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The rest of Montesquieu’s life was spent at his estates in the country and at Paris.

He made great improvements in his land, and increased his revenues largely. At his death his income is said to have been sixty thousand francs. He was not ambitious to be rich; but in all that he took in hand he wished to feel and to see signs of his ability. He has been accused of parsimony, but that is one of the commonest charges the weak have to bring against the strong. Order was the law of his being, and prodigality and dissipation as repugnant to him as anything else chaotic. Indeed there was always too little chaos about Montesquieu.¹ He saw life steadily and saw it whole, too soon, too easily; and he took a part for the whole. But, to return, he was certainly not avaricious. His enlightened benevolence appeared in the moderate rents he charged; and there are several specific acts of generosity recorded.

Henry Sully, an English astronomer of note, being at Bordeaux pursuing experiments in horology, received much attention at the hands of Montesquieu, then President of the Bordeaux Academy. One day Sully, reduced to his last sou, “no uncommon thing with inventors,” wrote Montesquieu a brief note, “very English and very artless”—“I am in the mood to hang myself, but I don’t think I should do so if I had a hundred crowns.” “I send you a hundred crowns,” replied Montesquieu, “don’t hang yourself, and come and see me.”

In the winter of 1747-48, Guienne, on account of the war with England, had been unable to import a sufficient quantity of grain. On the 7th of December, Montesquieu, being at La Brède, was told that the tenants on an estate of his fifty leagues away were almost famine-stricken. He drove to the place at once with hardly a halt; summoned the curés of “the four villages,” and while waiting for them examined the state of provisions. On their arrival, he said, “Gentlemen, I beg you to assist me in procuring some help for your parishioners. You know those who are in need of corn, or of money to buy it. I wish all the grain in my barns to be distributed gratuitously. My steward will hand it out in quantities to be fixed in proportion to the needs of those who are in want of it. It is not right that any one should lack the necessaries of life on my lands as long as I have a superabundance. Gentlemen, you are good fellows. I trust to you entirely to make this distribution. You will oblige me by carrying out my intentions promptly; and by keeping the thing a secret.”

Montesquieu then went away at once, to escape the thanks of his tenants. According to the friend—of a scenic turn of mind evidently—who accompanied him, wheat to the value of 6400 livres was distributed by the curés. To prevent the recurrence of the distress which he had so munificently relieved, Montesquieu established on his estates granaries for the poor (greniers de charité).

Montesquieu was, indeed, one of the best of landlords and country gentlemen. He was looked upon in France as a species of “Milord Anglais,” as interested in men as in books; and he was so—in the peasants of La Brède, who were “not learned enough to make the worse appear the better reason,” as well as in the wits of Paris. His habits and manners were as simple as could be. He would go about La Brède all day long with a white cotton cap on his head and a vine-pole over his shoulder; in which guise he was, of course, mistaken more than once for a vine-dresser, and asked by those who came to offer him “les hommages de l’Europe,” if that “was the chateau of Montesquieu.”² A Genevese naturalist, Trembley,³ whom he had met in England, wrote to a friend, after having passed several days at La Brède in the autumn of 1752, “I cannot describe the pleasure I enjoyed during my stay. How beautiful, how charming the things I heard! What do you think of conversations which begin at one o’clock in the day and last till eleven at night? Now there was talk of the loftiest subjects; anon full bodied laughter over some delightful story. . . I talked much of agriculture with M. de Montesquieu. In a conversation on that subject he exclaimed:

‘ O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint Agricolas!’

adding, ‘I have often thought of putting these words on the front of my house.’”

The Earl of Charlemont wrote requesting an audience.⁴ The reply was favourable, and he and his companion, so excited were they at the prospect of seeing the great man, arrived at his house before he was up. The servant put them into the library, where “the first thing we saw was an open book lying on a table at which he had probably sat on the preceding evening: the extinguished lamp was still in position. Impatient to know the night reading of the great philosopher, we stepped at once to the volume: it was the Elegies of Ovid, open at one of the most gallant pages. We had not recovered from our surprise, when it was increased by the entrance of the president, whose appearance and manners were entirely opposed to the idea which we had formed of him. Instead of a grave and austere philosopher, whose very presence would have intimidated young folk like us, the person who addressed us was a Frenchman”—even the French philosophers are French! – “gay, polished, full of vivacity, who, after a thousand agreeable greetings, and a thousand thanks for the honour which we did him, invited us to breakfast; but”. . . in short, we went to walk instead. “At the skirt of a fine wood, cut in alleys, surrounded by a paling, and entered by a gate three feet high and fastened with a chain, ‘Come on,’ said he, after having searched in his pocket, ‘it is not worth while waiting for the key. You can jump as well as I, I am sure, and it’s not a gate like that I’m afraid of.’ So saying, he ran at the gate and leapt over it as light as you like. He had noticed our embarrassment on first meeting him—for we were much moved—and so he set to work, out of pure good-nature, to put us at our ease. Little by little his age and his genius disappeared so completely that the conversation became as free and easy as if we had been his equals in every respect. We spoke of the arts and sciences. He questioned us on our travels, and as I had visited the east he addressed himself particularly to me, interesting himself in the smallest details of the lands through which I had traveled. I heard him say more than once that he regretted not having seen these countries. . . After having made the tour of his estate, laid out in the English style, we returned and were received by Madame la Baronne and her daughter. . . . The meal was simple and abundant. After dinner Montesquieu insisted that we should stay, and he kept us for three days, during which his conversation was equally amusing and instructive.” This, though of the gushing order, is evidently a true picture of the man who said, “He who writes well does not write as people write, but as he writes; very often in talking badly such a one writes well.” To himself may be applied what he said of Montaigne: “In most authors I see a writing man; in Montaigne, a thinking man.” He was always saying, “The misfortune of certain books is the killing work one has to do in condensing what the author took so much trouble to expand.”