Montaigne opens by admitting that almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and trust, and that this is not amiss in so weak an age. We approve the image of Socrates that his friends transmitted only because public sanction tells us to. If anything of that kind sprang up now, few would value it. We discern no graces that are not pointed and puffed out by art. Simplicity, as we take it, is cousin-german to folly. Socrates makes his soul move a natural and common motion: a peasant said this, a woman said that; he has never anybody in his mouth but carters, joiners, cobblers, and masons. We, who think all things low that are not elevated by learned doctrine, would never have recognised the splendour under so mean a form. Cato stays mounted upon the great horse. Socrates creeps upon the ground and treats the most useful matters in the ordinary way of human life. He brought human wisdom down from heaven and showed how much nature can do of itself. We are all richer than we think we are, yet we are taught to borrow and to beg. Sciences we swallow in buying and return from the market already infected or amended. Books have served Montaigne more for exercise than instruction: his tongue is enriched and his courage little elevated. Seneca sweats and pants to harden himself against death, and the agitation discovers that he was hard pressed. Meanwhile the poor people who know neither Aristotle nor Cato yield a firmer constancy than the schools. He who is now digging in Montaigne's garden has this morning buried his father or his son. They name the phthisic a cough and never keep their beds but to die. Montaigne was writing this when the enemy stood at one door and freebooters, worse enemies, at the other. A monstrous war, bent not against strangers but against itself, ruins itself with its own poison. Our physic makes us sick.
French armies hold only by the cement of foreigners. Favonius will not physic a government with such a mortal drug. Plato will not consent that a man should violate the peace of his country to cure it, and seems angry with Dion for proceeding otherwise. Montaigne was a Platonist in this point before he knew there had ever been such a man as Plato. Ambition baits itself with the titles of justice and devotion, and wickedness assumes the cloak of virtue. The common people were stripped even of hope. Moderation then robbed him on all hands: to the Ghibelline he was a Guelph, and to the Guelph a Ghibelline. The situation of his house presented one face; his life and actions another. They laid no formal accusations, only mute suspicions. He meets a charge with an ironical confession, or sits mute, and has often knocked his head against great persons who take want of submission as the great fault. He looked round for a friend to hold a necessitous and discredited old age and found himself bare. At last he saw that it was safest to trust to himself. Men throw themselves upon foreign assistance to spare their own, which is alone certain. He has long preached to himself to stick to his own concerns, yet a bow, a favourable word, or a kind look from a great person still tempts him towards the marketplace, and he refuses so gently it is as if he were half willing to be overcome. The true liberty is to be able to do what a man will with himself. He thanks fortune that has not made them live in an idle age. He cannot hinder the public death, so he is content to be present and instruct himself. Nothing tickles that does not pinch. Then plague, in air where no contagion had ever taken footing, made the sight of his house frightful. A distracted family shifted as soon as anyone's finger began to ache; all diseases were concluded to be the plague; imagination turned health itself into a fever. He served six months as a guide to this caravan. Of the people about him the hundredth part could not be saved. Yet the grapes remained untouched upon the vines. Every man expected death tonight or tomorrow with a countenance far from fear. A labourer of his, in dying, pulled the earth upon him with his hands and feet. Science, having abandoned nature, must now borrow constancy from this rustic rout and even from beasts. Men have done with nature as perfumers with oils, until she has lost her universal face.
What good, then, to anticipate every inconvenience against things which peradventure will never befall us? It is a phrensy to put on a furred gown at Midsummer because you will need it at Christmas. For the most part the preparation for death has administered more torment than the thing itself. If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will, at the time, fully and sufficiently instruct you. We trouble life by the care of death, and death by the care of life. We prepare ourselves against the preparations of death. If we have known how to live firmly and quietly, we shall know how to die so too. Death is the end, its extremity, but not its object. Montaigne never saw any peasant among his neighbours cogitate with what countenance he should pass his last hour. Caesar held that the least premeditated death was the easiest and the most happy. Socrates shall be one interpreter of that simplicity. Before the judges who sat upon his life he says he has neither frequented nor known death; such as fear it presuppose they know it; what he does not know to be evil he cannot fear. He will not move them to commiseration with tears, three desolate children, or a speech penned by Lysias. Had a suppliant voice been heard out of the mouth of Socrates, that lofty virtue had struck sail. He did not corrupt an incorrupt life to spin out his decrepitude another year. He owed his life not to himself but to the example of the world. The Athenians later abominated the causers of his death until those men hanged themselves. Montaigne has here only made a nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of his own but the thread to tie them. He can borrow from scrap-gatherers to trick up this treatise of Physiognomy. A president boasted two hundred commonplaces in one judgment and, in telling it, lost the glory. We naturalists prefer the honour of invention over allegation.
Socrates was a perfect exemplar, and Montaigne is vexed that he had so deformed a face, unsuitable to the beauty of his soul. The deformity that clothed a beautiful soul in La Boétie was of another kind: a superficial ugliness is of least prejudice to the mind. Beauty has the first place in the commerce of men. Phryne had lost her cause if, opening her robe, she had not corrupted her judges. And yet the lineaments by which men guess at character do not simply follow beauty. In a face which is none of the best there may dwell an air of trust; betwixt two beautiful eyes Montaigne has read menaces. There are favourable physiognomies, so that in a crowd of victorious enemies you choose one stranger to whom to surrender, and not properly upon beauty. A person's look is but a feeble warranty, and yet it is something considerable too. He would scourge those who belie the promises nature has planted in their foreheads, and punish malice under a mild aspect more severely still. He has embraced the rule that we cannot fail in following nature, and has not, as Socrates did, corrected his composition by reason. He has a favourable aspect that makes a contrary show to that of Socrates. Upon the mere credit of his presence, persons who had no knowledge of him have put a great confidence in him. A certain person planned to surprise his house, arriving alone at the gates with a panting horse and a chase story Montaigne knew by the quarrel. Shortly after came four or five soldiers, then more, five-and-twenty or thirty, well mounted and armed, pretending the enemy was at their heels. Thinking there was nothing to be got by having begun a courtesy unless he went through with it, he invited them all in. The leader, already master of the enterprise, later said that Montaigne's countenance and frankness had snatched the treachery out of his hands. He mounted again; his followers, eyes intent for the signal, were astonished to find him leave his prey behind. Another time, relying upon a truce just published, Montaigne rode through ticklish country and was overtaken on the third day by fifteen or twenty gentlemen in vizors. He was taken, withdrawn into a forest, robbed, his money-box taken. They set his ransom so high it was manifest he was not known, and they debated his life. After two or three hours the chief returned with gentler language, restored what could be recovered, even the money-box, and gave him his liberty. The most prominent amongst them pulled off his vizor and said, over and over, that he owed his deliverance to his countenance and the liberty and boldness of his speech. The last of those two gentlemen is yet living to tell the story; the first was killed not long ago. If his face did not answer for him, he had not lived so long without quarrels. When occasion required him to sentence criminals, he has rather chosen to fail in point of justice than to do it. That may be applied to him which was said of Charillus, king of Sparta: he must needs be good, because he is so even to the wicked. The look that saved him twice is still only a feeble warranty. The next panting horse at a gate will have to be read again before anyone knows whether the courtesy should have been refused.
