9

9. On vanity

[Montaigne justifies his digressions and expresses his admiration for the ‘motley’ style of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, with its varied themes, its ‘party-coloured’ subject-matter; there is the suggestion that such a style is particularly appropriate to Man who is (in the final words) ‘the jester of the farce’. ‘On vanity’ is just such a motley, with abrupt changes of subject from vanity (in general and particular) to travel and to political morality. Although philosophy aims at ‘reforming’ a man (that is, at improving and remoulding his soul as Socrates did) it hardly ever succeeds in its aim. Montaigne’s own soul is unreformed (in that sense) and so never content. Wisdom consists in learning how to accept that fact and to welcome such palliatives as inquiry and travel.]

[B] Perhaps there is no more manifest vanity than writing so vainly about it. That which the Godhead has made so godly manifest should be meditated upon by men of intelligence anxiously and continuously.1 Anyone can see that I have set out on a road along which I shall travel without toil and without ceasing as long as the world has ink and paper. I cannot give an account of my life by my actions: Fortune has placed them too low for that; so I do so by my thoughts. Thus did a nobleman I once knew reveal his life only by the workings of his bowels: at home he paraded before you a series of seven or eight days’ chamber-pots. He thought about them, talked about them: for him any other topic stank. Here (a little more decorously) you have the droppings of an old mind, sometimes hard, sometimes squittery, but always ill-digested. And when shall I ever have done describing some commotion and revolution of my thoughts, no matter what subject they happen upon, when Diomedes wrote six thousand books on the sole subject of philology?2 What can babble produce when the stammering of an untied tongue smothered the world under such a dreadful weight of volumes? So many words about nothing but words! O Pythagoras! Why couldest thou not conjure such turbulence!3

A certain Galba in days gone by was criticized for living in idleness. He replied that everyone should have to account for his actions but not for his free time. He was deceiving himself: for justice also takes note and cognizance of those who are not employed. The Law ought to impose restraints on silly useless writers as it does on vagabonds and loafers. Then my own book and a hundred others would be banished from the hands of our people. I am not joking. Scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of an age of excess. When did we ever write so much as since the beginning of our Civil Wars? And whenever did the Romans do so as just before their collapse? Apart from the fact that to make minds more refined does not mean that a polity is made more wise, such busy idleness arises from everyone slacking over the duties of his vocation and being enticed away. Each individual one of us contributes to the corrupting of our time: some contribute treachery, other (since they are powerful) injustice, irreligion, tyranny, cupidity, cruelty: the weaker ones like me contribute silliness, vanity and idleness. When harmful things are compelling then, it seems, is the season for vain ones; in an age when so many behave wickedly it is almost praiseworthy merely to be useless. I console myself with the thought that I shall be one of the last they will have to lay hands on. While they are dealing with the more urgent cases I shall have time to improve, for to me it seems contrary to reason to punish minor offences while we are ravished by great ones. Philotimus, a doctor, recognized the symptoms of an ulcerated lung from the features and breath of a patient who brought him his finger to be dressed. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘this is no time to be worrying about fingernails!’4

While on this subject, a few years ago a great man, whom I recall with particular esteem, in the midst of our great ills, when there was no justice, law or magistrate functioning properly any more than today, went and published edicts covering some wretched reform or other of our clothing, eating and legal chicanery.5 Such things are tidbits on which we feed an ill-governed people to show that we have not entirely forgotten them. Others do the same when they issue detailed prohibitions of swear-words, dances and sports for a people sunk in detestable vices of every kind.6 It is not the time to wash and to get the dirt off once you have caught a good fever. [C] It is right only for Spartans about to rush into some extreme mortal danger to start combing and dressing their hair.7

[B] I have a worse habit myself: if one of my shoes is askew then I let my shirt and my cloak lie askew as well: I am too proud to amend my ways by halves. When my condition is bad I cling violently to my illness: I abandon myself to despair and let myself go towards catastrophe, [C] casting as they say the haft after the axe-head; [B] stubbornly, I want to get worse and think myself no longer worth curing. Either totally well or totally ill.

It is a boon for me that the forlorn State of France should correspond to the forlorn age I have reached. It is easier for me to accept that my ills should be augmented by it than that such good things as I have should be troubled by it. The words I utter when wretched are words of defiance: instead of lying low my mind bristles up. Contrary to others I find I am more prayerful in good fortune than in bad. Following Xenophon’s precept, though not his reasoning, I am more ready to make sheep’s eyes at Heaven in thanksgiving than in supplication.8 I am more anxious to improve my health when it beams upon me than to restore it when I have lost it; prosperous times serve to discipline me and instruct me, as rods and adversities do to others. [C] As though good fortune were incompatible with a good conscience, men never become moral except when fortune is bad. For me good luck9 [B] is a unique spur to measure and moderation. Entreaties win me over: menaces I despise; [C] good-will makes me bow: fear makes me unbending.

[B] Among men’s characteristics this one is common enough: to delight more in what belongs to others than to ourselves and to love variation and change:

Ipsa dies ideo nos grato perluit haustu Quod permutatis hora recurrit equis.

[Even the daylight only pleases us because the hours run by on changing steeds.]10

I have my share of that.

Those who go to the other extreme, who are happy with themselves, who esteem above all else whatever they possess and who recognize no form more beautiful than the one they behold, may not be wise as we are but they are truly happier. I do not envy them their wisdom but I do envy them their good fortune.

My avid humour for things new and unknown helps to foster in me my yearning to travel, though plenty of other circumstances contribute to it as well. I am most willing to turn aside from ruling my house. There is some pleasure in being in charge, if only of a barn, and in being obeyed in one’s household, but it is too uniform and listless a pleasure; it also necessarily involves you in many troublesome thoughts. You are distressed when your tenants suffer from famine, when your neighbours quarrel among themselves or encroach on you.

Aut verberatæ grandine vineæ, Fundusque mendax, arbore nunc aquas Culpante, nunc torrentia agros Sidera, nunc hyemes iniquas.

[Either the hail has ravaged your vineyards, or the soil deceives your hopes, or your fruit trees are lashed by the rain, or the sun scorches your fields. And there are the rigours of winter.]11

Then there is the fact that barely once in six months will God send you weather which totally satisfies your steward: if it is good for the vines it is bad for the pastures:

Aut nimiis torret fervoribus ætherius sol, Aut subiti perimunt imbres, gelidæque pruinæ, Flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant.

[Either the blazing sun shrivels your harvests or else they are ruined by sudden rainstorms or frosts, or ravaged by violent whirlwinds.]

Then there is that shoe of the man of yore: new and shapely but pinching the foot;12 no outsider ever understands how much it costs you, and how much it takes out of you, to keep up that appearance of order to be seen in your household and which perhaps is bought too dearly.

I came late to managing my estates. Those whom Nature had given birth to before me long relieved me of that burden. I had already acquired a different bent, one more in keeping with my complexion. Nevertheless, from what I have seen of it, it is an occupation more time-consuming than difficult: if a man has the ability to do other things, then he can do it easily. If I were to seeking to get rich, that way would have seemed too long; I would have served kings – a business which produces better crops than any other. Since I [C] aim only to acquire the reputation for having acquired nothing, and squandered nothing either (in conformity with the rest of my life, which is as ill-suited to doing evil as good) and [B] seek only to get by, I can do it without paying much attention.

‘If the worst comes to worst, forestall poverty by cutting down expenses.’ That is what I try to do, changing my ways before poverty compels me to. Meanwhile I have established enough gradations in my soul to allow me to do with less than I have – and I mean contentedly. [C] ‘Non æstimatione census, verum victu atque cultu, terminator pecuniæ modus.’ [Your degree of wealth is not measured against your income but against your expenditure on food and luxuries.]13 [B] My real need does not so exactly take up all my income as to leave nothing for Fortune to get her teeth into without biting me to the quick. My presence, ignorant and disdainful though it be, does give a strong shove to the business of my home-estates. I do work at it, albeit grudgingly. And you can say this for me at home: while I do burn my end of the candle on my own, the other end does not have to cut down on anything.

[C] My travels only hurt me by their expense, which is considerable and exceeds my resources. Used as I am to travel not merely with an adequate retinue but an honourable one, I have to make my journeys shorter and less frequent, spending only the froth of my savings, putting things off and spinning them out as the money comes in. I have no wish that the pleasure of roaming should mar the pleasure of repose; on the contrary, I intend that each should nourish and encourage the other. Fortune has helped me in that; my chief aim in life being to live it lazily and leisurely rather than busily, she has taken from me the need to proliferate in wealth to provide for a proliferation of heirs. For a single heir, if what has been plenty enough for me is not enough for him, that is just too bad. His foolishness would not justify my wishing him more.14 Following the example of Phocion, every man provides enough for his children insofar as he provides for characters not dissimilar to his.15 I would in no wise favour what Crates did: he left his money with a banker to give to his children if they turned out to be fools, but to share between the simpletons among the people if they turned out to be clever. As if fools are better able to use money because they are less able to do without it!

[B] Anyhow such harm as may be done by my absence does not seem to me to merit my refusing to accept, while I can afford it, such occasions as come along to withdraw my irksome presence. Something is always going awry there. You are always tugged at by business concerning this house or that. You survey everything at too close quarters: there your sharp-sightedness is harmful to you, as often enough elsewhere. I shun all occasions for annoyance and keep myself from learning about things going wrong, yet not so successfully as to avoid stumbling at home upon things which displease me. [C] And the mean tricks they hide from me are the ones I know best: you have to help to conceal some of them yourself so that they hurt you the less! [B] Vain little jabs – [C] well, vain sometimes – [B] but jabs all the same.16 It is the smallest, finest cuts which are the most piercing; just as the smallest print tires and hurts your eyes so do the smallest concerns stab you most. [C] A multitude of petty ills beset you more than the violence of a single one, no matter how big. [B] The finer and more frequent those domestic thorns the more sharply and unexpectedly they bite into us, easily taking us by surprise.17

[C] I am no philosopher: ills crush me in proportion to their weight, and they weigh as much by their manner as their matter, often more I know them better than ordinary people do and so bear them better; but in the end, though they do not wound me they do strike me. Life is a delicate thing, easy to disturb. ‘Nemo enim resistit sibi cum coeperit impelli’ [No one can stop himself once he yields to the first impulse]:18 [B] once my face is turned towards chagrin, no matter how silly the cause which brought me to be so, I goad my humour in that direction. Thereafter it nourishes itself, provoking itself under its own impetus, drawing to itself and piling up matter upon matter on which to feed:

Stillicidi casus lapidem cavat. [Water dripping drop by drop makes fissures in a stone.]

Those everyday fissures eat into me. [C] Everyday irritations are never slight. They are constant and irremediable, particularly when they arise from the cares of your estates, which are constant and unavoidable.

[B] When I consider my affairs overall and from a distance I find (perhaps because my memory of them is hardly a detailed one) that they have, up to the present, gone on prospering beyond my projections or calculations; I seem to be getting more out than is there: their happy state misleads me. But once I am involved in the job and watching the progress of all the details–

Turn vero in curas animum diducimur omnes [Our souls torn asunder by all our cares]

– thousands of things cause me to hope or to fear. It is exceptionally easy for me to abandon them completely: dealing with them without anguish is exceptionally hard. It is wretched to be in a place where everything you see makes work for you and concerns you. I believe I am more happy when enjoying the pleasures of someone’s else’s house, and that I bring a more innocent taste to them. [C] When asked what kind of wine he thought best, Diogenes replied, ‘Someone else’s’.19 I agree with that.

[B] My father loved building at Montaigne, where he was born. In all my government of my domestic affairs I like to follow his precept and example, and as far as I can I will impose that duty on my successors. If I could do better for him I would. I glory in the fact that his wishes are still effective and implemented by me. God forbid that I should allow to fail in my hands any ghost of life which I could give to so good a father. The fact that I have bothered to complete some old section of wall and repair some botched bit of building has certainly been more out of regard for his intention than my contentment. [C] And I reproach my own laziness for not having gone on to complete the fine things he started in this house of his, the more so since I am most likely to be the last of my stock to own it and to give it a final touch. [B] As for my own inclinations, neither the pleasures of building (which are supposed to be so attractive) nor of hunting nor of laying out gardens, nor the other pleasure of life in the country, can keep me much occupied. I think ill of myself for this, as I do for all opinions which are disadvantageous to me. I do not so much care about having vigorous and informed opinions as having easy ones, convenient to live with; [C] they are true and sound enough if they are useful and pleasant.

[B] Those who, when they hear me tell of my inadequacies for the tasks of managing my estates, proceed to yell in my ears that it is due to disdain and that I cannot be bothered to learn the names of the tools used in husbandry, nor about its seasons and succession of tasks, nor how my wines are made, how grafting is done, the names of plants and fruits and the ways of preparing them for the table, [C] nor the names and quality of the cloth I wear, [B] because my mind is full of some higher knowledge, do me mortal wrong. That would be silly, more stupid than glorious. I would20 rather be a good equerry than a good logician:

Quin tu aliquid saltern potius Quorum indiget usus, Viminibus mollique paras detexere junco?

[Why do you not do something useful, like making baskets of wickerwork or pliant reeds?]21

[C] We confuse our thoughts with generalities, universal causes and processes which proceed quite well without us, and leave behind our own concerns for Michel,22 which touch us even more intimately than Man.

[B] Now usually I do remain at home; but I could wish that I were happier there than elsewhere.

Sit meœ sedes utinam senectœ, Sit modus lasso maris, et viarum, Militiœque.

[May it be my final haven when I am weary of the sea, of roaming and of war.]23

I do not know whether I shall manage to struggle through. I wish that, in lieu of some other part of his inheritance, my father had bequeathed me that passionate love for the running of his estates which he had in his old age. He was most successful in limiting his desires to his means and in knowing how to be content with what he had. If only I can acquire the taste for it as he did, then political philosophy can, if it will, condemn me for the lowliness and barrenness of my occupation. I do believe that the most [C] honourable [B] vocation24 is to serve the commonwealth and to be useful to many. [C] ‘Fructus enim ingenii et virtutis omnisque prœstantiœ tum maximus accipitur, cum in proximum quemque confertur.’ [The fruits of intellect and virtue and of all outstanding talents are best employed when shared with one’s neighbour.]25 [B] But where I am concerned I renounce my share, partly from self-awareness (which enables me to see both the weight attached to such vocations and the scant means I have of providing for them) – [C] even that master-theoretician of all political government Plato did not fail to abstain from it himself– [B] partly from laziness. I am content to enjoy the world without being over-occupied with it and to lead a life which is no more than excusable, neither a burden to myself nor to others.

No man ever entrusted his affairs more fully and passively into the care and control of another than I would do if only I had someone available. One of my wishes now would be to find me a son-in-law who would fill my beak, comfort my final years and lull them to sleep, into whose hands I could resign the control and use of my goods, with complete sovereignty to do with them as I do, getting out of them what I do now – provided that he brought to it a truly grateful and loving affection. Yes: but we live in a world where the loyalty of one’s own children is unheard of.

When I am on my travels, whoever has my purse has full charge of it without supervision. He could cheat me just as well if I kept accounts, and, unless he is a devil, by such reckless trust I oblige him to be honest. [C] ‘Multi fallere docuerunt, dum tintent falli, et aliis jus pec-candi suspicando fecerunt.’ [Many by their fear of being cheated have taught others to cheat; others have found justification for wrong-doing in suspicion thrown upon them.]26 [B] The surety I most usually have for my servants is my own ignorance. (I never assume defects until I have seen them, and I trust the young more, reckoning that they are less corrupted by bad example.) I prefer hearing after two months that I have spent four hundred crowns than having my ears battered every morning with three, five or seven. Yet [C] by larcenies of that kind [B] I have been as little robbed as anyone. True, I lend my ignorance a helping hand. I consciously encourage my knowledge of my money to be somewhat vague and uncertain; Up to a point I am pleased to be unsure about it. You should leave a little room for the improvidence or dishonesty of your manservant. On condition that there should remain, by and large, enough for us to do what we want, let us allow the surplus of Fortune’s liberality to flow on a little farther at her behest – [C] the gleaner’s portion.27 After all I do not prize the faithfulness of my men more than I disprize their wronging me. [B] Oh, what a servile and silly care is care for your money, loving to handle it, weigh it, count it over. That is the way miserliness makes its advances.

I have been in charge of property for the last eighteen years but have never yet got myself to look into my title-deeds nor into my principal affairs which must needs be transacted with my knowledge and attention. This is no philosophical contempt for the transitory things of this world: my taste has not been so purified as that. At the very least I value such things at their worth. It is a case, most certainly, of inexcusable and puerile28 [C] laziness and negligence. What would I not do to avoid reading through a contract and shaking the dust off piles of papers, a slave to my affairs and, worse still, a slave to other people’s, like so many folk who do it for the money! For me nothing is expensive save toil and worry: all I want is to be indifferent and bovine.

[B] I was made, I think, more for living off somebody else, if that could be done without servitude and obligation. And when I look at things closely I am not sure whether, for a man of my temperament and station, what I have to put up with from business and agents and servants does not entail more degradation, bother and bitterness than there would be in following a man born greater than I who would give me a bit of guidance and comfort. [C] ‘Servitus obedientia est fracti animi et abjecti.’ [Slavery is the obedience of a weak and despondent mind lacking in will.]29

[B] When Crates, to rid himself of the cares and indignities of his home, jumped into the freedom of poverty, he made things worse.30 That I would never do. I loathe poverty on a par with pain. But I would indeed exchange that first sort of existence for another less grand and less busy.

Once I am away I slough off all such preoccupations: I would feel it less then if a tower collapsed than I feel the fall of a tile when I am there. Once I am away my soul can easily find detachment: when I am there she frets like a wine-grower’s. [C] A twisted rein on my horse or a stirrup-strap knocking against my leg can put me out of humour for an entire day. [B] In face of difficulties I can lift up my thoughts but not my eyes.

Sensus, O superi, sensus.

[Feelings, ye gods! Feelings!]31

It is I who am responsible when anything goes wrong at home. There are few masters – I mean of my middle station (and if there are any at all the luckier they are) who are able to rely on anyone else without retaining most of the load. That [C] somewhat detracts from the way I treat visitors (though I may have made the odd one stay on, as bores do, more for my cuisine than for my charm); and it [B] considerably detracts from the pleasure I ought to take in visits and gatherings of friends in my house.

A gentleman in his own home never looks so [C] silly [B] as when32 he is seen to be preoccupied with the arrangements, having a word in a manservant’s ear or casting threatening glances at another: such arrangements should flow unnoticed and suggest a normal pattern. And I find it ugly to discuss with your guests the way you are treating them, either to apologize or to boast.

Order and cleanliness I love –

et cantharus et lanx Ostendunt mihi me

[I can see my reflection in tankard and plate]33

– on a par with abundance; in my own home I am punctilious about necessities but have little regard for ostentation. When you are in somebody else’s house and a servant brawls or a dish is spilled you simply laugh; and while My Lord settles tomorrow’s arrangements for you with his butler you can doze off.

[C] I am speaking for myself: I do not fail to realize how great a pastime it generally is for certain natures to run their households quietly and prosperously, all done with regularity and order. I do not wish to attribute my own mistakes and shortcomings to the thing itself nor to contradict Plato’s contention that the happiest occupation for any man is to manage his private concerns without injustice.34

[B] When on my travels I have to think only of me – and how to spend my money (one injunction can see to that). To amass a fortune you need too many talents: I know nothing about that. I know a bit about spending it and making a good show of my expenditure – which is indeed its principal use – but I strive a bit too ambitiously over it, which makes my spending uneven and misshapen, given to excess at both extremes. If it makes a parade, if it serves a purpose, I let myself be carried away injudiciously: and just as injudiciously I close up tight if it has no gleam and does not beam on me.

Whether it is art or nature which stamps on us that characteristic of living by what others say, it does us much more harm than good. We cheat ourselves of what is rightly useful to us in order to conform our appearances to the common opinion. We are not so much concerned with what the actual nature of our being is within us, as with how it is perceived by the public. Even wisdom and the good things of the mind seem fruitless to us if we enjoy them by ourselves, if they are not paraded before the approving eyes of others. Men there are whose gold flows unnoticed, swishing through great caverns underground: others spread theirs widely –all sheets of gold-leaf – so that the pennies of some are worth the guineas of others and vice versa, the world judging worth and expenditure by their show.

All attentive care for riches reeks of covetousness, as do spending when too ordinate and generosity when too contrived. They are not worth anxious attention and worry. Anyone who wants to make his expenditure just right makes it constricted and confined. Keeping and spending are in themselves indifferent: they take on the colour of good or evil depending upon how we apply our wills to them.35

The other cause which invites me to travel is my incompatibility with our present political morality. So far as the public interest is concerned I could reconcile myself easily enough to that corrupt condition:

pejoraque sœcula ferri Temporibus, quorum sceleri non invenit ipsa Nomen, et a nullo posuit natura metallo;

[worse than that Age of Iron in which crimes lacked a name, an age which Nature could find no metal to describe;]36

where my own interests are concerned, I cannot. It presses too hard upon me individually. For in my neighbourhood the prolonged licence of our Civil Wars has already hardened us to a form of government so overflowing with evil –

Quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas [Where right and wrong are all confounded]37

– that It is a miracle that it can endure.

Armati terram exercent, semperque recentes Convectare juvat prœdas et vivere rapto.

[Men bear arms while ploughing the fields, thinking only of grabbing fresh plunder and living by rapine.]

In short I learn from our example that, whatever the cost, human society remains cobbled and held together. No matter what position you place them in, men will jostle into heaps and arrange themselves in piles, just as odd objects thrust any-old-how into a sack find their own way of fitting together better than art could ever arrange them. King Philip made just such a pile from the most wicked and depraved men he could find. He built them a city which bore their name and sent them there.38 I reckon that out of their very vices they wove for themselves a political fabric and an advantageous lawful society.

It is not one deed that I see, not three, not a hundred, but morals, now commonly accepted, so monstrous in their inhumanity and above all in their disloyalty (which are for me the worst species of vice), that my mind cannot conceive of them without horror. Almost as much as with loathing they strike me with amazement. The practice of such remarkable wickedness is as much a sign of vigour and power in the soul as of error and unruliness. Necessity associates men and brings them together: afterwards that fortuitous bond is codified into laws; for there have been societies as ferocious as any that human opinion can spawn which have nevertheless kept their structures as sound and as durable as any which Plato or Aristotle could ever have founded. And indeed such descriptions of fictional and artificial polities are ridiculous and silly when it comes to putting them into practice.39 All those solemn long debates about the best form of society and the laws most suitable for bonding us together are appropriate only for exercising our minds. Among our arts disciplines there are several subjects, the essence of which consists in disputing and arguing and which, apart from that, have no existence.

Such political theories might be applied in some new-made world, but we have to take men already fashioned and bound to particular customs: we are not begetting them anew like Pyrrha and Cadmus.40 We may have the right to use any means to arrange them and to set them up afresh, but we can hardly ever wrench them out of their acquired bent without destroying everything. Solon was asked whether he had drawn up the very best laws which he could for the Athenians: ‘Yes, indeed’; he replied, ‘the best that they would accept.’41

[C] Varro pleaded a similar excuse: if he had to write on religion as something new he would tell us what he believed, but since it is already fashioned and accepted, he will talk about it following custom rather than its nature.

[B] Not as a matter of opinion but of truth, the best and most excellent polity for each nation is the one under which it has been sustained. Its form and its essential advantages depend upon custom. It is easy for us to be displeased with its present condition; I nevertheless hold that to yearn for an oligarchy in a democracy or for another form of government in a monarchy is wrong and insane.

Ayme l’estat tel que tu le vois estre: S’il est royal, ayme la royauté; S’il est de peu, ou bien communauté, Ayme l’aussi, car Dieu t’y a faict naistre.

[Love the constitution of your State as you find it; if a kingdom, love kingship; if the rule of the few or of the many, love them too: for God caused you to be born under it.]

Those verses are by that good man Monsieur de Pibrac42 whom we have just lost, a man of so noble a mind, so sound opinions, so gentle in his ways. His loss, and that of Monsieur de Foix which we suffered at the same time, are losses which matter to our Crown. I do not know whether there remains in France another pair of gentlemen who, for integrity and ability, could take the place of those two Gascons as counsellors to our Kings. Their souls were beautiful in different ways, each, in a time like ours, not only beautiful but rare in its own form. But whoever lodged in this age souls so unsuited to our corruption and so disproportionate to our tempestuous times?

Nothing crushes. State save novelty. Change alone provides the mould for injustice and tyranny. When some part works loose we can prop it up; we can resist being swept away from our original principles by the corruption and degradation natural to all things. But to undertake to recast such a huge [C] lump, [B] to shift43 the foundations of so great an edifice, is a task for those [C] for whom cleaning means effacing, [B] who seek to emend individual defects by universal disorder and to cure illnesses by death, [C] ‘non tam commutandarum quam evertendarum rerum cupidi’ [yearning not so much to change as to overthrow the constitution].44

[B] The world is not good at curing itself: it is so impatient of pressure that it can think of nothing but breaking loose from it without counting the cost. We know from hundreds of examples that it normally cures itself at the expense of itself. To throw off the burden of a present evil is no cure unless the general condition is improved. [C] The surgeon’s aim is not to cause the death of foetid flesh: that is merely the means which lead to the cure. He looks beyond that, to making natural flesh grow back again and to restoring the limb to its proper state. Anyone who proposes merely to remove what is irking him falls short, for good does not necessarily succeed evil. Another evil can succeed it – as befell Caesar’s killers who threw the Republic into such a crisis that they had cause to regret their intervention. The same has happened to many others down to our own times. My own contemporaries here in France could tell you a thing or two about that! All great revolutions convulse the State and cause disorder. Anyone who was aiming straight for a cure, and would reflect about it before anything was done, would soon cool his ardour for setting his hand to it.

Pacuvius Calavius corrected that defective procedure, so providing a memorable example.45 His fellow-citizens had revolted against their magistrates. He was an important man with great authority in his city of Capua. One day he found the means of locking the Senate in their palace; calling the citizens together in the marketplace he told them that the time had come when they were fully at liberty to take their revenge on the tyrants who had so long oppressed them. He had those tyrants in his power, disarmed and isolated. His advice was that they should summon them out one at a time by lots, decide what should be done to each of them and immediately carry out the sentence, provided that they should at the same time decide to put some honourable man in the place of the man they had condemned, so that the office should not remain unfilled. No sooner had they heard the name of the first Senator than there arose shouts of universal disapproval. ‘Yes, I can see,’ said Pacuvius, ‘that we shall have to get rid of that one. he is a wicked man. Let us put a good man in his place.’ An immediate silence fell, everyone being embarrassed over whom to choose. When the first man was rash enough to name his choice there was an even greater consensus of voices yelling out a hundred defects, and just causes for rejecting him. As those opposing humours became inflamed, the second and third senators fared even worse, with as much discord over the elections as agreement over the rejections. Having uselessly exhausted themselves in this quarrel they gradually began to slip this way and that out of the meeting, each going off convinced in his mind that an older, better-known evil is more bearable than a new and untried one. [B] I see we are in pitiful disarray – for what have we not done?

Eheu cicatricum et sceleris pudet, Fratrumque: quid nos dura refugimus Ætas? quid intactum nefasti Liquimus? unde manus Juventus Metu Deorum continuit? quibus Pepercit aris?

[We are alas disgraced by scars and crimes and fratricide. In this cruel age what atrocities have we not committed? Have our young men ever stayed their hand for fear of the gods? What altar have they spared?]46

Yet I do not immediately conclude that

ipsa si velit salus, Servare prorsus non potest hanc familiam.

[even the goddess Deliverance could not save this family if she tried.]

For all that, we may perhaps not yet have reached our own final period. The preservation of states is probably something which surpasses our understanding. [C] As Plato says, civic polities are strong, and difficult to break asunder.47 They can endure mortal illnesses in their guts and survive the injury of unjust laws, despite tyranny and despite the immorality and ignorance of their governors and the seditious licence of their peoples. [B] In all our misfortunes we compare ourselves with whatever is above us, looking towards those who are better off. Let us take our measure from what is below: there is no one so ill-fated as not to find hundreds of examples to console him. [C] Our crime is to be ever less willing to see people get ahead of us than trailing behind us. [B] Yet Solon48 said that if you were to gather all ills into a pile, there is nobody who would not rather bear away from that pile the ills he now has than to arrange to divide them equally between all other men, each taking his fair share.

Our polity is sick: yet some have been sicker still without dying. The gods use us for games of tennis, knocking us about in numerous ways.

Enimvero Dii nos homines quasi pilas habent. [To the gods we are indeed like balls to play with.]49

The stars fatally decreed that the Roman State should be the example of what they can achieve in this category, comprising every sort of fortune which can befall a State, all that order can do to it and chaos, every chance and mischance. Seeing the shocks and revolutions which shook it and which it survived, what State should despair of its condition? If the well-being of. State depends upon the extent of its dominions – which I in no wise accept, [C] liking as I do what Isocrates taught Nicocles, not to envy rulers who held sway over wide dominions but those who know how to look after those which they have inherited50 – [B] then Rome was never more flourishing than when its malady was greatest. You can scarcely recognize the ghost of a polity under the first few emperors: it was the densest and most dreadful confusion that man can conceive. Yet Rome endured it and survived it, preserving, not one single kingdom driven back to its frontiers, but such a great number of peoples, so diverse, so far scattered, so disaffected, so chaotically governed and so unjustly conquered.

Nec gentibus ullis Commodat in populum terrœ pelagique potentem, lnvidiam fortuna suam.

[Fortune allows no nation to pay off some private score against a people who rule both land and sea.]51

All that totters does not collapse. More than one nail holds up the framework of so mighty a structure. Its very antiquity can hold it up, like old buildings which, without cement or cladding, are propped up by their own mass:

nec jam validis radicibus hœrens, Pondere tuta suo est.

[No longer does it cling to the earth with its mighty roots: it is saved by its own weight.]

Besides it is not good practice to reconnoitre only your flank and trench: to judge the security of a fort you must note where the enemy can break through and what is the condition of your attackers. Few ships founder by their own weight without outside violence.

Now let us gaze all round us: all about us is collapsing; take all the great States which we know, in Christendom and elsewhere, and look at them: you will find a manifest threat of change and collapse:

Et sua sunt illis incommoda, parque per omnes Tempestas.

[They too have their misfortunes and a similar tempest threatening them all.]52

The astrologers have an easy time warning us as they do of great changes and mutations soon to come; what they foretell is present and palpable: no need to turn to the heavens for that! We should not only derive consolation from this universal fellowship in evil and menace: we should derive some hope that our State will endure, since in nature, when everything falls in unison, nothing falls. Universal illness means individual health. Uniformity is a quality hostile to disintegration. Personally I am not reduced to despair and it seems to me that there are ways of saving us:

Deus hœc fortasse benigna Reducet in sedem vice.

[Perhaps God of his kindness will restore things to their former state.]53

Who knows whether God’s will may not be that the same should happen to us as to bodies which are purged and restored to a better state by those long and grievous maladies which bring to them a fuller purer health than what they took away?

What depresses me most is that when I run through the symptoms of our malady I find as many natural ones and as many sent by the heavens and proper to that malady as ones attributable to our disorder and unwisdom. [C] It seems that the very stars ordain that we have lasted beyond the normal limits. And what also depresses me is that the most immediate evil which threatens us is not change within the whole solid lump, but our ultimate dread: disintegration and tearing asunder.

[B] In these ravings of mine, what I fear is that my treacherous memory should make me inadvertently record the same thing twice. I hate going over my writings and only unwillingly probe a topic again once it has got away. I have no freshly learned doctrines; these are my normal ideas. Having doubtless conceived them a hundred times I am afraid that I may have mentioned them already. Repetition is always a bore, even if it were in Homer, but it is disastrous in works which only make a superficial and passing impression. I hate persistent admonition even when it serves a purpose as in Seneca, [C] and I dislike the practice of the Stoic School of repeating copiously and at length, for each individual subject, the principles and postulates which apply over all, ever citing afresh their general arguments and universal reasons.

[B] My memory is growing cruelly worse every day:

Pocula Lethœos ut si ducentia somnos Arente fauce traxerim.

[As though my parched throat had drunk long draughts of the forgetful waters of Lethe.]54

Now – for thank God nothing has gone wrong up till now – whereas others seek time and occasion to think over what they have to say, I avoid preparation for fear of assuming an obligation from which I then have to extricate myself. I get lost when I am under an obligation, as I do when I depend on an instrument as feeble as my memory.

I never read the following account without being struck by a proper and natural resentment. Lyncestes was accused of conspiring against Alexander. On the day that he was brought to appear before the army, as was customary, to be heard in his defence, he, having learned off by heart a prepared speech, stammered out a few hesitant words. As he became more and more confused, fumbling and struggling with his memory, he was suddenly struck dead by blows from the pikes of the nearest soldiers who believed he had convicted himself. His dazed silence served them as a confession. Since he had time in prison to prepare himself, it was not his memory that was defective, they thought, but a case of guilt bridling his tongue and making him so feeble.55 What a good argument! Even when you merely aim to speak well you can be dazed by the place, the audience and their expectations. What can happen when you have to make an harangue on which your life depends!

For me the very fact of being tied down to what I have to say is enough to make me forget it. Once I have wholly committed and entrusted myself to my memory, I lean on it so heavily that I overwhelm it and it becomes afraid of its burden. As long as I rely upon it I lose control of myself, so much so that my very coherence is assayed. There was one day when I was hard put it to hide the servitude in which I was entangled, whereas my intention is always to suggest a deep indifference when speaking, making apparently fortuitous and unprepared gestures arising from the actual circumstances, preferring to say nothing at all of consequence rather than to show that I have come prepared to make a fine speech – something especially unbecoming in a man like me, a professed soldier, [C] and too much of an obligation for one who cannot retain much: preparation arouses greater hopes than it can satisfy. You often stupidly don your doublet, only to leap no better than in your smock. ‘Nihil est his qui placere volunt tam adversarium quam expectatio.’ [Nothing is more adverse to those who would please than aroused expectation.]56

[B] It is written of Curio the orator that after he had announced that he would divide his speech into three parts or four, or had stated the number of his arguments and reasons, he would often forget one of them or add one or two more.57 I have always taken care not to fall into that trap, loathing all such promises and outlines, not simply out of distrust for my memory but also because that style is too donnish: [C] ‘Simpliciora militates decent’ [In soldiers more bluntness is appropriate.]

[B] It is enough that from this day forth I have promised myself never again to accept the task of speaking in formal situations.

As for reading from a prepared script, that is not only a monstrosity but greatly to the disadvantage of those who by nature are capable of achieving anything directly. And as for throwing myself on the mercy of improvisation, that is even less acceptable: my powers of improvisation are stolid and confused and could never respond to sudden emergencies of any consequence.

Reader: just let this tentative essay, this third prolongation of my self-portrait, run its course. I make additions but not corrections: firstly, that is because when a man has mortgaged his book to the world I find it reasonable that he should no longer have any rights over it. Let him put it better elsewhere if he can, not corrupt the work he has already sold. From such folk you should buy nothing until they are dead. Let them do their thinking properly before they publish. Who is making them hurry? [C] My book is ever one: except that, to avoid the purchaser’s going away quite empty-handed when a new edition is brought out, I allow myself, since it is merely a piece of badly joined marquetry, to tack on some additional ornaments. That is no more than a little extra thrown in, which does not damn the original version but does lend some particular value to each subsequent one through some ambitious bit of precision. From this there can easily arise however some transposition of the chronological order, my tales finding their place not always by age but by opportuneness.

[B] My second reason is this: I fear that I will personally lose by the change. My mind does not always move straight ahead but backwards too. I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first. We are often as stupid when correcting ourselves as others.58 [C] My first edition dates from fifteen hundred and eighty: I have long since grown old but not one inch wiser. ‘I’ now and ‘I’ then are certainly twain, but which ‘I’ was better? I know nothing about that. If we were always progressing towards improvement, to be old would be a beautiful thing. But it is a drunkard’s progress, formless, staggering, like reeds which the wind shakes as it fancies, haphazardly.

Antiochus had written vigorously in support of the Academy. In old age he took a different line. Would I not be following Antiochus whichever I followed? After having established doubt he wished to establish the validity of human opinions: that amounted, did it not, to establishing doubt not validity, suggesting that if longer life were granted him he would have been ready for some new upset, not so much better as different.

[B] The approval of the public has made me a little more adventurous than I expected; but what I most fear is to surfeit. Like a certain scholar of my time, I would rather provoke than bore. Praise is always pleasant, no matter why it comes or from whom it comes; but genuinely to delight in it you need to discover its cause: even defects have ways of finding favour. The approval of ordinary common folk rarely hits the point, and I am mistaken if, in my own time, it is not the worst books which come top in popular approbation. I am indeed grateful to those gentlemen who deign to take my feeble efforts in good part. Nowhere are defects of style more obvious than when the subject-matter itself has little to commend it.

I do not, Reader, accept responsibility for misprints which slip in through the carelessness or fantasy of the various craftsmen; each hand introduces his own. I do not concern myself with the spelling (merely telling them to follow the traditional one) nor with punctuation: I am expert in neither. Even where they completely destroy my meaning, that does not worry me over-much: they at least take some weight off me; but when (as they often do) they substitute a false meaning and deflect me towards their own conception, they destroy me. So whenever the thought does not measure up to my own standard a gentleman should decline to accept it as mine. Anyone who knows how little industrious I am, and how far I am cast in a mould of my own, will not find it hard to believe that I would more readily compose as many essays again than subject myself to going through them once more to make schoolboy corrections.

I said just now that, being set in the deepest mine of that new metal,59 not only am I deprived of close contact with people whose manners and opinions hold them together by a bond which allows no other and which differs from mine, but I also run some risk by living among people who think that all deeds are equally lawful, most of whom have debts to pay to our justice which could not be made worse – whence arises the ultimate degree of licence. When I tot up all the details which concern me as an individual, I find that there is no man hereabouts to whom the defence of our laws costs more than it does to me, ‘either’ (as the law-clerks say) ‘in gains forgone or damages incurred’. [C] Some there are who boast of their zeal and toughness who, if you weigh things properly, do far less than I do.

[B] My house, being always open, easily approached and ever ready to welcome all men (since I have never let myself be persuaded to turn it into a tool for a war in which I play my part most willingly when it is farthest from my neighbourhood) has earned quite a lot of popular affection, so that it would be difficult to challenge me on my own dunghill. It is, I judge, a miraculous and exemplary achievement that it should remain unspotted by blood or sack during so long a tempest and so many upheavals and changes hereabouts. For to tell the truth it would have been possible for a man of my complexion to escape the effects of pressure of any kind, provided that it was constant and continuous, but these alternating invasions and incursions, these reversals and vicissitudes of Fortune round about me have, to date, hardened the temper of the local people rather than softened it, loading upon me insurmountable dangers and hardships. I escape, but it displeases me that I do so by Fortune and, indeed, by my cleverness rather than by justice; it displeases me to be outside the safeguard of our laws and under any other protection but theirs. As things stand I live more than half by somebody else’s favour, which is a harsh obligation. I do not want to owe my safety to the bounty and good-will of great men who respect my loyalty and independence, nor to the affable manners of my forebears or of myself. Supposing I had been different! And if my conduct and the frankness of my dealings do impose obligations on my neighbours and kinsmen, there is cruelty in their being able to pay off their debt by letting me stay alive and in their being able to say: ‘We allow him60 [C] to continue freely to have divine service in the chapel of his house now that we have pillaged and smashed all the neighbouring churches;61 and we allow him to keep his property and his life, [B] since, when the need arises, he protects our wives and our cattle.’ (We are old hands in my home at sharing in the praise given to Lycurgus of Athens, that he was the guardian and general depository of the purses of his fellow-citizens.)62

I maintain that we ought to live by the authority of the law, not by [C] recompense and [B] favour. How many gallant men have preferred to lose their life rather than to owe it to anyone. I avoid any sort of obligation, but above all the kind which binds me by a debt of honour. For me nothing costs dearer than what is vouchsafed to me and for which my will remains mortgaged under the title of gratitude: I prefer to receive services which are up for sale. And I should think so too! For the latter I give mere money: for the others I give myself. Such knots as bind me by the laws of honour seem tighter to me and heavier than the knots of civil constraint. A lawyer ties me in his knots more loosely than I do myself. And is it not reasonable that my conscience should be under a far greater obligation when anyone has put simple trust in it. In other cases my trustworthiness owes them nothing: they never lent it anything. Let them seek help from the trust and reliance which they placed in others than me. I would much rather break the restrictions of walls or of laws than of my word. [C] Being nice to the point of superstition over keeping my promises, I prefer on all subjects to make them conditional and provisional. To unimportant promises I attach weight because I keep jealously to my rule, which racks me and burdens me out of concern for itself. Why, even in such undertakings as are freely and entirely my own, once I have declared my intention I feel that I have ordered myself to carry it out, and that, by letting others into the know, I have prescribed it to myself. It seems to me that to state it is to promise it. That is why I do not give much wind of my projects.

[B] Any sentence which I pass on myself is far stiffer and more rigorous than any given by judges who can seize me only by aspects of common obligation, whereas my conscience is stricter and more severe. But in the case of duties towards which they would drag me if I would not go willingly, I pursue them but slackly: [C] ‘Hoc ipsum ita justum est quod recte fit, si est voluntarium.’ [The essence of a just deed lies in being voluntary.]63 [B] If the deed has none of the splendour of freedom it has neither grace nor honour:

Quod me jus cogit, vix voluntate impetrent. [You will not easily get me to do what the law says I must.]

When necessity compels me, I like to slacken my will, ‘quia quicquid imperio cogitur exigenti magis quam praestanti acceptum refertur’ [because when anything is commanded, gratitude is given to the one who issues the order not the one who obeys it].

I know some who adopt that position to the point of unfairness: they would rather give away than return, and lend out rather than repay, doing good most meanly to those to whom they are most beholden. I do not go that far, but I get close to it.

I am so fond of ridding myself of the weight of obligations that I have occasionally counted as gains such attacks or insults or acts of ingratitude as came from those to whom, by nature or accident, I owed some duty of affection, taking their offence, as it occurred, as so much towards the settling or discharge of my debt. Even when I continue to pay them the visible courtesies which society requires, I still find it a great saving [C] to do for justice what I used to do for affection and [B] to alleviate a little the inward stress and anxiety of my will [C] ‘Est prudentis sustinere ut cursum, sic impetum benevolentiae.’ [Wise men should stop a rush of benevolence as they would a runaway chariot.]64 [B] I have a will which, when I yield to it, is rather too impulsive and pressing, at least for a man who wishes never to be under any pressure. My restraint can reconcile me to the imperfections of those who are in contact with me: I am sorry that they are worth the less for it but I can nevertheless economize a little over my attachment and engagement towards them. I approve of the man who loves his son65 less if he is scabby or a hunchback, not merely when he is wicked but also when he is unfortunate or ill-endowed (for God has himself, to that extent, reduced his natural worth and value), provided that he behave, in his absence of warmth, with moderation and scrupulous fairness. In my own case a close relationship does not lighten defects: it tends to aggravate them.

After all that, insofar as I understand the subject of beneficence and gratitude (which is a delicate and most useful science) I know no one more free and under less obligation than I am so far. I owe whatever I do owe to common natural obligations: no one is more purely unindebted:66

nec sunt mihi nota potentum Munera.

[and as for presents from powerful men, I know them not.]

Princes [C] give me plenty if they take nothing from me and [B] do me enough good if they do me no harm. That is all I ask of them. Oh how beholden I am to God that it should have pleased Him that I should receive all I have directly from His grace and for His reserving all my debt to Him alone! [C] How urgently I beg God of His mercy that I may never owe a fundamental ‘Thank you’ to any man. Blessed freedom, which has guided me thus far! May it last to the end.

[B] I try to have no express need of anyone: [C] ‘in me omnis spes est mihi’ [all my hope is in myself].67 [B] That is something all can do, but it is easier for those whom God has protected from pressing natural needs. To depend upon another is pitiful and hazardous. Even our own self (which is the most secure and right place to turn to) does not provide adequate security. I own nothing but myself, yet even my possession of that is partly imperfect and defective. I husband myself68 [C] and put heart into myself (which is more important) while still fortunate, [B] so as to find there the wherewithal to satisfy me when all else should abandon me.

[C] Eleus Hippias did not equip himself solely with learning so as to be able, if needs be, to withdraw happily from all other company into the lap of the Muses, nor solely with philosophy so as to teach his soul to be content with itself, manfully doing without all external goods when Fate demands it: he took care to learn to be his own cook and barber, to make his own clothes, shoes and rings so as to be able to rely as far as possible entirely on himself and to relieve himself of the need of others’ help.69 [B] You can enjoy more freely and contentedly the use of good things which do not derive from yourself when your enjoyment of them is not bound and constrained by necessity and when your will has the power, and your financial resources the means, of doing without them.

[C] I know myself well, but it is hard for me to conceive of any act of kindness from anyone or any hospitality so frank and free but that, if I were to become involved in it out of necessity, it would be to me painful, tyrannical and stained with reproach. Just as giving is a pretentious quality, a prerogative, receiving is an act of subordination – witness Bajazet’s insulting and bellicose rejection of the gifts sent to him by Tamberlane;70 and the gifts sent on the part of the Emperor Soleiman put the Emperor of Calicut in such a rage that he not only bluntly rejected them, saying that neither he nor his predecessors were accustomed to take, it being their place to bestow, but he also had the envoys who had been sent with them cast into a dungeon.

Aristotle says that when Thetis flatters Jupiter, and the Spartans the Athenians, they do not start reminding them again of all that they themselves have done for them – that is always odious – but of all they have received from them.71 Those whom I see readily using the good offices of each and everyone and pawning themselves to them would not do so if they attached the weight which wise men should to the bond of an obligation: it can sometimes be repaid but never untied – a cruel trussing-up for anyone who likes to give his freedom elbow-room everywhere. Those who are acquainted with me (both those above and below me) know whether they have ever met anyone who puts fewer burdens upon others. If I am excessive about this by today’s standards, that is no great marvel, since so many elements in my character contribute to it: a little innate pride, the inability to bear a refusal, my restricted needs and my lack of flair for any kind of business – and my most cherished characteristics: idleness and frankness. For all of which reasons I have a mortal hatred of being beholden to anyone or through anyone but myself. Under any circumstances whatever, before I will make use of another’s kindly services, no matter how trivial or unimportant, I make vigorous use of every means of doing without them. Those whom I hold in affection distress me hugely when they beg me to beg a favour for them from a third party. If I make use of anyone, it seems to cost me no less to redeem what he has in pawn to me than, if he owes me nothing, to pawn myself to him on behalf of others. But apart from that condition and the next (that they do not want anything from me which requires anxious bargaining, for I have declared a war unto death against bother of any sort), I am easily accessible to the needs of everyone.72

[B] But even more than seeking to bestow I have fled from all receiving – [C] which Aristotle says is an easier thing to do.73 [B] My Fortune has not allowed me to give much to others, and the little she has allowed me has been lodged with the very poor.

If Fortune had brought me into this world to hold high rank among men I would have been ambitious to be loved, not feared or held in awe. Shall I express it more cheekily? I would have been more concerned to please than to bring moral improvement. [C] Cyrus said most wisely (through the mouth of an excellent captain and better philosopher)74 that he reckoned that his generosity and benefactions far excelled his valour and his conquests in war. And whenever Scipio the Elder wants to make himself esteemed he rates his affability and humanity above his bravery and victories, and always has this proud saying on his lips: he had given his foes as much reason to love him as his friends.

[B] What I mean, then, is that if I must owe anyone anything it should be for some other more legitimate pretext than the one I mentioned just now, in which I am implicated by the laws of this wretched war, one where the debt does not amount to my entire preservation. Such a debt overwhelms me. I have gone to bed in my own home hundreds of times thinking that I would be betrayed and killed that night, bargaining with Fortune that the event should not be terrifying and long drawn-out. And after reciting my Lord’s Prayer I have exclaimed,

Impius hœc tam culta novalia miles habebit! [Some impious soldier, then, will get these well-farmed lands!]75

What remedy is there? I was born in this place and so were most of my ancestors. They have entrusted their love and reputation unto it. We get hardened to anything to which we are accustomed. And in wretched circumstances such as ours now it is a most kindly gift of Nature that we do grow accustomed to it, so that it deadens our sense of suffering many evils.

What makes civil wars worse than other wars is that each man is on sentry-guard over his own home.

Quam miserum porta vitam muroque tueri, Vixque suæ tutum viribus esse domus.

[How pitiful it is to need gates and walls to protect your life and scarcely to be able to trust in the strength of your own home.]

It is to be in great extremity to be hard-pressed even within your very house, in the quiet of your home.76 The place where I dwell is always the first and the last to be pounded by our strife: peace never shows her full face there:

Tum quoque cum pax est, trepidant formidine belli. [Even when there is peace we tremble for fear of war.]77

Quoties pacem fortuna lacessit, Hac iter est bellis. Melius, fortuna, dedisses Orbe sub Eoo sedem, gelidaque sub Arcto, Errantesque domos.

[Every rime that Fortune strikes at peace, that is the road to war. Fortune, you would have been better advised to settle me in lands beneath the Morning Star or the wandering planets of the frozen North.]

Sometimes I find in indifference and languor the means of firming myself against such reflections – for they too can make us somewhat resolute. It often happens that I think with some pleasure of those mortal dangers and wait for them: I lower my head and plunge, devoid of sensation, into death, neither contemplating it nor exploring it, as into some voiceless, darkling deep, which swallows me up at one jump and in an instant overwhelms me with a powerful sleep entirely lacking any sensation or suffering. And what I foresee to follow upon those short and violent deaths consoles me more than their reality disturbs me. [C] (Life, they say, is no better for being long: death is better for not being so.) [B] I do not recoil from being dead but, rather, I become reassured about dying. I wrap up and crouch down during the storm, which, with one quick attack, one unfelt blow, must blind me and ravish me in its frenzy.

Just as some gardeners say that roses and violets spring up more sweet-scented near garlic and onions which attract and draw to themselves all that is foul-smelling in the soil,78 suppose those depraved characters similarly suck up all the venom in the air of our climate, rendering me better and purer by their proximity, so that all is not loss. But things are not so. Yet there may be something in the following: goodness is more beautiful and attractive when it is rare, while the determination to act well is stiffened by contradiction and concentrated in us by opposition, being enflamed by glory and a jealous desire to resist.

[C] Robbers, of their courtesy, do not have it in for me personally. Do I not return the compliment? I would need to have it in for too many people! [’95] Under various kinds of dress [C] are lodged79 similar consciences, similar cruelty, treachery and robbery, and they are all the worse when they are more cowardly and safe for being better hidden behind the shadow of the law. Avowed injuries I hate less than treacherous ones, and those of war less than those of peace – [’95] judicial ones. [C] This fever of ours has occurred in a body which it has hardly made worse: the fire was there already: the flames had already taken. The din is much greater, the evil but little more.

[B] When people ask why I go on my travels I usually reply that I know what I am escaping from but not what I am looking for. If they tell me that there may be [C] just as little soundness [B] among foreigners80 and that their morals may be no better than ours, I reply: first, that that would not be easy:

Tam multae scelerum facies. [Our wickedness has assumed so many faces.]

Secondly, that there is always gain in changing a bad condition for an uncertain one, and that the ills of others do not need to sting us as our own do.

And I do not want to omit that I am never such an enemy of France that I fail to look kindly on Paris: Paris has had my heart since boyhood. And as happens with all incomparable things, the more beautiful the other towns I have seen the more the beauty of Paris gains power over my affections. I love her for herself, more when left alone than overloaded with extra ornaments. I love her tenderly, warts, stains and all. That great city alone makes me. Frenchman,81 a city great in citizens, great in its happy choice of site, but great above all and incomparable in the variety and diversity of its attractions; it is the glory of France and one of the world’s great splendours. God drive our divisions far from her! When entire and united she is safe from other violence. The worst of all decisions, by my counsel, would be one which brought discord to her. I fear nothing for her but herself. And I certainly fear for her more than for any part of our State. While she endures I shall not lack a lair in which I can die at bay, one enough to make me lose all regret for any other.

Not because Socrates said it but because it truly corresponds to my humour (and is perhaps not free from excess): I reckon all men my fellow-citizens,82 embracing. Pole as I do. Frenchman, placing a national bond after the common universal one. I do not particularly hanker after the sweetness of my native soil. Acquaintances which are entirely new and entirely mine seem to me to be worth just as much as the other common kind, casually based on neighbourhood. Those loving relationships which are purely our own achievement normally outweigh those to which we are bound by ties of place or blood. Nature brought us forth free and unbound: we imprison ourselves in particular confines, like those kings of Persia who bind themselves to drink no water but that of the river Choaspes, foolishly renouncing their right to use all other waters, making, so far as they are concerned, all the rest of the world a desert.83

[C] When Socrates was near his end he judged that a sentence of exile was for him worse than a sentence of death. As far as I can tell I could never be so broken in, nor so narrowly accustomed to my part of the world, as to say that. Those heaven-marked lives have many traits which I embrace more with esteem than emotion. They also have other traits so soaring and inordinate that I cannot even do so with esteem, since I am quite unable to conceive them. That was a very delicate humour in a man who considered the whole world his city! It is true that he despised travel and had hardly set foot outside Attic territory. And what about his sparing his friends’ money with which they would have saved his life, and his refusal to escape from prison through the intercession of anyone at all, so as not to disobey the laws at a time when they were highly corrupt? Those examples fall into my first category: there are others to be found in that great man which fall into my second one. Many such examples surpass my power of action, but some surpass even my power of judgement.

[B] In addition to such reasons, travel seems to me to be an enriching experience. It keeps our souls constantly exercised by confronting them with things new and unknown; and (as I have often said) I know of no better school for forming our life than ceaselessly to set before it the variety found in so many other lives, [C] concepts and customs, [B] and to give it a taste of the perpetual diversity of the forms of human nature. The body is neither idle nor exhausted by it: the moderate exercise keeps it in good trim. Even suffering from the stone as I do, I can stay in the saddle, without dismounting, for eight or ten hours at I stretch:

Vires ultra sortemque senectae. [strength beyond the lot of old age.]84

No weather is inimical to me except the harsh heat of a blazing sun (for those parasols which Italy has used since the Ancient Romans put more weight on your arm than they take off your head). [C] I would love to know how hard it was for the Persians, so long ago at the very birth of luxury, to produce at will cool winds, as Xenophon says they did, and patches of shade.85

[B] I take to rain and mud like a duck. I change of air and weather does not disturb me: to me all climates are the same. The only things which do batter me are such internal disturbances as I produce within me – and they occur less during my travels.

It is hard to get me moving, but once I have started I will go on as far as you like. I resist little expeditions [C] as much as [B] big ones,86 and equipping myself for a day-trip or a visit to a cousin [C] as much as [B] for a real journey. I have learned to do each day’s journey in the Spanish style, all at one go, a long but reasonable day. When it is extremely hot I travel by night, from sunset to sunrise. (The other way – stopping to eat en route, in chaos and haste over your post-house dinner – is disagreeable, especially when the days are drawing in.) My horses are all the better for it. No horse which can get through the first day’s journey with me has ever let me down. I water them everywhere, merely taking the precaution of having enough road left for them to work it off. My own reluctance to get up allows my retinue to breakfast at leisure before we set off. I myself never dine very late. Appetite comes to me only with eating;87 except at table I never feel hungry.

Some complain at my delight in continuing this practice as a man married and old.88 They are wrong. The best time to leave our family is after we have set it on course to proceed without us, after we can leave behind such order as does not belie its former character. It is far more imprudent to go off if you leave your home in charge of a protectress who is less reliable and who may take less trouble to provide for your needs. The most useful science and the most honourable occupation for a wife is home-management. I am aware of more than one wife who is mean but of few who are good managers. Yet to be one is a wife’s chief virtue, the one that we should look for first as the only dowry which may either save our households or ruin them. [C] There is no need to lecture me on the subject: experience has taught me to seek one virtue above all others in a married woman: the virtue of sound housekeeping. [B] I enable my wife to do this properly when, by my absence, I leave the government of my house in her hands. It irritates me to see in many a household my lord coming home about noon, all grimy and tetchy from business worries, while my lady is still in her dressing-room, dolling herself up and doing her hair. That is for queens – and I am not sure even then. It is unjust and absurd that our wives should be maintained in idleness89 by our sweat and toil. [C] As far as it lies with me, nobody shall have a more serene enjoyment of my goods than I do, one more quit and more quiet. [B] Though the husbands provide the matter, Nature herself wills that the wives provide the form.90

As for the duties of conjugal love which are thought to be infringed by such absences, I do not believe that they are. On the contrary: such intercourse can easily be cooled by too continuous a presence and impaired by assiduity: every other woman seems charming then! Everyone knows that seeing each other all the time cannot provide the same pleasure as is given by alternately going away and coming together. [C] Such intervals fill me with fresh love for my family and restore me to a more agreeable use of my home. Alternation sharpens my appetite for both home and travel. [B] Loving affection, as I know, has arms long enough to stretch from one end of the world to the other and meet – especially conjugal love, for it comports a continuous exchange of duties which reawaken our memory of the tie. The Stoics say that there are such great bonds of interdependence and interconnection between the wise, that he who dines in France nourishes his fellow in Egypt and that, wherever he may be, if he merely raises a finger to help, all the wise men on this habitable earth feel the benefit.91

Enjoyment – possession – belongs mainly to the mind. [C] It more ardently embraces whatever it goes a-seeking than anything we actually hold, and it does so more continuously. Note how you spend your time every day: you will find that you are most absent from the one you love when he is present: your attentiveness is released by the fact that he is there; that gives your thoughts freedom to go absent at any time, on any pretext.

[B] Outwards from Rome I control and govern my household and the good things I have left there. Just as when I am there, I know within an inch or two how my walls, my trees or my rents are growing or declining:

Ante oculos errat domus, errat forma locorum. [Before my eyes there floats a vision of my home and the places I have left.]92

If we only enjoy things when we touch them, then goodbye to our golden sovereigns when they are in our money-chests – and to our sons when they are out hunting. We want them nearer. They are in our grounds: is that ‘far’? Is half a day’s journey ‘far’? How about ten leagues? Is that ‘far’ or ‘near’? If near, how about eleven leagues, twelve, thirteen and so on, pace by pace? Truly, if any wife can lay down for her husband how many paces make ‘far’ and how many paces make ‘near’, my counsel is to make him stop half-way –

excludat jurgia finis. Utor pemisso, caudœque pilos ut equinœ Paulatim vello, et demo unum, demo etiam unum, Dum cadat elusus ratione ruentis acervi

[‘Let us set limits and end this domestic strife!’… Yes, but I take whatever you allow and (like plucking hair after hair, one by one, from my horse’s tail) I take yard after yard until you are cheated by my accumulated sophisms]’93

– and let those wives dare to call Philosophy to their aid. But someone will object that Philosophy can only judge very vaguely where the middle point lies: she can descry neither of the limits linking too much and too little, long and short, light and heavy, since she can recognize neither their end nor beginning: [C] ‘Rerum natura nullam nobis dedit cognitionem finium.’ [Nature has given us no faculty which can know the boundaries of anything.]

[B] Are they not still the wives and beloveds of the dead who are not at the end of this world but in the next? Our arms enfold not only our absent ones but also those who have died or are yet to be. When we married each other we did not contract to be ever attached to each other’s tails like some little creatures or other we know of,94 [C] or doggy-fashion, like those bewitched couples of Karenty.95 Moreover a wife should not have her eyes so hungrily fixed on her husband’s foreparts that when the need arises she cannot bear to see his backside.

[B] Perhaps this jest from a most excellent portrayer of wives’ humours would not be out of place here to describe the cause of their complaints:

Uxor, si cesses, aut te amare cogitat, Aut tete amari, aut potare, aut animo obsequi,Et tibi bene esse soli, cum sibi sit male.

[You are late coming home. Your wife assumes that you are in love with somebody, or somebody with you, that you are getting drunk and having a good time without her while she feels miserable.]96

Or would it not be, perhaps, because they like opposing and thrive on contradiction, happy enough if they can make you unhappy?

In a truly loving relationship – which I have experienced – rather than drawing the one I love to me I give myself to him.97 Not merely do I prefer to do him good than to have him do good to me, I would even prefer that he did good to himself rather than to me: it is when he does good to himself that he does most good to me. If his absence is either pleasant or useful to him, then it delights me far more than his presence. And it is not strictly absence when there are means of keeping in touch. In former times I found advantages and pleasure in our being far apart. By going our separate ways we possessed life more fully and widely. It was for me that he lived, and saw and enjoyed things: and I for him – more fully than if he had been there. When we were together part of us remained idle: we were merged into one. Geographical separation rendered more rich the union of our wills. That insatiable hunger for physical presence reveals a certain weakness in the enjoyment of our souls.

As for my old age, which they cite against me, it is on the contrary for youth to be enslaved by common opinions and to restrain itself for someone else. Youth has plenty enough to provide for itself and others: we have too much to do to provide for ourselves. As natural pleasures fail us, let us support ourselves by artificial ones. It is unfair to forgive youth for pursuing its pleasures, while forbidding old age even to look for any. [C] when I was young I veiled my playful passions behind wisdom: now I am old, I disperse my gloomy ones by excess. Though Plato’s laws forbid foreign travel before forty or fifty so as to make it more useful and instructive, I would more readily subscribe to the second article in those same laws, which prohibits it after sixty.98

[B] ‘But at your age you will never return from so long a road’ – What does that matter to me? I did not set out either to return or to complete. I set out merely to keep on the move while moving pleases me. [C] I travel for travelling’s sake. They do not run for sport who course after hares or benefices: they run for sport who gallop in tournaments for the joy of the coursing.

[B] My itinerary can be interrupted at any point; it is not based on great expectations: each day’s journey is complete in itself. My life’s journey is conducted the same way. Yet I have seen enough far-off places where I would have liked to have been retained. And why ever not, when so many [C] wise [B] men of the most glowering sect99 – Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Zeno and Antipater – abandoned their homeland, having no cause to complain of it but merely to enjoy a different clime. Indeed what most displeases me in my peregrinations is that I cannot bring with me the right to make my home wherever I please and that (adapting myself to the common prejudice) I must always intend to come back. If I were to afraid of dying anywhere else but where I was born, and if I thought that I would die less at my ease when far from my family, not only would I hardly ever go out of France without terror, I would hardly go out of my parish: I feel death all the time, jabbing at my throat and loins. But I am made otherwise: death is the same for me anywhere. If I were to allowed to choose I would, I think, prefer to die in the saddle rather than in my bed, away from home and far from my own folk. There is more heartbreak than comfort in taking leave of those we love. I am inclined to neglect that social duty: for of all the obligations of loving affection it alone is displeasing. I would willingly therefore neglect to bid that great and everlasting farewell. Although some advantage may be drawn from the presence of others, there are hundreds of disadvantages. I have seen several men die most wretchedly, besieged by all that activity; they are suffocated by the crowd. It is undutiful, and a sign of slight care and affection, to let you die in peace! Someone is messing about with your eyes, another with your ears and another with your tongue: you have no limb nor sense which they are not badgering. Your heart is racked with pity at hearing the lamentations of those who love you – and perhaps with anger at hearing other lamentations, feigned and hypocritical. Anyone with a taste for gentleness has it more when he is weak. In such great straits he needs a soft hand to scratch him precisely where it itches. Otherwise, leave him alone. If we need. ‘wise-woman’ to midwife us into this world we need an even wiser man to get us out of it. We ought to pay a high price to have such a man, a friend, for such an event.

I have not attained to that vigorous contempt which fortifies itself and which nothing can help, nothing disturb. I am one peg below that. Not from fear but from cunning, I want to go to earth like a rabbit and steal off as I pass away. It is not my intention to test or to display my constancy during that action. For whom would it be? Then all my right to reputation and all my concern for it will be at an end. I am satisfied with a death which will withdraw into itself, a calm and lonely one, entirely my own, one in keeping with my life – retiring and private. Contrary to Roman superstition (according to which a man was held wretched if he died without speaking and without his nearest kinsfolk to close his eyes)100 I have enough to do to console myself without having to console others; enough thoughts in my mind without fresh ones evoked by my surroundings; enough to think about without drawing on others. This event is not one of our social engagements: it is a scene with one character. Let us live and laugh among our own folk, but let us die, grinding our teeth, among strangers. Provided you can pay, you can always find someone to turn your head and massage your feet, and who will leave you alone as much as you like, showing you an unconcerned face and letting you think and moan in your own way.

Every day I argue myself out of that childish and unkindly humour which makes us desire that our own ills should arouse compassion and mournful thoughts in those we love. So as to bring on their tears we exaggerate our misfortunes beyond all measure. And that steadfastness in supporting ill-fortune which we eulogize in everyone else, we arraign and condemn in close relatives when the ill-fortune is ours. We are not content that they should sympathize with our ills unless they are also afflicted by them. Joy we should spread: sadness, prune back as much as we can. [C] Whoever evokes pity without cause is not to be pitied when cause there is. To be always lamenting is to have none to lament you; so often to look pitiful arouses pity in nobody. Act dead when you are living, and you are likely to be treated as alive when you are dying. I have known it get the goat of some invalids if you said they had a healthy colour or a regular pulse; they would hold back their laughter since it would betray that they were cured; they hated good health because it aroused no compassion. And what is more, they were not women either.

[B] I present my maladies, at most, for what they are and I avoid studied groans and words of foreboding. If not merriness at least composure is appropriate for those attending a sick wise man. Just because he knows he is in the opposite condition himself he picks no quarrel with health: he delights in contemplating in others health, strong and whole, at least enjoying it through their company. Just because he knows that he is sinking, he does not reject all thoughts of life or avoid ordinary conversation. I want to study illness when I am well: when it is present it makes a real enough impact without my imagination helping it. We prepare ourselves beforehand for such journeys as we are resolved to undertake, but the hour when we should be climbing into the saddle we devote to those about us and prolong it in their favour.

I realize that there is an unexpected benefit from this publication of my manners: in some ways it serves me as a rule. Occasionally the thought comes over me that I should not prove disloyal to [C] this account of my life.101 [B] This public disclosure obliges me to stick to my path and not to belie the portrayal of my qualities, which are, on the whole, less deformed and objectionable than is commonly thought by the malice and distemper of present-day judgements. The consistency and straightforwardness of my ways produce an outward appearance which is easy to interpret, but because my style is rather novel and unusual it gives slander too easy a time. Yet it seems to me that anyone who wanted to criticize me honestly would find in my avowed and admitted imperfections quite enough to get his teeth into and to satisfy him without fencing with the wind. If it seems to such a man that, by forestalling his criticisms and revelations, I have made his bite toothless, it is reasonable that he should arrogate to himself the right to amplify and extend them (since offensives do have the right to go beyond justice) and he can take those defects whose roots in me I have revealed and magnify them into trees, using to that end not only such defects as have got a hold on me but also those which threaten me. Both in quality and quantity they are iniquitous: let him batter me with them. [C] I could frankly welcome the example of Dion the philosopher:102 Antigonus was trying to provoke him on the subject of his origins. He cut him short and retorted: ‘I am the son of a butcher – I branded slave – and of a prostitute whom my father married because of the baseness of his fortune. Both were punished for such-and-such a crime. When I was a youth an orator took a fancy to me and bought me. When he died he left me all his possessions. I transferred them here to Athens and devoted myself to philosophy. Biographers do not need to bother to seek news about me, for I will tell them how things stand.’

Free and open avowal robs rebuke of its sinews and strips insult of its weapons. [B] Nevertheless when all is said and done it appears that I am as often praised as disparaged beyond reason. It appears to me that I have, since my boyhood, been afforded a degree of rank and honour above what is mine rather than below. [C] I would feel more at ease in a land where such rankings were either regulated or held in contempt. Among men, as soon as a legal altercation about the order of precedence in processions or seating exceeds a triple rejoinder, it is discourteous. To avoid such churlish disputes I am never afraid to take or yield precedence unjustly: no man has ever challenged my precedence without my letting him take it.

[B] Apart from that profit which I derive from writing about myself, there is another which I hope for: if it chances before I die that my humours should please and suit some decent man, he might try to bring us together. I am meeting him more than half-way, since all that he could have gained from a long acquaintance and intimacy with me, he could get more reliably and minutely in three days from my account. [C] A pleasing fancy: many things that I would not care to tell to any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller’s stall:

Excutienda damns prœcordia. [We give them our inner hearts to ransack.]103

[B] If on equally good evidence I knew a man who was right for me I would certainly go far to find him, for in my judgement the sweetness of well-matched and compatible fellowship can never cost too dear. O! a friend! How true is that ancient judgement, that the frequenting of one is more sweet than the element water, more necessary than the element fire.104

To get back to my narration: there is no great evil in dying alone and afar. [C] Indeed we reckon that it is a duty to seek seclusion for natural functions less ugly than that one and less repulsive. [B] And, farther, those who are reduced by their sufferings to drag out a long existence should perhaps not wish to burden a large family with their misery. [C] (That is why the Indians in one particular territory thought it right to kill anyone who had fallen into such distress, while in another they would abandon him alone to save himself as best he could.) [B] Is there anyone for whom those long a-dying are not in the end an intolerable burden? Our duties to each other do not extend that far. Inevitably you teach cruelty to those who love you best, making your wife and children, by long accustoming, grow callous, no longer feeling or pitying your afflictions. (The groans of my colic paroxysms no longer bring distress to anybody.) And even if we were to derive some pleasure from their company (which is not always the case, because of the dissimilarity of our circumstances which readily produces contempt and hatred towards anyone whomsoever) is it not an abuse to make it last an entire age? The more I were to see them generously constraining themselves for my sake the more I should regret the trouble they were taking. We have a right to lean on others, but not to lie that heavily on top of them, supporting ourselves by their collapse – like that man who had little boys’ throats slit so as to use their blood to cure an illness of his, or like that other man who was supplied with little mites to warm his old limbs at night and to mingle the sweetness of their breath with the heavy sourness of his own.

As an asylum for such a condition and so feeble an existence I would be inclined to prescribe myself Venice. [C] Decrepitude is a solitary quality: I am sociable to the point of excess, yet from this day forward it seems reasonable that I should withdraw my importunity from the sight of the world and brood over it myself, retreating and shrinking into my shell as tortoises do. I am learning to see people without clinging to them – that would be an outrage on so steep a decline. It is time to turn my back on company.

[B] ‘But on so long a journey you will end up in some thieves’ kitchen where you will lack everything.’ – I carry most of my necessities with me. At all events we have no way of avoiding Fortune if she undertakes to fall upon us. When I am ill I want nothing beyond the natural order: what Nature cannot work in me I do not want some quack’s pill to do. While I am still in one piece and next-door to health, at the very onset of any fever or sickness which strikes me down, I reconcile myself to God by the last rites of Christianity; I find myself liberated and relieved by them, seeming to have got so much the better of my illness. Of lawyer and counsel I have even less need than of the doctor: do not expect me when I am ill to settle any affairs not already settled when I was in good health. What I intend to do to prepare for my death is done already: I would not dare to put it off for one single day. So if something remains undone, that means either that doubt has made me defer a decision (for sometimes the best decision is not to make one) or that quite simply I have wanted to do nothing about it.

My book I write for a few men and for a few years. If it had been on a lasting subject I would have entrusted it to a more durable language. Judging from the constant changes undergone by our own tongue up to the present, who can hope that its contemporary form will be current fifty years from now? [C] (It goes flowing through our fingers every day, and during my lifetime half of it has changed. We say that it is perfect now: each age says that of its own. I do not think it has reached perfection while it is still running away and changing form. It is up to good and useful writings to buckle French on to themselves, and its reputation will follow the fortunes of our State.)

[B] That is why I am not afraid to put in several personal details the currency of which will be exhausted during the lifetime of those who are alive today and which touch upon the private knowledge of some folk, who will see further into them than the general public can. When all is said and done I have no wish (as I know often happens whenever the dead are recalled to memory) that people should start arguing, claiming ‘This is how he thought; this is how he lived’; ‘If only he had uttered a few last words he would have said this or given away that’; ‘I knew him better than anyone else.’ Here I make known, as far as propriety allows, my feelings and inclinations. I do so more freely and readily by word of mouth for any who want to know; nevertheless if you look into these memoirs of mine you will find that I have said everything or intimated everything. What I have been unable to express in words I point towards with my finger:

Verum animo satis hæc vestigia parva sagaci Sunt, per quæ possis cognoscere cætera tute.

[Those slight traces are enough for a keen mind and will safely lead you to discover the rest.]105

About myself nothing is wanting and there is nothing to guess. If you must discuss such things, I want it to be done truly and fairly. I would willingly come back from the next world to refute anyone who, even to do me honour, would fashion me other than I was. I know that people make even the living different when they talk of them. Had I not with all my might come to the defence of a friend whom I had lost, they would have ripped him into hundreds of incompatible little features.106

To finish talking of my foibles, I admit that I hardly ever arrive at my lodgings during my travels without the question passing through my mind whether I could be ill and die there comfortably, lodged as I like in a place entirely to my taste – no noise, not filthy, smoky or stuffy. By such trivial amenities I seek to cajole death or (to put it better) to relieve myself of all other impediments to enable me to concentrate on death alone: it will probably weigh heavily enough on me without adding to the burden. I want it to have a share in the comforts and conveniences of my life. Death forms a big chunk of it, an important one: from this day forth I hope it will not belie my past.

Some forms of death are easier than others: death takes on qualities which differ according to each man’s way of thinking. Among natural deaths, pleasant and easy it seems to me is the one which comes from our growing torpid and weak. Among violent ones, I find it far harder to think of a precipice than the collapse of a wall, a slash from a sword than a volley from harquebuses; and I would rather have drunk Socrates’ poison than to have run myself through like Cato. And although it all comes to the same, my imagination can feel a difference as great as life from death between jumping into a fiery furnace and into the stream of a smooth river – [C] so absurdly does our fear look more at the means than the result. [B] It only takes a moment, but I would give several days of my life to spend that moment in my own fashion. Since each man’s fancy can find greater or less harshness in it, since each has some preference between ways of dying, let us assay going a little further and finding one quite free from unpleasantness. Might we not even make death luxurious like Antony and Cleopatra, those fellows in death? I leave aside as harsh the efforts devised by philosophy, and as ideal those devised by religion; but among lesser men we find a certain Petronius and a certain Tigillinus in Rome, who were required to kill themselves, lulling death to sleep,107 so to speak, by their voluptuous preparations. They made death flow gently along, slipping it in among their usual wanton pastimes, between their girls and their drinking-companions: no mention of consolation, no mention of wills, no ambitious show of constancy, no talk of their condition in the life to come, but amidst games and festivities, jokes and common everyday conversation, music and love-poetry. Could we not imitate their resolve, with a more honourable restraint? Since there are deaths good for fools and others for sages, let us find some which are good for people in between. [C] My imagination can present me with a kind of death which is easy and (since we have to die) desirable. The Roman tyrants virtually spared a criminal’s life when they allowed him to choose how he would die.

Yet was not a philosopher as subtle, modest and wise as Theophrastus forced by reason to recite the verse which Cicero put into Latin as:

Vitam regit fortuna, non sapientia. [Our life is governed by Fortune not philosophy.]108

How Fortune helps me now to rate my life at bargain-price, having reduced it to the point where nobody needs it and nobody is inconvenienced by it! That is a situation which I would have accepted at any period of my existence, but at this time, when I must fold up my garments and pack my bags, I find a special pleasure in causing no one when I die either pleasure or displeasure. By skilfully balancing the accounts, Fortune has made those who have a claim to some material gain from my death also conjoint heirs to some material loss. Death often oppresses us in as much as it weighs on others: we are virtually as concerned for their concerns as for our own – sometimes more or entirely so.

[B] Among the qualities I look for in my lodgings I do not include grandiose spaciousness – I hate it rather – but a simple individual charm more often met in places where there is less artifice and which Nature honours with some loveliness all her own: ‘Non ampliter sed munditer convivium.’ ‘Plus salis quant sumptus.’ [An elegant not a copious feast. More wit than waste.]109

Moreover it is for those whose business drags them up over the Grisons in midwinter to be surprised on the highway by their own life’s end. I, who most often travel for my own pleasure, am not all that bad a guide. If it looks nasty to the left I turn off to the right; if I find myself unfit to mount the saddle, I stop where I am. By acting thus I really do see nothing which is not as pleasant and agreeable to me as my home. It is true that I always do find superfluity superfluous and that I am embarrassed by delicacy, even, and by profusion. Have I overlooked anything which I ought to have seen back there? Then I go back to it: it is still on my road. I follow no predetermined route, neither straight nor crooked. Supposing when I do go to some place that I do not find there what I was told to expect: since others’ judgements do not agree with mine (I have more often proved them wrong) I do not regret my exertion; I have learned that something which they told me about is not there!

My physical predisposition is as flexible, and my tastes as catholic, as any man’s in the world. The diversity of custom between one nation and another touches me only by the pleasure of variety; each has its reason. Let the dishes be of pewter, wood or earthenware, consist of boiled meats or roasts, with butter, chestnut oil or olive oil, be hot or cold: it is all the same to me – so much so that, now I am getting old, I condemn such magnanimous facility and shall need discernment and selection to put a stop to my appetite’s lack of discrimination and to look after my stomach occasionally.

[C] When I have been elsewhere than in France and people have courteously inquired whether I want to eat French cooking, I have always laughed at the idea and hastened straight for the sideboards most crowded with foreigners. [B] I am ashamed at the sight of our Frenchmen befuddled by that stupid humour which shies away from fashions which conflict with their own. Once out of their villages they feel like fish out of water. Wherever they go they cling to their ways and curse foreign ones. If they come across a fellow-coutryman in Hungary, they celebrate the event: there they are, hobnobbing and sticking together and condemning every custom in sight as barbarous. And why not barbarous since they are not French! And those are the cleverer ones: as they speak ill of those customs, they have at least noticed them. Most go abroad merely to return. With a morose and taciturn prudence they travel about wrapped up in their cloaks and protecting themselves from the contagion of an unknown clime.

What I have said about them recalls something similar which I have noticed at times among some of our young courtiers. They mix only with their own kind, staring at us with disdain and pity as men from some other world. Strip them of their talk about the mysteries of the court and they are outside their hunting-grounds, as raw and awkward to us as we are to them. It is true what men say: a proper gentleman is a man of parts.

I on the contrary, as one who has had his fill of our customs, do not go looking for Gascons in Sicily – I have left enough of them at home. I look for Greeks, rather, or Persians. I make their acquaintance and study them. That is what I devote myself to and work on. And, what is more, I seem hardly ever to have come across any customs which are not worth quite as much as our own. I am not risking much by that assertion: I have hardly been out of sight of my own weathercocks.110

Meanwhile, most of the companions you chance to meet on the road are more an encumbrance than a pleasure I never latch on to them – even less so nowadays when old age singles me out and sets me somewhat apart from the usual pattern. Either you are putting up with them or they with you. Both awkwardnesses weigh heavy, but the latter seems harsher to me. It is a rare stroke of fortune, but an inestimable pleasure, to have a gentleman who likes to accompany you, a man with manners which conform to your own. I have greatly missed one on all my travels. But such a companion must be selected and secured from the outset. No pleasure has any taste for me when not shared with another: no happy thought occurs to me without my being irritated at bringing it forth alone with no one to offer it to. [C] ‘Si cum hac exceptione detur sapientia ut illam inclusam teneam nec enuntiem, rejiciam.’ [If even wisdom were granted me on condition that I shut it away unspoken, I would reject it.]111 This next author raised that a tone higher: ‘Si contigerit ea vita sapienti ut, omnium return affluentibus copiis, quamvis omnia quœ cognitione digna sunt summo otio secum ipse consideret et contempletur, tarnen si solitudo tanta sit ut hominem videre non possit, excedat e vita.’ [Supposing it were granted to a sage to live in every abundance, his time entirely free to study and reflect upon everything worth knowing: yet if his solitude were such that he could never meet another man he would quit this life.]

[B] I agree with the opinion of Archytas that there would be no pleasure in travelling through the heavens among those great immortal celestial bodies without the presence of a companion.112 Yet it remains better to be alone than in silly boring company. Aristippus preferred to live as an alien everywhere.

Me si fata meis paterentur ducere vitam Auspiciis,

[As for me, if the fates were to allow me to spend my life as I pleased,]113

I would choose to spend it with my arse in the saddle,

visere gestiens, Qua parte debacchentur ignes, Qua nebulœ pluviique rores.

[happy to see where the heat rages, or the clouds or the dripping rain.]

‘Do you not have easier ways of spending your time? What do you lack? Is your house not set in a fine healthy climate; is it not adequately furnished and more than adequately spacious? [C] The King’s Majesty in his splendour more than once put up with it!114 [B] Has your family not left behind many more families whose standards are below it than it has families above it in eminence? Is there something about the place so inordinate and [C] indigestible [B] that it gives you an ulcer,115

quœ te nunc coquat et vexet sub pectote fixa? [and which, rooted in your stomach, burns you and distresses you?]

Where do you think you can ever be without fuss and bother? “Nunquam simpliciter fortuna indulget.” [Fortune never sends unmixed blessings.] You really should realize that nobody is in your way but yourself, and that you will be following yourself about everywhere, and moaning to yourself everywhere,116 for there is no contentment here below except for souls like those of beasts or gods.117 Where can a man expect to find contentment if he is not content when he has such good cause? How many thousands of men are there whose aspirations do not exceed such circumstances as yours? Simply remould your Form: in such a matter you can do anything, whereas in face of Fortune you have no right but to endure. [C] “Nulla placida quies est, nisi quam ratio composait.” [There is no tranquil calm unless soothed by reason.]’118

[B] I can see the reasonableness of such counsel, see it very well. But it would have been quicker and more apposite simply to say to me one thing: ‘Be wise!’ Such a solution as yours lies the other side of wisdom: wisdom makes it and produces it. It is As though a doctor kept yelling at a wretched, languishing patient to feel merry: he would be prescribing a little less stupidly if he said, ‘Get well!’ As for me, I am merely a man [C] with a base Form.119

[B] ‘Be content with what is yours’ (that is, ‘with reason’). That is a sound precept, definite and easy to understand; but sages can no more put it into effect than I can. There is a saying – popular, but appalling in its extent (what is not included in it?) – ‘All things are subject to qualification and [C] limitation.’120

[B] I am well aware that, taken literally, this delight in travelling bears witness to restlessness and inconstancy. But those are indeed our dominant master-qualities. Yes. I admit it. Even in my wishes and dreams I can find nothing to which I can hold fast. The only things I find rewarding (if anything is) are variety and the enjoyment of diversity. When on my travels the very fact that I can stop without hindrance and conveniently make a diversion bolsters me up.

I love living a private life because I do so by my own choice, not because I am unsuited to a public one (which doubtless equally accords with my complexion). I serve my Prince all the more happily because that is the free choice of my judgement and reason, [C] without any private obligation, [B] and because I am not constrained or forced back to it by being unacceptable to all the other parties or disliked by them. And so on. I detest such helpings as necessity carves for me. Any advantage would have me by the throat if I had to rely on it alone.

Alter remus aquas, alter mihi radat arenas. [Let one oar sweep the water and the other sweep the strand.]121

One cord is never enough to hold me in place.

‘There is vanity,’ you say, ‘in such a pastime.’ – Yes. Where is there not? Those fine precepts are all vanity, and all wisdom is vanity: [C] ‘Dominus novit cogitationes sapientium, quoniam vanae sunt.’ [The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.]122 [B] Those exquisite subtleties are only good for sermons: they are themes which seek to drive us into the next world like donkeys. But life is material motion in the body, an activity, by its very essence, imperfect and unruly: I work to serve it on its own terms.

Quisque suos patimur manes. [Each suffers his own torments.]123

[C] ‘Sic est faciendum ut contra naturam universam nihil coritendamus; ea tamen conservata, propriam sequamur.’ [We must so live as not to struggle against Nature in general; having safeguarded such things, we should follow our own nature.]

[B] What is the use of those high philosophical peaks on which no human being can settle and those rules which exceed our practice and our power? I am well aware that people often expound to us ideas about life which neither the speaker nor the hearers have any hope of following or (what is more) any desire. The judge filches a bit of the very same paper on which he has just written the sentence on an adulterer in order to send a billet-doux to the wife of a colleague. [C] The woman you have just been having an illicit tumble with will soon, in your very presence, be screaming harsher condemnations of a similar fault in a friend of hers than Portia would. [B] Some condemn people to death for crimes which they do not actually believe to be even mistakes. When I was a youth I saw a fine gentleman offering to the public, with one hand, poetry excelling in beauty and eroticism both, and with the other, at the same instant, the most cantankerous reformation of theology that the world has had for breakfast for many a long year.124

That is the way humans proceed. We let the laws and precepts go their own way: we take another – not only because of unruly morals but often because of contrary opinions and judgement. Listen to the recital of a philosophical discourse: its invention, eloquence and appositeness at once strike your attention and move your emotions. But there is nothing there which stings or pricks your conscience: it was not addressed to it, was it? Yet Ariston said that neither a bath nor a lecture bears any fruit unless they cleanse you and get the filth off.125 You can linger over the hide, but only after extracting the marrow, just as it is only after we have drunk the wine that we examine the engravings and workmanship of a beautiful goblet.

In all the chambers of the ancient philosophers you will find that the same author, at the same time, publishes rules for temperance and works of love and debauchery. [C] Xenophon wrote against Aristippus’ concept of pleasure while lying in the lap of Clinias. [B] Those were not miraculous conversions sweeping over them in waves. First it is Solon presenting himself in the guise of a lawgiver, and then as himself: at one time he is speaking for the many, at another for himself alone and (certain as he is that he is firmly and totally well) he takes for himself the free and natural rules:

Curentur dubii medicis majoribus ægri! [Let the dangerously ill call in great doctors!]126

[C] Antisthenes allows his sage to like anything he finds appropriate, and to do it in his own fashion without heeding the laws, since he has a better judgement than they do and a greater knowledge of virtue. His disciple Diogenes said that we should counter perturbations by reason; fortune, by courage; laws, by nature.127 [B] It is for tender stomachs that we have restricted, artificial diets: [C] sound ones simply follow the prescriptions of their natural appetite. [B] Thus do our doctors eat melons and drink cool wine while keeping their patients on syrups and pap.

‘I know nothing of their books,’ said Laïs the courtesan, ‘nor of their wisdom and philosophy, but those fellows come knocking at my door as often as anyone.’128 Since our licence always takes us beyond what is lawful and permissible, we have often made the precepts and laws for our lives stricter than universal reason requires.

Nemo satis credit tantum delinquere quantum Permittas.

[Nobody thinks that his own transgressions exceed what is allowable.]129

It would be preferable if there were more proportion between commands and obedience. A target we cannot reach appears unfair. No man is so moral but that, if he submitted his deeds and thoughts to cross-examination by the laws, he would be found worthy of hanging on ten occasions in his lifetime – yes, even the kind of man whom it would be a great scandal to punish and a great injustice to execute.

Olle, quid ad te De cute quid faciat ilk, vel illa sua?

[What concern is it of yours, Ollus, what he does with his own skin and she with hers?]

And one who deserves no praise as a man of virtue [C] and whom philosophy could most justly cause to be flogged [B] may well break no laws, so confused and unfair is the correspondence between law and virtue. We do not care to be decent folk by the standards of God: we could never be so by our own. Human wisdom has never managed to live up to the duties which it has prescribed for itself; and if it had done so, it would have prescribed itself more, further beyond them still, towards which it could continue to strive and aspire, so hostile is our condition to immobility. [C] Man commands himself to be necessarily at fault. It is not very clever of him to tailor his obligations to the standards of a different kind of being. He expects no one to do it, so whom is he prescribing it for? Is it wrong of Man not to do what is impossible for him to do? The very laws which condemn us to be unable blame us for being so.

[B] If the worst comes to the worst, that deformed licence to present themselves in two ways, their actions in one fashion and their rhetoric in another, may be conceded to those who tell of things: it cannot apply to those who tell of themselves as I do my pen must go the same way as my feet. I life lived in society must bear some relationship to other lives. Cato’s virtue was excessively rigorous by the standards of his age; and in a man occupied in governing others and destined to serve the commonwealth, we could say that his justice, if not unjust, was at least vain and unseasonable. [C] My own manners deviate from current morality by hardly more than an inch, yet even that makes me untractable for this age and unsociable. I do not know whether I am unreasonable in losing my taste for the society I frequent, but I do know that it would be unreasonable if I complained that it had lost its taste for me more than I for it.

[B] The virtue allotted to this world’s affairs is a virtue with many angles, crinkles and corners so that it can be applied and joined to our human frailty; it is complex and artificial, not straight, clear-cut, constant, nor purely innocent. To this very day our annals criticize one of our kings for allowing himself to be too naively influenced by the persuasions which his confessor addressed to his conscience.130 Affairs of state have their own bolder precepts:

exeat aula Qui vult esse pius.

[he who would be pious should quit the court.]131

Once I made an assay at using in the service of some political manoeuvrings, such opinions and rules of life as were born in me or instilled into me by education – rough, fresh, unpolished and unpolluted ones, the virtues of a schoolboy or a novice, which I practise, [C] if not [B] conveniently [C] at least surely, [B] in my private life. I found that they were inapplicable and dangerous. Anyone who goes into the throng must be prepared to side-step, to squeeze in his elbows, to dodge to and fro and, indeed, to abandon the straight path according to what he encounters; he must live not so much by his norms but by those of others; not so much according to what he prescribes to himself but to what others prescribe to him, and according to the time, according to the men, according to the negotiations…132

[C] Plato says that anyone who escapes with unsmirched linen from the management of the world’s affairs does so by a miracle. He also says that when he laid it down that his philosopher should rule the state he was not speaking of corrupt polities such as that of Athens (and even less of ones like our own, faced with which even Wisdom would forget her Latin), since a seedling transplanted into a soil very different in character from itself conforms itself to it rather than reforming it.133

[B] If I had thoroughly to prepare myself for such occupations, I know that I would need many changes and adjustments. Even if I could manage it (and why should I not do so, given time and trouble?) I would not want to. The little I have assayed of such a vocation was quite enough to put me off. Sometimes I do feel some temptations towards ambition smouldering in my soul, but I tense myself and obstinately resist.

At tu, Catulle, obstinatus obdura! [Come on Catullus! Be obstinately obdurate!]134

I am rarely summoned: and I just as seldom volunteer. [C] My master qualities, liberty and laziness, are qualities which are diametrically opposed to such a trade. [B] We do not know how to distinguish the faculties of men: they have fine divisions and their boundaries are hard to select. To infer a capacity for the affairs of State from a capacity for private affairs is to make I bad inference. A man may control himself but not others, [C] being able to produce Essays but nothing effective; another [B] may organize a good siege but not a battle he may speak well in private but badly in public or before his prince. Indeed, evidence that he can do one perhaps suggests that he cannot do the other.

[C] I find that higher intellects are hardly less suited to lowlier matters than lowly intellects are to the higher. Who would ever have expected Socrates to have furnished the Athenians with a good laugh at his expense because he was never able to add up the votes of his tribe and report them to the Council?135 The veneration that I feel for the perfections of that great man certainly deserves that it should be his fortune to supply such a magnificent example to excuse my chief imperfections!

[B] Our ability is chopped up into little bits. My own has no breadth, and is also numerically weak. Saturninus said to those who had conferred on him the supreme command: ‘You have lost a fine captain, Comrades, to make a poor general.’

Anyone who, in an ailing time like ours, boasts that he can bring a naïve and pure virtue to this world’s service either has no idea what virtue is, since our opinions are corrupted along with our morals – indeed, just listen to them describing it; listen to most of them vaunting of their deeds and formulating their rules: instead of describing virtue they are describing pure injustice and vice, and they present it, thus falsified, in the education of princes – or else, if he does have some notion of it, he boasts wrongfully and, say what he will, does hundreds of things for which his conscience condemns him. In similar circumstances Seneca’s account of his experience I would readily believe, provided that he would talk to me about it unreservedly. In such straits the most honourable mark of goodness consists in freely acknowledging your defects and those of others, while using your powers to resist and retard the slide towards evil, having to be dragged down that slope, while hoping for improvement and desiring improvement.

During the divisions into which we are fallen, tearing France limb from limb, each man, I notice, strives to defend his cause, but even the best of them with deception and lies. Anyone who wrote bluntly about it would do so inadequately and ill-advisedly, since even the juster party is itself a limb of that rotten, worm-eaten body. Yet in such a body the least affected limb is termed healthy – rightly so: since our qualities are valid only by comparison, civil integrity is measured according to time and place. I would like to see, I must say, Agesilaus praised as follows in Xenophon!

Having been asked by a neighbouring Prince with whom he had formerly been at war for permission to pass through his domains, he granted it to him, affording him passage through the Peleponnesus: and not only did he not take him prisoner nor poison him, despite having him thus at his mercy, but he welcomed him courteously without doing him injury.136

Given the characters of people then, such things were taken for granted: elsewhere, and at other times, men will tell of the noble frankness and magnanimity of that deed! Why, our be-caped baboons of the Collège de Montaigue would laugh at him for it, so little does our French integrity resemble that of the Spartans. We still have men of virtue… but by our norms.137 Whoever has morals fixed to rules above the standards of his time must either distort and blunt his rules or (as I would advise him, rather) draw apart and having nothing to do with us. What would he gain from us?

Egregium sanctumque virum si cerno, bimembri Hoc monstrum puero, et miranti jam sub aratro Piscibus inventis, et fœtœ comparo mulœ.

[When I come across an outstandingly moral man, he seems to me like a kind of freak, like a two child, like fish turning up under an astonished farmer’s ploughshare, or like a pregnant mule.]138

We can regret better times but we cannot escape from the present; we can wish for better men to govern us but we must nevertheless obey those we have. There is perhaps more merit in obeying the bad than the good. While the ghost of the traditional ancient laws of this our monarchy glows in a corner somewhere, you will see me planted there. If those laws should, to our misfortune, become mutually exclusive or contradictory, producing a hard and dubious choice between two factions, my preference would be for hiding and escaping from that tempest. In the meanwhile, Nature may lend me a hand so may the hazards of war.

Between Caesar and Pompey I would have declared myself frankly. But if the choice lay between those three crooks who came after them,139 then I would either have fled into hiding or gone the way the wind blew (which I judge to be legitimate, once reason no longer guides us).

Quo diversus abis? [Where are you heading, so far off course?]140

This padding is rather off my subject. I get lost, but more from licence than carelessness. My ideas do follow on from each other, though sometimes at a distance, and have regard for each other, though somewhat obliquely. [C] I have just looked through one of Plato’s dialogues.141 It is particoloured, a motley of ideas: the top deals with love and all the bottom with rhetoric. They were not afraid of such changes, and have a marvellous charm when letting themselves be blown along by the wind, or appearing to be so. [B] The names of my chapters do not always encompass my subject-matter: often they merely indicate it by some token, like those other [C] titles, Andria or The Eunuch, or like those other [B] names Sylla, Cicero and Torquatus.142

I love the gait of poetry, all jumps and tumblings. [C] Poetry, says Plato, is an art which is light, winged and inspired by daemons.143 There are works of Plutarch in which he forgets his theme, or in which the subject is treated only incidentally, since they are entirely padded out with extraneous matter: witness how he proceeds in The Daemon of Socrates. My God! what beauty there is in such flights of fancy and in such variation, especially when they appear fortuitous and casual. It is the undiligent reader who loses my subject not I. In a corner somewhere you can always find a word or two on my topic, adequate despite being squeezed in tight. [B] I change subject violently and chaotically. [C] My pen and my mind both go a-roaming. [B] If you do not want more dullness you must accept a touch of madness, [C] so say the precepts of our past masters and, even more so, their example. [B] There are hundreds of poets who drag and droop prosaically, but the best of ancient prose – [C] and I scatter prose here no differently from verse – [B] sparkles throughout with poetic power and daring, and presents the characteristics of its frenzy. We must certainly cede to poetry the mastery and preeminence in prattle. [C] The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in rapture, like the gargoyle of a fountain, all that comes to his lips, without weighing it or chewing it; from him there escape things of diverse hue, contrasting substance and jolting motion.144 Plato himself is entirely poetic; and the scholars say that the ancient theology was poetry, as also the first philosophy.145 Poetry is the original language of the gods.

[B] I intend my subject-matter to stand out on its own: it can show well enough where changes occur, where the beginnings are and the ends, and where it picks up again, without an intricate criss-cross of words, linking things and stitching them together for the benefit of weak and inattentive ears, and without my glossing myself. Where is the author who would rather not be read at all than to be dozed through or dashed through? [C] ‘Nihil est tam utile, quod in transitu prosit.’ [Nothing really useful can be casually treated.]146 If taking up books were to mean taking them in; if glancing at them were to mean seeing into them; and skipping through them to mean grasping them: then I would be wrong to make myself out to be quite so totally ignorant as I am.

[B] Since I cannot hold my reader’s attention by my weight, manco male [it is no bad thing] if I manage to do so by my muddle. ‘Yes, but [C] afterwards [B] he will be sorry he spent time over it.’ I suppose so: but still he would have done it! And there are humours so made that they despise anything which they can understand and which will rate me more highly when they do not know what I mean. They will infer the depth of my meaning from its obscurity – a quality which (to speak seriously now) I hate [C] most strongly; [B] I would avoid it if there were a way of [C] avoiding [B] myself.147 [B] Aristotle somewhere congratulates himself on affecting it: a depraved [C] affectation!148

Because the very frequent division into chapters which I first adopted seemed to me to break the reader’s attention before it was aroused and to loosen its hold so that it did not bother for so slight a cause to apply itself and to concentrate, I started making longer chapters which require a decision to read them and time set aside for them. In this kind of occupation, whoever is not prepared to give a man one hour is prepared to give him nothing; and you do nothing for a man if you only do it while doing something else. Besides I may perhaps have some personal quality which obliges me to half-state matters and to speak confusedly and incompatibly.

[B] It remains for me to add that I wish no good to that chattering buffoon of a reason, and that, while those fantastic speculations and those oh-so-subtle notions may contain some truth, I find it too dear and too troublesome.149 I, on the contrary, strive to give worth to vanity itself – [C] to doltishness – if it affords me pleasure, [B] and I follow my natural inclinations without accounting for them thus closely.

– I have ‘already seen elsewhere ruined palaces and sculptures of things in heaven and on earth: and it is ever the work of Man’. That is quite true. Yet, however often I were to revisit the tomb of that great and mighty City, I would feel wonder and awe. We are enjoined to care for the dead: and since infancy I was brought up with those dead. I knew about the affairs of Rome long before those of my family; I knew of the Capitol and its site long before I knew of the Louvre, and of the Tiber before the Seine. My head was full of the characters and fortunes of Lucullus, Metellus and Scipio rather than of any of our own men. – ‘They are dead!’ So is my father, every bit as dead as they: in eighteen years he has gone as far from life and me as they have done in sixteen hundred, yet I do not cease to cherish his memory nor experience his love and fellowship in a perfect union, fully alive. Indeed, of my own humour, it is to the dead that I am most dutiful: since they can no longer help themselves I consider that they need my help the more. It is precisely then that gratitude shines forth resplendent. I favour is less richly bestowed when it can be returned or reflected back.

When Arcesilaus was visiting the [C] ailing Ctesibius,150 [B] he realized that he was badly off, so he gave him money, slipping it under his pillow. By concealing it from him he was also giving him a quittance from a debt of gratitude. Those who have deserved my love and thanks have never lost anything for being no longer with me: I have repaid them better and more punctiliously when they were absent and unaware. I speak all the more affectionately of those I love when they no longer have any way of knowing it. So I have begun dozens of quarrels in defence of Pompey or the cause of Brutus. Acquaintanceship still endures between us; why, even things present are grasped only by a faculty of the mind.

Finding myself useless for this present age I fall back on that one. I am such a silly baboon about it that the state of Ancient Rome, free and just and flourishing (for I like neither its birth nor its decline), is of passionate concern to me. That is why I could never so often revisit the site of their streets and their palaces, and their ruins stretching down to the Antipodes, without lingering over them. [C] Is it by nature or an aberrant imagination that the sight of places which we know to have been frequented or inhabited by those whose memory we hold dear moves us somewhat more than hearing a recital of their deeds or reading their writings?151 ‘Tanta vis admonitionis inest in locis. Et id quidem in hac urbe infinitum: quacunque enim ingredimur in aliquam historiam vestigium ponimus.’ [Such powers of evocation are inherent in those places […] And in this City there is no end to them: wherever we go we walk over history.]

[B] I like thinking about their faces, their bearing and their clothing. I mutter their great names between my teeth and make them resound in my ears. [C] ‘Ego illos veneror et tantis nominibus semper assurgo.’ [I venerate them, and on hearing such names I leap always to my feet.]152 [B] Whenever there are qualities in things which are great and awesome, I feel awe for their ordinary ones as well. I would love to see those men talking, walking and eating. It would be ungrateful to neglect the remains and ghosts of so many honoured and valiant men whom I have watched live and die and who, by their example, provide us with instructions in what is good if we know how to follow them.

And then this very Rome, the one that we see now, deserves our love as having been so long and by so many titles an ally of our Crown and the only city common to all men and universal. The sovereign magistrate who rules there is similarly acknowledged everywhere; it is the mother city of all Christian peoples: both Frenchman and Spaniard are at home there. To become princes of that state you merely need to belong to Christendom, no matter where. There is nowhere here below upon which the heavens have poured influences so constantly favourable. Even in ruins it is glorious and stately:

[C] Laudandis preciosior ruinis. [More precious for her ruins which deserve our praise.]153

[B] Even in her tomb she still retains the signs and ghost of empire:

[C] ‘ut palam sit uno in loco gaudentis opus esse naturae’ [so that it should be obvious that in this one place Nature delights in her work].

[B] A man might condemn himself and inwardly rebel for feeling stirred by so vain a pleasure. Yet our humours, if they do afford pleasure, are not too vain; whatever they may be, if they afford constant delight to a man capable of common feelings, I would be of no mind to feel sorry for him.

I am deeply indebted to Fortune in that, up to present, she has done me no outrage, [C] at least, none above what I can bear.154 [B] (Might it not be her style to leave in peace those who do not pester her?)

Quanto quisque sibi plura negaverit, A Diis, plura feret. Nil cupientium Nudus castra peto…

… Multa petentibus Desunt multa.

[The more a man denies himself, the more he will receive from the gods. I am naked but put myself in the camp of those who want nothing… Those who want much, lack much.]155

If she continues she will dispatch me content and well satisfied:

nihil supra Deos lacesso.

[for nothing more do I harass the gods.]

But watch out for the snag! Hundreds founder within the harbour.

I can easily find consolation over what will happen here below once I am gone: present concerns keep me busy enough:

fortunœ cœtera mando. [the rest I entrust to Fortune.]

Besides I do not have that strong link which is said to bind a man to the future by sons who bear his name and rank – and if that is what makes sons desirable I should perhaps desire them all the less: of myself I am only too bound to this world and this life.156 I am content to be at grips with Fortune through attributes which are strictly necessary to my being without extending her jurisdiction over me in other ways; and I have never thought that not having sons made life less perfect and less satisfying. There are advantages too in the vocation of childlessness. Sons are to be counted among things which do not have much to make them desired, especially at this moment when it would be hard to make them good – [C] ‘Bona jam nec nasci licet, ita corrupta sunt semina’ [Good things are not born now: the seed is so corrupt]157 – but which, once acquired, are rightly to be regretted by those who lose them.

He who left me responsible for my household forecast that I would ruin it, seeing how little stay-at-home my humour is. He was wrong. Here I am, just as I inherited it, or perhaps a little better off, yet without appointment or benefice.

Howbeit, though Fortune has done me no unusually violent outrage, neither has she done me any favour. Whatever gifts of hers are to be found in our home have been there for a hundred years before my time. Not one solid essential good thing do I personally owe to her generosity. To me she has vouchsafed some honorary titular favours, all wind and no substance; and (God knows!) she did not so much vouchsafe them to me as offer them to me – to me who am wholly material, who seek satisfaction in realities (solid ones at that) and who (if I dared to admit it) would scarcely find covetousness any less pardonable than ambition; pain, any less to be avoided than disgrace; health, any less desirable than learning; and wealth than noble rank. Among her vain favours I have none more pleasing to that silly humour in me which feeds on it than an authentic Bull of Roman Citizenship which was granted to me recently when I was there, resplendent with seals and gilded letters, granted moreover with all gracious generosity.158

Since they are given in a variety of styles, with more favour or less, and since before I had seen one myself I would very much like to have been shown one drawn up in due form, I want to transcribe it here in extenso, to satisfy anyone suffering from the same curiosity as I had.159

HORATIUS MAXIMUS, MARTUS CECIUS, ALEXANDER MUTUS, CONSERVATORS OF OUR KINDLY CITY, HAVING REPORTED UNTO THE SENATE CONCERNING THE GRANTING OF ROMAN CITIZENSHIP TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS MICHAEL MONTANUS, KNIGHT OF SAINT MICHAEL AND GENTLEMAN-IN-WAITING TO THE MOST CHRISTIAN KING: THE ROMAN SENATE AND PEOPLE HEREBY DECREE:

Whereas by Ancient custom and law, men have ever been received among us with eagerness and ardour when, outstanding for their virtue and nobility, they have either done great service to our Republic and enhanced it or may so do in the future: We, aroused by the authority and example of our Forefathers, decree that we should imitate and maintain so noble a custom Wherefore: whereas the illustrious Michael Montanus, Knight of Saint Michael and Gentleman-in-Waiting to the Most. Christian King, is most devoted to the name of Rome and is found most worthy, by the reputation and the splendour of his family and by the merit of his own virtue, to be admitted to Roman Citizenship by the highest judgement of the Roman People and Senate: it has pleased the SPQR that the most illustrious Michael Montanus, in all things most honoured, and most dear to this renowned People, be inscribed, him and his descendants, as Roman Citizens, and be further honoured by all those rewards and distinctions which such enjoy who are Roman Citizens and Patricians by birth or by legal processes duly thereanent. Which doing, the SPQR do not esteem that they are granting him these Rights of Citizenship of their bounty so much as repaying a debt, granting him no greater benefit than he has conferred upon them by accepting this their Citizenship, by which this their City is particularly honoured and enhanced.

Which Senatusconsultum the aforesaid Conservators, by their authority, hereby cause to be immatriculated by the scribes of the Roman Senate and People and deposited in the Roman Curia; and have caused this Document to be duly drawn up, sealed with the accustomed seal of the City. In the Year from the Foundation of the City Two Thousand Three Hundred and Thirty-one, and in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Five Hundred and Eighty-one: The Third of the Ides of March.

HORATIUS FUSCUS: Scribe to the Holy Senate and People of Rome; VINCENTIUS MARTHOLUS: Scribe to the Holy Senate and People of Rome.

Not being the citizen of any city, I am delighted to have been made one of the noblest City there ever was or ever shall be.

If others were to look attentively into themselves as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of emptiness and tomfoolery. I cannot rid myself of them without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in them, each as much as the other; but those who realize this get off, as I know, a little more cheaply.

That commonly approved practice of looking elsewhere than at our own self has served our affairs well! Our self is an object full of dissatisfaction: we can see nothing there but wretchedness and vanity. So as not to dishearten us, Nature has very conveniently cast the action of our sight outwards. We are swept on downstream, but to struggle back towards our self against the current is a painful movement; thus does the sea, when driven against itself, swirl back in confusion. Everyone says: ‘Look at the motions of the heavens, look at society, at this man’s quarrel, that man’s pulse, this other man’s will and testament’ – in other words always look upwards or downwards or sideways, or before or behind you. That commandment given us in ancient times by that god at Delphi was contrary to all expectation: ‘Look back into your self; get to know your self; hold on to your self.’ Bring back to your self your mind and your will which are being squandered elsewhere; you are draining and frittering your self away. Consolidate your self; rein your self back. They are cheating you, distracting you, robbing you of your self.160

Can you not see that this world of ours keeps its gaze bent ever inwards and its eyes ever open to contemplate itself? It is always vanity in your case, within and without, but a vanity which is less, the less it extends.

Except you alone, O Man, said that god, each creature first studies its own self, and, according to its needs, has limits to its labours and desires. Not one is as empty and needy as you, who embrace the universe: you are the seeker with no knowledge, the judge with no jurisdiction and, when all is done, the jester of the farce.