II
Like Montaigne, Montesquieu
was a Gascon. His father, Jacques de Secondat, married Marie-Françoise
de Penel, the desendant of an English family which had remained in France
after the English rule had ceased there. She was an only child, and
her husband received with her the title and barony of La Brède,
an estate in Gascony, with a fantastic old Gothic donjon built in the thirteenth
century. Montesquieu was the second of six children. The date
of his birth is not known, but he was baptized on the 18th of January,
1689. His godfather, like the godfathers of Montaigne in 1553, of
the lord of Beauvais in 1644, and of the Comte de Buffon in 1742, was a
beggar belonging to the district, chosen “in order that his godchild might
remember all his life that the poor are his brothers.” He was christened
Charles-Louis, and bore, according to a curious custom of the time, the
surname of De la Brède, the patronymic, De Secondat, being reserved
for the head of the house.
His nurse was a miller’s
wife, and the first three years of his life were spent with her.
Most of those who have written of Montesquieu have attributed his constant
use of the Gascon accent, and of certain idioms and solecisms, to these
three years. Is it likely, if he had not heard the Gascon accent
in his father’s household, and probably from his father’s lips, that the
effect of his lisping in a patois in his earliest infancy would
have remained with him all his life? If, however, he heard nothing
in his father’s house but the best “French of Paris,” his close and lasting
friendship with his foster-brother, Jean Demarennes, is a sufficient cause
for the perpetuation of his Gasconisms. But the point is of small
moment.
Montesquieu’s mother died
when he was seven years old, and four years after, in 1700, he was sent
to the college of the Oratorian Fathers at Juilly, near Meaux, in the department
of Seine-et-Marne. There he remained till 1711. He was docile
and diligent, and the solid foundation laid in Juilly enabled him to become
the best informed writer of his time in France. In the year in which
he left Juilly he wrote his first non-scholastic piece – the first, at
least, of which we known anything. It was a refutation, in the form
of a letter, of the doctrine of the eternal damnation of idolaters: the
substance of it he afterwards incorporated in the “Persian Letters.”1
1 Letter XXXV.