Montaigne names the solicitude of reputation the most universally received folly of the world. People abandon riches, peace, life, and health to chase a vain phantom that has neither body nor hold. He quotes Tasso: fame charms proud mortals, yet is only an echo, a dream, the shadow of a dream that vanishes at every breath. Even the philosophers are among the last to disengage. The humour is so deeply rooted that he dare not say anyone ever clearly discharged himself of it. Cicero's jab is that those who most controvert glory still want the books they write about it to visit the light under their own names, and seek to derive glory from seeming to despise it. All other things are communicable and fall into commerce. We lend our goods and stake our lives for friends. To communicate a man's honour, and to robe another with a man's own glory, is very rarely seen.
And yet he has examples. Catulus Luctatius, in the Cimbrian war, having done all he could to make flying soldiers face about, ran away with the rest and counterfeited the coward so they might seem to follow their captain rather than fly from the enemy. He abandoned his own reputation to cover their shame. When Charles V resolved on the Provence expedition of 1537, Antonio de Leva stiffly opposed it in council, though he believed it would redound to the emperor's honour, so that the entire glory of the resolution should be attributed to his master. Archileonida, mother of Brasidas, rejected Thracian ambassadors who said her son had not left his like, and sent the praise back to the city: Sparta has many citizens both greater and of greater worth. At Crecy the young Prince of Wales held the vanguard. Lords, overmatched, sent to King Edward for relief. The king asked if his son still lived and sat on horseback. Told that he did, Edward would neither go nor send. To ride in now would do the boy wrong and deprive him of the honour of a battle he had so long and so bravely sustained. Livy supplies the reason people give: what is last added seems to have accomplished the whole affair.
Many at Rome said the greatest of Scipio's acts were in part due to Laelius, whose constant practice was to advance Scipio's grandeur without any care of his own. Theopompus of Sparta, told the republic could not miscarry because he knew so well how to command, answered that it was rather because the people knew so well how to obey. The Bishop of Beauvais fought beside Philip Augustus at Bouvines, reduced several of the enemy with his own hand, then delivered them to the first gentleman he met, and fought with a mace so he might kill but not wound. A man of Montaigne's time, reproached by the king for laying hands on a priest, stiffly denied it: the meaning was, he had only cudgelled and kicked him. Glory here can be lent, redirected, or gamed with a mace. The next honour still has to choose which of those three it will be.
Coming Up in Chapter 42
Plutarch finds a greater difference between man and man than between beast and beast. Montaigne would go further: some souls sit farther from Epaminondas than from a beast. We praise a horse for legs, not caparison, and a hawk for her wing, not her bells. Why, he asks, do we still prize a man muffled in clothes?
