Montaigne opens with Epictetus: men are tormented with the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves. If that held throughout, evils would have no admission except by our own judgment, and fortune would only provide the matter while we gave it the form. We are strange fools, he says, to take arms for the side most offensive to us, and to give sickness, want, and contempt a bitter taste when we could give them another relish. Death, poverty, and pain stand as principal enemies, yet the same death is a harbour from life's storms for some and the most dreadful of things for others. Theodorus, threatened by Lysimachus, says killing him would only match a cantharides. Philosophers hasten their own deaths. Ordinary people go to execution mixed with shame and still settle affairs, sing, drink, and jest: one will not walk a street where a merchant might arrest him for an old debt; the Picard, offered a wench to save his life, sees she limps and tells them to tie up. In Narsingah wives go cheerfully to the fire. Montaigne's father saw five-and-twenty Milan masters of families make themselves away in one week. The Xanthians besieged by Brutus fell into such an appetite of dying that almost none could be saved. Every opinion is of force enough to be espoused at the expense of life. John of Portugal sells the Jews banished from Castile a retreat, then the ships strip them to their shirts; Emmanuel seizes children under fourteen, and parents throw them into wells. Fifty Albigeois burn in one fire rather than recant. An intimate friend of Montaigne's runs headlong upon death on the first honourable occasion. Pyrrho, in a tempest, shows the affrighted a hog that is nothing at all concerned, and asks whether reason was given us for a torment, and whether we are worse than that hog.
Then the objection: the rule may hold for death, but what of pain, which most sages repute the worst of evils? Posidonius tells Pompeius that pain shall never hinder him from talking, then cries that it may work its will but shall never make him say it is an evil. Montaigne will not call that contempt. He fights with words, yet interrupts his discourse, so all does not consist in the imagination. We cannot persuade our skins that a whip tickles, or our taste that aloes is vin de Graves. Pyrrho's hog does not fear death, but if you beat him he will cry out. Death is only felt by reason, the motion of an instant; what we pretend to fear in it is pain, yet it is rather the imagination of death that makes pain doubly grievous. Toothache and gout drop off the catalogue of diseases because they are not reputed mortal. He grants pain is the worst incident of our being, and that he most hates and avoids it, but it is in us at least to lessen it by patience. Without pain, where were the parts of valour and magnanimity? If violent, it is short; if long, nothing violent. It will end itself or export you. We suffer impatiently because we do not repose our chiefest contentment in the soul, mistress of our condition. The body has one bent; the soul is variable into all forms. Pain grows proud to see us truckle, and surrenders on better terms to those who make head against her.
Examples are his proper game. Pain is like stones that take lustre from the foil they are set in, and has no more room in us than we allow. We feel one touch of a surgeon's lancet more than twenty sword wounds in the heat of fight. Swiss women among the foot-soldiers trot today with the child at their necks that they carried yesterday in their bellies. The wife of Sabinus bears twins alone, without a groan. A Lacedaemonian boy lets a stolen fox tear out his bowels rather than confess the theft; another is burned to the bone by a coal in his sleeve rather than disturb a sacrifice. Scaevola, having missed Porsenna, confesses the plot and holds his arm in a pan of coals until the king commands it taken away. A gladiator of Caesar's laughs while his wounds are searched. At Paris a woman has her face flayed for a new skin; a maid in Picardy stabs her arm with a hair bodkin to prove her promises; Turks sear scars, and fellows slash a thigh for ten aspers. St. Louis wears a hair-shirt and is whipped every Friday with iron chains; Good Friday crowds lacerate themselves to the bone. Q. Maximus, Cato, and Paulus bury sons with countenances that express no grief. Montaigne lost two or three at nurse, if not without grief, at least without repining. Cicero says grief is not in nature, but in opinion. Alexander and Caesar hunt disturbance as greedily as others hunt repose. Cardinal Borromeo, amid the jollity of Italy and great riches, keeps straw for his bed and bread and water by his book.
Opinion gives the value: the price to the diamond, difficulty to virtue, suffering to devotion. Epicurus says to be rich is no relief, only an alteration of affairs; abundance, not want, creates avarice. Montaigne has lived in three conditions. For some twenty years he had no certain revenue, borrowed by letter, paid on the appointed day, and never lived more at his ease. Managers think such uncertainty horrible, yet most of the world lives so, and Caesar ran a million of gold in debt to become Caesar. Misery sits as near beyond two thousand crowns a year as if it stood beside him; a busy rich man seems more miserable than he that is simply poor. His second condition is money of his own. He lays up a notable sum, never speaks of it but falsely, and the more he loads himself for a journey the more he fears the roads and the servant with the bags. A cash-box left behind fills him with suspicions he dares not name. There is more trouble in keeping money than in getting it. Once the heart is set on the heap, he would sooner pawn a horse than breach that beloved purse. Dionysius restores a Syracusan's treasure once the man has learned to use it. A costly journey spurns the hoarding humour, and Montaigne falls into a third way: he lives at the height of his revenue, from hand to mouth, fighting fortune with his own arms, laying up only for a near pleasure, not for lands. Feraulez, finding substance no increase of appetite, gives all to a poor young friend who will keep him as guest. An aged prelate strips himself of purse-care and still keeps the best-governed house. Plenty and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of them. Fortune does neither good nor hurt; she presents the matter and the seed, which the soul turns as she pleases. Clothes warm us not with their heat, but our own. A straight oar seems crooked in the water: it matters not only that we see the thing, but how we see it. After so many discourses that persuade men to despise death and endure pain, why does not each apply one suitable to his own humour? If he cannot take the strong decoction, let him take a lenitive. He who has neither the courage to die nor the heart to live, who will neither resist nor fly, what can we do with him?
