Montaigne opens this stretch of the Virgil essay by confessing that the knot of marital duty lies principally in the will. Husbands have suffered cuckoldom not only without reproach but with singular obligation to wives they still praised. A woman who prized her honour above her life has given that honour to an enemy to save her husband, and ordinary houses do the same on a husband's order. Phaulius offered his wife to King Philip out of ambition. Galba, watching Maecenas and his own wife make eyes at supper, sank onto his cushion as if asleep, then caught a servant at the plate and cried that he only slept for Maecenas. In the East Indies a married woman might prostitute herself for an elephant and be valued for so high a rate. Solon let women sell chastity to live. Juvenal asks who shall guard the guards, once the wife has begun with them. Curiosity, Montaigne says, is vicious throughout and pernicious here. Jealousy inflames the disease it pretends to cure, and the character of cuckold is indelible: the punishment proclaims it more than the fault. Romans sent word home before they returned so they would not surprise their wives. One nation had the priest open the way to the bride on the wedding day to spare the husband's first curiosity. The world will be talking anyway. Each man has made somebody cuckold, and nature runs in compensation. Ladies laugh at a peaceable marriage. The sharps and sweets of marriage are kept secret by the wise, and a prating fellow like Montaigne is bound by custom not to tell all he knows. To counsel women against jealousy is time lost. Pittacus said his trouble was his wife's jealous head. The senate of Marseilles let a man kill himself to escape his wife's clamour. Someone called a happy marriage a blind wife and a deaf husband. Severity then produces the opposite of its design. Raising the value of the place raises the desire of the conquest. Interdiction incites. Messalina first cuckolded Claudius in private, then, bored by his stupid facility, married Silius in public while the emperor was out of the city. When that sleepy tolerance dissolved, anger and fury discharged at the first onset. He put her to death, and a great number with her. From that wreck Montaigne turns to Virgil and Lucretius on Venus and Mars. Their language is downright, nervous, and solid. He does not say it is well said but well thought. French scribblers of his age chase new words and leave sinewy old ones behind. His page understands love; Leo Hebraeus and Ficinus cover it in a school robe the boy cannot wear. He writes at home in a wild country, where few understand the Latin of a Paternoster, so the work will be exactly his. He corrects accidents, not the constant imperfections that make the book him. He is apish in imitation, like Alexander's Indian apes who glued their own eyes and bound themselves by copying hunters. On horseback his best conceits arrive and vanish. Laying books aside, he finds love is the thirst of enjoying the object desired, and Venus the pleasure of discharging one's vessels. Plato says the gods made man for their sport. Alexander knew himself mortal by this act and by sleeping.
On one side nature has fixed the most noble, useful, and pleasant of her functions to this desire. On the other she leaves us to accuse it, blush at it, and recommend abstinence. Are we not brutes, Montaigne asks, to call that work brutish which begets us? The Essenians, Pliny says, kept a country for ages without nurse or baby-clouts, preferring extermination to female embraces. Everyone avoids seeing a man born and runs to see him die. A lady of quality will not chew at a public table because chewing disfigures the face. Fanatic men in the Turkish empire hide their meals, mangle their limbs, and think they grow better by being worse. Poor man, Montaigne says, you have enough inevitable inconveniences without forging imaginary ones. Parish laws bind you; the laws of God and the world do not. Virgil and Lucretius treat wantonness reservedly and thereby discover it more openly. Ladies cover necks with network, priests cover sacred things, painters shadow pictures to give them lustre. He who is afraid to express himself draws us on to guess at more than is meant. The more respectful, timorous love of Spaniards and Italians pleases him. A glance, a bow, a word, a sign stand for favour. It would be excellent thrift to dine on the steam of the roast. Without hope and without desire we proceed not worth a pin. Ladies ought to dread entire possession: they are no sooner ours than we are no more theirs. Thrasonides, having gained a mistress's consent, refused to enjoy her so that he might not quench the ardour he fed. In Italy they court even women who sell themselves, saying the women sell the body and the will is too free to be exposed to sale. Montaigne abhors a body without affection. He likewise says we love a body without a soul or sentiment when we love a body without its consent and desire. Some would rather lend that than their coach. Tibullus has the woman hold you while she sighs for absent loves. In their own days a man used the act itself to poison a worthy lady. Italy, he says, is regent of the world in this. Their marriages impose so slavish a law that the most distant acquaintance with a stranger is as capital as the most intimate, so once the fence is broken they get on fire. They are extreme in constraint, the French in licence. Ladies who have been strictest with their maids have had no better luck than those who allowed greater liberty. Leave a great deal of conduct to their own discretion. For him, who has no title left but by the ears, it is enough if they keep him for counsel. He advises men and women to abstinence; if the age will not endure it, at least modesty and discretion. Aristippus told blushing young men that the vice is in not coming out, not in going in.
He commends gradation and delay. Plato forbids facility and promptness to the defendant in all sorts of love. They better conquer by flying, as the Scythians did. Thalestris, queen of the Amazons, came with three hundred horse and asked Alexander to lie with her so that the most valiant woman and the bravest man might leave issue. He detained her thirteen days in royal feasting. We are almost throughout unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours. Love, if it is not violent, is contrary to its nature, and violence is not constant. Joanna, queen of Naples, had Andrews hanged in a halter of gold and silk because his parts did not answer the expectation she had from his stature and youth. They buy a cat in a sack. Plato would have judges see young men stripped before marriage, women only to the girdle. Montaigne, fit but for once, will not trouble a woman he is to reverence. Nature should satisfy herself in having rendered this age miserable, without rendering it ridiculous too. He universally owes his entire picture to the public. The wisdom of his instruction consists in liberty, truth, and essence. Life is divided betwixt folly and prudence; whoever writes only what is reverend and canonical leaves above the one half behind. Churchmen of his nation have printed brisk verses of the same stamp. He loves modesty, yet nature chose this scandalous way of speaking for him. He will not let a man who has received stolen night-favours assume at once the coldness and authority of a husband. It is a free contract. He conducted the bargain as conscientiously as any other, acquainted them with the birth, vigour, and declination of his affection, kept his word, and more than once made pleasure strike to the interest of their honour. If he began again, he would use the same method. He retained a little emotion, but no dotage, and never purchased the vice at the price of ingratitude, treachery, malice, or cruelty. A young man asked Panetius if it became a wise man to be in love. Let the wise man look to that, said he; we who are not so should not enslave ourselves to others and grow contemptible to ourselves. Montaigne still looks on a love carried this way as wholesome: it enlivens a drowsy soul and defers the approaches of age while the pulse yet beats. Socrates, older than he, leaning shoulder to shoulder over a book, felt a sting like an insect's bite that lasted five days. Philosophy does not contend against natural pleasures if they are moderate. It preaches moderation, not total abstinence. In a body broken with age, as in a weak stomach, it is excusable to warm the appetite by art and fancy. We injuriously break up a man alive if we call nothing in us purely corporeal or spiritual. Why should the mind not pursue her pleasures without prejudice to the body, as the body must not prejudice the mind? He has no other passion to keep him in breath. Love would restore vigilance, sobriety, grace, and study, and hold up the chin of a man going full drive toward ruin. He understands it is hard to recover. Taste has grown nice. We ask most when we bring least, and we are harder to choose when we least deserve to be accepted.
They have strength and reason on their side. Let us give way. Blossoms of springing beauty will not be handled by benumbed hands. The old philosopher, jeered because he could not gain a young girl, said the hook will not stick in such soft cheese. The pleasure Montaigne gives tickles his imagination more than what he receives, and a mean soul will live as a continual charge. If they can be kind only out of pity, he had much rather die than live upon charity. Consort with women of your own condition, someone says. He calls that a ridiculous and insipid composition. Xenophon accuses Menon of never making love but to old women. Montaigne takes more pleasure in seeing two young beauties mixed, or only meditating on them, than in acting second in a pitiful conjunction. Love, in his opinion, is in season in the age next to childhood. Homer extends beauty to the budding of the beard; Marguerite of Navarre would convert the title of fair into that of good at thirty. Love is a beardless boy and knows no order. Women set the intelligence out as entirely spiritual, yet he has never seen one hold out a hand to a body in decadence, however full the mind. Why does not some woman make the Socratical bargain, purchasing a philosophical generation at the price of her thighs? Plato would not refuse a kiss, in war, to the man who has done a signal exploit, age or ugliness notwithstanding. To conclude the torrent of babble, males and females are cast in the same mould, and education and usage excepted, the difference is not great. Plato invites both to the same studies and vocations. Antisthenes rejected the distinction between their virtue and ours. It is much easier to accuse one sex than to excuse the other. The pot mocks the kettle. Both vessels are still on the fire, and neither speaker in the room has a clean hand to lift them off.
