There is a select group of writers who are accessible to anyone, at whatever age or stage of life—Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy—and then there are those whose significance is not properly revealed until a particular moment. Montaigne is one of these. In order to recognize his true worth, you should not be too young, too deprived of experience and life’s deceptions, and it is precisely a generation like ours, cast by fate into the cataract of the world’s turmoil, to whom the freedom and consistency of his thought conveys the most precious aid. Only he whose soul is in turmoil, forced to live in an epoch where war, violence and ideological tyranny threaten the life of every individual, and the most precious substance in that life, the freedom of the soul, can know how much courage, sincerity and resolve are required to remain faithful to his inner self in these times of the herd’s rampancy. Only he knows that no task on earth is more burdensome and difficult than to maintain one’s intellectual and moral independence and preserve it unsullied through a mass cataclysm. Only once he has endured the necessary doubt and despair within himself can the individual play an exemplary role in standing firm amidst the world’s pandemonium.
What meaning could his gentle and insistent call for temperance, for tolerance, have on a hot-headed youth who did not want to be dispirited, who did not care for his calming message, who, without even being aware, only aspired to be inflamed by the vital effusion of youthful enthusiasm? It is the business of youth to recoil from the counsel of gentleness, of scepticism. Doubt becomes an obstacle, for a youth has need of faith and ideals to give free rein to the impetuosity borne within. And even the most radical, the most absurd illusions, as long as they inflame, would in his eyes have more importance than the most profound wisdom, which saps the strength of his will.
Surely, for so long now, all that had been taken for granted—had been humanity’s rightful possession, freed from all tyranny and servitude, sealed by law and custom? It seemed obvious that the right to have our own lives, our own thoughts, to express them freely through the spoken and written word, belonged to us as much as the breath that left our mouths or the beating of our hearts. The world unfurled before us with its numberless countries; we were neither prisoners of the state, nor yoked to the service of war, nor arbitrarily submitted to tyrannical ideologies. It seemed to our generation that Montaigne was simply rattling chains we thought long since broken, and we could never imagine that in fact Fate had reforged them for us, far stronger and crueller than ever before. So then, we honoured, we respected his struggle for spiritual freedom like a historic battle, which seemed to us now superfluous and futile. For one of life’s mysterious laws shows that we only notice the authentic and essential values when it’s too late: youth, once it has fled, health at the moment it abandons us, freedom of the soul, that most precious essence, at the very moment when it is taken from us, or has already been taken.
It is crucial then that we strive to understand the art of living, the wise way of living according to Montaigne, and to realize that this struggle leads to the discovery of “soi-même”, the most crucial struggle of the spirit, exemplified by his own life. We too need to stand the test, to endure one of the most horrifying collapses of humanity, which follows directly one of its most magnificent periods of advancement. We too are to be torn from our hopes, from our experiences, our expectations and our enthusiasms, chased out from them as if under the whip, until we have only our naked selves left to defend, that unique being which is irreplaceable. It was only when destiny made us brothers that Montaigne granted me his aid, his consolation, his irreplaceable friendship; how indeed does his fate seem so very similar to our own! When Michel de Montaigne made his entry into the world, a great hope was beginning to die, the same hope that we experienced at the opening of our century: that of a more humanistic world. In the space of a single generation, the Renaissance had lavished on humanity a gift that enabled its artists, painters, thinkers, its seers and poets to reach a level of perfection none had anticipated. A century—no, centuries were opening up where creative power, step by step, wave on wave, was carrying dark and chaotic existence towards the threshold of the divine. All at once the world had become vaster, richer. With Greek and Latin, the scholars rediscovered antiquity and gave back to mankind the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle. Under the guidance of Erasmus, humanism promised a unified and cosmopolitan culture; the Reformation seemed, alongside the new scope of knowledge, to have founded a new religious freedom. Distances, borders between peoples were beginning to dissolve, for printing, which had just been invented, gave to each word, to each thought, the means to soar, to spread; that which had once been the reserve of a single people seemed now open to all; a spirit of unity was emerging beyond the bloody quarrels of kings, princes and armies.
Nothing is assured any more on this earth: this fundamental feeling is inescapably reflected through the spiritual intuition of Montaigne. One must seek another certitude beyond the world, beyond the homeland; one must refuse to join the chorus of the demoniacal and create one’s own homeland, one’s own world, outside the present time.
In such epochs where the highest values of life—our peace, our independence, our basic rights, all that makes our existence more pure, more beautiful, all that justifies it—are sacrificed to the demon inhabiting a dozen fanatics and ideologues, all the problems of the man who fears for his humanity come down to the same question: how to remain free? How to preserve the incorruptible lucidity of my spirit faced with all the threats and dangers of sectarian turmoil? How to keep humanity intact in the throes of bestiality? How to escape the tyrannical demands that the state and Church seek to impose on me? How to protect that unique part of my soul against enforced submission to rules and measures dictated from outside? How to safeguard the deepest region of my spirit and its matter which belongs to me alone, my body, my health, my thoughts, my feelings, from the danger of being sacrificed to the deranged prejudices of others, to serve interests which are not my own?
It is to this question and this question alone that Montaigne dedicated his life and his strength. It is for this love of liberty that he observes himself, watches over, experiences and criticizes every movement and every sensation. And this quest, which he undertakes to safeguard his soul, his liberty, at a moment of universal servility before ideologies and parties, makes him today a brother to us, more intimate than any other artist. If we love and honour him today more than any other, it is because he devoted himself more than any other to the most sublime art of living: “rester soi-même”.
This struggle that led Montaigne to safeguard his interior freedom, a struggle that in his case was surely more conscious and more determined than that of any other human being, had nothing heroic or sententious about it. It would be an injustice to include Montaigne with that group of poets and thinkers who, armed only with the word, fought for the “liberté de l’homme”. He has nothing of the forceful tirades or lofty outbursts of a Schiller or a Byron, nothing of the pugnacity of a Voltaire. He may have permitted himself a rueful smile at the idea of wanting to impose something as deeply personal as inner freedom on individuals, let alone on the masses, and he profoundly detested professional reformers, theoreticians and peddlers of ideology. He knew only too well the colossal task represented by this simple idea: to safeguard one’s independence at the core of oneself. His fight limits itself to the defensive, to defend this most intimate bastion, which Goethe named the “citadel”, where entry is forbidden to all other men. His tactic was to be as inconspicuous as possible, to attract the minimum of attention through outward appearance, to travel the world as if wearing a mask, to seek out only the path that would lead to himself.
Thus, Montaigne does not provide what one might term a biography. He never offended anyone, because he never pushed himself forward, never sought an audience or endorsement. Seen from the outside, he appeared to be a model citizen, a functionary, a married man, a Catholic, a man who discreetly paid his dues to the world. For his entourage, he assumed the mask of self-effacement so as to bloom inside himself, wondering at the nuances, the play of different colours over his soul. He was at every moment disposed to lend, never to give. Always, whatever his mode of living, he kept for himself alone the most authentic and most subtle element of his being. He left the rest to prattle on, to move with the herd, to get borne aloft, to preach and parade; he left the world to follow its chaotic crazed paths and only concerned himself with one thing: to be rational within himself, to remain human in an inhuman time, to remain free in the vortex of pandemonium. He let them have their say, those who mockingly accused him of indifference, indecision and cowardice; he let others relish their surprise at seeing him relinquish his duties and honours. His nearest and dearest, who knew him best, never doubted the perseverance, the clearsightedness and the subtlety with which, in the shadow of public affairs, he applied himself to the sole aim to which he was committed: to live his own life, and not simply to live.
Why let yourself be so torn and traumatized by the inanity and depravity of the epoch in which you are obliged to live? All of that can only graze your skin; it cannot reach the interior self. The outside world can take nothing from you and cannot unhinge you, as long as you do not allow yourself to be disturbed. The events of your time remain impotent before you, as long as you refuse to take part in them, and the madness of the epoch does not constitute a real danger, as long as you conserve in yourself a purity of spirit. And even the most dispiriting of your affairs, the seeming humiliations, the blows of fate: you only feel them if you show weakness before them, for who, other than you, assigns to things value and weight, joy and pain? Nothing can lower or raise your self from outside; that which remains inwardly free and sincere easily defeats the strongest pressure from the exterior. Always, and more so when the peace of the soul and the liberty of the individual are threatened, the word and the wise encouragement of Montaigne are a godsend, for nothing protects us more than sincerity and humanity in times of confusion and disunity. At any given moment, what he uttered centuries ago remains valuable and true for those who strive for independence. More than ever, we owe our knowledge to the ones who reinforce in us the sense of being human in an inhuman epoch like ours, those who exhort us not to abandon what is ours by right, what we cannot imagine losing, our deepest selves. Only the man who remains free from all and everything augments and sustains freedom on this earth.
From the very start, the ambitious Pierre Eyquem decided that his son would not be an indolent gentleman idling away his time in the frivolous pursuits of dice, wine and hunting, nor would he be a merchant or money-grubber. Rather he must be solely concerned with the highest spheres, must be of that minority who, through their sagacity and their culture, direct the destiny of their epoch through the counsel of kings and influence events by their word, those whose homeland is not the narrow provinces, but the vast horizons of the world. But, in the century of humanism, the key to this spiritual empire was Latin, and so Montaigne’s father decided to place this magic instrument in the hand of his son at the earliest opportunity. In the secluded chateau of Périgord, then, the most curious spectacle occurs, not without a certain air of comedy. At considerable cost, the father hires a German scholar, chosen deliberately since he knows not a word of French, plus two no less scholarly assistants, who are forbidden to address the child in any language bar Latin. The words and phrases that the four-year-old learns are in Latin and, to ensure that he does not absorb French, his mother tongue, at the same time, and so as to retain the purity and perfection of the Latin, they draw an invisible ring around little Michel. When the father, the mother or the servants want to say something to the child, they must first acquire for themselves a few snatches of Latin from the masters. And in the chateau of Montaigne, a truly comic situation emerges: due to a pedagogic experiment, an entire household, relatives and staff, are obliged to learn Latin for the benefit of an infant four years old!
But this method, which meant teaching Latin to his son without a book, without serious effort and in a sense by way of a game, is only one of the manifestations of the paternal will, carefully deliberated, to educate the child with the minimum of suffering. In contrast to the brutal schooling favoured at the time, where strict principles are hammered home under the blows of the cane, here the child was to develop according to his own inward predilections. The humanist advisors expressly stated to this concerned father the need, as Montaigne later writes, “to allow me to savour science and duty through free will and my own desire; to raise my soul in gentleness and liberty, without rigidity and any unnatural constriction”.
Certain traces of this upbringing, the best and the worst, remained visible in Montaigne for the rest of his life. It was evident in the stubborn refusal to submit to any authority, to bend before any discipline, which ultimately caused a certain atrophy of the will. This peculiar childhood gave Montaigne, for all the years to come, the unfortunate habit of evading as much as possible any overly insistent or powerful tension, all that was problematic, routine or an obligation, and of always giving in to his own desire, to his own caprice. This “mercurialness”, this “insouciance” which he laments so often, perhaps have their origin in these formative years, but so too does his obstinate will to remain unfettered, never to be the slave of one opinion or another. It is due to the generous solicitude of his father that later he is able to cry proudly: “I have a completely self-contained soul, accustomed to directing itself in its own way.” He who as a blameless child has known the exquisite delight and benefits of freedom will never forget these things and will never lose them.
France must become Huguenot or Catholic. The coming years impose huge responsibilities around the fate of his homeland, and Montaigne is the sworn enemy of all responsibility. He strives to dodge decisions. Solitary sage in a time of mass fanaticism, he seeks seclusion and flight. In his thirty-eighth year, Montaigne enters retirement. He no longer wishes to serve anyone but himself. He is weary of politics, of public life and business affairs. It is a moment of disillusion. In his social prestige, in his position in life, he is inferior to his father. He has been a worse civil servant, a worse husband, a worse custodian. What exactly is he then? He has the sense that up to this moment his life has been a sham; he yearns to live properly, to reflect deeply and ruminate. And it is among his books he hopes to find the solution to the eternal problem of “life and death”.
Montaigne has not waived public service, for day after day the petty concerns common to any head of a family trickle in. He wants to give the emperor what is the emperor’s right, but not a drop more. He wants to read, to think, to savour life; he does not want to be occupied with others, on the contrary, he wants to be occupied solely with himself. What Montaigne seeks is his interior self, that which cannot submit to state, to family, to time, to circumstances, to money, to property; this interior self, which Goethe labelled the “citadel”, where all access is prohibited. The path leading from public duty and into his house was only the first withdrawal; now he distances himself from family, demands of the estate, business affairs, in order to retire for good to his citadel.
This citadel, which for Goethe was only symbolic, Montaigne erects with real stones, a lock and a key. Today, it is difficult to imagine how the chateau of Montaigne must have once appeared, for it has experienced any number of reconstructions, and in 1882 a fire swept through the building, totally gutting it, with the happy exception of the “citadel”, the famous tower of Montaigne. When Michel de Montaigne takes possession of his house, he discovers a high tower, round and sturdy, which it seems his father had intended for defensive measures. On the ground floor is a tiny chapel, where a partly worn-away fresco shows St Michael vanquishing the dragon. A narrow spiral stairway leads to a round first-floor room and, because it is secluded, Montaigne chooses it as his sleeping quarters. But it is the next floor, until then “the most unavailing in my house”, a storeroom of sorts, which becomes for him the most important. Here he creates a chamber for reflection. From here he can easily survey his chateau and fields. When the mood takes him he can observe what is going on and keep an eye on things. But no one can watch over him, no one can disturb his solitude. The room is large enough for him to walk up and down and from side to side, for Montaigne is only able to think properly when his body is in motion. Here he installs the library he has inherited from La Boétie, alongside his own. On the beams of the ceiling, he paints fifty-four Latin maxims, so that wherever his glance falls, it finds a sagacious and soothing word. Only the final one is in French, the famous “Que-sais je?”
The great lesson Montaigne receives from books is that reading, in its rich diversity, sharpens his faculty of judgement. It impels him to respond, to lend his own counsel. And this is why Montaigne tends to annotate his books, underlining passages and writing at the end the date on which he read them, or the impression that they made on him in that moment. This is not the art of the critic, nor even the art of the writer, it is merely a dialogue with pencil in hand; at the beginning he is far from any desire to set down anything coherent himself. But little by little the solitude of his room begins to act on him; the silent voices of the books demand a response ever more urgently, and, in order to master the run of his thoughts, he writes them down. This is how his casual reading morphs into an activity proper. He did not willingly seek it out—it found him.
Thoughts track across his mind; he notes them without a sense of obligation, for the lord of the manor never dreams of committing these little efforts—essays—to print:
When my thoughts are like patterns cut from cloth, sewn together without plan or strategy—I find myself obliged neither to take responsibility for them nor to keep to them. I can drop them if it suits me; I can return to my doubts and insecurity, and to my overriding form of thought: ignorance.
He does not exude the exactitude of the scholar, the originality of the writer, the sublime diction of the poet. He has nothing of the presumption of professional philosophers, of holding thoughts above all others. Furthermore, he has no scruples about adding here and there a phrase, which he has just picked up, from Cicero or Seneca: “For I must say through others what I cannot articulate so well, as much due to the feebleness of my language as that of my sense. I don’t count my borrowings—I weigh them.” Intentionally, he omits the names of authors. But he admits it all willingly, for he is happy when he is stealing something, changing it, disguising it, turning it into something meaningful and new. He sees himself only as a “réfléchisseur”, not a writer, and he does not take too seriously what he scribbles down: “My aim is this, to pass the remainder of my life in an easeful state and not under the burden of labour, there is nothing I would break my head against in the name of scholarship.”
Montaigne complains unwearyingly of his bad memory. He regards this—together with a certain idleness—as the real Achilles heel of his being. His faculty for perception, his discernment, is exceptional. What he sees, what he observes, what he recognizes, he does with the lightning eye of a falcon. But then he is too nonchalant, as he is ever reproaching himself, to order these discoveries in any systematic way, to expand on them in a logical sense, and, as soon as he grasps a thought, he loses it again, lets it drift away. He forgets the books he has read, has no memory for dates and misplaces the momentous events in his life. Like a river, all flows over him, leaving nothing behind: no deep conviction, no solid opinion, nothing fixed, nothing stable.
This weakness, which Montaigne endlessly bemoans, is in fact his strength. An inability to remain fixed at a certain point allows him always to go further. With him nothing is ever set in stone. He never stops at the boundary of past experiences; he does not rest on his empiricism; he amasses no capital; before properly consuming them his spirit must acquire experiences over and again. So his life becomes an operation of perpetual renewal: “Unremittingly we begin our lives anew.” The truths that he finds may in the coming months or even the coming years be truths no more. He must be forever searching. Thus is born a multitude of contradictions. Now he appears an Epicurean, now a Stoic, now a sceptic. He is at one and the same time all and nothing, always different and yet ever the same, the Montaigne of 1550, 1560, 1570, 1580, the Montaigne of yesterday.
Montaigne’s greatest pleasure is in the search, not the discovery. He is not one of those philosophers who seek the philosopher’s stone, the convenient formula. He cares not for dogma, precepts, and has a horror of definitive assertions: “Assert nothing audaciously, deny nothing frivolously.” He has no defined destination. All roads are open to his “pensée vagabonde”. He is only a philosopher in the manner of Socrates, whom he revered above all others because he left behind no dogma, no teachings, no law, no system, only an example: the man who seeks himself in all and who seeks all in himself.
In the main these are jottings, points of reference, little more; only gradually does he attempt to create a link between them and a proper structure. He toils on, with the gnawing sense that he will not bring this task to any meaningful conclusion; most of the time he writes in short bursts, and this is no doubt why his phrases harbour a spontaneous quality. But he is ever convinced that they fail to transmit truth. To write, to note down is for him only a by-product, a derivative—one is tempted to say, rather mischievously, that these writings are the sand in the urine, the pearl in the oyster. The raw material is life itself, of which there are only fragments and debris: “My métier, my art, is to live.” They are in some sense what photography is to a work of art, nothing more. The writer in him is only the shadow of the man, though so often we observe men whose art of writing is so great, but whose art of living is so modest.
Because each of the Essais is distilled from a certain mood, from a reading, a conversation, an anecdote, they seem at first glance to be juxtaposed in a simple way, and this is how Montaigne conceived them. He never attempted to order them, to unify them. But gradually he begins to realize that these Essais have something in common, a bond, a centre, a direction. It is the point from which they depart and to which they return, that unchanging point: the self. At the beginning he appears to be chasing phantoms, or his own shadow across the wall; then, gradually, he becomes conscious that he is seeking something more defined: himself, that he is reflecting on his own life in all its forms, in order to live properly—but for himself alone. What he first took for an idle caprice gradually reveals its implication. Whatever he describes really only expresses the reaction of his ego to this or that. The Essais are a single object which echoes his life: the “moi” or, better still, “mon essence”.
He discovers he has a purpose, for “the soul which has no objective in sight, is one that is lost”. He makes it his task to be wholly sincere with himself, and he notes this definition of wisdom which he finds in Pindar: “True being is the beginning of a great virtue.” Barely has he unearthed this when the activity which he has until then been indulging as simple “amusement” takes on a new seriousness. He becomes an auto-psychologist. “What do I know?” he asks himself. Only three or four men have asked this question before him. He is fearful of the task he has set himself. Right away he realizes that it is not a simple matter to say what one is. He tries to observe himself from the outside, to see himself “as might another”. He spies on himself, surveys himself, studies himself and becomes, as he later writes, “my own metaphysics, my own physics”. He never ceases looking and claims that for years nothing has escaped his gaze: “Rare is the moment that evades or conceals itself from my scrutiny.” He is no longer alone; he has a double. And he discovers that this “amusement” is interminable, that his self constantly evolves, that he travels in waves “ondulant”, that the Montaigne of today is quite different from the Montaigne of yesterday. He firmly concludes that one develops only in phases, in different states, in details.
It is true: Montaigne achieved little else in his life aside from posing the question: “How should I live?” But what is so magnificent, so philanthropic in his case, is that when he posed this question: “How should I live?” he did not insist on following it up with: “This is how you should live!” The man who had engraved on a medallion the chosen maxim “Que sais-je?” had always detested fixed assertions. He had never sought to counsel others on anything he did not know intimately himself. “This is not my doctrine; it is my study, and no one else’s lesson but my own.” If someone wants to draw advantage from this, then he has no objection. As he says, his folly and error can hardly damage anyone else. “If I make a fool of myself then it’s at my own expense and cannot prejudice others, because it is a folly that abides within me and cannot be followed.” What he sought, he sought for himself. What he found rings true for each as much as he cares to accept it, or is in a position to do so. The true essence of freedom is that it can never restrict the freedom of another.
In all the works of Montaigne, I have found only one overriding theme, one emphatic affirmation: “La plus grande chose du monde c’est de savoir être à soi.” Neither position in the world, the privilege of blood nor talent makes for the nobility of man, but solely the degree to which he strives to preserve his personality and to live his own life. That is why for Montaigne the dialogue with the self is the highest level of art to be attained: “In the freedom of the arts, let us begin with the one which makes us free.” And nobody practised it better than Montaigne. At first glance this might seem a rather impoverished aspiration, for nothing, one imagines, would be more natural for a man than to incline towards his own self, to lead a life “following his own natural disposition”. But in truth, when one properly considers it, what could be more difficult?
Connection to anything, and yet we are all connected to the state, the community, the family; our thoughts are subject to the language we speak, making the isolated man, the absolutely free man, a phantom. It is impossible to live in a void. Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.
To be free, a man must feel no obligation or connection to anything, and yet we are all connected to the state, the community, the family; our thoughts are subject to the language we speak, making the isolated man, the absolutely free man, a phantom. It is impossible to live in a void. Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.
To free oneself from all of that is inconceivable. Montaigne knew this all too well, he who during his life had fulfilled his duties to the state, to family, to society, who remained, at least on the exterior, faithful to religion and regularly submitted to the required devotions. Montaigne sought, for himself, nothing less than to find the farthest reach. We do not have to give to ourselves, we only have to “lend”. We must “conserve the freedom of our soul and not mortgage it, except on those rare occasions when we deem it the right path”. We do not need to cut ourselves off from the world, to wall ourselves up in a cell. But we need to make a distinction: we can love this or that, but we cannot “form a marriage bond” unless it is with our own selves. Montaigne does not reject everything we owe to passions or lust. On the contrary, he always advises us to take pleasure as far as is possible, for he is the earthbound man who accepts no limits: whoever has a passion for politics must involve himself with politics; whoever loves books must read books; whoever loves to hunt must hunt; whoever loves his house, his soil, his lands, his money, whoever loves things must devote himself to them entirely. But the most crucial is this: you should take as much as brings you pleasure, but not just to acquire things: “In the home, at study, hunting and all other forms of activity, one should strive for the fullness, the limits of enjoyment, but not exceed them, for then suffering begins to encroach.” One must not allow oneself to be impelled by a sense of duty, overriding passion or naked ambition, to go beyond one’s natural capacity; one should endlessly weigh the genuine value of things and not overestimate them; one should stop when the enjoyment stops. One should safeguard a clear-sighted mind, not become confined but always remain free.
The man who detaches himself from everything, who is connected to nothing, who doubts all, and exists in the void: this is how Pascal paints Montaigne. Nothing could be more erroneous: Montaigne loved life inestimably. The one and only fear that he countenanced was of death. He loved everything about life, however it came: “There is nothing useless in nature, not even uselessness itself; nothing in this universe exists without having a specific place reserved for it.” He loves ugliness, for it makes beauty more visible, vice, because it underscores virtue; he loves stupidity and crime. All is good, and God blesses the diversity. The simplest man’s utterance is significant to him, and he is more open to fools and illiterates than to the learned. He loves a soul which is “multi-storeyed, a dwelling on different levels”, which above all is welcoming and proceeds where Fate decrees; he loves “people who can gossip with their neighbour about the house, hunting, claims for litigation, but also happily engage with a carpenter or gardener”.
This then is Montaigne’s attitude in the face of life, and as with all freethinkers it comes back to tolerance. He who demands freedom of thought for himself recognizes the same right for all men, and no one respected this tenet better than Montaigne. He does not recoil in fear before the cannibals, those native Brazilians he meets in Rouen, just because they eat human beings. He states calmly and clearly that he finds that of less significance than the torment, torture and martyrdom of living men. There is no belief, no opinion that he refuses consideration, and his judgement is unclouded by prejudice: “I do not subscribe to this communal error of judging a man according to the way I perceive things.” He guards himself against violence and brute force, which, insidiously, can ravage and desensitize the soul.
Now it is time to start anew. He has breathed out, now he can breathe in again. He has rooted himself, now he can uproot himself again. A new stage of his life begins. On 22nd June 1580, at the age of forty-eight, following a decade of self imposed retreat—Montaigne had never done other than to obey his own will—he embarks on a journey which will distance him for two years from his wife, his tower, his homeland and his work, removing him from all but his own self. It is a journey without end, a journey made for the simple love of travelling, or better still for the love of the pleasure of travelling. Until then his travels had always been, in some sense, missions, on the order of the parliament, to serve the court or on personal business. These were more like brief displacements; this time it’s a real journey, whose only objective is the eternal: finding oneself. He makes no plans, he has no real idea what he will see, on the contrary: he doesn’t want to know in advance; and when people question him, he contentedly replies: “I have no idea what I am looking for abroad, but I know very well what I am fleeing.”
Montaigne travels to liberate himself, and throughout this journey he affords us a shining example of how to be free. He travels, so to speak, on instinct. As a traveller, he avoids anything that might constrain him, even a self-imposed constraint. The road will lead him where it will, the mood carry him wherever it cares to go. What he wants is to be travelling, rather than merely to travel. The Monsieur Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux does not know whether Monsieur Michel de Montaigne will be in Paris or Augsburg during the coming weeks. It is the other Montaigne, the one in Augsburg or Paris, who will decide it in absolute freedom. He is at pains to remain wholly free within himself.
His greatest joy in every place is to encounter new people: unfamiliar people and unfamiliar customs. Wherever he goes he seeks out people of all different types. With each, he tries to discover what is their “gibier”, or as we might say, “passion”. Seeking people, he is indifferent to social differences, dining at Ferrara with the duke, chatting with the Pope, then with Protestant clergymen, Zwinglians and Calvinists. His attractions are not those that we might find in the pages of a Baedeker. He scarcely mentions the Raphaels, the Michelangelos, the monuments. Instead he attends the execution of a criminal, has himself invited into the home of a Jewish family to witness the circumcision of a child, visits libraries, enters the Bagni di Lucca, invites peasants to the ball; chats away with all the lazzarones. But he eschews all the celebrated sites. For him all that is natural is to be celebrated.