The Nature of True Friendship — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne watches a painter who serves him finish one central picture, then fill the rest of the wall with grotesques. He admits his own essays are those odd figures, and that he cannot offer a rich piece of his own, so he borrows Estienne de la Boétie's youthful discourse Voluntary Servitude, written in honour of liberty against tyrants. The treatise, shown to him long before they met, became the first cause of their friendship; on his death-bed La Boétie bequeathed him library and papers. Fortune, Montaigne says, brings such a bond but once in three ages. He then strips the usual names. Parent and child mix respect with disparity; brothers share a fine sound, yet estates jostle them; he had the most indulgent father and still will not call those ties the thing he means. The love he will not rank with friendship is a fever: the hunter cares for the hare only while it flees. Friendship is a temperate, equal heat that grows by enjoyment.

Marriage is free only at the door, then compulsory, a bargain contracted to other ends. The Academy's Greek licence, with its disparity of age, answers no better to a concurrence of two mature wills. What people commonly call friends are acquaintance contracted by occasion or design. In the friendship he speaks of, two souls mix into one piece with no sign of the seam. Asked why he loved La Boétie, he can answer only because it was he, because it was I. They sought one another by report, embraced in their names, and at a first meeting, accidentally at a great city entertainment, were so taken that nothing thereafter was so near. Laelius then presses Caius Blosius before the consuls who have sentenced Gracchus. Blosius will do all things for him, even fire the temples. Montaigne defends the answer: they were more friends than citizens, and he would as little suspect such a friend's will as his own.

Ordinary friendships, he warns, must walk with bridle in hand, because the knot may slip. Chilo's counsel to love as if you might one day hate is sound there and abominable here. In that noble commerce, benefits and thanks become words of division; one soul in two bodies has nothing left to lend. Eudamidas of Corinth, dying poor, bequeaths to Areteus the care of his mother and to Charixenus the marrying of his daughter; first hearers laughed, but the legatees accepted, and when Charixenus died within five days Areteus married both girls on one day. Even this example admits a multitude of friends, and the friendship that possesses the whole soul cannot admit a rival. If two called for succour at once, to which would you run? A young soldier would give Cyrus his prize horse to get a true friend, if he could find one.

In confederations that hold by one end, Montaigne asks only whether a physician or a cook can do the office they are hired for. He despairs of a judge who has actually lived the friendship he describes. If he compares all the rest of his life with the four years of this excellent man's society, it is nothing but smoke, an obscure and tedious night. From the day of the loss he has led a languishing life; pleasures double his affliction; they were halves throughout, and by outliving him he feels he defrauds him of his part, and is no more than half of himself. He withholds the political treatise, now mixed by men who aim at disturbing the government, and insists La Boétie wrote it in boyhood as a common theme, a better citizen than an innovator who would rather have been born at Venice than at Sarlac, yet still obeyed the laws of his birth. In exchange he will present another piece of a more gay and frolic air, from the same hand, written at the same age.