The Man Who Spent A Decade Locked In A Tower
By: Reuben Salsa
Tags: Ideas, Philosophy, Salsa, History, Writing

“The first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man.” — William Hazlitt, English journalist

Michel, born in 1533, was the poster boy for philosophers of the French Renaissance. His writing combined intellectual arguments with personal anecdotes. Today, that style is much revered and often copied, but not many have managed it with quite the eloquence and wisdom of Montaigne.

Michel’s upbringing was decidedly odd. His father insisted that Michel should only be spoken to in Latin. A cultured man would know the ancient languages he would argue. And so it was, that French born Michel’s first spoken language was the ancient verse of Latin. To compound his difficulty speaking his native voice, he was later assigned a German tutor who couldn’t even speak French.

If that wasn’t bizarre enough, his father, a practitioner of humanist philosophy, chose to send the new-born Michel to live with a peasant family. Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne and father to Michel had mapped out a pedagogical plan of upbringing. His father reasoned it would “draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help”. It’s hard to say what an impact that had on a baby, torn away from his natural mother and living unawares in a peasant cottage. At the age of three, the infant Michel was relocated back to the chateau.

At the behest of his father, all the servants, maids and every member of staff were instructed to only speak to Michel in Latin. This included his mother. A toddler, torn away from an adopted family and then thrown into an alien environment where nobody could speak his language. It’s a surprise that Michel didn’t harbor any deep resentment towards his father.

Indeed, Michel would thrive under the bizarre arrangements. Every morning he would be awaken by a musician playing one instrument or other. His Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than the more traditional books.

Michel was embellished with the spirit of liberty and delight. He would later muse on his upbringing with great fondness. His father was a constant source of pride within his Essays. At the age of 13, having mastered the entire school curriculum, Michel studied law. It wasn’t long before he became counsellor to the parliament of Bordeaux and later join the French King at court. His crowning glory in the professional world was being awarded the highest honor of the French nobility, the collar of the Order of Saint Michael.

Not bad for somebody under the age of 30! It was in Bordeaux where he first met Étienne de La Boétie. The two hit it off immediately. Side by side, they would share long walks and lunches together. The two woven into each other’s lives and were inseparable. Heartache was soon to follow as Etienne fell ill with the plague. In 1563, he died with Michel weeping by his side.

The impact on Michel from his friend’s death was huge. It would be a further eight years of torment before Michel declared he had had enough and locked himself away in the tower. In 1571, he retired from public life to the Tower of the château, his so-called “citadel”, in the Dordogne, where he almost totally isolated himself from every social and family affair.

Locked away from all human contact, Michel lost himself in his vast collection of books. A library that stretched to over 1,500 volumes of work. On the bookshelf, Michel inscribed the following:

“In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.”

It was here that Montaigne would write his Essais, a collection of a large number of short subjective essays on various topics published in 1580 that were inspired by his studies in the classics. His written style would go on to influence many great authors and critics, from Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche to Erich Auerbach.

According to Nietzsche, Montaigne ‘truly augmented the joy of living on this Earth’.

At the age of 59, Michel would die from quinsy (Peritonsillar abscess). An infection behind the tonsil that led to paralysis of his tongue. A man who loved to talk was rendered speechless.

As Michel de Montaigne once said: “Que sçay-je?” (“What do I know?”), it turns out, he knew an awful lot about life.