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Of Dialectics and Goat's Blood in an Anecdote by Montaigne

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Robert D. Cottrell
Robert D. Cottrell*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Extract

In his essay ‘De la ressemblance des enfants aux peres’ (II, 37) Montaigne tells two stories, the second of which is the curious account of how, after hearing that goat's blood was good for one's health, he raised a billy goat and had it slaughtered in the hope of procuring for himself some of this marvelous elixir. Only after the animal had been killed did he begin to have doubts about the medicinal virtues of goat's blood. Amused by his earlier credulousness, Montaigne relates this anecdote in a tone so personal, so affable and self-deprecatory that the reader, won over by the amiability of the speaker, is likely to be sensitive to the human quality of the narrator but unlikely to be attentive to the subtle way in which the text determines his responses or to the author's ulterior motives for eliciting those very responses.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Spring 1977 , pp. 29 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1977

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References

1 All references to Montaigne are to the Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres complètes, ed. Thibaudet and Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).

2 Readers of Stanley E. Fish's study of English Renaissance literature, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), will recognize my debt to Professor Fish, whose approach to a text I have found helpful in writing Part 1 of this article. Ehrlich, Héléne-Hedy in Montaigne: La Critique et le langage (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972)Google Scholar calls attention to Montaigne's practice of using the classical rhetorical device of exempla. She points out that Montaigne's exempla, instead of proving the point being illustrated, often suggest just the opposite. Ehrlich sees this procedure as a means of making the reader aware of ‘le décalage entre la réalité idéologique et la réalité observée’ (p. 38).

3 Essais, Edition Municipale, by Strowski, Gebelin, Villey (Bordeaux: Pech, 1906-33), IV, 359. The notes, which are by Villey, are contained in Vol. IV.

4 Les Sources et l'évolution des Essais de Montaigne (Paris: Hachette, 1908), 1, 154.

5 Essais, Edition Municipale, IV, ix.

6 Les Sources … , 1, 304.

7 La Première et Seconde Partie des erreurs populaires aufait de la medecine et regime de santé (Paris: Claude Micard, 1587), pp. 169-170.

8 Montaigne: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 191.

9 Historia Naturalis, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), x, 208-210.

10 Oeuvres (Paris: L'Imprimerie Nationale, 1879), pp. 394-397.

11 Marcelli de Medicamentis Liber, ed. Maximilianus Niedermann (Lipsiae et Berolini in aedibus B. G. Teubnesi, 1916), p. 196.

12 Cited by Gesner, p. 290, see below. See also Batisse, François, Montaigne et la médecine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1962), p. 277 Google Scholar.

13 De Mineralibus et Rebus Metallicis (Coloniae: Apud Iuannem Birckmannum & Theodorum Baumium, 1569), pp. 118-119.

14 Besser, Rheinhold, Das Verhältnis von Remy Belleau's Steingedicht Les Amours et Nouveaux Eschanges des Pierres Précieuses, Vertus et Proprietez d'Icelles zu den früheren Steinbüchem und den sonstigen Quellen (Oppeln: Eugen Frank, 1886), p. 13 Google Scholar.

15 Les Amours et nouveaux eschanges des Pierres précieuses, ed. Maurice F. Verdier, Textes Littéraires Français (Geneva: Droz, 1973), p. 59. Verdier points out that Belleau is here following La Rue, a doctor who, in addition to practicing medicine in Lille, published in 1547 a book on precious stones, De Gemmis aliquot… .

16 The copy I have consulted is the 1620 edition. I should like to express my gratitude to Miss Carol Armbruster of the Library of Congress for making it possible for me to consult this text. The famous English adaptation of Gesner's work (done by Edward Topsell) was first published in 1607 under the title of Four-footed Beasts and is readily available in a 1967 reprint of the 1658 edition, New York, Da Capo Press.

17 De Inventione, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 54: ‘Argumentum est ficta res, quae tamen fieri potuit,’ 1, 19, 27.

18 Gesner, p. 290.

19 Essais, Edition Municipale, IV, 359.

20 Montaigne's Deceits: The Art of Persuasion in the Essais (London: University of London Press, 1974), p. 45.

21 Sartre remarks in Saint-Genêt that ‘la loi de toute rhétorique, c'est qu'il faut mentir pour être vrai.’