1569 he published his French version of the Natural Theology of Raymond Sebond; his Apology is only partly a defence of Sebond and sets sceptical limits to human reasoning about God, man and nature.

‘Dr Screech’s principal achievement has been to render Montaigne into contemporary English without quaintness, but also without sacrifice of that flavour of the sixteenth century which is implicit in Montaigne’s thinking … We want the essence of the man in a form accessible to modern readers, and that is what the translator has so gracefully given us’

He is one of a select band of authors: he leads us to feel that we know him – not partially, as an author, but fully, as an individual person. Only a residual respect for convention stopped him from portraying himself in his native simplicity, ‘whole, and wholly naked’. Thank goodness he did not worry over-much about taboos of language or of topic; as a result we know the form of his mind better than that of anybody who wrote before him. Montaigne himself judged that he and his book were ‘of one substance’ with each other. Within his covers we find not merely a wise book but a wise man.

Montaigne was no don manqué, yet he changed the way we think about ourselves and about mankind. He achieved that revolution not by hectoring or by preaching, not by political manœuvring or by academic brilliance, but by writing about subjects which interested him, so letting us see the slant of his mind.

He made excellent use of the rhetorical techniques favoured in his day in order to set forth his ideas clearly, persuasively and often humorously. He wrote with a simple directness which won him readers far beyond the formally educated few: he was read and admired by statesmen such as Henry of Navarre (the future Henri Quatre for whom Paris was well worth a Mass). One of his valets realized the cash value of his writings and stole the only copy of one of his chapters (it has never resurfaced). He was much admired by noblewomen too.

Montaigne did not have a firm plan when he set about writing his Essays. His book and his aims changed and grew as he changed and grew in wisdom. That he was original and challenging is not, in retrospect, all that surprising.

His father, possibly under the influence of the ideas of the Humanist theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam, arranged for Latin to be his native tongue. A special tutor was brought from Germany; his parents and the servants learned sufficient Latin to speak to him in nothing but that language. He lost his fluency in speaking Latin when his father, getting cold feet, sent him to board at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, but he never ceased to read it with ease and delight. Even his Greek philosophers he read (as Renaissance scholars often did) in Latin translation. Latin was the language of educated men, still the dominant language of school, university and learning generally. In addition to Latin, Montaigne also had to learn French: in his region the language was Gascon.

it may come as a surprise that the whole undertaking of writing the Essays arose out of a crisis of melancholy. When his father died in June 1568 Montaigne, as his son and heir, resigned his legal office in the Parlement of Bordeaux and withdrew to his estates. His closest of friends, Etienne de la Boëtie, had died unexpectedly some four years earlier (August 1563), leaving a yearning gap in Montaigne’s life which nothing was ever completely to fill. They had spent very little time actually together, but they felt great joy in each other’s company and in their conversation; Montaigne was convinced that their friendship was of the rarest kind…

His withdrawal to his estates was not, therefore, a hermit’s withdrawal into literal solitude; it was, however, a conscious rejection of negotium in favour of otium, of, that is, a busy preoccupation with affairs in favour of learned leisure. In this Montaigne was following the practice and counsel of many a sage in Classical and Christian antiquity. Both Seneca and Augustine of Hippo would have appreciated his aim. He covered his library with quotations from Greek and Latin…

learned leisure was a great ideal, but, for Montaigne, it did not turn out well in practice. Instead of finding peace and mental repose he fell into chagrin (a melancholic depression). He experienced the kind of anguish which Milton describes in Il Penseroso and in his Ode to Melancholy. Where he had hoped that his mind would be content with a private, bookish idleness he found that it ‘bolted off like a runaway horse’, giving birth to ‘chimeras and fantastic monstrosities’.…

Before that access of melancholy he had apparently intended to write short discourses on matters of war and high policy – matters which directly concerned him as a gentleman who fought in the civil wars. He stood both for the Old Religion and, where the French monarchy was concerned, for the legitimate succession to the throne (which, for him, was independent of the religion of the heir). The…

In fact all the chapters of the first two Books are marked to some extent by that access of melancholy or by the remembrance of it. That is to be expected. Montaigne’s native complexion was a balanced mixture of humours, of the melancholy and the sanguine (II, 17). It was a good one to have: ever since the Problems of Aristotle (or Pseudo-Aristotle), that or a similar complexion was seen as the basis of all genius. But it was also a worrying one to have: the same Problems (30–1) also declared it to be potentially the sole basis of many distressing kinds of madness.

One of the marked features of Montaigne’s writings as a younger man is a preoccupation with death – not with being dead but with the act of dying.

The title Essays is one of striking modesty. It is nearer to ‘assay’ than to ‘essay’ as used today. The term was used of schoolboys’ ‘attempts’ or ‘exercises’; it was used when apprentices tried out their skills, well before producing their masterpiece; it was used when gold or silver was ‘assayed’ to find out its worth. What Montaigne was ‘assaying’ was both his ‘self’ and his opinions. He realized virtually from the outset that, since he was not a past master in any of the arts or sciences, he was not stating conclusions but exploring opinions – his opinions. Since he was writing philosophy, he could normally leave revelation aside and concentrate on whatever fell within the fields of human intellect and emotion.

His apparent subjects did not really matter to him: he could write, he said, about a fly! Whatever the subject of a chapter, Montaigne was really ‘assaying’ himself. He was breaking one of Europe’s greatest taboos by writing thus about himself. (Nobody had ever done so before – not even Saint Augustine, whose Confessions are more a work of theology than of moral philosophy.) Montaigne was not at first fully conscious that he was doing so, but he was quickly aware of the strangeness of his enterprise: … unless I am saved by oddness and novelty … I shall never extricate myself from this daft undertaking … It was a melancholy humour (and therefore a humour most inimical to my natural complexion) brought on by the chagrin caused by the solitary retreat I plunged myself into a few years ago which first put into my mind this raving concern with writing.

He found his enterprise to be ‘wild and monstrous’ or, on second thoughts, ‘wild and fantastically eccentric’. But he soon concluded that he was producing a self-portrait, analogous to the self-portraits which artists were increasingly painting in their studios. The portrait was, at first, mainly that of his forma mentis, the slant of his mind. (A sustained concern with his body came much later.) It portrays for us the way he thought and felt and, therefore, acted. There was at the outset little or no claim to reach unshakeable conclusions. But unlike the artist in his studio who catches in pencil or paint a fixed likeness of himself and of his character, Montaigne discovered that he could never pin down a stable ‘I’ which he could study: his ‘I’ as the writer was ever-changing; his ‘I’ as the subject was ever-changing too.

Montaigne’s method of avoiding the perils of pure introspection was to turn his gaze outward on to events, people or books and then to bring the subjects back to himself to find what his opinions about them really were. He did this with increasing confidence once he found that men may differ in degree but not in kind.

Montaigne, quite revolutionarily, started from the other end: he studied his own mind, his own form, and, since he, like anyone else, bore the whole form of the human condition, he applied his knowledge of himself to anyone he met in life, by report or in books. Recent changes in the way Aristotle was interpreted greatly helped him in his enterprise. Traditionally, strict Aristotelians allowed there to be nothing but absolute identity between all human forms. Individual differences arose not in the form but in the complex linking of soul (form) with its body (matter). Renaissance theologians (and many moral philosophers) insisted. on the contrary, that just as there are many shades of white which still nevertheless remain white, so there are many grades of human soul which still remain human souls. Some are greater or higher than others: some are baser and lower. All remain human. Montaigne accepts that view. So even a mediocre human soul and a splendid one remain, as it were, in touch with each other. Each can understand the other. Even a base soul can, in some circumstances, attain momentarily to the calm virtue which Socrates could sustain throughout his adult life.

Montaigne came to believe that no man ever ceased to be Man – not even Socrates, not even Homer. Similarly, men were never so wicked or evil that other men ceased to have cousinage with them. He also came to be convinced that, since Man is body and soul, to portray only the soul is signally inadequate: human beings are ‘wondrously corporeal’ (III, 8). The soul can influence the body, but the body can also influence the soul! That is how it should be: the body has its rights, its joys, its pabulum and its duties; they may be less valid and less enduring than those of the soul but they have their place within the wise and moral life of Man. Only saints, under grace, may rightly neglect the body as their enraptured souls enjoy an ecstatic foretaste of future joy. The rest of us must keep our feet on the ground, teaching the body and soul to live wedded together in mutual harmony, until death them do part.

He was deeply influenced by the Ancient Stoics. His own sceptical turn of mind was reinforced by his discovery of authentic Ancient scepticism in the works of Pyrrho. His taste for life was partly guided by the Epicureans. It is sometimes suggested that he was first a Stoic, then a Sceptic, then an Epicurean. In fact he held those and other philosophies in easy harmony. Ancient philosophers easily swayed him, but one did not replace another completely. Increasingly he came to appreciate, however, the humanity of Socrates, the calm judgement of Plutarch and, despite his verbosity and vanity, the wisdom of Cicero, who attached a real and solid importance to the body

Greek.) The wider background to much of Montaigne’s moral thought is provided by Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics. For Montaigne – an outstanding pupil of the School of Athens – Aristotle and the Peripatetics were the Ancients who were most concerned with civility. Plato, though admired, sought to rise too high and was anyway outstripped by his master, Socrates, who was content to ‘re-form’ his soul and to remain a man. Yet no man, no author, not even the greatest, ever provides the last word on anything. Men are ‘vain authorities who can resolve nothing’

Montaigne’s natural and acquired scepticism were both greatly increased by the vast new horizons of the Renaissance, which had opened up the riches of Ancient thought and more modern science, at the same time as the discovery of more and more new peoples and new lands put established ‘certainties’ to the test. Montaigne came to understand the ‘barbarity’ of the Incas: he found it preferable to the cruelty and compromises of the Europe of his own times.

The year that Montaigne began to write, 1572, is that of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day and of the beginning of the Fourth Civil War in France. 1580, the year of the original edition of the Essays, is the year of the Seventh Civil War, in southern France. 1588, the year of what seemed at first to be the definitive edition of the Essays, saw the Guises entering Paris; King Henry III fleeing; the invincible Armada blown to perdition by what Protestant Europe saw as the breath of God; and the murder of Henri de Guise and of his brother the Cardinal at the instigation of their King. When Montaigne died in 1592 civil war was still raging, with peasants having recently revolted in Brittany while the English supported Henri Quatre in Normandy. Those events eroded not only political and ecclesiastical systems; they eroded the very basis of law and morality. But ‘suffering is good for poets’, and momentous events form a rich backcloth for a man like Montaigne, who can be seen not merely talking as a philosopher but acting as one. He is sometimes presented as a bookworm: in fact he was anything but that. He tells us that he rarely spent more than an hour at a time with a book; but there are many hours in a lifetime and many an hour for reflections upon one hour’s reading.

When he was in Rome a friendly and powerful cleric, the Maestro di Palazzo of the Vatican, read the Essays and suggested changes, leaving Montaigne to do what he thought right. Some changes Montaigne made; in other cases he strengthened his argument, or made his position clearer. But when ‘the magistrate’ overstepped the mark, rebuking him for having judged that Beza (the successor to Calvin) was an excellent Latin poet, Montaigne stood his ground. He opposed the New Religion, just as he opposed innovation within the State, but he did so without hatred and anger:

But he won even greater respect for the guidance which he gave to men and women in search of a sound, wise and moral way to live. As Marc Fumaroli of the Collège de France has so cogently argued, there was a widespread desire in Roman Catholic circles in France – and, one could add, in Anglican circles in England – for a liberal spirituality, free from the constraints of the traditional clerical models and adapted to the circumstances of the independent lives of the laity. Montaigne began with his own self during a period of personal strain and peril: he ended up confidently seeking how men should (by the canons of natural reason and natural wisdom) live well and die well. His Essays show us not only what he thought but how he reached his poise and contentment, despite the plague, despite the suicidal pains of the stone, despite the collapse of the State and despite the din of conflicting opinions and the marauding bands around him.

In 1588 he republished his first two Books, making numerous modifications, and added a third one. But he was never satisfied: his Essays are not a static work but a process. No sooner had he published those three Books than he set about changing a little and adding much. Death overtook him before he could send his final text to the printer, but it was virtually ready for publication.

The last pages of the last chapter, On Experience, represent the sum of his wisdom and the end of his long quest. Those last pages were intended to be read last: they correct, resume, modify or emphasize such glimpses of wisdom as Montaigne had discovered. They tell us how he – and we – can enjoy living richly as human beings into a serene and grateful old age.

The first sentence of that final chapter echoes the first sentence of one of the most famous of all books. (That sentence was known by heart by schoolboys, let alone by dons and dominies; it comes from Aristotle’s Metaphysics.) [B] No desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge. For Aristotle that truth pointed the way to the mastering of all those arts which are based not on high reason but on lowly experience. Experience (which included experimentation) underlies medicine and common law, which are the ‘arts’ par excellence. Montaigne however is not convinced that experience, without sound judgement, is any better than wayward reason: [B] Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to resort to: experience has no fewer. The opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics had long been used to prove the existence of an afterlife. Mankind has been given by Nature a desire to know. In this life that desire is never satisfied. Since Nature does nothing without a cause, there must be a life after this one in which that desire can indeed be satisfied. By implication Montaigne accepts that argument: he soon reaches the conclusion that ‘there is no end to our inquiries: our end is in the next world’.

From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure from an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.

Within that general rule Montaigne found that each person was wise to live, as far as proper and as far as possible, secundum se (in accordance with his own inborn characteristics). He might, if he follows Socrates, strive to re-form his soul: what he will not do is to strive, unaided, to live like an angel. If he does, he will sink to the level of the beast.

Montaigne set out to discover himself. He did more than that: he discovered what makes the human race fully human.

I have tried to convey Montaigne’s sense and something of his style, without archaisms but without forcing him into an unsuitable, demotic English. I have not found that his meaning is more loyally conveyed by clinging in English to the grammar and constructions of his French: French and English achieve their literary effect by different means. On the other hand I have tried to translate his puns: they clearly mattered to him, and it was fun doing so. Montaigne’s sentences are often very long; where the sense does not suffer I have left many of them as they are. It helps to retain something of his savour.

translation.’ In Montaigne’s French this difficulty is even greater since his sense of gender enables him to flit in and out of various degrees of personification in ways not open to writers of English. Where the personification is certain or a vital though implied element of the meaning I have sometimes used a capital letter and personal pronouns, etc., to produce a similar effect.

1568 Death of Montaigne’s father, Pierre. Montaigne becomes Seigneur de Montaigne and inherits the domain. (Difficulties with his mother over the inheritance.) 1569 Montaigne publishes his French translation of the Theologia Naturalis of Raymond Sebond (Raymundus de Sabunde), with the printer G. Chaudière of Paris. 1570 Montaigne sells his counsellorship of the Parlement de Bordeaux. Goes to Paris to publish works left by Etienne de la Boëtie (Latin, then French). Birth of his first daughter, Toinette, who dies three months later. 1571 Montaigne returns to his estates, to consecrate his life to the Muses: to scholarship, philosophy and reflection. He receives the Ordre de Saint-Michel and is named Gentleman of the Chamber by Charles IX. Birth of Léonor (the only one of his six daughters to live). 1572 24 August: massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day. Uprisings at La Rochelle (a stronghold of the Reformed Church). Publication of the French translation of the Moral Works of Plutarch by Bishop Amyot. It joins other authors studied by Montaigne in the tower of his château.

[A] You have here, Reader, a book whose faith can be trusted, a book which warns you from the start that I have set myself no other end but a private family one. I have not been concerned to serve you nor my reputation: my powers are inadequate for such a design. I have dedicated this book to the private benefit of my friends and kinsmen so that, having lost me (as they must do soon) they can find here again some traits of my character and of my humours. They will thus keep their knowledge of me more full, more alive. If my design had been to seek the favour of the world I would have decked myself out [C] better and presented myself in a studied gait.fn1 [A] Here I want to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday fashion, without [C] strivingfn2 [A] or artifice: for it is my own self that I am painting. Here, drawn from life, you will read of my defects and my native form so far as respect for social convention allows: for had I found myself among those peoples who are said still to live under the sweet liberty of Nature’s primal laws, I can assure you that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole, and wholly naked. And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.

The Emperor Conrad III had besieged Guelph, Duke of Bavaria; no matter how base and cowardly were the satisfactions offered him, the most generous condition he would vouchsafe was to allow the noblewomen who had been besieged with the Duke to come out honourably on foot, together with whatever they could carry on their persons. They, with greatness of heart, decided to carry out on their shoulders their husbands, their children and the Duke himself. The Emperor took such great pleasure at seeing the nobility of their minds that he wept for joy and quenched all the bitterness of that mortal deadly hatred he had harboured against the Duke; from then on he treated him and his family kindly.

respect. Yet for the Stoics pity is a vicious emotion: they want us to succour the afflicted but not to give way and commiserate with them.

And, directly against my first examples, Alexander, the staunchest of men and the most generous towards the vanquished, stormed, after great hardship, the town of Gaza and came across Betis who commanded it; of his valour during the siege he had witnessed staggering proofs; now Betis was alone, deserted by his own men, his weapons shattered; all covered with blood and wounds, he was still fighting in the midst of several Macedonians who were slashing at him on every side. Alexander was irritated by so dearly won a victory (among other losses he had received two fresh wounds in his own body); he said to him: ‘You shall not die as you want to, Betis! Take note that you will have to suffer every kind of torture which can be thought up against a prisoner!’ To these menaces Betis (not only looking assured but contemptuous and proud) replied not a word. Then Alexander, seeing his haughty and stubborn silence, said: ‘Has he bent his knee? Has he let a word of entreaty slip out? Truly I will overcome that refusal of yours to utter a sound: if I cannot wrench a word from you I will at least wrench a groan.’ And as his anger turned to fury he ordered his heels to be piercedfn5 and, dragging him alive behind a cart, had him lacerated and dismembered. Was it because [C] bravery was so usual for himfn6 that [B] he was never struck with wonder by it and therefore respected it less? [C] Or was it because he thought bravery to be so properly his own that he could not bear to see it at such a height in anyone else without anger arising from an emotion of envy; or did the natural violence of his anger allow of no opposition?

Just as fallow lands, when rich and fertile, are seen to abound in hundreds and thousands of different kinds of useless weeds so that, if we would make them do their duty, we must subdue them and keep them busy with seeds specifically sown for our service; and just as women left alone may sometimes be seen to produce shapeless lumps of flesh but need to be kept busy by a semen other than her own in order to produce good natural offspring: so too with our minds.fn1 If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts:

When the soul is without a definite aim she gets lost; for, as they say, if you are everywhere you are nowhere. [B] Quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat. [Whoever dwells everywhere, Maximus, dwells nowhere at all.]fn4

[Idleness always produces fickle changes of mind]

it bolted off like a runaway horse, taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else; it gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness, that, so as to contemplate at my ease their oddness and their strangeness, I began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.fn6

I once heard a prince, a very great general, maintain that a soldier should not be condemned to death for cowardice: he was at table, being told about the trial of the Seigneur de Vervins who was sentenced to death for surrendering Boulogne.

Where cowardice is concerned the usual way is, certainly, to punish it by disgrace and ignominy. It is said that this rule was first introduced by Charondas the lawgiver, and that before his time the laws of Greece condemned to death those who had fled from battle, whereas he ordered that they be made merely to sit for three days in the market-place dressed as women:fn2 he hoped he could still make use of them once he had restored their courage by this disgrace – [C] ‘Suffundere malis hominis sanguinem quam effundere.’ [Make the blood of a bad man blush not gush.]fn3