the connections between diverse historical examples or between diverse human positions and experiences. Where Seneca (and the Stoic tradition in general) dismissed compassion as a character problem, Montaigne reads it as a structural one. His essay explores not the intention of emotion but rather the edges of its complicated organizational patterns.78
Montaigne eventually rereads and revises one essay into another as he adds a palimpsest of objections to his original premise. In parsing these examples, Montaigne gropes his way toward finding a pattern of similarities, examples that can be followed or understood, only to break that pattern in later revisions of the essay by proffering up differences: in the B text (the revision of 1588), the great Alexander who shows cruelty to the obstinate Betis; in the C text (the revision of 1595), Dionysius the Elder who drowns the valorous Phyto because although he, as a great man, is unmoved by Phyto’s valor he fears that the rank and file might admire it. (Dionysius, like Montaigne, fears what will come from spectacle, even if his reaction to that—to kill Phyto away from view—is not necessarily what Montaigne, whose vulgar “mollesse” makes him more akin to the soldiers, would admire.) In a final addition to the essay, Dionysius is moved to act against Phyto because he is a reader, this time reading not the foe but rather the emotions of his soldiers (i.e., reading their reading of the enemy):
Dionysius, lisant dans les yeux de la commune [la foule] de son armée qu’au lieu de s’animer des bravades de cet ennemy vaincu, au mespris de leur chef et de son triomphe, elle alloit s’amolissant par l’estonnement d’une si rare vertu. (9)
[Dionysius, reading in the eyes of the rank and file of his army that, disregarding their leader and his triumph, they were softened by astonishment at such rare valor.]79
Reading, then, is necessarily a form of interpretation and judgment of events: a method that can lead to widely diverse ends, since we can never be sure what will stem from such readings.80 In the example of Dionysius, it is a way of responding to “la commune” and acting against them; but it is also, contradictorily, a way of establishing some sort of commonality. If Montaigne’s essay reads and rehearses the structures of compassion, it also reaches across them to imagine the sort of common ground between different sorts of text and between writer and reader that can be shared in the process of essaying and reading.81 Montaigne’s opening shot of the Essais functions as something like a rhetorical captatio benevolentiae to garner the goodwill of his audience. By setting out his own vulnerability, he also asks the reader to take mercy on his book.
Montaigne returns to this link between reading and compassion in an essay that has often been read in a pair with “Par divers moyens”: “Divers evenemens de mesme conseil” (I, 24).82 He begins with the story of François duc de Guise, the notoriously unmerciful leader of the Catholic extremist faction, and describes his clemency to someone who has plotted against his life, noting without further comment on Guise’s reputation that this did not save him from another and this time successful attempt on his life. This story becomes part of a larger meditation on fortune, a question brewing in “Par divers moyens” but brought to explicit articulation here. Montaigne notes that fortune has a large part in both writing—which escapes from the author’s intention—and in military enterprises. But in both, he counters that the capacity to read—to sift and to judge—is something more within our own control. Thus, “Un suffisant lecteur descouvre souvant és ecrits d’autruy des perfections autres que celles que l’autheur y a mises et apperceües, et y preste des sens et des visages plus riches” (127). [“An able reader often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects”] (112). The “visage” or face (Frame has it as “aspect”) that we discover in reading is significant, for when Guise speaks to the plotter he knows he is guilty from reading his face: “votre visage le montre” (124) [“your face shows it”] (109). Skillful reading does not save Guise, but it helps him understand what he faces.
In “De la diversion” (III, 4) Montaigne returns again to this question of clemency, recounting how he counseled a young prince (probably Henri de Navarre) away from revenge by diverting him with the idea of “clemence et bonté” (835) [“clemency and kindness”] (769) not solely by praising these virtues but by suggesting what he might gain in them: “Je le destournay à l’ambition” (835). [“I diverted him to ambition”].83 Montaigne nips at the relation between emotion and belief. Just as Henri might not believe in clemency but believes it might stand him in good stead (like Guise), so readers can be moved by fictional regrets even when they do not believe them: “Ainsi nous troublent l’âme les plaintes de fables; et les regrets de Didon et d’Ariadné passionnent ceux mesmes qi ne les croyent point en Virgile et en Catulle” (837). [“Thus the laments in fiction trouble our souls, and in Virgil and Catullus the regrets of Dido and Ariadne impassion even those who do not believe in them”] (771). (We will see the power of these same fictional regrets return in Chapter 2.) Montaigne is untroubled by the fictiveness of these regrets and the nonbelief of the ensuing emotion; he suggests that hired mourners are sometimes carried away by true grief, and recounts Quintilian’s observation that he was sometimes overcome by emotions he sought only to arouse in others (838, 772). He offers the example of local mountain women who both praise and dismiss their husbands in mourning them, “comme pour entrer d’elles mesmes en quelque compensation et se diverter de la pitié au desdain” (838) [“as if to bring themselves to some sort of balance and to turn themselves aside from pity to disdain”] (772). Montaigne praises this “bien meilleure grace” (838) [“much better grace”] (772) which breaks the usual habit of speaking only well of the dead. The women’s emotion-diversion—from pity to disdain and back again—is a mark not of the fickleness of women (as one can imagine it might be elsewhere in this period) but stands in the text as an example of flexibility, and Montaigne gives a name to their activity: they are doing “le prestre martin” (838) [“play the part of Prester Martin”] (772), that is, following a proverbial priest who gave both call and responses as he said the Mass.
The mourning women could be almost comic, but Montaigne is serious about their grace. In their diversions they do better than a pairing of philosophers he had set against each other in another essay also centrally concerned with judgment, “De Democritus et Heraclitus” (I, 50). Contemplating the human condition, Democritus is always laughing; Heraclitus always hangs his head with “pitié et compassion” (303) [“pity and compassion”] (268). In this instance Montaigne plumps for Democritus’s disdain rather than the “estimation” compassion traces for its object. But in the essay on diversion, the mourning women move more flexibly, making an agile flip-flop between each affect or attitude.
The graceful switch of the mountain women returns us to Montaigne’s attempt in “Par divers moyens” to try out the positions of both vanquisher and vanquished. Though judgment is a question central to Montaigne’s Essais, it is a judgment that partakes of both curiosity and compassion; it is capable of inhabiting a range of positions. Where in partisan accounts the pitiful spectacle draws a community together and defines that community from a tightly drawn perspective, Montaigne’s revision of the topos tries out differing kinds of response, imagining and inhabiting different perspectives. Most importantly, Montaigne makes room for a particular model of bystander, emoter, and reader, who can observe with shared sympathy and whose lack of partisan action is a form of “bien meilleure grace.”
In what follows I ask how the seventeenth century, seemingly past the worst of the wars, will frame and respond to the legacy of the sixteenth century’s pitiful spectacle in different ways. Montaigne’s readerly vulnerability with regards to compassion—and especially the regrets of Dido—will recur at sometimes surprising points in this material; but, more often, seventeenth-century writers will draw their circle of compassion narrowly and carve out instead a sovereign scorn for those who ask for mercy. France’s political communities continued to look out for pity long after the end of the wars, but more often took their cue from the partisans than the politiques.
