35

35. On three good wives

[A chapter which in some ways is a pendant to II, 10, ‘On books’. History, true history, can be a source of both aesthetic delight and of moral profit. It is potentially a valuable alternative to moral fiction, to tales (such as those of Boccaccio). Montaigne’s preoccupation with great-souled suicides in the Stoic mould is rarely more visible than in this chapter; it is given prominence by coming near the end of Book II and so having (until Book III was published) the air of leading up to the conclusion.]

[A] As every man knows, they are not counted in dozens, especially in performing their matrimonial obligations: for marriage is a business full of so many thorny conditions that a woman cannot keep her intentions in it for long. Even the men (who are there under slightly better terms) find it hard to do so.

[B] The touchstone of a good marriage, the real test, concerns the time that the association lasts, and whether it has been constant – sweet, loyal and pleasant. In our century wives usually reserve their displays of duty and vehement love for when they have lost their husbands; [C] then at least they bear witness to their good intentions – a laggardly, unseasonable witness, by which they prove that they love their husbands only once they are dead. [B] Life is full of inflammatory material: death, love and social duties. Just as fathers hide their love for their sons so as to keep themselves honoured and respected, so do wives readily hide theirs for their husbands. That particular mystery-play is not to my taste! It is no good widows tearing their hair and clawing their faces: I go and whisper straight in the ear of their chambermaid or private secretary, ‘How did they get on? What were they like when living together?’ I always remember that proverbial saying: ‘Jactantius moerent, quae minus dolent.’ [Women who weep most ostentatiously grieve least.]1 Their lamentations are loathed by living husbands and useless to the dead ones. We husbands will willingly let them laugh afterwards if they will only laugh with us while we are alive.

[C] Is it not enough to raise a man from the dead out of vexation, if a wife who had spat in my face while I was still there were to come and massage my feet once I am beginning to go! [B] If some honour resides in weeping for husbands it belongs to widows who laughed with them in life; let those widows who wept when they were alive laugh outwardly and inwardly once they are dead. Moreover, take no notice of those moist eyes and that pitiful voice: but do note the way they carry themselves and the colour of those plump cheeks beneath their veils! That way they speak to us in the kind of French we can understand! There are few widows who do not go on improving in health: and health is a quality which cannot lie. All that dutiful behaviour does not regard the past as much as the future: it is all profit not loss. When I was a boy an honest and most beautiful lady, a prince’s widow who is still alive, began to wear some little extras not allowed by our convention of widowhood. To those who reproached her with this she replied, ‘It is because I meet no new suitors now: I have left behind the desire to remarry.’

So as not to be totally out of keeping with our customs, I have selected three wives who, on the death of their husbands, did show the force of their goodness and their love. They are however rather diverse examples of pressing cases which resulted in a bold sacrifice gof life.

[A] In Italy Pliny the Younger had a man living near one of his houses who was appallingly tormented by ulcers which appeared on his private parts. His wife watched him languishing in pain; she begged him to allow her enough time to examine the symptoms of his disease: she would then tell him more frankly than anyone else what hope he could have. She obtained this of him and carefully examined him; she found that it was impossible for him to be cured and that all he could expect was, over a long period, to drag out a painful and languishing life. And so she advised him, as the surest, sovereign remedy, to kill himself. Finding him a little hesitant about so stark a deed she said: ‘You must never think, my Beloved, that the pains which I see you suffer do not affect me as much as you, or that to deliver myself from them I am unwilling to use the same remedy that I am prescribing for you. I wish to be your companion in your cure as I am in your illness: lay aside your fears and think only that we shall have the pleasure of that journey into death which must free us from such torments. We shall go happily away together.’ Having finished speaking and bringing new warmth to her husband’s heart, she resolved that they should cast themselves into the sea from a window in their house which gave on to it. And so as to maintain unto the end that loyal and vehement love by which she had clung to him in life, she wanted him also to die in her arms. But fearing that those arms might fail her and that the clasp of her embrace might be loosened by the terror of the fall, she had herself tied to him, tightly bound by their waists. And thus she gave up her life for the repose of her husband.2

That woman was from a lowly class; among people of that condition it is not all that new to find signs of rare goodness.

Extrema per illos Justifia excedens terris vestigia fecit.

[When Justice finally left this earth, she left her last vestiges with them.]3

The other two are rich and noble; examples of virtue rarely make their home among people like that.

Arria was the wife of Caecinna Paetus, a great man of consular rank; she was the mother of another Arria, the wife of Thrasea Paetus who was so renowned for his virtue during the time of Nero; through this son-in-law she was the grandmother of Fannia. The similarity of name and fortune of these men and women has often led to confusion. This first Arria (when her husband Caecinna Paetus had been taken prisoner by the supporters of the Emperor Claudius after the defeat of Scribonianus whose faction he had supported) begged the men who were transferring their prisoner to Rome to take her aboard their ship, where she would be much less expense and trouble than the many people they would need to look after her husband since she alone would take care of his room, his cooking and all other chores. They refused this to her; so she leapt into a fisherman’s boat which she had immediately hired and in this manner followed her husband from Sclavonia.

One day in Rome in the presence of the Emperor she was familiarly approached by Junia, the widow of Scribonianus, because of their shared misfortunes; but she roughly thrust her away with these words: ‘Should I even talk to you or listen to you when Scribonianus, the husband of your bosom, is dead. Yet you are still alive!’ Such words and several other indications brought her relations to realize that, unable to endure her husband’s misfortune, she intended to do away with herself.

On hearing those words her son-in-law Thrasea begged her not to desire to kill herself, saying: ‘What? If I incurred a similar misfortune to Caecinna’s, would you want my wife, your daughter, to do likewise?’ – ‘What do you mean, would I!’ she replied. ‘Yes. Yes of course I would, if she had lived as long and as peacefully together with you as I did with my husband.’ Such answers increased their worries about her and led to their watching her behaviour closely.

One day she said to those who were set to guard her: ‘It is no good, you know. You can force me to make the death I die much harsher: you cannot stop me from dying.’ She madly darted out of the chair she was sitting in and, with all her might, bashed her head against the nearby wall. The blow felled her to the ground, severely wounded and unconscious. They just managed to bring her round with great difficulty. ‘I told you plainly,’ she said, ‘that if you refuse me the means to kill myself easily, then I shall choose some other way, no matter how hard it might be.’

The end of so amazing a virtue came like this: by himself Paetus her husband did not have courage enough to kill himself, as the Emperor’s cruelty would force him to do some day or other; so having first used the appropriate arguments and exhortations for the counsel which she was giving him to bring him to do so, she seized the dagger which her husband was wearing, drew it, held it in her hand and concluded her exhortation thus: ‘This is the way to do it, Paetus.’ And that same instant, having struck herself a mortal blow in the bosom, she wrenched the dagger from her wound and offered it to him, ending her life as she did so with these noble, great-souled, immortal words: ‘Paete, non dolet.’ Those three words so full of beautiful meaning were all she had time to utter: ‘You see, Paetus: it doesn’t hurt.’4

Casta suo gladium cum traderet Arria Pæto, Quem de visceribus traxerat ipsa suis: Si qua fides, vulnus quod feci, non dolet, inquit; Sed quod tu facies, id mihi, Pate, dolet.

[When chaste Arria proffered the blade to Paetus which she had torn from her very entrails, she said: ‘Believe me, that wound I have given myself does not hurt me. What hurts me, Paetus, is the wound you will give to yourself.’]

But it has much more living force in the original and a much richer meaning. Far from being depressed by the thought of her husband’s wound and death, or of her own, she was the one who advised and encouraged them; so, having performed that high courageous deed solely in the interest of her husband, even with the final words of her life her only thought was of removing from him his fear of following her by taking his life. Paetus at once struck himself through with that same blade, feeling shame, in my judgement, at having needed so costly and so precious a lesson.

There was a young and very high-born Roman matron called Pompeia Paulina. She had wedded Seneca in his extreme old age. Nero, that fine pupil of his, sent one of his courtiers to him to announce that he was sentenced to death.5 (Such sentences used to be executed in this way: when the Emperors of Rome had condemned any man of quality, they dispatched their officials to tell him to choose which death he would prefer and to see that he carried it out within such time as they caused to be prescribed, shorter or longer depending on how finely tempered their choleric humour was: it was a concession designed to allow him to put his affairs in order, though too short on occasions to permit him to do so. If the condemned person resisted their command they brought in suitable men to carry it out, either by slashing the veins in his arms and legs or forcing him to swallow poison. Men of honour did not wait for such compulsion but used their own doctors and surgeons to do the deed.) With a peaceful resolute expression Seneca listened to the order brought by Nero’s henchmen, then asked for paper to write his will. That was refused by the Captain, so Seneca turned to those who loved him and said: ‘Since I can bequeath you nothing else, out of gratitude for what I owe you I shall at least bequeath you the most beautiful thing I possess the portrait of my morals, of my life, which I pray you to conserve in your memory; by doing so you will acquire the reputation of ones who loved me purely and truly.’ At the same time with gentle words he quietened the bitter anguish which he saw that they were suffering, though sometimes speaking more firmly to rebuke them: ‘Where are all those beautiful precepts of philosophy?’ he asked. ‘What has happened to that store which we have set aside over so many years against the accidents of Fortune? Did we not know of Nero’s cruelty? What could we expect from a man who had killed his mother and his brother, except that he would also kill his tutor who had looked after him and brought him up?’

Having addressed them all in general, he turned aside to his wife; and since her heart and strength were yielding under the weight of her grief he held her tight in his arms; he prayed her that, for love of him, she should bear this misfortune a little more patiently, since the hour had come when he had to show the fruit of his studies not by speeches and arguments but by deeds, and since he, without the slightest doubt, was welcoming death not merely without grief but with joy. ‘Wherefore my Beloved do not dishonour it by your tears,’ he said, ‘lest it should seem that you love yourself more than my reputation. Quieten your grief and console yourself with the knowledge that you have of me and of my actions, consecrating the rest of your life to those honourable occupations to which you are so devoted.’

Paulina replied, having somewhat recovered her composure and brought warmth again to her magnanimous heart by her noblest love: ‘No, Seneca. I am not one to leave you companionless in such great need. I do not want you to think that the virtuous examples of your life have not yet taught me to know how to make a fine death. When could I ever die better, or more honourably, or more as I would wish to, than together with you? Rest assured that it is with you that I shall go.’ Whereupon Seneca, welcoming such a beautiful and glorious resolve in his wife, and also to rid himself of his fear of leaving her to the tender mercies of his enemies after his death, replied: ‘I once taught you, Paulina, such things as served you to live your life contentedly. Now you prefer the honour of death: truly I will never begrudge you that. The constancy and the resolve of our common end may be equal: but allow that on your side the beauty and the glory are greater.’

That done they both together slashed the veins in their arms; but since Seneca’s veins had become constricted by old age6 and abstemious diet they merely allowed the blood to trickle out slowly, so he gave orders to slash the veins in his thighs as well. Then, fearing that the torment he was suffering might sadden the heart of his wife, and also to deliver himself from the grief he bore at seeing her in so pitiful a state, after taking leave of her most lovingly he begged her to permit them to carry him away to another room; which they did. But as all those incisions were still insufficient to cause his death, he commanded Statius Annaeus his doctor to administer the poisoned drink; that too had little effect, since it could not reach his heart because his limbs were weak and chill. So they further prepared a very hot bath for him; as he felt his end approaching he continued, as long as he had breath, to deliver most excellent discourses on the subject of his present state, which his secretaries took down as long as they could hear his voice; and for years afterwards his final words remained honoured and respected, circulating in the hands of men. (it is a most regrettable loss that they have not come down to us.) As he felt the last pangs of death he took the blood-drenched waters of the bath and asperged his head with them saying, ‘This water I consecrate to Jove the Liberator.’

Nero, warned of all this, fearing that he might be criticized for the death of Paulina (who was one of the most nobly-connected of Roman matrons) and having no particular reason to hate her, sent back orders with all speed that her wounds were to be bound. Her people did so – without her knowledge, since she was half-dead already and quite without sensation. And so against her own design she lived her remaining span most honourably, as behoved her virtue, showing by the pallor of her face how much life-blood she had shed through her wounds.

There you have my three very true tales, which I find as pleasing in their tragedy as those fictions which we forge at will to give pleasure to the many. I am amazed that those who engage in that activity do not decide to choose some of the ten thousand beautiful historical accounts to be found in our books. In that they would have less toil and would afford more pleasure and profit. If any author should wish to construct them into a single interconnected unity he would only need to supply the links – like soldering metals together with another metal. He could by such means make a compilation of many true incidents of every sort, varying his arrangement as the beauty of his work required, more or less as Ovid in his Metamorphoses made a patchwork of a great number of varied fables.

In the case of my last couple it is also worth pondering on the fact that Paulina willingly gave up her life for love of her husband, and that formerly, for love of her, he had once given up dying. There is little equivalence in that for the likes of us: but to his Stoic humour I believe that he thought he had done as much for her by prolonging his life to please her as if he had died for her. In one of his letters to Lucilius,7 after telling him how he had caught a fever in Rome and promptly climbed into his coach to go off to one of his houses in the country against the wish of his wife who wanted to prevent him, he tells how he replied that his fever was not physical but geographical. He went on: ‘She then let me go, telling me to look after my health. So I, who know that her life is lodged in mine, now begin to take care of myself so as to take care of her. The privilege which old age had bestowed on me, making me more firmly resolved on many things, I am losing now that I remember that, in this old man, there is a young woman to whom I am of some use. Since I cannot bring her to love me more courageously, she brings me to love myself more carefully. For we must allow some place to honourable affections; so sometimes when opportunities pressingly invite us the other way, we must summon our life back – yes, even in torment. We must cling by our teeth to our souls since, for moral men, the law of life is not ‘as long as they please’ but ‘as long as they should’. The man who does not think enough of his wife or of his friend to prolong his life for them and who is determined to die is too fastidious, too self-indulgent. Our souls must order themselves to die when the interests of our dear ones require it. Sometimes we must make a loan of ourselves to those we love: even when we should wish to die for ourselves we should break off our plans on their account. It is a sign of greatness of mind to lay hold of life again for the sake of others, as several great and outstanding men have done. And it is a mark of particular goodness to prolong one’s old age (the greatest advantage of which is to be indifferent to its duration and to be able to use life more courageously and contemptuously) if one knows that such a duty is sweet, delightful and useful to someone who loves us dearly. And we ourselves receive a most delightful recompense: for what can be more delightful than to be so dear to your wife that you become dearer to yourself for her sake? Thus my Paulina has laid upon me not only her fears for me but my fears for myself as well. It is not enough for me to consider with what resolution I could die: I also have to consider how irresolutely she would bear it. So I have compelled myself to go on living. Sometimes there is magnanimity in doing so.’

Those are his words, [C] as excellent as are his deeds.