Loving Montaigne

I love the work of Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, one of my favourite literary forms; a man who wrote in a beautiful, self-effacing, humorous and precise fashion, expressing in limpid prose some simple and universal truths. Here is my favourite passage on memory and its defects;

Memory is the receptacle and case of science: and therefore mine being so treacherous, if I know little, I cannot much complain. I know, in general, the names of the arts, and of what they treat, but nothing more. I turn over books; I do not study them. What I retain I no longer recognize as another's; 'tis only what my judgment has made its advantage of, the discourses and imaginations in which it has been instructed: the author, place, words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.

I am so excellent at forgetting, that I no less forget my own writings and compositions than the rest. I am very often quoted to myself and am not aware of it. Whoever should inquire of me where I had the verses and examples that I have here huddled together, would puzzle me to tell him, and yet I have not borrowed them but from famous and known authors, not contenting myself that they were rich, if I, moreover, had them not from rich and honorable hands, where there is a concurrence of authority with reason. It is no great wonder if my book run the same fortune that other books do, and if my memory lose what I have written as well as what I have read, and what I give as well as what I receive.

You will find this in the Penguin edition of his Essays in the section On Presumption.

Now Sarah Bakewell has written a biography of the great master, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, a wonderfully whimsical title that I feel sure he would have appreciated. I haven’t read it so I can’t offer a review, but the reviews I have read are all very positive. So, acting on their recommendations, I have now added this to my ever growing ‘to buy’ list. Once acquired – and consumed – I shall add my own assessment.

A Glittering Prize?

I continue to derive much simple impish amusement from the antics of the French president, such an endearingly silly little man, and French politicians in general. There has been so much recently to smile over: Frédéric Mitterrand, the self–professed sex tourist; the Prince Jean affair; the storm over The Princess of Cleves; the massive amounts of money wasted by the Midget when France held the revolving Euro presidency. Now Marie NDiaye, a novelist and winner of Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, has been told she should not criticise Monsieur le Président. More than that; she was told that it was her duty not to criticise him.

And how she criticised! In an interview with Les Inrockuptibles, a leading cultural magazine, she said that she moved to Berlin in 2007 largely because of Sarkozy’s victory in the presidential election, finding the vulgar note he brought to French government and politics not quite the thing. To give up Paris for Berlin, of all places, is a sure sign of just how vulgar things have become in the Sarkozy Reich!

But this admission brought Eric Raoult, an MP and leading supporter of Le Dirigeant, to table a question to Frédéric Mitterrand, Culture minister as well as a sex tourist, asking whether “the duty of a person who defends the literary colours of France should not be to show a greater respect towards its institutions.” I see; Sarko is now an institution! He also demanded that prize winners should observe un devoir de reserve, the quality of reservation expected of servants of the state. Perhaps the same devoir de reserve, I wonder, expected in times past of the winners of the Stalin Prize?

In a style unique to the French, the literary proletariat have rallied to the side of their beleaguered colleague. Patrick Rambaud, himself a Goncourt laureate, said that Raoult is confusing the prize with Miss France, wrapped in her tricolour sash, though I personally would have gone with the archetypal figure of Marianne, just to give that little extra dignity. :-)

And Monsieur Mitterrand, what does he think? He thinks that writers, even winners of the Prix Goncourt, should be allowed to say what they like. Well he would, wouldn’t he, considering his taste for sex tourism was revealed in his autobiography. Alas, no award for the President, now generally considered a shallow philistine by many French writers and artists. Not good in a country where past leaders have always taken pride in their literary credentials. Perhaps he should let it be known that while he hates The Princess of Cleves he really loves The Da Vinci Code. :-))

The Damned

La-Bas, or The Damned, is a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a French writer of particular and idiosyncratic genius. I read this book last year with complete fascination. It took such hold of my imagination that I rushed through it in the course of an afternoon.

The novel focuses on the writer by the name of Durtal, who is researching the life of Gilles de Rais, one time companion of Joan of Arc, who turned to devil worship and child murder in an attempt to restore his lost fortunes. In the course of his research Durtal discovers that Satanism is not just something that belongs in the Middle-Ages, but is actively alive in contemporary France. He eventually attends a black mass.

The whole thing is quite fascinating, but for me the most fascinating thing of all was the character of De Rais himself, an individual I had never heard of prior to reading this novel. I tried so hard to fid out more about his life but the English sources are so scanty. Anyway, he remains for me one of the great demonic figures, whose only true partner is Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess herself.