How To Live Or A Life Of Montaigne Part 3

Pierre, one imagines, had a less fatalistic view of human nature, for he thought that the young Micheau could could be molded, and that the experiment was worth the trouble. With his usual can-do att.i.tude, he set out to build and develop his son just as he set out to build and develop his estate. be molded, and that the experiment was worth the trouble. With his usual can-do att.i.tude, he set out to build and develop his son just as he set out to build and develop his estate.

Alas, as with other projects, Pierre left the job unfinished, or so Montaigne believed. At the age of about six, the boy was abruptly removed from his unconventional hothouse and sent off to school like everyone else. All his life, he remained convinced that this was his fault: that some sign of his recalcitrance-his "ruling pattern"-had made his father give up. Or perhaps Pierre had merely caved in to convention, now that his original advisers were no longer around. It seems more likely that Pierre had always intended to send Micheau to school at a certain stage. Not understanding the plan, Montaigne read in a criticism of himself that was probably not there. The whole multistage progression, from peasant family to Latin nursery to school, amounted to a recipe for producing a perfect gentleman, independent of mind yet able to mold himself to society when necessary. Thus, in 1539, Montaigne joined other boys his age at the College de Guyenne in Bordeaux.

He would be a pupil there for a decade, until at least 1548, and to some extent would adjust to it, but at first it was a severe shock to his system. For a start, he had to get used to a city existence after the freedom of a boy's life in the countryside. Bordeaux was some forty miles away from his home, several hours' journey even on a fast horse. The trip was slowed further by the necessity of crossing the Dordogne on the way: a ferry picked travelers up from gentle green hills and vineyards, and dropped them in the heart of Bordeaux's commercial district-a different world.

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Walled and claustrophobic, cl.u.s.tered tightly around the river, sixteenth-century Bordeaux was not at all like the city of today. Its old streets were ripped out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to be replaced by boulevards and big creamy buildings which now give it a slightly abstract quality. In Montaigne's day, there was nothing creamy about it. It was populous, having about twenty-five thousand residents, and very busy. Its river was full of s.h.i.+pping. Its banks were equipped for the unloading of cargo: mainly wine, as well as a richly aroma'd mixture of preserved fish, salt, and timber.

The mood changed once one reached the College de Guyenne itself, which was set in a tranquil area of the city away from the commercial center and surrounded by elms. It was an excellent school, though Montaigne spoke ill of it. Its curriculum and methods sound formidable to a modern sensibility. Everything revolved around the rote study of Latin, the one subject in which Montaigne enjoyed an advantage so great that his teachers must have marveled at him. Both teachers and pupils were expected to converse in it. Just as in Montaigne's own home, the school was full of awkward, stilted speech-but there the similarity ended. Here no gentle music was played; there was no emphasis on pleasure and, most shockingly of all, no a.s.sumption that little Micheau was the center of the universe.

Instead, he now had to fit in with everyone else. Cla.s.ses began early in the morning with minute dissection of literary examples, usually from writers like Cicero who were least likely to appeal to young readers' tastes. In the afternoons, they studied grammar in the abstract, without recourse to examples. In the evenings, texts were read out together with a.n.a.lyses dictated by the teacher, which the boys were expected to memorize and spout back on request.

At first, Montaigne's mastery of Latin got him quickly promoted to cla.s.ses beyond his age group. But the bad influence of his less privileged cla.s.smates gradually destroyed his easy command of the language, so that-according to him-he left the school knowing less of it than when he arrived.

In fact, the College was relatively adventurous and open minded, and some aspects of school life amused Montaigne more than he liked to admit. In the older cla.s.ses, students competed in feats of oratory and debate, all in Latin of course, and with less attention to what they said than to how they said it. From these, Montaigne picked up rhetorical skills and critical habits of thought which he would use all his life. It was probably also here that he first encountered the idea of using "commonplace books": notebooks in which to write down snippets one encountered in one's reading, setting them in creative juxtaposition. In later years, as a teenager, Montaigne studied more interesting subjects, including philosophy-not, unfortunately, the kind he liked, which dealt with the question of how to live, but mostly Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. Some light relief was also allowed. A new teacher at the school, Marc-Antoine Muret, wrote and directed plays; Montaigne starred in one. He turned out to be a natural on stage, having (he wrote) an unexpected "a.s.surance in expression and flexibility in voice and gesture."

All this occurred during a difficult period for the College. In 1547, the forward-thinking princ.i.p.al, Andre Gouvea, was forced out by conservative political factions. He left for Portugal, taking his best teachers with him. The following year, upheavals broke out in Bordeaux itself: the salt-tax riots, which would cause such stress to Montaigne's father during his term as mayor. The southwest had traditionally been exempt from this tax. Now, suddenly, the new king Henri II tried to impose it, with inflammatory results.

Crowds of rebels a.s.sembled to protest, and for five days from August 17 to August 22, 1548, mobs roamed the streets setting fire to tax collectors' houses. Some attacked the homes of anyone who looked rich, until the disorder threatened to turn into a general peasant uprising. A few tax collectors were killed. Their bodies were dragged through the streets and covered in heaps of salt to underline the point. In one of the worst incidents, Tristan de Moneins, the town's lieutenant-general and governor-thus the king's official representative-was lynched. He had shut himself up in the city's ma.s.sive royal citadel, the Chateau Trompette, but a crowd gathered outside and howled for him to come out. Perhaps thinking to earn their respect by facing up to them, he ventured forth, but it was a mistake. They beat him to death.

Then fifteen, Montaigne was out in the streets, for the College had suspended cla.s.ses during the violence. He witnessed the killing of Moneins, a scene he never forgot. It raised in his mind, perhaps for the first time, a question that would haunt the entire Essays Essays in varying guises: whether it was better to win an enemy's respect by an open display of defiance, or to throw yourself on his mercy and hope to win him over by submission or an appeal to his better self. in varying guises: whether it was better to win an enemy's respect by an open display of defiance, or to throw yourself on his mercy and hope to win him over by submission or an appeal to his better self.

In this case, Montaigne thought Moneins had failed because he was not sure what he was trying to do. Having decided to brave the crowd, he then lost his confidence and behaved with deference, sending mixed messages. He also underestimated the distorted psychology of a mob. Once worked up into a frenzy, it can only be either soothed or suppressed; it cannot be expected to show ordinary human sympathy. Moneins seemed not to know this. He expected the same fellow-feeling as he would from an individual.

He was certainly brave to cast himself unarmed into a "sea of madmen." But his only hope then would have been to maintain this bold face to the end. He should have swallowed the whole cup and not abandoned his role; whereas what happened to him was that after having seen the danger close up, he lost his nerve and changed once again that deflated and fawning countenance that he had a.s.sumed into a frightened one, filling his voice and his eyes with astonishment and penitence. Trying to hole up and hide, he inflamed them and called them down on himself.

The shocking sight of Moneins's murder, and no doubt of other disturbing scenes during that week, taught Montaigne a great deal about the psychological complexity of conflict and the difficulty of conducting oneself well in crises. In this case, the violence was eventually calmed, mainly by Montaigne's future father-in-law, Geoffrey de La Cha.s.saigne, who negotiated a truce. But the city would suffer a severe punishment for allowing such disobedience. Ten thousand royal troops were sent there in October under the Constable de Montmorency; the t.i.tle "constable" officially meant only "chief of the royal stables," but his job was one of immense power. The troops remained for over three months, with Montmorency conducting a reign of terror. He encouraged his men to loot and kill like an occupying force in a foreign country. Anyone directly identified as having taken part in the riots was broken on the wheel, or burned. Everything was done to humiliate Bordeaux physically, financially, and morally. It lost legal jurisdiction over its own affairs; its artillery and gunpowder were confiscated; its parlement parlement was dissolved, and for a while it was governed by magistrates from other parts of France. It also had to pay the costs of its own occupation. And, when Moneins's body was exhumed for reburial in the cathedral, local officials were obliged to fall on their knees in front of Montmorency's house to beg forgiveness for the killing. was dissolved, and for a while it was governed by magistrates from other parts of France. It also had to pay the costs of its own occupation. And, when Moneins's body was exhumed for reburial in the cathedral, local officials were obliged to fall on their knees in front of Montmorency's house to beg forgiveness for the killing.

The privileges were gradually restored, thanks in part to Montaigne's father's efforts, as mayor, to make Bordeaux look good again in the king's eyes. Amazingly, in the long run, the rebellion did achieve its aim. Unnerved by the riots, Henri II decided not to enforce the salt tax. But the price had been high.

Just as this drama subsided, in 1549, plague broke out in the city. It was not a long or major outbreak, but it was enough to make everyone examine their skin uneasily and dread the sound of a cough. It also forced the College to close again for a while-but by this time Montaigne had probably already moved on. He left the school some time around 1548, ready to start the next phase of his young life.

There now follows a long period, until 1557, in which it is not clear what he was doing. He may have returned to the estate. He may have been sent to an academy, a sort of finis.h.i.+ng school where young men learned the n.o.ble accomplishments of riding, dueling, hunting, heraldry, singing, and dancing. (If so, Montaigne paid no attention to anything except the riding lessons: this was the only one of these skills he later claimed to be good at.) At some stage, he must also have studied the law. He emerged into adulthood with all he needed to become a successful young seigneur seigneur, and, despite his dislike of the experience, with a useful set of abilities and experiences acquired from school. Foremost among these was a discovery that would have delighted his father: that of books, and of the worlds they opened up to him-worlds far beyond the vineyards of Guyenne and the tedium of a sixteenth-century schoolhouse.

4. Q. How to live? A. Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted Q. How to live? A. Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted

READING.

THE CLOSE GRAMMATICAL study of Cicero and Horace almost killed Montaigne's interest in literature before it was born. But some of the teachers at the school helped keep it going, mainly by not taking more entertaining books out of the boy's hands when they caught him reading them, and perhaps even by slipping a few more his way-doing this so discreetly that he could enjoy reading them without ceasing to feel like a rebel. study of Cicero and Horace almost killed Montaigne's interest in literature before it was born. But some of the teachers at the school helped keep it going, mainly by not taking more entertaining books out of the boy's hands when they caught him reading them, and perhaps even by slipping a few more his way-doing this so discreetly that he could enjoy reading them without ceasing to feel like a rebel.

One unsuitable text which Montaigne discovered for himself at the age of seven or eight, and which changed his life, was Ovid's Metamorphoses Metamorphoses. This tumbling cornucopia of stories about miraculous transformations among ancient G.o.ds and mortals was the closest thing the Renaissance had to a compendium of fairy tales. As full of horrors and delights as a Grimm or Andersen, and quite unlike the texts of the schoolroom, it was the sort of thing an imaginative sixteenth-century boy could read with eyes rounded and fingers white-knuckled from gripping the covers too tightly.

In Ovid, people change. They turn into trees, animals, stars, bodies of water, or disembodied voices. They alter s.e.x; they become werewolves. A woman called Scylla enters a poisonous pool and sees each of her limbs turn into a dog-like monster from which she cannot pull away because the monsters are also her her. The hunter Actaeon is changed into a stag, and his own hunting-dogs chase him down. Icarus flies so high that the sun burns him. A king and a queen turn into two mountains. The nymph Samacis plunges herself into the pool where the beautiful Hermaphroditus is bathing, and wraps herself around him like a squid holding fast to its prey, until her flesh melts into his and the two become one person, half male, half female. Once a taste of this sort of thing had started him off, Montaigne galloped through other books similarly full of good stories: Virgil's Aeneid Aeneid, then Terence, Plautus, and various modern Italian comedies. He learned, in defiance of school policy, to a.s.sociate reading with excitement. It was the one positive thing to come out of his time there. ("But," Montaigne adds, "for all that, it was still school.") [image]

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Many of his early discoveries remained lifelong loves. Although the initial thrill of the Metamorphoses Metamorphoses wore off, he filled the wore off, he filled the Essays Essays with stories from it, and emulated Ovid's style of slipping from one topic to the next without introduction or apparent order. Virgil continued to be a favorite too, though the mature Montaigne was cheeky enough to suggest that some pa.s.sages in the with stories from it, and emulated Ovid's style of slipping from one topic to the next without introduction or apparent order. Virgil continued to be a favorite too, though the mature Montaigne was cheeky enough to suggest that some pa.s.sages in the Aeneid Aeneid might have been "brushed up a little." might have been "brushed up a little."

Because he liked to know what people really did, rather than what someone imagined they might do, Montaigne's preference soon s.h.i.+fted from poets to historians and biographers. It was in real-life stories, he said, that you encountered human nature in all its complexity. You learned the "diversity and truth" of man, as well as "the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him." Among historians, he liked Tacitus best, once remarking that he had just read through his History History from beginning to end without interruption. He loved how Tacitus treated public events from the point of view of "private behavior and inclinations," and was struck by the historian's fortune in living through a "strange and extreme" period, just as Montaigne himself did. Indeed, he wrote of Tacitus, "you would often say that it is us he is describing." from beginning to end without interruption. He loved how Tacitus treated public events from the point of view of "private behavior and inclinations," and was struck by the historian's fortune in living through a "strange and extreme" period, just as Montaigne himself did. Indeed, he wrote of Tacitus, "you would often say that it is us he is describing."

Turning to biographers, Montaigne liked those who went beyond the external events of a life and tried to reconstruct a person's inner world from the evidence. No one excelled in this more than his favorite writer of all: the Greek biographer Plutarch, who lived from around AD AD 46 to around 120 and whose vast 46 to around 120 and whose vast Lives Lives presented narratives of notable Greeks and Romans in themed pairs. Plutarch was to Montaigne what Montaigne was to many later readers: a model to follow, and a treasure chest of ideas, quotations, and anecdotes to plunder. "He is so universal and so full that on all occasions, and however eccentric the subject you have taken up, he makes his way into your work." The truth of this last part is undeniable: several sections of the presented narratives of notable Greeks and Romans in themed pairs. Plutarch was to Montaigne what Montaigne was to many later readers: a model to follow, and a treasure chest of ideas, quotations, and anecdotes to plunder. "He is so universal and so full that on all occasions, and however eccentric the subject you have taken up, he makes his way into your work." The truth of this last part is undeniable: several sections of the Essays Essays are paste-ins from Plutarch, left almost unchanged. No one thought of this as plagiarism: such imitation of great authors was then considered an excellent practice. Moreover, Montaigne subtly changed everything he stole, if only by setting it in a different context and hedging it around with uncertainties. are paste-ins from Plutarch, left almost unchanged. No one thought of this as plagiarism: such imitation of great authors was then considered an excellent practice. Moreover, Montaigne subtly changed everything he stole, if only by setting it in a different context and hedging it around with uncertainties.

He loved the way Plutarch a.s.sembled his work by stuffing in fistfuls of images, conversations, people, animals, and objects of all kinds, rather than by coldly arranging abstractions and arguments. His writing is full of things things, Montaigne pointed out. If Plutarch wants to tell us that the trick in living well is to make the best of any situation, he does it by telling the story of a man who threw a stone at his dog, missed, hit his stepmother instead, and exclaimed, "Not so bad after all!" Or, if he wants to show us how we tend to forget the good things in life and obsess only about the bad, he writes about flies landing on mirrors and sliding about on the smooth surface, unable to find a footing until they hit a rough area. Plutarch leaves no neat endings, but he sows seeds from which whole worlds of inquiry can be developed. He points where we can go if we like; he does not lead us, and it is up to us whether we obey or not.

Montaigne also loved the strong sense of Plutarch's own personality that comes across in his work: "I think I know him even into his soul." This was what Montaigne looked for in a book, just as people later looked for it in him: the feeling of meeting a real person across the centuries. Reading Plutarch, he lost awareness of the gap in time that divided them-much bigger than the gap between Montaigne and us. It does not matter, he wrote, whether a person one loves has been dead for fifteen hundred years or, like his own father at the time, eighteen years. Both are equally remote; both are equally close.

Montaigne's merging of favorite authors with his own father says a lot about how he read: he took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family. The rebellious, Ovid-reading boy would one day acc.u.mulate a library of around a thousand volumes: a good size, but not an indiscriminate a.s.semblage. Some were inherited from his friend La Boetie; others he bought himself. He collected unsystematically, without adding fine bindings or considering rarity value. Montaigne would never repeat his father's mistake of fetis.h.i.+zing books or their authors. One cannot imagine him kissing volumes like holy relics, as Erasmus or the poet Petrarch reportedly used to, or putting on his best clothes before reading them, like Machiavelli, who wrote: "I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workaday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them." Montaigne would have found this ridiculous. He preferred to converse with the ancients in a tone of camaraderie, sometimes even teasing them, as when he twits Cicero for his pomposity or suggests that Virgil could have made more of an effort.

Effort was just what he himself claimed never to make, either in reading or writing. "I leaf through now one book, now another," he wrote, "without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments." He could sound positively cross if he thought anyone might suspect him of careful scholars.h.i.+p. Once, catching himself having said that books offer consolation, he hastily added, "Actually I use them scarcely any more than those who do not know them at all." And one of his sentences starts, "We who have little contact with books..." His rule in reading remained the one he had learned from Ovid: pursue pleasure. "If I encounter difficulties in reading," he wrote, "I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there. I do nothing without gaiety."

In truth he did work hard sometimes, but only when he thought the labor was worthwhile. Annotations in Montaigne's hand survive on a few books from his collection, notably a copy of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things- On the Nature of Things- clearly a text that merited close attention. This is exactly the kind of book, idiosyncratic and intellectually adventurous, that you would expect Montaigne to want to take such trouble over. clearly a text that merited close attention. This is exactly the kind of book, idiosyncratic and intellectually adventurous, that you would expect Montaigne to want to take such trouble over.

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Presenting himself as a layabout, flicking through a few pages before tossing the book aside with a yawn, suited Montaigne. It accorded with the dilettantish atmosphere he wanted to evoke in his own writing. As the copy of Lucretius shows, the truth must have been more complicated. But no doubt he did abandon whatever bored him: that was how he had been brought up, after all. Pierre taught him that everything should be approached in "gentleness and freedom, without rigor and constraint." Of this, Montaigne made a whole principle of living.

MONTAIGNE THE SLOW AND FORGETFUL.

Whenever Montaigne did exert himself to flick through a book, according to him, he promptly forgot almost everything he had read. "Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgment does its work with difficulty," he wrote, before adding, "it is entirely lacking in me."

There is no man who has less business talking about memory. For I recognize almost no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is another one in the world so monstrously deficient.

He admitted that this was a nuisance. It was annoying to lose his most interesting ideas simply because they came to him while he was out riding and had no paper on which to write them down. It would have been nice to remember more of his dreams, too. As he wrote, quoting Terence, "I'm full of cracks, and leak out on all sides."

Montaigne often sprang to the defense of the mnemonically challenged. He felt "indignation" and "personal resentment" when reading, for example, about Lyncestes, who was obliged to give a speech of defense to a whole army after being accused of conspiring against Alexander the Great. Lyncestes memorized an oration, but, when he tried to deliver it, he got only a few words out before becoming confused and forgetting the rest. While he stammered and hedged, a nearby group of soldiers lost patience and ran him through with their pikes. They thought his inability to speak proved his guilt. "That certainly was good reasoning!" exclaimed Montaigne. It proved only that, under stress, an overburdened memory is likely to take fright at its load like a panicky horse, and dump the lot.

Even if one's life was not at stake, learning a speech by heart was not necessarily a good idea. Spontaneous talk was usually more enjoyable to listen to. When Montaigne himself had to speak in public, he tried to be nonchalant, and used "unstudied and unpremeditated gestures, as if they arose from the immediate occasion." He particularly avoided announcing a sequence of numbered points ("I will now discuss six possible approaches...") because it was both boring and risky: one was likely either to forget some of them or to end up with too many.

Sometimes the very significance or interest of a piece of information drove it out of his mind. Once, being lucky enough to meet a group of Tupinamba people brought over by French colonists from Brazil, he listened eagerly to their answers when they were asked what they thought of France. They replied with three remarks, all fascinating-but when Montaigne came to recount the conversation in his Essays Essays, he could remember only two. Other lapses were worse. In a published letter describing the death of La Boetie-the man he loved most in his life-he confessed that he might have forgotten some of his friend's final acts and parting words.

Montaigne's admission of such failings was a direct challenge to the Renaissance ideal of oratory and rhetoric, which held that being able to think well was the same as being able to speak well, and being able to speak well depended upon remembering your flow of argument together with sparkling quotations and examples to adorn it. Devotees of the art of memory, or ars memoriae ars memoriae, learned techniques for stringing together hours' worth of rhetoric, and even developed these techniques into a whole program of philosophical self-improvement. This had no appeal for Montaigne.

From the start, some readers have refused to believe that his memory could really be as bad as he claimed. This irritated him so much that he complained about it in the Essays Essays. But doubters continued to point out that, for example, he seemed to have no difficulty remembering quotations from his reading: so many appear in the Essays Essays, not least the one about feeling like a leaking pot. Either he was less leaky than he claimed, or he was less lazy, for if he did not remember the quotations, he must have written them down. Some people became positively angry about this. One near-contemporary of his, the poet Dominique Baudier, said that Montaigne's lamentations about his memory drove him to "nausea and laughter"-an extreme reaction. The seventeenth-century philosopher Malebranche felt Montaigne was lying to him, a serious charge against a writer who always made much of his honesty.

It was a charge that had something to it. Montaigne surely did remember more than he let on. It is not unusual to feel let down by one's memory: this is part of the imperfect human condition. An undisciplined memory is also just what one might expect from Montaigne's easygoing upbringing and his dislike of forcing himself in anything. His apparent modesty on this subject can also be translated into a subtle claim to virtues which he thought more important. One of these, ironically, was honesty. As the old saying had it, bad memories make bad liars. If Montaigne was too forgetful to keep stories straight in his head, he had to tell the truth. Also, his lack of memory kept his speeches brief and his anecdotes concise, since he could not remember long ones, and it enabled him to exercise good judgment. People with good memories have cluttered minds, but his brain was so blissfully empty that nothing could get in the way of common sense. Finally, he easily forgot any slight inflicted on him by others, and therefore bore few resentments. In short, he presented himself as floating through the world on a blanket of benevolent vacancy.

Where Montaigne's memory did seem to work well, if he wanted it to, was in reconstructing personal experiences such as the riding accident. Instead of resolving them into neat, superficial anecdotes, he could recover feelings from the inside-not perfectly, because the Herac.l.i.tan stream kept carrying him away, but very closely. The nineteenth-century psychologist Dugald Stewart speculated that Montaigne's lack of control of his memory made him better at such tasks. Montaigne was attuned to the kind of "involuntary" memory that would one day fascinate Proust: those blasts from the past that irrupt unexpectedly into the present, perhaps in response to a long-forgotten taste or smell. Such moments seem possible only if they are surrounded by an ocean of forgetfulness, as well as a suitable mood and sufficient leisure.

Montaigne certainly did not like to strain at things. "I have to solicit it nonchalantly," he said of his memory. "It serves me at its own time, not at mine." Any effort to haul something back on demand just drove the sought item further into the shadows. Conversely, he noticed, nothing made an incident stick in the memory more than a conscious effort to forget it.

"What I do easily and naturally," he wrote, "I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict command." Allowing his memory to follow its own path formed part of his general policy of letting nature govern his actions. In his childhood, the result was that he often appeared to be lazy and good for nothing, and in many ways he probably was. Despite his father's constant efforts to motivate him, he wrote, he turned out to be "so sluggish, lax, and drowsy that they could not tear me from my sloth, not even to make me play."

By his own estimation, he was not only idle but slow-witted. His intelligence could not penetrate the slightest cloud: "There is no subtlety so empty that it will not stump me. Of games in which the mind has a part-chess, cards, draughts, and others-I understand nothing but the barest rudiments." He had a "tardy understanding," a "weak imagination," and a "slow mind," none of which was helped by his lack of recall. All his faculties slumbered along together, snoring gently: he makes his brain sound like a tea party at which all the guests were Dormice.

But, again, there were benefits. Once he had grasped something, he grasped it firmly. Even as a child, he says, "What I saw, I saw well." Moreover, he deliberately used his inert manner as a cover under which he could hide any number of "bold ideas" and independent opinions. His apparent modesty made it possible for him to claim something more important than quick wits: sound judgment.

Montaigne would make a good model for the modern "Slow Movement," which has spread (in a leisurely fas.h.i.+on) to become something of a cult since its inception in the late twentieth century. Like Montaigne, its adherents make slow speed into a moral principle. Its founding text is Sten Nadolny's novel The Discovery of Slowness The Discovery of Slowness, which relates the life of Arctic explorer John Franklin, a man whose natural pace of living and thinking is portrayed as that of an elderly sloth after a long ma.s.sage and a pipe of opium. Franklin is mocked as a child, but when he reaches the far North he finds the environment perfectly suited to his nature: a place where one takes one's time, where very little happens, and where it is important to stop and think before rus.h.i.+ng into action. Long after its publication in Germany in 1983, The Discovery of Slowness The Discovery of Slowness remained a best seller and was even marketed as an alternative management manual. Meanwhile, Italy generated the Slow Food movement, which began in protest against the Rome branch of McDonald's and grew to become an entire philosophy of good living. remained a best seller and was even marketed as an alternative management manual. Meanwhile, Italy generated the Slow Food movement, which began in protest against the Rome branch of McDonald's and grew to become an entire philosophy of good living.

Montaigne would have understood all this very well. For him, slowness opened the way to wisdom, and to a spirit of moderation which offset the excess and zealotry dominating the France of his time. He was lucky enough to be naturally immune to both, having no tendency to be carried away by the enthusiasms others seemed p.r.o.ne to. "I am nearly always in place, like heavy and inert bodies," he wrote. Once planted, it was easy for him to resist intimidation, for nature had made him "incapable of submitting to force and violence."

As with most things in Montaigne, this is only part of the story. As a young man he could could fly off the handle, and he was restless: in the fly off the handle, and he was restless: in the Essays Essays he says, "I know not which of the two, my mind or my body, I have had more difficulty in keeping to one place." Perhaps he only played the sloth when it suited him. he says, "I know not which of the two, my mind or my body, I have had more difficulty in keeping to one place." Perhaps he only played the sloth when it suited him.

"Forget much of what you learn" and "Be slow-witted" became two of Montaigne's best answers to the question of how to live. They freed him to think wisely rather than glibly; they allowed him to avoid the fanatical notions and foolish deceptions that ensnared other people; and they let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led-which was all he really wanted to do.

Slow wits and forgetfulness could be cultivated, but Montaigne believed he was lucky in having his by birth. His tendency to do things his own way became evident from an early age, and was accompanied by a surprising degree of confidence. "I remember that from my tenderest childhood people noticed in me some indefinable carriage of the body and certain gestures testifying to some vain and stupid pride," he wrote. The vanity was superficial: he was not deeply infused with the stuff, only lightly "sprinkled." But his inner independence kept him cool. Always prepared to speak his mind, the young Montaigne was also prepared to make other people wait for what he had to say.

THE YOUNG MONTAIGNE IN TROUBLED TIMES.

Montaigne's air of nonchalant superiority was made more difficult to carry off by his having a smallish physical build: something he bemoaned constantly. It was different for women, he wrote. Other forms of good looks could compensate. In men, stature was "the only beauty," and it was just the quality he lacked.

Where smallness dwells, neither breadth and roundness of forehead, nor clarity and softness of eyes, nor the moderate form of the nose, nor small size of ears and mouth, nor regularity and whiteness of teeth, nor the smooth thickness of a beard brown as the husk of a chestnut, nor curly hair, nor proper roundness of head, nor freshness of color, nor a pleasant facial expression, nor an odorless body, nor just proportion of limbs, can make a handsome man.

Even Montaigne's employees did not look up to him, and, when he traveled or visited the royal court with a retinue of servants, he found it most annoying to be the one asked, "Where is the master?" Yet there was little he could do, other than go on horseback wherever possible-his favorite ploy.

A visit to Montaigne's tower suggests that he was telling the truth: the doorways stand only around five foot high. People in general were shorter then, and the doors were built before Montaigne lived there, but clearly he did not bang his head often enough to go to the trouble of having them raised. Of course it is hard to know whether it was his self-proclaimed smallness or his self-proclaimed laziness that was the deciding factor.

He may have been diminutive, but he tells us that he had a strong, solid build, and that he conducted himself with flair, often strolling with a stick on which he would lean "in an affected manner." In later life, he took up his father's practice of dressing in austere black and white, but as a young man he dressed with stylish ease according to the fas.h.i.+on of the day, with "a cloak worn like a scarf, the hood over one shoulder, a neglected stocking."

The most vivid picture of the young Montaigne comes from a poem addressed to him by his slightly older friend etienne de La Boetie. It shows both what was troubling about Montaigne and what made him attractive. La Boetie thought him brilliant and full of promise, but in danger of wasting his talents. He needed guidance from some calmer, wiser mentor-a role in which La Boetie cast himself-but he had a stubborn tendency to reject this guidance when it was offered. He was too susceptible to pretty young women, and too pleased with himself. "My house supplies ample riches, my age ample powers," La Boetie has Montaigne say complacently in the poem. "And indeed a sweet girl is smiling at me." La Boetie compares him to a beautiful Alcibiades, blessed by fortune, or a Hercules, capable of heroic things but hesitating too long at the moral crossroads. His greatest charms were also his greatest faults.

By the time this poem was written, Montaigne had already traveled a long way from his schoolboy days; he had entered upon his career in the Bordeaux parlement parlement. Having disappeared from biographical view for some years after finis.h.i.+ng his studies at the College, he reappeared in the city as a young magistrate.

To embark on such a course, he must have studied law somewhere. He is unlikely to have done this in Bordeaux; more likely cities are Paris and Toulouse. Perhaps he spent time in both. Remarks in the Essays Essays show that he knew Toulouse well, and he also had a lot to say about Paris. He tells us that the city had his heart since childhood-which could mean any stage of his youth, up to around twenty-five. "I love her tenderly," he says, "even to her warts and her spots." Paris was the only place where he didn't mind feeling like a Frenchman rather than a proudly local Gascon. It was a great city in every way: "great in population, great in the felicity of her situation, but above all great and incomparable in variety and diversity of the good things of life." show that he knew Toulouse well, and he also had a lot to say about Paris. He tells us that the city had his heart since childhood-which could mean any stage of his youth, up to around twenty-five. "I love her tenderly," he says, "even to her warts and her spots." Paris was the only place where he didn't mind feeling like a Frenchman rather than a proudly local Gascon. It was a great city in every way: "great in population, great in the felicity of her situation, but above all great and incomparable in variety and diversity of the good things of life."

Wherever Montaigne acquired his training, it fulfilled its function: it propelled him into the legal and political career that may have been envisaged for him from the start. It then kept him there for thirteen years. This period usually shrinks small in biographies, since it is patchily doc.u.mented, but they were important years indeed, running from just before Montaigne's twenty-fourth birthday to just after his thirty-seventh. When he retired to his country life, growing wine and writing in his tower, he had already acc.u.mulated a wealth of experience in public service, and this was still fresh in his mind in the early essays. By the time he came to the later ones, even tougher responsibilities had taken over.

Montaigne's first post was not in Bordeaux, but in another nearby town, Perigueux, northeast of the family estate. Its court had only recently been founded, in 1554, and would almost immediately be abolished, in 1557. The main purpose of it had been to raise money, since public offices were always sold for cash. The abolition ensued because the more powerful Bordeaux parlement parlement objected to Perigueux's existence, and even more strenuously to the fact that, for some reason, officials there received a higher salary than they did. objected to Perigueux's existence, and even more strenuously to the fact that, for some reason, officials there received a higher salary than they did.

Montaigne went to Perigueux in late 1556, and the court survived just long enough to start his career. As things turned out, it even put him on a fast track into Bordeaux politics, for when Perigueux closed many officials were transferred there. Montaigne was among them: his name appears on the list. They were not exactly welcomed, but Bordeaux's magistrates had no choice in the matter. They made up for it by making life as uncomfortable for the Perigueux men as possible, allotting them a cramped working s.p.a.ce and depriving them of the service of court ushers. The resentment is understandable: the Perigueux men were still receiving their higher salaries. These were helpfully cut in August 1561, which in turn made the Perigueux contingent unhappy. Although he was still junior, at twenty-eight, Montaigne was chosen to present their appeal to the court. His speech, reported in the Bordeaux records, marks his first appearance there. No doubt he used his newly honed public speaking tricks-all spontaneity and unrehea.r.s.ed charm-but it did not work. The parlement parlement ruled against the protesters, and their salaries went down after all. ruled against the protesters, and their salaries went down after all.

Despite the unharmonious office politics, life in the Bordeaux parlement parlement must have been more interesting than in Perigueux. It was one of eight key city must have been more interesting than in Perigueux. It was one of eight key city parlements parlements in France, and, even with its privileges still only partially restored, Bordeaux was among the most powerful. It had responsibility for most local laws and civic administration, and could reject royal edicts or present formal remonstrances to the king whenever he issued a law they did not like-as happened often in these troubled times. in France, and, even with its privileges still only partially restored, Bordeaux was among the most powerful. It had responsibility for most local laws and civic administration, and could reject royal edicts or present formal remonstrances to the king whenever he issued a law they did not like-as happened often in these troubled times.

At first, Montaigne's daily life involved the law more than politics. He worked primarily for the Chambre des Enquetes, or court of inquiry, where his task was to a.s.sess civil cases too complex to be resolved immediately by the judges of the main court, the Grand'chambre. He would study the details, summarize them, and hand his written interpretation to the councillors. It was not up to him to pa.s.s judgment, only to sum things up intelligently and lucidly, and capture each party's point of view. Perhaps this was where he first developed his feeling for the multiplicity of perspectives on every human situation, a feeling that runs like an artery through the Essays Essays.

Thinking of his job in these terms makes sixteenth-century law sound an engrossing pursuit, but it was hampered by extreme pedantry. All legal arguments had to be based on written authorities, and fitted into predefined categories. The facts of each case were often secondary to codes, statutes, doc.u.mented customs, jurisprudential writings, and above all commentaries and glosses-volumes and volumes of them. Even simple cases required the study of seemingly infinite verbiage, usually by some long-suffering junior such as Montaigne.