Cicero says that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare oneself to die. Montaigne takes the line two ways: contemplation already withdraws the soul from the body, a kind of apprenticeship of death, and every school of wisdom ends by teaching us not to fear the end. He will not pretend that pleasure is someone else's aim. Even virtue aims at a more sinewy pleasure, and of all its benefits, contempt of death is the greatest, because it gives life a soft taste without which every other pleasure goes extinct. Pain and poverty can miss a person entirely. Death cannot. If it frightens you, the fright is perpetual, for there is no road it cannot take. Courts send condemned men to die on the scene of the crime, and even fine houses cannot sweeten a journey whose end stays in the mouth. The vulgar remedy is not to think on it. Romans, who found the syllable too harsh, said a man had lived instead of saying he was dead. Montaigne writes at nine-and-thirty, born the last day of February 1533, and already he has outlived the ordinary term. Christ and Alexander both ended at three-and-thirty.
A duke of Brittany is pressed to death in a crowd at Lyons. Henry II dies at a tilting. Aeschylus, careful to avoid a falling house, is knocked on the head by a tortoise from an eagle's talons. Montaigne's own brother, Captain St. Martin, three-and-twenty and already known for valour, takes a tennis ball a little above the right ear, sits down to nothing, and dies within five or six hours of an apoplexy. People gallop and dance and will not mention death, then fall into outcries when it takes a wife or child unprepared. Montaigne would creep under a calf's skin if the shift could keep him at his ease, but death catches the poltroon as surely as the honest man. So he takes the contrary course. At the stumbling of a horse, the falling of a tile, the least prick of a pin, he asks what if it had been death itself. Egyptians brought a dried skeleton into the height of a feast. Premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty. He who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. Paulus Emilius told the imprisoned King of Macedon to make his request for mercy to himself.
Montaigne is not melancholic but meditative. In company he entertains the memory of a man surprised by fever after just such an evening, and the thought does not wrinkle his forehead for long. A friend finds in his tablets a memorandum of something to be done after his decease. He wrote it while merry and well, a league from his own house, because he was not certain to live till he came home. He would always have a man doing, and then let death take him planting his cabbages, indifferent to unfinished gardens. He saw one man, at his last gasp, complain that destiny was cutting a chronicle that had reached only the fifteenth king. He keeps death continually in his mouth. Nature helps. Sudden death leaves no leisure to fear. In a fever he looks on death with less terror as the commodities of life lose their use. Things appear greater at a distance than near at hand. Nature leads us by the hand, step by step, so that we do not feel the harder death when youth dies in us. The soul that can assure itself against this adversary becomes sovereign of its passions. To him that told Socrates the thirty tyrants had sentenced him to death, Socrates answered that nature had sentenced them.
Then Nature herself speaks. Go out of this world as you entered it. Your death is a part of the order of the universe, a part of the life of the world. Mortals live by turns and, like runners, give up the lamp. If you have made your profit of life, go satisfied. If you have not, why keep what you cannot use? Live as long as you can, you shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead. The utility of living consists not in the length of days but in the use of time. Chiron refused to be immortal when he heard the conditions. The last day contributes no more to dissolution than every other day: every day travels toward death, and the last only arrives at it. Why, then, does the image of death look milder in war than in our own houses? Montaigne believes the terrible ceremonies frighten more than the thing itself: cries of mothers, pale servants, a dark room set with tapers, physicians and divines, so that we seem buried already. Children fear even those they know when a visor disguises them. Take the visor off and you find the same death a poor chambermaid died of a day or two ago, without any manner of apprehension. Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.
