The Complete Essays (44 page)

The husbands have several wives: the higher their reputation for valour the more of them they have. One beautiful characteristic of their marriages is worth noting: just as our wives are zealous in thwarting our love and tenderness for other women, theirs are equally zealous in obtaining them for them. Being more concerned for their husband’s reputation than for anything else, they take care and trouble to have as many fellow-wives as possible, since that is a testimony to their husband’s valour.

– [C] Our wives will scream that that is a marvel, but it is not: it is a virtue proper to matrimony, but at an earlier stage. In the Bible Leah, Rachel, Sarah and the wives of Jacob all made their fair handmaidens available to their husbands; Livia, to her own detriment, connived at the lusts of Augustus, and Stratonice the consort of King Deiotarus not only provided her husband with a very beautiful chambermaid who served her but carefully brought up their children and lent a hand in enabling them to succeed to her husband’s rank.
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– [A] Lest anyone should think that they do all this out of a simple slavish subjection to convention or because of the impact of the authority of their ancient customs without any reasoning or judgement on their part, having minds so dulled that they could never decide to do anything else, I should cite a few examples of what they are capable of.

Apart from that war-song which I have just given an account of, I have another of their songs, a love-song, which begins like this:

O Adder, stay: stay O Adder! From your colours
let my sister take the pattern for a girdle
she will make for me to offer to my love;
So may your beauty and your speckled hues be for
ever honoured above all other snakes.

This opening couplet serves as the song’s refrain. Now I know enough about poetry to make the following judgement: not only is there nothing ‘barbarous’ in this conceit but it is thoroughly anacreontic.
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Their language incidentally is [C] a pleasant one with an agreeable sound [A] and has terminations
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rather like Greek.

Three such natives, unaware of what price in peace and happiness they would have to pay to buy a knowledge of our corruptions, and unaware that such commerce would lead to their downfall – which I suspect to be already far advanced – pitifully allowing themselves to be cheated by their desire for novelty and leaving the gentleness of their regions to come and see ours, were at Rouen at the same time as King Charles IX.
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The King had a long interview with them: they were shown our manners, our ceremonial and the layout of a fair city. Then someone asked them what they thought of all this and wanted to know what they had been most amazed by. They made three points; I am very annoyed with myself for forgetting the third, but I still remember two of them. In the first place they said (probably referring to the Swiss Guard) that they found it very odd that all those full-grown bearded men, strong and bearing arms in the King’s entourage, should consent to obey a boy rather than choosing one of themselves as a Commander; secondly – since they have an idiom in their language which calls all men ‘halves’ of one another – that they had noticed that there were among us men fully bloated with all sorts of
comforts while their halves were begging at their doors, emaciated with poverty and hunger: they found it odd that those destitute halves should put up with such injustice and did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.

I had a very long talk with one of them (but I used a stupid interpreter who was so bad at grasping my meaning and at understanding my ideas that I got little joy from it). When I asked the man (who was a commander among them, our sailors calling him a king) what advantage he got from his high rank, he told me that it was to lead his troops into battle; asked how many men followed him, he pointed to an open space to signify as many as it would hold – about four or five thousand men; questioned whether his authority lapsed when the war was over, he replied that he retained the privilege of having paths cut for him through the thickets in their forests, so that he could easily walk through them when he visited villages under his sway.

Not at all bad, that. – Ah! But they wear no breeches…

32. Judgements on God’s ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence

[The theme that God’s counsel is a secret which Man should not try to scan was a common one in the Renaissance. Montaigne applies that dogma to the ups and downs of the Wars of Religion: we cannot say that God is on the side of the victors in battle. Montaigne asserts that even the pagan Indians of the New World know that better than warring Christians do.]

[A] The real field and subject of deception are things unknown: firstly because their very strangeness lends them credence; second, because they cannot be exposed to our usual order of argument, so stripping us of the means of fighting them. [C] Plato says that this explains why it is easier to satisfy people when talking of the nature of the gods than of the nature of men: the ignorance of the hearers provides such hidden matters with a firm broad course for them to canter along in freedom.
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[A] And so it turns out that nothing is so firmly believed as whatever we know least about, and that no persons are more sure of themselves than those who tell us tall stories, such as alchemists and those who make prognostications: judicial astrologers, chiromancers, doctors and
‘id genus omne’
[all that tribe].
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To which I would add if I dared that crowd of everyday chroniclers and interpreters of God’s purposes who claim to discover the causes of everything that occurs and to read the unknowable purposes of God by scanning the secrets of His will; the continual changes and clash of events drive them from corner to corner and from East to West, but they still go on chasing the tennis-ball and sketching black and white with the same crayon. [B] In one Indian tribe they have a laudable custom: when they are worsted in a skirmish or battle they publicly beseech the Sun their god for pardon for having done wrong, attributing their success or failure to the divine mind, to which they submit their own judgement and discourse.

[A] For a Christian it suffices to believe that all things come from God,
to accept them with an acknowledgement of His holy unsearchable wisdom and so to take them in good part, under whatever guise they are sent to him. What I consider wrong is our usual practice of trying to support and confirm our religion by the success or happy outcome of our undertakings. Our belief has enough other foundations without seeking sanction from events: people who have grown accustomed to such plausible arguments well-suited to their taste are in danger of having their faith shaken when the turn comes for events to prove hostile and unfavourable. As in the religious wars which we are now fighting, after those who had prevailed at the battle of La Rochelabeille had had a great feast-day over the outcome, exploiting their good fortune as a sure sign of God’s approval for their faction, they then had to justify their misfortunes at Moncontour and Jarnac as being Fatherly scourges and chastisements:
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they would soon have made the people realize (if they did not have them under their thumb) that that is getting two kinds of meal from the same bag and blowing hot and cold with the same breath. It would be better to explain to the people the real foundations of truth.

That was a fine naval engagement which we won against the Turk a few months ago, led by Don John of Austria: yet at other times it has pleased God to make us witness other such battles which cost us dear.
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In short it is hard to bring matters divine down to human scales without their being trivialized. Supposing someone sought to explain why Arius and Leo his Pope (who were the main proponents of the Arian heresy) both died at different times of deaths so strange and similar, for they both had to leave the debates because of pains in their stomach and go to the lavatory, where both promptly died; and supposing they emphasized God’s vengeance by insisting on the nature of the place where this happened: well, they could add the example of the death of Heliogabalus who was also killed in a privy. Why, Irenaeus himself met the same fate.
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[C] God wishes us to learn that the good have other things to hope for and the wicked other things to fear than the chances and mischances of this
world, which his hands control according to his hidden purposes: and so he takes from us the means of foolishly exploiting them. Those who desire to draw advantage from them by human reason delude themselves. For every hit which they make, they suffer two in return. St Augustine amply proved that against his opponents: the arms which decide that wrangle are not those of reason but of memory.
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[A] We must be content with the light which the Sun vouchsafes to shed on us by its rays: were a man to lift up his eyes to seek a greater light in the Sun itself, let him not find it strange if he is blinded as a penalty for his presumption. [C]
‘Quis hominum potest scire consilium dei? aut quis poterit cogitare quid velit dominus?’
[For what man can know the counsel of God: or who shall conceive what the Lord willeth?]
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33. On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of one’s life

[This chapter shows how Christianity in early times was closer to Stoicism than many realized. The anecdote of St Hilary derives from the
Annales d’Aquitaine
of Jean Bouchet (a friend of Rabelais and a fluent moral poet and historian of the generation before Montaigne).]

[A] I had already noted that the majority of ancient opinions agree on the following: that it is time to die when living entails more ill than good, and that preserving our life to our anguish or prejudice is to infringe the very laws of Nature – as these old precepts put it:

[Either a quiet life or a happy death.
It is good to die for those who find life a burden.
Better not to live than to live in wretchedness.]
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But to carry contempt for death to the point of using it to dissuade us from honours, riches, great offices and the rest of what we call Fortune’s goods and favours, as if reason did not already have cause enough to persuade us to abandon them without adding this fresh attack, is something I had never seen enjoined or practised until I happened upon a passage in Seneca; in it he advises Lucilius, a man of power and of great authority in the Emperor’s court, to renounce his life of pomp and pleasure and to withdraw from such worldly ambition into a solitary life, tranquil and philosophical. When Lucilius cited some of the difficulties, Seneca said: ‘My counsel is that either you should quit that life or life itself; I do indeed advise you to adopt the easier course of slipping the bonds which you have wrongly tied
rather than breaking them, providing that you do break them if you cannot do otherwise. No man is such a coward that he would not rather make one fall than to be forever on the brink.’
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I would have found that counsel in keeping with the asperity of the Stoics, but it is rather odd that Seneca could borrow it from Epicurus, who on this subject writes to Idomeneus in the very same way.
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Nevertheless I think I have noted a similar precept among our own people, but with Christian moderation. St Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers and a famous enemy of the Arian heresy, was in Syria when he was told that his only daughter Abra, whom he had left overseas with her mother, was being courted by some of the most notable lords of the land since she was very well brought up, a maiden fair, rich and blooming. He wrote to her (as we know) that she should get rid of her love of the pleasures and favours that were being offered her, saying that he had found for her during his journey a Suitor who was far greater and more worthy, a Bridegroom of very different power and glory, who would vouchsafe her a present of robes and jewels of countless price. His aim was to make her lose the habit and taste of worldly pleasures and to wed her to God; but since the most sure and shortest way seemed to him that his daughter should die, he never ceased to beseech God in his prayers, vows and supplications that he should take her from this world and call her to Himself. And so it happened: soon after his return she did die, at which he showed uncommon joy. He seems to have outstripped those others in that he had immediate recourse to a means which they keep in reserve; and besides it concerned his only daughter.

But I would not omit the end of this story: when St Hilary’s wife heard from him how the death of their daughter had been brought about by his wish and design, and how much happier she was to have quitted this world than to have remained in it, she too took so lively a grasp on that eternal life in Heaven that she besought her husband, with the utmost urgency, to do the same for her. Soon after, when God took her to Himself in answer to both their prayers, the death was welcomed with open arms and with an uncommon joy which both of them shared.
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