The Book of Montaigne 5 · Written in his tower, from his Essays
Michel de Montaigne, born in Périgord in France in 1533, died in 1592. At thirty-eight he gave up public office and withdrew to the library in his own tower, and over the twenty years that followed wrote the Essays: three books, a hundred and seven of them. The form is his invention. He later served twice as mayor of Bordeaux. He remained in the church all his life and never left it. He wrote his own book, so nothing here is another man’s record of him. He differs from the rest of this scripture: the others set down what they believed, and he sets down what he is. Where he contradicts himself he did not strike it out, and neither does this scripture.
5.1I hold cruelty to be the ugliest of all the vices.
5.2For the others I might find something to say. For this one I can find nothing.
5.3In our own age men make war, and killing is not enough — they must watch a man die slowly, and invite others to watch.
5.4I cannot bear to watch even a chicken killed.
5.5Some laugh at me for softness. I do not argue.
5.6I say only this: a man who can watch suffering with an itch of pleasure in him has something worse in him than any single act he has done.
5.7I am the same about animals.
5.8A stag run to exhaustion turns and pleads with the men hunting it, by the only means it has — its tears.
5.9I will not take that quarry.
5.10Someone says: animals are not men.
5.11I say: between us and them one thing is held in common — we all feel pain.
5.12This is not only between us and the beasts.
5.13It is the same between one man and another.
5.14Pain does not ask who you are. It does not look at your family, or your office, or what you have on.
5.15I have the stone. A king has the stone. It hurts in the same way.
5.16On the highest throne in the world you are still sitting on your own backside.
5.17I have met some men brought over from the new world. They were taken to see the king of France, who was then a child.
5.18They were asked what struck them here as strangest.
5.19They named two things. One was that grown men in their strength obeyed a child.
5.20The other was that some were gorged full while others, worn to the bone, begged at their doors —
5.21and that the starving ones had not taken the full ones by the throat, or set fire to their houses.
5.22I set down both their sentences as they said them, without altering a word for them.
5.23What rule can be drawn from this I do not know. I only lay it here, for someone later to trip over.
5.24I set this down not to establish a great principle. I cannot establish one.
5.25I simply will not watch. I write it so that you know there is a man who will not watch.
5.26If a principle requires me to watch another die slowly before it makes sense, I do not want that principle.