A Summer with Montaigne by Antoine Compagnon

Author:Antoine Compagnon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

21

THE SKIN AND THE SHIRT

Montaigne was a political man, an involved and engaged man, as I have said. However, he was always careful not to get too caught up in the game; he maintained a certain level of detachment, observing himself as if he were watching a play. He explains this in the chapter “Of Managing the Will” in Book Three of the Essays, discussing his service as mayor of Bordeaux:

“‘Most of our business is farce’:

‘Mundus universus exercet histrioniam.’

—Petronius Arbiter, iii. 8.

We must play our part properly, but withal as a part of a borrowed personage; we must not make real essence of a mask and outward appearance; nor of a strange person, our own; we cannot distinguish the skin from the shirt: ‘tis enough to meal the face, without mealing the breast.” (III, 10)

The world is a theater. Montaigne is using a common theme here, familiar since Antiquity. We are actors, masks; therefore we must not mistake ourselves for the roles we play. We have to act with conscience and fulfill our responsibilities, but we must not confuse our actions with who we are. We must maintain the margin between our inner life and our worldy affairs.

Is Montaigne giving us a lesson in hypocrisy? As a teenager reading the Essays for the first time, I thought so, and was suspicious of this kind of subtle distinction. Young people yearn for sincerity, authenticity, and thus perfect, ideal transparency and agreement between what is and what appears to be. The adolescent Hamlet rejects courtly manners and refuses any compromise: “I know not seems,” he cries to the queen, his mother.

Later, we discover that it is better for powerful people not to take themselves too seriously; not to identify so fully with their duties. It is better for them to keep a certain sense of humor or irony. This is what they meant in the Middle Ages, more or less, when they put forward the doctrine of the king’s two bodies, the political, immortal body and the physical, mortal one. The sovereign must not confuse himself as an individual with the responsibility he holds, but neither must he doubt his own position too much, which could compromise his authority, as happened to another of Shakespeare’s heroes, Richard II, who was too conscious of the fact that he was playing a role, and was soon deposed.

Montaigne prefers to do business with men who, to put it simply, are not big-headed:

“I see some who transform and transubstantiate themselves into as many new shapes and new beings as they undertake new employments; and who strut and fume even to the heart and liver, and carry their state along with them even to the close-stool: I cannot make them distinguish the salutations made to themselves from those made to their commission, their train, or their mule:

‘Tantum se fortunx permittunt, etiam ut naturam dediscant.’

‘They so much give themselves up to fortune, as even to unlearn nature.’—Quintus Curtius, iii. 2.

They swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking, according to the height of their magisterial place.

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