There is no such thing as a definitive edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. One has to choose. The Essays are a prime example of the expanding book.
The text translated here is an eclectic one, deriving mainly from the corpus of editions clustering round the impressive Edition municipale of Bordeaux (1906–20) edited by a team led by Fortunat Strowski. This was further edited and adapted by Pierre Villey (1924); V.-L. Saulnier of the Sorbonne again revised, re-edited and adapted the work for the Presses Universitaires de France (1965). Useful editions were also published by J. Plattard (Société ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1947) as well as by A. Thibaudet and M. Rat for the Pléiade (1962). These editions largely supersede all previous ones and have collectively absorbed their scholarship.
I have also used the posthumous editions of 1595, 1598 and 1602 and, since it is good and readily available at All Souls, the Edition nouvelle procured in 1617 by Mademoiselle Marie de Gournay, the young admirer and bluestocking to whom Montaigne gave a quasi-legal status as a virtually adopted daughter, a fille d’alliance.
The numbering of the essays selected here remains the same as in The Complete Essays, since the selection aims to give some idea of the structure of the Essays as a whole.