How to Live (39 page)

It helped that the years of Montaigne’s mayoralty were also technically years of peace. The wars halted from 1580 to 1585, a period spanning Montaigne’s traveling years as well as his time in office. But this peace was not easy either, and, as usual, everyone was unhappy with the limited degree of tolerance extended to Protestant worship. Bordeaux was a divided city: its own Protestant minority numbered about one seventh of the population, and it was surrounded by Protestant lands, but it had a powerful Leaguist faction too. It was hard to manage the place at the best of times. These were not the best of times, though they were by no means the worst either, as Montaigne would have been quick to point out.

He shared responsibility for maintaining peace and loyalty with the king’s lieutenant-general in the area, a man named Jacques de Goyon, comte de Matignon.
An experienced diplomat, eight years older than Montaigne, Matignon may have reminded him somewhat of La Boétie. They did not become intimate friends, but they got on well. Both had a talent for dealing delicately with extremists, and they were men of principle. During the St.
Bartholomew’s massacres, Matignon had distinguished himself by being one of the few officials to protect Huguenots in his areas of responsibility, Saint-Lô and Alençon. Calm and firm, he was the right personality for the situation in Guyenne at the moment. So was Montaigne, though he lacked two crucial things: experience and enthusiasm.

Montaigne was anxious to forestall any expectation that he might be a copy of his own father, ruining his health with work. He remembered seeing Pierre worn out by business trips, “his soul cruelly agitated by this public turmoil, forgetting the sweet air of his home.”
Montaigne’s own enthusiasm for traveling declined now that, like his father, he was supposed to do it out of duty. But he could not avoid it, and he did make several trips to Paris, notably in August 1582, when he went to obtain confirmation of the privileges at last fully restored to Bordeaux following the long-ago salt-tax riots. Towards the end of his second term, he became even more peripatetic. Documents show him at Mont-de-Marsan, at Pau, at Bergerac, at Fleix, and at Nérac. He also commuted regularly between Bordeaux and his own château, where, happily, much of his work could be done. While there, he could carry on with his own projects too, and his second, corrected edition of the
Essays
came out in 1582, the year after he took office.

Even if he did not exactly treat it as a full-time job, Montaigne must have performed well in his first term, for he was reelected on August 1, 1583. He could not help feeling pride in this, for it was unusual to be voted in for two terms. “This was done in my case, and had been done only twice before.”
It did meet opposition, especially from a rival who wanted to be mayor himself: Jacques d’Escars, sieur de Merville, governor of the city’s Fort du Hâ. Montaigne did not give in to him, which suggests that he felt more commitment to the job than he had initially professed.

Perhaps he had a change of heart because he had discovered how much of an aptitude he had for political work. With Matignon, he was now responsible for keeping communication going between the officials of the king, the Leaguist rebels in Bordeaux, and the Protestant Henri of Navarre, who wielded more power than ever in the region. Increasingly, through his second term, Montaigne played the role of go-between. He built up particularly good relations with the king’s officials and with the Navarre camp. The Leaguists became more difficult, since they rejected compromise
with anyone and still seemed determined to maneuver Montaigne out of his job and take over Bordeaux themselves.

The most dramatic rebellion came from the baron de Vaillac, Leaguist governor of the city’s Château Trompette.
In April 1585, Matignon and Montaigne heard that he was planning a full-scale political coup in the city. They must have debated how to deal with the threat: whether to face up to it aggressively, or make overtures and try to win Vaillac over. It was one of those loggerhead scenes, again. In this case, they decided that bold opposition combined with a willingness to offer mercy was the best response. Presumably with the active collaboration of Montaigne, Matignon invited Vaillac and his men into the
parlement
, then had the exit blocked as soon as the conspirators were inside. Matignon offered the trapped Vaillac a choice between arrest, with a probable death sentence, or giving up his rights even to the Trompette fortress and leaving Bordeaux for good. Vaillac chose the latter. He went into exile, but from just outside the city walls he set about building up League forces as if preparing to attack. That was always the risk of showing your enemies mercy.

Several anxious days followed. On May 22, 1585, Montaigne wrote to Matignon saying that he and other officials in the city were watching the gates, knowing that men were assembled outside. Five days later he wrote that Vaillac was still in the area. Every day brought fifty urgent alarms, he said.

In the end, there was no attack. Perhaps, seeing the preparations for defense, Vaillac slunk away, proving that Montaigne and Matignon’s blend of aggression and sympathy could prevail after all. In any case, the crisis passed. Yet the build-up to war in the region continued, as it did throughout France, and the League continued to resist Montaigne’s efforts to establish a middle ground.

Many who knew Montaigne during this period admired his work. The
magistrate and historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou wrote that he had “learned many things from Michel de Montaigne, a man free in spirit and foreign to factions, who … had great and certain knowledge of our affairs, and especially of those of his own Guienne.” The politician Philippe Duplessis-Mornay praised Montaigne’s calmness and wrote of him as a person who neither stirred up trouble nor was readily stirred himself.

As generally happened when contemporaries recorded impressions of Montaigne, this fits remarkably well with his assessment of himself. He wrote that his terms in office were characterized most of the time by “order” and by “gentle and mute tranquillity”.
He had enemies, but he had good friends too. And the solution to the Vaillac crisis suggests that he was capable of decisive action when it was necessary, unless this decisiveness all came from Matignon.

Some did apparently feel that Montaigne was too lax and disengaged, for a certain defensiveness on this point comes across in the
Essays
, in which Montaigne admits that he was accused of showing “a languishing zeal.” He looked to some like a typical
politique
, a person who refused to commit himself in any direction. This was clearly true, and Montaigne owned up to it; the difference is that his opponents considered it a bad thing. For modern Stoics and Skeptics such as himself, it was not bad at all. Stoicism encouraged wise detachment, while Skeptics held themselves back on principle. Montaigne’s politics flowed from his philosophy. People complain that his terms as mayor passed without much trace, he wrote. “That’s a good one! They accuse me of inactivity in a time when almost everyone was convicted of doing too much.”
With “innovation” (that is, Protestantism) having caused such mayhem, surely it was commendable to have kept a city in a mostly uneventful state for so long. And Montaigne had long since learned that much of what passed for passionate public commitment was just showing off. People involve themselves because they want to have an air of consequence, or to advance their private interests, or simply to keep busy so that they don’t have to think about life.

One of Montaigne’s problems was that he was so honest about his choices. Other people, far less conscientious than he, were praised because they pretended to be committed and energetic. Montaigne warned his
employers that this would not happen with him: he would give Bordeaux what duty commanded, no more and no less, and there would be no playacting.

Montaigne here sounds remarkably like another great truth-teller in Renaissance literature: Cordelia, the daughter in Shakespeare’s
King Lear
who refuses to wax on insincerely about her love for her father as her greedy sisters do to win his favor.
Like her, Montaigne remains honest and thus comes across as gruff and indifferent. Cordelia might well have said of herself, as Montaigne did:

It seems a rebellious position, but Montaigne and Cordelia were not really at odds with their late Renaissance world in this. The virtues of sincerity and naturalness were much admired. Also, by emphasizing his plain-speaking, Montaigne was usefully distancing himself from the accusation constantly made against
politiques:
that they were men of masks and silver tongues who could not be trusted. At times, in the
Essays
, Montaigne can sound like the nightmare vision of a
politique
, equivocal, oversophisticated, secular, and elusive. It did him no harm to be blunt once in a while.

And, by the same kind of twist that made the lack of door locks a good security feature, Montaigne’s rough honesty proved a formidable diplomatic talent. It opened more doors than the labyrinthine deceptions of his colleagues ever could. Even when dealing with the most powerful princes in the land—perhaps especially then—he looked them straight in the face. “I frankly tell them my limits.”
His openness made other people open up as well; it drew them out, he said, like wine and love.

As to the political difficulties of being caught between sides, Montaigne typically belittled these. It is not really difficult to get on when caught
between two hostile parties, he wrote; all you have to do is to behave with a temperate affection towards both, so that neither thinks he owns you. Don’t expect too much of them, and don’t offer too much either. One could sum up Montaigne’s policy by saying that one should do a good job, but not
too
good a job. By following this rule, he kept himself out of trouble and remained fully human. He did only what was his duty; and so, unlike almost everyone else, he did do his duty.

He realized that not everyone understood his way of conducting himself.
Where his attitude really caused problems was not with his contemporaries but with posterity. Cordelia’s choice is vindicated within the play: there is no doubt about her genuine love for her father. Montaigne, on the other hand, has suffered image problems connected with his mayoralty ever since. He knew the dangers of writing too unassumingly about his actions in the
Essays:
“When all is said and done, you never speak about yourself without loss. Your self-condemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited.” Perhaps the old rule against writing about yourself had something going for it after all.

Montaigne’s circumscribed sense of where his duty lay became most apparent in June 1585, when Bordeaux suffered a heat wave rapidly followed by an outbreak of plague: a particularly destructive combination. The epidemic lasted until December, and during those few months more than 14,000 people died in the city, almost a third of its population. More people were killed than in the St. Bartholomew’s massacres across the whole country, yet, as often happens with epidemics occurring in time of war, it left little trace on historical memory. In any case, plague was common. So frequent were outbreaks in the sixteenth century that it is easy to forget how catastrophic they were, each time, for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in them.

As usual, when the first rumors of plague began in Bordeaux that year, anyone who could flee the city did so. Almost no one stayed out of choice, though a few officials remained at their posts. Most of those connected with
the
parlement
left, including four out of the six jurats. Matignon wrote to the king on June 30: “The plague is spreading so in this city that there is no one having the means to live elsewhere who has not abandoned it.”
That was still in the early stages. A month later, Matignon told Montaigne that “every one of the inhabitants has abandoned the city, I mean those who can bring some remedy to it; for as for the little people who have stayed, they are dying like flies.”

Matignon apparently did stay, but Montaigne had not been in the city to begin with. He was at home when the plague began, getting ready to travel in for a handover ceremony; his mayoralty was now over, and he was about to be succeeded by Matignon himself. The first of August 1585 was his last official date, so, when Matignon’s letter was written on July 30, Montaigne had two days to go. His only task during those two days was apparently to attend the ceremony to mark the election of Matignon. Under present conditions, however, that event would be almost entirely unattended, if it took place at all.

Montaigne now had to decide whether he should go to Bordeaux for the handover or not. His own estate was unaffected by the disease; if he went to Bordeaux now, he would be entering a plague zone purely for the sake of form. What, really, did duty require? Unsure what to do, he traveled as far as Libourne, nearer to the city but outside the danger area. From there, he wrote to the few remaining jurats in town, asking for their advice. “I will spare neither my life nor anything else,” he wrote. But he added: “I will leave you to judge whether the service I can render you by my presence at the coming election is worth my risking going into the city in view of the bad condition it is in.” Meanwhile, he would wait in the château of Feuillas, just across the river from the city. From Feuillas, he wrote again the following day, repeating his question: what did they recommend?