Ives The Essays of Montaigne/Volume 1/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
THE CEREMONY AT INTERVIEWS OF KINGS
All subjects belong to conversation, and so all matters may be touched upon in these Essays. Montaigne recognises this, and also that the topic he now takes up is not a very interesting one, when he says: “There is no subject so trivial as not to deserve a place in this medley” — this collection of fragments. It is of royal ceremonies and of courtesies among “the great” that he talks. He had just been reading Guicciardini, and the account of the meeting of the Pope and emperor at Boulogne, in 1532, had entertained him and so he transported it to his own pages.
In 1562 there was published Anales et croniques de France depuis la destruction de Troyes jusques au temps des roy Louis onzieme, with additions bringing it down to the year of publication. The first part was composed by “feu maistre Nicolle Gilles,” who had been “secrettaire iudiciaire du Roy, et controlleur de son tresor.” Montaigne owned a copy of this volume and made in it some hundred and seventy annotations. It became in our day the property of the well-known Montaigne scholar, M. Dezeimeris, who has published an elaborate study of it.
Among many other indications that Montaigne may have had it occasionally in mind when writing, M. Dezeimeris suggests that a passage in the additions, “De l’entree de l’empereur et son fils, Roy des Romains [Charles] en la ville de Paris,” might have been the occasion of this Essay.
The last paragraph was added in 1595.
The little personal touch, “For my part … I do away with all ceremony,” was inserted in 1588, and was changed in 1595 to “so far as I can."
In a later Essay (“Of Vanity,” Book III, chapter 9) Montaigne says: “There is more of heartbreak than of consolation in taking leave of one’s friends [when setting out on a journey]; I willingly forget this duty of our manners’’; a detail of the feeling expressed earlier here.
THERE is no subject so trivial as not to deserve a place in this medley.[1] According to our ordinary conventions, it would be a signal discourtesy, both to an equal and even more to a great man, to fail to be at home when he had notified you that he was about to come to your house. Indeed, Queen Marguerite of Navarre went further and said, on this subject, that it is uncivil for a gentleman to leave his house, as is most often
done, and go forth to meet the person who is coming to visit him, however great a man he may be; and that it is more respectful and civil to wait at home to receive him, were it only for fear of missing him on the road; and that it is enough to accompany him on his departure. (b) For my own part, I often forget both one and the other of these idle civilities, as in my own house I do away with all ceremony so far as I can. If some one should take offence, what matters it to me? It is better to offend him once than myself every day: that would be a never-ending subjection. To what end do we shun the servitude of courts, if we bring it into our own lair?[2]
(a) It is also a common rule in all gatherings that it is for the inferior persons to be first at the place appointed, since it is more fitting that the greater should be waited for. And yet at the interview which was arranged between Pope Clement[3] and King Francis at Marseilles, the king, having ordered the necessary preparations, left the city and gave the Pope two or three days of leisure, to make his entry and recreate himself before meeting him. And in like manner, at the entry of the same Pope and the emperor[4] into Bologna, the emperor gave the Pope opportunity to be there first, and arrived after him. It is, they say, a common ceremonial at the conferences of princes, that the greatest should arrive before the others at the place assigned, even before him in whose country the meeting is held; and they look at it in this way:[5] that it is because this arrangement testifies that the inferiors go to find the greatest, and seek him, not he them.
(c) Not only every country, but every city and every profession has its special code of manners. I was trained carefully enough in my childhood, and have lived in sufficiently good society, not to be ignorant of the laws of our French manners; and I might teach them. I like to follow them, but not so slavishly that my life is constrained by them. They have some troublesome forms, which if we forget discreetly and not erroneously, we suffer no loss of grace. I have often seen men uncivil through over-civility, and importunate out of courtesy. After all, the art of social tact[6] is a very useful art. Like grace and beauty, it conciliates the approaches of sociability and familiarity, and consequently opens the way for us to instruct ourselves by the examples of others, and to put into execution and make visible our own example, if there be in it any thing instructive and communicable.