Montaigne was once employed in consoling a lady truly afflicted. Opposition, he finds, only irritates sorrow, as a casual remark grows firmer once someone controverts it. A physician's first addresses should be gracious. His aim was chiefly to gull the watching company, so he took it into his head only to palliate the disease. He refused philosophy's ready consolations and bent discourse by little digressions until he led her from the sorrowful thought. Successors who struck at the root found no amendment. Hempricourt, trapped in mutinous Liege, sent milder terms, then four new mediators, and laid the fury asleep until dawn. Hippomenes dropped Venus's three golden apples so Atalanta stepped aside and lost the race. When physicians cannot stop a catarrh, they turn it into a less dangerous part.
Directly jostling a man's infirmities only makes him decline and evade the attack. It belongs to one sole Socrates to meet death with an ordinary countenance and seek no consolation outside the thing itself. Men on the scaffold fill their senses with prayer the way children are amused with a toy at the surgeon's lancet; that is devotion, not constancy. Subrius Flavius, led to die by Niger under Nero, keeps his thought on the subject: the grave is ill-made, and he tells Niger to strike as firmly as he holds his head. A duellist of Montaigne's acquaintance, nailed by nine or ten thrusts, thought only of revenge and later killed his man. Xenophon threw down his crown at news of Gryllus, then replaced it when the death proved brave. Epicurus consoles himself on his writings; even Zeno's syllogisms barely rub the crust of death. Perfect men as they are, they are yet simply men.
To divert a young prince from revenge, Montaigne did not preach turning the other cheek. He made him relish the honour he would win by clemency, and so turned him toward ambition. Wounded by a just displeasure, Montaigne might have lost himself had he trusted his own strength; by art and youth he became amorous, and love rescued him from the evil friendship had engaged him in. Variation relieves what argument cannot subdue. Alcibiades cut the ears and tail of his beautiful dog so rumour would prate of that and let his other actions alone. Some women counterfeit a second affection to stop conjecture and are caught by the disguise. A little thing will turn and divert us because a little thing holds us. Plutarch laments a daughter's apish tricks; Caesar's robe troubles Rome more than his death; names and tones wound like a preacher's cry. These are the foundations of our mourning.
The obstinacy of Montaigne's stone then threw him into suppressions of urine for three or four days, near enough to death that evasion looked like folly. Imagination fed the regret of life on a dog, a horse, a book, a glass. He insults death in gross, but in detail it domineers: the tears of a footman, the disposing of his clothes, the touch of a friendly hand. Conveying Monsieur de Grammont from La Fere to Soissons, he saw people weep who never knew the name. Mountain women play Priest Martin, listing a dead husband's faults to turn pity toward disdain. Montaigne henceforth renounces favourable posthumous praise, not because he will deserve none, but because he will be dead. A soldier who claims no passion for a siege is red with fury the next day once steel and drums have done their work. Cambyses killed a beloved brother on a dream. Propertius is left speaking: Prometheus fashioned bodies and did not apply his art to the mind, which should have been his first care.
Coming Up in Chapter 98
Profitable thoughts, Montaigne says, are more cumbersome than gaiety. Vice, death, poverty, and disease are grave subjects. An ordinary soul grows besotted if kept continually intent on them. Age now preaches temperance, so he purposely lets himself run a little into disorder and occupy his mind with wanton youthful thoughts.
