…the house I live in…

“For thirty years I have kept Donald M. Frame’s translation of  “The Complete Works of Montaigne” at, if not bedside, hand.” ~ Gore Vidal 

I was working in the campground. We’d had a violent thunderstorm the previous night and branches were down and stuff was strewn about. A woman approached. She was not young and was small of stature. “Is it going to rain today?” she asked. She was a tent camper and soaked from the storm. She wanted to dry out her gear but not if more rain was on the way. I told her that rain was not in the forecast and asked how she’d managed the storm. She shrugged her shoulders. “You do what you can when you can,” she said, cryptically. I detected an accent and asked where she was from. “France, Burgundy.” She asked me if I’d been. “To France, yes, a few times, but not to Burgundy.” She said it was lovely and that I must visit. I told her that I anticipated my next trip to France would be to Bordeaux, as I was working on a project and wanted to do research there. She asked about the project. “Montaigne,” I responded. 

“Ah,” she said, knowingly, “what a jumble of contradictions he is.” I laughed at the serendipitous intersection of the moment. A woman from France in a state park on the Appalachian plateau, and me, a guy picking up branches who happens to be doing a deep dive into Montaigne. 

“Contradictions, of course,” I responded. “He spent over twenty years writing about himself, you would expect a change of mind on occasion.” 

“I contain in some fashion every contradiction, as the occasion provides. Bashful, insolent, chaste, lustful, silent, clumsy, fastidious, witty, stupid, morose, gas, false, wise, foolish, liberal, greedy, prodigal: I see myself somewhat all of this as I turn myself around–and so will everyone if he does the like.” 

When she said his name she added a third syllable, Montaigne- ya. I’m not french so adding the french syllable seemed pretentious. I held my ground, only two syllables for this stubborn english speaker.

“You know he was a secret Protestant.” 

“There’s no evidence of that,” I protested. “He consistently declared his commitment to the Catholic church.” We were drawing lines in the sand. 

“His whole region was under the control of the Huguenots.” ^1.

“He said his castle was the hub in the wheel of unrest, Catholics fighting Protestants and vice versa, all around him, but he continued to pledge his allegiance to the king.” ^2.

She shrugged her shoulders in dismissal.

“And then there was the trip to Rome,” I added, gaining ground. 

We began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation: two strangers standing in a wet forest arguing about Montaigne’s religion. “And how do you know so much about your fellow countryman?” 

She told me that she used to teach the classics, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and “of course Montaigne-ya was extremely well versed in the classics.” I asked if she was aware that Montaigne was raised in a household that, by dictate of the patriarch, only spoke Latin around him, that he grew up believing Latin to be the mother tongue. Of course she was aware. 

She was retired from teaching and was reinventing herself as a naturalist, traveling North America solo in search of birds and mammals and plants in her quest for knowledge and experience of the natural world. Montaigne would appreciate that, holding that the most valid endeavor is the endeavor towards experience. 

“There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. We try all the ways that can lead us to it. When reason fails us, we use experience.”

III.13

I returned to her campsite the next day to ask a follow-up question but she had departed early. Although a brief and unexpected encounter, our campground exchange settled on me in a happy and deep way. To think that Montaigne was the topic of our conversation filled me with joy.

Upon his death (September 13, 1592) his wife, Francoise de La Chasaigne, commissioned a monument inscribed with a Greek epitaph, which ends: “I have gone to take my place among the immortals, where my homeland is.” If a random encounter of two strangers finding sudden commonality in Montaigne is an indication, his immortality is, indeed, secure. 

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^1. The Huguenots were a sect of French Protestants who held to the Reformed or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism.

².”…the French Wars of Religion, which stretched from 1562 to 1598, and over half of Montaigne’s adult lifetime–a period in which he described his country as a ‘disturbed and sick state’….In his own region of Gascony, Bordeaux was staunchly Catholic, yet Bergerac, upstream on the Dordogne, was a Protestant stronghold, known as the Geneva of France. Montaigne was stranded between the two.” Saul Frampton, When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I know She is Not playing with Me?, Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life. Pantheon Books, New York, pg 56