Montaigne opens this essay to Madame D'Estissac, whose husband left her a widow young, who refused the great matches of France, and who has carried the burden of affairs through every corner of the kingdom. He writes so that her son, still too young to notice the offices she has done him, may one day read a true account after Montaigne has neither mouth nor speech left. If any law is truly natural, he says, the begetter's care for offspring holds the second place after self-preservation. Children's return is weaker because nature aims at succession, not gratitude. Aristotle adds that he who confers a benefit loves more than he is loved, because giving is an honest action and receiving only a useful one, and every artificer is fonder of his work than the work, if it had sense, would be of him. Reason should conduct inclination. Montaigne will not dandle infants who have as yet neither motion of soul nor shape of body he can esteem, and he has not willingly suffered them to be nursed near him. A regular affection ought to grow with the knowledge children give of themselves. Most fathers do the opposite. They are taken with running and games, as if they loved children for sport like monkeys, then grow close-handed when the sons come of age. Jealousy at seeing them enjoy the world the father is about to leave makes the old man niggardly. It is cruelty, Montaigne says, not to receive grown children into the share of goods and the intelligence of domestic affairs. An old fellow broken and half dead, enjoying in a chimney corner the money that would advance many children, drives them to despair and to dishonourable shifts. He has seen young men of good extraction addicted to stealing that no correction could cure. One gentleman of a very good family, spoken to at a brother's request, confessed he had been put upon that paltry practice by the severity and avarice of his father, and could not leave it off.
At that very time the same man was trapped stealing a lady's rings from her chamber. Another, so accomplished in the trade in youth that even after he came to his estate he could not pass a shop without catching up what he liked, then sending later to pay. Montaigne, a Gascon, hates the vice more by disposition than he condemns it by reason, and still fears it is to be attributed to the vice of the fathers. A lord of good understanding once said he hoarded not to use his parsimony but to keep himself honoured and sought after, because age had deprived him of all other power. A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children's affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection. Terence is cited: government attached to friendship is more durable than government acquired by force. Montaigne condemns all violence in the education of a tender soul designed for honour and liberty. In all his first age he never felt the rod but twice, and then very slightly. He practised the same method with his children, who all died at nurse except Leonora. She reached five years with no correction but very gentle words. Whipping, he has observed, renders boys more cowardly or more wilfully obstinate. Do we desire to be beloved of our children? Will we remove from them all occasion of wishing our death? He married at three-and-thirty and concurs with Aristotle's thirty-five. Plato will have nobody marry before thirty. Thales, importuned young, said it was too soon, and grown into years said it was too late. A gentleman of thirty should not give place entire to a son of twenty. The ordinary answer, that he will not put off his clothes before he goes to bed, serves that man. But a father worn out with age and infirmities, who cannot enjoy the heap he still amasses, wrongs himself and his. He has lived long enough to strip himself to go to bed, not to his very shirt, but to that and a good warm dressing-gown. The greatest act of the Emperor Charles V was that, when clothes encumbered him and his legs began to fail, he resigned possessions, grandeur, and power to his son. Horace would dismiss the old horse in good time, lest, failing in the lists, the spectators laugh.
Montaigne has known persons of great authority marvellously lapsed from the sufficiency of their former years, whom he could have wished at home at their ease. He told an old widower, with daughters to marry and a son of ripe age, that he would do better to leave his principal house to the son and retire to an estate hard by. The man took the advice and found an advantage. Montaigne, arrived at the age for such things, would resign the enjoyment of house and goods with a power of revocation, live near in the most commodious part, not the best in show, and not as the dean of St Hilary of Poitiers, who for two and twenty years had not stepped one foot out of his chamber, a servant coming once a day with something to eat. He is angry at the custom that forbids children to call their father by the name of father. We call Almighty God Father and disdain to have our children call us so. He has reformed the error in his family. Though he could make himself feared, he had much rather make himself beloved. He has known a man once imperious who, grown old, would ever strike, rant, swear, and curse, the most violent householder in France, while others had the greatest use of barn, kitchen, cellar, and purse, and he kept his keys in his pocket more carefully than his eyes. In his presence all bow. A dismissed servant packs his bundle and goes no further than out of sight, and lives and does his old office in the same house a year together without being perceived. Letters are then pretended from a great way off, humble and full of promises, and the man is received again. Bargains that do not please are suppressed. No letter reaches him but those fit for his knowledge. If one falls into his own hand, the reader appointed to speak it aloud changes the sense, and often makes the old man ask pardon of the person who rails at him in the page. Wives lay hold of every occasion to contradict. Montaigne has seen one who robbed her husband wholesale that she might distribute the more liberal alms. Cato said so many servants, so many enemies. The late Mareschal de Montluc, having lost his son in the island of Madeira, a very worthy gentleman of great expectation, insisted to Montaigne what a sorrow it was that he had never made himself familiar with him. That poor boy, said he, never saw in me other than a stern and disdainful countenance, and is gone in a belief that I neither knew how to love him nor esteem him according to his desert. For whom had he reserved the discovery of that singular affection?
Montaigne finds the complaint rational. He opens himself to his family as much as he can, as he did to La Boétie, and will not have them mistaken in him in anything. Ancient Gauls, Caesar reports, never let sons appear in public with their fathers until they began to bear arms. Another indiscretion of fathers is to leave wives the same authority over estates after death. A principal officer of the crown, with fifty thousand crowns yearly in reversion, died necessitous and in debt at above fifty, his mother in her extremest decrepitude still in possession. Mothers should administer until the children are of age, yet the son should rather be cut short than the mother left in indigence. The most judicious distribution, when we come to die, is to let goods follow the custom of the country. People play with their wills as with apples or rods. Montaigne himself was the most dull and heavy boy at his book in the whole province, and will not dispossess an heir on such divinations. Plato's legislator tells dying citizens they are not their own, nor is that theirs of which they are possessed: goods and family appertain to the public. Natural affection, to which we give so great authority, has but very weak roots. For a very little profit we tear children out of the mothers' arms and make them take ours. Countrywomen call goats to their assistance, and two of Montaigne's men-servants never sucked women's milk more than eight days after they were born. A borrowed goat is taken away. The child will not touch another and dies, doubtless of hunger. Beasts alter their natural affection as we do. There is another kind of production, he then says: that which we engender by the soul, the issue of understanding, courage, and abilities, of which we are both father and mother. Heliodorus would rather lose the dignity of his prelacy than that daughter. Labienus, seeing his books condemned to the fire at Rome, caused himself to be shut up alive in the monument of his ancestors. Cassius Severus cried that they should condemn him to the fire too, seeing he carried in his memory all that they contained. Cremutius Cordus, accused of commending Brutus and Cassius, killed himself with fasting when the Senate condemned his writings. Lucan, bleeding out by Nero's order, recited verses of his battle poem as the last thing in his memory. Epicurus dying of the stone had all his consolation in the beauty of the doctrine he left. Montaigne does not know whether he had not much rather have begot a very beautiful one through society with the Muses than by lying with his wife. What he gives the book he gives absolutely and irrevocably. If he is wiser than his book, it is richer than he. Pygmalion's ivory grows soft under his fingers. The book has already been given. The living children are still waiting to hear the same sentence spoken while they can answer it.
