Free How to Live by Sarah Bakewell Page B

to him, and, when he traveled or visited the royal court with a retinue of servants, he found it most annoying to be the one asked, “Where is the master?”Yet there was little he could do, other than go on horseback wherever possible—his favorite ploy.
    A visit to Montaigne’s tower suggests that he was telling the truth: the doorways stand only around five foot high. People in general were shorter then, and the doors were built before Montaigne lived there, but clearly he did not bang his head often enough to go to the trouble of having them raised. Of course it is hard to know whether it was his self-proclaimed smallness or his self-proclaimed laziness that was the deciding factor.
    He may have been diminutive, but he tells us that he had a strong, solidbuild, and that he conducted himself with flair, often strolling with a stick on which he would lean “in an affected manner.”In later life, he took up his father’s practice of dressing in austere black and white, but as a young man he dressed with stylish ease according to the fashion of the day, with “a cloak worn like a scarf, the hood over one shoulder, a neglected stocking.”
    The most vivid picture of the young Montaigne comes from a poem addressed to him by his slightly older friend Étienne de La Boétie.It shows both what was troubling about Montaigne and what made him attractive. La Boétie thought him brilliant and full of promise, but in danger of wasting his talents. He needed guidance from some calmer, wiser mentor—a role in which La Boétie cast himself—but he had a stubborn tendency to reject this guidance when it was offered. He was too susceptible to pretty young women, and too pleased with himself. “My house supplies ample riches, my age ample powers,” La Boétie has Montaigne say complacently in the poem. “And indeed a sweet girl is smiling at me.” La Boétie compares him to a beautiful Alcibiades, blessed by fortune, or a Hercules, capable of heroic things but hesitating too long at the moral crossroads. His greatest charms were also his greatest faults.
    By the time this poem was written, Montaigne had already traveled a long way from his schoolboy days; he had entered upon his career in the Bordeaux
parlement
. Having disappeared from biographical view for some years after finishing his studies at the Collège, he reappeared in the city as a young magistrate.
    To embark on such a course, he must have studied law somewhere. He is unlikely to have done this in Bordeaux; more likely cities are Paris and Toulouse.Perhaps he spent time in both. Remarks in the
Essays
show that he knew Toulouse well, and he also had a lot to say about Paris. He tells us that the city had his heart since childhood—which could mean any stage of his youth, up to around twenty-five. “I love her tenderly,” he says, “even to her warts and her spots.” Paris was the only place where he didn’t mind feeling like a Frenchman rather than a proudly local Gascon. It was a great city in every way: “great in population, great in the felicity of her situation, but above all great and incomparable in variety and diversity of the good things of life.”
    Wherever Montaigne acquired his training, it fulfilled its function: it propelled him into the legal and political career that may have been envisaged for him from the start. It then kept him there for thirteen years. This period usually shrinks small in biographies, since it is patchily documented, but they were important years indeed, running from just before Montaigne’s twenty-fourth birthday to just after his thirty-seventh.When he retired to his country life, growing wine and writing in his tower, he had already accumulated a wealth of experience in public service, and this was still fresh in his mind in the early essays. By the time he came to the later ones, even tougher responsibilities had taken over.
    Montaigne’s first post was not in Bordeaux, but in another nearby town, Périgueux,