagno, e non ci vengi.If you want your wife impregnated, Take her to the baths then vacate it.

And clearly Montaigne is rather an unreconstructed man in his att.i.tude towards women. In Rome, 'as at Paris', he takes a keen interest in the local prost.i.tutes and finds 'the most remarkable beauty...among those who put it up for sale'. In Venice the celebrated meretrice meretrice Veronica Franca even sends Montaigne some examples of her verse. He admires the ladies of Ancona, who are famed for their beauty, although in Fano, a town also renowned for its beautiful women, he is disappointed: 'We saw none, but some very ugly ones, and when I asked an honest man of the town, he told me that that was a long time ago.' Veronica Franca even sends Montaigne some examples of her verse. He admires the ladies of Ancona, who are famed for their beauty, although in Fano, a town also renowned for its beautiful women, he is disappointed: 'We saw none, but some very ugly ones, and when I asked an honest man of the town, he told me that that was a long time ago.'

If there was a place to indulge his taste in women, though, it was at the baths. After dinner on a Sunday in May he holds a ball for the 'peasant girls' which is so successful that he holds another, this time inviting the gentlemen and the ladies who are also resident, and holding a compet.i.tion to find the best dancers. He sends to Lucca for the prizes: for the men a leather belt and a bonnet of black cloth; for the ladies two muslin and two taffeta ap.r.o.ns, one green, one violet, four papers of pins, a pair of slippers, three crystal nets, three braids of hair, four little necklaces and four pairs of pumps (although he gives one of these to a girl not at the ball). The prizes are tied to a hoop for all to see.

Montaigne clearly enjoys himself, expressing his characteristic open-mindedness with a certain raffish charm: In truth, it is a beautiful thing, and a rare one to us French, to see these peasant girls, so graceful and dressed like ladies, dancing so well: in this they could compete with the rarest of our ladies...

At the end of the evening he addresses the party and requests the help of the ladies in awarding the prizes. They politely decline out of courtesy and at last he agrees to distribute them, mingling chivalry with a certain droit de seigneur: droit de seigneur: I did in fact go about choosing with my eyes, now one, now the other, and always with regard to their beauty and gentleness, pointing out that the charm of the dance did not depend solely in the movement of the feet, but also the countenance, bearing, but also the carriage and elegance of the whole body. The prizes were distributed, more to some, less to others, according to their value...It was all conducted in an orderly and regular manner, except that one of the girls refused the prize. She begged me, for her sake, to give it to another, which I did not think was the right thing to do. She was not one of the most attractive.

Whether Montaigne exploits his droit de seigneur droit de seigneur more fully is difficult to say. It is perhaps significant that on the morning after the ball he arrives 'a little later at the bath', after stopping to get a haircut and a shave. On the other hand, he seems to miss his family, his wife and his daughter, having a plaque to them placed on the walls of the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto, showing them kneeling before the figure of Mary, accompanied by the inscription: 'Michel de Montaigne, Gascon Frenchman, Knight of the Order of the King, 1581, Francoise de La Cha.s.saigne, his wife, and Leonor de Montaigne, his only daughter.' more fully is difficult to say. It is perhaps significant that on the morning after the ball he arrives 'a little later at the bath', after stopping to get a haircut and a shave. On the other hand, he seems to miss his family, his wife and his daughter, having a plaque to them placed on the walls of the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto, showing them kneeling before the figure of Mary, accompanied by the inscription: 'Michel de Montaigne, Gascon Frenchman, Knight of the Order of the King, 1581, Francoise de La Cha.s.saigne, his wife, and Leonor de Montaigne, his only daughter.'

But what is most important about Montaigne's stay at the baths and the pleasures s.e.xual or not that they bring, is that it creates in him an acute awareness of his body. With other illnesses, he notes, as soon as you are returned to 'fresh air, and wine and your wife and melons' (his favourite fruit), 'it is a wonder if you do not relapse into some new misery'. But the stone 'takes itself off clean', focusing his attention on painlessness as well as pain. The stone therefore offers a way of becoming aware of health, of what it is to be be. Through it Montaigne achieves an intensification of his kinaesthetic sense of himself, of being Michel de Montaigne. The sensation of ejecting a stone he thus celebrates in terms which echo both birth and s.e.xual climax: ...is there anything sweeter than the sudden change when, after extreme pain, by ejecting the stone I recover, in a flash of lightning, the beautiful light of health, so free and so full, as happens after our sudden and sharpest attacks of colic? Can the pain we have suffered for a moment counterbalance the pleasure of such a sudden recovery? How much more beautiful health appears to me after the illness, when they come so close and are in such close contact, that I am able to recognize them in their full armour; when they appear as two opponents testing and defying one another.

In these intervals when 'my ureters are languid without stinging' Montaigne says he returns to his 'natural state...I talk, I laugh, I study.' And writing towards the end of his days, he has 'flashes of recovery so clear, though irregular and brief, that they fall little short of my youthful health and freedom from pain'. The role of pain becomes transformed, not as something with which to hone our Stoic indifference to life, but something to bring our sense of life closer: Just as the Stoics say that vices have been introduced as an aid to virtue, we may say, with better reason and less bold conjecture, that nature has given us pain in order to honour and appreciate pleasure and relaxation.

Warm water, wine, and melons, and the subtle smile of a pretty girl's eyes: all have the power to improve Montaigne's mood. But simple painlessness, 'the beautiful light of health' 'a bubbling, rich, and lazy health' has a transformative power.

But what is equally important is how suffering facilitates companions.h.i.+p and fellow feeling for Montaigne. In his final essay he says with unabashed sn.o.bbery: 'I see on all hands men afflicted with the same sort of illness, and it is an honourable society, since it attaches itself by preference to the great: it is essentially a n.o.ble and dignified disease.' He writes to Marshal de Matignon with a fellow sufferer's bonhomie, wis.h.i.+ng that 'the stone that was troubling you lately...has now slipped out easily, like the one that I expelled at the same time'. The Seigneur de Langon even demonstrates how to stop the flow of urine and turn it on again, so that the stone may pop out like a cork. (Little wonder Montaigne is so obsessed with waterworks and fountains and their carefree jouissance jouissance.) The stone also exposes Montaigne to simple kindness. He says how he has swallowed 'broths of eryngo or rupture wort' numerous times 'to please the ladies, who with a kindness greater than the sharpness of my pain, offered me half of theirs'. And summarizing his findings after his return from his travels, he concludes that the value of bathing lies in the company as much as in the waters themselves: He who does not bring with him so much cheerfulness so as to enable him to enjoy the pleasure of the society he will meet there, and the walks and exercise to which the beauty of the places in which these waters are commonly located invites us, will doubtless lose the best and greatest part of their effect.

And so Montaigne's journey comes to an end. The cure he had hoped to find fails to materialize in his final essay he writes that only 'fools' believe that stones are to be dissolved 'by drinking' but a deeper restoration has taken place. For Montaigne, travel makes a man a foreigner unto himself, not only in his manners, language, and customs, but in his habitual sense of his self. Through it, he begins to consider the distinction between sameness and difference, barbarism and civilization, concluding that what is often seen as uncivilized is simply 'off the hinges of custom'. He says that he looks upon 'all men as my countrymen and embraces a Pole as I would a Frenchman'. Moreover, in opening ourselves to other customs and other people, travel has the power to revitalize our relations.h.i.+p to ourselves, in the intermixture of our mind and body, of ourselves and ourself.

On 7 September 1581, after soaking for an hour in the bath at Lucca, Montaigne receives the letter he had feared, informing him of his election to the mayoralty of Bordeaux, urging him to accept 'for the love of my country'. Duty calls. He returns home in a rather circ.u.mambulatory manner, however, by way of Siena and Rome, telling his secretary that he sees himself 'like a person who is reading some amusing story or a fine book and begins to be afraid that he is getting towards the end'. But as he does eventually reach his destination, nearly three months later, his narration carries on: On Sunday, 26th of November, I left Limoges after dinner, and went to sleep at LES CARS, five leagues, where there was no-one but Madame des Cars. On the Monday I came to sleep at PeRIGUEUX, five leagues. On the Wednesday to sleep at MAURIAC, five leagues. On the Thursday, St Andrew's Day, the last day of November, to sleep at MONTAIGNE, seven leagues, which I had left on the 22nd June 1580, to go to La Fere. Thus my travels had taken seventeen months and eight days.

'To sleep at Montaigne.' What is interesting is how Montaigne portrays his homecoming as if it were another stop on the way: staying with himself, as it were; granting himself the honour of sleeping in his own bed. And as if to witness this discreet moment of self-meeting, he goes up to his library and re-records it in the flyleaves of his copy of Beuther's Ephemeris Historica Ephemeris Historica, turning his diary into a guest book, pressing within its pages the silent movements of his own hand.

9.

The Exercises of Venus

(ill.u.s.trations credit 9.1)

The return from his travels inaugurated a sustained period of public service for Montaigne, serving as mayor for two terms in the years from 1581 to 1585. His reluctance to take up the post was no doubt influenced by the image he drew of his father during his own mayoralty: 'I remember seeing him as a boy...with little regard to his own life, which he came near to losing, obliged as he was to make long and laborious journeys on their behalf.' And for Montaigne these were even more troubling times, with him attempting to negotiate between the Catholic forces loyal to the King and the competing interests of the Protestant leader Henri de Navarre. He says that some objected that his administration pa.s.sed without leaving a 'mark or a trace', but responds: 'I am accused of doing nothing when almost everyone else was guilty of doing too much!'

But somehow Montaigne managed to find time to return to the Essays Essays. Newly amended editions were issued in 1582 and 1587, and in 1588 a new enlarged edition was published, including significant additions to the text and a third volume of thirteen new essays. (Montaigne's own copy of this edition, with his further handwritten additions, still survives, being known as the 'Bordeaux copy' and which serves as the basis for most modern editions of his text.) In these later expansions Montaigne bears out his statement that 'The Mayor and Montaigne have always been two' by writing in a more personal tone, composing essays on subjects such as vanity, repentance, and s.e.x.

In himself Montaigne represents the other-worldliness of Renaissance att.i.tudes to s.e.x, being at once more strait-laced but more unbridled than we are. His wife was twenty when she married the thirty-two-year-old Montaigne, and was supposedly quite beautiful, but Montaigne nevertheless conducted himself with reserve in the marital bed. He compares himself to Maximilian I of Austria, who, despite great physical beauty, was as 'careful as a virgin in not revealing himself, even writing in his will that they should put underpants on him when he had died'. And one of Montaigne's friends, Florimond de Raemond, annotates his own copy of the Essays Essays with a note about Montaigne's marital chast.i.ty, stating that he had not even glimpsed his wife's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. But Montaigne seems to unb.u.t.ton in his essays, whose freedom allows him to call into question 'those comical inhibitions by which our society is so fettered'. with a note about Montaigne's marital chast.i.ty, stating that he had not even glimpsed his wife's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. But Montaigne seems to unb.u.t.ton in his essays, whose freedom allows him to call into question 'those comical inhibitions by which our society is so fettered'.

For, central to the Stoic and the Christian morality of his time was a shared antipathy towards s.e.x. The Christian story began with Satan's temptation of Eve, and Eve's subsequent temptation of Adam, linking original sin with women. But the Stoics also saw s.e.x as disabling through its a.s.sociation with women, and their softening and weakening effect. Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect, had relations with a woman only once, notes Montaigne, and this was merely to save face. And in his De Constantia De Constantia, Justus Lipsius describes the heaven of a male-only Garden of Eden, untroubled by the emotional demands of the weaker vessel. Such misogynistic att.i.tudes were repeated on a popular level, where women were seen as fickle and inconstant, their bodies mysteriously leaky through their monthly cycles, the v.a.g.i.n.a a dark and terrifyingly unknowable place. Diaboli virtus in lumbis est Diaboli virtus in lumbis est, as St Jerome said: 'The power of the devil is in the loins.'

The religious response to the body was thus one of chastis.e.m.e.nt, as Montaigne says 'vigils, fasts, and hair-s.h.i.+rts, distant and solitary exiles, perpetual imprisonments, scourges, and other afflictions' a process he himself witnessed in Rome, where a procession of penitents scarified their shoulders, their whips 'so clotted with gore that they had to be wetted before they could be unwound'. And whilst a popular ribaldry continued through the sixteenth century, the latter half saw an increasing repression of s.e.xual mores. Bedrooms became separated from living areas, and children made to sleep on their own. Underpants became obligatory and nakedness taboo. Words referring to particular parts of the body also came to be seen as dirty 'we dare not call our members by their right name,' complains Montaigne. And a stream of conduct manuals placed an increasing emphasis on policing s.e.xual behaviour, particularly in terms of the chast.i.ty of daughters and wives. In his widely read The Christian State of Matrimony The Christian State of Matrimony (1541) the Swiss reformer Henry Bullinger described 'how daughters and maidens must be kept': (1541) the Swiss reformer Henry Bullinger described 'how daughters and maidens must be kept': As for this thing every discreet parent shall know by the foresaid rules how to order them to avoid all wantonness...Books of Robin Hood, Beves of Hampton, Troilus and such like fables do but kindle in liars like lies and wanton love, which ought not in youth with their first spittle to be drunk in...Take the New Testament in your hands and study it diligently, and learn your profession in baptism to mortify your flesh...

Against these paranoid strictures Montaigne strikes a more reasonable tone. He recalls how his own daughter whilst reading stumbled across the word 'fouteau' (beech), p.r.o.nouncing it 'foutre' (f.u.c.k), which caused her tutor some momentary discomfiture. But this Montaigne records as a more worldly, unshockable observer, noting how her tutor's embarra.s.sment served only to arouse his daughter's interest. And this puritanical context is reflected in the coy indirection of the t.i.tle of Montaigne's essay on s.e.x: 'On Some Verses of Virgil'.

But as Montaigne embarks on these later essays, at the age of fifty-three, he grows more indiscreet as he grows more mature, franker in his confessions, signalling his rejection of the strictures of Stoicism, and polite society, and his desire to: now deliberately allow myself a little licence, and sometimes occupy my mind, to give it a rest, with frisky and youthful thoughts. I am at this age too stale, too heavy and too mature. Every day my years read me lessons in coldness and temperance...It does not leave me an hour of respite, sleeping or waking, from preaching to me about death, patience, and penitence. I now defend myself against temperance, as I once did against sensuality.

Now he feels little by way of embarra.s.sment and declares an urge to confess all: 'I speak truth, not as much as I would like, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.'

He says he finds 'sweetness in the company of beautiful and beautiful and honest women' (adding 'beautiful' at a later date) and recalls the tender age of his first s.e.xual encounter 'long before the age of choice and knowledge'. He boasts that in his early manhood he gave free rein to 'the fluttering wings of cupid', although does not recall managing more than six lovemakings in one a.s.signation. He recalls how his whiskers served as a forget-me-not: 'the close kisses of youth, savory, greedy and sticky, used to cling to it and stay there for several hours', betraying 'the place I come from'. He asks to be dragged through the years backward, looking fondly on the s.e.xual pleasures of his prime. honest women' (adding 'beautiful' at a later date) and recalls the tender age of his first s.e.xual encounter 'long before the age of choice and knowledge'. He boasts that in his early manhood he gave free rein to 'the fluttering wings of cupid', although does not recall managing more than six lovemakings in one a.s.signation. He recalls how his whiskers served as a forget-me-not: 'the close kisses of youth, savory, greedy and sticky, used to cling to it and stay there for several hours', betraying 'the place I come from'. He asks to be dragged through the years backward, looking fondly on the s.e.xual pleasures of his prime.

He says how he prefers 'wit rather than prudence' at the dinner table and 'beauty before goodness' in bed. He does not desire 'n.o.ble, magnificent and lofty' pleasures, so much as ones that are 'delicious, easy, and ready to hand'. He sees s.e.x as princ.i.p.ally a matter of 'sight and touch': 'one can do something without the charms of the mind, but nothing without the charms of the body'. He discusses ways to procrastinate e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n: 'to cast our soul back to other thoughts at this very instant' perhaps to War Horses, or Whether a Ruler Should Go Out to Parley? But one must 'tense and stiffen it attentively', Montaigne advises adding proudly in his final edition: 'I am well versed in this.'

Yet he pities his p.e.n.i.s, saying that nature has 'done me the most enormous damage' in making it so small. And he confesses to episodes of impotence 'an accident with which I am not unacquainted' only to cross it out (twice, using different pens). Yet he talks about these 'ligatures', as they were often called, as natural failings, often resulting from the power of the imagination rather than witchcraft, as was often believed. He thus talks about a 'friend' (himself?) who suddenly suffered from this failing 'in the very lap of enjoyment' to the extent that the memory of it continually 'inhibited and tyrannized him'. He found relief in unburdening himself to another, which 'relieved the tension of his soul'. Are the essays, one wonders, Montaigne's own form of 'talking cure'?

And if things go wrong, Montaigne offers sympathetic counselling for s.e.xual strife. s.e.x should not be rushed, nor attempted if unprepared. Men should attempt 'essays' and sallies, presenting themselves 'lightly' rather than risking a first refusal, with the result that s.e.x becomes an issue.

Men also suffer though the unruliness of their p.e.n.i.s, 'obtruding so rudely when we have no use for it and failing so importunately when we have most use for it...refusing with so much stubbornness and pride our solicitations, both mental and manual'. The former magistrate Montaigne puts his c.o.c.k in the dock in a mock trial, but pleads the common insubordination of our other parts: the face that betrays our emotions; our hair standing on end. It is only p.e.n.i.s-envy on their part that raises the accusing finger.

And once again Montaigne harks back to the ancients, but this time not for their fort.i.tude and military strength, but for their relaxed att.i.tude towards the body. He tells how they used a sponge to wipe themselves on the toilet, and cleaned themselves after s.e.x using perfumed wool. Caesar had his body shaved and anointed with oil. He admires the Greek philosopher caught with his pants down who explained 'I am planting a man' as coolly as if he had been planting garlic. When caught masturbating in public, Diogenes quipped to onlookers that he wished that he could placate his stomach by rubbing it in the same way.

Their literature is similarly uninhibited, Montaigne listing the ancient works devoted to the art of love: Strato's Of Carnal Conjunction; Of Carnal Conjunction; Theophrastus' Theophrastus' The Lover The Lover and and Of Love; Of Love; Aristippus' Aristippus' Of Ancient Delights; Of Ancient Delights; Aristo's Aristo's On Amorous Exercises; On Amorous Exercises; not least Chrysippus' fable of Jupiter and Juno 'shameless beyond all limits'. But most of all Montaigne admires the brazenness of their poetry, the verses of Virgil alluded to in his t.i.tle telling how Venus (here in Dryden's translation): not least Chrysippus' fable of Jupiter and Juno 'shameless beyond all limits'. But most of all Montaigne admires the brazenness of their poetry, the verses of Virgil alluded to in his t.i.tle telling how Venus (here in Dryden's translation): her arms, of snowy hue, About her unresolving husband threw.

Her soft embraces soon infuse desire; His bones and marrow sudden warmth inspire; And all the G.o.dhead feels the wonted fire.

Not half so swift the rattling thunder flies, Or forky lightnings flash along the skies...

Trembling he spoke; and, eager of her charms, He s.n.a.t.c.h'd the willing G.o.ddess to his arms; Till in her lap infus'd, he lay possess'd Of full desire, and sunk to pleasing rest.

Ovid declaring even more flagrantly: Et nudam pressi corpus ad usque meum.

I pressed her naked body close to mine.

'I feel he makes a eunuch of me with this expression...in exposing her so completely', confesses Montaigne.

In the 'Apology' Montaigne turns his attention to sperm, pondering the extrapolations of the ancients. Is it the froth of the best of our blood, as Pythagoras says, or the marrow from our backbone, as according to Plato it is here that we first begin to ache during s.e.x? Is it part of the substance of the brain since those who are s.e.x-addicted have eyes that are curiously bedimmed? Or is it distilled from the whole ma.s.s of the body, or rather both the soul and the body according to Epicurus? And is Creation itself little more than an enormous emission, as Socrates imagined, all life formed from a milky substance in what can only be called the original big bang?

And in his essayistic excursions upon the customs of the world, Montaigne free-a.s.sociates about the liberal customs of other, unspecified places: where chast.i.ty is only prized in wedlock, and maidens abandon themselves at their leisure, securing abortions when pregnant with the use of drugs. In some places, tradesmen share their wives on their wedding night with their fellow workers, as do officers of higher rank. If it is the marriage of a labourer or peasant, she is presented to the local lord, notes Montaigne.

But, most of all, s.e.x reveals our indebtedness to our bodies, showing that our body has a life and desires that overrule our Stoic decrees: The same cause that animates this member also animates, without our knowledge, the heart, the lungs and the pulse; the sight of a pleasing object spreads in us imperceptibly the flame of a feverish emotion...We do not command our hair to stand on end or our skin to s.h.i.+ver with desire or fear. The hand often moves itself to where we do not send it. The tongue is paralysed, and the voice is congealed, in their own time.

o.r.g.a.s.m itself shows the necessary confusion of mind and body the moment when 'Venus prepares to sow the woman's fields' (Lucretius) and 'pleasure transports us so far beyond ourselves that our reason could not possibly then discharge its function, being all crippled and enraptured in pleasure'.

Nature, Montaigne notes, also likes to take a walk on the wild side.

Visiting Vitry-le-Francois on the Marne during his journey to Rome in 1580, Montaigne hears what he describes as 'three memorable stories'. The first is that the widow of the Duc de Guise was still alive at the age of eighty-seven and still able to walk a mile. The second is that a few years previously a handful of local girls had taken upon themselves to dress as men and live their lives as such. One, named Mary, came to Vitry and earned her living as a weaver. She took up with a local girl but then broke off the relations.h.i.+p, moving to Montirandet. There she married a woman with whom she lived to her 'satisfaction' for four or five months, until she was recognized by a person from Chaumont and being brought before a justice she was condemned to be hanged 'which she said she would rather endure than re-a.s.sume her original dress and habits'.

The third story concerns a man still living who until the age of twenty-two had been a girl named Marie that is, until she leapt a ditch whilst chasing a pig and her 'masculine organs came forth'. Henceforth, local girls would sing a song warning about the dangers of putting a spring in their stride and thereby becoming a man. S/he was renamed Germain by the Bishop of Chalons (the name conveniently containing the former 'Marie') and was now heavily bearded, but living alone. Montaigne tried to pay a visit, but Germain was out.

There is clearly something in the water around Vitry, which was itself built as a replacement for 'the other Vitry', burnt down by Charles V some forty years before. But in these three memorable stories of a widow in her virility making up for the loss of her husband, of two women living as man and wife, of a man born female Montaigne touches on some of the deeper differences between modern and pre-modern notions of s.e.xual difference, which makes the Renaissance worldview at once stranger but also more modern than our own. Cultural historians describe the Renaissance as operating with a 'one-s.e.x' notion of s.e.xual difference that goes back to the Greeks: where men and women are physiologically the same, but separated along a spectrum of difference, the male being seen as a later, more perfect version of the female. Thus, in anatomical ill.u.s.trations from the period, what look like male s.e.xual organs turn out to be female, the male form being seen as an inverted form of the female literally turned inside out. This is in contrast to our modern, biologically determined version of s.e.xual difference, where male and female are essentially, necessarily differentiated. Where we see an essential difference, early moderns saw things as nearly or almost the same.

Montaigne touches on these ideas in his essay 'Of a Monstrous Child', in which he relates how he saw a child that was being exhibited for money: Two days ago I saw a child that two men and a nurse...were carrying round to get a few sous by showing its strangeness...Underneath the breast it was joined to another child without a head...[and] one arm shorter than the other, which had been broken by accident at their birth. They were joined together face to face, as if a smaller child sought to throw its arms about the neck of a bigger one...The nurse told us that it urinated at both bodies, and that the members of the other were nourished, sensible, and in the same state as its own, excepting that they were shorter and thinner.

And then, in a subsequent edition, he adds to it another example of the variability of generation: I have just seen a shepherd in the Medoc, of about thirty years of age, who shows no sign of s.e.xual organs: he has three holes where he makes water incessantly; he is bearded, has desire, and seeks contact with women.

Montaigne's choice of words the child being shown for money (montrer); the shepherd who does not show ( the shepherd who does not show (montre) any genitals forges a link to the root of the word 'monster', from the Latin monstrum monstrum, meaning a show, a portent, a warning of G.o.d's providence. What Montaigne seems to be saying is that, whilst we see the child as something 'monstrous', to the shepherd 'showing' the male s.e.xual organs might appear equally so. And maybe the shepherd's hermaphrodite attributes might be an integral version of something more entire: perhaps the culmination of the weaker child's attempt to embrace its sibling.

In his final handwritten additions to the essay, Montaigne goes on to ask whether 'That which we call monsters, are not so to G.o.d, who sees in the immensity of His work an infinity of forms. Who is to say that this figure that astonishes does not have a similarity to some other figure unknown to us' perhaps to G.o.d him or her or her self? self?

And in the context of the varieties of s.e.xual experience, Montaigne opens his mind to the possibility of a greater number of s.e.xual-social norms. He speaks of countries where there are male brothels, and where marriage is contracted between men. In Rome he learns of a Portuguese sect that practises same-s.e.x marriage 'with the same ceremonies...the same marriage service...and went to bed and lived together'. He speaks of countries where women accompany their men to war, and share in the fighting as well as the command.

And whilst in his offhand comments Montaigne seems very much a man of his time he says for three beautiful women you must kiss fifty ugly ones, and quotes the Duke of Brittany on the fact that all a woman needed to know was the difference between her husband's doublet and his s.h.i.+rt in the body of his essays Montaigne nonetheless tries, as much as he is able, to think outside the box, and to imagine what women think of men. And here, especially in his later additions, he puts men under the microscope, suggesting, In any case, inconstancy is perhaps rather more pardonable in them than in us. They may allege, as we do, the inclination to variety and novelty common to all of us; and secondly they may say, as we cannot, that they buy a cat in a bag.