Of Names

It is a curious vanity, and one peculiar to the French nobility in particular, that a man will change his name as readily as he changes his coat — and with less occasion. A gentleman who inherits an estate acquires, along with the land and the revenues, a new name, which he adopts as though he had been born again. His children, if they are fortunate enough to acquire further land, will change their names again. In two generations a family may pass through three or four surnames, each one testifying not to any deed or quality of the bearer, but only to the accident of an inheritance. What the name means, what history it carries, what obligations it implies — these are questions nobody troubles to ask.

The ancients had a sounder practice in this regard. Among the Romans, a name was a serious thing. The cognomen in particular was earned, not bestowed by deed of transfer: Africanus had been to Africa; Torquatus had taken a torc from a Gaul he killed in single combat; Dentatus had remarkable teeth, which at least distinguished him from everyone else. These names attached to persons, not to properties. They followed the man, not the ground.

“A name should be a portrait, however rough — some trace of the person who first bore it. When names are bought and sold with the land, they become merely labels on packages, telling us where the thing was made, nothing about what it contains.”

I am myself a small example of this confusion, for I bear the name of Montaigne from an estate that was not always in my family, and that name is what the world knows me by, while my family name of Eyquem has fallen into such obscurity that few who read my essays could tell you it exists. I do not complain of this — a writer is perhaps better served by a name that sounds of stone and height than by one that means nothing in particular. But I notice the arbitrariness of it. There is nothing about me that is especially montane. The hill in question is modest. The whole system is a kind of theatre, and we are all playing characters named after the properties they happened to be standing on when the curtain rose.