“It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.” II.6
Imagine: Western Europe, the year is 1580. Plague is rampant; war is ceaseless; roads, such as they are, are not only dangerous, but muddy, without signage, and peppered with dubious lodgings; traveling alone is too dangerous to risk; traveling with an entourage attracts attention, a different kind of danger. Europe is anything but homogenous. Fiefdoms reign, tribes roam. Every region is singular in its customs, currency, and laws. And yet, our man Montaigne, driven by curiosity, adventure, and in search of a cure for his kidney stones, sets out from home on June 22, not to return until November 30, 1581, eighteen months later–even then, cutting his trip short. As Sarah Bakewell writes, “Then, unexpectedly, he was called away. Montaigne, who claimed to want only a quiet life and the chance to pursue his ‘honest curiosity’ around Europe, was issued with a long- distance invitation which he could not refuse.”1. Back home he has been elected mayor of Bordeaux.
He traveled on horseback. He was an excellent horseman, disdained carriages, and found being in the saddle a relief from his “stones.” The journey will take him to Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He would rather have skipped Italy, as it was too popular a destination–the pilgrimage to Rome and all that– but others in his party persuaded him. He would have preferred going on to Cracow and Greece.
In his introduction to the travel journals, Montaigne scholar and translator Donald M. Frame writes, “He made the trip for pleasure and for health…Perhaps most of all he simply wanted to see the world.” Frame continues:
“The Journal is a sightseer’s record of the places and people that Montaigne saw. The reader finds some surprises. Montaigne shows a lively interest in all sorts of details of everyday living–prices, foods, lodgings, as well as manners and customs in the larger sense–nearly always, to be sure, with the hope of coming to know people of other nations better through their way of life.[…].Wherever he goes, he tries to live as the natives do.” 2.
To lived as the natives do includes learning Italian, which he accomplishes to the degree that while in Italy he writes his journal entries in Italian. I find this a remarkable degree of sincerity and earnestness, though that should not surprise me. The journals portray a traveler engaged and curious, eager to learn and always generous. These are attributes we glean from the Essais but there he writes about them, here he lives them. Compare this to a comment I overheard in a European city last year, made by an American to his companion: “Once you’ve seen one European city, you’ve seen them all.” Montaigne was the very antithesis of this attitude. The world is forever interesting to him, filled with interesting people and intriguing customs. The world could use more Montaigne travelers.
A bit more backstory, however, before we take up the journals directly. Montaigne’s travels were well known; he was famous by this time, to the degree that he met with the Pope upon arriving in Rome. Yet his travel journals lay undiscovered in a chest at the family estate until 1770 when Canon Prunis, a sleuthing historian discovered them. The first two pages were missing and have never been recovered. The journals were published four years later (1774). No other publication occurred until 1837. Then mysteriously, the original manuscript disappeared during the French Revolution and has never been recovered. I imagine–I hope–that they are secreted away by some wealthy, yet selfish, individual, protected properly, and one day will again emerge.
In the next post I will delve deeper in Montaigne’s travel experience. But before I end I must share a quote I am particularly fond of by Mark Twain, summing up, in my estimation, the value of travel as Montaigne experienced it.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
1. Sarah Bakewell, How to Live – or – A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, p. 244.
2. Donald M Frame, Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, p. 1049
...the house I live in... 
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