In his earliest essays, Montaigne displays a similarly Stoic bravado in facing up to death: 'let us stiffen and fortify ourselves'; 'let us look for it [death] everywhere'; 'the end of our race is death; it is the necessary object of our aim, which, if it frights us, how is it possible to take a step without feverishness?' All the actions of our life should be directed towards this final showdown: 'In this last scene there is no counterfeiting: we must speak out plain and display what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot.'

And into this stoical pessimism Montaigne mixes Lucretius' cosmological atomism, where life is pa.s.sed on like a baton in an endless relay race: 'Your death is part of the order of the universe, it is part of the life of the world'. Why, therefore, 'seek to add longer life, merely to renew ill-spent time and be tormented?' For, as Montaigne comments: ...if you have lived one day, you have seen them all. One day is equal to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade. This sun, this moon, these stars, this disposition of things is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and will also entertain your descendants.

Why drag things out? 'We are turning in the same circle,' says Lucretius, 'ever confined therein.' There are no new things to please you: 'It is the same over and over again.' The true task of life is, therefore, 'to lay a foundation for death'.

True to his word, Montaigne recalls how, even in his youth, morbid thoughts would strike him in the most unlikely situations: 'in the company of ladies and at games'. And he tells how someone turning over some of his papers came across a note he had written about something he wished to be done after his death, a note he had written down whilst less than a mile from his house, whilst perfectly healthy but still unsure whether he would survive the journey home. Whereas others may complain that death surprises them and breaks off their plans the education of their children, their daughter's marriage Montaigne insists we should be always be at the ready: 'We should be booted and ready to go.'

Montaigne's Stoic pessimism comes to a head in his essay 'Of Practice', in which he looks back to the late 1560s to an incident when he was knocked off his horse and almost killed. The essay addresses the paradox that death is 'the greatest task we have to perform' and yet the one thing for which we cannot rehea.r.s.e: 'Practice can give us no a.s.sistance...we are all apprentices when we come to it.' Hence his interest in his own near-death experience: During our third or second civil wars (I do not well remember which), I went out one day, about a league from my house, which is seated in the middle of all the trouble of the civil wars in France. Thinking myself safe as I was so near to my home that that there was no need for a better mount, I had taken a very easy but not very strong horse. On my return...one of my men, a tall, strong fellow, mounted upon a strong packhorse that had a very hard mouth [i.e. was obstinate] and was fresh and vigorous, to play the brave and get ahead of his fellows, came at full speed down my track, and crashed like a thunderbolt into the little man and little horse, striking us with such strength and weight, that he sent us both head over heels into the air. So that there lay the horse overthrown and stunned with the fall, I ten or twelve paces further away, dead, stretched out, with my face all battered and broken, my sword which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, and my belt all broken to pieces, with no more life or feeling than a log.

His men gather round and try to revive him but, failing to rouse him, fear the worst and begin to carry his body back to his house. But on the way he begins to cough and throw up blood, only to lapse back into unconsciousness, to the extent that 'my first sentiments were much nearer to death than to life'. Word of the accident reaches his home and his wife and daughter rush out to meet him. He hears their voices, but only at the periphery of his soul. He fumbles with his doublet. He sees his wife stumbling and in his delirium calls for someone to fetch her a horse. He quotes Ta.s.so to the effect that his soul was clearly doubtful of ever returning to his body, having lost confidence in its link to life.

Montaigne's accident has all the signs of a serious concussion, the obvious consequences of which can be a stroke and, of course, death. But what is remarkable about his account is the fact that the prospect of death does not seem to disturb him. He says that his 'first thought was that I had been shot in the head with an arquebus, for indeed several were being fired around us at the time'. In other words, he has succ.u.mbed to the worse death imaginable, a random mixture of negligence and bad luck. Moreover, it has happened not on the field of battle, but on a path less than a mile from his house.

But as he lies there, unmoving upon the cold earth, it is Stoicism that comes to his aid. As he says, he tells this account in order to 'give us more fort.i.tude' in the face of 'the greatest task we have to perform'. For what Montaigne seems to achieve in his final moments is exactly the state of apatheia apatheia that the Stoics cherished, declaring, with Holbein's that the Stoics cherished, declaring, with Holbein's Amba.s.sadors Amba.s.sadors, that this life is worth less than the next or as La Boetie whispered on his deathbed: 'An vivere tanti est?' (Is life worth so much?). In his late thirties, living, as he thinks, already on borrowed time; with his country in the midst of a violent civil war; with the deaths of friends, fathers, brothers and children all around him; with his face battered and broken, his sword ripped out of his hand, and with own extinction only fingertips away, Montaigne concludes, with Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas There is nothing to be gained by desperately hanging on to life and gives up: There is nothing to be gained by desperately hanging on to life and gives up: I saw myself all covered in blood, for my doublet was stained all over with the blood I had vomited...I thought my life was just hanging on the end of my lips, and I shut my eyes, to help, as I thought, to push it out, and took pleasure in languishing and letting myself go...

5.

Que scais-je? What Do I Know? What Do I Know?

(ill.u.s.trations credit 5.1)

Around this time a fog descended over northern Europe. It covered the Rhine, merging with the reed beds and sea mists. It cloistered the churchyards of France. It slipped inside books, it tarnished sword blades. It scaled the high walls of Oxford and surrounded Aristotle. It seemed to enter flesh itself, and confuse the ident.i.ties of things and the very boundaries of matter. And then it settled in men's minds.

Montaigne survived the fall from his horse. He was carried back to his house, coughing and retching, and lay in bed for several days refusing any treatment, convinced, as he says, that he had been 'mortally wounded in the head'. But when he sets about retelling the story of his accident in his essay 'Of Practice' (written perhaps some eight years after the event), something begins to cloud his Stoic resolution not fear or cowardice, but a new sense of the doubtfulness and uncertainty of our knowledge, a new sense of the sceptical fog in which we are immersed.

Scepticism arrived as a new and intoxicating intellectual force in the sixteenth century. Again it was an idea that had ancient precedents, particularly in the writings of the Greek sceptic s.e.xtus Empiricus, whose Outlines of Pyrrhonism Outlines of Pyrrhonism Montaigne knew from the translation of Henri Estienne of 1562. But as well as communicating these ancient ideas, the 'revival' of scepticism seemed to bespeak a loss of intellectual confidence more generally, no doubt as a result of the turmoil brought in by the Reformation, an uncertainty reflected in the t.i.tle of Francisco Sanchez's Montaigne knew from the translation of Henri Estienne of 1562. But as well as communicating these ancient ideas, the 'revival' of scepticism seemed to bespeak a loss of intellectual confidence more generally, no doubt as a result of the turmoil brought in by the Reformation, an uncertainty reflected in the t.i.tle of Francisco Sanchez's Quod nihil scitur Quod nihil scitur ( (That Nothing Is Known), published within a year of Montaigne's Essays Essays in 1581. For, as Montaigne describes the aftermath of his fall he thus seems to become strangely enthralled by the sceptical wonder of his near-death experience, and the strange confusion caused by his knock on the head: in 1581. For, as Montaigne describes the aftermath of his fall he thus seems to become strangely enthralled by the sceptical wonder of his near-death experience, and the strange confusion caused by his knock on the head: ...the fact is I was not there at all: these were but idle thoughts, in the clouds, stirred up by the senses of the eyes and ears, and not coming from me. I did not know where I had come from or where I was going; nor was I able to weigh and consider what I was asked: these were light effects, that the senses produced of themselves out of habit. What the soul contributed was in a dream, lightly touched, licked and moistened by the soft impression of the senses.

More vividly than any abstract argument, Montaigne's accident thus shows him that our minds are closely related to the body: 'the functions of the soul...regained life at the same rate as those of the body'. Moreover, the body may, in fact, be more capable on its own: he only began to 'move and to breathe', he recalls, because 'so great a quant.i.ty of blood had fallen into my stomach that Nature needed to rouse her forces to discharge it'. By contrast his mind, his reason, is out for the count: the 'weakness' of his understanding depriving him of the 'faculty of discerning' what had happened. He concludes that in those who have suffered terrible injuries, 'their minds and bodies are submerged in sleep'.

So whilst Montaigne might have embarked on 'Of Practice' to prove a Stoic point that we should not be afraid of death as he begins to write it down an alternative interpretation starts to take shape. Firstly, he realizes that the mind is is necessarily tied to the body, and as a consequence our ability to distance ourselves from our pa.s.sions and our senses is necessarily curtailed. Our basic condition is one of grogginess and uncertainty; despite our pretensions to knowledge, we may be concussed in the first place as he later declares: necessarily tied to the body, and as a consequence our ability to distance ourselves from our pa.s.sions and our senses is necessarily curtailed. Our basic condition is one of grogginess and uncertainty; despite our pretensions to knowledge, we may be concussed in the first place as he later declares: We wake sleeping, and in our waking sleep. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my waking, I never find it sufficiently clear and cloudless. Moreover, the deepest sleep sometimes puts dreams to sleep. But our waking is never so awake that it purges and dissipates those reveries which are the dreams of the waking, and worse than our dreams.

But the second implication an idea that runs through the later essays like the underground streams nourishing the vines around him is that the vulnerability of our consciousness suggests the vulnerability of our souls. He says that it was impossible that his soul 'could maintain any force within to recognize itself'. Our final moments from the perspective of one who has 'essayed' them reveal not the imperiousness and composure of the soul, but its confusion, its concussion, and its likely dissolution as a result. And this has clear theological implications in bringing Montaigne to the boundaries of atheism but philosophical implications as well: for if we possess no umbilical link to the afterlife (and hence to G.o.d), our ability to reach perfect knowledge is also jeopardized. We are effectively on our own.

Montaigne's fall from his horse, 'so light an incident', is therefore an experience that stays with him for the rest of his life: 'To this moment I still feel the bruises of that terrible shock.' But it also becomes a momentous event in terms of the redirection of human knowledge that it suggests: away from a Christian humanist yearning for the afterlife, and back to the human, to the body, to the natural natural. And when he returns to 'Of Practice' in his final additions to the essays additions that are characterized by their honesty and intellectual courage it is this rudderless yet intoxicating freedom that Montaigne emphasizes, seeing the process of self-a.n.a.lysis as something radically new a 'new and extraordinary undertaking': And should it be taken amiss if I communicate it. What is of use to me, may perhaps be of use to another. As to the rest, I am not hurting anything; I use nothing but that which is my own. And if I play the fool, it is at my own expense, and n.o.body else's business. For it is a folly that will die with me, and has no consequence. We have only heard of two or three of the ancients who have beaten this path, and yet I cannot say if it was in a similar manner, knowing nothing of them but their names. No one since has followed this track. It is a difficult undertaking, more difficult than it seems, to follow a gait so rambling and uncertain as that of the mind; to penetrate the dark profundities of its inner windings; to identify and lay hold of all the delicate airs of its motions. It is a new and extraordinary undertaking, and which withdraws us from the common and most recommended employments of the world.

The 'two or three ancients' that Montaigne refers to could be any number of figures, but a strong possibility is the pre-Socratic materialists, Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus, who were often described as const.i.tuting a 'school' of atheism (hence, perhaps, Montaigne's unwillingness to name them), and whose writings no longer exist, their views only coming down to us second-hand. As a consequence, the soul/self is not something that is simply a.s.sumed, but something whose nature is to be actively discovered. Rather than the soul trying to escape its embodiment, it should embrace it, explore it. The 'vanity' of such an activity goes against the Christian/Stoic consensus of his time ('the most recommended employments of the world'). But it is, he insists, sticking to his guns: 'a folly that will die with me'.

Montaigne thus begins to forge a bridge between his preoccupation with death and Stoicism as an antidote to that fear of death to the more sceptical outlook displayed in the essays that Montaigne composes in the mid-1570s, where 'both within and without, man is full of weakness and falsehood'. But with it comes a distancing from the stoical infatuations of his youth, the cult of death that had tied him to the memory of La Boetie.

For at some point Montaigne decides to no longer live under the baleful influence of Lucretius' philosophical pessimism, and reaches up to erase it from his ceiling, leaving only the barest of outlines

(ill.u.s.trations credit 5.2) and replaces it with the humbler wisdom of the book of Ecclesiastes: SICVT IGNORAS QVOMODO ANIMA CONIVNGATVR CORPORI SIC NESCIS OPERA DEI SICVT IGNORAS QVOMODO ANIMA CONIVNGATVR CORPORI SIC NESCIS OPERA DEI / You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of G.o.d. / You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of G.o.d.

Echoing it on other joists, he records other sceptical statements, in a cosmic mind map that reaches from Euripides and Ecclesiastes, to Pliny and St Paul: And who knows if this thing, which is called life, is death, whilst to live is to die?

Man is clay The only thing certain is that nothing is certain and nothing is more wretched or proud than man Emptiness everywhere And on the main beams of his ceiling, more weightily profound that the rest, he inscribes the prudent scepticism of s.e.xtus: With wavering judgement I do not understand Nothing to a greater extent than the other Inclining to neither side I do not grasp I attend to I consider With custom as sense and guide

Montaigne's most sustained engagement with scepticism, however, comes in his essay 'An Apology for Raymond Sebond', prompted by the work of the fifteenth-century Spanish theologian that he had translated at his father's request a story that he tells at the start of the essay. His father had made his house open to men of learning during the flourishing of humanism at the time of Francis I, and one of them, Pierre Bunel, presented his father with Sebond's Natural Theology, or Book of the Creatures Natural Theology, or Book of the Creatures, presenting it as an antidote to the 'novel doctrines of Luther' which were then coming into vogue.

Sebond's book lay under a 'pile of neglected papers' for many years until Montaigne's father came across it a few days before his death, and asked his eldest son to put it into French, which he did; he was 'singularly pleased with it' and gave instructions to have it published. It is this book, printed in Paris in 1569, that Montaigne reflects upon in his 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', by far the longest of his essays. Here he outlines a sceptical, tolerant philosophy, summed up in the phrase 'Que scais-je?' (What do I know?), a phrase he says that he adopted as his personal motto, having it inscribed on a medal.

Montaigne's 'Apology' has become famous as the central statement of sixteenth-century scepticism, a critique of man's presumption and conceptual frailty. It builds on the keenly ironic sense of Montaigne's earlier essays, and the influence of his schooling, in the humanistic mode of argumentation in utramque partem in utramque partem on either side of a case. But in the 'Apology' Montaigne expands his scepticism to defend Sebond. on either side of a case. But in the 'Apology' Montaigne expands his scepticism to defend Sebond.

Sebond had argued that G.o.d had provided man with two books the scriptures and the natural world in which he might 'read' proof of G.o.d's existence, where animals provide the alphabet, and man the initial capital letter. Sebond's arguments proved popular, sixteen editions being published after the second edition of 1485. But in the sixteenth century his work came under attack for its seeming privileging of nature over scripture, leading Pope Paul IV to place it on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559.

Montaigne sets about defending his author against charges of heresy and simple-mindedness, first choosing to attack the intellectual arrogance of his detractors, declaring that 'presumption' is man's 'natural and original disease': Who has persuaded him to believe that this wonderful motion of the celestial vault, the eternal light of those torches that roll so proudly over his head, the dreadful movements of the boundless sea, were established, and endured so many ages, for his convenience and for his service? Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as that this miserable and puny creature, who is not even master of himself, but exposed to blows from every angle, should call himself master and emperor of the universe, of which he has not the power to know the smallest part, much less to command it?

And against those who say that Sebond undervalues the role of faith, Montaigne does not find it difficult to point to the religious wars of his own time, and the hypocrisy of those who commit barbarous deeds in the name of theological 'purity': And we think it strange if, in the wars which at this hour oppress our state, we see the issues bending and wavering in a common and ordinary manner. It is because we bring to them only that which is our own. The justice which is in one of the parties is there only for an ornament and covering...See the horrible impudence with which we bandy divine reasonings, and how irreligiously we have rejected and taken them up again, as fortune has changed our position in these public storms.

'There is no enmity excelling that of Christians,' he comments ruefully.

But Montaigne's 'Apology' has also given rise to the most discussion among commentators, basically in terms of what has been called the 'perplexing' contradiction between Sebond's belief that man can find theological support for his beliefs in the natural world and Montaigne's avowed scepticism i.e. his doubt about the power of reason. In what sense, therefore, can the essay be said to const.i.tute an 'apology' or defence of Sebond?

If we look closely at the beginning of Montaigne's essay, however, we soon see that what Montaigne finds congenial in Sebond is not his belief in the power of reason in the abstract, but his belief that religion requires tactile, tangible support. It is Sebond's attempt to ground belief in 'human and natural reasons' with which Montaigne is most in sympathy 'natural' for him being not a theoretical ent.i.ty, but that which involves the body and our senses: 'to adapt to the service of our faith the natural and human instruments that G.o.d has endowed us': We do not content ourselves with serving G.o.d with our minds and souls; we also owe him a bodily reverence; we apply even our limbs and our movements and external things to honour him.

Religion is therefore something that we cannot help but understand in proximate terms the feelings and sensations it arouses in us, its ties to our lands and customs, the sights and sounds of our local church. He writes of the island of Dioscorides (Soqotra in the Indian Ocean), where men are said to live happily as Christians, with rituals and feasts, but with no knowledge of the meaning of their religion at all. 'We are Christians,' Montaigne concludes, 'by the same t.i.tle as we are Perigordians or Germans.'

And to prove the centrality of body and our senses to our being, Montaigne suggests a terrifying test for his Stoic, to see if he can think his way out of that: Let a philosopher be placed into a cage of thin iron bars, that is suspended from the top of a tower of Notre Dame of Paris. He will see by evident reason that it is impossible to fall, and yet (unless he has been brought up as a steeplejack) he will not be able to avoid a feeling of terror and paralysis at the extreme height. For we have enough trouble rea.s.suring ourselves in the galleries of our bell-towers if they are made with an open bal.u.s.trade, even if it is made of stone. There are some who cannot even bear the thought of it. Let a plank be thrown between these two towers, of a width sufficient to walk upon. There is no philosophical wisdom of such firmness that it can give us the courage to walk on it, as we could if it were on the ground.

Whereas philosophers, in particular the Stoics, think they can escape the orbit of the body, Montaigne shows that ultimately, it is impossible: just as we find human intimacy comforting, great distances fill us with dread. The abstractions of theologians and philosophers fly in the face of even our instinct for self-preservation.

Scepticism thus arises from our attempt to escape our embodiment and raise hypotheses in areas where we have no grasp. And perhaps the clearest example of Montaigne's particular brand of scepticism is his att.i.tude towards witchcraft, one of the most pressing intellectual topics of his age. In the two hundred years from 1450 to 1650 up to 100,000 people, mostly women, were tried as witches, and up to half of them executed as a result. One theory for the rise in prosecutions is that learned and legal opinion, traditionally sceptical, momentarily suspended its disbelief through an infatuation with demonology, thus releasing the floodgates of prejudice, misogyny and cruelty.

But here Montaigne, again, is remarkable for his intellectual independence. In his essay 'Of Cripples', in many ways a vehicle for his scepticism about witchcraft, he says that 'the witches in my neighbourhood are in danger for their lives when some new author appears whose opinion gives a body to their fancies.' He thus clearly sees the way traditional folk belief provided the raw material for demonological interpretation, and goes on to warn of the danger of using biblical sanction ('Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live') to support the deranged tales provided by witnesses, 'whether in giving evidence against another or against themselves'. That is to say, we should be mistrustful of confessions as much as accusations.

He gives the example of a prince who, in order 'to overcome my incredulity', showed him some ten or twelve witches that he held prisoner. They freely confessed their witchcraft, and had, the prince insisted, evidence of the devil's mark upon them. Montaigne was permitted to talk with them and ask as many questions as he wished, but concluded: 'In the end, in all conscience, I would rather have prescribed them h.e.l.lebore [a cure for mental illness] than hemlock [a fatal poison].'

Montaigne's scepticism is thus opportunistic rather than schematic; less a dogmatic denial of knowledge (which itself smacks of presumption), and more a resistance to the inquisitorial mindset that characterized sixteenth-century intellectual life. The distinguished legal theorist Jean Bodin held that in cases of witchcraft even children could be tortured in order to reveal the elusive truths of the practice. Montaigne, by contrast, knows that such measures merely throw up more fictions: The rack is a dangerous invention, and moreover seems to be a trial of patience rather than truth. Both he who has the strength to endure it conceals the truth, and so does he who has not. For why should pain sooner make me confess what is, than force me to say what is not?

For himself, Montaigne prefers 'to hold on to the solid and the probable', what lies closer to hand. 'Our life,' he says, 'is too real and essential to support these supernatural and fantastic accidents.' And sounding the ba.s.s note of compa.s.sion that underlines his work, he concludes: 'After all, it is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have a man roasted alive for them.'

Montaigne thus sees human knowledge as needing to return to tangible objects: he describes touch as the sense that is 'nearer, more vivid and substantial' and able to 'overthrow all those fine stoical resolutions'. Moreover, it is a belief that characterizes not only the symphony of the 'Apology', but some of his earliest essays, such as 'Our Feelings Extend Beyond Ourselves', and 'How the Soul Discharges Her Pa.s.sions Against False Objects Where the True Ones Are Wanting'. Here Montaigne finds 'the most universal of human errors' to be 'always gaping after future things': We are never at home, we are always beyond ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future, and deprive us of the feeling and consideration of that which is, to distract us with the thought of what will be, even when we shall be no more.

And yet we cannot escape our tactile, proximate awareness of human affairs. He tells how Edward I of England asked that after his death his bones should be carried in campaigns against the Scots, and he relates how an acquaintance of his would curse and rail at the sausages and hams which he saw as having caused his gout. He tells how men chew and swallow cards and choke themselves on the dice that they feel have cheated them. After seeing a bridge he had built destroyed, Xerxes of Persia attempted to have the h.e.l.lespont whipped and put in chains. And even in terms of our most abstract speculations: ...just as the arm when it is raised to strike, pains us if it misses the blow and meets only with the air...The mind when it is agitated and in motion becomes lost within itself if it is not given something to take hold of...just as animals attack the stone or the metal that has been thrown at them...what do we not choose to blame, rightly or wrongly, so as to have something at which to push.

Montaigne's sympathy for Sebond, and his impatience with his detractors, is based on his sense that all our knowledge natural and theological alike needs to be grounded in people, places, things not least our own bodies and selves. And whilst this might be seen to align him conveniently with the rituals of Catholicism he says that Protestants have tried to establish 'a purely contemplative and immaterial faith' that will merely slip through their fingers it also strikes a chord with Montaigne's original impulse in writing: his attempt to rein in his flyaway mind idly flickering like the reflections on water in a vat by bringing it into contact with the task of writing, something that can be seen and heard and felt.

But here, Montaigne finds inspiration from not only Sebond's theology, but his zoology, the circus of G.o.d's creation: for Sebond a text that could not be lost or deleted; for Montaigne, a squawking, squealing symphony that he found impossible to ignore.

6.

When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing with Me?

(ill.u.s.trations credit 6.1)

As you wander through the Musee d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux making your way to Montaigne's tomb, now situated near the way out you come across an exhibit whose innocent freshness seems to provide a shelter against the ponderous weight of the past. A Gallo-Roman statue of a young girl, from around the second century CE CE, accompanied by a c.o.c.kerel, and holding in front of her as if posing for a picture her cat. It's a simple enough image, but one that seems to skip across history somehow, as if all that divides you from the girl, with her cat, her bracelets, and her wide-open eyes, is little more than a thin pane of time.

And perhaps that was the intention of the man who commissioned it, inscribing it, 'Laetus...Father'. What he thought about her death we don't know. Perhaps he looked optimistically into her future, seeing her with her cat, and the c.o.c.kerel for good measure, playing in a field of asphodels in the ever-morning of the afterlife. But her death signalled an alteration all the same, and to that, in the shape of this gravestone, he paid attention, in employing the sculptor to keep somehow some part of her near.

Montaigne seems less recognizable from his sarcophagus, lying short and fully armed on top of it, a bit like a tin soldier. But if he slips down from it on hot summer nights, and walks around the museum, you feel that this is a sculpture he would have liked. He also had a daughter. He liked animals too. And after resting for a while in its naturalism, he may have noticed a resemblance between the round-faced, wide-eyed little girl and her wide-eyed little cat, which the sculptor seems to see through his fingers. The father loved his daughter, and he was fond of the cat too: for in looking at the cat he looked at her.

We have always noticed similarities between ourselves and other animals. We have cat-fights and bear-hugs, we feel bird-brained and sheepish. And if all goes to the dogs, we can resort to calling people pigs, chickens, or cows or reach for that symbol of our over-eating, over-heated age: the beached whale. This may just be horsing around, but the more we look at history, the more our debts to animals emerge: where they stand as the silvering to the mirror of ourselves, a differential equation through which our humanness is constantly worked out.

For instance, the word 'cat' comes from the Latin catus catus, which could also mean quick-witted or cunning (the Egyptians rather charmingly called their cats miew miew). But deciding which came first, the cat or cat-like cunning, results in a sort of chicken-and-egg situation. The Chamber of the Bulls in the caves of Lascaux, sixty miles east of Montaigne, displays the antiquity of man's obsession with animals, yet in a cave whose echoing acoustics also suggest his wonder at the bullishness within himself (interestingly, in Lascaux's Chamber of Felines, with its seven prowling lions, the acoustics are much subtler).

And throughout human history the animal alphabet has provided a long-running index of human behaviour. Aesop in his fables saw animals as a rich source of moral insight, as did Aristophanes in The Frogs The Frogs and and The Birds The Birds. The Athenian Triptolemus concluded in his three laws that you should honour your parents, not hurt animals, and make offerings of fruit to the G.o.ds instead. And in the bestiaries animal encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, we see a fascinating overlap between animals and humans: similarities that humans could never really escape from, living in such proximity to animals and being animals themselves.

To the medieval mind it was noted that in the Bible animals had been created before man, whom they were therefore intended to serve. This could be as food, or by working as beasts of the field, or simply to provide light entertainment, like peac.o.c.ks and chimps. In the case of lions and bears, they were there to remind us of G.o.d's roar. But philosophers like Thomas Aquinas began to theorize about the differences between animals and ourselves and explained that animals lacked reason specifically, the ability to look into the past or the future. Our humanness was therefore to some extent in inverse proportion to our animality: the further you moved away from animals the more human you were.

At the same time, animals and humans were often seen to share attributes. It could be said that the medieval mind looked for resemblances rather than differences when a.n.a.lysing phenomena, and animals served as convenient a.n.a.logues of moral and spiritual virtues. Twelfth-century bestiaries tell how a weasel's sniff-sniffing represents those who hear the word of G.o.d but are easily distracted. It describes how the male beaver, whose t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es were thought to have medicinal value, bites them off if being pursued and throws them in the hunter's face. If hunted for a second time, he displays his self-mutilation: 'For when the hunter sees that the beaver lacks t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, he leaves him alone' amazingly, this served as an allegory of how we should renounce our sins and throw them in the face of the devil, who will then stop molesting us. The twelfth-century philosopher Jacob ibn-Zaddik thus concluded: 'There is nothing in the world which has not its correspondence in man...He is courageous like the lion, timorous like the hare, patient like the lamb, clever like the fox.'

(ill.u.s.trations credit 6.2) But these resemblances could also work in both directions from animal to human but also from human back again. In his De humana physiognomonia De humana physiognomonia of 1586, Giambattista della Porta showed how a man's face was an augury of his destiny, linked to the animal he most resembled, such as a horse or a lion. of 1586, Giambattista della Porta showed how a man's face was an augury of his destiny, linked to the animal he most resembled, such as a horse or a lion.

And in the literature of the sixteenth century animals were constantly invoked as defining the baser aspects of human behaviour. The scandal of Machiavelli's The Prince The Prince (1513), lay in his advice that a Prince ought intentionally to wallow in his animal nature: 'So, as a prince is forced to know how to act like a beast, he must learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenceless against traps and a fox is defenceless against wolves.' (1513), lay in his advice that a Prince ought intentionally to wallow in his animal nature: 'So, as a prince is forced to know how to act like a beast, he must learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenceless against traps and a fox is defenceless against wolves.'

Montaigne's writing is filled with animals the clucking, whinnying, scratching soundtrack of the gentilhomme campagnard gentilhomme campagnard. He talks knowledgeably about husbandry and hunting. He looks into his poultry yard and wonders how the c.o.c.k knows when to crow. But pride of place in Montaigne's menagerie, and in keeping with his status as a seigneur, is, of course, the horse.

The short-statured Montaigne felt most at home in the saddle: 'I do not alight eagerly when I am on horseback; it is where I feel most at ease, whether healthy or sick.' He displays a n.o.bleman's love of riding, and discusses the art of buying a horse, of examining the 'beauty of his colour or the breadth of his hindquarters...his legs, his eyes, and feet'. A badly fixed rein or a loose strap will put him in a bad mood all day. And in his account of the melancholy that followed his retirement, he likens his mind to 'a runaway horse' that his writing will attempt to break-in and subdue. He goes on to compare discourse to a horse, remarking that a horse's 'true strength is shown in making a sharp and sudden stop'. And pulls up his sentence there.

It could be said that early modern French had almost as many words for horses as the mythical fifty Inuit words for snow destrier, palefroi, haquenee, haridelle, pouter, poulin destrier, palefroi, haquenee, haridelle, pouter, poulin and and roussin roussin such were the variety of uses to which horses were put. The first meant a war-horse, to which Montaigne devotes an essay, the last meant a packhorse, the horse ridden by the servant who ploughed into Montaigne when he was out riding. But it was also Don Quixote's mount, from which after four days' deliberation he derived a name 'Rocinante', meaning an ex-packhorse obviously an a.n.a.logy for the aged Don himself. And this fascination with the relationship between horse and rider posts untiringly through history: from Bucephalus to Black Bess and Black Beauty, whose adventures even Wittgenstein was reading when he died. such were the variety of uses to which horses were put. The first meant a war-horse, to which Montaigne devotes an essay, the last meant a packhorse, the horse ridden by the servant who ploughed into Montaigne when he was out riding. But it was also Don Quixote's mount, from which after four days' deliberation he derived a name 'Rocinante', meaning an ex-packhorse obviously an a.n.a.logy for the aged Don himself. And this fascination with the relationship between horse and rider posts untiringly through history: from Bucephalus to Black Bess and Black Beauty, whose adventures even Wittgenstein was reading when he died.

Montaigne is no exception. In his essay on war-horses he describes how Bucephalus looked like a bull (in this resembling Alexander himself), and would allow no one else to ride him. Grieving at his death, Alexander named a city in his honour (Bucephela, what is now Jhelum in Pakistan). Caesar's horse had forefeet like a man, the hooves divided like toes, which Caesar would ride bareback with no hands at full pelt, notes the admiring Montaigne.

He goes on to tell how the Islamic Mamelukes boasted the world's finest cavalry horses, that could tell friend from foe and would join in the battle kicking and biting, and could pick up lances and arrows with their teeth. The conquistadors, feeling rather well-heeled, went so far as to adorn their mounts with horseshoes made of gold. On the other hand, the army of Bajazet, frozen by the Russian winter, found a final use for their horses by disembowelling them and climbing inside. Montaigne pauses as if to allow his reader to take breath, then says: 'Let us carry on, since we are here.'

In an essay 'Of Riding Post', he tells how in Romania the couriers of the Grand Sultan travel at extraordinary speeds, having the right to demand a fresh horse from anyone they meet, and giving them their exhausted animals in return. But he sees the French as the best hors.e.m.e.n in the world the reason, according to Ta.s.so, why their legs are so short. He sees a man riding with both feet on the saddle, take the saddle off and put it on again, pluck something from off the ground and shoot backwards with a bow, all whilst riding at full gallop. On the other hand another Frenchman, the eccentric theologian Pierre Pol, rode round Paris side-saddle 'like a woman', chuckles Montaigne.

He reserves a special disdain for coaches, which are effeminate and make him feel sick. He can't stand them, or litters, or boats, and 'all other riding but on horseback, both in town and country'. He cites the degeneracy of Heliogabalus 'the most effeminate man in the world', who had his coach drawn by two stags, and at other times by four naked women, 'having himself drawn by them in pomp totally nude'. The Emperor Firmus had his coach drawn by two ostriches of enormous size, so that it looked like he was taking to the air.

But as for Montaigne, horseback is the place to be. He would 'rather be a good horseman than a good logician' and would prefer to die on a horse than die in his bed. He notes how Plato prescribes riding for our general health, and Pliny says it is good for the stomach and the joints. For in riding, the body is neither idle or exhausted, and the moderate agitation keeps it fit. Despite suffering with the stone, I can stay on horseback without dismounting or becoming weary, for eight or ten hours at a time...

For Montaigne 'being consists in movement' and he travels in the Spanish fashion, in long stages, rather than stopping for meals, saying that 'my horses are better for it'. He waters them as often as he can, taking care that they have enough time to absorb their water between stops, and claims that none has failed him that lasted the first day. Moreover, interesting thoughts strike him 'where I least expect them...on horseback, at table, and in bed; but mostly on horseback, where I am most given to thinking'.

And the thinking that emerges as Montaigne clops along is a new inquisitiveness about the capacities of animals, but one that stands in stark contrast to the general intellectual trajectory of the age.

The humanist movement, in the spirit of which Montaigne had been trained, saw the essence of humanity in man's capacity for language, the thing that distinguished him from beasts. But the upward mobility that was characteristic of Renaissance humanism resulted in an increasing separation between ourselves and our four-legged friends. Human potential was on the up, but as a result the rest of creation received a dumbing-down. Thus, in one of the manifestos of humanism, Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), he calls on animals to contradistinguish human ambition: (1486), he calls on animals to contradistinguish human ambition: 'Man is an animal of diverse, multiform and destructible nature.' But why do I emphasize this? In order for us to understand that, after having been born in this state so that we may be what we will to be, then, since we are held in honour, we ought to take particular care that no one may say against us that we do not know that we are made similar to brutes and mindless beasts of burden.

The Dutch humanist Desiderus Erasmus, in his Handbook of a Christian Soldier Handbook of a Christian Soldier (1503), says similarly that man is 'of a soul as of a certain goodly thing, and of a body as it were a brute or dumb beast'. But advises that through the scripture and the love of G.o.d one can move up the food chain: (1503), says similarly that man is 'of a soul as of a certain goodly thing, and of a body as it were a brute or dumb beast'. But advises that through the scripture and the love of G.o.d one can move up the food chain: Embrace zealously this rule, not to be willing to crawl along the ground with unclean animals, but supported on those wings whose growth Plato thinks are induced in our minds by the heat of love and shoot out anew, raise yourself as on the steps of Jacob's ladder from the body to the spirit, from the visible to the invisible, from the letter to the mystery, from sensible things to intelligibile things...

Central to Erasmus's optimism is the translation from the 'letter' to the 'spirit' of the word of G.o.d i.e. biblical literacy and understanding. And it was this humanistic, literate upturn, augmented by the increase in literacy following the invention of print, that led to language, rather than reason alone, being increasingly seen as the distinguishing mark of the human. With the proliferation of printed texts, language became more visible, making it obvious that animals didn't read. In the seventeenth century Edward Reynolds thus concluded that it was a clear symptom of 'melancholy' i.e. madness to think that 'Elephants and Birds, and other Creatures have a language whereby they discourse with one another.'

Others added to this sense of animals as increasingly tongue-tethered, and hence more contemptible than ourselves. Shakespeare's Hamlet reserves his basest terms of vituperation for his widowed mother, whom he sees as having l.u.s.tfully, animalistically animalistically, taken Hamlet's uncle as her husband too soon: 'O G.o.d, a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer!'; and compares her to a pig: 'Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty'. The dumb show that opens 'The Mousetrap', Hamlet's play-within-a-play designed to catch the conscience of Claudius, is thus not only a plot device, but a horrifying portrayal of his mother's 'dumb' b.e.s.t.i.a.l oblivion.

But it could also be said that things were not looking good for animals more generally. In the increasingly polarized world of Reformation Europe, animality became a common language of abuse. Protestants pictured the Pope as the 'Beast of the Apocalypse' and Luther published a pamphlet describing the allegorical appearance of a Pope-a.s.s and a Monk-Calf. People's lived experience of animals was also becoming more distant and penned-in. In the expanding towns of the sixteenth century, people had a less organic, mutually dependent relationship with animals, and experienced them more as parasites and pests like dogs, or rats or saw them simply as meat. And as markets expanded and liquidity increased, animals were increasingly traded and trafficked, slaughtered and skinned with little by way of sentiment.

The logical conclusion to this devaluing of animals came in Descartes' Discourse on Method Discourse on Method (1637), with his theory of animals as 'beast-machines'. Aristotle had argued that animals possessed 'animals spirits' which gave them movement, something that they shared with human beings. But for Descartes animal movement could be understood simply as mechanical activity an extension of the clockwork mechanism of the universe. Man's body could also be understood along mechanical lines, but the difference was that animals act (1637), with his theory of animals as 'beast-machines'. Aristotle had argued that animals possessed 'animals spirits' which gave them movement, something that they shared with human beings. But for Descartes animal movement could be understood simply as mechanical activity an extension of the clockwork mechanism of the universe. Man's body could also be understood along mechanical lines, but the difference was that animals act only only in accordance with the 'disposition of their organs' like automata and never 'use speech or other signs as we do when placing our thoughts on record for the benefit of others'. in accordance with the 'disposition of their organs' like automata and never 'use speech or other signs as we do when placing our thoughts on record for the benefit of others'.

It was thus not simply reason the ability to look into the future and the past but an inward, cognitive self-awareness that was seen to separate animals from ourselves: it was this that speech gave utterance to. The physician Walter Charlton, writing soon after Descartes, hence claimed: ...nothing comes nearer to a manifest absurdity, than to suppose, that a Dogg can, as it were, say within himself, I imagine that I do imagine I imagine that I do imagine, or I perceive that I am perceiving essence I perceive that I am perceiving essence, and the like; which is an action of such singular eminence above all what we observe to proceed from Doggs, or any of the most able and cunning Beasts in nature.

But the unpleasant upshot of this amongst some of Descartes' followers was that animals were therefore denied feeling. As Nicolas Malebranche cruelly concluded: 'They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing' and reportedly kicked a dog by way of ill.u.s.tration.

The human perfection that was heralded by the humanist project seemed to have been achieved: man had erected a barbed-wire fence of language and consciousness between himself and other animals. Not only were they inferior, but they were qualitatively different too. Man became the measure of all things 'the lords and masters of nature', as Descartes put it but animals were the necessary scapegoats. The Aristotelian reins that had tied us to our fellow creatures were let go.

But here Montaigne is remarkable for his intellectual independence. For Montaigne, it is not that animals do not possess language, but simply that we do not understand them do not understand them By a certain bark, the horse knows that a dog is angry, at another sound he is not afraid. Even in animals that have no voice, by the reciprocal kindnesses that we see between them, we can easily argue for another form of communication: their movements converse and discourse.

Here, in the central section of the 'Apology', using examples taken from s.e.xtus and Plutarch, Montaigne allows his interest in animals to take centre-stage. In it he brackets human reason by looking at how other creatures possess knowledge of the world and conduct themselves in sympathy rather than in opposition to nature. He cites Aristotle on the way partridges give different calls, depending on their whereabouts. And whilst we don't understand animals, they understand us, and we unconsciously adjust the language we use to them without even knowing it: In what a variety different ways do we speak to our dogs, and they reply to us? With another language, and with other words, we summon birds, hogs, oxen, horses, and change the idiom according to is the species.