Backroom
Image crafted by Montaigne in the chapter *"On Solitude"* to describe the inner retreat each person must keep *"entirely free,"* sheltered from any outside grasp. It is the place of *"true freedom,"* where one holds with oneself a conversation *"so private"* that nothing foreign enters. Wives, children, possessions, health—one may have them, but without clinging to them to the point that *"our happiness depends on them."* The *arrière-boutique* is the part of oneself no loss can touch.
Il se faut reserver une arriereboutique toute nostre, toute franche, en laquelle nous establissons nostre vraye liberté et principale retraicte et solitude.
The image is that of the shopkeeper who keeps, behind the open storefront, a back room where no customer enters. Montaigne makes this the model of the inner sanctum: a space “entirely our own, entirely free” that we share with no one. The solitude he prescribes is not geographical—one can carry it into the crowd—but an independence of judgment in the face of all that does not depend on us.
The reasoning is Stoic in origin. Wives, children, possessions, health: “one must have” all these “if one can; but not cling to them in such a way that our happiness depends on them.” Practicing to converse “without wife, without children, without possessions” is to learn, “when the occasion arises of their loss,” not to be stripped of them within. The back room is that inalienable capital one hides “in a place where no one goes.”
Yet Montaigne is careful not to turn it into a stagnant void: he refuses to “languish in tedious idleness” there, for the soul, “pliable within itself,” keeps itself active company. This is what sets it apart from escape: the back room is not a renunciation of the world but a reserve maintained within worldly life. Back room ≠ anachoresis, the withdrawal from the world of Stoics and monks: one abandons the world, the other carves out a room of one’s own without ceasing to live in it.