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– DRAWN FROM LIFE – us, but has great respect for the Protestants. The word ‘Christian’ only occurs once in this selection, thus: ‘When we hear our Christian martyrs shouting out to the tyrant from the midst of the flames, “It is well roasted on this side; chop it off and eat it; it is cooked just right: now start on the other side [. . .]” then we have to admit that there is some change for the worse in their souls, some frenzy, no matter how holy.’ Where I have shown an elision Montaigne inserts a similar but non-Christian example of fanatic martyrdom that runs to a full ten lines, thus keeping the words ‘Christian’ and ‘frenzy’ safely apart. Aside from the threat of war and violence – at nineteen Montaigne was present at the siege of protestant Rouen, in his fifties he would be captured by bandits and briefly imprisoned in the Bastille – there was the ever present hazard of disease and early death. Outbreaks of the plague occurred in Bordeaux in 1548, 1563, 1585 and 1586. Infant mortality was the norm. Montaigne’s parents had lost two children before him and he and his wife would lose five of the six children born to them in early infancy. In 1563, aged thirty, Montaigne lost the one great passion of his life to the plague. A man not a woman. There were women and, he admits, doses of the clap – no pleasure without danger – but the one truly intense friendship of his life was with fellow lawyer Étienne de La Boétie. It was a meeting of minds and dispositions that had nothing to do with any shared cause or creed, a friendship entirely xii
page 15
– Introduction – focused on mutual regard, lasting just five years, much of the time being spent apart. Later, Montaigne would write that relationships must never become so close that they cannot be lost ‘without flaying us or tearing out part of our whole’. Rather ‘we must espouse nothing but ourselves’. It was a strategy for survival. Whether talking about death in war or from sickness, Montaigne’s reflections on mortality – and almost everything he speaks about brings him back to that – are always framed in terms of fear and courage. However much he digresses, backtracks or meanders, this is the force field in which experience is understood. Fear is the most understandable reaction in the world, since the world is unspeakably dangerous. But it robs us of ourselves. In battle, sports, or sex, it prevents us from performing (Montaigne has a great deal to say about impotence). Fear inhibits freedom and freedom, which requires constant courage, remains the supreme good. ‘I am so sick for freedom that if anyone should forbid me access to some corner of the Indies I should live distinctly less comfortably.’ When he tells us that ‘the thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear’, it is because the fearful man has lost his freedom. A courtier cannot be free, because constant concerns over his master’s reaction ‘corrupt his freedom and dazzle him’. When Montaigne attacks social customs it is because they inhibit his freedom; afraid of breaking with tradition one is frustrated and constrained. ‘Whichever way I want to go I find myself obliged to break through xiii

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– DRAWN FROM LIFE –

us, but has great respect for the Protestants. The word ‘Christian’ only occurs once in this selection, thus: ‘When we hear our Christian martyrs shouting out to the tyrant from the midst of the flames, “It is well roasted on this side; chop it off and eat it; it is cooked just right: now start on the other side [. . .]” then we have to admit that there is some change for the worse in their souls, some frenzy, no matter how holy.’ Where I have shown an elision Montaigne inserts a similar but non-Christian example of fanatic martyrdom that runs to a full ten lines, thus keeping the words ‘Christian’ and ‘frenzy’ safely apart.

Aside from the threat of war and violence – at nineteen Montaigne was present at the siege of protestant Rouen, in his fifties he would be captured by bandits and briefly imprisoned in the Bastille – there was the ever present hazard of disease and early death. Outbreaks of the plague occurred in Bordeaux in 1548, 1563, 1585 and 1586. Infant mortality was the norm. Montaigne’s parents had lost two children before him and he and his wife would lose five of the six children born to them in early infancy. In 1563, aged thirty, Montaigne lost the one great passion of his life to the plague. A man not a woman. There were women and, he admits, doses of the clap – no pleasure without danger – but the one truly intense friendship of his life was with fellow lawyer Étienne de La Boétie. It was a meeting of minds and dispositions that had nothing to do with any shared cause or creed, a friendship entirely xii

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