The Essayist on Trial
Toy et moy nous rendons l’un à l’autre, par ce que nous ne sçaurions si bien rencontres ailleurs.
MARIE DE GOURNAY
In a chapter entitled “Montaigne’s Family Romance” I previously discussed the engendering of the Essays as a compensatory gesture that enabled Montaigne to overcome the loss of La Boétie by transforming a profound feeling of absence into a dialogic endeavor realized through the writing project.1 I suggested that the representation of the self as a recuperative act for the lost friend constituted an effort to endure the anxiety of separation by becoming “argument et … subject” (II, 8, 385) (“argument and subject” [278]) of his creation. This writerly act enabled the essayist to triumph over the nothingness of death through the narcissistic illusion of giving life to art. As Montaigne put it: “Platon adjouste que ce sont icy des enfans immortels [the children of the mind] qui immortalisent leurs peres” (II, 8, 400) (“Plato adds that these are immortal children who immortalize their fathers and even deify them, as with Lycurgus, Solon, and Minos” [291]). The act of paternity as textual project, as realized through the representation of the figure of the child in the textual space of “De l’affection des peres aux enfans” (II, 8) (“Of the Affection of Fathers for Their Children”), permitted that filial creation to become an epistemological locus capable of conjoining the affective with the cognitive: “Je n’ay pas plus faict mon livre que mon livre m’a faict” (II, 18, 665) (“ I have no more made my book than my book has made me” [504]). In this process the Montaignian text assimilated the knowledge that its wise progenitor was presumed to possess. By means of that symbolically nurturant act, it was able to assume a transcendence of sorts through an act of writing that projected a textual progeny more perfect than the biological workings of nature itself. For Montaigne, then, the resistance to death could only be realized through this gift of writing, the construction of a child of the mind, a textual offspring, whose being would be more perfect than life itself and would maintain the literary legacy of La Boétie (the gift of the library) through Montaigne’s gift of the book, or what he termed the “monumens des muses” (II, 8, 400) (“monuments of the muses” [292]).
Literary historians Marjorie Henry Ilsley and Elayne Dezon-Jones have made us aware of the biographical dynamics concerning the relationship between Montaigne and Marie de Gournay le Jars, although they have failed to discuss it within a textual and rhetorical framework.2 In 1595 Montaigne’s adopted daughter and literary executrix, the woman he called his “fi lle d’alliance” (II, 17, 661) (“covenant daughter” [502]) prepared for publication a posthumous edition of the Essays drawn from the writer’s 1588 handwritten addenda to that text. Based on the “Bordeaux Exemplar,” this posthumous edition was, as Richard Regosin suggests, derived from a copy of Montaigne’s original manuscript that Marie de Gournay had sent to Paris and modified to such a degree that it now included the rewriting of certain passages of the Essays and the excision of some archaic formulations perceived as inelegant.3
Being the executrix of both the paternal “will” and testament signified for Marie de Gournay bearing the burden of the writer’s posterity as literary witness, a textual guardian whose function, in principle, was to maintain a subtle balance between what she knew and what she did not or could not possibly know. As daughtersecretary-successor in whose life “real” amorous relations were somewhat problematic, it could be argued that she is represented as one who is destined to be “wedded” to the Montaignian Logos: “Il ne luy en falloit, pour son bien, nul autre que moy,” she declares.4 To sustain this posture, she alludes to others who have made this literary engagement possible, such as Justus Lipsius, who opened “les portes de louange aux Essais ” (24) and, surprisingly, Madame de Montaigne herself (Françoise de la Chassaigne). Amazingly, the essayist’s wife is recuperated in a revisionist family history as the surrogate mother who makes Marie de Gournay’s work as editor of the manuscript possible through “les offices d’une tres ardente amour conjugale” (25). In Marie de Gournay’s narrative the essayist’s wife becomes retroactively implicated in sustaining his literary legacy through what is described as the devotion of a surrogate mother-daughter relationship. Gournay enhances the glory of the name of the father through an invention of familial ties that transforms Madame de Montaigne into a benefactress of sorts who, through her magnanimity, empowers Marie to bring her husband back to life: “Que son maistre mesme n’en eust jamais eu tant de soing… . Chaqu’un luy doibt, sinon autant de graces, au moins autant de louanges, que je faiz: d’avoir voulu r’embrasser et r’échauffer en moy les cendres de son mary, et non pas l’espouser mais se rendre une autre luy-mesme” (25–26).
In this context, the textual addition at the end of the 1595 version of the essay “De la praesumption” (II, 17) “Of Presumption”) is quite revelatory concerning the supposed genealogy of Montaigne’s text. The love relations suggested in the following fragment, whether penned by Montaigne or Marie de Gournay, indicate that there are no separations from love objects in writing, and that the substance of these object-choices suggest a certain narrative presumption, an anticipatory gesture that makes possible a looking ahead to the reality of death:
J’ay pris plaisir à publier en plusieurs lieux l’esperance que j’ay de Marie de Gournay le Jars, ma fille d’alliance: et certes aymée de moy beaucoup plus que paternellement, et enveloppée en ma retraitte et solitude, comme l’une des meilleures parties de mon propre estre. Je ne regarde plus qu’elle au monde. Si l’adolescence peut donner presage, cette ame sera quelque jour capable des plus belles choses, et entre autres de la perfection de cette tres-saincte amitié où nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait peu monter encores: la sincerité et la solidité de ses mœurs y sont desjà bastantes, son affection vers moy plus que sur-abondante, et telle en somme qu’il n’y a rien à souhaiter, sinon que l’apprehension qu’elle a de ma fin, par les cinquante et cinq ans ausquels elle m’a rencontré, la travaillast moins cruellement. Le jugement qu’elle fit des premiers Essays, et femme, et en ce siecle, et si jeune, et seule en son quartier, et la vehemence fameuse dont elle m’ayma et me desira long temps sur la seule estime qu’elle en print de moy, avant m’avoir veu, c’est un accident de tres-digne consideration. (II, 17, 661–62)
I have taken pleasure in making public in several places the hopes I have for Marie de Gournay le Jars, my covenant daughter, whom I love indeed more than a daughter of my own, and cherish in my retirement and solitude as one of the best parts of my own being. She is the only person I still think about in the world. If youthful promise means anything, her soul will some day be capable of the finest things, among others of perfection in that most sacred kind of friendship which, so we read, her sex has not yet been able to attain. The sincerity and firmness of her character are already sufficient, her affection for me more than superabundant, and such, in short, that it leaves nothing to be desired, unless that her apprehension about my end, in view of my fifty-five years when I met her, would not torment her so cruelly. The judgment she made of the first Essays, she a woman, and in this age, and so young, and alone in her district, and the remarkable eagerness with which she loved me and wanted my friendship for a long time, simply through the esteem she formed for me before she had seen me, is a phenomenon very worthy of consideration. (502)
If Montaigne is indeed the author of this passage, he gives himself the pleasure of enjoying the fantasy of being the father of a daughter onto whom he projects a fictional symbiosis—“comme l’une des meilleures parties de mon propre estre”; “as one of the best parts of my own being”—that functions as the emblem of his desire to invent one whom he calls “ma fi lle d’alliance” (my covenant daughter). Desire as it is represented here is inextricably linked to a “family romance” that transcends the boundaries and limitations of biological relationships; it is more an invention of the imagination than anything else. The natural daughter Léonor and the authentic mother Madame de Montaigne are replaced by a love object derived from a narcissistic model capable of nurturing the self and equal in quality to the greatest minds of the times. In a way, mothers and natural children appear to disappoint Montaigne to such an extent that what he discovers in the surrogate-child relationship is described as potentially superior to the child he has biologically fathered. The “invention” of the surrogate daughter functions as an anticipatory omen of the joys the future will bestow upon his literary legacy: “Si l’adolescence peut donner presage, cette ame sera quelque jour capable des plus belles choses, et entre autres de la perfection de cette tres-saincte amitié où nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait peu monter encores”) (“If youthful promise means anything, her soul will some day be capable of the finest things, among others of perfection in that most sacred kind of friendship which, so we read, her sex has not yet been able to attain.”) In a sense, Montaigne discovers in the young girl what he fearfully described in the 1588 edition of “De la vanité” (III, 9) (“Of Vanity”) as being potentially impossible, namely, the existence of a sponsor or a “respondant” to execute his “will” and testament: “Je scay bien que je ne lairray apres moy aucun respondant si affectionné bien loing… . Il n’y a personne à qui je vousisse pleinement compromettre de ma peinture” (III, 9, 983, n. 4) (“I know well that I will leave behind no sponsor anywhere near as affectionate… . There is no one to whom I would be willing to entrust myself fully for a portrait” ([752 n. 14]). However, the potential sponsorship of Marie de Gournay—who, in a way, turns out to be more like a man in her ability to transcend the limitations of the sacred bonds of friendship from which women are traditionally excluded— offers the essayist the hope of escaping entrapment within the infelicitous commentaries of the less gifted readers of the Essays. As he suggests in “De l’amitié” (I, 28) (“Of Friendship”) concerning friendship with women: “D’y comparer l’affection envers les femmes, quoy qu’elle naisse de nostre choix, on ne peut, ny la loger en ce rolle” (I, 28, 185) (“To compare this brotherly affection with affection for women, even though it is the result of our choice—it cannot be done; nor can we put the love of women in the same category” [137]).
In a way, Marie de Gournay is represented as being more perfect than a woman might ever possibly become, the “perfection de cette tres-saincte amitié où nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait peu monter encores” (“perfection in that most sacred kind of friendship which, so we read, her sex has not yet been able to attain”). The father’s partial disassociation from the women in his family and his continuing desire to establish differences between women and man make it difficult for him to recognize his adoptive daughter in terms of her gender. He therefore obliquely makes her portrayal, as it is embodied in the book, more closely aligned with that of a surrogate son, one in whom he discovers a potentially nascent amorous relationship, “beaucoup plus que paternellement” (“more than a daughter of my own”). Moreover, Marie de Gournay’s exemplarity stems from a remarkable cognitive ability to read and interpret the Essays, which therefore raises her above the deficiencies usually accorded to those of her own sex: “le jugement qu’elle fit des premiers Essays, et femme, et en ce siecle, et si jeune, et seule en son quartier” (“the judgment she made of the first Essays, she a woman, and in this age, and so young, and alone in her district”). This rhetorical crossdressing obliges the female voice to engage in a symbolic masquerade; it defines the daughter negatively as she is mediated by the image of a masculine ideal traditionally associated with judgment and virtue.
Montaigne attributes a kind of omnipotence to the magical daughter with whom he identifies; she is meant to represent his being beyond death, a role that he had previously attributed to himself in terms of preserving La Boétie’s literary fortune following his friend’s demise:
Privé de l’ami le plus doux, le plus cher et le plus intime, et tel que notre siècle n’en a vu de meilleur, de plus docte, de plus agréable et plus parfait, Michel de Montaigne, voulant consacrer le souvenir de ce mutuel amour par un témoignage unique de sa reconnaissance, et ne pouvant le faire de manière qui l’exprimat mieux a voué à cette mémoire ce studieux appareil dont il fait ses délices.5
In a way, the memory of La Boétie is meant not only to invoke the continuity of lost friendship but also a striving for survival (“survie”) associated with an identificatory drive that functions as the sign of mutual attraction (“certes aymée de moy beaucoup plus paternellement” and “la vehemence fameuse dont elle m’ayma et me desira long temps”; “whom I love indeed more than a daughter of my own” and “the remarkable eagerness with which she loved me and wanted my friendship for a long time”). The representation of this attraction, however, is not without its paradoxes and ambiguities. Unlike Montaigne’s perfect friend, with whom he maintained a seamless bond of communication, a perfect symbiosis or interchangeability of souls, the woman who is represented here is yet to have a voice of her own; by accepting the “name of the daughter,” she must relinquish her entitlement to desire and preserve the essayist’s omnipotence. Instead of recognizing the female other as different, the father identifies her only to disidentify her as an imperfect copy of the same. If she is to speak as she finally crosses the threshold into the realm of womanhood, her coming into language can only be a simulacrum of the power and desire that she aspires to, which is ultimately possessed by the man whom she idealizes.
What if Marie de Gournay is the author of the passage near the close of “De la praesumption”? In that case the muted voice described by Montaigne abandons the proleptic dream of maturity for the daughter and produces a narrative segment that leads us back to a future already inscribed in the editing of the text’s present. By inverting the narrative point of view previously articulated, one now encounters a different perspective that can be shown to unsettle the first reading by projecting a future that is already now. No longer portrayed as a mere representation of what she might one day become as the result of the surrogate father’s naming her daughter by covenant, Marie de Gournay now becomes an authorizing force entitling herself to speak. She engages in a pseudoprocess of individuation whose idealism is subverted by the writing of a family history which identifies the female voice with the likeness of the father: “J’estois toute semblable à mon Pere, je ne puis faire un pas, soit escrivant ou parlant, que je ne me trouve sur ses traces” (45). Assuming the other’s position and imaginatively perceiving the father’s needs enables her to lose herself in the other. This lack of mutual recognition creates the gender polarity underlying the self-other relationship between Montaigne and Marie de Gournay. The inscription of the female figure as dutiful daughter is less the result of her being engendered by the substitute father inscribed in the text than a consequence of Marie de Gournay’s “fathering” of her desire to write. I insist on the issue of “fathering” here because the perceived image of and identification with the male writer engenders her desire to seek entry into writing through the pleasure of taking hold of the body, or corpus, constituting the Essays. The recognition of the other as textual strategy enables Marie de Gournay to engage in a process of differentiation by simultaneously maintaining separateness and connection. The ideal of autonomy is held hostage to a discourse that “others” the desiring subject and ultimately distances her from the project of becoming.
Marie de Gournay’s role as textual editor of the Montaignian corpus is clearly associated with a process of mourning that sustains itself through a carthetic relationship to the lost object. Ironically, the plenitude of affection can only be realized phantasmically since the ideal union only comes into being because of a feeling of deprivation. “Etre seul,” declares Marie de Gournay, “c’est n’estre que demy” (47). Unquestionably, the mourning topos inscribes the female subject in a quasi-libidinal relationship (involving questions of attachment and loss) through which the female subject is protected against the libidinal expenditure associated with mourning and the erotic drives that it motivates: “Mais combien est encore plus miserable celuy qui demeure demy soy-mesme, pour avoir perdu l’autre part, qu’à faute de l’avoir rencontré!” (47). The death of the surrogate father enables the living book to appropriate the remains of the dead textual corpus. However, the discourse embodying Montaigne is retained as representative of the symbolic capital of sociopaternal power.
In examining the writerly relationship between Marie de Gournay and Montaigne, what I am particularly interested in is not the authenticity of the literary performance attributed to either one of the possible narrative voices. Rather, I am drawn to the ways in which amorous figurations are sustained in the text by what is unquestionably a series of object relations. In any event, the authenticity of authorship is less important than its figurative dynamics and the ways in which representation constructs itself as literary myth. In this context, one must therefore ask the following questions: What narrative function is Marie de Gournay assuming in her role as literary executrix? Where do her commentaries on Montaigne end and where does her self-assertion as authorizing subject begin? To be sure, as one scans Marie de Gournay’s “Préface” to the 1595 edition of the Essays and her textual addenda—such as the possibly counterfeit addition to the chapter “De la praesumption”—what emerges is the representation of a female subject who is both primary and secondary to textual production, one who is both central and marginal to the engendering of the text. In a way, the figure of Marie de Gournay emerges as an authorizing agent: the excluded female presence alluded to in the preface of 1595 may be regarded as the condition of both the enabling and disabling factors in representing her identity. Marie de Gournay describes herself as being in a rather paradoxical situation: having become daughter by social covenant and as the result of magical thinking, she owes more to the rhetorical construction of an artificially conceived nature (“nature m’ayant faict tant d’honneur” [45]) than she does to the workings of biological relations. She is a specially chosen friend in a world where female friendship with men appears to be something of a social anomaly. Authorship, taken in its etymological sense of auctoritas, or authority, thus becomes a process that seeks its own justification. Accordingly, when discussing the essayist’s position on religious matters, she proclaims the value of her judgments concerning Montaigne: “C’est à moy d’en parler; car moy seulle avois la parfaicte cognoissance de cette grande ame, et c’est à moy d’en estre creue de bonne foy, quand ce livre l’esclairciroit pas… . Je dis doncq avec verité certaine” (34).
In the context of the 1595 preface, Montaigne becomes for Marie de Gournay the prototype of intellectual exemplarity, one in whom the author finds an ideal image of the self. In confronting the reality of paternal loss, the female subject finds comfort in her fictional role as mediator of paternal omnipotence. In terms of fatherly relations, Marie de Gournay comes to terms with the power of her own desire and elaborates it through the projection of an internally constructed ideal: “Lecteur, l’appeller autrement; car je ne suis moymesme que par où je suis sa fille” (25). Ironically, the daughter-father relation is based on a preexisting affective model involving two men, Montaigne and La Boétie, who are engaged in a sublimated homoerotic relationship. As in both cases, the figuration of object relations is the result of paternal loss, for which ideal love becomes the only source of salvation.
In its most rudimentary form, Marie de Gournay’s story is a narrative of paternal legitimation; it is enacted through a rhetorical performance whose potency is realized by means of a mimetic reproduction of the other that enables the textual editor to lose herself in him:6 “Je ne suis moy-mesme que par où que je suis sa fille” (25). Marie de Gournay’s “performance” functions, in part, as a textual prosthesis of fragments of Montaigne’s literary corpus. In adopting the name of the father she assumes a position that enables her to transcend what might in psychoanalytic terms be called her “narcissistic black hole.” By becoming Montaigne’s double she permits herself to engage in a rhetorical transvestism that manifests itself as a hermeneutic fetishism in terms of its relationship with the master’s text: “Je te dirois qu’il a pensé … je te diray que la faveur publicque dont il parle n’est pas celle qu’il cuidoit” (23–24). The legitimation of the name of the father is based not only on the desire to protect his name but is sustained according to the exigencies of an editorial project previously protected against the infelicities of “la miserable incorrection” by “quelque bon Ange” but now guaranteed by someone described as being greater than heaven itself, the dutiful daughter: “J’ose me vanter qu’il ne luy en falloit, pour son bien, nul autre que moy, mon affection suppleant à mon incapacité” (53).
At the beginning of the 1595 preface Marie de Gournay conceives of her writing strategy as a defensive posture whose line of articulation is one of excess: “Tu devines ja, Lecteur, que je me veux plaindre du froid recueil, que nos hommes ont fait aux Essais: et cuydes peultestre avoir suject d’accuser ma querimonie, en ce que leur ouvrier mesme dit que l’approbation publicque l’encouragea d’amplifier les premiers” (23). To be sure, the lost object of desire (Montaigne) is gradually absorbed by the desiring daughter; the female subject retains the imprint of the lost object such that mourning becomes a process through which gender is inscribed on the female body (or the textual corpus) and thereby mirrors the father’s perceived desire as “truth.” The paternal word therefore carries within it the law of the father, which is passed on to the surrogate daughter: “soubs ceste seulle consideration que celuy qui le voulut ainsin estoit Pere, et qu’estoit Montaigne” (53).
Following the 1595 preface Marie de Gournay’s writings on Montaigne take on a more ambivalent and slightly measured perspective that signifies the conditional rather than the absolute nature of Montaigne’s literary fatherhood. As Adam Phillips has pointed out, “children,” in Freud’s view, “realize desire but without possibility,” whereas D. W. Winnicot suggests “they are all dressed up with no place to go.”7 Like the desiring child implicated in the oedipal romance, Marie de Gournay was the victim of a literary seduction that left her imprisoned in an unproductive passion. The origin of desire as represented in the language of the preface of 1595 was the result of a literary seduction to be understood in its etymological sense as meaning a leading away from.8 Marie de Gournay reveals how her first encounter with Montaigne’s text stimulated her to such a degree that she was given the sedative hellebore to assuage her anxiety: “On estoit prest à me donner de l’hellebore lors que comme ils me furent fortuitement mis en main au sortir de l’enfance, ils me transsissoient d’admiration” (24). Beyond the obvious references to figures of metamorphosis associated with the Neoplatonic tradition, for Marie de Gournay the act of reading Montaigne’s Essays provoked a spontaneous reaction, a transfiguration of sorts, that produced a kind of metaphorical death for the female writer.9 If anxiety replaces pleasure at this originary act of desire, its ultimate effect is to make the female subject incapable of realizing her autonomy before this encounter with a seductively powerful text. Incited by the perception of the father and the magnetic force of his knowledge, the female subject assimilates the substance of his writerly being and makes it her own: “Les grands esprits sont desireux, amoureux, et affolez des grands esprits: comme tenans leur estre du mouvement, et leur prime mouvement de la rencontre d’un pareil” (47). Ultimately the phallic identification with the father, as described in the preface, disinclines the female subject from engaging in a symbolic performance on the level of language. Nevertheless, Marie de Gournay paradoxically appropriates a kind of authority by situating herself among “the happy few,” those intellectually gifted readers capable of recognizing the value of Montaigne’s discourse: “C’est de telles ames qu’il fault souhaitter la ressemblance et la bonne opinion” (25).
Underlying Marie de Gournay’s “malady of the soul”10 is, metaphorically speaking, a rhetorical perversion, defined as behavior that deviates from the norm, in this case manifesting itself as the desire to write in a vaguely counterpatriarchal tradition. As she states in a letter to Justus Lipsius dated November 1596 concerning the preface (composed just one year earlier): “Que je lui laissois couler en saison où ma douleur ne me permettoit ni de bien faire ni de sentir que je faisois mal.”11 The abandonment of the 1595 preface can thus be interpreted as a taking possession of her female subjectivity, a decision by means of which the woman writer can become the subject of her own writing, albeit this time more on her own terms. This movement away from dependency allows for the almost impossible act of selfinscription. It enables Marie de Gournay to give shape to her repressed rhetorical corpus, whose initial nonexistence is the result of her inability to transcend the implicit paralysis produced by Montaigne’s disabling death.
It is thus not surprising to recall that in one of his early essays entitled “Que le goust des biens et des maux depend en bonne partie de l’opinion que nous en avons” (I, 14) (“That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them”), Montaigne draws our attention to the fact that “il est ordinaire à beaucoup de nations de nostre temps de se blesser à escient, pour donner foy à leur parole” (I, 14, 60) (“It is a common practice in many nations of our time for people to wound themselves intentionally to give credit to their word” [41]). Among the examples the essayist draws upon is that of a young girl who disfigures herself in order to maintain the constancy of her word: “J’ay veu une fi lle, pour tesmoigner l’ardeur de ses promesses, et aussi sa constance, se donner du poinçon qu’elle portoit en son poil, quatre ou cinq bons coups dans le bras, qui luy faisoient craquetter la peau, et la saignoient bien en son escient” (I, 14, 60) (“I have seen a girl, to show the ardor of her promises, and also her constancy, strike herself, with the bodkin she wore in her hair, four or five lusty stabs in the arm, which broke the skin and made her bleed in good earnest” [41]). In examining the 1595 edition of the Essays established by Marie de Gournay, one discovers that this passage has been rewritten in a most revelatory manner. Specifically, she substitutes the formulation “J’ay veu une fille” (“I have seen a girl”) by “Quand je veins de ces fameux Estats de Blois, j’avois veu peu auparavant une fille de Picardie” (I, 14, 60, n. 6). The reference is definitely to Marie de Gournay. According to Donald Frame’s biography, Montaigne had visited the young woman in Picardy in 1588 while attending the Estates General at Blois.12
The variant of this text conceals more than first meets the eye. The metaphoric reference to the disfiguring of the female body takes on an even greater significance within the allegorical dynamics involved in the daughter-father relationship and the previously articulated unconditionally laudatory references to the Montaignian corpus. There are those who choose to read this passage as a somewhat literal affirmation of the female writer’s coming into being.13 Yet one could even go a step further by suggesting that this image of the wound or representation of martyrdom, traditionally viewed as a metaphoric means of transcendence, here represents the literal violence done to the female body. However, one must remember to read this passage in an allegorical fashion. It is not simply about violence inflicted on a female body destined for marriage. Rather, it represents the passage of violence through language itself (from “to force,” one of the root meanings of this word), an attempt to ascribe an oppositional tone to a literary performance by replacing the pleasure of Marie de Gournay’s prefatory statements with a new introduction that paradoxically gives voice to what was previously silent. The various writings and rewritings alluded to by Alan Boase (reprinted in the editions published between 1598 and 1617) attest to Marie de Gournay’s “double-talk.” Her revisionist history assured her the possibility of dissociating the name of the father from the production of a revisionist literary culture: “ LECTEUR , si je ne suis assez forte pour escrire sur les Essais, aumoins suis-je bien genereuse pour advouër ma foiblesse, et te confesse que je me retracte de cette Preface que l’aveuglement de mon aage et d’une violente fievre d’ame me laissa n’aguere eschaper des mains.”14 If guilt is an issue here, as it has been suggested by Regosin, it does not stem from the “writer’s guilt of having spoken at all.”15 Rather, it takes the form of a muted yet powerful rhetoric constituting a drama realized at the level of the Logos. As a result of this corporeal albeit textual excision, Marie de Gournay is motivated to act. The narrative disfiguration alluded to here undoes the privileged and identificatory position with the father. Ironically, it devalues the initial female position by representing Marie de Gournay as a rather puerile being; her unresolved tension serves to justify her seeking refuge within the very problem that her own desire has engendered. Although the removal of the daughter’s illusion of paternal omnipotence ironically liberates her, it transforms her rhetorical performance into a simulacrum of a partially realized autonomy that reestablishes the discourse of this “newly born woman” and enables her to represent her being through a distancing from the master narrative: “C’est une femme qui parle.”16 By withdrawing unconditional support of the name of the father, Marie de Gournay engages in a discourse where the newly excluded material is now seen as the narrative symptom of the wound or gap created by the excision of her prefatory corpus. No longer described as “un semblable” who bore witness to the exemplarity of Montaigne’s writing, her word now begins to emerge from the wound inflicted on the representation of the paternal body, the literary corpus of which now only the ashes remain and from which the surrogate daughter can no longer rekindle her originary desire in the name of the father.