Good wives, Montaigne says, are not found by the dozen. Marriage is a bargain of so many nice circumstances that a will, even a man's, has enough to do to last. The true touch is the time of the companionship: whether it has been constantly gentle, loyal, and agreeable. His own age publishes devotion after husbands are dead, a testimony too slow, and one that rather proves they never loved them till they were gone. He has no palate for that mystery. He whispers to a waiting-woman or a secretary, "How were they, how did they live together?" Tacitus is in his head: they make the most ado who are least concerned. Whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead. He would let them laugh after we are gone if they will smile while we are here. Look under the formal veils at deportment, complexion, the plumpness of the cheeks. There the face talks plainly. That starched countenance looks forward to a new husband more than back to the old. A beautiful widow of a prince, still living when he was a boy, wore more ornament than the laws of widowhood allow, and said she did it because she was resolved never to marry again.
He chooses three women who also showed their goodness at a husband's death, yet of another kind, so austere they will hardly be copied. Pliny had a neighbour in Italy tormented with ulcers. The wife asked leave to study the disease, found it incurable, and advised him to kill himself. He was backward. She said she would use the same remedy, tied herself to him by the waist, and they threw themselves from a window into the sea so he would die in her arms. She was of mean condition. Among that class, Montaigne says, rare virtue is not so new. The other two were noble and rich, where such examples rarely lodge. Arria, wife of Caecina Paetus, followed her captured husband from Sclavonia in a hired fisher-boat when the escort would not take her. At Rome she repulsed Junia, widow of Scribonianus: she would not hear a woman in whose lap that man was slain while she herself still lived. Thrasea asked whether she would have her own daughter do the same if he met Caecina's fortune. Yes, she said, if the daughter had lived as long and in as good understanding. Watchers tried to keep her from dying. She dashed her head against the wall, then told them they might make her die an ill death but could not keep her from dying. When Paetus still lacked resolution to obey the emperor's sentence, she snatched the poignard from his side, stabbed herself in the breast, and handed him the blade with the three words that last: "Paetus, it is not painful." He struck himself, ashamed to have needed so dear an example.
Pompeia Paulina, young and noble, had married Seneca in his extreme old age. Nero sent the sentence. Seneca asked for paper to write his will, was refused, and left his friends the image of his life and manners. He told Paulina not to dishonour the death with tears. She answered that she was not a woman to let him go alone, and that she would go along with him. He took the offer: he had taught her how to live; she more coveted the honour of dying; the glory of her part was greater. Surgeons opened the veins of both. His, shrunk with age and abstinence, ran too slowly, so they opened the thighs, then gave poison, then a hot bath. He sent her to her chamber so his torment would not pierce her. Nero, hearing, and having no particular unkindness for a lady of her birth, ordered her wounds bound. She lived contrary to her design, pale ever after. Montaigne finds the three stories as tragic as any invented tale. In the last couple the exchange looks uneven: she offered to die, and he had already forborne to die for her. Seneca's letter to Lucilius explains the stoic ledger. Seized with an ague, he went to the country against her wish, then began to make much of himself because her life was involved in his. He lost the privilege of old age, the right to be more resolute, because a young girl was interested in this old fellow's health. He is enforced to live, and sometimes to live in magnanimity. The funeral still has not scored the years they actually shared.
Coming Up in Chapter 92
If asked his choice among all men, Montaigne names three more excellent than the rest. He begins with Homer: blind and poor, yet so complete that later writers of government, war, religion, and philosophy treated his books as a treasury. Alexander kept Homer in Darius's cabinet as his most faithful counsellor in war.
