The
Itinerary
|
A strong imagination is creating the event
|
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.
©
3/29/2007 by michael sympson
1,575 words, all
rights reserved