How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
B efore he was famous, the essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne brushed shoulders with death on a bridle path, some time in 1569 or early 1570. He was 36 and he liked to ride to get away from his inherited and elected responsibilities: a chateau and estate in the Dordogne and a seat in the Bordeaux parliament (or high court). He was on a placid horse and expecting an easy ride when what felt like a shot from an arquebus (the firearm of the day) knocked him and his horse to the ground: "There lay the horse bowled over and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword, which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having no more motion or feeling than a log." When he regained consciousness, and afterwards his memory of what had really happened, Montaigne learnt that it was not a shot, but one of his servants, a muscular man on a more powerful horse, who had mistakenly charged past and hit him.
Previously, Montaigne had often imagined death. His reading in classical philosophy – the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics – encouraged him to brood on mortality and he had endured the recent deaths of his best friend (the humanist writer La Boétie), his father, younger brother and first-born child. But the riding accident cured him of morbidity. He awoke from it confused and vomiting blood, but went on to reinvent himself. He resigned from his position in Bordeaux and resolved to devote himself to writing the essays that would bring him immortality. As Sarah Bakewell writes in her new biography: "Don't worry about death became his fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live."
