Montaigne: Of Sadness
Montaigne tells us how Psammenitus, the captured King of Egypt, seeing his daughter enslaved and his son led to his execution, reacted not at all; yet when he saw his friend among the captives, the broken king beat his head and wailed with grief. And he tells us of a prince, Montaigne’s own contemporary, who stoically endured the deaths of his older and younger brothers, yet broke down at the demise of one of his subordinates. These two men Montaigne compares to Niobe, who lost seven sons and seven daughters; he describes how the poets said she had ultimately turned to stone: “Petrified,” according to Ovid, “by her woes.”
Niobe’s transformation explains the odd responses of the king and the prince to their own losses: it represents “that bleak, dumb, and deaf stupor that benumbs us when accidents surpassing our endurance overwhelm us.” As Psammenitus himself explained, only the capture of his friend could be signified by tears; “the first two [tragedies] far surpass any power of expression.”
Montaigne knew what it was to experience loss. As an advisor to Henri of Navarre amidst the savagery of the French Wars of Religion, he was certainly familiar with death and dispossession on a grand scale, but grief was something he knew on the most intimate level as well. He had six children; only one survived infancy. In 1563, his beloved friend Etienne de la Boetie died of a fever, aged only 32, depriving Montaigne of, as Donald Frame describes it, a “perfect and intimate friendship … the great emotional experience of Montaigne’s life.” Five years later, Montaigne’s father, with whom he was very close, also passed away. In 1572, the year of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Montaigne began writing his essays, driven by a motive that will be familiar to many writers: the need to do something to keep his own depression at bay.
The first edition of his essay on sadness begins with the story of Psammenitus, and ends with anecdotes about historical figures who died from an excess of emotion: not just sadness, but also joy and shame. To me, these latter references are part of what makes “Of Sadness” particularly interesting.
Midway through the essay, Montaigne describes a German captain who, after a battle, finds his own son among the dead. The captain is frozen, expressionless and seemingly emotionless; he doesn’t weep or cry, but stands erect, just staring—until he drops “stone dead on the ground.” And here Montaigne quotes Petrarch:
“He who can say how he burns, burns little.”
But Petrarch isn’t talking about grief: he’s talking about love. He is talking, presumably, about Laura. Real sadness, Montaigne is telling us, is something as profoundly inexplicable as real love. Perhaps it is only possible to understand the former if one has experienced the latter: “the soul is then burdened with deep thoughts, and the body weighed down and languishing with love.” Those who truly grieve are struck as dumb as those made senseless by love; they are insensate and fragile and at risk of choking on passions too intense to be digested or described.
In 1588 Montaigne published a new and expanded edition of his essays, incorporating additions he made to many of the pieces in 1587. It had been a difficult time for him: drawn back into politics after an early retirement, he’d been harassed by extremists on both sides of the French religious conflict, and ultimately driven from his home outside Bordeaux by the same plague which had killed half the city’s population during his recent term as mayor.
In the 1588 edition of this essay, at the beginning and again at the end, Montaigne has added new text. These lines are what you might call disclaimers. “I am one of those freest from this passion,” he now asserts before he tells us about Psammenitus. And, having described to us so convincingly the foreign shore of grief and its deep similarities to true love and joy and shame, Montaigne, whose country was torn apart by waves of slaughter, whose city was destroyed by plague, who lost five infant children and his father and the friend who was also the love of his life, insists to us that he is “little subject to these violent passions.”
Montaigne, it seems, is turning to stone. “My susceptibility is naturally tough,” he writes, and you sense that day by day this claim gets truer, but that it never gets any easier: “and I harden and thicken it every day by force of reason.”