of much were he weighed without the glory and grandeur of the end of his life. God hath willed it as it pleased him; but in my own days, three of the most execrable persons I have known, living in every sort of abomination, and the most infamous, have had well-ordered deaths and perfectly disposed in every detail.
(c) There are noble and fortunate deaths. I have seen death cut short a wonderful upward progress in the springtime of its development,[1] by an end so glorious that, in my opinion, there was nothing in the man’s ambitious and daring plans so exalted as was their interruption. He arrived without going thither at the place where he would be, more grandly and gloriously than had been his desire and hopes, and attained by his fall the power and the fame to which he aspired by his course in the race.
In judging another’s life I observe always how its close has borne itself, and my chief endeavour regarding my own end is that it may carry itself well, that is to say, quietly and insensibly.[2]
CHAPTER XX
THAT TO THINK AS A PHILOSOPHER IS TO LEARN TO DIE
This Essay opens with a consideration of the meaning of the sentence of Cicero which forms its title; and continues with the assertion that to lose the fear of death is part of that pleasure, or volupté (as Montaigne chooses to call it from a wilful desire to shock those to whom this word “is so abhorrent”), which is “the final object of our aim”; and from this he passes into a noble passage regarding the pleasure of virtue, condemning those “who instruct us that her quest is hard and laborious.” The last sentence could hardly be finer. (The whole paragraph belongs to 1595.)
Continuing, he says: “The end of our career is death; it is the unavoidable thing in full sight.” The original text has a deeper significance than can easily be conveyed in English; the phrase is: Death “est le but de nostre carriere … c’est l’object de nostre visee”; this can be paraphrased: “the winning post of our race … the object of our aim.”
