Montaigne

From September 4 in 1580 to November 30 in the next year, Montaigne had a prolonged holiday and traveled through Switzerland, upper Germany, Tyrol and Italy to see the Pope in Rome. The itinerary was leading him through places I know from my childhood; I grew up there.

His travel started on a rather inauspicious note.

“We were badly lodged at the ‘Eagle’ and received from the landlord a sample of the barbaric German unruliness and pride over the quarrel of one of our footmen with our guide from Basel. And because the thing came even before the judges, the provost of the place - an Italian gentlemen who has settled and married here - answered when asked whether the servants would be believed in their testimony on our behalf, that yes they would be believed, provided they were discharged; but that immediately afterward they could be taken back into service. This was a remarkable piece of subtlety.” (Itinerary, trans. Donald M. Frame). About the German males Montaigne observed that “it is hard to distinguish the nobles, for their velvet bonnets are worn by just everybody, and everyone wears a sword at his side.”

Very soon Montaigne was to recognize in the local breed a vainglorious and choleric people, many of them hard drinkers. It was considered polite to walk on the left of your company, since walking on a man’s right would have inhibited his freedom to reach for his rapier or dagger.

He wouldn’t have been a Frenchman, had Montaigne not taken note of the food.

“The courses at their tables are changed frequently. Here and often since, after the cloth was removed, they served new courses with the wine, little cakes - “canaules,” as the Gascons call them - then ginger bread and a soft white bread cut into slices but still holding together; between the slices and also on top of the crust they toss a lot of spices and salt.” He even had a bite from a farm laborer’s sandwich: “the village people serve their laborers for breakfast flat slices of a sticky cake in which there is fennel, topped with tiny bits of bacon and cloves of garlic.” At the tables of the better inns the main courses were accompanied with soups of quinces and baked apples sliced in, and broths “into which everyone fishes together, for there is no individual serving.”

Which reminds me of an anecdote about the king’s bread - but I won’t go there. In fact this Frenchman admitted that the “cuisines of the French nobility hardly seemed comparable,” which does make sense; it was the period when the Italians still taught the French how to cook proper meals.

The region had Fish in abundance, but only as a side to the meat dishes. “They disdain trout and eat only the roe; they have lots of game, woodcocks, young hares, which they dress in a manner very different from ours, but at least as good. They mix stewed plums and pear and apple tarts with the meat course Their fruit for desert is only pears and apples - which are very good - nuts, and cheese. Together with the meat they bring out a tray of silver or pewter with four compartments, in which they put various sorts of powdered spices; and they mix caraway which is tangy and hot with their bread; and their bread is mostly made with fennel.”

Montaigne began to regret that he had not brought along his own cook, so that the man could pick up recipes and replicate some of the dishes back home. Montaigne was not the breakfast type but sometimes he couldn’t resist a slice of bread fresh from the oven together with a bunch of grapes from the vineyards along his way. He had to be careful, he was plagued with gall bladder stones. In the nights Montaigne missed his mattress but appreciated the featherbeds. In France he had never slept under a duvet before. It was not a period in his life in which he held his countrymen in high regard, although the expenses in Southern Germany did put a frown on the face of Monsieur de Montaigne’s bookkeeper. The good news was, you were told the price for every item up front and there was some real value for your money: “The first thing we noticed at our arrival was a strange arrangement, and one that shows the general cleanliness: the steps of our inn’s staircase were all covered with linen, on which we had to walk, so as not to dirty the steps, which they had just washed and scoured, as they do every Saturday. We have never noticed any cobwebs or mud in their inns. They often hang pewter plates against the wall, beside the beds, linen, and curtains, so that people may not dirty their wall with spitting.” However there was one particular disappointment, an important issue for a Frenchman, or should I rather say, “a man?”

“We did not see even one beautiful woman.”

Montaigne wasn’t exaggerating. Some of the best German painters did live in that period and in the places Montaigne was visiting, and their erotic paintings are anything but stimulating.

Before he took his turn southwards to Italy, Montaigne arrived in Augsburg. I am sure today the name barely means anything to anybody; Augsburg is just a dot on the Bavarian map. In 1580 it was home to the Fuggers, then arguably the wealthiest dynasty of bankers on the planet; wealthier even than the Medici. Augsburg was the financial capital of the world.

If we think of Bill Gates as a rich man we should remember an observation by the triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus (115-53 BC.): “Nobody qualifies as a rich man who isn’t able to put an army in the field and maintain it.” Such comparably small campaign as the present war in Iraq would see even Mr. Microsoft run out of funds in no time. Crassus had 166,000,000 sesterces, and that made him the richest man on the planet. He did entertain armies and finance wars, and a man like Julius Caesar was his lieutenant. Yet the Fuggers did even better. Their wealth had sprung from a monopoly on the salt trade, and their bank was able to bail out the Spanish Habsburgs from bankruptcy, not once, not twice, but three times. The Spanish offered franchises in their possessions in Latin America as collateral. Only when the incompetence of another King Phillip of Spain - IV or V, I forgot who - required another cash injection, it was one too many for the Fuggers.

But what can I say? More than 500 years later - since 1486 - the bank is still owned by the family, now a member of Germany’s dwindling nobility. No more a big bank by any means, yet still controlling half of Augsburg’s real estate and offering specialized services to clients from the region’s elite. When Montaigne entered Augsburg, the Fuggers were on the peak of their wealth and power. He realized that this was the headquarters of a financial empire and he is duly impressed. “One of this family, dying a few years ago, left two solid millions of French crowns to his heirs.”

The Fugger’s palace was roofed with copper - something seen only on the newer churches - the houses looked more beautiful, bigger, and taller, than in any city of France, the streets seemed much wider. Augsburg offered many entertainments. There was a hippodrome with daily spectacles, summer houses of the Fuggers, with fishponds, water organs, water clocks, zoological gardens. Montaigne for the first time saw a pair of ostriches. The city had undergone considerable developments. A wooden aqueduct fed into the water tower, and from the tower through countless conduits kept wells in every district flowing with fresh water, in some cases even delivered directly to the hand pumps in the houses.

Monsieur Montaigne would have preferred to stay anonymous, but his servants blew the cover and the magistrate gave Montaigne the VIP treatment. Supper invitations, free supply of victuals, an invitation to a wedding. It wiped the frown off from the accountant’s face. Montaigne gives us perhaps the earliest description of a forerunner of the waltz. “The man kisses his hand to the lady; the lady receives him without kissing hers, and then, putting his hand under her armpit, she embraces him, cheek to cheek and puts his right hand on her shoulder.” It was called the ‘allemande.’ Another highlight were visits to the greenhouses and the defense works.

Montaigne is the earliest example for a European writer who was fully aware that his work was all about his own temperament, the nerve ends of his perception. To the reader this conveys the glow of memories from a childhood we never had.

Great essayists are a rarity. Of all English essayists Charles Lamb came closest to emulate the spirit of Montaigne. In his easy going discourse Montaigne opens a window to the entire panoply of classic learning; it is like old gramophone recordings of long forgotten opera stars. Never sounded Seneca more convincing. It may be the last thing I do, but one day I shall stand at the window of Montaigne’s study and look into his garden; I hope in September when the pears turn yellow.