Montaigne’s account of three exemplary wives implies that a woman is “good” if she will take her own life upon her husband’s death. But I think his cause isn’t really to fight for perfect love, but to point out the barbarism at the heart of it. Montaigne begins by saying that you know a good marriage because it’s lasted a long time. Or do you?
The touchstone of a good marriage, the real test, concerns the time that the association lasts, and whether it has been constant – sweet, loyal and pleasant. In our century wives usually reserve their displays of duty and vehement love for when they have lost their husbands; then at least they bear witness to their good intentions – a laggardly, unseasonable witness, by which they prove that they love their husbands only once they are dead …. Just as fathers hide their love for their sons so as to keep themselves honored and respected, so do wives readily hide theirs for their husbands. That particular mystery-play is not to my taste! Is it not enough to raise a man from the dead out of vexation, if a wife who had spat in my face while I was still there were to come and massage my feet once I am beginning to go!
Montaigne suggests we shouldn’t believe the tears of widows and instead should note just how well these women seem to get along without their dead husbands:
Let those widows who wept when they were alive laugh outwardly and inwardly once they are dead. Moreover, take no notice of those moist eyes and that pitiful voice: but do note the way they carry themselves and the color of those plump cheeks beneath their veils! There are few widows who do not go on improving in health: and health is a quality which cannot lie. All that dutiful behavior does not regard the past as much as the future: it is all profit not loss.
As is often the case, Montaigne turns to Seneca when he needs a guide through proper behavior between husband and wife. It’s the proper punctuation to an essay that takes a macabre turn—riddled with the kinds of love suicides that likely inspired Shakespeare:
Sometimes we must make a loan of ourselves to those we love: even when we should wish to die for ourselves we should break off our plans on their account. It is a sign of greatness of mind to lay hold of life again for the sake of others, as several great and outstanding men have done. And it is a mark of particular goodness to prolong one’s old age (the greatest advantage of which is to be indifferent to its duration and to be able to use life more courageously and contemptuously) if one knows that such a duty is sweet, delightful and useful to someone who loves us dearly …. What can be more delightful than to be so dear to your wife that you become dearer to yourself for her sake?
For his time, Montaigne was being rebellious. He was skeptical about love and how much happiness it actually created for men and women. Montaigne hints that stringing together a few clichés — and gruesome tales of sacrifice — about love and selling them to the masses is all too easy. He basically advises writers to plagiarize liberally with love stories:
I am amazed that those who engage in that activity do not decide to choose some of the ten thousand beautiful historical accounts to be found in our books. In that they would have less toil and would afford more pleasure and profit. If any author should wish to construct them into a single interconnected unity he would only need to supply the links – like soldering metals together with another metal. He could by such means make a compilation of many true incidents of every sort, varying his arrangement as the beauty of his work required, more or less as Ovid in his Metamorphoses made a patchwork of a great number of varied fables.
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