façon d’amollir les cœurs de ceux qu’on a offensez, lors qu’ayant la vengeance en main, ils nous tiennent à leur mercy, c’est de les esmouvoir par submission à commiseration et à pitié. Toutesfois la braverie, et la constance, moyens tous contraires, ont quelquefois servi à ce mesme effect.67
[The commonest way of softening the hearts of those we have offended, when, vengeance in hand, they hold us at their mercy, is by submission to move them to commiseration and pity. However, audacity and steadfastness, entirely contrary means, have sometimes served to produce the same effect.]68
Montaigne’s exploration of how to soften a victor’s heart is, David Quint suggests, a refraction of his thinking about and through the Wars of Religion.69 But unlike the other accounts of pity we have seen stemming from those wars, Montaigne’s essay does not let us rest with an easy distinction between subject and object of pity, pitier and pitied. And unlike most writers discussed throughout this book, he does not deliberate on how or when to grant compassion but rather on how to get it. Montaigne draws on the familiar language of writing the wars but also in this first essay of his book sets a deliberately new tone as thinker, writer, and perhaps most of all reader. “Par divers moyens” sets up reading as a form of response to the wars.
Montaigne’s essay is in part, of course, a reading of and meditation on Seneca, whose essay “De clementia” [“On Mercy”] written for Emperor Nero famously distinguishes between mercy and pity in order to dismiss the latter.70 In granting clemency, writes Seneca, we gain security and thus exercise a reasoned mercy; but in pity we lose that rationality and lose our security, too. Seneca’s distinctions between different categories of emotion, attitude, and effect also structure Montaigne’s essay, but where Seneca uses those distinctions to push some categories of emoters aside—notably those who respond to suffering but not its cause—Montaigne lets no distinction remains secure for long. He begins with the example of Edward, prince of Wales, hailed for his greatness, who responded not to supplications but only to the bold resistance of three gentlemen whose “notable vertu” [“remarkable valor”] eventually causes him to “faire misericorde à tous les autres habitans de la ville” [“show mercy to all the inhabitants of the city”].71 Here greatness responds to the greatness it recognizes in others; compassion, in this instance, responds by following similarity.
The following example gives us the prince Scanderberg, who on the point of killing a soldier is struck by the “resolution” of his foe and desists. Here great nobility reaches across difference and responds to the great virtue of a common man; Montaigne notes that Scanderberg’s refusal to act might be read differently by those “qui n’auront leu” [“who have not read”] (8, 3) the strength and valor of the prince, who might imagine his inaction to be a sign of weakness. In this phrasing, what we see is bolstered by reading; the text hesitates between imagining that we might read the person or have read about the person (Donald Frame translates the line in full as “who have not read about”). Montaigne puts the two practices—reading texts and reading people—in necessary relation with one another.
Earlier in this chapter we saw how compassion proceeds through and constructs rigorous social structures. In “Par divers moyens,” Montaigne moves carefully through a range of such structures, trying out each variation in turn. Already in his first examples of mercy in response to audacity, we see the structural underpinning of supplication and response. In responding to another, we respond across or behind a mesh of similarities and differences: rank, gender, courage. In his third example Montaigne worries at the gendered distinctions between male virtue and womanly softness that are so important to the Stoic tradition: the “cœur magnanime” (8) of the noble women who “great-heartedly” (3) carry their duke and their households on their shoulders so impressed Emperor Conrad that his hatred for the duke is lost and he begins to treat them “humainement” [“humanely”] (8, 4).72 Here the emperor responds across a gender distinction but within the circle of nobles. His human treatment is of humans who are, in some way, like him. In this example, you get a better result from your valor if you are the right sort of person to start with. Although Montaigne began by announcing that he would study “the commonest way,” up to this point it looks as though the common way depends almost exclusively on being born noble.
From these historical examples Montaigne falls back upon himself, in what Quint has described as “from an ethical standpoint, the single most important contribution to the self-portrait that will be a major project of his book.”73 We swing from one perspective to another. Leaving behind the position of the vanquished, Montaigne notes that either supplication or Stoicism would undo him were he the victor, “car j’ay une merveilleuse lascheté vers la misericorde et la mansuetude. Tant y a qu’à mon advis je serois pour me rendre plus naturellement à la compassion qu’à l’estimation” (8). [“I am wonderfully lax in the direction of mercy and gentleness. As a matter of fact, I believe I should be likely to surrender more naturally to compassion than to esteem”] (4). This attitude is indeed something we see played out throughout the Essais, in his response to animal suffering in “De la cruauté” (II, 11), or in “De l’expérience” (III, 13) where he speaks of a “naturelle compassion, qui peut infiniement en moy” (1100) [“natural compassion, which has infinite power over me”] (1028) for those he sees suffering in war. This preferential option for pity is, he acknowledges, something that sets him apart from the Stoics, who “veulent qu’on secoure les affligez, mais non pas qu’on flechisse et compatisse avec eux” (8) [want us to succor the afflicted, but not to unbend and sympathize with them”] (4), and as he goes on to note it is “des femmes, des enfans, et du vulgaire” (8) [“women, children, and the common herd”] (4) who are most prone to it. He continues by turning to “ames moins genereuses,” “less lofty souls”, the “peuple” who might be imagined in Stoic terms to be prone to pity. Yet in the example of the Theban people, they too yield to valor rather than supplication: they respond sympathetically to difference rather than sameness, as does Montaigne.
What can we make of this aside on the self which surges up in the midst of the essay’s strange dialectical proceedings? Montaigne’s procedure in this essay is based on Renaissance rhetorical training.74 Peter Mack suggests he takes his cue from the Renaissance rhetorician Agricola, who asks in De inventione dialectica “For if we are more likely to pity gladiators the less they beg for life, how much more will a very brave man who despises danger move us?”75 But Montaigne’s method also and more importantly suggests a particular disposition of the self. Quint argues that it is not only through commiseration that Montaigne eagerly takes up the “mollesse” or softness criticized by the Stoics, but also through his continual practice of seeing more than one side, practicing “mollesse” as what Quint calls an ethical pliancy.76 Montaigne’s acknowledgment of his own pity, and perhaps of his womanliness or vulgarity, is the pivot point of the essay: we pirouette from imagining the position of the pitied to that of the pitier and back again. Where the pitiful spectacles seen earlier in this chapter allowed for only one proper perspective, Montaigne allows himself to try out all positions in response, asking himself: Am I like this historical example, or unlike?
The sifting of similarity and difference that structures the essay’s examples is also crucial as a structuring pattern within each individual example. Montaigne tries out the same but different story again and again in order to establish some sort of common rule for finding commiseration, the emotion which brings people together in common emotion. Distinctions of rank and gender are crucial to the careful choreography of sameness and difference in this essay. Sometimes the great are moved by great virtue (sameness), sometimes the people are (difference); sometimes the greatest, Alexander, is not moved by the valor of Betis for in his greatness he cannot see how uncommon it is: “Seroit-ce que la hardiesse luy fut si commune que, pour ne l’admirer point, il la respectast moins?” (9–10). [“Could it be that hardihood was so common to Alexander that, not marveling at it, he respected it the less?”] (5).77 In moving through these examples, Montaigne essays the distinctions between pity and valor, victor and vanquished, noble and common, men and women. From this
