Becoming Montaigne 3: Hype
Michel de Montaigne's noble roots are shallower than most. His great-grandfather, Ramon Felipe Eyquem, makes a fortune in the herring fishery along the southwest coast of France, buys a chateau in the village of Montaigne in the 1470s and settles in as its Seigneur before his hands have entirely lost the smell of fish.
It’s bad enough that Michel, the fourth Seigneur de Montaigne, has taken up the vulgar hobby of book writing. Now he learns from a deeply pedigreed prince, of all people, that a Montaigne cousin recently embarrassed every living Montaigne by campaigning for funeral honours from his deathbed.
“He asked all the nobility who visited him to give him their word that they would attend his burial convoy,” Montaigne reports. “He asked the prince himself to command his entire family to be there, giving several examples of why this was something to which a man of his kind was entitled.”
To serve as one’s own premature eulogist is a crass display of self-love. Montaigne would rather die on horseback in the middle of nowhere, his disappearance regrettable to his loved ones but unsurprising given the turbulent times they live in, than to demean himself for the sake of a couple of extra coaches in his funeral procession.
That a blood relative would use his dying breaths to hype himself for tributes he won't live to witness offends Montaigne at a metaphysical level. He says the present is the only time in which we ever actually live. What's the past but an ever-fading source of nostalgia and recriminations, the future but an imaginary pool of hopes and fears?
It scandalizes Montaigne that the ancient Spartans, who were so admirably spartan in most things, fell into a fawning swoon every time one of their kings died. How can historical accounts be relied on if accolades are showered willy-nilly on dead kings and other notables, regardless of their merits while alive? Don't we all have the right to know if Alfred the Great was only Alfred the Alright?
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