There are a handful of Montaigne’s essays that take time and context to understand, this is one of them. It’s his first essay about Etienne de La Boetie, even though he is not mentioned by name. But this paragraph very near the end is clearly about him:
I knew a man whose thread of life was progressing towards brilliant preferment when it was snapped; his end was so splendid that, in my opinion, his great-souled search after honour held nothing so sublime as that snapping asunder: the goal he aimed for he reached before he had even set out; that was more grand and more glorious than anything he had wished or hoped for. As he fell he surpassed the power and reputation towards which his course aspired.
Montaigne wrote to his father about the death of La Boetie, detailing how they agreed that Montaigne would become executor to his work, and the original collection of essays was intended to be pieces surround the grand centerpiece, La Boetie’s “Discourse on Involuntary Servitude.” The religious war between the Catholics and Huguenots got in between that hope, with La Boetie’s essay becoming a calling card of the Huguenots after his death.
So Montaigne wanted nothing to do with that controversy, and it clearly wasn’t what he had in mind when describing his friend’s honorable death. More likely, Montaigne was referring to La Boetie’s end of life decision to personally renounce his conversion to Catholicism and to reclaim his Jewish faith upon his death. This seems to align with the thoughts Montaigne has about what should constitute an honorable end to life:
Happiness in life (depending as it does on the tranquillity and contentment of a spirit well-born and on the resolution and assurance of an ordered soul) may never be attributed to any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play, which is indubitably the hardest.
It wasn’t the faith itself that Montaigne found so honorable in La Boetie’s end, it was the way he was willing to put down the masks necessary for survival in his life at the end and embrace what brought him the greatest tranquility and contentment, in his case, the faith of his childhood. Montaigne elaborates on this:
In all the rest he can wear an actor’s mask: those fine philosophical arguments may be only a pose, or whatever else befalls us may not assay us to the quick, allowing us to keep our countenance serene. But in that last scene played between death and ourself there is no more feigning; we must speak straightforward French; we must show whatever is good and clean in the bottom of the pot. “Only then are true words uttered from deep in our breast. The mask is ripped off: reality remains.” (Lucretius)
Montaigne never wrote about La Boetie’s death bed return to Judaism in his essays, in large part because he had to keep on his own mask and remain faithful to Catholicism. The fact that he had to do so is clearly gnawing at him in this essay. He was looking forward to a day when he could walk away from public life and begin the final act of his life.
While I feel nowhere near the end of my life, I do feel a similar tug towards living a life without masks or pretension at this phase of my existence. I recognize that it can make me difficult to deal with at times. I wear my heart on my sleeve, express my opinions freely and feel completely at ease telling people what they mean to me. If this is Montaigne’s definition of tranquility and contentment in life, I wish to dwell in this place for many years.
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