MONTAIGNE, miln-t5tV, Jr. peon. niiiN'te ny', 311CIIEL EYQr1:31 IIE ( 1533-112). A great French essayist and moralist. Montaigne got Iris name from the Chateau :Montaigne, near the Dordogne, in Wrigord, where he was born Feb ruary 28, 1533. The family fortune was begun by Michel's great-grandfather, a merchant and citizen of Bordeaux. The essayist's father turned him over to a nurse. who reared him in a hamlet on his father's estate. As he tells its himself, he was awakened in the morning with musk, and his father had him so well drilled in Latin that when lie went to the College de Guyenne at Bordeaux he astounded every one by his Latinity, though he was but six years old. The boy's mother was Antoinette de Loupes (i.e. Lopez), of a Jewish family, which had come from Spain. To judge by Saint Aubin's engraving after the original portrait at the Chilteau :Montaigne. the essayist had an oval fuel., a good-sized nose, a wrinkled forehead. high cheek bones, and a smallish chin. lie wore a short beard, with a moustache, and his mouth hardly suggests the sweetness of temper so ap parent in his essays.
After eight. years under the famous Andre. de Coven. master of the College de Guyenne, then the best school in Franee, 'Montaigne seems to have studied law in Bordeaux and Toulouse till 1554. Bit: essays, however, are scarcely the work of a lawyer. hut rather of a genial, ever-inquisi tive, and usually whimsical humorist. Sooner or later Montaknc skirted most of the hills of knowledge, rarely exerting himself to climb to their tops, but seeing very clearly from the level. At the College de Guyenne he had eontinued his studies in the language. literature. and history of Itome, and had taken part in the Latin plays written for him and his mates by Buchanan and :Muret. This we know front :Montaigne's own words: but we also /earn from him that he was lazy and careless. and that in reading he followed his whims. At twenty-4)1w, as a younger son, he was eared for by being made a member of the Cour des Aides at IV•rigueux, and three years later lie was appointed counsehir of Parliament at Bor deaux. Thus he met Etienne de la Bootie (q.v.I. and there sprang up between them a friendship that lasted till La death in 1363. _\t thirty-three -Montaigne wedded Franeoise de la Chassaigne. yielding to convent bm. for he de dares he "would riot have married Wisdom her self" for his own pleasure. lie tells us that lie lost "two or three" children in babyhood, hut a daughter survived him. NIontaigie had done his first literary work in 1568 by translating the Theo/of/la of Ilatiniond Sebond. a Span iard who had been a professor at Toulouse in the fifteenth century. This book was the text for Mont ai?me's most famous essay in -kept kism, the .1prthwie de Ksirotind in 1370 taiguc edited the literary remains of La iris tie. After this he seldom left his estate, except for visits to Paris and an eighteen months' visit to Germany, Switzerland. and Italy in 1580. (11
this voyage he left an interesting diary. partly in Prowl] and partly in Italian. first pnblished in 1771. and edited by A. d'Ancona (Citta di Castello, 1889). lie was elected (1581) and re elected Mayor of Bordeaux. His last years were brightened by the Platonic affection of an adopted daughter, Mlle. de Gournay. a Parisian, who at nineteen had been attracted by his essays. of which she later prepared a valuable edition (1597). Montaigne suffered much toward the close of his life from gravel and stone. In 1592 la- died of quinsy, receiving devoutly the last offices of the Church, though his mottoes Quo sais-jef (What do I know?) and (What matters it?) are those of an easy-going skeptic.
The essays, of which the first were written in 1572, beginning in self-analysis, finally came to take for their field the knowledge of man in gen eral. Wholly unsystematic though they are, they show an insatiable curiosity, which seeks rather its own stimulation than the satisfaction of a definite conclusion. Montaigne drew the ma terial for his reflections not so mueli from his own surroundings a- from Seneca, Lucretius, and the historians. from Plutarch, Xenophon, and the anthology of Stoba-us, and from the biogra phies of Diogenes Lafirtius. as well as from Ital ian letter-writers and historians. Behind their thought he often sheltered his own, preferring rather to suggest that others had doubted than that he himself was other than a royalist and a Catholic. Suspended judgment. contented de tachment, and a practical epicureanism are the teachings of Montaigne, who observes that "men are tormented by what they think about things, not by the things themselves." "However specious novelty may be," says he, "I change not easily, for I fear to lose by the change So I have, by God's grace, kept without worry and turmoil of conscience the old beliefs of ono• reli gion through all the sects and divisions that our century has brought forth." His attitude was not heroic, but it proved contagious; for the anti Christian or simply non-Christian current which can be noted in the seventeenth century, passing through Moliere or through Descartes and finally reaching Voltaire, seems to have its source in _Montaigne. Rationalism, Epicurean or Cartesian. is already by implication in the essays. In his own day Montaigne stood almost alone among nu•n who were hasty in thought and quick to act. Few French works have exercised so great and lasting an influence on the writing and thought of the world as the essays of Montaigne. Ile stands alone and sec•nre among the world's writ ers. Through Florio (q.v.), who published his admirable translation in 1603, Montaigne was known to Shakespeare, and he very slightly in fluenced Francis Bacon. ten of whose essays ap peared in 1597. He has fascinated great men in every civilized country and in every generation— never, perhaps, more than now.