Montaigne as the Young Hedonist

We usually thing of Montaigne as a meditative middle-aged man, reading and writing alone in the tower of his manor. This is proper enough, for it was in his last twenty years that he wrote the Essays that make him live today. Our knowledge of the first two-thirds of his life is still tantalizingly fragmentary. There are some facts to go on most of them external and some judgments and insights, a few by his friends La Boetie, the majority by himself. Most of these need weighing as well as arranging to give a true and clear picture of young Montaigne.

He was born at bright moment for French humanists and for the peaceful religious reform they sought. Inspired by Erasmus and Lefevre d’Etaples (Faber Stapulensis), they wanted mainly to know the Bible better through humanistic inquiry and make it available and understandable to all. They were bitterly attacked by the powerful conservative theologians of the Sorbonne but were protected by King Francis I, who had never liked the Sorbonne, and by his sister, Queen Marguerite of Navarre, who was almost a disciple of Leffevre. To the delight of the evangelistic umanists, Francis had recently founded the first non-theological school of higher learning in France the school which later became the College de France-and he continued to support it against the fury of the conservatives. Rabelais in his Gragantua and Marot in his poems could feel secure in mocking the ignorant Sorbonne and hailing the new academy as inaugurating a golden age of learning.

But before Montaigne was two years old the situation changed abruptly. The “Affaire des Placards,” the posting of handbills violently attacking the Mass and the papaey, in Paris an devan on the King’s chamber door at Amboise, on the night of October 17, 1534, was the decisive event; for it convinced Francis that reform had become seditious. Prosecution and persecution began immediately. Calvin fled to prepare his Institutes and to build in Geneva a fortress of militant reform. The day of the moderates was past.

It was Calvinism that now spread through France, underground but steadily, until the outbreak of hostilities. Even the violent repressive measures taken by Francis’s sons Henry II (1547-59) could not halt its growth. His death and that of his son Francis II a year later left the monarchy weak, for his other sons were minors, and his widow Catherine de’Medici, the regent, was a foreigner. The Protestants demanded freedom of worship. When Catherine and her chancellor, Michel de l’Hospital, granted it to them, Catholic opinion was outraged. A colloquy was held at poissy (October 1561) to try to reconcile the doctrinal differences, but it only emphasized them. Incidents on both sides, such as the attempt to capture the Catholic leader Francois de Guise, Fanned the flames of violence that were already raging. When Guise was provoked by some of his Protestant subjects who were worshipping illegally at Vassy (March 1, 1562), he and his men attacked the, wounded over a hundred, and killed over twenty. Alarmed Protestant leaders raised troops, and open war began.

Though Montaigne grew up in this atmosphere of mounting tension, he seems to have remained for his first thirty years an observer, concerned but not involved. He was born on February 28, 1533 of a line of important Bordeaux merchants ennobled since 1477 by the purchase of the “noble land” of Montaigne on a breezy hill in the Dordogne vally region between Bordeaux and Perigueux. His father, Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne, he dearly loved; of his mother, ne Antoinette de Louppes, he almost never speaks. She too was of prosperous merchant stock; her family were converted Spanish Jews well established in Bordeaux. Two or three of their eight children became Protestants; Michel and the rest remained Catholics like their parents.

When Michel Eyquem de Montaigne-he was later to drop the bourgeois name Eyquem-was born, two older brothers had already died. His father, a vigorous, original man who had served in the wars in Italy and was alive to new ideas, gave his full attention to bringing up his oldest surviving son.

To draw him close to humble folk. Michel had peasant godparents and was sent out to nurse at a nearby village. On his return nothing was spared to make his life pleasant; hardly ever punished, he was even awakened every morning by music. To teach him Latin easily and well-he and his father later picked up a little Greek as a game-he was put in the charge of a German tutor who knew no French, and of two assistant, and heard nothing but Latin spoken until he was six. At the College de Guyenne in Bordeaux, where he spent the next seven years, even the best Latinists of a brilliant faculty feared to accost him, so fluent was he; and he played leading roles with great enjoyment in some of their Latin plays. However, despite his father’s special arrangements, he found here the seamy side of education-monotomy, pointless confinement, severity and even cruelty in punishment: “a real jail of captive youth. His Latin grew rusty; all he got out of this schooling was a fondness for a few authors such as Ovid, Virgil, Terence, and Plauntus, whom a wise private tutor put in his way and lured him into reading on the sly.

Of the next eight years of Montaigne’s life (1546-54) we know only that he must have studied law probably at Toulouse-and that at the age of fifteen he witnessed in Bordeaux an act of mob violence that he was never to forget. The governor, M. de Moneins, tried to go from one safe place to another though streets full of townspeople ready for riot. His actin, Montaigne tells us, may not have been unwise; but his woeful lack of assurance incited the mob, and he was killed. Years later, as mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne was to remember this lesson and meet a similar situation successfully with a firm and confident demeanor.

In 1554 the king created a new court in Perigueux, the Cour des Aides, to deal with special tax cases, and also to bring in money to the treasury from the customary sale of the newly-created offices. Montaigne’s father bought himself a place and promptly resigned it in favour of his son to take up his new duties as mayor of Bordeaux. The new court was opposed so strongly that three years later the king dissolved it and ordered its members to be accepted into the Parlement of Bordeaux. Though they were most grudgingly received, young Montaigne thus became at twenty-four a member of a very important body, in which he remained for thirteen years. Less powerful than the Paris Parlement because less central, the regional parlements had the same rights and functions. New edicts needed their promulgation to be carried out in their districts; in times of trouble they had much to do in support-theoretically at least-of the royal authority. Primarily, however, they were king’s judicial arm. The Bordeaux Parlement, comprising many learned and distinguished men, was dividing into two main chambers and a third smaller one. Though their actions were taken jointly, the Chamber des Enquetes mainly prepared and reported on cases, whereas the Grand’ Chamber handed down the decisions. Montaigne began, as was natural, in the Chamber des Enquetes, and to his chagrin was never able to change.

His years as a magistrate seem to have been a mixed experience but mainly a bad one. Although this was a fairly good court, still there was some corruption and hypocrisy, much cruelty and inequity, and too much pomp and ceremony. Once in the Essays, starting to write little about himself, Montaigne says he finds himself “entangled in the laws of ceremony” and decides to “let her alone for the moment.” That was possible in his book, but easier said than done in the Parlement of Bordeaux.

Certainly he was absent much of the time-by permission, to be sure-at the court of the king, mostly on mission but on missions that he had requested. It is positively known that he made nine such trips before his retirement; it is likely that he went about once a year. Here was a gayer and more exciting life than in the Parlement, with history being made before your eyes; this had a great appeal to the young Gascon gentleman. But here, too, you could not be yourself; there you were a machine, here a mask.

Only one unmixed blessing came to Montaigne from these long years: his friendship with Etienne de la Boetie. Even this did not last, for after four or five years his friend died young. With his death ended a period in Montaigne’s life.

In trying to picture young Montaigne we must avoid two opposite extremes. The sage of fifty was not a sage in his twenties. Nor was he on the other hand as gay, heedless, and lascivious as we might assume from certain remarks in La Boetie’s verses and later in the Essays. All these remarks must be judged in context. The verses are monitory, not descriptive; no giddy reprobate could have been the bosom friend of the high-minded La Boetie. When Montaigne tells us of his wanton youth, he is aging, failing in body, struggling to avoid going sour; almost all his descriptions are in terms of contrast, and exaggerated. When he gives us a more balanced picture that seems more reliable.