by Michel de Montaigne
His book, bound again as a book of chapters, each one a thing to play with: a cat who plays with you, a fall from a horse, three remarks of which he forgot one, a ceiling to lie under, and a weathervane that is always right.
tags: montaigne, essais, skepticism, friendship, renaissance, self-portrait
Essais · Bordeaux 1580 · Paris 1588 · Paris 1595
Of Montaigne
Which, like the chapters it is about, will not stay on its subject.
To the Reader
Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of me.
Had my intention been to seek the world’s favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties: I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint. My defects are therein to be read to the life, and … my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me. If I had lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature’s primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked.
Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.
From Montaigne, this first of March, 1580.
He tells you to go away. The first page of the first book ever to call itself essays ends Therefore farewell, and for four hundred and forty-six years readers have taken it as the warmest invitation in literature, and stayed. What follows is his book as he made it, a book of chapters, each titled Of something, each one a thing to pick up and turn over, and hardly one of them staying on its subject.
His longest chapter was meant to defend a theologian, and turned into a long proof that man is no better than the animals. He calls his cat as a witness.
Chap. I.Of my Cat
You have amused the cat: 0. The cat has amused herself with you: 0.
She is washing. She has not yet decided to notice you.
The cat had the house. He kept the tower, and at the top of it a round room with sentences painted on its beams, where he walked round and round so that his thoughts would not fall asleep. Lie on your back in the middle of it, and choose one.
Chap. II.Of a Round Room
Joist 38 · third bay · painted facing the other way
SOLVM CERTVM NIHIL ESSE CERTI ET HOMINE NIHIL MISERIVS AVT SVPERBIVS
Only one thing is certain: that nothing is certain. And nothing is more wretched than man, or prouder.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History II · in the Essais, II.12 and II.14
None of this was his idea. His father came home from the Italian wars with a theory of education, and the boy was the experiment.
Chap. III.Of Waking
He is asleep. Choose the music, and wake him.
Morning IWoken by music: 0Turned to the wall: 0Brains troubled and disturbed: 0
It worked the way habits work, by steps too small to notice. He knew a story about that, and he lived under a bell.
Chap. IV.Of Custom
Morning 0. The calf weighs 5 stone; since yesterday, nothing yet. Mornings it was too heavy: 0.
The calf is new, and so is the habit. She has not lifted it yet.
The experiment grew into a man who doubted almost everything except that it is good to be alive, and who thought the way to keep it good was to get used to dying. The Egyptians, he noted, did it at dinner.
Chap. V.That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die
Brought in: 0. Shrieks: none yet.
A feast, in the height of mirth. The Egyptians, at about this point, “caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room.”
Learning to die, he found, was mostly a way of learning to live, and living was not a thing to put off until he deserved it.
Chap. VI.Of Living Now
Rungs climbed: 0. Rungs left to the top: one more. Hours entered as nothing done: 0.
Noon. The day-book is open; the ladder is against the wall. He has a great deal to become first.
He practised, and then he nearly had the chance, out for a quiet ride near home.
Chap. VII.Of a Fall
Times thrown: 0. Times it hurt: 0.
About a league from home, on “a horse that went very easy upon his pace, but was not very strong.”
He got up, and spent the twenty-odd years he had left writing, mostly in his own margins. Here are four passages as they grew: choose one, and then a year.
Chap. VIII.Of Adding
Essais I.28, Of friendship
If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could not be expressed. There is, it seems, beyond all that I am able to say, I know not what divine and fated power that brought on this union.
In print, seventeen years after La Boétie’s death, he tries to say why he loved him, and cannot, and says so.
What he added was mostly himself, in small things, on the principle that the big ones are made of them. Begin with the nose.
Chap. IX.Of Smells
He watched other people as closely, especially the ones his neighbours called savages, who had some remarks to make about his neighbours.
Chap. X.Of Cannibals: Three Remarks
Their second remark was about the men they saw full and crammed with good things while their halves begged at the doors. His own answer was to undress the king.
Chap. XI.Of the Inequality amongst us
Taken off the king: 0 of 7. His height by the rule: 8 ft 7 in. As reputed: 16 ft 7 in.
A king on his pedestal, beside a porter. By the rule, the king is the taller man by three feet and an inch.
The king's robes are borrowed from the eyes of his subjects. So, he noticed, are most of ours.
Chap. XII.Of Glory
The Lady asks: “Monsieur, how did you find my sonnet?” Choose how he answers.
Cheers: 0. Sneers: 0. Yawns: 0. Glory caught: 0 in 0 reaches.
The court is seated. Each of them has a question, and a card.
Most of his chapters wander off their titles. One of them, barely a page long, keeps its word exactly.
Chap. XIII.Of Thumbs
On one knee, appealing: Priscus.
He is down, and appeals to the stands with one finger. Your thumb, please.
Verdicts given: 0. Given as you meant them: 0.
Tacitus reports, that amongst certain barbarian kings their manner was, when they would make a firm obligation,
Treaties sealed: 0. Thumbs pricked: 0.
All of this began because, at thirty-eight, he retired to his tower to do nothing at all. It went badly.
Chap. XIV.Of Idleness
Fig. The mind, broke from its rider
Instructions: do nothing.
A Register of Chimaeras and Fantastic Monsters
kept, as his was, to make the mind ashamed of itself
Empty.
Born 0. Alive 0 of 7. Sent away 0.
An idle mind breeds monsters. A busy one, he found, can make you ill, and cure you, on its own.
Chap. XV.Of the Force of Imagination
Pins in her throat: 0. Her pain: intolerable. Montaigne’s cough, caught: 0.
“A woman fancying she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread, cried and lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her throat.”
A pin can do that much. He wanted every pin, tile and stumble to remind him of something larger.
Chap. XVI.Of Looking for Him Everywhere
Found: 0 of 10. Montaigne: startled.
An ordinary morning. A tile slips, the horse stumbles, and Montaigne jumps. Somewhere in it, ten times, is the thing he jumped at.
Twenty years of writing himself down taught him that he was never the same man twice, and that each of them was telling the truth.
Chap. XVII.Of the Inconstancy of our Actions
Blow from either corner, tap the sky, or drag the vane round. Three puffs in one spin make a gale. On the keyboard, the arrow keys turn it a point and Enter blows on it.
The present reading
Still air.
For the moment he is nothing in particular.
The ledger the last six readings
- Nothing yet; the air is still.
Readings taken: 0. Correct: 0.
If no man is the same twice, how is he to live? His last chapter answers in an orchard.
Chap. XVIII.Of Experience
Some part of the time, called back: 0. The other part, elsewhere: 0.
He is walking in his orchard. For the moment, only that.
He read the way he wrote, one book and then another, without method or design. So open his anywhere: it falls open where a real copy would, more often in the long chapters than the short.
Chap. XIX.Of a Hundred and Seven Chapters
The book is shut. Opened anywhere, it falls open in the long chapters more often than the short, as a real copy does: a sixth of the whole is the Apology for Raymond Sebond.
The first book 1 That men by various ways arrive at the same end2 Of sorrow3 That our affections carry themselves beyond us4 That the soul expends its passions upon false objects, where the true are wanting5 Whether the governor of a place besieged ought himself to go out to parley6 That the hour of parley is dangerous7 That the intention is judge of our actions8 Of idleness (why he began to write)9 Of liars10 Of quick or slow speech11 Of prognostications12 Of constancy13 The ceremony of the interview of princes14 That the relish for good and evil depends in great measure upon the opinion we have of them15 That men are justly punished for being obstinate in the defence of a fort that is not in reason to be defended16 Of the punishment of cowardice17 A proceeding of some ambassadors18 Of fear19 That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death20 That to study philosophy is to learn to die21 Of the force of imagination (among other things, a man who could break wind in tune)22 That the profit of one man is the damage of another23 Of custom, and that we should not easily change a law received24 Various events from the same counsel25 Of pedantry26 Of the education of children27 That it is folly to measure truth and error by our own capacity28 Of friendship29 Twenty-nine sonnets of Étienne de La Boétie30 Of moderation31 Of cannibals (the Brazilians, and the Europeans, who were worse)32 That a man is soberly to judge of the divine ordinances33 That we are to avoid pleasures, even at the expense of life34 That fortune is oftentimes observed to act by the rule of reason35 Of one defect in our government36 Of the custom of wearing clothes37 Of Cato the younger38 That we laugh and cry for the same thing39 Of solitude40 A consideration upon Cicero41 Not to communicate a man’s honour42 Of the inequality amongst us43 Of sumptuary laws44 Of sleep45 Of the battle of Dreux46 Of names47 Of the uncertainty of our judgment48 Of war horses, or destriers49 Of ancient customs50 Of Democritus and Heraclitus51 Of the vanity of words52 Of the parsimony of the ancients53 Of a saying of Caesar54 Of vain subtleties55 Of smells (chiefly his moustache)56 Of prayers57 Of age
The second book 1 Of the inconstancy of our actions2 Of drunkenness3 A custom of the isle of Cea4 To-morrow’s a new day5 Of conscience6 Use makes perfect (falling off a horse, and nearly dying, pleasantly)7 Of recompenses of honour8 Of the affection of fathers to their children9 Of the arms of the Parthians10 Of books11 Of cruelty12 Apology for Raimond Sebond (doubting everything, Sebond included)13 Of judging of the death of another14 That our mind hinders itself15 That our desires are augmented by difficulty16 Of glory17 Of presumption18 Of giving the lie19 Of liberty of conscience20 That we taste nothing pure21 Against idleness22 Of posting23 Of ill means employed to a good end24 Of the Roman grandeur25 Not to counterfeit being sick26 Of thumbs (thumbs)27 Cowardice the mother of cruelty28 All things have their season29 Of virtue30 Of a monstrous child31 Of anger32 Defence of Seneca and Plutarch33 The story of Spurina34 Observations on the means to carry on a war according to Julius Caesar35 Of three good women36 Of the most excellent men37 Of the resemblance of children to their fathers (kidney stones, which he had from his father, and doctors)
The third book 1 Of profit and honesty2 Of repentance3 Of three commerces4 Of diversion5 Upon some verses of Virgil (sex, frankly, and growing old)6 Of coaches (the conquest of Mexico and Peru, after a page on coaches)7 Of the inconvenience of greatness8 Of the art of conference9 Of vanity (travel, his house, and his Roman citizenship)10 Of managing the will11 Of cripples (the new calendar, witches, and a proverb about lame lovers)12 Of physiognomy13 Of experience (his body, his habits, and how to live)
Chap. the last.Of the End
He had written that he wanted death to find him "planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished."even here he added It found him at home, at fifty-nine, in September 1592, with the book still growing in its margins.
Near the end of the last chapter, after twenty years of watching himself, he observes that it is no use going upon stilts, since on stilts we must still walk with our legs;
and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech.
Of the sources. The English throughout is Charles Cotton's translation of 1685-86, as revised by William Carew Hazlitt in 1877 (Project Gutenberg, no. 3600), except the preface "To the Reader", which Cotton left out and Hazlitt translated. Chapters are numbered as in that edition, which differs from modern ones in the first book. The chapters of this page are drawn from his, and his words in them are his; what the cat, the boy, the servant, the household and the reader do and say in them is written for this page, and so is every caption. The four passages that grow, and their French, are from the Villey-Saulnier edition with its layers marked, as published online by the ARTFL Montaigne Project (University of Chicago); the words he struck out are read from the photographs of the Bordeaux Copy itself. The ceiling follows Alain Legros, Sentences peintes au plafond de la bibliothèque de Montaigne (Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes, Tours, 2013), for every transcription, position and source; the English of the sentences is ours, and the plan is a schematic, not a survey. The pages opened at random are passages from all hundred and seven chapters, chosen by scripts/build-montaigne-pages.py.