CHAPTER XXIV
DIFFERENT RESULTS OF THE SAME COUNSEL
It is pleasant to think of Montaigne and Jacques Amyot (1503-1593), “evêque d’Auxerre,” talking together; pleasant, not because Amyot was “grand aumosnier de France,” but because he was the famous translator of Plutarch, the writer of whom Montaigne says in a later Essay (“Business To-morrow”), “I give … the palm to Jacques Amyot over all our French authors, not only for simplicity and purity of language wherein he surpasses all others,” and for this and for that; “but especially I am grateful to him for having culled out and chosen a book so worthy and so opportune, to make a present of it to his country. We ignoramuses had been lost if this book had not lifted us out of the mire.” We see that in the whole course of the Essays Montaigne felt himself indebted to Amyot.
So Jacques Amyot was talking to him (one would like to know when and where) about “one of our princes.” This particular prince of Amyot’s story was François, duc de Guise, surnamed le Balafré, who was assassinated in 1563, and whose death we have already heard of in the second Essay. Here we learn how, the year before, he escaped assassination (by a Protestant) by “sermonising” his would-be murderer. This story is followed by a long translation from Seneca of the similar story of Augustus, which Corneille has celebrated in his Cinna. These two stories are intended to “point the moral,” that the rightest path is the safest: “The safest way … is, in my opinion, to throw oneself on the side in which there is the most uprightness” and justice. A characteristic conclusion for Montaigne to reach.
But in reaching this conclusion, Montaigne has taken a most wandering course, and has discussed the share that fortune has in the success of medicine, of poetry and painting, and of military enterprises; so large a share that he believes (as his title says): in “different results of the same counsel.” The passage about medicine is amusing; it is the first of his repeated Molière-like outbursts against the medical profession.
The title does not fit closely to the rest of the Essay, the greater part of which was added in 1588, and which is occupied with the uselessness of attempting to prevent conspiracies by punishments, and with the torment a ruler must suffer who is suspicious of those about him.
The passage connected with these thoughts, beginning, “Those who teach princes watchful distrust,” probably refers to Henri III and Henri IV. The noble lines, “Courage … displays itself … as nobly in a doublet as in armour,” seem a forerunner of those of Lowell (Commemoration Ode):
Life may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to truth be
As bravely in the closet as the field.
