Considering the way a painter I know goes about his business, I was tempted to follow him. He chooses the most beautiful place and middle of each wall, to house a painting elaborated with all his talents; and, having emptied it all around, he fills it with grotesques, which are fanciful paintings, having grace only in their variety and strangeness. What are they here too, in truth, but grotesque and monstrous bodies, composed of various limbs, without a certain figure, having no order, sequence or proportion other than by chance?
“A lovely woman tapers off into a fish.” (Horace)
I am going well up to this second point with my painter, but I am falling short in the other and better part: for my self-sufficiency does not go so far as to dare to undertake a rich, varied and artfully-composed painting. I have decided to borrow one from Etienne de la Boitie, which will honor all the rest of this task. It is a discourse to which he gave the name La Servitude Volontaire; but those who were unaware of it have quite properly renamed it Le Contre Un. He wrote it as a kind of essay in his early youth, in honor of freedom against tyrants. It is slowly making its way into the hands of people of understanding, not without a great and well-deserved recommendation: for it is kind, and as full as possible.
If there is anything good to say, it is that this is the best he can do; and if, in the age in which I knew him, more advanced, he had taken such a design as mine, to put his fantasies in writing, we would see several rare things that would bring us very close to the honor of antiquity: for, particularly in this part of the gifts of nature, I know of none comparable to him. But all that remains of him is this discourse, again by chance, and I believe he has never seen it since it escaped him, and some memoirs on this edict of January, famous for our civil wars, which may perhaps find their place elsewhere. This is all that I have been able to recover of his relics, with the loving recommendation, through his will, that death be kept at bay, to the heir of his library and his papers, in addition to the booklet of his works that I have had published.
And I am particularly indebted to this piece, especially as it served as a means of our first acquaintance. For she was shown to me at a great distance before I had seen her, and gave me the first knowledge of her name, thus fostering the friendship that we have nurtured, as long as God willed, between us, so whole and so perfect that certainly there is little to compare with it, and, among our men, there is no trace of it in use. It takes so many encounters to build it that it is a big ask for fortune to happen once in three centuries. It seems that nature has steered us towards nothing more than society. And Aristotle says that good legislators have taken more care of friendship than of justice. Now the last point of its perfection is this one.
For, in general, all those that voluptuousness or profit, public or private need forge and nourish, are all the less beautiful and generous, and all the less friendship, as they mix another cause and purpose and fruit in friendship, than friendship itself. Neither do these four ancient species: natural, social, hospitable, and venerian, particularly agree with it, nor together.
From children to fathers, it is more of a respect. Friendship is nourished by communication that cannot take place between them, due to the too great disparity, and would perhaps offend the duties of nature. For neither can all the secret thoughts of fathers be communicated to children without giving rise to an annoying familiarity, nor can warnings and corrections, which is one of the first duties of friendship, be given by children to fathers. There have been nations where, by custom, children kill their fathers, and others where fathers kill their children, to avoid the hindrance they can sometimes bring upon each other, and naturally one depends on the ruin of the other.
There have been philosophers who disdained this natural seam, witness Aristippus: when pressed about the affection he owed his children for having come from him, he began to spit, saying that this had also come from him; that we did indeed generate lice and worms. And this other, whom Plutarch wanted to persuade to come to an agreement with his brother: I don’t make any more fuss about it, he said, coming out of the same hole. It is, in truth, a beautiful name and full of affection that the name of brother, and for this reason we, he and I, made our alliance. But this mixture of goods, this sharing, and that the wealth of one is the poverty of the other, it spoils wonderfully and relaxes this fraternal bond. As brothers have to pursue their advancement along the same path and in the same manner, they are bound to hurt and often clash with each other.
What is more, the correspondence and relationship that engenders these true and perfect friendships, why will it be found in these? The father and son can be of completely different complexions, and so can the brothers. He is my son, he is my relative, but he is a fierce man, a villain or a fool. And then, as it is friendship that loyalty and natural obligation command us, there is all the less of our choice and voluntary freedom. And our voluntary freedom has no production that is more properly its own than that of affection and friendship. It is not that I have not tried everything I could in that regard, having had the best father who ever was, and the most indulgent, until his extreme old age, and being from a famous family from father to son, and exemplary in this part of fraternal harmony,
“Known to others For fatherly affection toward my brothers.” (Horace)
Compare the affection towards women, which, although it arises from our choice, cannot be accommodated in this role. His fire, I confess,
“Of us that goddess is not unaware Who blends a bitter sweetness with her care.” (Catullus)
is more active, more searing and more harsh. But it is a reckless and fickle fire, undulating and diverse, a feverish fire, subject to flare-ups and relapses, and one that is always just around the corner. In friendship, it is a general and universal warmth, temperate and even, a constant and reassuring warmth, all gentleness and courtesy, with nothing harsh or poignant. What’s more, in love, it is only a wild desire for what eludes us:
“Just as a huntsman will pursue a hare O’er hill and dale, in weather cold or fair; The captured hare is worthless in his sight; He only hastens after things in flight.“ (Ariosto)
As quickly as he entered into the terms of friendship, that is to say, when the parties involved so desired, he vanished and languished.
Enjoyment loses him, as having a bodily end and being subject to satiety. Friendship, on the other hand, is enjoyed as it is desired, rising, nourishing itself, and growing only in the enjoyment as being spiritual, and the soul refining itself through use. Under this perfect friendship, these fickle affections once found a place in me, so that I do not speak of him, who confesses all too much in his verses. Thus these two passions came to know each other in me; but never in comparison: the first now maintains its course with haughty and superb flight, and disdainfully watches the second pass its points far below it.
As for marriages, apart from the fact that it is a market with only free admission (its duration being constrained and forced, depending moreover on our will), and a market that is usually done for other purposes, there arise a thousand extraneous fireworks to unravel among, sufficient to break the thread and disturb the course of a lively affection; where, in friendship, there is no business or commerce, only of itself. In truth, the ordinary self-sufficiency of women is not suited to this kind of conversation and communication, nourished by this holy bond; nor does their soul seem firm enough to bear the pressure of such a tight and lasting knot.
And certainly, without this, if it were possible to establish such a free and voluntary relationship, where not only the souls would have this entire enjoyment, but also where the bodies would have a part in the alliance, where the man would be entirely committed, it is certain that friendship would be fuller and more complete. But this sex by no example is yet little able to attain it, and by the common consent of the ancient schools is rejected.
And this other Greek license is rightly abhorred by our customs. Which, however, for having, according to their custom, such a necessary disparity of ages and difference of offices between the lovers, did not sufficiently correspond to the perfect union and propriety that we demand here:
“For what is this love of friendship? Why does no one love either an ugly youth, or a handsome old man?” (Cicero)
For even painting as practiced by the Academy will not, I think, prevent me from saying on its behalf: that this first infatuation inspired by the son of Venus in the lover’s heart for the object of the bloom of tender youth, to which they give free rein to the insolent and passionate efforts that immoderate ardour can produce, was based simply on external beauty, false image of the physical generation. For in the mind it could not, from which the watch was still hidden, which was only in its birth, and before the age of germination.
If this fury seized a low courage, the means of its pursuit were riches, presents, favor for the advancement of dignities, and such other base merchandise as they reprove. If it fell to a more generous courage, the means were equally generous: philosophical instruction, teachings to revere religion, obey the laws, die for the good of one’s country: examples of valor, prudence, justice: the lover endeavoring to make himself acceptable by the graciousness and beauty of his soul, that of his body having already faded, and hoping by this mental association to establish a firmer and more lasting bond.
When this pursuit came to fruition in its season (for what they did not require of the lover, that he bring leisure and discretion to his enterprise, they required exactly the same of the beloved: especially since he had to judge her on an inner beauty, difficult to recognize and abstruse to discover) when the desire for a spiritual conception through the intermediary of a spiritual beauty arose in him. This was the main thing here: the bodily, accidental and secondary: the complete opposite of the lover.
For this reason they preferred him, and verified that the gods also preferred him, and greatly praised the poet Aeschylus for having, in the love of Achilles and Patroclus, given the lover’s part to Achilles, who was in the first and unspoiled greenness of his adolescence, and the most beautiful of the Greeks. After this general partnership, the mistress and most worthy party thereof exercising her offices and predominating, they say that there resulted fruits very useful to the private and the public; that it was the strength of the countries that received the use thereof, and the principal defense of equity and liberty: witness the salutary loves of Hermodius and Aristogiton.
Yet they call it sacred and divine. And, according to them, only the violence of tyrants and the cowardice of peoples are its adversaries. In the end, all that can be said in favor of the Academy is that it was a love that ended in friendship: something that relates well to the Stoic definition of love:
“Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.” (Cicero)
I return to my description, in a fairer and more even-handed way.
“Only those are to be judged friendships in which the characters have been strengthened and matured by age.” (Cicero)
Moreover, what we usually call friends and friendship are only acquaintances and familiarities formed by some occasion or convenience, by means of which our souls are entertained. In the friendship of which I speak, they mix and confuse one into the other, in such a universal blend that they erase and can no longer find the seam that joined them.
If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was him; because it was me. There is, beyond all my words, and what I can say about it in particular, some inexplicable and fatal force, mediator of this union. We were looking for each other before we had seen each other, and through reports that we heard from each other, which made our affection more effort than the reason of the reports, I believe by some ordinance of heaven: we embraced each other by our names.
And at our first meeting, which happened to be at a big festival and in a city crowd, we found ourselves so taken, so familiar, so obliged to each other, that nothing since has been so close to us as each other. He wrote an excellent Latin satire, which has been published, in which he excuses and explains the haste of our understanding, so quickly brought to perfection.
Having so little time to last, and having started so late, for we were both grown men, and he more than a few years, it had no time to lose, and to settle itself to the pattern of friendships soft and regular, to which so many precautions of long and prior conversation are necessary. This one has no other idea than itself, and can only relate to itself. It is not a special consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand: it is I know not what quintessence of the whole mixture, which, having seized all my will, led it to plunge and lose itself in his; which, having seized all his will, led it to plunge and lose itself in mine, with such hunger, such concurrence.
I say lose, in truth, reserving nothing for ourselves that was ours, nor that was his or mine. When Laelius, in the presence of the Roman Consuls, who, after the condemnation of Tiberius Gracchus, were pursuing all those who had been of his intelligence, came to inquire of Caius Blosius (who was the principal of his friends) how much he would have liked to do for him, and he replied: “Everything”; “What, everything?” he followed up. And what if he had commanded you to set fire to our temples? He never commanded me to do so, replied Blosius. But if he had done it? added Laelius. I would have obeyed him, he replied.
If he was such a perfect friend of Gracchus, as the histories say, he had no need to offend the consuls by this last and bold confession; and he should not have departed from the assurance he had of the will of Gracchus. But, nevertheless, those who accuse this response as seditious do not understand this mystery well, and do not presuppose, as is the case, that he held the will of Gracchus in his sleeve, and by power and by knowledge.
They were more friends than citizens, more friends than friends and enemies of their country, than friends of ambition and trouble. Having committed themselves perfectly to each other, they held the reins of each other’s inclinations perfectly; and if this harness is guided by the virtue and conduct of reason (as it is also completely impossible to harness it without it), Blosius’ answer is as it should be. If their actions were reversed, they were neither friends according to my measure of each other, nor friends to themselves.
Moreover, this answer does not sound like mine would either, if someone were to ask me in this way: If your will commanded you to kill your daughter, would you kill her? and if I agreed. For this does not bear any witness of consent to do so, because I have no doubt about my will, and just as little about that of such a friend. It is not in the power of all the speeches in the world to dislodge me from the certainty that I have, of the intentions and judgments of my own. None of her actions could be presented to me, whatever face it had, without my immediately finding the reason for it.
Our souls have been so closely bound together, they have regarded each other with such ardent affection, and with such affection uncovered to the very depths of each other’s being, that not only did I know his as my own, but I would certainly have trusted him with my secrets more readily than I would have trusted myself to myself. Let no one put me in this category of other common friendships: I have as much knowledge of them as anyone else, and of the most perfect of their kind, but I do not advise that one confuse their rules: one would be mistaken.
One must tread carefully in these other friendships, with prudence and caution; the bond is not so strong that one need not be wary of it. Love him (said Chilon) as if one day having to hate him; hate him as if having to love him. This precept, which is so abominable in this sovereign and masterful friendship, is healthy in the use of ordinary and customary friendships, in relation to which we must use the word that Aristotle was very familiar with: O my friends, there are no friends. In this noble trade, offices and benefits, the nourishment of other friendships, do not deserve to be taken into account: this confusion so full of our wills is the cause.
For, just as the friendship that I bear myself receives no increase for the help that I give myself in need, whatever the Stoics may say, and as I do not thank myself for the service that I do myself: also the union of such friends being truly perfect, it makes them lose the feeling of such duties, and hate and drive out of them these words of division and difference: good done, obligation, gratitude, prayer, thanksgiving, and their like. All being by common effect between them, will, thoughts, judgments, goods, women, children, honor and life, and their suitability being only one soul in two bodies according to Aristotle’s very definition, they can neither lend nor give anything. This is why lawmakers, in order to honor the marriage of some imaginary resemblance of this divine union, prohibit gifts between husband and wife, wanting to infer that everything should belong to each of them, and that they have nothing to divide and share together.
If, in the friendship of which I speak, one could give to the other, it would be the one who would receive the favor who would oblige his companion. For both seek, more than anything else, to do good to each other, and he who lends the means and the opportunity is the one who acts generously, giving his friend this pleasure, of fulfilling in his place what he desires most.
When the philosopher Diogenes was short of money, he said that he was asking his friends for it, not that he was asking for it. And, to show how this is actually practiced, I will recite an ancient, singular example. Eudamidas, a Corinthian, had two friends: Charixenus, a Sicyonian, and Aretheus, a Corinthian. Coming to die being poor, and his two friends rich, he made his will as follows: I bequeath to Aretheus to feed my mother and to maintain her in her old age; to Charixenus, to marry my daughter and give him the largest dowry he can; and, in case one of them should fail, I substitute in his share the one who shall survive.
Those who first saw this will mocked it; but his heirs, having been informed, accepted it with singular contentment. And one of them, Charixenus, having passed away five days later, the substitution being open in favor of Aretheus, he curiously supported this mother, and, of the five talents he had in his possessions, he gave two and a half to the marriage of one of his own daughters, and two and a half for the marriage of Eudamidas’ daughter, and he celebrated the weddings on the same day.
This example is full, if one condition could be said to be present, which is the multitude of friends. For this perfect friendship, of which I speak, is indivisible: each person gives himself entirely to his friend, so that he has nothing left to give elsewhere; on the contrary, it is unfortunate if he is not twofold, threefold, or fourfold, and if he does not have several souls and several wills to confer them all on this subject. Common friendships can be separated: one can love beauty in this person, the ease of their manners in that person, generosity in another, paternity in someone else, fraternity in yet another, and so on; but this friendship that possesses the soul and rules it with complete sovereignty cannot possibly be twofold.
If two people were to ask for help at the same time, which one would you help? If they were to ask you to do different things, how would you decide? If one of them told you something in confidence that the other needed to know, how would you sort it out? Unique and primary friendship breaks all other bonds. The secret that I have sworn not to reveal to anyone else, I can, without perjury, communicate to the one who is no other: it is me.
It is a great enough miracle to double oneself; and those who talk of tripling themselves do not know the height of it. Nothing is extreme that does not have its equal. And he who will suppose that of two I love one as much as the other, and that they love each other and love me as much as I love them, multiplies in confraternity the most united and united thing, and of which only one is still the rarest thing to be found in the world.
The rest of this story fits very well with what I was saying: for Eudamidas gives his friends the grace and favor of employing them at his service. He leaves them heirs of his generosity, which consists in putting in their hands the means of doing him good. And, without doubt, the strength of friendship shows itself much more richly in his case than in that of Aretheus. In short, these are unimaginable effects for those who have not experienced them, and they make me marvel at the response of this young soldier to Cyrus, asking him how much he would like to give for a horse, with which he had just won the race, and if he would like to exchange it for a kingdom: “No, indeed, Sire, but I would gladly exchange it to acquire a friend, if I found a man worthy of such an alliance.” He did not say a bad thing: if I found one; for one easily finds men suitable for a superficial acquaintance.
But in this case, in which the fine depth of one’s courage is negotiated, which does nothing else, it is certainly necessary that all the springs be clean and perfectly secure. In confederations that are only held together at one end, one only has to provide for the imperfections that particularly affect that end. It does not matter what religion my doctor and my lawyer are. This consideration has nothing in common with the offices of friendship that they owe me. And, in the domestic acquaintance that those who serve me establish with me, I do the same. And I ask little of a lackey, if he is chaste; I seek if he is diligent. And do not fear so much a gambler muleteer as an imbecile, nor a swearing cook as an ignorant one. I do not meddle in telling the world what to do, others are meddling enough.
“That is my practice: do as you see fit.” (Terence)
To the familiarity of the table I associate the pleasant, not the prudent: to the bed, beauty before goodness; in the society of discourse, smugness, even without prudery. Similarly elsewhere. Just like the man who was once met riding on a stick, playing with his children, begged the man who saw him to say nothing about it, until he was a father himself, believing that the passion that would arise in his soul would make him an equitable judge of such an action: I would also like to talk to people who have tried what I am saying. But, knowing how far from common usage such friendship is, and how rare it is, I do not expect to find any good judge of it. For even the discourses that antiquity has left us on this subject seem to me weak in the face of the feeling I have of it. And, on this point, the effects surpass the very precepts of philosophy:
“Nothing shall I, while sane, compare with a dear friend.“ (Horace)
The ancient Menander said that he was happy who had only just met the shadow of a friend. He was certainly right to say so, even if he had tasted it. For, in truth, if I compare the rest of my life, which, with God’s grace, I have spent sweetly, comfortably and, except for the loss of such a friend, free from heavy affliction, full of peace of mind, having taken my natural and original comforts as payment without seeking others: if I compare her, I say, entirely to the four years that I was blessed to enjoy the sweet company and society of this personage, it is nothing but smoke, nothing but a dark and boring night. Since the day I lost him,
“Which I shall ever recall with pain, Ever with reverence—thus, Gods, did you ordain.” (Virgil)
I do nothing but languish; and even the pleasures that are offered to me, instead of consoling me, only increase my regret at his loss. We were each other’s half; it seems to me that I am robbing him of his share,
“Nor may I rightly taste of pleasures here alone, —So I resolved—when he who shared my life is gone.” (Terence)
I was already so used to being second in everything that it seems to me that I am only halfway there.
“Since an untimely blow has snatched away Part of my soul, why then do I delay, I the remaining part, less dear than he, And not entire surviving? The same day Brought ruin equally to him and me.” (Horace)
There is no action or imagination in which I do not hear his voice, as if it were right for me to do so. For, just as he surpassed me by an infinite distance in all other sufficiency and virtue, so too did he in the duty of friendship.
“Why should I be ashamed or exercise control Mourning so dear a soul?” (Horace)
“Brother, your death has left me sad and lone; Since you departed all our joys have gone, Which while you lived your sweet affection fed; My pleasures all lie shattered, with you dead. Our soul is buried, mine with yours entwined; And since then I have banished from my mind My studies, and my spirit’s dearest joys. Shall I ne’er speak to you, or hear your voice? Or see your face, more dear than life to me? At least I’ll love you to eternity.” (Catullus)
But let us hear a little from this sixteen-year-old lad. Because I have found that this work has since been brought to light, and to bad ends, by those who seek to disturb and change the state of our polity, without caring whether they will amend it, which they have mixed with other writings of their own making.
(Note: Montaigne also included this explanation for not including the Treatise, although I am reproducing it here.)
And so that the author’s memory is not prejudiced in the eyes of those who have had little first-hand knowledge of his opinions and actions, I advise them that he treated this subject in his childhood, merely as an exercise, as a commonplace subject hackneyed in a thousand places in books. I have no doubt that he believed what he wrote, for he was conscientious enough not to lie, even in jest. And I know further that, given the choice, he would have preferred to have been born in Venice rather than Sarlat: and rightly, too.
But he had another maxim deeply engraved on his soul, to obey and submit most religiously to the laws under which he was born. He was never a better citizen, nor more devoted to the peace of his country, nor more an enemy of the upheavals and novelties of his time. He would have used his fame to extinguish conflict rather than to provide a side with something to stir them up further. His mind was molded on the pattern of other centuries.