On Friendship

Summary

This small volume presents Montaigne's celebrated essay on friendship together with other essays from the Essais in M. A. Screech's translation. The title essay, 'Of Friendship' (Book I, Chapter 28 in modern numbering), was written as a memorial to Étienne de La Boétie, the young magistrate and humanist whom Montaigne met in Bordeaux around 1558 and who died in 1563. Montaigne begins by comparing himself to a painter who fills the borders of a wall with grotesques around a central picture: his essay was meant to frame La Boétie's treatise On Voluntary Servitude, which he decided not to print there because it had been misused by Protestant pamphleteers. He then distinguishes perfect friendship from other human bonds. The relations of parents and children are bound by duty and inequality; brotherhood is complicated by inheritance; erotic love for women is a feverish, fickle fire; and Greek love between men, as the ancients practised it, is unequal and tied to bodily beauty. Ordinary friendships are alliances of convenience, which must be conducted with prudence. The friendship Montaigne shared with La Boétie, by contrast, was a complete fusion of two wills, so that neither could say what belonged to whom; it arose suddenly from their first meeting and lasted only four years. Asked why he loved La Boétie, Montaigne answers that he can say only: because it was he, because it was I. He argues that such a friendship can exist only between two, cannot be divided, and makes ordinary obligations such as gratitude meaningless, since friends own everything in common. He illustrates with classical examples, especially Gaius Blossius's loyalty to Tiberius Gracchus, and with a story of Eudamidas bequeathing his friends the duty of caring for his mother and daughter. The essay ends with a grief-stricken account of the dull, smoky life Montaigne has led since his friend's death, in which every pleasure seems halved. Other essays in This selection (contents vary by edition) extend Montaigne's reflections on affection, solitude and the self.

Top Lessons

• Friendship as union

  Montaigne describes friendship not as an exchange of favours but as a merging of wills. The essay sets a high, perhaps impossible, ideal against which to measure our relationships.

• Grief for a friend

  The essay is an act of mourning. It shows how loss can be honoured by writing and how a friendship can shape a whole life afterward.

• Comparing loves

  Montaigne contrasts friendship with family duty and erotic passion, revealing assumptions of his time, including about women. Readers can test his distinctions against their own experience.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The essay is primarily a meditation on friendship but closes as a document of bereavement, describing a lasting dulling of pleasure after La Boétie's death. Montaigne's separate letter describing La Boétie's death (from an illness often described as dysentery or plague) is a valuable early account of a deathbed. Elsewhere in the Essais, Montaigne writes extensively on his kidney stones, physicians and the practice of philosophy as preparation for death, but whether those essays appear in this volume depends on the edition.

• 'Of Friendship', closing pages

  Montaigne's description of the dull, half-life he has led since his friend's death.