3

3. On three kinds of social intercourse

[One of the most personal of the chapters so far. The ‘trois commerces’ examined by Montaigne are the three forms of social intercourse which enrich his private life and make it worth living: 1) loving-friendship – even though ordinary friendships become rather insipid when judged against his perfect friendship with La Boëtie; 2) loving relationships with ‘ladies’, beautiful and, if possible, intelligent; 3) reading books. The one adjective common to the friends, women and books discussed here and in ‘On books’ is honnête (honourable and decent). Montaigne’s ideal social intercourse would engage the whole man, body and soul. By themselves none of these three fully does so, and the first two engage the body and the soul in widely differing proportions, while books hardly engage the body at all.

Montaigne speaks of women in a gruffly humorous way, but it will be noted that the reading he would concede to them corresponds closely to what he says of his own reading in the chapter ‘On books’.

There is an important insistence that sexual intercourse is more than a physical ‘necessity’ and so not merely a hunger to be satisfied physically without the involvement of the higher faculties.

The disease Montaigne caught from prostitutes was syphilis.]

[B] We should not nail ourselves so strongly to our humours and complexions. Our main talent lies in knowing how to adapt ourselves to a variety of customs. To keep ourselves bound by the bonds of necessity to one single way of life is to be, but not to live. Souls are most beautiful when they show most variety and flexibility. [C] Here is a testimony which honours Cato the Elder: ‘Huic versatile ingenium sic pariter ad omnia fuit, ut natum ad id unum diceres, quodcumque ageret.’ [His mind was so versatile, and so ready for anything, that whatever he did you could say he was born for that alone].1

[B] If it was for me to train myself my way, there would be no mould in which I would wish to be set without being able to throw it off. Life is a rough, irregular progress with a multitude of forms. It is to be no friend of yourself – and even less master of yourself – to be a slave endlessly following yourself, so beholden to your predispositions that you cannot stray from them nor bend them. I am saying this now because I cannot easily escape from the state of my own Soul, which is distressing in so far as she does not usually know how to spend her time without getting bogged down nor how to apply herself to anything except fully and intensely. No matter how trivial the subject you give her she likes to magnify it and to amplify it until she has to work at it with all her might. For this reason her idleness is an activity which is painful to me and which damages my health. Most minds have need of extraneous matter to make them limber up and do their exercises: mine needs rather to sojorn and to settle down: ‘Vitia otii negotio discutienda sunt’ [We must dispel the vices of leisure by our work];2 my own mind’s principal and most difficult study is the study of itself. [C] For it, books are the sort of occupation which seduces it from such study. [B] With the first thoughts which occur to it it becomes agitated and makes a trial of its strength in all directions, practising its control, sometimes in the direction of force, sometimes in the direction of order and gracefulness, [C] controlling, moderating and fortifying itself. [B] It has the wherewithal to awaken its faculties by itself: Nature has given it (as she has given them all) enough matter of its own for its use and enough subjects for it to discover and pass judgement upon.

[C] For anyone who knows how to probe himself and to do so vigorously, reflection is a mighty endeavour and a full one: I would rather forge my soul than stock it up. No occupation is more powerful, or more feeble, than entertaining one’s own thoughts – depending on what kind of soul it is. The greatest of souls make it their vocation, ‘quibus vivere est cogitare’ [for them, to think is to live];3 there is nothing we can do longer than think, no activity to which we can devote ourselves more regularly nor more easily: Nature has granted the soul that prerogative. It is the work of the gods, says Aristotle, from which springs their beatitude and our own.4 Reading, by its various subjects, particularly serves to arouse my discursive reason: it sets not my memory to work but my judgement. [B] So, for me, few conversations are arresting unless they are vigorous and powerful. It is true that grace and beauty occupy me and fulfil me as much or more as weight and profundity. And since I doze off during any sort of converse and lend it only the outer bark of my attention, it often happens that during polite conversation (with its flat, well-trodden sort of topics) I say stupid things unworthy of a child, or make silly, ridiculous answers, or else I remain stubbornly silent which is even more inept and rude. I have a mad way of withdrawing into myself as well as a heavy, puerile ignorance of everyday matters. To those two qualities I owe the fact that five or six true anecdotes can be told about me as absurd as about any man whatsoever.

Now to get on with what I was saying: this awkward complexion of mine renders me fastidious about mixing with people: I need to handpick my companions; and it also renders me awkward for ordinary activities. We live and deal with the common people; if their commerce wearies us, if we disdain to apply ourselves to their humble, common souls – and the humble, common ones are often as well-governed as the most refined [C] (all wisdom being insipid which does not adapt to the common silliness) – [B] then we must stop dealing with our own affairs and anyone else’s: both public and personal business involves us with such people. The most beautiful motions of our soul are those which are least tense and most natural: and the best of its occupations are the least forced. O God! What good offices does Wisdom do for those whose desires she ranges within their powers! No knowledge is more useful. ‘According as you can’ was the refrain and favourite saying of Socrates, a saying of great substance.5 We must direct our desires and settle them on the things which are easiest and nearest. Is it not an absurd humour for me to be out of harmony with the hundreds of men to whom my destiny joins me and whom I cannot manage without, in order to restrict myself to one or two people who are beyond my ken? Or is it not rather a mad desire for something I cannot get?

My mild manners, which are the enemies of all sharpness and contentiousness, may easily have freed me from the burden of envy and unfriendliness: never did man give more occasion – I do not say to be loved but certainly not to be hated? But the lack of warmth in my converse has rightly robbed me of the goodwill of many, who can be excused for interpreting it differently, in a worse sense.

Most of all I am able to make and keep exceptional and considered friendships, especially since I seize hungrily upon any acquaintanceship which corresponds to my tastes. I put myself forward and throw myself into them so eagerly that I can hardly fail to make attachments and to leave my mark wherever I go. I have often had a happy experience of this. In commonplace friendships I am rather barren and cold, for it is not natural to me to proceed except under full sail. Besides, the fact that as a young man I was brought to appreciate the delicious savour of one single perfect friendship has genuinely made the others insipid to me and impressed on my faculty of perception that (as one ancient writer said) friendship is a companiable, not a gregarious, beast.6 I also, by nature, find it hard to impart myself by halves, with limitations and with that suspicious vassal-like prudence prescribed to us for our commerce with those multiple and imperfect friendships7 – prescribed in our time above all, when you cannot talk to the world in general except dangerously or falsely.

Yet I can clearly see that anyone like me whose aim is the good things of life (I mean those things which are of its essence) must flee like the plague from such moroseness and niceness of humour. What I would praise would be a soul with many storeys, one of which knew how to strain and relax; a soul at ease wherever fortune led it; which could chat with a neighbour about whatever he is building, his hunting or his legal action, and take pleasure in conversing with a carpenter or a gardener. I envy those who can come down to the level of the meanest on their staff and make conversation with their own servants. [C] I have never liked Plato’s advice to talk always like a master to our domestics, without jests or intimacy, whether addressing menservants or maidservants.8 For, apart from what my own reason tells me, it is ill-bred and unjust to give such value to a trivial privilege of Fortune: the most equitable polities seem to me to be those which allow the least inequality between servants and masters.

[B] Other men study themselves in order to wind their minds high and send them forth: I do so in order to bring mine lower and lay it down. It is vitiated only when it reaches out:

Narras, et genus Æaci, Et pugnata sacro bella sub Ilio:Quo Chium pretio cadum Mercemur, quis aquam temperet ignibus, Quo præbente domum, et quota, Pelignis caream frigoribus, taces.

[You sing of Aeacus’ line and the wars beneath the sacred walls of Ilium: but you do not say how much I must pay for a jar of Chian wine, who will heat my water on his fire, where I shall find shelter and when I shall escape from the cold of the Pelignian mountains.]9

Thus, just as Spartan valour needed moderating by the gentle gracious playing of flutes to calm it down in war lest it cast itself into rashness and frenzy10 (whereas all other peoples normally employ shrill sounds and powerful voices to stir and inflame the hearts of their warriors), so it seems to me that, in exercising our minds, we for the most part – contrary to normal practice – have greater need of lead-weights than of wings, of cold repose rather than hot agitation.

Above all, to my mind, it is to act like a fool to claim to be in the know amidst those who are not, and to be ever speaking guardedly – ‘favellar in punta di forchetta’ [speaking daintily, ‘with the prongs of your fork’]. You must come down to the level of those you are with, sometimes even affecting ignorance. Thrust forceful words and subtleties aside: when dealing with ordinary folk it is enough if you maintain due order. Meanwhile, if they want you to, creep along at ground-level. That is the stone which scholars frequently trip up over. They are always parading their mastery of their subject and scattering broadcast whatever they have read. Nowadays they have funnelled so much of it into the ears of the ladies in their drawing-rooms that, even though those ladies of ours have retained none of the substance, they look as though they have: on all sorts of topics and subjects, no matter how menial or commonplace, they employ a style of speaking and writing which is newfangled and erudite:

Hoc sermone pavent, hoc iram, gaudia, curas, Hoc cuncta effundunt animi secreta; quid ultra? Concumbunt docte.

[This is the style in which they express their fears, their anger, their joy and their cares. This is the style in which they pour forth all their secrets; why, they even lie with you eruditely.]11

They cite Plato and St Thomas Aquinas for things which the first passer-by could serve to support. That doctrine which they have learned could not reach their minds so it has stayed on their tongues. However well-endowed they are, they will, if they trust me, be content to make us value the natural riches proper to them. They hide and drape their own beauties under borrowed ones. There is great simpleness in such smothering of their own light so as to shine with borrowed rays; they are dead and buried under artifice: [C] ‘De capsula totae.’ [All out of the clothes-press.]12

[B] That is because they do not know enough about themselves: there is nothing in the whole world as beautiful; they it is who should be lending honour to art and beauty to cosmetics. What more do they want than to live loved and honoured? They have enough, and know enough, to do that. All that is needed is a little arousing and enhancing of the qualities which are in them. When I see them saddled with rhetoric, judicial astrology, logic and such-like vain and useless trash, I begin to fear that the men who counsel them to do so see it as a way of of having a pretext for manipulating them. For what other excuse can I find for for them?

It suffices that ladies (without our having to tell them how) can attune the grace of their eyes to gaiety, severity and gentleness; season. ‘No! No!’ with rigour, doubt or favour; and seek no hidden meanings in the speeches with which we court them. With knowledge like that it is they who wield the big stick and dominate the dominies and their schools.

Should it nevertheless irk them to lag behind us in anything whatsoever; should they want a share in our books out of curiosity: then poetry is a pastime rightly suited to their needs: it is a frivolous, subtle art, all disguise and chatter and pleasure and show, like they are. They will also draw a variety of benefits from history; and in philosophy – the part which helps us to live well – they will find such arguments as train them to judge of our humours and our attributes, to shield them from our deceptions, to control the rashness of their own desires, to cultivate their freedom and prolong the pleasure of this life, and to bear with human dignity the inconstancy of a suitor, the moroseness of a husband and the distress of wrinkles and the passing years. That sort of thing.13

That – at most – is the share of learning that I would assign to them.

Some natures are withdrawn, enclosed and private. The proper essence of my own form lies in imparting things and in putting them forth: I am all in evidence; all of me is exposed; I was born for company and loving relationships. The solitude which I advocate is, above all, nothing but the bringing of my emotions and thoughts back to myself, restricting and restraining not my wandering footsteps but my anxiety and my desires, abandoning disquiet about external things and fleeing like death from all slavery and obligation, [C] and running away not so much from the throng of people as from the throng of affairs.

[B] To tell the truth, localized solitude makes me reach out and extend myself more: I throw myself into matters of State and into the whole universe more willingly when I am alone. In a crowd at the Louvre I hold back and withdraw into my skin; crowds drive me back into myself and my thoughts are never more full of folly, more licentious and private than in places dedicated to circumspection and formal prudence. It is not our folly which makes me laugh: it is our wisdom.

I am not by complexion hostile to the jostlings of the court: I have spent part of my life there and am so made that I can be happy in large groups provided that it be at intervals and at my own choosing. But that lax judgement I am speaking of forces me to bind myself to solitude even in my own home, in the midst of a crowded household which is among the most visited. I meet plenty of people there, but rarely those whom I love to converse with; and I reserve an unusual degree of liberty there for myself and for others. There we have called a truce with all etiquette, welcomings and escortings and other such painful practices decreed by formal courtesy. (Oh what servile and distressing customs!) Everybody goes his own way; anyone who wants to can think his own thoughts: I remain dumb, abstracted and inward-looking – no offence to my guests.

I am seeking the companionship and society of such men as we call honourable and talented: my ideal of those men makes me lose all taste for the others. It is, when you reflect on it, the rarest of all our forms; and it is a form which is mainly owed to nature. The ends of intercourse with such men are simply intimacy, the frequenting of each other and discussion – exercising our souls with no other gain. In our conversation any topic will do: I do not worry if they lack depth or weight: there is always the grace and the appropriateness: everything in it is coloured by ripe and sustained judgement mingled with frankness, goodwill, gaiety and affection. Our minds do not merely show their force and beauty on the subject of entailed property or our kings’ business: they show it just as well in our private discussions together. I recognize my kind of men by their very silences or their smiles; and I perhaps discover them better at table than in their workrooms. Hippomachus said that he could tell a good wrestler simply by seeing him walk down the street.14

If Erudition wants to mingle in our discussions, then she will not be rejected, though she must not be, as she usually is, professorial, imperious and unmannerly, but courting approval, herself ready to learn. We are merely seeking a pastime: when the time comes to be lectured to and preached at we will go and seek her on her throne. Let her be kind enough to come down to us on this occasion, please! For, useful and desirable as she is, I presume that if we had to we could get on quite well in her absence and achieve our effect without her. A well-endowed Soul, used to dealing with men, spontaneously makes herself totally agreeable. Art is but the register and accounts of the products of such souls.

There is for me another delightful kind of converse: that with [C] beautiful and [B] honourable women: [C] ‘Nam nos quoque oculos eruditos habemus.’ [For we too have well-taught eyes.]15 [B] Though there is less here for our souls to enjoy than in the first kind, our physical senses, which play a greater part in this one, restore things to a proportion very near to the other – though for me not an equal one. But it is a commerce where we should remain a bit on our guard, especially men like me over whom the body has a lot of power. I was scalded once or twice in my youth and suffered all the ragings which the poets say befall men who inordinately and without judgement let go of themselves in such matters. It is true that I got a beating which taught me a lesson:

Quicunque Argolica de classe Capharea fugit, Semper ab Euboicis vela retorquet aquis.

[Anyone in the Grecian fleet who escaped from that shipwreck on the promontory of Caphareus ever thereafter turns his sails away from the waters of Euboea.]16

It is madness to fix all our thoughts on it and to engage in it with a frenzied singleminded passion. On the other hand to get involved in it without love or willing to be bound, like actors, so as to play the usual part expected from youth, contributing nothing of your own but your words, is indeed to provide for your safety; but it is very cowardly, like a man who would jettison his honour, goods and pleasure from fear of danger. For one thing is certain: those who set such a snare can expect to gain nothing by it which can affect or satisfy a soul of any beauty. We must truly have desired any woman we wish truly to enjoy possessing; I mean that, even though fortune should unjustly favour play-acting – as often happens, since there is not one woman, no matter how ugly she may be, who does not think herself worth loving [C] and who does not think herself attractive for her laugh, her gestures or for being the right age, since none of them is universally ugly any more than universally beautiful. (When the daughters of the Brahmans have nothing else to commend them, the town-crier calls the people together in the market-place expressly for them to show off their organs of matrimony to see whether they at least can be worth a husband to them.) [B] It follows that there is not one who fails to let herself be convinced by the first oath of devotion sworn by her suitor. Now from the regular routine treachery of men nowadays there necessarily results what experience already shows us: to escape us, women turn in on themselves and have recourse to themselves or to other women; or else they, on their side, follow the example we give them, play their part in the farce and join in the business without passion concern or love. [C] ‘Neque affectui suo aut alieno obnoxiae’ [Beholden to no love, their own or anyone else’s];17 following the conviction of Lysias in Plato and reckoning that the less we love them the more usefully and agreeably they can devote themselves to it. [B] It will go as in comedies: the audience will have as much pleasure as the comedians, or more.

As for me, I no more know Venus without Cupid than motherhood without children: they are things whose essences are interdependent and necessary to each other. So such cheating splashes back on the man who does it. The affaire costs him hardly anything, but he gets nothing worthwhile out of it either.

Those who turned Venus into a goddess considered that her principal beauty was not a matter of the body but of the spirit: yet the ‘beauty’ such men are after is not simply not human, it is not even bestial. The very beasts do not desire it so gross and so earth-bound: we can see that imagination and desire often set beasts on heat and arouse them before their body does; we can see that beasts of both sexes choose and select the object of their desires from among the herd and that they maintain long affectionate relationships. Even beasts which are denied physical powers by old age still quiver, whinny and tremble with love. We can see them full of hope and fire before copulation, and, once the body has played its part, still tickling themselves with the sweet memory of it; some we see which swell with pride as they make their departure and which produce songs of joy and triumph, being tired but satisfied. A beast which merely wished to discharge some natural necessity from its body would have no need to bother another beast with such careful preparations: we are not talking about feeding some gross and lumpish appetite.18

Being a man who does not ask to be thought better than I am, I will say this about the errors of my youth: I rarely lent myself to venal commerce with prostitutes, not only because of the danger [C] to my health (though even then I did not manage to escape a couple of light anticipatory doses) [B] but also because I despised it. I wanted to sharpen the pleasure by difficulties, by yearning and by a kind of glory; I liked the style of the Emperor Tiberius (who in his love-affairs was attracted more by modesty and rank than by any other quality)19 and the humour of Flora the courtesan (who was also attracted by a dictator, a consul or censor, delighting in the official rank of her lovers). Pearls and brocade certainly add to the pleasure; so do titles and retainers. Moreover I set a high value on wit, provided however that the body was not wanting; for if one of those two qualities had to be lacking, I must admit in all conscience that I would have chosen to make do without the wit; it has use in better things. But where love is concerned – subject which is mainly connected with sight and touch – you can achieve something without the witty graces but nothing without the bodily ones.

Beauty is the true privilege of noblewomen. [C] It is so much more proper to them than ours is to us men, that even though ours requires slightly different traits, at its highest point it is boyish and beardless, and therefore confounded with theirs. They say that in the place of the Grand Seigneur males chosen to serve him for their beauty – and they are countless in number – are sent away at twenty-two at the latest.20 [B] Reasoning powers, wisdom and the offices of loving-friendship are rather to be found in men: that is why they are in charge of world affairs.

Those two forms of converse21 depend on chance and on other people. The first is distressingly rare, the second withers with age, so they could not have adequately provided for the needs of my life. Converse with books (which is my third form) is more reliable and more properly our own. Other superior endowments it concedes to the first two: its own share consists in being constantly and easily available with its services. This converse is ever at my side throughout my life’s course and is everywhere present. It consoles me in my old age and in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever the pain is not too masterful and extreme. To distract me from morose thought I simply need to have recourse to books; they can easily divert me to them and rob me of those thoughts. And yet there is no mutiny when they see that I only seek them for want of other benefits which are more real, more alive, more natural: they always welcome me with the same expression.

It is all very well, we say, for a man to go on foot when he leads a ready horse by the bridle! And our James, King of Naples, manifested a kind of austerity which was still delicate and vacillating, when, young, handsome and healthy, he had himself wheeled about the land on a bier, lying, on a cheap feather-pillow, clad in a robe of grey cloth with a bonnet to match, followed meanwhile by great regal pomp with all sorts of litters and horses to hand, and by officers and noblemen.22 ‘No need to pity an invalid who has a remedy up his coat-sleeve!’ All the profit which I draw from books consists in experiencing and applying that proverb (which is a very true one). In practice I hardly use them more than those who are quite unacquainted with them. I enjoy them as misers do riches: because I know I can always enjoy them whenever I please. My soul is satisfied and contented by this right of possession. In war as in peace I never travel without books. Yet days and even months on end may pass without my using them. ‘I will read them soon,’ I say, ‘or tomorrow; or when I feel like it.’ Thus the time speeds by and is gone, but does me no harm; for it is impossible to describe what comfort and peace I derive from the thought that they are there beside me, to give me pleasure whenever I want it, or from recognizing how much succour they bring to my life. It is the best protection which I have found for our human journey and I deeply pity men of intelligence who lack it. I on the other hand can accept any sort of pastime, no matter how trifling, because I have this one which will never fail me.

At home I slip off to my library a little more often; it is easy for me to oversee my household from there. I am above my gateway and have a view of my garden, my chicken-run, my backyard and most parts of my house. There I can turn over the leaves of this book or that, a bit at a time without order or design. Sometimes my mind wanders off, at others I walk to and fro, noting down and dictating these whims of mine.

[C] It is on the third storey of a tower. The first constitutes my chapel; the second, a bed-chamber with a dressing-room, where I often sleep when I want to be alone. Above that there is a large drawing-room. It was formerly the most useless place in my house: I spend most days of my life there, and most hours of each day, but I am never there at night. It leads on to quite an elegant little chamber which can take a fire in winter and agreeably lets in the light. If I feared the bother as little as the expense – and the bother drives me away from any task – I could erect a level gallery on either side, a hundred yards long and twelve yards wide, having found all the walls built (for some other purpose) at the required height. Every place of retreat needs an ambulatory. My thoughts doze off if I squat them down. My wit will not budge if my legs are not moving – which applies to all who study without books.

My library is round in shape, squared off only for the needs of my table and chair; as it curves round it offers me at a glance every one of my books ranged on five shelves all the way along. It has three splendid and unhampered views and a circle of free space sixteen yards in diameter. I am less continuously there in winter since my house is perched on a hill (hence its name) and no part of it is more exposed to the wind than that one. By being rather hard to get at and a bit out of the way it pleases me, partly for the sake of the exercise and partly because it keeps the crowd from me. There I have my seat. I assay making my dominion over it absolutely pure, withdrawing this one corner from all intercourse, filial, conjugal and civic. Everywhere else I have but a verbal authority, one essentially impure. Wretched the man (to my taste) who has nowhere in his house where he can be by himself, pay court to himself in private and hide away! Ambition well rewards its courtiers by keeping them always on display like a statue in the market-place: ‘Magna servitus est magna fortuna.’ [A great destiny is great slavery.]23 They cannot even find privacy on their privy! I have never considered any of the austerities of life which our monks delight in to be harsher than the rule that I have noted in some of their foundations: to be perpetually with somebody else and to be surrounded by a crowd of people no matter what they are doing. And I find that it is somewhat more tolerable to be always alone than never able to be so.

[B] If anyone says to me that to use the Muses as mere playthings and pastimes is to debase them, then he does not know as I do the value of pleasure, [C] plaything or pastime. [B] I could almost say that any other end is laughable. I live from day to day; and, saving your reverence, I live only for myself. My plans stop there. In youth I studied in order to show off; later, a little, to make myself wiser; now I do it for amusement, never for profit. A silly spendthrift humour that once I had for furnishing myself with books, [C] not to provide for my needs but three paces beyond that, [B] so as to paper my walls with them as decorations, I gave up long ago.

Books have plenty of pleasant qualities for those who know how to select them. But there is no good without ill. The pleasure we take in them is no purer or untarnished than any other. Reading has its disadvantages – and they are weighty ones: it exercises the soul, but during that time the body (my care for which I have not forgotten) remains inactive and grows earth-bound and sad. I know of no excess more harmful to me in my declining years, nor more to be avoided.

There you have my three favourite private occupations. I make no mention of the ones I owe to the world through my obligations to the state.