

Montaigne's teachings are brought vividly to life in this fine study, says Ruth Scurr
 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Montaigne: ‘Intense awareness of the individuality of himself and others.’ Bridgeman Art Library Bridgeman Art Library/The Bridgeman Art Library

Before he was famous, the essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne brushed shoulders with death on a bridle path, some time in 1569 or early 1570. He was 36 and he liked to ride to get away from his inherited and elected ­responsibilities: a chateau and estate in the ­Dordogne and a seat in the Bordeaux parliament (or high court). He was on a placid horse and expecting an easy ride when what felt like a shot from an arquebus (the firearm of the day) knocked him and his horse to the ground: "There lay the horse bowled over and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword, which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having no more motion or feeling than a log." When he regained consciousness, and afterwards his memory of what had really happened, Montaigne learnt that it was not a shot, but one of his servants, a muscular man on a more powerful horse, who had mistakenly charged past and hit him.

Previously, Montaigne had often imagined death. His reading in classical philosophy – the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics – encouraged him to brood on mortality and he had endured the recent deaths of his best friend (the humanist writer La Boétie), his father, younger brother and first-born child. But the riding accident cured him of morbidity. He awoke from it confused and vomiting blood, but went on to reinvent himself. He resigned from his position in Bordeaux and resolved to devote himself to writing the essays that would bring him immortality. As Sarah Bakewell writes in her new biography: "Don't worry about death became his fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live."

Bakewell's sprightly book aims to do three things for Montaigne. First, it gives the general reader the basic facts of his life, sometimes summarised in point form. Second, it introduces those who do not know his essays to his wide-ranging answers to the question: how to live? "Don't worry about death" might have been the most fundamental, but there was a plethora of others: pay attention; read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted; survive love and loss; use little tricks; question everything and so on. Bakewell takes each of these answers as a chapter heading and uses them to group her reflections on Montaigne in roughly chronological order.

Third, she splices her ­biographical material and extracts from Montaigne's writing with stories of how he has been received over time. She draws on the responses of his first enthusiastic readers, "who praised his Stoic wisdom and his skill in collecting fine thoughts from the ancients", and also on Descartes, ­Pascal, the 17th-century libertines, Enlightenment philosophers, the Romantics, 19th-century moralists, Nietzsche, ­Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Stefan Zweig, and others.

It was Leonard Woolf who called Montaigne "the first completely modern man" and argued that his modernity consisted in his "intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and of all other human beings". Non-human, or animal, beings also registered in Montaigne's intense awareness, as Bakewell, following Woolf, emphasises. She quotes Leonard's reminiscence of a traumatic episode in his childhood which reading Montaigne reminded him of. He was asked to drown unwanted day-old puppies and with retrospect he remembered them fighting death in the bucket of water: "As I would fight death if I were drowning in the multitudinous seas. It was I felt and feel a horrible, an uncivilised thing to drown that 'I' in a bucket of water."

Virginia Woolf is equally an inspiration for Bakewell in her mission to make Montaigne accessible to a contemporary, non-specialist audience. Woolf, she writes, "had a beautiful vision of ­generation interlinked in this way: of how 'minds are threaded together – how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides… it is this common mind that binds the whole world together and all the world is mind'." It is precisely this capacity for living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history that makes a book like Montaigne's Essays a true classic, Bakewell argues.

Montaigne died of quinsy on 13 September 1592. Since his riding accident, he had fathered another five daughters, but only one survived into adulthood. He had become famous in France and Europe following the first edition of his essays in 1580. He had been elected mayor of Bordeaux in 1581 and participated successfully in the fraught politics of his day, blighted by the wars of religion. He went on annotating and adding to his essays until the end of his life; afterwards, editorial disputes broke out over what he had intended the final version to be. They continue to this day.

Bakewell manages to glide gracefully across current editorial ranklings over his texts without taking sides. Central as the essays are to her own approach to his life, it is ultimately his life-loving ­vivacity that she succeeds in communicating to her readers: "What he left behind was all the better for being imperfect, ­ambiguous, inadequate and vulnerable to distortion. 'Oh Lord,' one might imagine Montaigne exclaiming, 'by all means let me be misunderstood.'"

Ruth Scurr is the author of Fatal Purity, published by Vintage.