Michel de Montainge

Michel de Montaigne 

Michel de Montaigne is an old friend of mine. 

We were introduced back in 1960. My aunt Kay and her husband Henry had invited my brother and me to spend a fortnight with them on Scotland's 'Outer Isles'. We walked a lot during the day, enjoying the peaty hinterland of Lewis and the sandy 'machair' sward and the 'crottle'-covered, rocky, hills of Harris. After evening dinner, Henry amused himself with 'Les Essais de Montaigne'  in their archaic French of 1588. ***  I was thrilled to note how easy and succinct I found the old French.

Henry told us of this distinguished gentleman, active in the politics of Bordeaux, removing to his ancestral village and castle de Montaigne when the plague came to the city; troubled in later life from kidney stones, touring Europe from Spa to Spa searching for a cure. (Here Henry digressed to give his own opinion that drinking pure water was the best cure, and he described the terrible operation by which Samuel Pepys was successfully 'cut of the stone' in 1658.) He was called back from Italy when elected, in his absence, to be Mayor of Bordeaux, at the age of 48.

Montaigne, as a young boy, was brought up speaking Latin as first language. By strict order of his father, the servants and also his mother had to speak only Latin when around the boy. 

As a young man he enjoyed a deep comradeship with a brilliant poet and politician some four years his senior, with whom he delighted to converse. However, Boétie died (perhaps of the plague) at the age of 32 leaving Montaigne bereft. It is suggested that the honest, intimate, discursive, introspective as well as curious, wandering and learned writing of these essays evolved as a replacement for his conversations with Boétie. 

Inclined to solitude...

"In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments,........." [he retired to his tower with his books and his pen.]

The mature man showed fairness, inquisitiveness, great learning of the Latin and Greek writers who had come his way, and that rare ability called 'common sense'.  He was liked and trusted by both of the warring religious factions. He talked to seamen about Brazil, and to farmers about crops, 

But when I step back and consider Montaigne as a man and an intellect, I realise that there are also: Voltaire, Rousseau, Euler, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, JS Mill, John Keats, Walter Scott, not to mention Shakespeare. I suppose I would like to think I resemble Montaigne. Other heros (friends, companions) will appeal to other readers.

(*** Footnote. C.f. I'ay veu plusieurs de mon temps conuaincus par leur conscience retenir  . .X . . .(1588); with J'ai vu, de mon temps, nombre de gens, auxquels leur conscience reprochant de s'être approprié  . .X . . . (1907). I was thrilled to note how easy and succinct I found the old French, as long as you realise that v and u are inter-changeable, as also i and j.)