How to Live (43 page)

This part of the letter was conventional enough, but then Montaigne
added some tougher advice. Still speaking with formal deference, he told the new king that he should have been less indulgent recently to the soldiers in his army. He should impose his authority but, at the same time, make conquests through “clemency and magnanimity,” since these are better lures for winning people over than threats. The king must be strong, but he must also show trust in people, and be loved rather than feared.

He wrote another letter on September 2, after Henri had again asked Montaigne to travel, this time to go to see Matignon. He offered to pay Montaigne’s expenses. But, again, Montaigne waited for a leisurely six weeks before replying, then claimed to have only just received the letter. He had in fact written to Matignon three times already, proposing to visit him, he said, but Matignon had not sent an answer. Perhaps, suggested Montaigne, Matignon wished to spare him the dangers and length of the journey, considering “the length and hazard of the roads.” The hint is clear: Henri IV ought to show the same consideration. Montaigne also took umbrage at the offer of money.

This seems an astonishingly assertive way to talk to a king—but Montaigne was aging and ill (he had a fever at the time), and he had been close to the king for long enough to speak openly. In the
Essays
, he wrote: “I look upon our kings simply with a loyal and civic affection, which is neither moved nor removed by private interest … This is what makes me walk everywhere head high, face and heart open.”
His letter to Henri IV shows that he was as good as his word. Indeed, he comes across in both letters exactly as he does in the
Essays:
blunt, unimpressed by power, and determined to preserve his freedom.

Montaigne may have detected the first signs of what was to become a feature of Henri IV’s reign: the king’s tendency to make a cult of himself.
He was strong, which was what the country needed after its series of feeble and self-indulgent kings, but he was not subtle. Short speeches and quick, decisive action were his style. Instead of washing regularly and using forks to eat with, like Henri III, he was filthy, the way a real man should be, and reportedly stank like rotting meat. He had charisma. Montaigne liked the idea of a strong king, but he had no love for mystique. In the
Essays
, he wrote of Henri IV with judicious approval rather than mindless devotion; similar reservations come across in his letters.
And he won this particular battle, for he never did travel to join Henri IV.

In early 1595, too late for Montaigne to know about it, Henri IV successfully managed to start a war against an external enemy, Spain, and thus begin to drain off the energies of the civil wars, which ended at last in 1598. France started to build up a real collective identity, though still a fragile one, mostly centered on the person of Henri himself. Many were passionately loyal to him, but others hated him just as passionately. He too was eventually assassinated, stabbed to death by the fanatical Catholic François Ravaillac in 1610.

Among his contributions to history was the Edict of Nantes, proclaimed on April 13, 1598, which guaranteed freedom of conscience and some freedom of worship to both sides of the religious divide. Unlike earlier conciliatory treaties, this one succeeded, for a while. From being the land worst afflicted by religious differences, France became the first Western European country formally to recognize two different forms of Christianity. In a speech to
parlement
on February 7, 1599, Henri made it clear that the edict was not based on a weak desire to please, as previous ones had been, and should not be taken as a license to cause trouble.
“I shall nip in the bud all factions and all seditious preaching; and I shall behead all those who encourage it.”

Imposed so forcefully, with the kind of forthright confidence Montaigne would have appreciated, the Edict of Nantes endured for almost a century, until 1685, when its revocation sent a wave of Huguenot refugees to England and other places. Among these were many Montaigne readers, including Pierre Coste, the man whose samizdat edition of the
Essays
would eventually sneak back home across the Channel and promote a revolutionary new Montaigne to his troubled countrymen.

S
TRANGELY, THROUGHOUT THE
century leading up to Montaigne’s rebranding by Coste in 1724—a period in which the
Essays
had a hard time in France—the English never ceased to admire him. They were the first outside France to adopt Montaigne, and they came to consider him almost one of their own. Something in the English mentality put them instantly on the same wavelength; forever more they continued to chime harmoniously on that wavelength in apparent indifference to intellectual changes going on elsewhere.

It seems worth pausing the story of Montaigne’s “afterlife” for a moment (running alongside the main life story, and currently suspended in the mid-nineteenth century, a chapter ago) to take a quick tour through several hundred years of his fortunes on the other side of the Channel—a place to which he seems never to have thought of traveling, and where he would have been most surprised to find himself taken in as a refugee, especially since it was a Protestant country.

Religion was one of the reasons why many English readers, from the late seventeenth century on, felt so free to enjoy Montaigne. It was of no concern to English Protestants when the Church put his book on the
Index
. It even allowed them to enjoy the pleasant feeling of getting one up on Catholics and, more gratifyingly still, on the French. The latter could be portrayed as a people unable to recognize their own best writers, especially after the French Académie began imposing rigorous standards of classical elegance on all its literature. A “free and unruly” writer (as Montaigne described himself) had no place in the new French aesthetics, but the English language welcomed him like a prodigal son.
As the exuberant and anarchic home of Chaucer and Shakespeare, English seemed the right language for such an author. Lord Halifax, a dedicatee of one seventeenth-century edition, observed that to translate Montaigne “is not only a valuable acquisition to us, but a just
censure of the critical impertinence of those French scribblers who have taken pains to make little cavils and exceptions to lessen the reputation of this great man, whom nature hath made too big to confine himself to the exactness of a studied style.” And the essayist William Hazlitt managed to squeeze Montaigne, as well as Rabelais, into a piece called “On Old English Writers and Speakers.” He justified their inclusion thus: “But these we consider as in a great measure English, or as what the old French character inclined to, before it was corrupted by courts and academies of criticism.”

If they liked the
Essays’
style, English readers were even more charmed by its content. Montaigne’s preference for details over abstractions appealed to them; so did his distrust of scholars, his preference for moderation and comfort, and his desire for privacy—the “room behind the shop.” On the other hand, the English also had a taste for travel and exoticism, as did Montaigne. He could show unexpected bursts of radicalism in the very midst of quiet conservatism: so could they. Much of the time he was happier watching his cat play by the fireside—and so were the English.

Then there was his philosophy, if you could call it that. The English were not born philosophers; they did not like to speculate about being, truth, and the cosmos. When they picked up a book they wanted anecdotes, odd characters, witty sallies, and a touch of fantasy. As Virginia Woolf said
à propos
Sir Thomas Browne, one of many English authors who wrote in a Montaignean vein, “The English mind is naturally prone to take its ease and pleasure in the loosest whimsies and humors.”
This is why William Hazlitt praised Montaigne in terms guaranteed to appeal to an unphilosophical nation:

On one of the rare occasions when Montaigne referred to himself as a philosopher at all, it was to say that it happened only by chance: he was an “unpremeditated and accidental philosopher.”
He spent so many pages rambling through his thoughts that he was bound to blunder into some great classical theory here and there. The practical philosophy of how to live
interested him, but that was different. All this, on the whole, applied equally to the English.

Much of his success there, however, may have been a matter of happy chance rather than deep affinity, as befits an accidental man. The
Essays
happened to find an excellent English translator from the beginning, in a man named John Florio.
This made all the difference.

The fact that Florio should have been the first to bring out the hidden Englishman in Montaigne is all the more remarkable because he himself was a multicultural wanderer of a most un-English sensibility. He is usually described as an Italian, although his mother was English and he was born in London in 1553, so he was English more than anything else. But he had an Italian father, Michele Agnolo Florio, a language tutor and author who had come to England as a Protestant refugee many years earlier. When the Catholic Mary Tudor came to the throne, the Florio family found themselves in exile again, and drifted around Europe, which is how the young John picked up so many languages. Once more in England as an adult, he made his name by teaching French and Italian, and by publishing a series of conversational primers as well as a successful English–Italian dictionary.

He translated the
Essays
on the urging of a rich patron, the Countess of Bedford, who also supplied him with a horde of friends and collaborators to help with tracing quotations and promoting the book. Florio repaid the help with ornate dedications, in some cases so elaborate that the dedicatees could hardly have made head or tail of them. A sentence from his epistle to the Countess of Bedford reads:

This was typical of what happened when Florio was left to run on unchecked. Like Montaigne, he wrote by exuding ever more complex
thoughts as a spider exudes silk. But while Montaigne always moves forward, Florio winds back on himself and scrunches his sentences into ever tighter baroque spirals until their meaning disappears in a puff of syntax. The real magic happens when the two writers meet. Montaigne’s earthiness holds Florio’s convolutions in check, while Florio gives Montaigne an Elizabethan English quality, as well as a lot of sheer fun. Where Montaigne writes, “Our Germans, drowned in wine” (
nos Allemans, noyez dan le vin
), Florio has “our carowsing tospot German souldiers, when they are most plunged in their cups, and as drunke as Rats.”
A phrase which the modern translator Donald Frame renders calmly as “werewolves, goblins, and chimeras” emerges from Floriation as “Larves, Hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellowes, and other such Bug-beares and Chimeraes”—a piece of pure
Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

(illustration credit i16.1)

Shakespeare and Florio did know one another, and Shakespeare was among the first readers of the
Essays
translation. He may even have read parts in manuscript before it went to press; signs of Montaigne seem faintly discernible in
Hamlet
, which predates Florio’s edition. A much later play,
The Tempest
, contains one passage so close to Florio that there can be no doubt
of his having read it. Eulogizing his vision of a perfect society in the state of nature, Shakespeare’s Gonzalo says
: