A Summer with Montaigne by Antoine Compagnon

French nonfiction

Original title – Un été avec Montaigne

Translator – Tina Kover

Source – Personal copy

 

I picked this as one of my summer TBR books because I had read it last year but hadn’t reviewed it. I still ned to read more than the couple of Essays from Montaigne I have read.  This book was taken from a series of radio essays that were done over a summer by the literary professor Antoine Compagnon, where each day over the summer a passage of Montaigne’s was read, and these essays were then read where he used his ideas to compare to the modern day to help maybe make people want to read Him. The series must have been successful, as he did a series about the French poet Baudelaire after this, and the series itself ran for a number of years, covering over writers and Poets over the years.

This is one of the most moving passages in the Essays; it is rare for Montaigne to talk about an event in his life, a private moment, in such detail. The story is about a fall from a horse, and the loss of consciousness that followed. “In the time of our third or second troubles (I do not well remember which), going one day abroad to take the air, about a league from my own house, which is seated in the very center of all the bustle and mischief of the late civil wars in France; thinking myself in all security and so near to my retreat that I stood in need of no better equipage, I had taken a horse that went very easy upon his pace, but was not very strong. Being upon my return home, a sudden occasion falling out to make use of this horse in a kind of service that he was not accustomed to, one of my train, a lusty, tall fellow, mounted upon a strong German horse, that had a very ill mouth, fresh and vigorous, to play the brave and set on ahead of his fellows, comes thundering full speed in the very track where I was, rushing like a Colossus upon the little man and the little horse, with such a career of strength and weight, that he turned us both over and over, topsy-turvy with our heels in the air:

The fall from the Horse

So each of the forty short essays picks part of what Montaigne wrote about or stood for as a person; alongside this, we learn a little of his history from him,oving riding the acident he had and how this led to him spend the years he did in his tower, where he wrote the essays in a world were he read and wroote about his thoughts and his life.  From the first essay around engagement and how Montaigne hadn’t been so taken with the ideas of Machchiavelli when he read The Prince. Then through how Montaigne conversed with people and how he was a plainspeaker, not someone who wanted to stuff ideas into people.  Then about the horse and his fall from the horse, which is in his essays. To his obsession over the essays with Death from the fall on the horse to how we are all going to die.  What emerges from this is a desire to read Montaigne himself; the passion that Compagnon has for him comes through in the essays, but also in how, even after all this time, the themes and ideas he wrote about still have echoes in the present.

Death is one of the major subjects on which Montaigne ruminates, and to which he returns again and again. The Essays are also a sort of preparation for death, from the chapter “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die” early in Book One to the end of Book Three and its final two chapters, “Of Physiognomy,” in which Montaigne praises the stoic attitude of peasants, who are exposed to the ravages of war and plague and yet remain as composed and tranquil as Socrates on the verge of drinking hemlock, to “Of Experience.”

His obsession with Death in the Essays

I loved this. I am a huge fan of radio essays. I spent a lot of my younger years listening to Radio Four and love the likes of Alistair Cooke and shows like Something Understood.  The series was broadcast with an actor reading a section of Montaigne that each essay uses as its source material.  The book is a great intro to Montaigne; I will be reading his essays in the near future. I have a feeling I will be looking back and cross-referencing Compagnon’s thoughts on the essays, but also, like he does, thinking about how what he wrote about touches us now.  Montaigne lived in a time of war, and we seem to be living in increasingly darker times. But I also think Europa have missed a trick by not doing the other books in this radio series; it seems every series has been published as a book after the summer. It would be an interesting collection to have.  Do you have a favourite series of radio essays or, even these days, podcasts ?