Michel de
Montaigne, the 16th Century French author who invented the essay
literary form, probed the human experience so deeply that most of his readers
believe, when they read his essays, they are reading about themselves. Examples:
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It
seemed to me as if I had myself written the book in some former life.”
Andre Gide: “So much have I
made him my own that it seems he is my very self.”
Bernard Levin: “How did he
know all that about me?”
A favorite essay
of most readers is “Friendship.” As a
young man Montaigne formed an intense relationship with Etienne de la Boetie,
which, forever after he considered the most important relationship of his
life. La Boetie died suddenly of the
plague when Montaigne was 30 years old.
Writing years
later, Montaigne compares his friendship with La Boetie to biological
relationships. “Truly the name of
brother is a beautiful name…but why should the harmony and kinship found in
these true and perfect friendships be found between brothers?” He pointed out that biological brothers necessarily
compete (we call it sibling rivalry) and “often clash with each other.” “Likewise,” he wrote, “Father and son may be
of entirely different dispositions, and brothers also. He is my son, he is my kinsman, but he is an
unsociable man, a knave, or a fool.” Montaigne believed that the freedom essential
to true friendship is unlikely to exist among biological relatives because “
they are friendships which law and natural obligation impose on us…and our free
will has no product more properly its own than affection and friendship.”
La Boetie’s death
began a tragic period in Montaigne’s life.
Three years later the father to whom he was devoted died. Then his brother died improbably in a tennis
accident and Montaigne himself nearly died while riding his horse. His wife would eventually give birth to five
daughters but only one survived infancy and lived to adulthood.
Sarah Bakewell, in
her excellent recently biography of Montaigne, How to Live or a Biography of Montaigne, describes how in the last
decade of his life a young woman, Marie le Jars de Gournay, came into his
life. She had read an early edition of
his essays and felt, “she had found her other self in Montaigne, the one person
with whom she had a true affinity, and the only one to understand her.” They eventually met and though they were often
linked only by correspondence, he eventually invited her to become his adopted
daughter, an offer she quickly accepted, as well as his first great editor and
publicist. Bakewell thinks their
relationship was not sexual, partly because Gournay remained on good relations
with his mother, his wife and his biological daughter. One reason Gournay
wanted Montaigne to adopt her was to replace her deceased father.
Bakewell observes: “What Montaigne’s real daughter Leonor
thought of this claim to surpass biological family bonds is anyone’s
guess. One could not blame her if she
felt put out, but it seems she did not.
She and Marie de Gournay became good friends in later years, with
Gournay calling her “sister,” as was logical if they had the same father.”
This is how Gournay and Montaigne described
their relationship:
Gournay: In truth, if someone is
surprised that, although we are not father and daughter except in title, the
good will that allies us nevertheless surpassed that of real fathers and
children, the first and closest of all the natural ties. Let that person try one day to lodge virtue
within himself and to meet with it in another; then he will scarcely marvel
that it has more strength and power to harmonize souls than nature has.”
Montaigne: “She is the only person
I still think about in the world. If
youthful promise means anything, her soul will some day be capable of the
finest things, among others of perfection in that most sacred kind of
friendship which, so we read, her sex has not yet been able to obtain. (Note: That
women were not capable of “sacred friendship” was a common view in the 16th
Century!) The sincerity and firmness of
her character are already sufficient, her affection for me more than
superabundant, and such, in short, that it leaves nothing to be desired, unless
that her apprehension about my end, in view of my 55 years when I met her,
would not torment her so cruelly.”
Montaigne died at age 60, five
years after he met Gournay. This was, ironically,
the same length of time he had enjoyed in his earlier intense friendship with
La Boetie, which ended only when La Boetie died.
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