Forbidden fruit

In fact, Montaigne’s Essays is an eclectic book. I mean, he writes about many different themes that, at least for the average reader, have no relationship to each other. Take for example essay 14 in Book II, titled “How our mind hinders ourself”, which I discussed in my blog last week. This essay is about the question whether dilemmas exist, to put it in my words. The next essay, however, treats a very different theme, as the title already shows: “That our desires are augmented by difficulty”. It treats the theme that we desire most what we cannot get or can get only with great effort: The more difficult it is to get a thing, the more we desire it. In Montaigne’s words: “Our will is more obstinate by being opposed.” And the other we round: We have no great desire for what we can get with little effort. When we see that we can get something in an easy way, our desire for it fades away. Actually, it is something everything knows. It’s the story of the forbidden fruit, as Montaigne’s examples show. For instance: The inhabitants of Liège (now in Belgium) praise the baths in Lucca in Italy, while the inhabitants of Lucca praise the baths in Spa near Liège. Young people long most for their lovers, when they are not allowed to meet them. Or the grass is greener in your neighbour’s garden. As for the latter, I always wonder why cows try to eat the grass on the other side of the fence, while their own meadow is full of it. Or that’s what I think. But as Montaigne says: “Difficulty gives all things their estimation … To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to it.”
The most known story of the “forbidden fruit” is, of course, the story that gave the phenomenon its name: The Bible story of Adam and Eve in Paradise that tells us that Eve was tempted by a serpent – usually interpreted to be Satan – to take a fruit (usually depicted as an apple) from a tree in Paradise and to eat it, although it was explicitly forbidden to do so. And then Eve tempted Adam to eat from the same fruit. The consequences were fatal and Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise, because they had violated the most important rule there. However, usually the consequences of a forbidden desire are not that fatal.
Montaigne ends the essay with a remarkable story. First he tells us yet that “there is a certain nation, where the enclosures of gardens and fields they would preserve, are made only of a string of cotton; and, so fenced, is more firm and secure than by our hedges and ditches”. If there is no lock on the door, no thief will enter your house, for if there would be something worth to steal, you would have made a lock. Montaigne lived in a time of civil war in France, which was especially fought in the region where he lived. Bands pillaged the countryside. Therefore, many lords had hired soldiers for protecting their castles, and they had strengthened them. However, often to no avail. Montaigne had not done so. He hadn’t hired soldiers; he hadn’t locked the gate of his castle. The gate was protected only be an old man who friendly and politely received the visitors. So, Montaigne left his castle unprotected in a situation in which violence and civil war reigned. He thinks that just this may have made that during all those years of civil war in France he lived safe and well in his castle and that no band tried to take it or to plunder it.
No band? In his essay “On physiognomy” (Book III-12), Montaigne tells us that a group of 25 soldiers succeeded to come in his castle with a trick. Since he vaguely knew the leader of the band, he invited him for a drink, once the band was within the walls. While the soldiers were waiting in the court, Montaigne and the leader had a friendly chat in the hall. After some time, the man said that he had to go again, and to the surprise of his men, they were ordered to leave without plundering the castle. Of course, it will not always happen this way, but often it is so that who gives trust receives trust. And when trust doesn’t help, maybe friendliness does.