However drawn we may be towards such radical measures, Montaigne’s philosophy is one of reconciliation: ‘The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being.’ Rather than trying to cut ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as unalterable facts of our condition, neither so terrible nor so humiliating.
In the summer of 1993, L. and I travelled to northern Portugal for a holiday. We drove along the villages of the Minho, then spent a few days south of Viana do Castelo. It was here, on the last night of our holiday, in a small hotel overlooking the sea, that I realized – quite without warning – that I could no longer make love. It would hardly have been possible to surmount, let alone mention the experience, if I had not, a few months before going to Portugal, come across the twenty-first chapter of the first volume of Montaigne’s Essays.
The author recounted therein that a friend of his had heard a man explain how he had lost his erection just as he prepared to enter a woman. The embarrassment of the detumescence struck Montaigne’s friend with such force, that the next time he was in bed with a woman, he could not banish it from his mind, and the fear of the same catastrophe befalling him grew so overwhelming that it prevented his own penis from stiffening. From then on, however much he desired a woman, he could not attain an erection, and the ignoble memory of every misadventure taunted and tyrannized him with increasing force.
Montaigne’s friend had grown impotent after failing to achieve the unwavering rational command over his penis that he assumed to be an indispensable feature of normal manhood. Montaigne did not blame the penis: ‘Except for genuine impotence, never again are you incapable if you are capable of doing it once.’ It was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform. The solution was to redraw the portrait; it was by accepting a loss of command over the penis as a harmless possibility in love-making that one could preempt its occurrence – as the stricken man eventually discovered. In bed with a woman, he learnt to:
admit beforehand that he was subject to this infirmity and spoke openly about it, so relieving the tensions within his soul. By bearing the malady as something to be expected, his sense of constriction grew less and weighed less heavily on him.
Montaigne’s frankness allowed the tensions in the reader’s own soul to be relieved. The penis’s abrupt moods were removed from the Cimmerian recesses of wordless shame and reconsidered with the unshockable, worldly eye of a philosopher whom nothing bodily could repulse. A sense of personal culpability was lessened by what Montaigne described as:
[The universal] disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it.
A man who failed with his mistress and was unable to do any more than mumble an apology could regain his forces and soothe the anxieties of his beloved by accepting that his impotence belonged to a broad realm of sexual mishaps, neither very rare nor very peculiar. Montaigne knew a Gascon nobleman who, after failing to maintain an erection with a woman, fled home, cut off his penis and sent it to the lady ‘to atone for his offence’. Montaigne proposed instead that:
If [couples] are not ready, they should not try to rush things. Rather than fall into perpetual wretchedness by being struck with despair at a first rejection, it is better … to wait for an opportune moment … a man who suffers a rejection should make gentle assays and overtures with various little sallies; he should not stubbornly persist in proving himself inadequate once and for all.
It was a new language, unsensational and intimate, with which to articulate the loneliest moments of our sexuality. Cutting a path into the private sorrows of the bedchamber, Montaigne drained them of their ignominy, attempting all the while to reconcile us to our bodily selves. His courage in mentioning what is secretly lived but rarely heard expands the range of what we can dare to express to our lovers and to ourselves – a courage founded on Montaigne’s conviction that nothing that can happen to man is inhuman, that ‘every man bears the whole Form of the human condition,’ a condition which includes – we do not need to blush nor hate ourselves for it – the risk of an occasional rebellious flaccidity in the penis.
Montaigne attributed our problems with our bodies in part to an absence of honest discussion about them in polite circles. Representative stories and images do not tend to identify feminine grace with a strong interest in love-making, nor authority with the possession of a sphincter or penis. Pictures of kings and ladies do not encourage us to think of these eminent souls breaking wind or making love. Montaigne filled out the picture in blunt, beautiful French:
Au plus eslevé throne du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul
.
Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.
Les Roys et les philosophes fientent, et les dames aussi
.
Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies.
King Henri III (Ill. 16.1)
Catherine de’ Medici (Ill. 16.2)
He could have put it otherwise. Instead of ‘cul’, ‘derrière’ or ‘fesses’. Instead of ‘fienter’, ‘aller au cabinet’. Randle Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (for the furtherance of young Learners, and the advantage of all others that endeavour to arrive at the most exactly knowledge of the French language), printed in London in 1611, explained that ‘fienter’ referred particularly to the excretions of vermin and badgers. If Montaigne felt the need for such strong language, it was to correct an equally strong denial of the body in works of philosophy and in drawing rooms. The view that ladies never had to wash their hands and kings had no behinds had made it timely to remind the world that they shat and had arses:
The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter the words
kill
,
thieve
, or
betray
; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth.
In the vicinity of Montaigne’s château were several beech-tree forests, one to the north near the village of Castillon-la-Bataille, another to the east near St Vivien. Montaigne’s daughter Léonor must have known their silences and their grandeur. She was not encouraged to know their name: the French for ‘beech tree’ is ‘fouteau’. The French for ‘fuck’ is ‘foutre’.
‘My daughter – I have no other children – is of an age when the more passionate girls are legally allowed to marry,’ Montaigne explained of Léonor, then about fourteen:
She is slender and gentle; by complexion she is young for her age, having been quietly brought up on her own by her mother; she is only just learning to throw off her childish innocence. She was reading from a French book in my presence when she came across the name of that well-known tree