The Complete Essays (45 page)

34. Fortune is often found in Reason’s train

[The Roman censor was not too happy about Montaigne’s writing about Fortune (as distinct from Providence) – strangely so, since fickle Fortune and Fortune’s Wheel were centuries-old commonplaces. (The word
Fortune
itself occurs some 350 times in the
Essais.
Montaigne explains why he finds it right to use words such as Fortune and Destiny in I, 56, ‘On prayer’.)]

[A] The changeableness of Fortune’s varied dance means that she must inevitably show us every kind of face. Has any of her actions ever been more expressly just than the following? The Duke of Valentinois decided to poison Adrian the Cardinal of Corneto, to whose home in the Vatican he and his father Pope Alexander VI were coming to dine; so he sent ahead a bottle of poisoned wine with instructions to the butler to look after it carefully. The Pope, chancing to arrive before his son, asked for a drink; that butler, who thought that the wine had been entrusted to him merely because of its quality, served it to him; then the Duke himself, arriving just in time for dinner and trusting that nobody would have touched his bottle, drank some too, so that the father died suddenly while the son, after being tormented by a long illness, was reserved for a worse and different fortune.
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Sometimes it seems that Fortune is literally playing with us. The Seigneur d’Estrées (who was then ensign to Monseigneur de Vendôme) and the Seigneur de Licques (a lieutenant in the forces of the Duke of Aerschot) were both suitors of the sister of the Sieur de Fouquerolle – despite their being on opposite sides, as often happens with neighbours on the frontier. The Seigneur de Licques was successful. However, on his very wedding-day and, what is worse, before going to bed, the bridegroom desired to break a lance as a tribute to his new bride and went out skirmishing near St Omer; there, he was taken prisoner by the Seigneur d’Estrées who had proved the stronger. To exploit this advantage to the full, d’Estrées compelled the lady –

Conjugis ante coacta novi dimittere collum,
    Quam veniens una atque altera rursus hyems
Noctibus in longis avidum saturasset amorem
.

[Forced to release her embrace of her young husband before the long nights of a couple of winters had sated her eager love]
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–

personally to beg him, of his courtesy, to surrender his prisoner to her. Which he did, the French nobility never refusing anything to the ladies…

[C] Was the following not Fate apparently playing the artist? The Empire of Constantinople was founded by Constantine son of Helena: many centuries later it was ended by another Constantine son of Helena!

[A] Sometimes it pleases Fortune to rival our Christian miracles. We hold that when King Clovis was besieging Angoulême, by God’s favour the walls collapsed of themselves; Bouchet borrows from some other author an account of what happened when King Robert was laying siege to a certain city: he slipped off to Orleans to celebrate the festival of St Aignan; while he was saying his prayers, at a certain point in the Mass the walls of the besieged city collapsed without being attacked.
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But Fortune produced quite opposite results during our Milanese wars: for after Captain Renzo had mined a great stretch of the wall while besieging the town of Arona for us French it was blown right up in the air, only to fall straight back on to its foundations all in one piece so that the besieged were no worse off.
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Sometimes Fortune dabbles in medicine. Jason Phereus was given up by his doctors because of a tumour on the breast; wishing to rid himself of it even by death, he threw himself recklessly into battle where the enemy was thickest; he was struck through the body at precisely the right spot, lancing his tumour and curing him.

Did Fortune not surpass Protogenes the painter in mastery of his art? He had completed a portrait of a tired and exhausted dog; he was pleased with everything else but could not paint its foaming slaver to his own satisfaction; irritated against his work, he grabbed a sponge and threw it at it, intending to blot everything out since the sponge was impregnated with a variety of paints: Fortune guided his throw right to the mouth of the dog and produced the effect which his art had been unable to attain.
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Does she not sometimes direct our counsels and correct them? Queen Isabella of England had to cross over to her kingdom from Zealand with her army to come to the aid of her son against her husband; she would have been undone if she had landed at the port she had intended, for her enemies were awaiting her there; but Fortune drove her unwillingly to another place, where she landed in complete safety.
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And that Ancient who chucked a stone at a dog only to hit his stepmother and kill her could he not have rightly recited this verse:
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‘Fortune has better counsel than we do.’
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[C] Icetes had bribed two soldiers to murder Tomoleon during his stay in Adrana in Sicily. They chose a time when he was about to make some sacrifice or other; they mingled with the crowd; just as they were signalling to each other that the time was right for their deed, along comes a third soldier who landed a mighty sword-blow on the head of one of them and then ran away. His companion, believing he was discovered and undone, ran to the altar begging for sanctuary and promising to reveal all the truth. Just as he was giving an account of the conspiracy the third man was caught and was being dragged and manhandled through the crowd towards Timoleon and the more notable members of the congregation: he begged for mercy, saying that he had rightly killed his father’s murderer, immediately proving by witnesses which good luck had conveniently provided that his father had indeed been murdered in the town of the Leontines by the very man against whom he had taken his revenge. He was granted ten Attic silver-pounds as a reward for his good luck in saving the life of the Father of the Sicilian People while avenging the death of his own father. Such fortune surpasses in rightness the right-rules of human wisdom.
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[B] To conclude. Does not the following reveal a most explicit explicit granting of her favour as well as her goodness and singular piety? The two Ignatii, father and son, having been proscribed by the Roman Triumvirate, nobly decided that their duty was to take each other’s life and so frustrate the cruelty of those tyrants. Sword in hand they fell on each other. Fortune guided their sword-points, made both blows equally mortal and honoured
the beauty of such a loving affection by giving them just enough strength to withdraw their forearms from the wounds, blood-stained and still grasping their weapons, and to clasp each other, there as they lay, in such an embrace that the executioners cut off both their heads at once, allowing their bodies to remain nobly entwined together, wound against wound, lovingly soaking up each other’s life-blood.
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35. Something lacking in our civil administrations

[Montaigne’s father had sound ideas on practical charity and on running a household. The link between the two parts of this short chapter is the word
polices (
polity: civil administration) which applies both to the running of a country and the running of an estate. Montaigne shows the breadth of his charity, Sebastian Castalio being in bad odour because of his translation of the Bible and for his use of Lutheran works to preach religious tolerance.]

[A] My late father, a man of a decidedly clear judgement, based though it was only on his natural gifts and his own experience, said to me once that
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he had wished to set a plan in motion leading to the designation of a place in our cities where those who were in need of anything could go and have their requirements registered by a duly appointed official; for example: [C] ‘I want to sell some pearls’; or ‘I want to buy some pearls.’ [A] ‘So-and-so wants to make up a group to travel to Paris’; ‘So-and-so wants a servant with the following qualifications’; ‘So-and-so seeks an employer’; ‘So-and-so wants a workman’; each stating his wishes according to his needs.

It does seem that this means of mutual advertising would bring no slight advantage to our public dealings; for at every turn there are bargains seeking each other but, because they cannot find each other, men are left in extreme want.

I have just learnt something deeply shameful to our times; under our very eyes two outstanding scholars have died for want of food, Lilius Gregorius Giraldus in Italy and Sebastian Castalio in Germany; and I believe that there are hundreds of people who would have invited them to their houses on very favourable terms [C] or sent help to them where they were, [A] if only they had known.
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The world is not so completely corrupt that we cannot find even one man who would not gladly wish to see his inherited wealth able to be used (as long as Fortune lets him enjoy it) to provide shelter for great men who are renowned for some particular achievement but who have been reduced to extreme poverty by their misfortunes; he could at least give them enough assistance that it would be unreasonable for them not to be satisfied.

[C] In his administration of his household affairs my father had a rule which I can admire but in no ways follow. In addition to keeping a record of household accounts entrusted to the hands of a domestic bursar (making entries for small bills and payments or transactions which did not need the signature of a lawyer) he told the man who acted as his secretary to keep a diary covering any noteworthy event and the day-to-day history of his household. It is very pleasant to consult, once time begins to efface memories; it is also useful for clearing up difficulties. When was such-and-such a job begun? When was it finished? Who called at Montaigne with their retinues? How many came to stay? It notes our journeys, absences, marriages and deaths, the receipt of good or bad news; changes among our chief servants – things like that: an ancient custom which I would like to be revived by each denizen in his own den. I think I am a fool to have neglected it.

36. On the custom of wearing clothing

[In this chapter Montaigne makes a pun on the French taste for
bigarures,
which means, as Cotgrave explains it in his
Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (
1632) both a medley of ‘sundry colours mingled together’ and a discourse ‘running odly and fantastically, from one matter to another’. This chapter is an example of such a colourful medley, hopping from thoughts on Man’s natural nakedness to examples of extraordinary cold.]

[A] Whichever way I want to go I find myself obliged to break through some barrier of custom, so thoroughly has she blocked all our approaches. During this chilly season I was chatting about whether the habit of those newly discovered peoples of going about stark naked was forced on them by the hot climate, as we say of the Indians and the Moors, or whether it is the original state of mankind. Since the word of God says that ‘everything under the sun’ is subject to the same law,
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in considerations such as these, where a distinction has to be made between natural laws and contrived ones, men of understanding regularly turn for advice to the general polity of the world: nothing can be counterfeit there. Now, since everything therein is exactly furnished with stitch and needle for maintaining its being, it is truly unbelievable that we men alone should have been brought forth in a deficient and necessitous state, a state which can only be sustained by borrowings from other creatures. I therefore hold that just as plants, trees, animals and all living things are naturally equipped with adequate protection from the rigour of the weather –

Proptereaque fere res omnes aut corio sunt,
Aut seta, aut conchis, aut callo, aut cortice tectæ

[Wherefore virtually everything is protected by hides, silks, shells, tough skin or bark]
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– so too were we; but like those who drown the light of day with artificial light, we have drowned our natural means with borrowed ones. It can easily be seen that custom makes possible things impossible for us: for some of the peoples who have no knowledge of clothing live under much the same climate as ourselves – and even we leave uncovered the most delicate parts of our bodies: [C] our eyes, mouth, nose, ears and, in the case of our peasants and forebears, the chest and the belly. If we had been endowed at birth with undergarments and trousers there can be no doubt that Nature would have armed those parts of us which remained exposed to the violence of the seasons with a thicker skin, as she has done for our fingertips and the soles of our feet.

[C] Why should this seem so hard to believe? The gulf between the way I dress and the way my local peasant does is wider than that between him and a man dressed only in his skin. In Turkey especially many go about naked for the sake of their religion.
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[A] In midwinter somebody or other asked one of our local tramps who was wearing nothing but a shirt yet remained as merry as a man swaddled up to his ears in furs how he could stand it. ‘You, Sir,’ he replied, ‘have your face quite uncovered: myself am all face!’

The Italians tell a tale about (I think it was) the Duke of Florence’s jester. He was poorly clad; his master asked him how he managed to stand the cold, which he himself found very troublesome. ‘Do as I do,’ he said, ‘and you won’t feel the cold either. Pile on every stitch you’ve got!’

Even when very old, King Massinissa could not be persuaded to wear anything on his head, come cold, wind or rain.
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[C] And the same is told about the Emperor Severus.

Herodotus says that both he and others noted that, of those who were left dead in the battles between the Egyptians and the Persians, the Egyptians had by far the harder cranium: that was because the Persians always kept their heads covered first with boys’ caps and then with turbans,
whereas the Egyptians went close-cropped and bareheaded from childhood.
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[A] And King Agesilaus wore the same clothes, summer and winter, until he was decrepit. According to Suetonius, Caesar always led his armies, normally bare-headed and on foot, in sunshine as in rain. The same is said of Hannibal:

    tum vertice nudo
Excipere insanos imbres cælique ruinam
.

[Bare-headed he withstood the furious rainstorms and the cloudbursts.]
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[C] A Venetian just back from the Kingdom of Pegu where he had spent a long time writes that the men and women there cover all the rest of their body, but always go barefoot even on their horses. And Plato enthusiastically advises that, for the health of our entire body, we should give no other covering to head or foot than what Nature has put there.
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[Al] The man whom the Poles elected King after our own monarch
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(and he is truly one of the greatest of princes) never wears gloves and never fails to wear the same hat indoors, no matter what the winter weather.

[B] Whereas I cannot bear to go about with my buttons undone or my jacket unlaced, the farm-labourers in my neighbourhood would feel shackled if they did not do so. Varro maintains that when mankind was bidden to remain uncovered in the presence of gods and governors it was for our health’s sake and to help us to endure the fury of the seasons rather than out of reverence.
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[A] While on the subject of cold, since the French are used to a medley of colours – not me though: I usually wear black and white like my father – let me switch subject and add that Captain Martin Du Bellay relates how he saw it freeze so hard during the Luxembourg expedition that the wine-ration had to be hacked at with axes, weighed out to the soldiers and carried away in baskets.
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Ovid is but a finger’s breadth from that:

Nudaque consistunt formam servantia testæ
    Vina, nec hausta meri, sed data frusta bibunt
.

[The naked wine stands straight upright, retaining the shape of the jar: they do not swallow draughts of wine but chunks of it.]
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[B] It freezes so hard in the swampy distributaries of Lake Maeotis that in the very same spot where Mithridates’ lieutenant fought dry-shod against his enemies and defeated them, he defeated them again, when summer came, in a naval engagement.

[C] In their battle against the Carthaginians near Placentia, the Romans were at a great disadvantage since they had to charge while their blood was nipped and their limbs stiff with the cold, whereas Hannibal had caused fires to be lit throughout his camp to warm his soldiers and had also distributed an embrocation oil to his troops to rub in, thaw out their muscles and limber up, while clogging their pores against the penetrating blasts of the prevailing bitter wind.

The Greeks’ homeward retreat from Babylon is famous for the hardships and sufferings they had to overcome. One was their encountering a dreadful snowstorm in the Armenian mountains; they lost all their bearings in that country and its roads; they were so suddenly beset that, with most of their mule-train dead, they went one whole day and night without food or drink; many of them met their deaths or were blinded by the hailstones and the glare of the snow; many had frostbitten limbs and many others remained conscious but were frozen stiff and unable to move.
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Alexander came across a people where they bury their fruit trees in winter to protect them from the frost.
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[B] While on the subject of clothing, the King of Mexico changed four times a day and never wore the same clothes twice; his cast-off garments were constantly used for gifts and rewards; similarly no pot, plate, kitchen-ware or table-ware was ever served him twice.
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