To Madame Diane de Foix, Countess of Gurson.
I never saw a father, however ill-tempered or hunchbacked his son might be, who failed to recognize him as his own son. So I too see, better than anyone else, that these brainchildren of mine are but the daydreams of a man who tasted the sciences only in their earliest form in his childhood, and retained only a general and shapeless impression of them: a little of everything, and nothing at all, in the French manner. For, in short, I know that there is medicine, jurisprudence, four parts to mathematics, and roughly what they are aimed at. And perhaps I know the claim of the sciences in general to be of service to our lives. But I have never delved deeper, never worn my nails down studying Aristotle, monarch of modern doctrine, or doggedly pursued some science; nor is there any art by which I could even paint the first outlines. And there is no child of the middle classes who cannot claim to be more learned than I, who has nothing with which to examine him on his first lesson: at least according to it.
And, if I am forced to do so, I am compelled, rather ineptly, to draw some matter of universal discourse from it, on which I examine their natural judgment: a lesson as unknown to them as theirs is to me. I have not traded with any solid book, except Plutarch and Seneca, where I am like the Danaids, constantly filling and pouring. I attach something to this paper; to myself, little or nothing.
History is more my game, or poetry, which I love with a particular inclination. For, as Cleantes said, just as the voice, constrained in the narrow channel of a trumpet, comes out higher and stronger, so it seems to me that the sentence, pressed at the many feet of poetry, springs much more abruptly and strikes me with a more vivid jolt. As for the natural faculties, which are on average what I am trying to test here, I feel them faltering under the strain. My conceptions and my judgment only proceed by trial and error, staggering, stumbling and bumping; and, when I have gone as far as I can, I am still not satisfied: I can still see land beyond, but with blurred vision and in a cloud, which I cannot clear.
And, undertaking to speak indifferently of everything that presents itself to my imagination and using only my own natural means, if it happens to me, as it often does, to encounter by chance in the good authors these same places that I have undertaken to treat, as I have just done in Plutarch’s discourse on the power of the imagination: to recognize myself, at the expense of these people, so weak and so petty, so dull and so sleepy, I feel pity or disdain for myself.
I am gratified by this, that my opinions have the honor of often encountering theirs; and that I at least follow them closely, saying that I saw it. Also, I have that which not everyone has, of knowing the extreme difference between them and me. And let my inventions run nevertheless as weak and base as I have produced them, without repairing and mending the defects that this comparison has revealed to me. One must have a very firm backbone to undertake to walk face to face with these people. The indiscreet writers of our century, who, among their works of nothingness, go about sowing entire passages from ancient authors to honor themselves, do the opposite.
For this infinite dissimilarity of periods makes a face so pale, so tarnished and so ugly to what is theirs, that they lose much more than they gain. They were two contrary fantasies. The philosopher Chrysippus would mix into his books, not just passages, but entire works by other authors, and, in one, Euripides’ Medea: and Apollodorus said that, if one were to remove what was foreign, the paper would remain blank. Epicurus, on the other hand, in the three hundred volumes he left, had not scattered a single foreign allegation. I happened to come across such a passage the other day.
I had been languishing after French words, so bloodless, so fleshless and so empty of substance and meaning, that they were not really French words: at the end of a long and boring road, I came across a high, rich and lofty piece. If I had found the slope gentle and the ascent a little longer, it would have been excusable: it was a precipice so straight and so cut that, from the first six words, I knew that I was flying away to the other world. From there I discovered the quagmire from which I had come, so low and so deep, that I never had the heart to go back there. If I embellished one of my speeches with these rich spoils, it would only highlight the stupidity of the others.
To take up my own faults as if they were someone else’s seems to me to be no more incompatible than to take up, as I often do, those of others as if they were my own. They must be accused of everything and denied any place of frankness. If I know how boldly I undertake to outdo myself in my tricks, to go toe to toe with them, not without a reckless hope that I can deceive the eyes of the judges in discerning them. But it is as much through the benefit of my application as through the benefit of my invention and my strength. And then, I don’t fight these old champions in bulk, and hand-to-hand: it’s through repeated, small and light attacks. I don’t get carried away; I only test them; and I don’t go as far as I bargain to go. If I can hold my own against them, I will be an honest man, because I only tackle them where they are at their stiffest.
To do what I have discovered of some, to cover themselves with the weapons of others, to the point of not showing even the tips of their fingers, to carry out their plan, as is easy for the learned in a common subject, under the ancient inventions referred to here and there: to those who want to hide them and make them their own, it is first of all injustice and cowardice, that having nothing of their own by which to distinguish themselves, they seek to present themselves by a foreign value, and then, great folly, contenting themselves with fiddling to acquire the ignorant approval of the vulgar, they disparage themselves towards people of understanding who shake their heads at our borrowed encrustation, from whom praise alone carries weight.
For my part, there is nothing I want to do less. I am not speaking for others, except to say even more for myself. This does not concern the centones that are published for the sake of being published: and I have seen some very ingenious ones in my time, including one, under the name of Capilupus, in addition to the ancient ones. These are minds that show themselves here and there, like Lipsius in this learned and laborious fabric of his politics.
In any case, I mean, and whatever these nonsense may be, I have not decided to hide them, nor my bald and graying portrait, where the painter would have put, not a perfect face, but mine. For these are also my moods and opinions; I give them for what I believe, not for what is to be believed. My aim here is only to discover myself, which by chance will be someone else tomorrow, if new learning changes me. I have no authority to be believed, nor do I desire it, feeling too poorly educated to educate others.
Someone who had seen the previous essay said to me at home the other day that I should have elaborated a little more on the subject of the education of children. Now, Madame, if I were to be smug on this subject, I could only make the best use of it by presenting it to this little man who is threatening to make a grand exit from your home (you are too generous to start anything other than with a male). For, having had so much to do with helping facilitate your marriage, I have some right and interest in the greatness and prosperity of all that will come of your family, besides what the ancient possession you have over my servitude enough obliges me to desire honor, good and advantage to all that touches you. But, in truth, I understand nothing else than that the greatest and most important difficulty of human science seems to lie in this area, which deals with the nourishment and upbringing of children.
Just as in agriculture, the methods that precede planting are certain and easy, as is the planting itself; but once what is planted comes to life, in raising them there is a great variety of ways and difficulties: similarly to men, there is little industry in planting them; but, from the moment they are born, a diverse care, full of need and fear, is taken in raising and feeding them. The display of their inclinations is so tender at this early age, and so obscure, the promises so uncertain and false, that it is difficult to form any sound judgment. See Cimon, see Themistocles and a thousand others, how much they have displeased themselves. The young of bears and dogs show their natural inclination; but men, throwing themselves immediately into customs, opinions, laws, easily change or disguise themselves.
It is difficult to force natural propensities. Hence it happens that, for lack of having chosen their path well, one often works for nothing and spends a lot of time training children in things in which they cannot gain a foothold. However, in this difficulty, my opinion is to always direct them to the best and most profitable things, and that we should apply little to these slight divinations and prognostics that we take from the movements of their childhood. Plato himself, in his Republic, seems to me to give them a lot of authority.
Madam, science is a great ornament and of marvelous service, especially to people raised to such a degree of fortune as you are. In truth, it is not put to its true use in vile and base hands. It is much prouder to lend its power to waging war, to commanding a people, to cultivating the friendship of a prince or a foreign nation, than to marshal a dialectical argument, or to plead an appeal, or to order a mass of pills.
So, Madame, because I believe you will not forget this part in the institution of yours, you who have savored its sweetness, and who are of a literate race (for we still have the writings of those former Counts of Foix, from whom the Count, your husband, and you are descended; and Francois, Monsieur de Candale, your uncle, continues to produce others every day, who will extend the knowledge of this quality of your family which has lasted for several centuries), I want to tell you about a single fantasy that I have contrary to common usage: that is all I can confer in your service in this regard. The office of governor, the choice of which determines the effectiveness of the institution, has many other important aspects; but I will not touch on them, as I have nothing worthwhile to contribute; and as for this particular matter, on which I have taken it upon myself to advise him, he will believe me as much as he sees fit.
To a child of the house who seeks letters, not for gain (for such an abject end is unworthy of the grace and favor of the Muses, and besides it looks to and depends on others), nor so much for external conveniences as for his own, and to enrich and adorn himself within, being more eager to draw from it a skilled man than a learned man, I would also like it if care were taken to choose for him a guide who would rather have a well-formed head than a full one, and that both would be required, but morals and understanding more than knowledge; and that he conduct himself in his office in a new way.
We are constantly being shouted at, as if through a megaphone, and our job is just to repeat what we have been told. I would like him to correct this part, and that, with a beautiful arrival, according to the scope of the soul he has in hand, he begins to put it on the watch, making him taste things, choose them and discern them by himself: sometimes opening the way for him, sometimes letting him open it. I don’t want him to invent and speak alone, I want him to listen to his disciple speak in turn. Socrates and, since then, Arcesilaus first made their disciples speak, and then they spoke to them.
”The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.” (Cicero)
It is good for him to make him trot in front of him to judge his gait, and to judge to what extent he must lower himself to accommodate himself to his strength. Without this proportion, we waste everything: and knowing how to choose it and behave appropriately is one of the most difficult tasks I know: and it is the mark of a strong and noble soul to know how to condescend to its childish ways and guide them. I walk more surely and firmly uphill than downhill. Those who, as is our custom, undertake to teach several minds of such diverse sizes and shapes from the same lesson and with the same measure of conduct, it is no wonder if, out of a whole group of children, they hardly find two or three who bear any real fruit from their discipline.
Let him not only require an account of the words of his lesson, but of the sense and substance, and let him judge of the profit he has made, not by the evidence of his memory, but of his life. Let him put what he has just learned into a hundred faces and adapt it to as many different subjects, to see if he has still taken it in and made it his own, taking the instruction of his progress from Plato’s pedagogies. It is a sign of crudeness and indigestion to regurgitate meat as it has been swallowed. The stomach did not do its job, if it did not change the shape and form of what it was given to cook. Our soul moves only on credit, bound and constrained to the appetite of other people’s fantasies, serving and captivated under the authority of their lesson. We have been so subjugated to the ropes that we no longer have free pace. Our vigor and freedom are extinguished.
“They never become their own guardians.” (Seneca)
I saw privately in Pisa an honest man, but such an Aristotelian, that the most general of his dogmas is: that the touchstone and rule of all solid imaginations and of all truth is conformity to the doctrine of Aristotle; that apart from this they are but chimeras and inanity; that he has seen and dictated all. This proposition, having been interpreted a little too broadly and unfairly, once made him and kept him for a long time a great accessory to the inquisition in Rome. Let him face everything through scrutiny and not lodge anything in his head by simple authority and on trust; Aristotle’s principles are no more principles to him than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let him be offered this diversity of judgments: he will choose if he can, if not he will remain in doubt. There are only certain and resolute fools.
“For doubting please me no less than knowing.” (Dante)
For if he embraces the opinions of Xenophon and Plato through his own discourse, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing, indeed he seeks nothing.
“We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom.” (Seneca)
At least he should know that he knows. He must follow their moods, not learn their precepts. And he should boldly forget, if he wants to, where he got them from, but he should know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and belong not to those who said them first, but to those who said them after. It is not according to Plato, but according to me, since he and I understand it and see it in the same way. Bees gather pollen from flowers here and there, but they use it to make honey, which is all they have; it is no longer thyme or marjoram: in the same way, he will transform and merge the pieces he borrows from others to make something that is entirely his: his judgment. His institution, his work and study are aimed solely at training him. Let him conceal everything he has been helped with, and produce only what he has made of it.
Plunderers and borrowers parade their ships and their purchases, not what they take from others. You do not see the spices of a man of parliament, you see the alliances he has won and the honors to his children. No one puts his recipe on public display: everyone puts his own gain into it. The gain from our study is in having become better and wiser. It is, said Epicharmus, the understanding that sees and hears, it is the understanding that takes advantage of everything, that arranges everything, that acts, that dominates and reigns: all other things are blind, deaf and soulless. Certainly we make him servile and cowardly, so as not to leave him the freedom to do anything on his own. Who ever asked his disciple what he thought of Rhetoric and Grammar, of this or that sentence of Cicero? They are thrust into our memory all feathered up, like oracles where the letters and syllables are the substance of the thing.
Knowing something by heart is not the same as knowing it: it is holding what has been entrusted to your memory. What you know directly, you can use without looking at the teacher or your book. What a spiteful smugness, this purely bookish smugness! I expect it to serve as an ornament, not a foundation, according to the advice of Plato, who dictated that firmness, faith and sincerity are true philosophy, and that the other sciences, which aim elsewhere, are nothing but make-believe. I would like the Paluel or Pompey, those beautiful dancers of my time, to learn capers just by seeing them performed, without us moving from our seats, just as these people want to instruct our understanding without shaking it: Either we are taught to handle a horse, or a spear, or a lute, or the voice, without exercising ourselves in it, as those here want to teach us to judge and speak well, without exercising ourselves either in speaking or in judging.
Now, in this apprenticeship, everything that comes to our eyes serves as a sufficient book: the malice of a page, the silliness of a valet, a remark at table, these are all new subjects. For this reason, the commerce of men is wonderfully suited to it, and the visit of foreign countries, not only to bring back, in the manner of our French nobility, how many steps to Santa Rotonda, or the richness of Signora Livia’s calessons, or, like others, how much Nero’s face, or some old ruin there, is longer or wider than that of some similar medal, but to bring back mainly the moods of these nations and their ways, and to rub and polish our brains against those of others.
I would like it to be taken up from early childhood, and first, to kill two birds with one stone, by the neighboring nations where the language is more distant from ours, and to which, if not formed early, the tongue cannot bend. It is also a generally accepted opinion that it is not right to feed a child at his parents’ table. This natural love makes them too tender and indulgent, even for the wisest. They are incapable of chastising his faults or of seeing him fed rudely, as he should be, and carelessly. They would not be able to bear to see him come back sweaty and dusty from his exercise, drinking hot or cold, or to see him on a backward horse, or against a rough fencer, with his foil in his fist, or the first harquebus. For there is no remedy: who wants to make a good man of him, no doubt he must not be spared in this youth, and often go against the rules of medicine:
“Let him live beneath the open sky And dangerously.” (Horace)
It is not enough to steel his soul; he must also steel his muscles. She is in too much of a hurry if she is not assisted, and has too much to do on her own to do two jobs. I know how much my daughter pants in the company of such a tender, sensitive body, which lets itself be so easily overwhelmed. And I often notice in my lesson that in their writings my teachers emphasize, for magnanimity and strength of courage, examples that tend to be more about the thickness of the skin and the hardness of the bones. I have seen men, women and children so born that a beating is less to them than a flick of the wrist is to me: they neither flinch nor raise an eyebrow at the blows dealt them. When athletes imitate philosophers in patience, it is more a matter of strength of nerve than of heart. Now the habit of bearing toil is the habit of bearing pain:
“Work hardens one against pain.” (Cicero)
He must be weaned from the pain and harshness of exercise, and trained to the pain and harshness of sickness, of colic, of cautery, and of gout, and of torture. For of the latter, here again he may be taken, who regard the good according to the weather, as the wicked. We are in the trial. Whoever fights the laws, threatens the most good people with flogging and hanging. And then, the authority of the governor, who must be sovereign over him, is interrupted and impeded by the presence of his parents. Added to the respect that the family shows him, and the knowledge of the means and greatness of his house, these are not, in my opinion, slight inconveniences in this age. In this school of human interaction, I have often noticed this vice, that instead of learning about others, we only work to give away about ourselves, and are more concerned with selling our goods than acquiring new ones. Silence and modesty are very useful qualities in conversation. This child will be taught to be thrifty and to keep his self-sufficiency in check once he has acquired it; not to take offense at the nonsense and fables that will be said in his presence, for it is an uncivil importunity to shock everything that is not to our taste. Let him be content to correct himself, and not appear to reproach others for what he refuses to do, nor to challenge public morals.
“A man may be wise without ostentation, without arousing envy.” (Seneca)
Flee these domineering and uncivilized images, and this puerile ambition of wanting to appear more refined in order to be different, and to make a name for oneself through reprimands and novelty. As it is only fitting for great poets to use the license of art, so it is only bearable for great and illustrious souls to place themselves above custom.
“If Socrates and Aristippus have done something contrary to the rules of behavior and custom, let him not think that he has a right to do the same; for they have gained that privilege by great and divine merits.” (Cicero)
He will be taught to engage in discourse or dispute only where he will see a champion worthy of his fight, and there even not to employ all the tricks that can serve him, but only those that can serve him most. Let him be taught to be delicate in the choice and sorting of his reasons, and to love relevance, and consequently brevity. Let him be instructed in everything to take up and lay down arms in truth, just as quickly as he can see it: either that it is born in the hands of his adversary, or that it is born in himself by some surprise. For he will not be put in a chair to recite a prescribed role. He is committed to no cause, except that which he approves. Nor will he do the job where he sells himself for hard cash, knowing he has the freedom to repent and recognize.
“Nor is he forced by any necessity to defend everything that has been prescribed and commanded.” (Cicero)
If his governor has any of my disposition, he will form in him the will to be a very loyal, affectionate and courageous servant to his prince; but he will damp his desire to be attached to him other than by public duty. In addition to several other inconveniences that offend our frankness through these particular obligations, the judgment of a man bound and bought is less whole and less free, or stained with imprudence and ingratitude. A courtier can have neither the will nor the law to say or think anything but favorably of a master who, among so many thousands of other subjects, has chosen him to be nurtured and raised by his hand. This favor and utility corrupt, not without some reason, his frankness, and dazzle him.
Yet one usually sees the language of these people different from any other language of a status, and of little faith in such matters. Let his conscience and his virtue shine through his speech, and let reason alone be his guide. Let it be made clear to him that to confess the fault that he will discover in his own speech, even if it is perceived only by him, is an effect of judgment and sincerity, which are the main qualities he seeks; that obstinacy and argumentativeness are common qualities, more apparent to the basest souls; that changing one’s mind and correcting oneself, abandoning a bad party in the heat of the moment, are rare, strong and philosophical qualities. One should be warned, when in company, to keep an eye on everything; for I find that the first seats are commonly taken by the less capable men, and that greatness of fortune is rarely found mixed with smugness.
I saw, however, that while one was talking at the head of the table about the beauty of a tapestry or the flavor of a Malvasia, many beautiful traits were being lost at the other end. He will sound out the range of each and every one: a cowherd, a mason, a passer-by; everything must be put to use, and each must borrow according to his merchandise, for everything serves in housekeeping; even the folly and weakness of others will be an instruction to him. By balancing out the graces and manners of each and every one, he will engender envy of the good and contempt for the bad. Let him be encouraged by an honest curiosity to inquire about all things; he will see everything that is unusual around him: a building, a fountain, a man, the site of an ancient battle, the passage of Caesar or Charlemagne;
“Which land is parched with heat, which numb with frost, What wind drives sails to the Italian coast.” (Propertius)
He will inquire into the morals, the means and the alliances of this Prince, and of that one; These are very pleasant things to learn and very useful to know. In this practice of men, I intend to include, and mainly, those who live only in the memory of books. He will practice, by means of stories, these great souls of the best centuries. It is a vain study, for those who want it; but for those who want it too, it is a study of inestimable fruit: and the only study, as Plato says, that the Lacedaemonians had reserved for their part. What profit will he not make in that part, by reading the lives of our Plutarch? But let my guide remember where his charge is aimed; and let him impress on his disciple not so much the date of the ruin of Carthage as the deaths of Hannibal and Scipio, nor so much where Marcellus died, as why he was unworthy of his duty that he died there.
Let him not learn him so much the stories, as to judge. It is to my mind, above all, the subject to which our minds apply themselves in the most diverse measure. I have read a hundred things in Livy that no one else has read. Plutarch has read a hundred of them, besides what I have been able to read there, and, perhaps, besides what the author had put in them. For some it is a purely grammatical study; for others, the anatomy of philosophy, in which the most abstruse parts of our nature interpenetrate. In Plutarch there are many extended discourses, very worthy of being read, for in my opinion he is the master craftsman of such a task; but there are a thousand that he has only touched on: He only winks to indicate where we should go, if it pleases us, and sometimes is content to give only a hint in the liveliest of a proposal. They must be torn from there and put in their place. Like his own word, which the inhabitants of Asia used for a single one, not knowing how to pronounce a single syllable, which is No, perhaps provided the material and the opportunity for Le Boétie of his “Involuntary Servitude.”
Even to see him choose a slight action in a man’s life, or a word, which does not seem to fit: that is a discourse. It is a pity that people of understanding love brevity so much: no doubt their reputation is worth more, but we are worth less: Plutarch would rather we praised his judgment than his knowledge; he would rather leave us longing for him than sated. He knew that even of good things one can say too much, and that Alexandridas rightly criticized the man who made good proposals to the Ephors, but too long: O stranger, you say what is necessary, but not as it should be. Those who have a wiry body, make it bigger with padding: those who have an exiled matter, inflate it with words.
A wonderful clarity for human judgment is drawn from frequenting the world. We are all constrained and piled up within ourselves, and our vision is shortened to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He did not reply: From Athens; but: From the world. He, who had a more open and broader imagination, embraced the universe as his city, and extended his knowledge, his society and his affections to the whole human race, not like us, who look no further than our own backyard. When the vines freeze in my village, my priest argues that it is God’s wrath on the human race, and believes that the cannibals are already suffering. Seeing our civil wars, who doesn’t cry out that this machine is turning upside down and that judgment day is catching up with us, without realizing that many worse things have been seen, and that the ten thousand parts of the world are still having a good time?
Moy, according to their license and impunity, admires seeing them so sweet and soft. To him who has hail on his head, the whole hemisphere seems to be in storm and tempest. And the Savoyard said that, if that fool of a King of France had known how to manage his fortune well, he was the man to become steward of his Duke. His imagination could conceive of no greater greatness than that of his master. We are all imperceptibly in this error: an error of great consequence and prejudice. But who presents himself, as in a painting, with this great image of our mother nature in all her majesty; who reads in her face such a general and constant variety; who notices within her, not himself, but a whole kingdom, as a stroke of a very delicate pen: only he who does so esteems things according to their true greatness. This great world, which some people continue to multiply as species under one genus, is the mirror in which we must look in order to know ourselves properly.
In short, I want it to be the book of my schoolboy. So many moods, sects, judgments, opinions, laws and customs teach us to judge our own sensibly, and teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness: which is no easy learning. So many upheavals of state and changes of public fortune teach us not to make too much of our own. So many names, so many victories and conquests buried in oblivion, make ridiculous the hope of immortalizing our name by the capture of ten argonauts and a pouillier who is known only for his downfall. The pride and the fierceness of so many foreign pompous displays, the so inflated majesty of so many courts and grandeurs, strengthens us and assures us that we can bear the splendor of our own without flinching. So many millions of men, buried before us, encourage us not to fear to go and find such good company in the other world. So it goes.
Our life, said Pythagoras, is withdrawn from the great and populous assembly of the Olympic Games. Some exercise their bodies there to acquire the glory of the games; others bring goods there to sell for profit. There are some, and they are not the worst, who seek no other fruit than to see how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, in order to judge and regulate their own. To these examples may be properly matched all the most profitable discourses of philosophy, to which human actions must be related as to their rule. One will say to him,
“What you may justly wish; the use and ends Of hard-earned coin; our debt to country and to friends; What heaven has ordered us to be, and where our stand, Amid humanity, is fixed by high command; What we now are, what destiny for us is planned.” (Persius)
what it is to know and to ignore, which should be the goal of study; what valiance, temperance and justice are; what there is to be said between ambition and avarice, servitude and subjection, license and liberty; by what marks one recognizes true and solid contentment; to what extent one should fear death, pain and shame,
“What hardships to avoid, what to endure, and how.” (Virgil)
what springs move us, and the means of so many different movements in us. For it seems to me that the first discourses by which one must nourish the understanding, must be those which regulate one’s morals and one’s sense, which will teach one to know oneself, and to know how to die well and live well. Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that makes us free. They all serve in no way for the instruction of our life and its use, as all other things serve in no way. But let us choose the one that serves directly and professionally. If we knew how to restrict the belongings of our life to their proper and natural limits, we would find that the best part of the sciences that are in use is not for us; and in those which are, there are very useless expansions and contractions, which we would do better to leave out, and, following the teaching of Socrates, confine the course of our study to those where use is to be made of them.
“Dare to be wise! Begin! The man who would reform, but hesitates, is kin Unto the boor who waits until the stream is gone; But ever flows the stream, and ever will flow on.” (Horace)
It is very silly to teach our children
“What effect have Pisces and Leo, fierce and brave, Or Capricorn, that bathes in the Hesperian wave, (Propertius)
the knowledge of the stars and the movement of the eighth sphere, before the knowledge of themselves and their movements:
“What are the Pleiades to me, And what to me Boötes’ stars?” (Anachreon)
Anaximenes writing to Pythagoras: Of what use can I be amused in the secrets of the stars, with death or servitude always present in my eyes (for at the time the Kings of Persia were preparing war against his country). Each one must therefore say: Being overcome by ambition, avarice, temerity, superstition, and having within such other enemies of life, shall I go and think of the turning of the world? After he has been told what will make him wiser and better, he will be taught logic, physics, geometry, rhetoric; and the science he chooses, having already formed his judgment, he will soon master. His lessons will be given sometimes by word of mouth, sometimes by book; sometimes his tutor will provide him with the author himself, suitable for this purpose of his education; sometimes he will give him the marrow and the substance of it all mashed up.
And if, of himself, he is not sufficiently familiar with books to find in them so many fine discourses as are necessary for the effect of his design, some man of letters may be joined to him, who, whenever the need arises, will furnish the munitions that are required, to be distributed and dispensed to his infant. And can this lesson be any easier and more natural than that of Gaza, who can be doubted? These are thorny and unpleasant precepts, and vain and unlovely words, where there is no hold, nothing to awaken the mind. Here the soul finds where to bite and where to feed. This fruit is greater, beyond compare, and will be more lasting.
It is a great shame that things should be like this in our century, that philosophy, even to people of understanding, should be a vain and fantastic name, which is of no use and of no account, in opinion or in effect. I believe that these quibbles are the cause of this, which have seized its avenues. It is a great mistake to depict her as inaccessible to children, with a frowning, frowning and terrible face. Who has masked this false, pale and hideous face from me? There is nothing more gay, more cheerful, more playful, and almost more foolish. She preaches only celebration and good times.
A sad and frozen face shows that this is not the case. Demetrius the Grammarian, meeting a group of philosophers sitting together in the temple of Delphi, said to them: Unless I am mistaken, to see you with such peaceful and cheerful expressions, you are not engaged in serious discussion. To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarian, replied: It is for those who are seeking to determine whether the future of the verb ballo has a double l, or who are seeking the derivation of the comparatives cheiron and beltion, and of the superlatives cheiriston and beltiston, that it is necessary to furrow the brow, conversing about their science. But as for the discourses of philosophy, they are accustomed to cheer up and rejoice those who treat of them, not to make them gloomy and sad.
“You’ll find the hidden torments of the mind Shown in the body, and the joys you’ll find; The face puts on a cloak of either kind.” (Juvenal)
The soul that harbors philosophy must, through its health, make the body healthy as well. It must make its rest and ease shine through to the outside; it must shape the external bearing to its mold, and consequently arm it with a gracious pride, an active and cheerful demeanor, and a contented and debonair countenance. The most explicit mark of wisdom is a constant cheerfulness: its state is like things above the Moon: always serene. It is “Barroco” and “Baralipton” that make their suppositories so curdy and smoky, it is not her: they only know her by hearsay. How? It claims to calm the tempests of the soul, and to teach boredom and fever to laugh, not through some imaginary epicycles, but through natural and palpable reasons. Its goal is virtue, which is not, as the school says, planted at the top of a cut, rough and inaccessible mountain.
Those who have approached it, hold it, on the contrary, to be located in a beautiful fertile and flourishing plain, from where it can oversee all things below; but how can one get there, who knows the address, by shady, grassy and sweetly flowering routes, pleasantly and with an easy and polite pace, like that of the celestial vaults. For having not possessed this supreme virtue, beautiful, triumphant, amorous, delightful and courageous in equal measure, and the sworn and irreconcilable enemy of sourness, displeasure, fear and constraint, having nature, fortune and voluptuousness as their guide and companion; they went, according to their weakness, to forge this foolish image, sad, quarrelsome, spiteful, threatening, malicious, and place it on a rock, out of the way, among the brambles, a fantasy to astonish people.
My governor, who knows he must fulfill the will of his disciple with as much or more affection as reverence for virtue, will be able to tell him that poets follow common moods, and make him realize that the Gods put sweat into the adventures of Venus’ cabinets rather than Pallas’. And when he begins to feel himself, presenting him with Bradamant or Angelique as a mistress to enjoy, and of a naive, active, generous beauty, not effeminate but virile, at the cost of a soft, affected, delicate, artificial beauty; one dressed as a boy, wearing a shining morion, the other dressed as a slut, wearing a beaded cap: he will judge his love masculine even if he chooses everything differently from this effeminate pastor of Phrygia.
He will give him this new lesson, that the price and height of true virtue is in the ease, usefulness and pleasure of its exercise, so far removed from difficulty that children can do it as well as men, the simple as well as the subtle. The rule is its use, not its force. Socrates, its first lover, deliberately renounced his strength to slide into the naivety and ease of its progress. It is the foster mother of human pleasures. By making them just, it makes them true and pure. By moderating them, it keeps them alive and in taste. By removing those it rejects, it sharpens us for those it allows: and gives us abundantly all that nature wants, and to satiety, maternally, if not to the point of weariness (if by chance we mean that the regime that stops the drinker before drunkenness, the eater before rawness, the lecher before baldness, is the enemy of our pleasures). If it needs common fortune, it escapes it or does without it, and forges another of its own, no longer floating and rolling. It knows how to be rich and powerful and learned, and to sleep on musk mattresses.
It loves life, it loves beauty and glory and health. But her own particular function is to know how to use these goods in moderation, and to know how to lose them constantly: a function much nobler than harsh, without which any course of life is unnatural, turbulent and deformed, and it is only right to attach these pitfalls, these traps and these monsters to it. If this disciple is of such diverse condition that he prefers to hear a fable than the narration of a beautiful journey or a wise remark when he hears it: who, to the sound of the tabourin, which stirs up the youthful ardour of his companions, turns away to another who calls him to the game of the batteleurs; who, by wish, finds it no longer pleasant and sweeter to return dusty and victorious from a fight, than from the paulme or the bal with the prize of this exercise: I see no other remedy than for his governor to strangle him early, if he is without witnesses, or for him to be made a pastry cook in some good town, even if he is the son of a duke, according to Plato’s precept that children should be placed not according to the faculties of their father, but according to the faculties of their soul. Since philosophy is that which teaches us how to live, and childhood has its lesson in it, as do other ages, why do we not communicate it to him?
“He still is yielding clay; now, now, ere he congeal, Tirelessly we must shape him on the potter’s wheel.” (Persius)
We are taught to live when life is over. A hundred schoolboys took their leave before they got to their lesson in Aristotle, on temperance. Cicero said that, if he had the life of two men to live, he would not take the time to study lyric poets. And I find these ergotists even more sadly useless. Our children are in much more of a hurry: they owe only the first fifteen or sixteen years of their lives to pedantry: the rest is due to action. Let us use such a short time for the necessary instructions. These are abuses: put aside all these thorny subtleties of Dialectic, by which our life cannot be improved, take the simple discourses of philosophy, know how to choose them and treat them aptly: they are easier to conceive than a tale of Boccaccio.
A child is capable of this, from the time it is nursed, much better than learning to read or write. Philosophy has discourses for the birth of men as well as for decrepitude. I am of Plutarch’s opinion that Aristotle did not amuse his great disciple so much with the artifice of composing syllogisms, or with the Principles of Geometry, as with instructing him in the good precepts concerning valor, prowess, magnanimity and temperance, and the assurance of fearing nothing; and, with this munition, he sent him as a child to subjugate the Empire of the world with only 30,000 foot soldiers, 4,000 horses and forty-two thousand escudos. The other arts and sciences, he said, Alexander honored well, and praised their excellence and kindness; but, for all the pleasure he took in them, he was not easily surprised into the desire to practice them.
“Young men and old, seek here a purpose for the soul, And comfort for the woes that over gray hairs roll.” (Persius)
This is what Epicurus says at the beginning of his letter to Meniceus: Neither the youngest shies away from philosophy, nor the oldest tires of it. He who does otherwise seems to say either that it is not yet time to live happily, or that it is no longer time. For all that, I don’t want this boy to be imprisoned. I don’t want him to be abandoned to the melancholy mood of an angry schoolmaster. I don’t want to corrupt his spirit by keeping him to work and toil, like the others, fourteen or fifteen hours a day, like a porter. Nor will I find it good, when by some solitary and melancholy disposition one sees him given to an overly indiscreet application to the study of books, that one nourishes it: this makes them unfit for civil conversation, and distracts them from better occupations.
And how many in my time have I seen of men abested by reckless greed for knowledge? Carneades found himself so overwhelmed by it that he no longer had the leisure to take care of his hair and nails. Nor do I want to spoil his generous nature with the incivility and barbarity of others. French wisdom was once a proverb, for a wisdom that was acquired at an early age and was hardly maintained. In truth, we still see that there is nothing so nice as young children in France: but they usually disappoint the hope we have of them, and, grown up, we see no excellence in them. I have heard from people of understanding that these colleges where they are sent, of which there are many, stupefy them in this way.
In our case, a study, a garden, a table and a bed, solitude, company, morning and evening, all hours will be useful to him, all places will be studied: for philosophy, which, as the formation of judgments and morals, will be his principal lesson, has the privilege of mixing with everything. Isocrates the orator, being asked at a feast to speak about his art, was rightly thought by all to have replied: Now is not the time for what I know how to do; and what now is the time for, I do not know how to do. For to present harangues or rhetorical disputes to a company assembled to laugh and have a good time would be a mixture of too poor a harmony. And the same could be said of all the other sciences. But, as for philosophy, in the part where it deals with man and his duties and offices, it has been the common judgment of all the sages that, for the sweetness of its conversation, it should be welcomed at feasts and games. And when Plato invited her to his dinner party, we see how she entertains the guests in a gentle and accommodating manner appropriate to the time and place, even though it is one of her loftiest and most salutary speeches:
“Upon the rich and poor alike its blessing flow, And its neglect to young and old alike brings woe.” (Horace)
So, without doubt, he will sleep less than the others. But, just as the steps we take when walking in a gallery, even though there are three times as many of them, do not tire us like the steps we take along a designated path, so our lesson, happening as if by chance, with no obligation of time or place, and blending in with all our actions, will flow without being felt. Games and exercises will be a good part of the study: running, fighting, music, dance, hunting, handling horses and weapons. I want external decorum, and friendliness, and the bearing of the person, to be shaped by and in accordance with the soul. It is not a soul, it is not a body that one trains: it is a man; it is not necessary to do both.
And, as Plato dictates, they should not be trained one without the other, but equally led, like a pair of horses harnessed to the same cart. And, on hearing this, it seems he did not devote more time and care to physical exercises, and considered that the mind is exercised in this way, and not the other way around. Moreover, this institution should conduct itself with a gentle severity, not as it does. Instead of introducing children to letters, they are, in truth, presented only with horror and cruelty. Leave violence and force to me: there is nothing, in my opinion, that so debases and stunts a well-born nature.
If you want him to fear shame and chastisement, do not harden him to it. Harden him to sweat and cold, to wind, sun and the hazards he must despise; deprive him of all softness and delicacy in dressing and lying down, in eating and drinking; accustom him to everything. Let him not be a handsome, dandy boy, but a green and vigorous boy. As a child, as a man, as an old man, I have always believed and judged in the same way. But, among other things, this policy of most of our colleges has always displeased me. One should have tried to make it less harmful, leaning towards indulgence. It is a veritable captivity of youthful gaiety. It is returned debauched, punishing it before it is. Arrive there at the point of their lesson: you hear nothing but screams and the cries of children, and teachers enervated in their anger.
What a way to whet the appetite for their lesson, to these tender and fearful souls, to guide them there with a dreadful whip, their hands armed with whips? An unjust and pernicious method. Consider what Quintilian very clearly pointed out, that this imperious authority has dangerous consequences, especially for our way of chastisement. How much more decently their classrooms would be strewn with flowers and leaves than with bloody pieces of wicker. I would depict joy, merriment and Flora and the Graces there, as the philosopher Speusippus did in his school. What is the use of it, if it is also their pastime. Meat that is healthy for children should be sweetened, and those that are harmful to them should be made less so. It is wonderful how careful Plato is in his laws, the gayety and pastimes of the youth of his city, and how much he dwells on their races, games, songs, leaps and dances, of which he says that antiquity has given the conduct and patronage to the gods themselves: Apollo, the Muses and Minerva.
He extends it to a thousand precepts for his gymnasiums: he has very little fun with the learned sciences, and seems to recommend poetry particularly only for music. Any strangeness or peculiarity in our customs and conditions is to be avoided as inimical to communication and society and as monstrous. Who would not be astonished at the complexion of Demophon, Alexander’s hostel-master, who sweated in the shade and trembled in the sun? I have seen some flee the scent of apples more than the sound of musketry, others be frightened by a mouse, others be sick at the sight of cream, others at the sight of a feather bed being turned, just as Germanicus could not bear the sight or the crowing of roosters. There may be, perhaps, some occult property in this; but it can be eradicated, in my opinion, if it is tackled early.
The institution has gained this over me, it is true that it has not been without some care, that, except for beer, my appetite is adaptable to all things that one eats. The body, still supple, must, for this reason, be bent to all manners and customs. And provided that one can keep one’s appetite and will under control, that one can boldly make a young man suitable for all nations and companies, even to disorder and excesses, if need be. his exercise should follow custom. May he be able to do all things, and only love to do the good. Even philosophers do not find it commendable in Calisthenes to have lost the good grace of the great Alexander, his master, for not having wanted to drink as much as he did. He will laugh, he will fool around, he will revel with his prince. I want him to surpass his companions in vigor and firmness in his debauchery, and that he leaves evil to be done neither through lack of strength nor knowledge, but through lack of will.
“There is a great difference between not wishing to do evil and not knowing how.” (Seneca)
I thought to honor a lord so far removed from such excesses that there may be some in France, to ask him, in good company, how many times in his life he had become intoxicated for the sake of the King’s business in Germany. He took it this way, and replied that it was three times, which he recited. I know some who, lacking this ability, have put themselves to great trouble, having to practice this nation. I have often noticed with great admiration the marvelous nature of Alcibiades, of transforming himself so easily in so many different ways, without concern for his health: sometimes surpassing Persian sumptuousness and pomp, sometimes Lacedemonian austerity and frugality; as much a reformer in Sparta as he was voluptuous in Ionia,
”Any dress rank, or state, Aristippus bore well.” (Horace)
Such would I have my disciple,
“Him I admire whom patience clothes in shabby dress, If he can grace a different way of life no less, And if he plays both parts with equal comeliness.” (Horace)
These are my lessons. He who does them benefits more than he who knows them. If you see it, you hear it; if you hear it, you see it. God forbid, said someone in Plato, that to philosophize is to learn many things and to deal with the arts’
“The most valuable of all arts, the art of living well, they followed rather in their lives than in their writings.” (Cicero)
Leon, prince of the Phliasians, inquiring of Heraclides Ponticus what science, what art he professed: I know neither art nor science,’ he said, ‘but I am a philosopher. Diogenes was criticized for how, being ignorant, he meddled in philosophy. ‘I meddle in it,’ he said, ‘all the more appropriately. Hegesias asked him to read a book to him: “You are joking,” he replied, “you choose true and natural figs, not painted ones: why don’t you also choose natural, true and unwritten exercises? He will not so much say his lesson as he will do it. He will repeat it in his actions. We shall see if he is prudent in his undertakings, if he is kind and just in his deportment, if he has good judgment and is gracious in his speech, if he has vigor in his illnesses, if he is modest in his games, if he is temperate in his pleasures, if he is indifferent in his tastes, whether they be of meat, fish, wine or water, order in his economy:
“Who makes his learning not a display of knowledge, but the law of his life; who obeys himself and submits to his own injunctions.” (Cicero)
The true mirror of our speeches is the course of our lives. Zeuxidamus replied to someone who asked him why the Lacedaemonians did not write down the orders of the prowess and give them to their young people to read: it was because they wanted to accustom them to facts, not words. Compare, after 15 or 16 years, this one with one of those college Latinists, who will have taken just as long to learn only to speak. The world is nothing but babble, and never see a man who does not say more than he should, or rather less; yet half of our age is spent in this. We are kept for four or five years listening to words and sewing them into clauses; then we are expected to proportion them into a large body, extended into four or five parts, and then another five parts, at least, to know how to mix and interlace them briefly in some subtle way.
Let’s leave it to those who make it their profession. Going to Orleans one day, I found, in that plain below Clery, two riders who were coming to Bourdeaux, about fifty paces apart. Further behind them, I discovered a troop and a master at the head, who was the late Count de la Rochefoucaut. One of my people asked the first of these regents, who was the gentleman who came after him. He, who had not seen the train that was following him and who thought that he was being asked about his companion, replied pleasantly: He is not a gentleman; he is a grammarian, and I am a logician. Now, we who are trying here, on the contrary, to train not a grammarian or logician, but a gentleman, let them abuse their leisure: we have business elsewhere.
But let our disciple be well provided with things, the words will follow all too much: he will drag them along if they do not want to follow. I hear some of them apologize for not being able to express themselves, and pretend to have their heads full of many beautiful things, but, for lack of eloquence, not being able to bring them out: it’s a mess. In my opinion, what do you think it is? They are shadows that come from some shapeless conceptions, which they cannot untangle and clarify within, nor consequently produce outside: they do not yet understand themselves. And see how they stammer on the verge of giving birth; you judge that their labor is not in childbirth but in conception, and that they are only licking this imperfect matter. For my part, I hold, and Socrates commands, that he who has a lively and clear imagination in his mind will produce it, either in Bergamasque or by signs if he is mute:
“Master the stuff, and words will freely follow.” (Horace)
And as another said just as poetically in his prose:
“When things have taken possession of the mind, words come thick and fast.” (Seneca)
And another:
“The things themselves carry the words along” (Cicero)
He does not know ablative, subjunctive, noun, nor grammar; he does not act as a lackey or a haranguer of the petit pont, and if you will talk to him all your soul, if you feel like it, and will unburden themselves as little, perchance, to the rules of their language, as the best master of arts of France. He does not know rhetoric, nor, for that matter, does he seek to win over the benevolence of the candid reader. In truth, all this beautiful painting is easily erased by the luster of a simple and naive truth. These kindnesses only serve to amuse the vulgar, incapable of taking the meat more massive and firmer, as Afer shows clearly in Tacitus. The Ambassadors of Samos came to Cleomenes, King of Sparta, prepared with a beautiful and long oration, to move him to war against the tyrant Polycrates.
After he had let them speak at length, he answered them: As for your beginning and exordium, I do not remember it, nor, consequently, the middle; and as for your conclusion, I will do nothing with it. That seems to me a fine answer, and the orators were well-come. And what about this other one? The Athenians were choosing between two architects to run a large factory. The first, more affected, presented himself with a beautiful premeditated speech on the subject of this business, and swayed the judgment of the people in his favor. But the other, in three words: Lords Athenians, what this one has said, I will do. At the height of Cicero’s eloquence, many were in awe of him, but Cato only laughed: “We have a funny consul,” he said. Whether before or after, a useful sentence, a fine trait is always in season. If it is not right for what goes before, nor for what comes after, it is right in itself. I am not one of those who think the right rhythm makes the right poem: let him lengthen a short syllable if he wants; for that, no force; if the inventions laugh in it, if the mind and the judgment have done their office well, there is a good poet, I will say, but a bad versifier,
“His taste is keen, although his verse is harsh.” (Horace)
Let his work, says Horace, lose all its seams and measures—
“The rhythm and the measure; and what goes Foremost, make last, and last to first transpose; Yet still the poet’s scattered limbs it shows” (Horace)
it will not be contradicted by that; the pieces themselves will be beautiful. This is what Menander replied, as he was told, approaching the day on which he had promised a play, which he had not yet put his hand to: It is composed and ready, all that remains is to add the verses. Having arranged the things and the material in his mind, he gave little thought to the rest. Since Ronsard and du Bellay gave credit to our French poetry, I see so few apprentices who do not inflate words, who do not roughly revile the cadences like them.
“It makes more sound than sense.” (Seneca)
For the common people, there were never so many poets. But, as it was very easy for them to reproduce their rhythms, they are also very good at imitating the rich descriptions of one and the delicate inventions of the other. But what will he do if pressed by the sophisticated subtlety of some syllogism: ham makes you drink, drinking desalters, therefore ham desalters? Let him laugh at it. It is more subtle to laugh at it than to answer it. Let him borrow this pleasant counter-subtlety from Aristippus: Why should I untie it, since, being tied, it hinders me? Someone proposed dialectical subtleties against Cleanthes, to whom Chrysippus said: Play with these games with children, and do not divert the serious thoughts of a man of age to that end. If these silly quibbles,
“Tortuous and thorny sophisms.” (Cicero)
Are to persuade him of a lie, that is dangerous; but if they remain without effect and only make him laugh, I do not see why he should be wary of them. There are some so foolish that they turn aside a quarter of a league from their path to chase a clever word;
“Or who do not fit words to things, but seek irrelevant things which their words may fit” (Quintilian).
And as another says,
“There are some who are led by the charm of some attractive word to write something they had not intended” (Seneca)
I much rather twist a good sentence to sew it on me, than twist my thread to go and fetch it. On the contrary, it is up to the words to serve and follow, and the Gascon can do it, if the Frenchman cannot. I want things to overcome, and to fill the imagination of the listener in such a way that he has no recollection of the words. The kind of speaking that I love is simple and naive, both on paper and in the mouth; a succulent and nervous style, short and tight, not so much delicate and combed as vehement and abrupt:
”The speech that strikes the mind will have most taste.” (Epitaph of Lucan)
Which is rather difficult than boring, remote from affectation, disordered, disjointed and hardy: each squadron faces its body; not pedantic, not monkish, not lawyerly, but rather like a soldier, as Suetonius called the speeches of Julius Caesar, but I do not know why he calls it that.
I have willingly imitated this debauchery that can be seen in our youth, in the way they wear their clothes: a cloak as a scarf, the cape over one shoulder, badly stretched stockings, which represents a disdainful pride in these foreign trappings, and a lack of regard for art. But I find it even better employed in the form of speech. Any affectation, especially in French gayety and freedom, is unbecoming to the courtier. And, in a monarchy, every gentleman must be trained in the manner of a courtier. Therefore we do well to deviate a little from the naive and contemptuous. I do not like a weave where the joins and seams show, just as in a beautiful body, one should not be able to count the bones and veins.
“Let the language devoted to truth be plain and simple, Who speaks carefully unless he wants to speak affectedly?” (Seneca)
Eloquence insults things, which distracts us from ourselves. As with accouterments, it is pusillanimity to want to distinguish oneself by some particular and unusual manner: likewise, in language, the search for new phrases and little-known words comes from a childish and pedantic ambition. May I use only those that are used at the market in Paris! Aristophanes the grammarian knew nothing about it, to take up again in Epicurus the simplicity of his words and the end of his oratorical art, which was only perspicuity of language.
The imitation of speech, by its ease, incontinently follows a whole people; the imitation of judging, of inventing it does not go so fast. Most readers, having found such a robe, very foolishly think they hold such a body. Strength and nerves cannot be borrowed; finery and the cloak can. Most of those who haunt me speak likewise of the Essays, but I do not know if they think likewise. The Athenians (according to Plato) are concerned with the abundance and elegance of speech; the Lacedaemonians with brevity, and those of Crete with the fecundity of ideas rather than of language: these are the best. Zeno said that he had two kinds of disciples: some, whom he called philologists, curious to learn things, who were his favorites; the others, logophiles, who were concerned only with language.
That is not to say that speaking well is not a fine and good thing, but not as good as it is made out to be; and it is a shame that our whole life should be taken up with it. I would first of all like to know my language well, and that of my neighbors, with whom I most often have dealings. Greek and Latin are undoubtedly a fine and grand arrangement, but they are too expensive. I will tell you here a way to get them more cheaply than usual, which has been tried on myself. Whoever wants to may use it. My late father, having made all the inquiries that a man can make, among learned and intelligent people, of an exquisite form of institution, was advised of this inconvenience that was in use; and it was said to him that this length that we took in learning languages, which cost them nothing, is the only reason why we could not reach the greatness of soul and knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
I don’t believe that this is the only reason. In any case, the expedient that my father found was that, as a nurse and before the first unfolding of my tongue, he entrusted me to a German, who has since died a famous doctor in France, completely ignorant of our language, and very well versed in Latin. This man, whom he had expressly brought over and who was very dearly paid, had me continually in his arms. He also had with him two others less knowledgeable to follow me and relieve the first. These others spoke no language to me other than Latin. As for the rest of his household, it was an inviolable rule that neither he himself, nor my mother, nor valet, nor chambermaid, spoke in my company except in as many words of Latin as each had learned to use in jargon with me. It is a marvel at what fruit each bore.
My father and mother learned enough Latin to understand it, and acquired enough to use it when necessary, as did the other servants who were more closely attached to my service. In short, we Latinized ourselves to the point that it overflowed into the villages all around us, where it still exists, and several Latin names for crafts and tools took root through usage. As for me, I was over six years old before I heard François or Perigordin any more than Arabesque. And, without art, without a book, without grammar or precepts, without a whip and without tears, I had learned Latin, just as pure as my schoolmaster knew it: for I could not have mixed it up or altered it.
If, by trial, they wanted to give me a theme, in the style of the colleges, they gave it to the others in French; but to me they had to give it in bad Latin, so that I could turn it into good. And Nicolas Groucchi, who wrote de comitiis Romanorum, Guillaume Guerente, who commented on Aristotle, George Bucanan, that great Scottish poet, Marc Antoine Muret, recognized by France and Italy as the best orator of the time, my domestic tutors, often dictated to me that I had this language, in my childhood, so ready and so easy, that they feared to approach me. Bucanan, whom I have since seen in the retinue of the late Mareschal de Brissac, told me that he was about to write about the education of children, and that he was using my copy, for he was at that time in charge of the Comte de Brissac, whom we have since seen to be so valiant and so brave.
As for Greek, of which I have almost no understanding at all, my father intended to teach it to me by art, but in a new way, by way of entertainment and exercise. We would recite our declensions in the manner of those who, through certain board games, learn Arithmetic and Geometry. For, among other things, it had been advised that I should taste science and duty through an unforced will and of my own desire, and that my soul should be raised in all gentleness and freedom, without rigor and constraint. I went so far as to believe in such superstition that, because some people think that it disturbs the tender brains of children to wake them up in the morning with a start, and to tear them from sleep (in which they are immersed much more than we are) suddenly and violently, I was woken by the sound of some instrument; and I was never without a man who used it on me.
This example will suffice to judge the rest, and also to commend the prudence and affection of such a good father, who was by no means to be taken in if he had not reaped any fruits responding to such exquisite cultivation. Two things were the cause of this: the barren and inconvenient field; for, although I had strong and whole health, and a gentle and tractable nature, I was so lazy, soft and sleepy in it, that I could not be dragged out of idleness, not to make me play. What I saw, I saw well, and under this heavy complexion, I was nourished by bold imaginations and opinions above my age. My mind was slow, and only went as far as it was led; apprehension, tardy; invention, lazy; and after all, an incredible lack of memory. From all this it is no wonder that he could not draw anything worthwhile.
Secondly, as those who are pressed by a furious desire for healing let themselves be swayed by all sorts of advice, the good man, being extremely afraid of failing in something he cared so much about, finally let himself be carried away by the common opinion, which always follows those who are ahead of him, like the cranes, and he reverted to custom, no longer having around him those who had given him those first institutions, which he had brought from Italy; and he sent me, at about the age of six, to the college of Guienne, very flourishing at the time, and the best in France. And there, it is not possible to add anything to the care he took, and to choosing me sufficient private tutors, and to all the other circumstances of my education, in which he reserved several particular ways against the use of colleges. But all the same, it was still a college.
My Latin soon degenerated, and I have since lost all use of it through disuse. And my new institution only served to get me through to the first classes: for, when I left college at the age of thirteen, I had completed my course (as they call it), and in truth without any fruit that I can now account for. The first taste I had of books came from the pleasure of the fables of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. For, at about the age of seven or eight, I stole away from all other pleasures to read them: all the more so as that language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew, and the most suited to my age because of the subject matter. For Lancelots du Lac, Amadis, Huons de Bordeaus, and other such jumble of books with which childhood amuses itself, I knew neither the name nor the contents, so exact was my discipline. I became more nonchalant about studying my other prescribed lessons.
Then it occurred to me, strangely enough, that I was dealing with a man of the tutor’s understanding, who knew how to skilfully connive at my debauchery and other similar things. For, in this way, I quickly went through Vergil in the Aeneid and then Terence, and then Plautus, and Italian comedies, always charmed by the sweetness of the subject. If I had been so foolish as to break this routine, I believe that I would have taken away from school only a hatred of books, as is the case with almost all of our nobility. He managed ingeniously. Pretending not to see anything, he whetted my appetite, only allowing me to secretly devour these books and gently keeping me busy with the other studies of the curriculum. For the main qualities that my father looked for in those to whom he entrusted my care were good nature and an easy disposition. Also mine had no other vice than languor and laziness.
The danger was not that I would do wrong, but that I would do nothing. No one predicted that I would become bad, but useless. They foresaw idleness, not malice. I feel that the same has happened to me. The complaints that grate on my ears are like this: Idle; cold in the offices of friendship and kinship and in public offices; too private. The most offensive do not say: Why did he take? Why did he not pay? But: Why did he not leave? Why did he not give? I would appreciate it if only such supererogatory effects were desired of me. But it is unjust to demand what I do not owe, much more so than to demand of others what they owe.
By condemning me in this way, they take away the reward for my actions and the gratitude that I would otherwise have received: whereas active good deeds should weigh more heavily in my hands, in view of the fact that I have no passive debts. The more my fortune is mine, the freer I can dispose of it. However, if I were a great illuminator of my actions, perhaps I would rebuke these reproaches. And to some apprentices, let them not be so offended that I do not do enough, that I could do more than I do. Yet my soul did not fail at the same time to have firm stirrings and sound and open judgments about the objects it knew, and to digest them alone, without any communication. And, among other things, I truly believe that she would have been completely incapable of resorting to force and violence. Will I take into account this ability from my childhood: self-assurance, and suppleness of voice and gesture, to apply myself to the roles I undertook? Because, before the age of
“Scarce had my twelfth year snatched me from the year before.” (Virgil)
I played the first characters in the Latin tragedies of Bucanan, Guerente and Muret, which were performed with dignity in our college of Guienne. In this, Andreas Goveanus, our headmaster, was without comparison the greatest headmaster in France, as in all other aspects of his role: and I was held to be his master craftsman. It is an exercise that I do not disdain to entrust to young house children: and I have seen our Princes devote themselves to it since in person, following the example of some of the elders, honorably and commendably. It was even permissible for people of honor in Greece to make it their profession:
“He revealed the matter to the tragic actor Aniston. This man was distinguished in both birth and fortune; nor did his art spoil his position, since nothing of that sort is considered a disgrace by the Greeks.” (Livy)
For I have always accused of impertinence those who condemn these amusements, and of injustice those who refuse entry to our good cities to comedians who are worthy of it, and begrudge the people these public pleasures. Good policies take care to bring citizens together and unite them, not only in the serious duties of devotion, but also in exercises and games; society and friendship are increased by this. And then one could not grant them more regulated pastimes than those that are done in the presence of everyone and in full view of the magistrate.
And I would consider it reasonable that the magistrate, and the prince, at his own expense, should sometimes reward the community with paternal affection and kindness; and that in populous cities there should be places set aside and arranged for these spectacles: some entertainment of the worst and most secret deeds. To return to my point, there is nothing like whetting the appetite and affection, otherwise all you are doing is making donkeys loaded with books. They are whipped into keeping their pockets full of knowledge, which, to do well, should not only be housed at home, it should be embraced.