‘Life is pain Highness, anyone who tells you different is selling something.’
The Dread Pirate Roberts, from the film, Princess Bride
 
Life is hard. It always has been. It was hard for Michel de Montaigne, a respected ‘seigneur’, or lord, with his own vineyards and lands producing revenues and every opportunity for a comfortable life. He lived in a chateau near Bordeaux, close to where we’ll be cycling, and he was twice elected mayor of the city. He had a wife, a daughter, and many friends. He was a magistrate, and a diplomat, held in high esteem by kings and princes…
Life is hard. It always has been. It was hard for Michel de Montaigne, a respected ‘seigneur’, or lord, with his own vineyards and lands producing revenues and every opportunity for a comfortable life. He lived in a chateau near Bordeaux, close to where we’ll be cycling, and he was twice elected mayor of the city. He had a wife, a daughter, and many friends. He was a magistrate, and a diplomat, held in high esteem by kings and princes.
But Montaigne lived – as we do – in troubled and violent times. As a teenager, he witnessed atrocities in his home city – executions, murders and riots – first hand. The Wars of Religion, fought between Catholic and Protestant factions, ravaged the country, sprouting random violence and rogue bands of soldiers who attacked and killed without discrimination or mercy. He had his fair share of personal tragedy, too. His wife gave birth to six daughters, but only one – Léonore – would survive beyond infancy. If that was hard on Montaigne, pause a moment to reflect on his wife’s lot. The pain, the grief, and the continual pressure to produce children, and no doubt a male heir in particular, was probably immense. He scarcely mentions any of this in the Essais, who knows why, but part of the reason may have been that infant mortality was such a common tragedy in his day.
He lost his most intimate friend and soulmate, Étienne de la Boétie, to plague, the pandemic of the period. Millions had died in the fourteenth century and the disease continued to make regular comebacks. Montaigne had to leave his home for months and take his family on the road to escape one of the outbreaks. And there were other dangers. He saw his beloved father’s painful death caused by kidney stones – the same disease that would one day kill Montaigne – and soon after, his younger brother, Arnaud, died at twenty-three after being hit on the head by a tennis ball, ‘leaving neither visible bruise or wound.’
A tennis ball in those days was made of leather stuffed with wool, but was hardly a lethal weapon.
After all his travails – some commentators say because of them – Montaigne, decided to withdraw from the world. And though he was sometimes called back to the fray in his role as a trusted go-between, he managed to carve out enough time in his study and his circular library, situated on the top floors of a squat tower in the walls of his chateau, to write what would one day become his world-famous Essais, three volumes of reflections written over twenty years designed, as he put it himself, to record ‘some traits of my character and of my humours.’
It’s a modest claim, one that belies both his motives and his achievement. When he first sat down to write the Essais in 1572, having just turned thirty-eight years old, Montaigne was fighting his own demons. Average life expectancy for a man in his day was thirty-three, and though he says melancholy was not natural to his character, he’d lost his best friend, his father, his brother, and then his first child only a short time before he began writing. He freely admits his thoughts were agitated and he compares them to a runaway horse, or a shapeless lump of flesh.
‘When I recently retired at home, I was determined,