the umbrellas made use of in Italy, ever since the time of the ancient
Romans, more burden a man's arm than they relieve his head. I would fain
know how it was that the Persians, so long ago and in the infancy of
luxury, made ventilators where they wanted them, and planted shades, as
Xenophon reports they did. I love rain, and to dabble in the dirt, as
well as ducks do. The change of air and climate never touches me; every
sky is alike; I am only troubled with inward alterations which I breed
within myself, and those are not so frequent in travel. I am hard to be
got out, but being once upon the road, I hold out as well as the best.
I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitous
to equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbour, as for
the longest voyage. I have learned to travel after the Spanish fashion,
and to make but one stage of a great many miles; and in excessive heats
I always travel by night, from sun set to sunrise. The other method of
baiting by the way, in haste and hurry to gobble up a dinner, is,
especially in short days, very inconvenient. My horses perform the
better; never any horse tired under me that was able to hold out the
first day's journey. I water them at every brook I meet, and have only a
care they have so much way to go before I come to my inn, as will digest
the water in their bellies. My unwillingness to rise in a morning gives
my servants leisure to dine at their ease before they set out; for my own
part, I never eat too late; my appetite comes to me in eating, and not
else; I am never hungry but at table.
Some of my friends blame me for continuing this travelling humour, being
married and old. But they are out in't; 'tis the best time to leave a
man's house, when he has put it into a way of continuing without him, and
settled such order as corresponds with its former government. 'Tis much
greater imprudence to abandon it to a less faithful housekeeper, and who
will be less solicitous to look after your affairs.
The most useful and honourable knowledge and employment for the mother of
a family is the science of good housewifery. I see some that are
covetous indeed, but very few that are good managers. 'Tis the supreme
quality of a woman, which a man ought to seek before any other, as the
only dowry that must ruin or preserve our houses. Let men say what they
will, according to the experience I have learned, I require in married
women the economical virtue above all other virtues; I put my wife to't,
as a concern of her own, leaving her, by my absence, the whole government
of my affairs. I see, and am vexed to see, in several families I know,
Monsieur about noon come home all jaded and ruffled about his affairs,
when Madame is still dressing her hair and tricking up herself, forsooth,
in her closet: this is for queens to do, and that's a question, too: 'tis
ridiculous and unjust that the laziness of our wives should be maintained
with our sweat and labour. No man, so far as in me lie, shall have a
clearer, a more quiet and free fruition of his estate than I. If the
husband bring matter, nature herself will that the wife find the form.
As to the duties of conjugal friendship, that some think to be impaired
by these absences, I am quite of another opinion. It is, on the
contrary, an intelligence that easily cools by a too frequent and
assiduous companionship. Every strange woman appears charming, and we
all find by experience that being continually together is not so pleasing
as to part for a time and meet again. These interruptions fill me with
fresh affection towards my family, and render my house more pleasant to
me. Change warms my appetite to the one and then to the other. I know
that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of
the world to the other, and especially this, where there is a continual
communication of offices that rouse the obligation and remembrance. The
Stoics say that there is so great connection and relation amongst the
sages, that he who dines in France nourishes his companion in Egypt; and
that whoever does but hold out his finger, in what part of the world
soever, all the sages upon the habitable earth feel themselves assisted
by it. Fruition and possession principally appertain to the imagination;
it more fervently and constantly embraces what it is in quest of, than
what we hold in our arms. Cast up your daily amusements; you will find
that you are most absent from your friend when he is present with you;
his presence relaxes your attention, and gives you liberty to absent
yourself at every turn and upon every occasion. When I am away at Rome,
I keep and govern my house, and the conveniences I there left; see my
walls rise, my trees shoot, and my revenue increase or decrease, very
near as well as when I am there:
"Ante oculos errat domus, errat forma locorum."
["My house and the forms of places float before my eyes"
--Ovid, Trist, iii. 4, 57.]
If we enjoy nothing but what we touch, we may say farewell to the money
in our chests, and to our sons when they are gone a hunting. We will
have them nearer to us: is the garden, or half a day's journey from home,
far? What is ten leagues: far or near? If near, what is eleven, twelve,
or thirteen, and so by degrees. In earnest, if there be a woman who can
tell her husband what step ends the near and what step begins the remote,
I would advise her to stop between;
"Excludat jurgia finis . . . .
Utor permisso; caudaeque pilos ut equinae
Paulatim vello, et demo unum, demo etiam unum
Dum cadat elusus ratione ruentis acervi:"
["Let the end shut out all disputes . . . . I use what is
permitted; I pluck out the hairs of the horse's tail one by one;
while I thus outwit my opponent."--Horace, Ep., ii, I, 38, 45]
and let them boldly call philosophy to their assistance; in whose teeth
it may be cast that, seeing it neither discerns the one nor the other end
of the joint, betwixt the too much and the little, the long and the
short, the light and the heavy, the near and the remote; that seeing it
discovers neither the beginning nor the end, it must needs judge very
uncertainly of the middle:
"Rerum natura nullam nobis dedit cognitionem finium."
["Nature has green to us no knowledge of the end of things."
--Cicero, Acad., ii. 29.]
Are they not still wives and friends to the dead who are not at the end
of this but in the other world? We embrace not only the absent, but
those who have been, and those who are not yet. We do not promise in
marriage to be continually twisted and linked together, like some little
animals that we see, or, like the bewitched folks of Karenty,--[Karantia,
a town in the isle of Rugen. See Saxo-Grammaticus, Hist. of Denmark,
book xiv.]--tied together like dogs; and a wife ought not to be so
greedily enamoured of her husband's foreparts, that she cannot endure to
see him turn his back, if occasion be. But may not this saying of that
excellent painter of woman's humours be here introduced, to show the
reason of their complaints?
"Uxor, si cesses, aut to amare cogitat,
Aut tete amari, aut potare, aut animo obsequi;
Et tibi bene esse soli, cum sibi sit male;"
["Your wife, if you loiter, thinks that you love or are beloved; or
that you are drinking or following your inclination; and that it is
well for you when it is ill for her (all the pleasure is yours and
hers all the care)."
--Terence, Adelph., act i., sc. I, v. 7.]
or may it not be, that of itself opposition and contradiction entertain
and nourish them, and that they sufficiently accommodate themselves,
provided they incommodate you?
In true friendship, wherein I am perfect, I more give myself to my
friend, than I endeavour to attract him to me. I am not only better
pleased in doing him service than if he conferred a benefit upon me,
but, moreover, had rather he should do himself good than me, and he most
obliges me when he does so; and if absence be either more pleasant or
convenient for him, 'tis also more acceptable to me than his presence;
neither is it properly absence, when we can write to one another: I have
sometimes made good use of our separation from one another: we better
filled and further extended the possession of life in being parted.
He--[La Boetie.]--lived, enjoyed, and saw for me, and I for him, as
fully as if he had himself been there; one part of us remained idle, and
we were too much blended in one another when we were together; the
distance of place rendered the conjunction of our wills more rich. This
insatiable desire of personal presence a little implies weakness in the
fruition of souls.
As to what concerns age, which is alleged against me, 'tis quite
contrary; 'tis for youth to subject itself to common opinions, and to
curb itself to please others; it has wherewithal to please both the
people and itself; we have but too much ado to please ourselves alone.
As natural conveniences fail, let us supply them with those that are
artificial. 'Tis injustice to excuse youth for pursuing its pleasures,
and to forbid old men to seek them. When young, I concealed my wanton
passions with prudence; now I am old, I chase away melancholy by debauch.
And thus do the platonic laws forbid men to travel till forty or fifty
years old, so that travel might be more useful and instructive in so
mature an age. I should sooner subscribe to the second article of the
same Laws, which forbids it after threescore.
"But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey."
What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it
my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me;
I only walk for the walk's sake. They who run after a benefit or a hare,
run not; they only run who run at base, and to exercise their running.
My design is divisible throughout: it is not grounded upon any great
hopes: every day concludes my expectation: and the journey of my life is
carried on after the same manner. And yet I have seen places enough a
great way off, where I could have wished to have stayed. And why not,
if Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Zeno, Antipater, so many sages of the
sourest sect, readily abandoned their country, without occasion of
complaint, and only for the enjoyment of another air. In earnest, that
which most displeases me in all my travels is, that I cannot resolve to
settle my abode where I should best like, but that I must always propose
to myself to return, to accommodate myself to the common humour.
If I feared to die in any other place than that of my birth; if I thought
I should die more uneasily remote from my own family, I should hardly go
out of France; I should not, without fear, step out of my parish; I feel
death always pinching me by the throat or by the back. But I am
otherwise constituted; 'tis in all places alike to me. Yet, might I have
my choice, I think I should rather choose to die on horseback than in
bed; out of my own house, and far from my own people. There is more
heartbreaking than consolation in taking leave of one's friends; I am
willing to omit that civility, for that, of all the offices of
friendship, is the only one that is unpleasant; and I could, with all my
heart, dispense with that great and eternal farewell. If there be any
convenience in so many standers-by, it brings an hundred inconveniences
along with it. I have seen many dying miserably surrounded with all this
train: 'tis a crowd that chokes them. 'Tis against duty, and is a
testimony of little kindness and little care, to permit you to die in
repose; one torments your eyes, another your ears, another your tongue;
you have neither sense nor member that is not worried by them. Your
heart is wounded with compassion to hear the mourning of friends, and,
perhaps with anger, to hear the counterfeit condolings of pretenders.
Who ever has been delicate and sensitive, when well, is much more so when
ill. In such a necessity, a gentle hand is required, accommodated to his
sentiment, to scratch him just in the place where he itches, otherwise
scratch him not at all. If we stand in need of a wise woman--[midwife,
Fr. 'sage femme'.]--to bring us into the world, we have much more need
of a still wiser man to help us out of it. Such a one, and a friend to
boot, a man ought to purchase at any cost for such an occasion. I am not
yet arrived to that pitch of disdainful vigour that is fortified in
itself, that nothing can assist or disturb; I am of a lower form; I
endeavour to hide myself, and to escape from this passage, not by fear,
but by art. I do not intend in this act of dying to make proof and show
of my constancy. For whom should I do it? all the right and interest I
have in reputation will then cease. I content myself with a death
involved within itself, quiet, solitary, and all my own, suitable to my
retired and private life; quite contrary to the Roman superstition, where
a man was looked upon as unhappy who died without speaking, and who had
not his nearest relations to close his eyes. I have enough to do to
comfort myself, without having to console others; thoughts enough in my
head, not to need that circumstances should possess me with new; and
matter enough to occupy me without borrowing. This affair is out of the
part of society; 'tis the act of one single person. Let us live and be
merry amongst our friends; let us go repine and die amongst strangers; a
man may find those, for his money, who will shift his pillow and rub his
feet, and will trouble him no more than he would have them; who will
present to him an indifferent countenance, and suffer him to govern
himself, and to complain according to his own method.
I wean myself daily by my reason from this childish and inhuman humour,
of desiring by our sufferings to move the compassion and mourning of our
friends: we stretch our own incommodities beyond their just extent when
we extract tears from others; and the constancy which we commend in every
one in supporting his adverse fortune, we accuse and reproach in our
friends when the evil is our own; we are not satisfied that they should
be sensible of our condition only, unless they be, moreover, afflicted.
A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief. He who
makes himself lamented without reason is a man not to be lamented when
there shall be real cause: to be always complaining is the way never to
be lamented; by making himself always in so pitiful a taking, he is never
commiserated by any. He who makes himself out dead when he is alive, is
subject to be thought living when he is dying. I have seen some who have
taken it ill when they have been told that they looked well, and that
their pulse was good; restrain their smiles, because they betrayed a
recovery, and be angry, at their health because it was not to be
lamented: and, which is a great deal more, these were not women.
I describe my infirmities, such as they really are, at most, and avoid
all expressions of evil prognostic and composed exclamations. If not
mirth, at least a temperate countenance in the standers-by, is proper in
the presence of a wise sick man: he does not quarrel with health, for,
seeing himself in a contrary condition, he is pleased to contemplate it
sound and entire in others, and at least to enjoy it for company: he does
not, for feeling himself melt away, abandon all living thoughts, nor
avoid ordinary discourse. I would study sickness whilst I am well; when
it has seized me, it will make its impression real enough, without the
help of my imagination. We prepare ourselves beforehand for the journeys
we undertake, and resolve upon them; we leave the appointment of the hour
when to take horse to the company, and in their favour defer it.
I find this unexpected advantage in the publication of my manners, that
it in some sort serves me for a rule. I have, at times, some
consideration of not betraying the history of my life: this public
declaration obliges me to keep my way, and not to give the lie to the
image I have drawn of my qualities, commonly less deformed and
contradictory than consists with the malignity and infirmity of the
judgments of this age. The uniformity and simplicity of my manners
produce a face of easy interpretation; but because the fashion is a
little new and not in use, it gives too great opportunity to slander.
Yet so it is, that whoever would fairly assail me, I think I so
sufficiently assist his purpose in my known and avowed imperfections,
that he may that way satisfy his ill-nature without fighting with the
wind. If I myself, to anticipate accusation and discovery, confess
enough to frustrate his malice, as he conceives, 'tis but reason that he
make use of his right of amplification, and to wire-draw my vices as far
as he can; attack has its rights beyond justice; and let him make the
roots of those errors I have laid open to him shoot up into trees: let
him make his use, not only of those I am really affected with, but also
of those that only threaten me; injurious vices, both in quality and
number; let him cudgel me that way. I should willingly follow the
example of the philosopher Bion: Antigonus being about to reproach him
with the meanness of his birth, he presently cut him short with this
declaration: "I am," said he, "the son of a slave, a butcher, and
branded, and of a strumpet my father married in the lowest of his
fortune; both of them were whipped for offences they had committed. An
orator bought me, when a child, and finding me a pretty and hopeful boy,
bred me up, and when he died left me all his estate, which I have
transported into this city of Athens, and here settled myself to the
study of philosophy. Let the historians never trouble themselves with
inquiring about me: I will tell them about it." A free and generous
confession enervates reproach and disarms slander. So it is that, one
thing with another, I fancy men as often commend as undervalue me beyond
reason; as, methinks also, from my childhood, in rank and degree of
honour, they have given me a place rather above than below my right.
I should find myself more at ease in a country where these degrees were
either regulated or not regarded. Amongst men, when an altercation about
the precedence either of walking or sitting exceeds three replies, 'tis
reputed uncivil. I never stick at giving or taking place out of rule, to
avoid the trouble of such ceremony; and never any man had a mind to go
before me, but I permitted him to do it.
Besides this profit I make of writing of myself, I have also hoped for
this other advantage, that if it should fall out that my humour should
please or jump with those of some honest man before I die, he would then
desire and seek to be acquainted with me. I have given him a great deal
of made-way; for all that he could have, in many years, acquired by close
familiarity, he has seen in three days in this memorial, and more surely
and exactly. A pleasant fancy: many things that I would not confess to
any one in particular, I deliver to the public, and send my best friends
to a bookseller's shop, there to inform themselves concerning my most
secret thoughts;
"Excutienda damus praecordia."
["We give our hearts to be examined."--Persius, V. 22.]
Did I, by good direction, know where to seek any one proper for my
conversation, I should certainly go a great way to find him out: for the
sweetness of suitable and agreeable company cannot; in my opinion, be
bought too dear. O what a thing is a true friend! how true is that old
saying, that the use of a friend is more pleasing and necessary than the
elements of water and fire!
To return to my subject: there is, then, no great harm in dying privately
and far from home; we conceive ourselves obliged to retire for natural
actions less unseemly and less terrible than this. But, moreover, such
as are reduced to spin out a long languishing life, ought not, perhaps,
to wish to trouble a great family with their continual miseries;
therefore the Indians, in a certain province, thought it just to knock a
man on the head when reduced to such a necessity; and in another of their
provinces, they all forsook him to shift for himself as well as he could.
To whom do they not, at last, become tedious and insupportable? the
ordinary offices of fife do not go that length. You teach your best
friends to be cruel perforce; hardening wife and children by long use
neither to regard nor to lament your sufferings. The groans of the stone
are grown so familiar to my people, that nobody takes any notice of them.
And though we should extract some pleasure from their conversation (which
does not always happen, by reason of the disparity of conditions, which
easily begets contempt or envy toward any one whatever), is it not too
much to make abuse of this half a lifetime? The more I should see them
constrain themselves out of affection to be serviceable to me, the more I
should be sorry for their pains. We have liberty to lean, but not to lay
our whole weight upon others, so as to prop ourselves by their ruin; like
him who caused little children's throats to be cut to make use of their
blood for the cure of a disease he had, or that other, who was
continually supplied with tender young girls to keep his old limbs warm
in the night, and to mix the sweetness of their breath with his, sour and
stinking. I should readily advise Venice as a retreat in this decline of
life. Decrepitude is a solitary quality. I am sociable even to excess,
yet I think it reasonable that I should now withdraw my troubles from the
sight of the world and keep them to myself. Let me shrink and draw up
myself in my own shell, like a tortoise, and learn to see men without
hanging upon them. I should endanger them in so slippery a passage: 'tis
time to turn my back to company.
"But, in these travels, you will be taken ill in some wretched place,
where nothing can be had to relieve you." I always carry most things
necessary about me; and besides, we cannot evade Fortune if she once
resolves to attack us. I need nothing extraordinary when I am sick.
I will not be beholden to my bolus to do that for me which nature cannot.
At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down,
whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile
myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by
so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much
the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or
counsellor than of a physician. What I have not settled of my affairs
when I was in health, let no one expect I should do it when I am sick.
What I will do for the service of death is always done; I durst not so
much as one day defer it; and if nothing be done, 'tis as much as to say
either that doubt hindered my choice (and sometimes 'tis well chosen not
to choose), or that I was positively resolved not to do anything at all.
I write my book for few men and for few years. Had it been matter of
duration, I should have put it into firmer language. According to the
continual variation that ours has been subject to, up to this day, who
can expect that its present form should be in use fifty years hence?
It slips every day through our fingers, and since I was born, it is
altered above one-half. We say that it is now perfect; and every age
says the same of its own. I shall hardly trust to that, so long as it
varies and changes as it does. 'Tis for good and useful writings to
rivet it to them, and its reputation will go according to the fortune of
our state. For which reason I am not afraid to insert in it several
private articles, which will spend their use amongst the men that are now
living, and that concern the particular knowledge of some who will see
further into them than every common reader. I will not, after all, as I
often hear dead men spoken of, that men should say of me: "He judged, he
lived so and so; he would have done this or that; could he have spoken
when he was dying, he would have said so or so, and have given this thing
or t'other; I knew him better than any." Now, as much as decency
permits, I here discover my inclinations and affections; but I do more
willingly and freely by word of mouth to any one who desires to be
informed. So it is that in these memoirs, if any one observe, he will
find that I have either told or designed to tell all; what I cannot
express, I point out with my finger:
"Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci
Sunt, per quae possis cognoscere caetera tute"
["By these footsteps a sagacious mind many easily find all other
matters (are sufficient to enable one to learn the rest well.)"
--Lucretius, i. 403.]
I leave nothing to be desired or to be guessed at concerning me. If
people must be talking of me, I would have it to be justly and truly; I
would come again, with all my heart, from the other world to give any one
the lie who should report me other than I was, though he did it to honour
me. I perceive that people represent, even living men, quite another
thing than what they really are; and had I not stoutly defended a friend
whom I have lost,--[De la Boetie.]--they would have torn him into a
thousand contrary pieces.