The Essays of Montaigne

OF LIARS

There is not a man living whom it would so little become to speak from
memory as myself, for I have scarcely any at all, and do not think that
the world has another so marvellously treacherous as mine. My other
faculties are all sufficiently ordinary and mean; but in this I think
myself very rare and singular, and deserving to be thought famous.
Besides the natural inconvenience I suffer by it (for, certes, the
necessary use of memory considered, Plato had reason when he called it a
great and powerful goddess), in my country, when they would say a man has
no sense, they say, such an one has no memory; and when I complain of the
defect of mine, they do not believe me, and reprove me, as though I
accused myself for a fool: not discerning the difference betwixt memory
and understanding, which is to make matters still worse for me. But they
do me wrong; for experience, rather, daily shows us, on the contrary,
that a strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment. They do,
me, moreover (who am so perfect in nothing as in friendship), a great
wrong in this, that they make the same words which accuse my infirmity,
represent me for an ungrateful person; they bring my affections into
question upon the account of my memory, and from a natural imperfection,
make out a defect of conscience. “He has forgot,” says one, “this
request, or that promise; he no more remembers his friends; he has forgot
to say or do, or conceal such and such a thing, for my sake.” And,
truly, I am apt enough to forget many things, but to neglect anything my
friend has given me in charge, I never do it. And it should be enough,
methinks, that I feel the misery and inconvenience of it, without
branding me with malice, a vice so contrary to my humour.

However, I derive these comforts from my infirmity: first, that it is an
evil from which principally I have found reason to correct a worse, that
would easily enough have grown upon me, namely, ambition; the defect
being intolerable in those who take upon them public affairs. That, like
examples in the progress of nature demonstrate to us, she has fortified
me in my other faculties proportionably as she has left me unfurnished in
this; I should otherwise have been apt implicitly to have reposed my mind
and judgment upon the bare report of other men, without ever setting them
to work upon their own force, had the inventions and opinions of others
been ever been present with me by the benefit of memory. That by this
means I am not so talkative, for the magazine of the memory is ever
better furnished with matter than that of the invention. Had mine been
faithful to me, I had ere this deafened all my friends with my babble,
the subjects themselves arousing and stirring up the little faculty I
have of handling and employing them, heating and distending my discourse,
which were a pity: as I have observed in several of my intimate friends,
who, as their memories supply them with an entire and full view of
things, begin their narrative so far back, and crowd it with so many
impertinent circumstances, that though the story be good in itself, they
make a shift to spoil it; and if otherwise, you are either to curse the
strength of their memory or the weakness of their judgment: and it is a
hard thing to close up a discourse, and to cut it short, when you have
once started; there is nothing wherein the force of a horse is so much
seen as in a round and sudden stop. I see even those who are pertinent
enough, who would, but cannot stop short in their career; for whilst they
are seeking out a handsome period to conclude with, they go on at random,
straggling about upon impertinent trivialities, as men staggering upon
weak legs. But, above all, old men who retain the memory of things past,
and forget how often they have told them, are dangerous company; and I
have known stories from the mouth of a man of very great quality,
otherwise very pleasant in themselves, become very wearisome by being
repeated a hundred times over and over again to the same people.

Secondly, that, by this means, I the less remember the injuries I have
received; insomuch that, as the ancient said,--[Cicero, Pro Ligar.
c. 12.]--I should have a register of injuries, or a prompter, as Darius,
who, that he might not forget the offence he had received from those of
Athens, so oft as he sat down to dinner, ordered one of his pages three
times to repeat in his ear, “Sir, remember the Athenians”;--[Herod., v.
105.]--and then, again, the places which I revisit, and the books I read
over again, still smile upon me with a fresh novelty.

It is not without good reason said “that he who has not a good memory
should never take upon him the trade of lying.” I know very well that
the grammarians--[Nigidius, Aulus Gellius, xi. ii; Nonius, v. 80.]--
distinguish betwixt an untruth and a lie, and say that to tell an untruth
is to tell a thing that is false, but that we ourselves believe to be
true; and that the definition of the word to lie in Latin, from which our
French is taken, is to tell a thing which we know in our conscience to be
untrue; and it is of this last sort of liars only that I now speak. Now,
these do either wholly contrive and invent the untruths they utter, or so
alter and disguise a true story that it ends in a lie. When they
disguise and often alter the same story, according to their own fancy,
‘tis very hard for them, at one time or another, to escape being trapped,
by reason that the real truth of the thing, having first taken possession
of the memory, and being there lodged impressed by the medium of
knowledge and science, it will be difficult that it should not represent
itself to the imagination, and shoulder out falsehood, which cannot there
have so sure and settled footing as the other; and the circumstances of
the first true knowledge evermore running in their minds, will be apt to
make them forget those that are illegitimate, and only, forged by their
own fancy. In what they, wholly invent, forasmuch as there is no
contrary impression to jostle their invention there seems to be less
danger of tripping; and yet even this by reason it is a vain body and
without any hold, is very apt to escape the memory, if it be not well
assured. Of which I had very pleasant experience, at the expense of such
as profess only to form and accommodate their speech to the affair they
have in hand, or to humour of the great folks to whom they are speaking;
for the circumstances to which these men stick not to enslave their faith
and conscience being subject to several changes, their language must vary
accordingly: whence it happens that of the same thing they tell one man
that it is this, and another that it is that, giving it several colours;
which men, if they once come to confer notes, and find out the cheat,
what becomes of this fine art? To which may be added, that they must of
necessity very often ridiculously trap themselves; for what memory can be
sufficient to retain so many different shapes as they have forged upon
one and the same subject? I have known many in my time very ambitious of
the repute of this fine wit; but they do not see that if they have the
reputation of it, the effect can no longer be.

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have
other tie upon one another, but by our word. If we did but discover the
horror and gravity of it, we should pursue it with fire and sword, and
more justly than other crimes. I see that parents commonly, and with
indiscretion enough, correct their children for little innocent faults,
and torment them for wanton tricks, that have neither impression nor
consequence; whereas, in my opinion, lying only, and, which is of
something a lower form, obstinacy, are the faults which are to be
severely whipped out of them, both in their infancy and in their
progress, otherwise they grow up and increase with them; and after a
tongue has once got the knack of lying, ‘tis not to be imagined how
impossible it is to reclaim it whence it comes to pass that we see some,
who are otherwise very honest men, so subject and enslaved to this vice.
I have an honest lad to my tailor, whom I never knew guilty of one truth,
no, not when it had been to his advantage. If falsehood had, like truth,
but one face only, we should be upon better terms; for we should then
take for certain the contrary to what the liar says: but the reverse of
truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound
or limit. The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite, and evil,
infinite and uncertain. There are a thousand ways to miss the white,
there is only one to hit it. For my own part, I have this vice in so
great horror, that I am not sure I could prevail with my conscience to
secure myself from the most manifest and extreme danger by an impudent
and solemn lie. An ancient father says “that a dog we know is better
company than a man whose language we do not understand.”

“Ut externus alieno pene non sit hominis vice.”

[“As a foreigner cannot be said to supply us the place of a man.”
--Pliny, Nat. Hist. vii. I]

And how much less sociable is false speaking than silence?

King Francis I. vaunted that he had by this means nonplussed Francesco
Taverna, ambassador of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, a man very famous
for his science in talking in those days. This gentleman had been sent
to excuse his master to his Majesty about a thing of very great
consequence, which was this: the King, still to maintain some
intelligence with Italy, out of which he had lately been driven, and
particularly with the duchy of Milan, had thought it convenient to have a
gentleman on his behalf to be with that Duke: an ambassador in effect,
but in outward appearance a private person who pretended to reside there
upon his own particular affairs; for the Duke, much more depending upon
the Emperor, especially at a time when he was in a treaty of marriage
with his niece, daughter to the King of Denmark, who is now dowager of
Lorraine, could not manifest any practice and conference with us without
his great interest. For this commission one Merveille, a Milanese
gentleman, and an equerry to the King, being thought very fit, was
accordingly despatched thither with private credentials, and instructions
as ambassador, and with other letters of recommendation to the Duke about
his own private concerns, the better to mask and colour the business; and
was so long in that court, that the Emperor at last had some inkling of
his real employment there; which was the occasion of what followed after,
as we suppose; which was, that under pretence of some murder, his trial
was in two days despatched, and his head in the night struck off in
prison. Messire Francesco being come, and prepared with a long
counterfeit history of the affair (for the King had applied himself to
all the princes of Christendom, as well as to the Duke himself, to demand
satisfaction), had his audience at the morning council; where, after he
had for the support of his cause laid open several plausible
justifications of the fact, that his master had never looked upon this
Merveille for other than a private gentleman and his own subject, who was
there only in order to his own business, neither had he ever lived under
any other aspect; absolutely disowning that he had ever heard he was one
of the King’s household or that his Majesty so much as knew him, so far
was he from taking him for an ambassador: the King, in his turn, pressing
him with several objections and demands, and challenging him on all
sides, tripped him up at last by asking, why, then, the execution was
performed by night, and as it were by stealth? At which the poor
confounded ambassador, the more handsomely to disengage himself, made
answer, that the Duke would have been very loth, out of respect to his
Majesty, that such an execution should have been performed by day. Any
one may guess if he was not well rated when he came home, for having so
grossly tripped in the presence of a prince of so delicate a nostril as
King Francis.

Pope Julius II. having sent an ambassador to the King of England to
animate him against King Francis, the ambassador having had his audience,
and the King, before he would give an answer, insisting upon the
difficulties he should find in setting on foot so great a preparation as
would be necessary to attack so potent a King, and urging some reasons to
that effect, the ambassador very unseasonably replied that he had also
himself considered the same difficulties, and had represented them to the
Pope. From which saying of his, so directly opposite to the thing
propounded and the business he came about, which was immediately to
incite him to war, the King of England first derived the argument (which
he afterward found to be true), that this ambassador, in his own mind,
was on the side of the French; of which having advertised his master, his
estate at his return home was confiscated, and he himself very narrowly
escaped the losing of his head.--[Erasmi Op. (1703), iv. col. 684.]