by Michel de Montaigne
The father of the essay - retired at 38 to a tower, painted 57 mottoes on the beams, invented a new form of writing by putting 'I' at the centre. Six vignettes of his life, his Italian journey pin by pin, his cat, his coin, his signature swerve of thought, the 107 essais, and the apparatus he left behind for the rest of us to use.
tags: montaigne, essais, skepticism, friendship, renaissance, self-portrait
· The Commonplace Book of ·
Michel Eyquem - b. 28 fevrier 1533, Château de Montaigne · d. 13 septembre 1592, ibid.
Je suis moy-mesmes la matiere de mon livre.
- I am myself the matter of my book.
AU LECTEUR · 1580
Trois livres · Cent et sept chapitres · Quatre éditions
Bordeaux 1580 · Paris 1588 · Gournay 1595 · 1602
Retiré de la magistrature à trente-huit ans, Michel de Montaigne se cloître en mille cinq cent septante-un dans le troisième étage d'une tour ronde de son château gascon, et invente une forme de littérature en faisant de soi le sujet de son livre. Essais - essais, tentatives, épreuves. Trois livres, cent et sept chapitres, vingt-et-un ans de révisions. The page below follows the man from Périgord to the tower to the tomb, then turns his own habits - the medallion, the cat, the swerving essays - into apparatus you can use yourself.
In 1571, at thirty-eight, a Gascon gentleman retired from the Parlement of Bordeaux, climbed the stairs of a round tower on his estate, and began writing sentences that nobody had written before. He called them essais - trials, attempts. They weren't arguments, weren't sermons, weren't letters; they were a man thinking on paper, changing his mind in public, quoting the ancients to disagree with them. For the next twenty-one years he kept rewriting them. The form has been called the essay ever since.
The page below follows the man first - Périgord to the tower to the tomb - then turns his own habits into things you can hold: a coin that flips, a cat that watches back, a journey pinned to a map, and the swerve of thought that makes an essay an essay.
Latin before French, a magistrate's gown he never liked, the friend he lost at thirty, the tower he retired to at thirty-eight, the mayoralty he didn't ask for, the last book. Six vignettes, walnut and gold.
- six rooms, 1533 to 1588 -
Born at Château de Montaigne. His father Pierre Eyquem ran a pedagogical experiment: the infant Michel would hear only Latin, spoken, before French. The experiment ended when the servants ran out of Latin.
Law studies, then a seat at the Parlement de Bordeaux. There he met Étienne de La Boétie - a friendship that, thirty years later, he would still describe in the present tense.
Étienne, aged 32, dies of dysentery. Montaigne nurses him through the final week and sends his father a long letter narrating the death hour by hour. Everything he writes afterward is, in some measure, writing around that absence.
At 38 he retires from public office, inherits the château, moves his library into the third-storey tower, and begins painting Greek and Latin sentences on the beams. The first essays are drafted that year.
Elected in absentia while travelling in Italy for his kidney stones. Serves two terms during the Wars of Religion - a Catholic presiding over a half-Huguenot city, keeping it quiet by not insisting.
Book III is published, with heavy expansions to I and II. The final essays - “Of Experience”, “Of Coaches”, “Of Vanity” - are the densest things he wrote. He dies four years later in the tower, aged 59.
vitae·Gascogne·1533–1592
June 1580 to November 1581: kidney stones, the Alps, an audience with a pope, a visit to a poet in an asylum, a mayoralty accepted by mail. The travel diary was lost in his own château for two centuries. Eleven stops; click any pin.
Montaigne’s travel diary - lost in his own château for two centuries, rediscovered in 1774 by an aristocrat reading the attic floorboards - records the journey city by city. Eleven stops follow.
Lorraine, France
First spa. Drinks the waters for kidney stones.
The journey begins at the spa town of Plombières-les-Bains in Lorraine, north-east France. Montaigne spends ten days drinking the waters and bathing - the first of many such stops on a journey explicitly undertaken for his kidney stones, his "constant household enemy." The pains never stopped him. They became his subject.
Montaigne kept the diary partly in French, partly in Italian (after he crossed the Alps), and partly in Latin (when his secretary fell ill and he took over the dictation himself). The manuscript was found in the attic of his château in 1774 by Joseph Prunis, the chaplain of a descendant. First published 1774 as Journal du voyage de Michel de Montaigne en Italie. He never intended it for publication.
Small, verifiable facts about the man, filterable by category - origins, mind, family, civic life, travel, the tower, death.
15 brief facts about the man - the Latin childhood, La Boétie, the tower, the kidney stones, the Italian journey, the mayoralty, and the death in mid-essay.
Three books. One hundred and seven chapters. Ranging from Of Sadness (I.2) to Of Experience (III.13). A single essay runs from one paragraph to seventy pages. Open the bookshelf, draw at random, or unfold the whole.
107 chapters · click any row to read the opener
At thirty-eight he had a medal struck in silver: on one face the Pyrrhonist scales and the Greek ΕΠΕΧΩ - "I suspend judgment" - on the other, in plain French, the question he asked for the rest of his life. Click to flip it.
cast in silver, the year he retired to the tower - click to flip
The Greek ΕΠΕΧΩ - I suspend judgment - is the Pyrrhonist motto, taken from Sextus Empiricus by way of Diogenes Laërtius. The balanced scales mean: every argument has met its equal; the wise man neither claims nor denies; he holds the pans level. This face is the philosophy without the question.
the medallion·Bordeaux mint·1576
The medallion is a motto worn in the pocket; the exercise below is the same motto kept as a daily habit - log one thing a day you thought you knew but, on inspection, do not.
The question engraved on the silver medallion Montaigne had struck in 1576 - his lifelong refrain. Each day, log one thing you thought you knew but on inspection do not. Mark resolved the day you actually figure it out. Most entries will stay open. That is the point.
Étienne de La Boétie died in 1563, age thirty-two, with Montaigne at the bedside. Everything Montaigne wrote afterward is, in some measure, written around that absence. Click either profile.
Étienne de La Boétie · Michel de Montaigne · 1559 - 1563.The closest friendship of his life lasted four years; the rest of the Essais are, in some sense, a long letter to a man who could not read them.
Of Friendship·Essais I.28·first written 1572
Essais I.28 formalizes the same grief into a doctrine - six criteria that distinguish this one, unrepeatable kind of friendship from every ordinary alliance. Score a friend of your own against them.
Montaigne's essay Of Friendship is the most famous account of a particular kind of friendship - the unrepeatable, soul-mingling kind he had with Étienne de La Boétie. He carefully distinguishes it from ordinary "common friendships." Below: six criteria from the essay, scored 0–4. The verdict is a Montaigne-flavoured read.
“In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them.”
When you speak together, does one continue the other’s sentence? Is the seam visible?
“If pressed to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be expressed by answering: because it was he; because it was me.”
Can you list the reasons you are friends? If the list is short or absent - Montaigne would call that a good sign.
“In this noble relationship, services and benefits, on which other friendships feed, do not even deserve to be taken into account.”
Are you keeping a private ledger of who owes whom? If you can’t remember, the friendship is on the right side of Montaigne.
“He drew my will after his; he drew mine after his.”
When you make a decision, does this person already know about it? Do you already know about theirs?
“Since the day I lost him… I have only languished.” (After La Boétie’s death in 1563, when Montaigne was 30.)
If they died tomorrow, would the world have a person-shaped hole? Or would the role be filled by another?
“Common friendships will admit of division… Our perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible.”
Does the friendship live mostly between the two of you, or does it perform for an audience?
The most-quoted sentence Montaigne ever wrote, from the Apology for Raymond Sebond (II.12). Click the figure to swap perspectives.
The most-quoted sentence Montaigne ever wrote. From the long and rambling chapter on the limits of human reason - the one in which he undermines, over a hundred pages, the human assumption that we are at the centre of the moral universe. Click the figure to swap perspectives.
“Quand je me joue à ma chatte, qui sçait si elle passe son temps de moy plus que je ne fay d’elle?”
When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her? We mutually divert one another with our monkey-tricks. If I have my hour to begin or to refuse, so has she hers.
The line is a small lever placed under the entire scaffolding of Western anthropocentrism. Montaigne uses it to introduce a hundred pages of arguments that animals reason, communicate, plan, and feel - that the human claim to a unique soul is a vanity. Three centuries before Darwin, four before Singer.
Three habits of mind, each a way of watching him work: the swerve every essay takes from where it starts to where it ends up; the contradictions he held at once without embarrassment; and the digressive compass that let him wander a subject on purpose.
Montaigne starts every essay somewhere and ends it somewhere else. The journey is the form. Que sais-je? Click any essay to see where the swerve happens.
STARTSA traveller’s account of Tupinambá tribesmen in Brazil, including their warfare, their meals, and their religion.
SWERVES VIAHe notes, almost in passing, that the Tupinambá when shown the disparities of European life - palaces beside beggars - were astonished that the beggars did not seize the palace-dwellers by the throat or set their houses on fire.
ARRIVES ATA scathing critique of European Christianity and its supposedly civilised wars, where men are tortured and dismembered while still alive - far more savage than anything done by the so-called savages, who at least eat the dead.
The trick is the swerve from "look at the savages" to "look at us." Anthropology becomes confession. He never preaches; he reports. By the end of the essay, the reader has done the moral work themselves.
"If my soul could but find footing, I should not write essays." Six pairs of contradicting passages, with the gloss on how he held both at once.
He did so constantly, and was proud of it. "If my soul could but find footing, I should not write essays, I should resolve; but it is ever in apprenticeship and on trial." Six pairs of contradicting passages drawn from across the Essais. Pick the one you believe, or both. The gloss explains how Montaigne held both.
Montaigne's prose is famous for swerving in the small as well as the large - chapters that begin on one subject and end somewhere unrecognisable. He called this ranging at will. The compass formalises the habit at sentence scale.
Montaigne's prose is famous for swerving - chapters that begin on one subject and end somewhere unrecognisable. He called this ranging at will. State a topic, then click ··· swerve for a Montaignean left turn. Five swerves deep is a passable paragraph.
On the joists of his library ceiling he painted fifty-seven Greek and Latin sentences - a private zodiac of skepticism. Each is a working motto.
All 57 inscriptions Montaigne had painted on the joists of his library at the Château de Montaigne, drawn from Villey (1908) and Bonnefon (1898). The 12 marked best attested appear in virtually every scholarly account. Click any beam to open it.
the ceiling·Château de Montaigne·1571–1592
Château de Montaigne, Périgord. The only part still standing today. Three storeys: chapel below, bedroom in the middle, library above.
The third floor. A round room with five long windows and one thousand volumes shelved along the curved walls - Greek and Latin antiquity in the main, a smattering of Italian. The ceiling is the famous one: fifty-seven inscriptions painted on the joists, each one a Greek or Latin maxim he wanted to look up at while writing. The Essais were composed here, almost entirely standing, between roughly 1572 and 1592.
the tower·Château de Montaigne, Périgord·1571 - present
The 1580 essay on the Brazilian Tupinambá - Montaigne's argument that what we call barbarism is nothing but the wild fruit of nature, and that Europe's own cruelties run deeper. Quoted later by Shakespeare in The Tempest.
The lines from the Essais most often pulled out, beside the chapters they came from.
340 slips filed · arrow-keys to riffle the drawer
I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. ..I am myself the matter of my book.
- THE DEATH -
in the tower, aged 59. Some accounts say during mass, in his own chapel. The heart was buried separately; the body was moved more than once; the tomb now rests in the Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux.
Of the 57 beams, most survive. The books survive entire. The man himself remains.
requiescat·Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux·1592
Thirteen chapters carry the man and his apparatus together: the life, the Italian journey, the curious particulars, the bookshelf of 107 essays, the 1576 medallion paired with the Que sçay-je? journal, the La Boétie friendship (profiles, test, and the full 1580 essay), the cat, three instruments on how he thought, the fifty-seven beams of the tower, Of Cannibals entire, five practice instruments held behind one fold, the digest of his most-quoted lines, and the death in the tower.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI