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– DRAWN FROM LIFE – afflicted by excruciating bladder stone pains. The son’s whole life might be seen as a demonstration for educators of the impossibility of shaping another’s character and destiny according to a predetermined model. That he nevertheless loved and admired his father and insisted that his education was the best a child could ever have, only added to the benevolent irony that seeps through all Montaigne’s thinking; it was the right education because it did not produce what its designer intended. ‘What is it that makes all our quarrels end in death nowadays?’ asks Montaigne in one of the essays in this book, and in so doing points to another circumstance that profoundly affected his approach to life. Violence. Aged fifteen, at college in Bordeaux, he was witness to street riots and saw the governor of the town beaten to death. At home his father entertained the family with terrifying accounts of military butchery in Italy. Above all, there were the so-called ‘religious wars’ between Catholics and Protestants that kept France in a state of civil strife more or less continuously from 1562 through to the end of the century. Pitching one Christian dogmatism against another, nobles against king, dynasty against dynasty and state against state, the wars were as cruel as they were complex, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, in mob massacres, open warfare, executions and assassinations. ‘In our time above all’, Montaigne remarks, ‘you cannot talk to the world in general except dangerously or falsely.’ At no point in x
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– Introduction – his essays does he discuss the doctrinal or even political differences between the two sides. It was the only way to avoid danger and falsity. Yet the endless ‘odd fantastic figures’ he conjures up for us constantly imply that missing scene of violence in their centre, its peril and its folly. What was it, though, that made these quarrels end in death? The essay that puts that question is entitled ‘On Cowardice, the Mother of Cruelty’ and begins rather oddly by attributing people’s haste to kill to their cowardice; if they really wanted revenge they would make sure their enemies stayed alive to savour their defeat (‘To kill a man is to shield him from our attack’). By the end of the essay, however, he is making what might seem the opposite reflection, that ‘Everything which goes beyond mere death [i.e. torture] seems to me to be cruelty.’ And this again is the product of cowardice. Both killing and causing gratuitous suffering are cowardly. The drift beneath the surface, never openly stated, no doubt for fear of religious dogmatism, is that flexibility and clemency are the only real courage. ‘Souls are most beautiful when they show most variety and flexibility,’ he tells us in another essay discussing quite other matters. ‘We should not nail ourselves so strongly to our humours and complexions.’ So if a certain mild waywardness was Montaigne’s reaction to his father’s educational regime, a refusal to engage passionately with doctrinal differences was his response to the religious wars. He is Catholic, he tells xi

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– DRAWN FROM LIFE –

afflicted by excruciating bladder stone pains. The son’s whole life might be seen as a demonstration for educators of the impossibility of shaping another’s character and destiny according to a predetermined model. That he nevertheless loved and admired his father and insisted that his education was the best a child could ever have, only added to the benevolent irony that seeps through all Montaigne’s thinking; it was the right education because it did not produce what its designer intended.

‘What is it that makes all our quarrels end in death nowadays?’ asks Montaigne in one of the essays in this book, and in so doing points to another circumstance that profoundly affected his approach to life. Violence. Aged fifteen, at college in Bordeaux, he was witness to street riots and saw the governor of the town beaten to death. At home his father entertained the family with terrifying accounts of military butchery in Italy. Above all, there were the so-called ‘religious wars’ between Catholics and Protestants that kept France in a state of civil strife more or less continuously from 1562 through to the end of the century. Pitching one Christian dogmatism against another, nobles against king, dynasty against dynasty and state against state, the wars were as cruel as they were complex, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, in mob massacres, open warfare, executions and assassinations. ‘In our time above all’, Montaigne remarks, ‘you cannot talk to the world in general except dangerously or falsely.’ At no point in x

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