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Authors: Sarah Bakewell
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none more so than developing the estate. Perhaps what irritated her was his preference for spending on improvements rather than on buying new property, together with the habit of starting more things than he finished. Pierre’s abandonment of the trading-post idea may have been more in character than it seems.On Pierre’s death, Montaigne inherited a lot of half-completed jobs on the estate, which he always felt he should see through, but never did.Work left at the building-site stage is very annoying; perhaps inaction was Montaigne’s way of dealing with it, just as overt exasperation was Antoinette’s.
Some of the abandoned work may have been a sign that Pierre’s energies were in decline, for, from the age of sixty-six, he suffered regular debilitating attacks of kidney stones. Montaigne often saw his father doubled over in agony during the last few years of his life. He never forgot the shock of witnessing the first attack, which struck Pierre without warning and knocked him unconscious from sheer pain. He fell into his son’s arms as he passed out. It was probably a similar episode, or complications ensuing from one, that finally killed him. He died on June 18, 1568, at the age of seventy-four.
By this time, Pierre had replaced his first will, so implicitly critical of his son’s abilities, with a new one which gave Montaigne the task of looking after his younger brothers and sisters and serving them as a replacement father. “He must take my place and represent me to them,” was how he put it. Montaigne did take his father’s place, and he did not always find it an easy one to occupy.
In the
Essays
, he comes across as a kind of negative image of Pierre. Praise for his father is often followed by an assertion that he himself is completely different. Having described how Pierre loved to build up theestate, Montaigne gives us an almost comically exaggerated picture of his own lack of either skill or interest in such work. Whatever he has done, “completing some old bit of wall and repairing some badly constructed building,” has been in honor of Pierre’s memory rather than for his own satisfaction, he says.As the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would warn, “One should not try to surpass one’s father in diligence; that makes one sick.” On the whole Montaigne did
not
try, and thus he kept himself sane.
Inadequate as he felt himself to be in the practical skills of life, he knew the advantage he had when it came to literature and learning. Pierre’s knowledge of books was as limited as his love of them was boundless. Typically for his generation, in Montaigne’s view, he made books the object of a cult and went to great lengths to seek out their authors, “receiving them at his house like holy persons” and “collecting their sayings and discourses like oracles.”Yet he showed little critical understanding. All right, so Pierre could bounce over the table on one manly thumb, Montaigne seems to say, but in matters of the intellect he was an embarrassment. He worshiped books without understanding them. His son would always try to do the opposite.
Montaigne was right in thinking this characteristic of Pierre’s contemporaries. French nobles of the early 1500s loved everything clever and Italianate; they distanced themselves from their own predecessors’ defiantly crass attitude to scholarship. What Montaigne neglected to observe was that he himself was just as typical of
his
era in rejecting the book-learning fetish. The fathers filled their sons with literature and history, trained them in critical thinking, and taught them to bandy around classical philosophies like juggling balls. By way of thanks, the sons dismissed it all as valueless and adopted a superior attitude. Some even tried to revive the older anti-scholarly tradition, as if it were a radical departure never thought of before.
There was a tiredness and a sourness in Montaigne’s generation, along with a
Some of the abandoned work may have been a sign that Pierre’s energies were in decline, for, from the age of sixty-six, he suffered regular debilitating attacks of kidney stones. Montaigne often saw his father doubled over in agony during the last few years of his life. He never forgot the shock of witnessing the first attack, which struck Pierre without warning and knocked him unconscious from sheer pain. He fell into his son’s arms as he passed out. It was probably a similar episode, or complications ensuing from one, that finally killed him. He died on June 18, 1568, at the age of seventy-four.
By this time, Pierre had replaced his first will, so implicitly critical of his son’s abilities, with a new one which gave Montaigne the task of looking after his younger brothers and sisters and serving them as a replacement father. “He must take my place and represent me to them,” was how he put it. Montaigne did take his father’s place, and he did not always find it an easy one to occupy.
In the
Essays
, he comes across as a kind of negative image of Pierre. Praise for his father is often followed by an assertion that he himself is completely different. Having described how Pierre loved to build up theestate, Montaigne gives us an almost comically exaggerated picture of his own lack of either skill or interest in such work. Whatever he has done, “completing some old bit of wall and repairing some badly constructed building,” has been in honor of Pierre’s memory rather than for his own satisfaction, he says.As the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would warn, “One should not try to surpass one’s father in diligence; that makes one sick.” On the whole Montaigne did
not
try, and thus he kept himself sane.
Inadequate as he felt himself to be in the practical skills of life, he knew the advantage he had when it came to literature and learning. Pierre’s knowledge of books was as limited as his love of them was boundless. Typically for his generation, in Montaigne’s view, he made books the object of a cult and went to great lengths to seek out their authors, “receiving them at his house like holy persons” and “collecting their sayings and discourses like oracles.”Yet he showed little critical understanding. All right, so Pierre could bounce over the table on one manly thumb, Montaigne seems to say, but in matters of the intellect he was an embarrassment. He worshiped books without understanding them. His son would always try to do the opposite.
Montaigne was right in thinking this characteristic of Pierre’s contemporaries. French nobles of the early 1500s loved everything clever and Italianate; they distanced themselves from their own predecessors’ defiantly crass attitude to scholarship. What Montaigne neglected to observe was that he himself was just as typical of
his
era in rejecting the book-learning fetish. The fathers filled their sons with literature and history, trained them in critical thinking, and taught them to bandy around classical philosophies like juggling balls. By way of thanks, the sons dismissed it all as valueless and adopted a superior attitude. Some even tried to revive the older anti-scholarly tradition, as if it were a radical departure never thought of before.
There was a tiredness and a sourness in Montaigne’s generation, along with a
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