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Montaigne's quiet defence of a friendship the world rarely sees

Some essays announce themselves with a flourish. The chapter titled "On Friendship" in Montaigne's Essais does the opposite. It moves slowly, often wandering back to the death of a single person, and it assumes that the reader has either known such a loss or will one day. Across more than a hundred pages in modern editions, Montaigne never lets go of the question he returns to again and again: what does it mean to have loved one person so completely that the world after their death is a different place?

The BnF Collection eBooks edition of the Essais places the chapter in the order Montaigne himself arranged, the version that begins with the death of Étienne de La Boétie in 1563. For Australian readers picking the book up over a long Sunday afternoon, perhaps in a sun-bleached courtyard in Adelaide or on the verandah of a Queenslander in Brisbane, the essay often lands with a strange weight. There is a feeling that Montaigne is talking about something the rest of us keep folding up and putting away.

A loss that became a book

When La Boétie died, probably of plague, Montaigne was thirty years old. The two had known each other for around six years, and the first half of the essay is a long, almost devotional account of what the friendship had been. Montaigne admits, with the kind of candour that made the Essais famous, that he cannot write about La Boétie without becoming, as he puts it, a sort of fool. The grief has not settled. He likens himself to a body that has lost its principal support and now sways where it once stood firm.

What gives the chapter its lasting force is this refusal to be tidy. Montaigne refuses to console himself, refuses to climb into the comfortable thought that time heals. Instead, he treats the loss as a fact about himself: I am a person who had this friend, and I am a person who no longer has him, and those two facts are bound together. He writes the essay as a way of keeping the second fact from burying the first.

What friendship is, and what it isn't

Around the midpoint of the chapter, Montaigne begins to define his subject more sharply. He has been making distinctions all along, separating friendship from a number of other forms of affection, and the list is worth holding onto. The chapter treats friendship as something distinct from:

He is impatient, in particular, with the way most people use the word. Men, he says, will say they would die for a friend whom they would barely cross a room to visit.

His working definition is closer to Aristotle's notion of a perfect friendship than to anything casual. It is the bond that exists, he suggests, when two people are so drawn to each other that the question of usefulness or pleasure simply does not arise. They wish each other well because they wish each other well. He offers the line that anyone who has read the essay remembers: because it was he, because it was I. The repetition is doing real work. The friendship did not depend on circumstance, on family, on a shared project, or on a shared enemy. It depended on the two of them, and nothing else could substitute.

The friend himself

A surprising amount of "On Friendship" is given over to La Boétie, including a long passage in which Montaigne prints a sonnet by his friend. The sonnet is a meditation on the ruins of ancient Egypt, and Montaigne tells us that it cost his friend some trouble and is, in his view, as fine a piece of verse as the French language had yet produced. The inclusion is significant. Montaigne is not only mourning La Boétie. He is preserving him, putting his work into a book that he knows will outlive them both.

This is a quietly radical move. Most friendship writing of the period still belonged to the tradition of classical imitation. Montaigne does not write a formal eulogy. He does not compare La Boétie to Achilles or to Scipio. He lets the friend speak in his own words, and then he comments, gently, on what the friendship meant. For an Australian reader who has watched a mate's memoir, or a family collection of letters, sit in a shoebox in a Hallam cupboard for twenty years, there is something recognisable in this act of preservation. We know what it is to keep a friend's handwriting, even when the keeping is mostly private.

The influence that carried through the seventeenth century

It is hard to overstate how much of early modern French thought grew in the soil that Montaigne turned. His habit of following a thought, doubting it, and following it again shaped writers who were determined to disagree with him. The most famous of these is Blaise Pascal, whose Pensées take up many of the same questions about the self, vanity, and the limits of reason. Readers who come to Montaigne through the Essais often find themselves, a few years later, working their way into Pascal as well, and a careful look at Pascal's philosophical writings shows how directly Pascal responded to the earlier essayist.

Pascal's quarrel with Montaigne is not really a quarrel at all. It is the argument of one deeply attentive reader with another, and the chapters on friendship are part of what is being argued over. Pascal believed that Montaigne's picture of the self was too self-contained, and that the friendship Montaigne described, beautiful as it was, could not stand on its own. Reading the two together gives a sense of how much a single essay can do. It can shape the questions of the century that follows.

Reading Montaigne in a crowded week

There is a practical question, too, that comes up whenever a reader in Sydney or Perth or Hobart opens Montaigne for the first time. How does one find the time? The Essais are not long by the standards of nineteenth-century fiction, but they require something a novel does not always require: a willingness to slow down. The chapters reward re-reading in a way that most contemporary prose does not, and they reward a particular kind of attention that is hard to find in a week that is already full.

A few habits tend to help:

What often surprises readers is how modern Montaigne sounds when he is being funny. He complains about the way his memory fails him, the way his mind wanders, the way his body objects to too much serious thought. The voice is the voice of a man who would have been perfectly at home in a Melbourne laneway cafe, talking too long over a coffee, and a Hobart reader who has been keeping up with an Australian friendship project will recognise the same patient attention to ordinary affection.

A book that keeps its promise

There is no final answer in "On Friendship." Montaigne does not offer one, and the few readers who go looking for one are usually the ones who end up frustrated. What he offers instead is a careful, honest record of a particular bond, and an argument that such bonds are rarer, and more important, than most of us admit. The essay has been read, now, for more than four hundred years, by people who have lost someone, by people who have not yet, and by people who suspect, on a quiet evening, that the friendship they keep meaning to call about is the one they should be calling about tonight.

Open the BnF Collection eBooks edition of the Essais, find a quiet corner, and let the chapter do what it has done for readers since the sixteenth century. Read it slowly, read it twice, and see what the old Frenchman is still trying to say.