Montaigne opens Upon some verses of Virgil by saying profitable thoughts of vice, death, poverty, and disease are more full and solid, and by so much more cumbersome. An ordinary soul must take them by intervals or grow besotted. Youth needed reminders to duty; age now preaches without asking. From the excess of sprightliness he has fallen into that of severity, which troubles him more, so he purposely runs a little into wanton thoughts. His body now guides his mind toward reformation, preaching death, patience, and repentance sleeping or waking. He defends himself from temperance as he once did from pleasure, lest prudence wither him. Wisdom has its excesses. In the truces his infirmities allow, he turns from the stormy sky he regards without fear and amuses himself in better years. Janus should make age look backward. Martial says it is to live twice to enjoy a former life again. Plato would have old men watch young dances and give the prize to the youth who most diverted the company. Cloudy days are now ordinary; a clear one startles him like a favour. He cannot force a smile from this wretched body; the contest of art against nature is weak. He would rather be a less while old than old before he is so. He seizes the least occasions of pleasure, wants them sweet and ready rather than magnificent, and asks what if he took pleasure in cob-nut or a top. The laws send the old home. He furnishes age with toys as one does children. The lightest puncture now goes through. The mind, like mistletoe on a dead tree, should stay green, yet if its companion has the stone, it seems to have it too. He loves a gay and civil wisdom. Socrates kept a serene smiling face, not Crassus who never laughed. Virtue is a pleasant and gay quality. Let us not be ashamed to speak what we are not ashamed to think.
He has enjoined himself to dare to say all that he dares to do. Whoever will tell all should do nothing he must conceal; they who hide vice from others hide it from themselves. He confesses in public, greedy to be known truly, and mortally hates to be mistaken by those who learn his name. Archelaus, soaked in the street, said the water fell on him whom they took him to be. Socrates, told people spoke ill of him, said there was nothing in him of what they said. Montaigne would owe no thanks for being called a good pilot or very chaste, and as little concern for traitor or drunkard. He is content to be less commended if better known. The Essays serve ladies as hall furniture; this chapter will make him part of the water-closet. Then the subject: what has the act of generation, so natural, so necessary, and so just, done to men, to be a thing not spoken of without blushing, while we boldly pronounce kill, rob, betray? Aristotle says bashfulness is an ornament to youth and a reproach to old age. Venus is not so beautiful, naked and panting, as she is in Virgil, snowy-armed around a hesitating Vulcan until the flame runs through his bones. Montaigne finds her a little too passionate for a married Venus. Love hates to hold of any title but itself, and marriage, with alliance and dowry, is another title. Men marry for posterity and family more than for themselves; he likes a match carried by a third hand. It is a kind of incest, he says, to pour amorous licence into that alliance. Aristotle wants a husband to approach his wife with prudence; physicians add that extreme pleasure hinders conception. Marriages contracted on beauty fail first.
They who honour marriage by joining love to it confound two names. A good marriage rejects love's company and tries to represent friendship: constancy, trust, useful services. A woman of right taste would be loth to serve as mistress; lodged as a wife she is more securely placed. Ask a husband which disgrace would afflict him more, wife's or mistress's, and a sound marriage has no dispute. So few are happy, which is a token of the price. We cannot live without it and yet do nothing but decry it. It happens as with cages: birds without despair to get in, those within despair of getting out. Socrates said take which course you will, you will repent. Montaigne would not have married Wisdom herself. Custom drew him in when he was less tractable; as great a libertine as he is taken to be, he has observed the laws of marriage more strictly than he promised. Once the fetters are on, kicking is vain. Treachery is to marry without espousing. Virgil still shows a marriage of good accord with not much loyalty. A woman may yield to a stranger and keep some duty; they are two designs with several paths. Few who made a wife of a mistress have not repented; Jupiter's life with Juno is to befoul a basket and put it on one's head. Athens pleased as ladies do whom men court: everyone takes a turn, no one wants to inhabit. Husbands who hate their wives because they themselves do them wrong should, for repentance, hold them dearer. The ends are compatible without being the same. Marriage takes utility, justice, honour, constancy; love needs darts and fire. Women are not to blame for refusing rules men make without them. After Tiresias, after an Empress's five-and-twenty bouts, after the Queen of Arragon set six times a day while Solon taxes men at three a month, men still enjoin women continency as abomination while going to it without reproach. We would have them sound, vigorous, high-fed, and chaste: hot and cold at once.
Boleslas and Kinge vowed virginity on the wedding bed. We train girls from infancy in the traffic of love, then ask the governess to skip the word. Montaigne's only daughter, reading a French book before him, hits fouteau, a beech-tree whose sound resembles an obscene word. The woman who governs her stops her roughly. He lets their rules alone, but twenty lacqueys in six months could not have printed meaning, usage, and consequence as that reprimand did. He once overheard women's talk he will not repeat; they need not learn, they breed it. If fear and honour did not restrain them, we should all be shamed. Philosophers wrote of conjunction and the art of loving; nations deified the member and called incontinency necessary for continency's sake. Egyptian ladies carried carved wood in the Bacchanalia; modest Roman matrons offered flowers to Priapus. A man of Montaigne's youth gelded noble statues so ladies should not be corrupted, and should, he says, have gelded horses and asses and all nature. We heat the imagination and then find fault. Scarce one of us apprehends the shame of his own vices as he does his wife's; he would rather she were a murderess than less chaste than himself, an unjust estimate. He holds it easier to carry armour all one's life than a maidenhead. A queen said a lady cannot boast of chastity who was never tempted. Honour has a frontier that is free and neuter. Plato, told the world spoke ill of him, said he would live so as to make them change their note. Table-talk now boasts of favours once told only to one friend. The exasperation springs from jealousy. Beasts feel it: the he-goat crushed the she-goat Cratis loved. Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, and Cato were cuckolds and made no bustle; only Lepidus died of the grief. Vulcan put Venus to shame and still armed Aeneas. When jealousy seizes, friendship's causes become mortal hatred; Octavius killed Pontia rather than fail to marry her. Is it the will we would restrain? Dreams already engage it. Scythian women put out the eyes of slaves so they might have their pleasure and the men never the wiser. A neighbour, suspected insufficient, swore he had ridden twenty stages and was divorced by the oath. Midwives destroy virginity while testing it. Fatua never suffered herself to be seen by any man after marriage; Hiero's wife never noticed his stinking breath, thinking it common to all men. They must become insensible and invisible to satisfy us.
