The Story of Spurina — The Essays of Montaigne

Philosophy gives reason the job of ruling appetite. Love looks like the strongest of those appetites because it seizes body and soul at once, yet Montaigne notes that anything mixed with the body can be cooled, cut, or starved. Men have amputated the rebelling members, applied snow and vinegar, and worn horse-hair shirts to torture the reins. A prince at the court of King Francis I put on his father's hair shirt for a festival and could not wear it till night. He was sick a long time after, and still a hair shirt does not always make the wearer chaste. Xenocrates, finding his flesh in mutiny after the courtesan Lais had been slipped naked into his bed, had the consenting members burned. Appetites that live wholly in the soul, ambition and avarice among them, cannot be helped except by reason itself, and they grow sharper by being fed.

Julius Caesar is the proof of that disparity. Never was a man more given to amorous delights: Suetonius gives the fair complexion and hazel eyes, the four wives, Cleopatra and the child Caesario, and Servilia, Cato's sister and mother of Brutus. Yet when ambition rose to contend with love, love was compelled to give way. Mohammed who took Constantinople was equally lecher and soldier, but the quarrelling passion still won until extreme old age. Ladislaus of Naples ran the other way. He would lift the siege of Florence if they delivered a beautiful maid. Her physician father sent a poisoned handkerchief, and the pair died in one another's arms. Caesar never stole a minute from advancement. He ate medicated oil rather than shame his host, whipped a baker for serving finer bread, and Cato called him the first sober man who ever made it his business to ruin his country. In the Senate Cato snatched a sealed letter, found a love note from Servilia, and threw it back with "There, drunkard." After victory Caesar dismissed whole armies without oath, sat Catullus at his table the same day the poet offered excuses, and published conspiracies without hunting the men. All of it was stifled by furious ambition. That vice made a liberal man a public thief, taught him to prefer the wicked if they served his rise, and led him to boast that he had made Rome a name without form. One vice, Montaigne says, spoiled the richest nature that ever was.

To bridle appetite by reason or by violence is already much. To hate one's own graces because they inflame other people is rarer. Spurina, a young Tuscan of such beauty that even chaste eyes could not look without catching fire, slashed and scarred the face nature had so carefully made. Montaigne more admires than honours the act: the design was conscientious, the prudence defective. Deformity might later breed hatred, contempt, envy, or the charge of mad ambition. It would have been more just, and more noble, to make those gifts a subject of exemplary regularity. They who retire from the offices of civil life die a little to avoid the pain of living well. Entire abstinence is easier than the due use of abundance. Moderation gives more work than suffering. Scipio's well living has a thousand fashions. Diogenes has one. The thousand still wait in the room. The one has already left it.