Montaigne says we must not rivet ourselves so fast to one humour. Life is unequal and multiform, and the bravest souls show variety and pliancy. Livy's elder Cato had a versatile ingenium that fitted every task as if he had been born only for the work in his hands. To stay tied to a single course is to be, but not to live. Montaigne writes this late, when his soul amuses itself only in a limited range and with all its force, so idleness is painful labour and books debauch it from self-study. He would rather fashion the soul than furnish it. One sole and perfect friendship has given him a distaste for the herd, and ordinary friendships find him cold. He still commends a soul of several stages that can stretch and slacken, chat with a carpenter or a gardener, and talk with followers in their own way.
He dislikes Plato's rule that masters must always speak in a magisterial tone to their servants. Others study how to raise their minds; he studies how to humble his. As Lacedaemonian valour needed flutes to keep it from fury, most minds need lead more than wings. You must let yourself down to those with whom you converse, and sometimes affect ignorance. Learned men stumble here: they strew Plato and Aquinas where the first person met could decide as well. Montaigne would have people of quality set out their own natural treasures. If women must have books, poetry and moral philosophy may teach them to manage liberty and bear a husband's rudeness. The solitude he loves is not leaving the crowd but withdrawing cares. At the Louvre the bustle thrusts him upon himself. At home he sits mute in his closet, without ushering guests to the coach. The men he covets are those called sincere and able. That first commerce is simply privacy, frequentation, and conference, the exercise of souls, without other fruit.
He understands those men by silence and smiles, better at table than in council, as Hippomachus knew good wrestlers by their walk in the street. His second commerce is with beautiful and honourable women. He scalded himself in youth by loving without order, and Ovid's Capharean rocks taught him to steer off. It is folly to fix all thought on love, and just as cowardly to play the comedian without desire. He no more acknowledges a Venus without a Cupid than a mother without issue; the cheat recoils on the actor. He seldom gave himself to mercenary embraces, preferring difficulty and a certain glory in the manner of Tiberius and the courtesan Flora. Beauty remains women's true prerogative. Reason and the offices of friendship stay better among men.
Those two engagements depend on others. Friendship is rare; love withers with age. Neither could carry the business of his life. Books, the third commerce, are more certain and more his own. They go side by side with him in his whole course, comfort old age, blunt griefs that have not seized the whole soul, and receive him with the same kindness when he runs to them from a troublesome fancy. He enjoys them as misers enjoy money, knowing he may read when he pleases. His round tower library on the third storey overlooks garden, court, and base-court. Five rows of shelves surround a room sixteen paces across. There he walks to think, dictates these whimsies, and sequesters one corner from conjugal, filial, and civil claim. A man is miserable who has not at home where to be by himself. He lives from day to day, for himself alone, and studies now for diversion, not profit. Books still cost him: the soul is exercised, but the body grows heavy in declining age. These have been his three favourite occupations, apart from the civil offices he still owes the world.
Coming Up in Chapter 97
Montaigne is once employed in consoling a lady truly afflicted. Most mournings, he says, are artificial, but this grief is real. Opposition only irritates sorrow. A physician's first addresses should be gracious. He takes it into his head only to palliate the disease, not to go to the root.
