Fionnuala's Reviews > Les Essais

I bought this gargantuan book seven years ago with the firm intention of reading its 1350 pages someday. I suspect I didn't fully believe I ever would but I have a great capacity for hope.

Until last year, the book lay unopened, though not entirely pristine, because in my ongoing hope, I'd placed it on a shelf underneath a coffee-table where I wouldn't forget about it, and eventually a glass of wine was spilled on the table drenching the book underneath so that now the edges of all its pages are wine tinged. That was a fitting baptism because there was a vineyard attached to Michel de Montaigne's chateau, and wine is still produced there today, five hundred years after Montaigne's time. One of the wines the present day owners make is called 'Les Essais'.



Not that Montaigne talks about wine very often in the course of the essays because wine has always been a matter of course in France—it's simply what you drink with your food on a daily basis. But still it's interesting to note that in the 107 essays, wine does get mentioned 107 times. Some of those references are in the Latin and Greek quotes which Montaigne liked to sprinkle liberally throughout the essays, so not only do we hear a little about the habits of wine drinking in his own time but we also hear about wine-drinking among the Greeks going back to the time of Homer and Plato (Plato recommends copious wine drinking once you reach the age of forty, by the way). That was a time when Chian wine was highly prized, according to the Greek writer Plutarch, whom Montaigne references frequently. One of the Plutarch stories he relays to us is about Diogenes, who, when asked what kind of wine he liked, said, 'Someone else's!'
Montaigne also quotes Romans writers such as Horace, Ovid and Pliny on many matters, but on wine drinking too. Some of those quotes talk of the much prized Falernian wine, a white wine from the slopes of Mount Falernus south of Rome which must have been very high in alcohol because apparently you could set a match to it!
Montaigne seems to have read Erasmus on wine drinking too, and in line with what Erasmus recommended, he drank a 'moderate' amount a day in his prime (that amount would be the equivalent of a litre, or one and a half pints today). Later, when Montaigne was in poor health (he suffered from kidney stones in his fifties and sixties) he watered his wine, but he also put wine in his water—he refused to drink one without the other, maintaining that wine-drinking is one of the last pleasures left in older age. He talks about the seat of bodily pleasures changing throughout his life, moving from his feet when he was a child running about all day, to his loins when he was a young adult (a time he remembers very fondly), to settling in his gullet in middle age when he'd learned to better savor what he ate and drank.
He had a favorite drinking glass too, a small one, because he liked to be able to empty it completely before topping it up. And he rejected completely the idea of drinking wine out of any receptacle that wasn't clear—he says he drank with his eyes as much as with his tastebuds. I identify with him on many of those practices—except drinking a litre a day or watering my wine. I must be like the Germanic peoples whom Montaigne says would never be caught mixing water with wine—though he also claims they gulped it down as if it were water, but that they were all the healthier for it.
He mentions too that the people in his part of France used wine as a medicine. They heated it and mixed it with herbs and spices to make a kind of mulled wine which was often a successful remedy. Generally though, he hadn't much time for medical remedies, especially not the sort that doctors of his day recommended—such as fasting and purging. He seems to have had a great fear of doctors and would rather avoid them. He relies instead on his own experience of what works for him and his body, and notes that eating roast lamb always nourishes him and drinking wine always warms him. They are two of my favourite things!

At the beginning of this review you might have wondered why it took me so long to open this wine-stained book that had lain on the shelf for six or seven years. A big part of it was fear. Fear of suffering through a mountain of very long and possibly boring essays—but as Montaigne says on the subject of suffering, the fear of it is sometimes the worst part. I can truly agree with him now because I didn't suffer nearly as much as I feared, and really hardly at all. Admittedly, that was partly due to the great group of friends who incited me to finally open the book in 2023. I'd posted a review years ago of Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in which I'd admitted abandoning her book because I thought I'd much rather read the man himself (that must have been around the time I bought this book). So last year when someone pulled that old review out of the archives, I quickly found myself with a group of friends eager to take me at my word and to keep me company while reading Montaigne. My good friend Kalliope created a group complete with separate discussion threads for the many essays—57 in Book I, 37 in Book II, and 13 in Book III—so that was a lot of discussion threads. Thanks again, Kalliope.

The members of the group filled those discussion threads with a mountain of observations over the course of our Montaigne year (which had 16 months as it turned out), and I only have to look back at the comments to get an instant reminder of all our impressions—though if I tried to extract my own main impressions out of all of that, I'd become so bogged down that this review would never see the light of a GR day! And if I've learned anything from Montaigne it's to not get too side-tracked in a piece of writing that you forget the intention you started out with (he often almost did). So I'm going to finish this review by adding only a few non-wine-related highlights that have stuck in my mind.

As someone who often talks about herself in the course of writing book reviews (for better or worse), I noted with satisfaction that Montaigne recognised that he was going against the grain of his times by devoting a book of essays entirely to his own opinions about his own self and about his own life (the focus on himself as subject is more predominant in the later essays than in the earlier ones). It seems he took seriously the adage about the unexamined life not being worth living, and so he set about examining his own life in great detail, the bad as well as the good, in order to know how to completely enjoy and appreciate being alive, savoir jouir de son être.

I really related to that 'savoir être' idea, how to be happy in your own self. I also liked that he wanted to examine everything about himself that he himself was aware of, whether good or bad, and come to terms with it all. He admits, for instance, that he prefers spending time in his tower library surrounded by his books and his writings, and feels no guilt about neglecting the work that went with being the Seigneur of a large chateau and a vast estate—or about not knowing the first thing about wine-making or farming.
And when he was appointed Mayor of neighbouring Bordeaux, he was quite happy to do no more than the minimum required to keep the post functioning, leaving the task of improving the position—and the glory that might go with that—to his successor.
Next to sitting quietly with his books, he liked best to travel, spending months at a time away from home—not worrying about the wife and daughter he had left behind (they are rarely mentioned in his essays (which might be seen as discretion—or not)).
His travels took him across France and Italy, and he usually journeyed on horseback spending eight or nine hours a day in the saddle, something he loved to do even up to a few years before he died (he'd had military experiences on and off throughout his life which might explain his ease on horseback).
He mentions too that his idea of a good death would be to die while traveling in some strange place where no one would cry over him, preferably Venice—perhaps because he had a bad attack of kidney stones while visiting that city and must have thought he was facing certain death there.
He also says he would not have minded facing death on a battlefield because Death itself was not something he feared, only the prolonged pain of dying from an illness.
He reminds us that death happens, not because we may be sick, but because we are alive, so we should value life while we have it and see death as the inevitable end-part of life. Tu ne meurs pas parce que tu es malade, tu meurs parce que tu es vivant. In spite of all those references to death, he says that we shouldn't waste too much living time thinking about dying!

He didn't believe in any afterlife that could be imagined by our mortal minds—the two things were irreconcilable to him. In that, he was probably unlike his Catholic contemporaries but in other respects he seemed to keep to the Church of Rome's teachings, at least publicly. He lived during a time in France when many turned away from Rome and embraced Protestantism, which resulted in the sixteenth-century Religious Wars which raged in France for most of his lifetime. He was no theologian however and was content to leave theological matters to the Doctors of Theology at the Sorbonne University in Paris. In one of the final essays, he talks of the fine wines those theologians were famous for quaffing, and which he calls 'vin théologal et sorbonnique'. When I read that line, I smiled because I remembered that Montaigne's contemporary, François Rabelais, also mentioned that famous 'vin théologal et sorbonnique' in his Gargantua books which, incidentally, begin and end with his characters quaffing wine, or to say it in Rebalais style, en train de chopiner le vin.

So I think I'll do the same with this wine-themed review and finish by saying that during the sixteen months I spent reading Montaigne's essays, and sipping some good wine, j'ai chopiné du 'vin philosophal et montaignique'!