CHAPTER 9

“Benignity of the Great” and “Public Ruin” (1585–1588)

While the king, cheerful and careless, was playing at cup-and-ball in the streets of Paris, with the dukes of Épernon and Joyeuse imitating him, surrounded by young people in colorful costumes, the “great and furious”1 plague was raging in Lyon, Dijon, Senlis, and Bordeaux. We are in August 1585. Montaigne had just completed his second term as mayor. He had refused to go to Bordeaux for fear of the contagion and had holed up on his estate before setting out to wander the roads of the region to escape the epidemic. On the religious level, the situation was deteriorating from day to day, and any hope of a political solution between the two Henrys was indefinitely deferred. In September, Henry of Navarre and Condé were excommunicated by the “private bull” issued by Pope Sixtus V. Supported by the Guises, Charles of Bourbon appeared as the pretender to the crown. Henry III had once again yielded to the pressure of his entourage and had not been able to carry to success the negotiations begun at the end of 1584. His “not warlike, but timid and fearful, temperament was the object of caustic criticism on the part of those whom he thought could do him a disservice.”² His mother’s influence reinforced his image as a poor decision maker, and people denounced the duplicity he was said to have learned from her. For Montaigne, dissimulation and deceit were not recommendable qualities in a sovereign.

In this climate of uncertainty and contempt for the king, Montaigne withdrew from the Court. He had not been able to understand the logic of Henry III’s political decisions. In an addition to the Bordeaux Copy he offers this not very flattering portrait of the last Valois king, without naming him: “No middle position, always being carried away from one extreme to the other by causes impossible to guess; no kind of course without tacking and changing direction amazingly; no quality unmixed, so that the most likely portrait of him that men will be able to make some day, will be that he affected and studied to make himself known by being unknowable.”³ Henry III was a true mystery,⁴ and Montaigne, like many of his contemporaries, more than once paid the price for an unpredictable royal politics that was punctuated by abrupt reversals and often conducted in accord with the caprice of the moment.

Despite his character weaknesses, the king had an elevated conception of his responsibilities. For example, he had an excessive confidence in the judicial system and the law, which Montaigne admired in him. Against the views of the Catholics who wanted war, Henry III continued tirelessly to seek religious reconciliation and tried to find a compromise between the extreme policies that were polarizing public opinion. The last Valois was often forced to yield to those who wanted to settle matters by force. He did all he could to avoid the country’s ruin and the danger toward which it was irremediably heading. A man of ideas who preferred dialogue to violence, Henry III was not able to create a political sphere that would allow the politiques to exert a decisive influence on his decisions. After 1585, prudence was no longer fashionable, and the king applied his mother’s teachings to governmental matters, going so far as to legitimate violence to preserve royal authority. Fifteen years after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres, he was now confronted by a power relationship that favored his opponents.5 In early 1585, he still wanted to avoid resorting to force, even though the League had taken up arms. There followed a short period of hesitations. Many gentlemen still had a few scruples about siding with the princes of Lorraine, whose audacity fascinated them, however.⁶ Montaigne no longer shared the Guises’ point of view, as he had at the beginning of the first civil war. Certainly, he respected their unconditional commitment to the service of the Catholic religion, but he was opposed to “seditions” and “troubles” that brought “disorder into our consciences.”⁷ “Public sedition” was always to be avoided, according to Montaigne, who considered himself, in the course of the civil wars and his own experiences, to be a man of compromise and dialogue.

Henry III had just given in to the Catholic extremists. The Treaty of Nemours in July 1585 was an abdication of royal power in favor of the League. The edicts of toleration were canceled, and the situation returned to what it had been several years before. All that had been achieved by Montaigne’s diplomatic efforts to reconcile Henry III and Henry of Navarre was destroyed in an instant. Southwestern France was transformed into a battlefield, and religious tensions between Protestants and Catholics were exacerbated more than ever by the increase in military maneuvers in Guyenne. Religious divisions within a single village, or even a single family, were frequent, and Montaigne’s family did not escape this religious and ideological explosion. Thus one of his brothers—Thomas, lord of Beauregard—and his three sisters embraced the Protestant cause. His youngest brother—Bertrand, lord of Mattecoulon—retained his Catholic faith, but now was a gentleman of the king of Navarre’s chamber, as was Montaigne himself. The relations between Montaigne and his siblings were difficult, both because of religious divergences and for reasons connected with Pierre Eyquem’s legacy. Let us also recall that Thomas’s second wife was Marguerite de Carle, La Boétie’s daughter-in-law. La Boétie’s heirs’ drift toward Protestantism certainly awakened bad memories in him. These conversions to the new religion within his family also made Montaigne himself suspect. Located in Huguenot territory, his château was “situated at the very hub of all the turmoil of the civil wars of France.”8 He was surrounded by neighbors who had opted for the Reformation, and he lived on high alert in a zone of permanent insecurity.

In a context of military preparations and at the king’s order, Matignon convoked the nobility of Guyenne in the autumn of 1585. Questions remain regarding Montaigne’s actions and movements in late 1585. Some think he joined the army of noble volunteers Matignon had raised in Guyenne,⁹ but this hypothesis is improbable. It is true that as a Catholic gentleman Montaigne had an obligation to join the royal army. However, he did not respond to this call and did not fight alongside Matignon. For him, the only wars worthy of being waged were those that took place abroad, or at least outside his region: he took part in a war “most willingly when it is most distant from my neighborhood.”¹⁰ Matignon seems not to have reproached him at this time. In the eyes of the lieutenant governor of Guyenne and new mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne’s status as a politique was worth preserving for the time being.

Chosen by Catherine de Medici “to subjugate the Huguenots there as he had done in Normandy,”¹¹ Matignon favored a political solution between Henry III and Henry of Navarre. Famed for his patience and his prudence—he was later to be accused of having “a very slow humor”¹²—Matignon spared Henry of Navarre, but he was forced to respond to his military operations. He tried to make everyone happy, serving Henry III while at the same time maintaining cordial relations with Henry of Navarre. Matignon wanted to avoid the mistakes made by his predecessor, Marshal Biron. Moreover, once the storm had passed, Montaigne’s noninvolvement in the royal army might be transformed into a diplomatic asset. At that point, the League army led by the duke of Mayenne reached Matignon’s garrisons. The troops in the service of the Guises wanted to come to grips as soon as possible with the leaders of the “so-called new religion.”¹³ Under Huguenot control, Bergerac, Castillon, and Sainte-Foy suddenly became highly symbolic military stakes. Matignon slowed Mayenne’s advances as much as he could, while continuing to communicate with Henry of Navarre. However, this balanced policy was not to last long faced by the League’s growing demands.

Toward the end of 1585 a political polarization was emerging. The Catholic Union, better known under the name of the League, rallied around Henry of Lorraine, duke of Guise, who presented himself as the defender of the Roman Church and opposed both Henry III, whom he accused of weakness toward the heretics, and the presumptive heir to the French throne, Henry of Navarre. This religious confrontation was aggravated by personal conflicts and individual desires arising from the political realignment. René de Lucinge speaks of the “religious zeal”14 that was a handy excuse justifying choices and decisions that were essentially matters of clienteles. On both sides, lists of supporters and enemies were drawn up. For example, a report written by an Italian observer in 1589 lists fifty-three lords who had gone over to the League and fifty-nine who remained loyal to Henry III.¹⁵ One had to choose sides. The politiques were accused of waiting passively on the sidelines, whereas, according to the zealous leaders of both the Huguenot and the League parties, the religious conflict required more than ever that commitments be made and strong and resolute actions taken. Montaigne’s noncommitment—trying to maintain a position between Henry III and Henry of Navarre—soon turned against him. It was a time for polemical pamphleteers, and the inconclusive essays of a Gascon gentleman seemed a little anachronistic confronted by the ideological assurance that marked most people’s minds at this time. Montaigne engaged in a kind of subtle propaganda that advocated political and religious immobility: “As long as the image of the ancient and accepted laws of this monarchy shines in some corner, there will I be planted.”¹⁶

This “wait-and-see” posture adopted by those that were then called the “laughers” (rieurs) was, of course, not peculiar to Montaigne. In fact, more than 60 percent of the nobles in Languedoc, Guyenne, and Gascony played the neutrality card.¹⁷ The great majority of the knights of the Order of Saint Michael remained loyal to Henry III. Of seventy-eight members of the order in Guyenne and Gascony, 32 percent embraced the royal cause, 10 percent fought for Henry of Navarre, and only 1 percent sided with the League, the rest preferring to remain neutral.¹⁸ This nonalignment reflects sympathetic goodwill toward Henry of Navarre, no doubt more out of tradition than a genuine religious choice. Montaigne’s neutralist attitude was thus in no way exceptional and followed a regional tradition well established in Guyenne. The Gascons liked to display their difference with Paris. Moreover, Henry of Navarre was a neighbor, while the Guises were foreigners in the southwest. The nobility of Aquitaine joined the Huguenot army in far greater numbers than did the nobility of other parts of France, and also gave the least support to the League—so little as to be negligible. In Gascony, 40 percent of the nobles were Protestants, a figure three times higher than the national average.¹⁹ On several occasions, Montaigne reaffirmed his adherence to the Catholic religion, but he was never prepared to fight against Henry of Navarre to defend his religious convictions. That kind of involvement would have alienated many of his neighbors.

In light of the events that were occurring on the military front, the author of the Essais admitted that after 1585 his political convictions had considerably evolved:

In truth, and I am not afraid to confess it, I would easily carry, in case of need, one candle to Saint Michael and one to the dragon, according to the old woman’s plan. I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it. Let Montaigne be engulfed in the public ruin, if need be; but if not, I shall be grateful to fortune if it is saved; and as much rope as my duty gives me, I use for its preservation.20

Serving the king so far as possible, without prejudicing the security of his home or his reputation in the region: that is the foundation of Montaigne’s political position in late 1585. This attitude is based on a realistic and practical conception of power. Evasion when faced by “public ruin” seemed to Montaigne an inevitable choice.

René de Lucinge comments with realism and perspicacity on the political situation in early 1586. According to him, the duke of Guise was well aware that the pope considered him one of the pillars of the Roman Church in France, and knew that in the event of Henry III’s death, the king of Navarre, even if “Catholicized,” could still influence the forms of government and destroy “the foundations of the Catholic Church in France.”²¹ Faced with this apocalyptic analysis, people spoke less of the Huguenot leader’s conversion than of his destruction. Every compromise was viewed as a breach that would cause the ship of the Roman Catholic Church to sink. The clock had been turned back twenty years and only the military solution was on the agenda. In December 1584, the Guises had signed with the Spanish the Treaty of Joinville, which made the Cardinal of Bourbon Henry III’s legitimate successor. They had no intention of considering the possible accession to the throne of a prince who sympathized with the heretics. A plan of action was rapidly put in place, and many cities were retaken by the League.

Weakened politically, Henry III issued several edicts intended to satisfy his new political partners. The kingdom’s future was henceforth to be contested among three men: Henry III, Henry of Navarre, and the duke of Guise. The intransigence of the princes of Lorraine gave the king little room for maneuver, and he was easily influenced by the events of the moment. The problem with Henry III was that he was a modern prince, more pragmatic than his adversaries and totally out of step with the dogmas expressed by the Huguenot and Catholic extremists. The League was gaining ascendancy, and for Henry III the Guises were beginning to be a more immediate danger than Henry of Navarre. For a time, he considered adopting a solution based on the interim agreement signed in Augsburg in 1548, a political turning point when Charles V found himself forced to allow states and cities within the Empire to follow the Augsburg Confession.i But this solution fizzled out and any compromise soon became impossible. The eighth War of Religion began in the spring of 1585, that is, at the end of Montaigne’s second term as mayor of Bordeaux.

For all that, Montaigne did not blame Henry III for this rush into armed conflict. On principle, military leaders always called for war, and the sovereign’s duty was to remain as dignified as possible amid the confrontations: “The toughest and most difficult occupation in the world, in my opinion, is to play the part of a king worthily. I excuse more of their faults than people commonly do, in consideration of the dreadful weight of their burden, which dazes me.”²² According to Montaigne, it is difficult to “observe moderation”²³ and not become enraged in dangerous situations. In this passage, and in several others written around the same time, Montaigne shows that he has not only a sense of civic duty but also a profound respect for the sovereign’s authority, as opposed to other forms of authority. He places royal decisions above any moral consideration, and never allows himself to challenge the policies of his king. For him, it is not easy to act as a head of state, because adversaries often do not see the political necessity of decisions and almost always direct their criticisms to the person of the sovereign, preferring to blame the actors rather than the actions. This reflection on the relation between the individual and government was to occupy an important place in the Essais after 1588.

“Through an Extraordinarily Ticklish Part of the Country”

Military operations in Guyenne were resumed at the end of 1585. Montaigne chose to distance himself from current political and religious events. Holed up in his château, he spent most of his time in his library, reading and writing part of the third book of the Essais. As we see from the notes that he wrote at the end of the books in his possession, he did a good deal of reading at this time. Thus in early 1586, Montaigne was consulting especially history books. Very early in his life, he had already thought of historians as coming “right to [his] forehand.”24 In February, he read Herburt de Fulstin’s Histoire des rois et princes de Pologne (Paris: Pierre L’Huillier, 1573), translated by François Bauduin; in March, he plunged into Denis Sauvage’s Chronique de Flandres (Lyon: Guillaume Roville, 1562) and commented on Olivier de La Marche’s Mémoires. On March 6, he wrote the following commentary on a flyleaf of the Chronique de Flandres:

Finished reading on March 6, 1586/52 [at the age of fifty-two], at Montaigne. L’Histoire de Flandres commonly known and is presented better elsewhere. The boring introduction of speeches and prefaces. The Mémoires is a pleasant book, and useful, especially for understanding the laws of combats and jousts, a subject peculiar to this author, and [he] says he wrote about it in detail. His narrative is exact in every way and conscientious. He mentions Philippe de Commynes, as Philippe de Commynes mentions him.25

Montaigne preferred the military stratagems of earlier ages, which he evaluates and comments on, to the history that was being made with cannon balls at the gates of his home. One might be surprised by this detachment with regard to events that were taking place around him. The southwest was on fire, it was becoming a war zone, and Montaigne returned to his books.²⁶ He began a second retirement and took pleasure in being idle while at the same time denouncing the immorality of public life: “The corruption of the age is produced by the individual contribution of each one of us; some contribute treachery, others injustice, irreligion, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, in accordance with their greater power; the weaker ones bring stupidity, vanity, idleness, and I am one of them.”²⁷ This salutary withdrawal represented more a necessity than a genuine career choice. The château was once again transformed into a refuge.

The author of the Essais recounts this difficult and perilous period of his life in “Of physiognomy” (III: 12). Despite his silence and recent retirement from political life, Montaigne was suspected by both sides. Supporters of the League reproached him for having friends too close to Henry of Navarre and for not displaying his Catholic faith more openly. The Protestants suspected him of being in the pay of the Catholic princes and of not having been an impartial negotiator. In short, Montaigne was isolated: “I incurred all the disadvantages that moderation brings in such maladies.”²⁸ Without political support, he gave the impression of an ambiguous indifference at a time when it was practically impossible to separate the public and the private: “The situation of my house, and my acquaintance with men in my neighborhood, presented me in one aspect, my life and my actions in another.” Montaigne continues the description of his difficult situation and explains why he feels torn between the opposing political parties: “I was belabored from every quarter; to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, to the Guelph a Ghibelline,”²⁹ identifying in this passage the Guelphs with the League and the Ghibellines with the Huguenots. The historical comparison Montaigne makes here is appropriate to describe the delicate situation he faced in 1586. The Guelphs and the Ghibellines were two factions that opposed each other in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy.ii These two clans supported different dynasties that were fighting over the throne of the Holy Roman German Empire. It has often been suggested that Dante, who experienced this conflict because he sat in various Florentine political assemblies, was himself a white Guelph,ⁱⁱⁱ even though he argued, in his treatise De monarchia, in favor of a Ghibelline emperor reigning with the pope’s blessing. The comparison with Dante no doubt pleased Montaigne, who saw himself as also forced to ally himself with several parties because his place of residence put him at the heart of the conflict. As he puts it in the Essais: “It was mute suspicions that were current secretly, for which there is never a lack of apparent grounds in such a mixed-up confusion, any more than there is of envious or inept minds.”³⁰

In this climate of mutual distrust, Montaigne traveled little in the period immediately following his two terms as mayor. There was still plague in Bordeaux, and it was too dangerous to roam roads that had been taken over by deserters, foreign mercenaries, and highway robbers. For greater security, and for lack of political prospects, he chose to remain in the relative calm of his château from August 1585 to July 1586. Montaigne was waiting, holding back. This was an opportunity to return to his Essais, which he expanded considerably in light of his experience as mayor of Bordeaux. Some of the chapters of the third book were written during 1586. However, it would be a mistake to see this period as uniquely a time of writing. It was, of course, difficult to ignore the military situation that was taking on a menacing form all around him. Troop movements, skirmishes, sieges, and all kinds of discussions and negotiations were brewing just outside the gates of his château and did not allow him to insulate himself from the intense military and political activity prevalent in the region.

Confronted with the growing insecurity, Montaigne developed a strategy that consisted of keeping the gates of his château wide open. He reports two incidents in which he claims to have avoided great peril and even saved his life thanks to a naïveté feigned for the occasion. A “certain person” whom he knew, who was probably motivated by the weakened political situation in which Montaigne found himself at that time and who was “to some extent a relative of mine,” showed up alone at the gate of the château. Montaigne let him enter. The man told him that he was being pursued by an “enemy” whom Montaigne also knew, thanked his host for having saved his life, and asked that his men might also be allowed to take refuge inside the walls of the château. Montaigne understood that a trap was being laid for him, and that this man, whose intentions were hostile, was trying to take control of his château by means of a ruse. Not having men-at-arms to oppose this invasion of his lands, he decided to play along with his adversary: “I tried quite naïvely to comfort, reassure, and refresh him.”31 Four or five armed men quickly appeared, followed by several other soldiers. A small group of about thirty armed men, “pretending to have the enemy at their heels,” was soon in his courtyard. Then Montaigne saw how much he was envied by some of his neighbors, and that the age favored such attacks on those who showed weakness.

This kind of misadventure was common in the region, and several nearby châteaus had been assaulted on religious pretexts. Caught in this delicate situation, from which he could hardly imagine a peaceful escape, Montaigne made use of a technique he had earlier practiced to display his qualities as a negotiator and diplomat. His character, which was little inclined to either effusiveness or anger, allowed him to keep cool despite the immediate danger. Confronted by this threat, he remained calm and imperturbable. His adversaries took his impassiveness for naïveté. The effect Montaigne sought was, of course, to destabilize this armed group and make it believe that it was welcomed. Still astride their horses in the château’s courtyard, the soldiers waited in vain for their leader to order them to act and seize Montaigne’s château. Disconcerted by the friendly reception he had received from the master of the house, the would-be brigand gave up his sinister scheme and departed with his men as he had come. Montaigne adds that, “He has often said since, for he was not afraid to tell this story, that my face and my frankness had disarmed him of his treachery. He remounted his horse, his men constantly keeping their eyes on him to see what signal he would give them, very astonished to see him go away and abandon his advantage.”³² The frankness Montaigne showed for the occasion was, however, equivalent to dissimulation, since he had immediately recognized his visitor’s hostile intentions. In this anecdote we find a quality—false naïveté—that Montaigne associates with success in politics. The sincerity and candor shown on Montaigne’s face were a considerable advantage for a man who did not have the means to demonstrate by force his political or military power. Without any guarantee other than his own face, Montaigne thus explains his sincerity and straight talking: “If my face did not answer for me, if people did not read in my eyes and my voice the innocence of my intentions, I would not have lasted so long without quarrel and without harm, considering my indiscreet freedom in saying, right or wrong, whatever comes into my head, and in judging things rashly.”33

In the chapter “Of physiognomy,” Montaigne relates a second episode in which his face once again saved his life. Reassured by the announcement of several truces between Protestants and Catholics, Montaigne was traveling “through an extraordinarily ticklish part of the country”³⁴ when he was caught by twenty masked gentlemen after a furious chase. Taken prisoner, he was led into a forest and robbed. His “money box,” his chests, his horses, and his equipment were taken. This band of Huguenots (or League supporters?) began to negotiate with him a high ransom for his liberation. Once again, Montaigne was in great danger. After two or three hours of intense discussion, surrounded by some fifteen harquebusiers, separated from those who were accompanying him, and as his captors were getting ready to take him off to a secure place to await the payment of ransom, a rather astonishing reversal occurred. Montaigne recounts it: “Behold, a sudden and very unexpected change came over them. I saw the leader return to me with gentler words, taking pains to search for my belongings scattered among the troop, and having them returned to me as far as they could be recovered, even including my money box.”³⁵ As if by a miracle, Montaigne was freed and his goods were returned. Clearly Montaigne could have lost his life that day, but chance was on his side. He concludes the narrative of this incident with an important realization about his own existence: “The best present they made me was finally my freedom; the rest did not concern me much at that time.”³⁶

However, it is difficult to believe in such a reversal of the situation without imagining other, more prosaic and far more plausible causes. Had his captors realized who he was? The fact that he was on a mission and was negotiating on behalf of Henry of Navarre may have produced the happy outcome of this affair. We can reasonably say that Montaigne explained to his captors that he was personally acquainted with the king of Navarre and other Protestant leaders. Otherwise it would be difficult to explain why these masked soldiers suddenly changed their minds. Naturally, Montaigne tells us nothing about the arguments he gave for his release, except that he “kept standing on [his] rights under the truce.”³⁷ He prefers to make us think that his face alone sufficed to deliver him from a perilous situation. What could be interpreted as the success of a political negotiation is for him the result of a personality trait, a kind of political disposition opposed to rhetorical effects or other kinds of byzantine quibbles.

Such incidents logically led Montaigne to stay home. He received several visitors at his château and traveled little during the summer of 1586. On July 2, he received Pierre Charron “in suo castello”iv and gave him a copy of Bernardino Ochino’s Catechismo.^v Montaigne lived in the countryside and took care to avoid attracting the attention of the hostile soldiers, Huguenots, or supporters of the League, who were roaming around the region. The summer was marked by a military event fateful for Montaigne and his family. On July 10, 1586, Mayenne and Matignon set siege to Castillon, only a short distance from Montaigne’s estate. The royal army was camped less than a league from his château. It was one of the longest and bloodiest sieges of this military campaign conducted by the League in the southwest. To feed themselves, 25,000 soldiers (according to D’Aubigné), poorly supplied, resorted to pillaging the nearby lands, including Montaigne’s. The Huguenot garrisons led by Turenne infiltrated the royal army’s lines to harass the soldiers. There was fighting on the border of Montaigne’s land and looters plundered the region. An undisciplined army of 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers—including 5,000 Swiss—threatened Montaigne’s château and his people every day. The siege going on and on; the soldiers were no longer paid and deserted in large numbers. That meant even more armed men on the roads in Guyenne. The long encirclement of Castillon spelled economic ruin for many gentlemen who could no longer cultivate their lands and who saw their harvests pillaged by starving soldiers.

The region was full of soldiers who came from other countries. Montaigne was scandalized by the recruitment of foreign mercenaries by both the Protestant and the Catholic forces: “Our armies are no longer bound and held together except by foreign cement; of Frenchmen one can no longer form a steadfast and disciplined army corps. How shameful! There is only so much discipline as borrowed soldiers show us; as for ourselves, we follow our own lead and not our leader’s, every man his own way.”³⁸ He deplored the internationalization of the conflict, regretting that religious disputes could not be settled among Frenchmen, and above all was annoyed by the inefficiency of these armies and their leaders’ lack of authority. Conflicts had changed, and Montaigne by far preferred the noble war of the “time of our fathers” or of the Cannibals of the New World, a distraction from his own military disillusions. Recourse to force is never excluded in politics. It is a final but necessary resort in the event that negotiations fail. The political conservatism of which Montaigne has been accused expresses more a survival reaction than a genuine ideological position. According to him, civil wars make no sense politically because they are fought between people from the same country, the same culture. A good war is an honorable war fought between people of different countries and cultures. The religious conflict marks the failure of diplomacy and compromise, because the opposing parties are culturally too close to one another to be able to make any concessions to an “enemy” who speaks the same language and dresses in the same way. It is often easier to understand foreigners from distant lands than to imagine what happens in the heads of one’s neighbors. For example, Montaigne is astonished by the associations formed for denominational reasons and deplores the “disturbances in the neighborhood”39 that were reorganizing the society of his time: “I see from our example that human society holds and is knit together at any cost whatever. Whatever position you set men in, they pile up and arrange themselves by moving and crowding together.”⁴⁰

Despite the royal army’s victory, the siege of Castillon resulted in a slowing of the League’s initial momentum. However, their revenge was bloody and shocked Montaigne. The day after Castillon fell, the duke of Mayenne had a large number of the city’s inhabitants ruthlessly hanged. It was becoming increasingly difficult to commit oneself as a Catholic or a Protestant in Guyenne without being caught up in the infernal system of political reprisals. A declared advocate of moderation, Montaigne tried in his turn to put into practice his convictions in favor of a “golden mean.” Compared with the extreme positions taken by the League and some Huguenot leaders, the king’s party established itself as a lesser evil, as a “political necessity” to safeguard the state.⁴¹ Despite his veiled critiques of the king’s government, Montaigne saw no option other than a quick agreement between Henry III and Henry of Navarre. Now it was the League that determined events and set the political agenda. It could be said that after the siege of Castillon Montaigne realized that Mayenne, the military man, had prevailed over Matignon, the political man.⁴² The middle way and compromise had suddenly disappeared, and in the future it would be necessary to deal with the new forces in the arena.

For Montaigne, the siege of Castillon made it even harder to be both a Gascon and a Frenchman. The national stakes involved upset the regional political balance, and he felt himself caught between the principles of being a good neighbor and his desire to serve his king. A red line had been crossed, and he was witnessing, from a front-row seat, a distressing spectacle that was setting the kingdom ablaze in the name of a more correct faith. Mutinies were rife, and the royal army was falling apart as the siege went on. Commanders spent more time cultivating good relations with their soldiers and calming them down than they did setting up military strategies. Montaigne commented on the paradoxes of this siege: “The leader has more trouble within than without. It is for the commander to follow, court, and bend, for him alone to obey; all the rest is free and dissolute.”⁴³ In a disconcerting confusion, the parties to the conflict stuck to their positions but were unable to impose them militarily. At the end of August, nothing had been decided. It was then that an epidemic of plague struck the region. Montaigne testifies: “Both outside and inside my house I was greeted by a plague of the utmost virulence.”44 Was this the same epidemic that had raged in Bordeaux the preceding year and that had now reached Montaigne’s lands? Scholarly opinion is divided on this point. In any case, the unsanitary conditions of the siege of Castillon and the high density of soldiers in the region allowed the plague to spread like wildfire. The preceding summer, Montaigne had fled Bordeaux to hole up in his house. Now his château itself was no longer the safe refuge to which he had retired after handing his powers over to Bordeaux’s jurats. The epidemic that was ravaging his region was now becoming an immediate threat to him. Moreover, his land was no longer being cultivated, and he did not have sufficient income to maintain his usual way of life.

Montaigne decided to “escape” from his château. Frightened by the contagion, he hastily put a few possessions in a cart and departed his estate with his wife and a few servants:

I had an absurd situation to put up with: the sight of my house was frightful to me. All that was in it was unguarded and abandoned to anyone who wanted it. I, who am so hospitable, had a great deal of trouble finding a retreat for my family: a family astray, a source of fear to their friends and themselves, and of horror when they sought to settle, having to shift their abode as soon as one of the group began to feel pain in the end of his finger.⁴⁵

From August 1586 to February 15, 1587, Montaigne wandered the highways with his family serving “for six months of misery as guide to this caravan.”⁴⁶ The danger was too great to go south, and it is likely that Montaigne and his family headed for Poitou. Great poverty prevailed in the kingdom. Pierre de L’Estoile writes about the indigence in which he found France at that time: “Almost all over France, the poor in the countryside, dying of hunger, went to the fields in groups to cut kernels of wheat and eat them on the spot, so desperate was their hunger.”⁴⁷ Montaigne was then at an important turning point in his life. He had suddenly become a gentleman vagabond, dependent on his acquaintances for lodging: “As things stand, I live more than half by others’ favor, which is a harsh obligation. I do not want to owe my safety either to the kindness and benignity of the great, who approve of my obedience to the laws and my independence, or to the affable ways of my predecessors and myself.”⁴⁸

Abandoned by those close to him and by his political acquaintances, Montaigne experienced some of the darkest moments of his life. He had to rely on his friends’ kindness and his neighbors’ protection: “A thousand different kinds of troubles assailed me in single file; I would have suffered them more cheerfully in a single pile. I was already considering to whom among my friends I could commit a needy and unfortunate old age; after letting my eyes wander all over, I found myself stripped to my shirt.”49 Even his political protector, the marquis of Trans, seems to have abandoned him. His mentor may not have understood his withdrawal or his apparent indifference with regard to recent military developments. The tyrannical old man was known for his unbridled rages and may have been annoyed by the passivity, or even the cowardice, of the man whose political career he had made. In a long passage handwritten on the Bordeaux Copy, Montaigne sketches a not very flattering portrait of his patron, presenting him as “the most tempestuous master in France.”⁵⁰ Florimond de Raemond identified this man about whom Montaigne spoke in a rare moment of exasperation as the marquis of Trans.⁵¹

It is improbable that Montaigne was able to write his Essais during this forced peregrination. He still nourished a few political ambitions and kept an eye out for any opportunity that might present itself. Although discouraged by his failure as a negotiator at the end of his second term as mayor, he still hoped to be able to serve his king. An opportunity came up late in 1586. Confronted by the mounting power of the Guises, Henry III and Catherine de Medici tried once more to relaunch negotiations with Henry of Navarre. More than ever, they wanted to convince Henry of Navarre to abjure his religion and to return to the Court. The League was firmly established in Paris, and the king felt that his position in the capital had grown weaker. It was in this context that Catherine de Medici undertook her trip in Poitou to negotiate with the presumptive sovereign. A meeting between Navarre and Catherine took place in the château of Saint-Brice, near Cognac, on October 18, 1586. The queen mother was rather poorly received and was not able to convince Navarre to convert to the Catholic religion.⁵²

The negotiations conducted at Saint-Brice were described in the “letter from a French gentleman” published in the Mémoires de la Ligue (book VIII) printed in Paris in 1631. In this conversation, Navarre tells the queen mother that he has not obeyed the king for the past eighteen months and complains about the League’s hostilities. Catherine is said to have thereupon grown angry, having replied that the members of the League were all good French Catholics who feared being oppressed by the Huguenots. This confrontation made her realize that the negotiations with Navarre would take more time than she had anticipated. Some have doubted her intention of arriving at a rapprochement with Navarre. For example, the duchess of Uzès, one of the queen mother’s ladies-in-waiting, reported to Sully that during these discussions Catherine’s goal was to amuse Henry of Navarre “so that he would undertake no further operations, and that he would slow the advance of the foreign army.”⁵³ Despite this testimony that treats Catherine as a perpetual conspirator, the situation was alarming enough that her effort at conciliation can be taken seriously.

On December 3, Catherine informed her son that she had assembled princes and lords at Cognac to decide with them how she should proceed with Navarre to avoid a break with him. The discussions at Saint-Brice did not advance the royal cause because Navarre, banking on his military successes in the southwest, was not about to abjure his religion. His commanders had convinced him that they now had an army that would allow them to stand up to the Catholic troops. Navarre was evasive, declaring that he would have to confer with the Reformed churches. He was no longer inclined to negotiate with a king whose authority was challenged by the duke of Guise. On December 16, after three meetings, the parties finally agreed on a fragile truce of two and a half months. In fact, this negotiation had failed, and Navarre was already recruiting German mercenaries. This was a dead end, and Catherine de Medici tried to conceive bold political solutions to bring the two Henrys together. As is often the case, diplomacy was a matter of individuals more than one of ideas or programs. Tired of having failed in his negotiation with Navarre during the ceremony of the Knights of the Holy Spirit, Henry III announced that he would accept only the Catholic religion in his kingdom. He made ready to go to war, with the help of 8,000 Swiss soldiers.

Catherine did not want to give up her efforts and was prepared to receive new suggestions. Montaigne’s name arose on this occasion. His good relations with Henry of Navarre were an advantage. The queen mother was also aware that the Gascon gentleman was loyal to Henry III, and that the failure of the 1585 negotiations had resulted from external circumstances over which Montaigne had no control. Thus he could once again appear to be an ideal intermediary figure. Catherine had to find men who were experienced in political negotiation, who belonged to the Huguenot leader’s inner circle, and who could gradually push the idea of an abjuration in the name of national reconciliation. She told Turenne about her plan, “whom I also persuaded to do the right thing in this matter; I found him well-disposed to do so, it seems to me, and I believe that he will do what he can with regard to the king of Navarre and also the sister of Montmorency, his uncle.”54 On December 17, she appealed to several gentlemen in Guyenne to join Matignon’s army. But Montaigne was not in a position to join the royal cause; he was wandering around Poitou without sufficient funds to maintain men-at-arms. In 1586 and 1587, famine struck the Paris region, Normandy, the Loire valley, and the area around Lyon. This context was unfavorable to a diplomatic mission and so Catherine came up with a better way for Montaigne to serve the king. He was not expected to bear arms, because he had other qualities that were more useful to the royal cause. Perhaps that is how, on several occasions, Montaigne’s military nonengagement with Matignon should also be interpreted.

The political setback at Saint-Brice notwithstanding, Catherine de Medici obtained a short truce. It was precisely at that time that Montaigne reappeared in politics. The queen mother imagined a role as an “interpreter” (truchement) for this Gascon gentleman who belonged to both Henry III’s chamber and Henry of Navarre’s, an appreciable advantage that could facilitate an accord between the two monarchs and thus contribute to a lasting peace. On December 31, 1586, Catherine de Medici dictated the following letter to her treasurer:

Me Raoul Feron, my treasurer and general tax collector, because I am writing to Montaigne to tell him and his wife to come to see me, I wish and command you to provide, in addition to the one hundred crowns that you already gave him a few days ago, another hundred and fifty crowns, partly to replace one of the horses of his carriage, and partly to cover the extraordinary expense of traveling overland and also to purchase a few clothes that they need; and when you have receipts from Montaigne for the sum of a hundred and fifty crowns, it will be paid [to] you and credited to your account without difficulty.55

Some scholars have expressed reservations concerning the identification of the author of the Essais with the Montaigne mentioned in this letter, suggesting that he might instead be one of the queen mother’s secretaries, François Montaigne. However, this secretary was no longer employed by Catherine in late 1586. The list of the domestic officers of the queen mother’s household,⁵⁶ from 1547 to 1585, confirms that François Montaigne served as her secretary, but only between 1571 and 1578.⁵⁷ We have a letter from him written later, but it is a private document that has nothing to do with his service to Catherine, which had ended eight years earlier. Moreover, the amount of the travel costs proposed by Catherine (250 crowns, that is, 750 livres) was significantly higher than the annual salary of a secretary, which was set at 400 livres per year.⁵⁸ On the other hand, this sum would not be extravagant if it was to be paid to a gentleman.⁵⁹ It is true that Catherine does not use the title “lord” (sieur or Monsieur), which was always appropriate in correspondence with a gentleman—a practice required by etiquette—but the details of this letter nonetheless make it possible to identify Montaigne as its addressee. He had fled his château and had been roaming the roads with his family since September. He declared that he was short of money at this time, and complained about being dependent on others’ favors. Without resources and in great distress, the author of the Essais did not cut a fine figure. There is nothing surprising in the fact that he had to replace one of his horses and dress properly in order to present himself before the queen mother. Montaigne’s wife was also asked to come (which would be unusual in the case of a secretary’s wife) because she was accompanying him. If we decide that it was Montaigne, we can then infer that the goal of this meeting Catherine desired was to entrust him with a mission as an intermediary seeking a rapprochement with Henry of Navarre.60 Montaigne had no fresh horses, and though he was not in rags, we can understand why he might have asked Catherine for money to travel to the meeting he had just been ordered to attend.

The letter addressed to Raoul Féron, the queen mother’s tax collector, is part of a series of missives sent by Catherine on the same day. These messages show the extensive diplomatic activity the queen mother deployed to persuade Henry of Navarre to give up the Protestant faith. On December 31, 1586, she sent a messenger named Verac to inform Matignon of “the state that we are in here with respect to my negotiation in favor of peace.”⁶¹ Catherine’s letter was intended to ask for instructions from her son to authorize her to send new emissaries to Henry III, Montaigne probably being one of them. Thanks to his past experience as a negotiator, Montaigne might have been chosen by Catherine to restart a dialogue with Navarre after the semifailure of the discussions at Sainte-Foy. She had persuaded herself that an entente between the king of Navarre and her son was desirable to pull the rug from under the feet of the dukes of Lorraine. The name “Montaigne” is mentioned in another letter sent to Henry III, dated January 18: “In accord with your intention I have told and commanded the lord of Malicorne what you want done with Montaigne; I will also assist in this endeavor and in any other matter concerning your service, in accord with your intention, in this province.”⁶² The phrase “in this province” (es province de deça) refers to Guyenne, which worried the king, and a secretary could not have played the role of negotiator.

At first, Henry III seems to have accepted Montaigne’s mediation, but in the end Catherine preferred to make use of Jean de Chourses, lord of Malicorne. When the queen mother presented her plan to Henry III in greater detail, the king forbade her, in a letter written in late January 1587, to reestablish contact with the Huguenots through “persons who were their confidants.”⁶³ Among these “confidants” we must count Montaigne, who was well acquainted with the king of Navarre because he had lodged him at his home. Henry III mistrusted Gascon gentlemen, whom he thought too close to Henry of Navarre. Montaigne was certainly disappointed by the king’s decision, and when the reply was received, he went back to his château. The mission was compromised and the name “Montaigne” disappeared from Catherine de Medici’s correspondence. The plague epidemic had abated, and Montaigne could go home safely. The queen mother headed back to Paris at the same time, that is, in March 1587, not without having informed Montaigne of Henry III’s reluctance to negotiate with Navarre through intermediaries: another disappointment for Montaigne and another setback for Catherine de Medici.

After roaming the roads of France for six months—from September 1586 to March 1587—Montaigne returned home and resumed composing the third book of the Essais. He made many additions to the first two books—about 13 percent of the whole text. Between 1582 and 1588, he spent at most two years “working” on his Essais. After an initial period of writing, from August 1585 to July 1586, Montaigne put the final touches on the thirteen chapters of the third book and the additions he had made to the first two books between February 1587 and December 1587. The year 1587 had given the Essais an unexpected reorientation, and Montaigne was now planning to have his book printed in Paris. His Essais were going to allow him to join a select and limited group of European humanists. It was in this perspective that at the beginning of 1588 Montaigne began a correspondence with Justus Lipsius, who was then residing in the Low Countries. We have two letters from the famous humanist addressed to Montaigne and dated April 15 and August 30, 1588. In May 1587 Montaigne bought a Bible and, in early summer, read and annotated Quintus Curtius.

In a letter written in June 1587, Montaigne reminded Matignon of his existence by asking him to grant a safe-conduct to Madame de Brigueux, the wife of the governor of Beaugency. He ended his letter by asking the mayor of Bordeaux and lieutenant governor of Guyenne if he could do anything for him: “If not, at least this letter will have served to bring me back to your memory, from which I may have been dislodged by my small merit and the long time that I have not had the honor of seeing you.”64 On July 29, 1587, Montaigne noted in his almanac the loss of his neighbors and patrons, the three sons of the marquis of Trans—Louis, count of Gurson; Gaston, viscount of Meilles; and François-Phoebus, knight—all of whom died at the battle of Moncrabeau.^vi Although they were Catholics, they had fought alongside the king of Navarre. Montaigne was deeply marked by these deaths, which reminded him of the horror of the Wars of Religion.

The League was more active than ever, and had the advantage militarily. The Huguenots had obtained the support of 40,000 German mercenaries recruited in the Empire and paid by the queen of England and the king of Denmark. This “Huguenot league” comprised chiefly of German soldiers had been created to provide aid to the Huguenots in Aquitaine. Strengthened by this foreign support, Henry of Navarre won at Coutras, on October 20, 1587, his first great victory in the eighth War of Religion.⁶⁵ The royal army was routed, and more than 2,000 soldiers lost their lives, including 300 nobles. The duke of Joyeuse and his brother, Claude, baron of Saint-Sauveur, were killed in this battle, which had a great effect on people in the southwest. As a courtesy, Navarre sent a letter of condolences to Matignon, who was a distant relative of Joyeuse. In this letter, Navarre declares that he makes no distinction between “good, native-born Frenchmen” and “the supporters and adherents of the League,” adding that “at least those who have remained in my hands will testify to the courtesy they have found in me and in my servants who have taken them.”66

The Battle of Coutras rebalanced the forces involved and gave Montaigne’s political career a new breath of air, because it was more necessary than ever to negotiate with Henry of Navarre, who now had gained the military advantage. But ironically, the initiative for the negotiations now fell to Navarre. Although Henry III did not want to negotiate through third parties, the Battle of Coutras had changed the power relationship between Protestants and Catholics. The Huguenots’ military victory aroused serious concern in the capital, where the people feared the arrival of the German mercenaries. The king appealed to the princes of Lorraine to defend the capital and protect him. Henry III no longer inspired confidence, and only the duke of Guise looked like a liberator. He was summoned in the spring of 1588 and made his entrance into Paris in broad daylight, acclaimed by the people. Hurt and worried, Henry III took refuge in the Louvre palace. Loyal to his king, Montaigne then thought an agreement between the king and Navarre could keep the League from seizing power. Henry of Navarre’s second visit to Montaigne’s château, three years after the first, restored a political role to Montaigne, who now appeared to be an inevitable negotiator. We can suppose that in dealing with Henry III and Catherine de Medici Montaigne emphasized his friendship with Navarre’s mistress, Diane d’Andoins, countess of Guiche, who offered him direct access to the king of Navarre.

On October 23, 1587, three days after his victory at Coutras, Henry of Navarre dined and slept at Montaigne’s château while he was crossing the region to carry the twenty-two banners taken at Coutras to his mistress, who was living in Béarn. Montaigne did not mention this second visit in his almanac, but we can sense the importance of this meeting. It was probably during this encounter, when he was still intoxicated by his recent victory, that Navarre decided to call upon Montaigne to propose a negotiated peace to the king. Now it was Navarre’s turn to take the initiative in the negotiations with Henry III, and he asked Montaigne to be his envoy and intermediary. This request was advantageous for Montaigne, because it suddenly made him indispensable. If the king had not thought it useful to retain his services after Catherine de Medici’s proposal, the Protestants now saw in him an ideal negotiator. Resurfacing in politics thanks to the Protestant leaders was hardly an unpleasant prospect for Montaigne. What neither Henry III nor Catherine de Medici had been able to give him—an ambassadorship in Rome in 1580 or a role as an official negotiator ten months earlier—now suddenly became possible through the opposite party. Montaigne’s wait-and-see strategy, which had been so heavily criticized in the preceding period, now finally bore fruit.

Secret Mission

Catherine de Medici failed to make Montaigne an intermediary between Henry III and the Huguenots, so now it was Henry of Navarre’s turn to make use of Montaigne’s services. Matignon approved of Navarre’s initiative, because he had a good opinion of the presumptive sovereign and still believed in an agreement between the two Henrys as a way to stop the League. This proposal of mediation was also encouraged by Diane d’Andoins, who was fond of Montaigne. A descendant of a very old family that had been connected since 1444 with the house of the Foix—through the marriage of Bernard of Cauna and Isabelle of Béarn, the daughter of Jean I—Diane d’Andoins, known as Corisande, had been flattered by the attention Montaigne gave her in his dedication of one of the chapters of his Essais in 1580. A combination of circumstances in Henry of Navarre’s love life thus allowed Montaigne to make a political comeback. To this must be added the more political calculation of one of the Belle Corisande’s friends, Cyprien de Poiferré, lord of Varène, who protected Diane d’Andoins’s interests and who had transmitted La Boétie’s sonnets to Montaigne in the early 1570s.67

In 1587, Diane d’Andoins had a considerable influence on Henry of Navarre, and through her Montaigne enjoyed privileged access to him. Montaigne had previously seen the Belle Corisande on the occasion of a meeting with Navarre between May 5 and May 10, 1584. Shortly before, he had expressed concern about her health. We recall that, after so much attention to her, Diane d’Andoins had not failed to propose Montaigne’s name to present her lover’s point of view and political proposals at the Court of Henry III. In 1587 she continued to enjoy a notable influence on Henry of Navarre. The foreign diplomats posted in Paris were not taken in and rapidly understood that the Belle Corisande was a woman of great ambition who “governeth the king of Navarre as she listeth.”⁶⁸ The English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, considered Montaigne himself “a great favorite” of the countess of Guiche.

In order to thwart the League’s ambitions, a proposal for a reconciliation—or at least a political agreement—between Henry of Navarre and Henry III was worked out in October 1587. This required Navarre to agree to “Catholicize” himself, as Lucinge put it. Montaigne had a role to play in these difficult negotiations, and the task pleased him. In early 1588, the conflict between Henry III and Henry of Navarre was no longer religious in nature—at least in the sense of the Huguenots/Catholics opposition of the early Wars of Religion. The League was now considered a common enemy and represented a still more pressing danger for the king and Catherine de Medici. Navarre was delighted by the political orientation that could only benefit him in the meantime. In a letter to his mistress, he observes that “the League is very active. This is so much leisure for us.”69 Montaigne’s trip to the capital in early 1588 is situated in this political context favorable to Henry of Navarre. Montaigne was playing the key role, and that is how he was perceived by foreign observers and the Protestant leaders.

Thus Montaigne set out for Paris in January 1588. His château was about 550 kilometers from the capital, or about eight to ten days’ travel on horseback with baggage. He expected to be busy with his affairs, but this stay in Paris was also to give him an opportunity to deposit a greatly expanded edition of his Essais with a printer of the palace, Abel L’Angelier. During this trip, Montaigne was accompanied by Commander Odet de Thorigny, Matignon’s son, who was supposed to introduce him more easily at the Court and also to ensure his security between Bordeaux and the capital. There is no reason to think that Pierre de Brach traveled with them, as has been claimed. We know that the poet from Bordeaux went to Paris at the same time, but he probably arrived in the capital a few days or weeks after Montaigne. No mention is made of him in the account of an incident that occurred while Montaigne and his group were approaching Paris. It is true that in one of his books, Brach dedicated a poem to Thorigny—which led some specialists on Montaigne to think that he might have made his acquaintance during this trip—but Brach could just as well have met Thorigny in Bordeaux under other circumstances. As for Montaigne, he was “on a mission,” assigned to transmit Navarre’s latest proposals to the king. He was once again playing the role of an extraordinary ambassador—this time for the king of Navarre—a diplomatic function that had escaped him seven years earlier during his stay in Rome. His visit to the Court was in no way a pleasure trip and did not go unnoticed.

In a letter dated January 24, 1588, Duplessis-Mornay, one of the king of Navarre’s counselors, informed his wife that “Monsieur de Montaigne has gone to the Court. We are told that we will soon be sought out in peace by neutral persons.”⁷⁰ This “neutral person” was none other than Montaigne, who succeeded in projecting the image of an impartial, honest intermediary. The description of him as a dispassionate negotiator marks a major reversal of the situation in relation to the orders Henry III gave his mother a year earlier, during the discussions at Sainte-Foy. Montaigne could once again begin to imagine a “nameless office”⁷¹ conceived specially for him, in the long tradition of extraordinary ambassadorships that he had dreamed about in the 1570s.

In reality, Montaigne had more talent for “interpreting” than for negotiating. He did not mince words and was famous for his frankness. For example, he declares that, “In Paris, I speak a language somewhat different than at Montaigne.”72 Estienne Pasquier described a man “who took pleasure in being pleasantly unpleasant,”⁷³ an unusual style for a negotiator, it has to be admitted. But it was a style he had been able to construct for himself over the years. His “frank speech” (libre parole) might have repelled some people, and it remains to be seen whether frankness is really an asset for a man who has political pretensions. Despite this real or imaginary quality, Montaigne had all the attributes required to be a valuable advisor to Henry of Navarre. He was sufficiently familiar with the political situation in Guyenne to be able to convey Navarre’s proposals in the capricious context of the political pressures the Huguenot leaders put on their pretender to the French throne. A significant number of nobles in the southwest felt caught between their obligation to be loyal to the king and the desire to see their interests better represented on the national level. The political network the Protestants had set up in the region over the past few years had revealed to Navarre new opportunities—both political and economic—that led him to think on the regional scale more than on the national scale. Montaigne was well acquainted with this frame of mind characteristic of Guyenne and Aquitaine.

A week later, on February 1, 1588, Stafford reported to his superior, the principal secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, the imminent arrival at the Court of a gentleman on a secret mission: “The news arrived today that the son of the Marshal de Matignon is coming here, and is expected at any moment; that he is bringing with him a certain Montigny [sic], a very wise man of the King of Navarre, to whom he has given his word to present to the King. I have never in my life heard anyone speak of this man.”⁷⁴ Stafford clearly associates Montaigne with Navarre’s entourage and considers him his envoy. Stafford was an occasional secret agent of Spain and an informer for the duke of Guise, from whom he received 3,000 crowns in recompense for the information provided. Montaigne’s arrival in Paris was seen as bad news for the Spanish party, and people distrusted this Gascon gentleman little known at the Court. The Catholic extremists disapproved of an agreement between the king and Navarre, fearing that an abjuration of the Protestant faith might be merely temporary and part of a strategy that would allow the Huguenots to accede to the French throne. To prevent any such entente between the two princes, the League had strengthened its presence in the capital and succeeded in putting the bourgeoisie and common people of Paris on their side.

At two days’ ride from the capital, Montaigne and Thorigny were stopped and robbed in the forest of Villebois, not far from Orléans, by a band of “villainous murdering soldiers of these days,”⁷⁵ masked men whose leader, “a certain Matois,” called “le Lignou”⁷⁶—and not “le Ligueur,” as many commentators have thought—is associated with a Huguenot in the correspondence between Lucinge and the lawyer Mondragon: “In Poitou the Huguenots stole the baggage of Count Toriginy, the Marshal de Matignon’s son, and took prisoner a few gentlemen among those who were accompanying the body of the late Mr de Joieuse, which was being taken to this city to bury him in the superb and sumptuous tomb that the King has had made for him.”77 In fact, the infamous Captain Lignou was not in the pay of any party. A text from that period describes him as a bandit, “neither for one [Henry III] nor the other [Henry of Navarre], but for himself alone.”⁷⁸ Montaigne was captured by the same brigand who had already taken Barrault and La Rochefoucauld prisoner. His safe-conduct had hardly helped him travel in safety. This Lignou had the annoying habit of roaming the region with his band of robbers and taking hostages, with the goal of holding them at ransom, gentlemen who were traveling the main roads between Tours and Paris. Montaigne adds that he was more affected than the others, because he was carrying all his money on him. Although his “papers and belongings” were not returned to him, we can imagine that he managed to keep the manuscript of the Essais from his aggressors. The count of Thorigny lost fifty crowns and various objects and articles of clothing.

Montaigne was sequestered by the bandits for several days, and he reported this disagreeable event in a letter to Matignon:

My lord, you will have been told that our baggage was taken from us in the forest of Villebois, before our eyes, and then, after much confusion and delay, the capture was deemed unjust by Monsieur the Prince [Condé]. However, we did not dare to reveal our intentions, because of our uncertainty regarding the safety of our persons, which should have been guaranteed by our safe-conducts. It was Le Lignou who captured us, the same who took Monsieur de Barrault and de La Rochefoucauld. The storm hid me hardest, because I had my money in my box. I recovered nothing, and most of my papers and belongings remained in their hands. We did not see Monsieur the Prince. Monsieur the Count of Thorigny lost some fifty crowns, a silver ewer (aiguière), and a few minor articles.⁷⁹

In the same letter, Montaigne informs Matignon of the latest political developments: “The trip to Normandy has been postponed. The king [Henry III] has sent Messieurs De Bellièvre and La Guiche [Diane d’Andoins] to Monsieur de Guise to summon them to the Court. We will be there Thursday.”⁸⁰ Montaigne was confident and had resumed his duties, considering himself to have Navarre’s mandate for a mission of the greatest importance. He was finally released when the brigands learned that Thorigny and Montaigne were on a mission to negotiate an agreement between Henry III and Henry of Navarre. The prey the brigands had captured was a little too big for their nets, and they decided to let them go without demanding ransom. This incident seems to be different from the one reported in the chapter “Of physiognomy.”

After an extraordinary journey, Navarre’s envoys and Matignon finally arrived in Paris on February 18. Montaigne had stayed in the capital on many occasions, and in his Essais he declares that he is French only through this great city. For a gentleman, Paris, which already had a population of almost 300,000 at that date, meant mainly the Court, a world of intrigues where rumors flew around. Spies in the service of the English and Spanish were numerous there.

Thus on February 20, Stafford sent a report to his protector, William Cecil, Lord Treasurer of England:

I have spoken with milord the Secretary (Walsingham) in a coded message—I cannot know whether he will show it—about the arrival here of a certain Montaigne on behalf of the King of Navarre, sent with Matignon’s son; and how all the servants of the King of Navarre here are jealous of his arrival, because on the one hand he does not have to address them, and on the other hand they do not know anything at all about the reasons for his trip; and moreover (I can write this to your Lordship), because I know that it will not be spoken of, I beg you, they suspect all the more that he is a great favorite of the countess of Bishe [Guiche], who governs, it is said, the King of Navarre as she wishes; and who is a very dangerous woman; and who is spoiling the King of Navarre’s reputation throughout the world; for he is completely mad about her, as people say. They fear, and so do I, that he [Montaigne] has come to discuss some special matter with the King, without the religious knowing about it; for certainly no one knows anything, and it is believed that neither Du Plessis [Mornay] nor Viscount Turenne, nor any one else of that religion knows anything about it. Besides, the man in question is a Catholic, a very capable man; he was once mayor of Bordeaux, and is not a man to accept the assignment to bring the King something that does not please him. And the Marshal de Matignon would not have undertaken to have him escorted by his son if he had not been very sure that his message would please, and not displease, the King. I have not written without some purpose in my long letter delivered by M. Hacklytt that I feared that the King of Navarre might find himself forced, whether he will or not, to satisfy the King; which I would not willingly see happen without the Queen’s knowledge, and without her having had, as it were, her part in the affair.81

Montaigne and his traveling companions arrived in Paris in the greatest secrecy. Thorigny and Montaigne were quickly received by the king. On February 25, a letter from Lucinge confirms that “the King continues to prepare his trip to Poitou and Guyenne for this spring, and on the other hand because the Biscayne [Henry of Navarre] is holding his assembly in Montauban to decide what he should do, and while waiting to see what he decides, the King has delayed La Guiche’s [Diane d’Andoins] and Bellièvre’s missions; they will not leave to find the Guisard until it is clearer what Navarre wants to do for his religion.”82

We begin to understand better what the king was asking of Navarre: if he agreed to convert, Henry III was prepared to visit him in Guyenne. This gesture would make it possible to send a strong message concerning the legitimate heir to the French throne. However, in light of the events that followed over the coming weeks, this plan was quickly abandoned. Montaigne’s extraordinary embassy was doomed to failure because Navarre had no intention of abandoning his faith, despite his mistress’s recommendations.

To the spies and foreign diplomats Montaigne seemed to be a pawn on a complex chessboard. He was thought to be manipulated by or in the pay of Navarre. In reality, he escaped the control of Navarre’s Court because, as Stafford stresses, this “capable” man was not one to defend positions of which he did not personally approve. The Spanish ambassador in Paris, Bernardino de Mendoza, was not deceived either, and on February 25 he also hastened to recount a Gascon gentleman’s suspicious visit to the Court: “And here, they say, has arrived Monsieur de Montaigne, who is a Catholic gentleman and a follower of the man from Béarn under the direction of Matignon; and because those who handle the affairs of the man from Béarn do not know the reason why he has come, they suspect that he is on some secret mission.”⁸³ Thus Montaigne really was on a secret mission, and those close to Navarre new nothing about the exact content of the message he was conveying to the king. Mendoza moved in the hushed milieu of spies, diplomats, and other official or unofficial negotiators in Paris. He had served as ambassador to London in 1578 before being expelled for lacking in respect toward the queen of England. Having long experience with political subtleties and diplomatic negotiations, Mendoza arrived in Paris as the Spanish king’s ambassador in mid-October 1584. His task was to avoid at all cost a reconciliation between the Guises and Henry III.⁸⁴ And on this point, every day brought news that made an entente between Navarre and the king less likely. On February 18, Mary Stuart, François II’s widow, was executed by Queen Elizabeth of England after eighteen years in captivity. This news, which was spreading among members of the League at the time Montaigne arrived in Paris to present what was then considered a Protestant plot, increased the animosity against Henry III, who was called an “Englishman of the Garter”^vii and a tyrant.⁸⁵

On February 28, after obtaining additional information, Mendoza provided new details regarding Montaigne:

Monsieur de Montaigne, about whom I wrote to your Majesty in one of my letters of the 25th, is considered to be a man of understanding, though somewhat addlepated. They tell me that he controls the countess of La Guisa [Diane d’Andoins], who is a very beautiful lady and lives with the sister of the man from Béarn, since she is the brother’s lady. They say that the man from Béarn has dealings with him, and therefore they judge that he [Montaigne] is entrusted with some commission and that the King wants to make use of Montaigne so that he [Montaigne] may intercede with the said countess of La Guisa, that she may persuade the man from Béarn to come to what the King desires.86

Henry III’s counterproposals were transmitted to Navarre by François de Montesquiou, lord of Sainte Colombe, who was sent to the Court of Nérac. Henry III, under pressure from the Guises, once again urged Navarre to immediately abjure his faith. In a letter to his mistress, Navarre discusses the difficult situation in which he found himself: “The Devil is on the loose. I am to be pitied, and [it] is a miracle that I am not succumbing to the burden. If I weren’t a Huguenot, I’d become a Turk! Ah! The violent trials by which my brain is sounded! I cannot fail soon to be either a mad man or a clever one…. All the torments to which a mind can be subjected are constantly inflicted upon mine.”⁸⁷ Although Navarre proposed to Henry III that they make a common front against the League, he was not ready for any compromise in matters of religion, not being able to “silence his conscience,” as he put it.

Montaigne’s arrival in Paris came at a critical time in the relations among France, England, and Spain. After his initial career in local and regional politics, Montaigne now found himself literally propelled onto the international scene. A series of particular, more personal circumstances, such as the growth of the duke of Guise’s power and the new power relationship favorable to Navarre, made the author of the Essais an inevitable intermediary in 1588. Because he knew the two Henrys personally without ever having openly sided with either of them against the other, Montaigne was able to serve as a relatively neutral intermediary. The king was greatly weakened, because his position was considered ambivalent. He had almost no room for maneuver with respect to the Guises, but he still persisted in trying to satisfy both sides. Starting in March 1588, a test of strength between the duke of Guise and Henry III began. Lucinge tells us that henceforth neither the duke of Guise nor Mayenne was willing to disarm. The negotiations were once more at an impasse, and the king emerged from this situation even weaker than before. The people were concerned to see foreign troops entering the kingdom. On the point of rioting, Paris finally fell under the control of the League. Montaigne had few options and decided once again to remain faithful to his king. Little inclined to take conflictual positions, he had long since acquired the habit of siding with the established government. A passage in the 1580 edition of the Essais comments on his natural inclination to be a “follower”: “Thus I am fit only to follow, and I let myself be carried away easily by the crowd. I do not trust my own powers enough to undertake to command, to guide, or even to counsel; I am very glad to find my steps traced out by others. If I must run the risk of an uncertain choice, I would rather it should be under some man who is more sure of his opinions and wedded to them than I am to mine.”88 On the Bordeaux Copy, Montaigne crossed out “or even to counsel,” thus removing all trace of his experience in this matter. He was going to put into practice, once again, this character trait that made of him a loyal and devoted servant of the king, whom he followed not by political choice, but simply because it was the duty of a man of his rank and status.

“I Buy Printers in Guienne, Elsewhere They Buy Me”

In early 1588, Montaigne and Pierre de Brach planned to go to Paris to work on their literary and publishing projects. Montaigne was to see to the publication of his Essais, augmented by a third book (thirteen chapters) and “six hundred additions to the first two books,” while Brach was thinking about collecting verses by Paris poets for the Tombeau d’Aymée, a volume paying homage to his wife, who had died shortly before. In the middle of the excitement of his diplomatic and political activity, while he was an active participant at the heart of complex negotiations, Montaigne was therefore also busy having a new edition of his book published by Abel L’Angelier, one of the most famous publisher-booksellers of the Palace. However, as we have suggested, everything indicates that Brach did not accompany Montaigne in February 1588, but rather arrived in Paris shortly before. The two men had ambitions as authors, and the capital had attracted them to carry out their respective publishing plans.

Pierre de Brach might have suggested to Montaigne that a move from Bordeaux to Paris, to find a new publisher, would ensure greater visibility and better distribution for his book. Longtime friends, Montaigne and Pierre de Brach both came from the robin milieu, and both loved poetry. Brach had once dedicated a poem to Montaigne and probably suggested that he talk to the publisher who had brought out his Poèmes in 1576. The common publishing route the two writers followed has already been mentioned, and although to date no publishing contract between Montaigne and L’Angelier has been found, the author of the Essais mentions that his relations with publishers had changed since 1588.89 Whereas in 1580 he had bought the paper on which his Essais were printed, in 1588 he was offered much more favorable conditions. Like many authors of this period, he was not paid, but he did receive a few free copies of the book that he could distribute by himself to make his book known or to offer to his friends—a very widespread practice. Several extant copies of this 1588 edition bear the mark of having been sent or given to friends or acquaintances.

Simon Millanges and Abel L’Angelier had commercial agreements. Thus Brach had his Imitations—translations of Tasso’s Aminta and the Olympia episode from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso—published by Millanges in 1584, and L’Angelier republished the book under the title Aminte, l’Olimpe in 1584–85.90 The title page stipulated: “In Bordeaux, by S. Millanges. Ordinary printer of the King. They are sold in Paris by Abel L’Angelier.” Similarly, a contract signed on October 19, 1579, between François de Foix-Candale and Simon Millanges indicates that of the 150 copies printed in Millanges’s workshop in Bordeaux, 140 were to be sold in Paris and Lyon. In 1574, Foix-Candale had published with Millanges a French translation of fragments of Hermes Trismegistus. He had a second, revised and expanded, edition printed by the same printer in 1579, before it was brought out again by L’Angelier on the Paris market in 1587. Millanges had been working with his Paris colleague since 1584, and several titles published by Millanges thus passed to L’Angelier in accord with a distribution agreement between the two publishers. Montaigne’s Essais were probably ceded to L’Angelier in the framework of this arrangement.

After the relatively local publication of the first edition of the Essais in 1580 and their republication in 1582 by Simon Millanges in Bordeaux, Montaigne decided to have his book printed in Paris by Abel L’Angelier. His political ambitions required a broader readership. L’Angelier allowed Montaigne to acquire greater fame and to move closer to the Court and to political power. Located at the “first pillar of the great hall of the Palace,” L’Angelier had become a university-certified bookseller in 1581. He had good contacts in Aquitaine and counted among his authors several scholars and poets from the Bordeaux region: Pierre de Brach, François de Foix-Candale, Florimond de Raemond, Blaise de Monluc, and Jean de Sponde. L’Angelier’s privilege (authorization to print) for the publication of the Essais of 1588 was valid for nine years, a longer-than-average period at the time.

The edition L’Angelier printed in 1588 should logically be the fourth, and not the fifth, as the title page indicates. Much has been written about the famous “missing” edition of the Essais. A third edition, with a title page bearing the name of Jean Richer, had been published in Paris a year earlier. Composed on the basis of the 1582 text, it does not contain the third book. This Paris edition of 1587 is the least known of those that appeared during Montaigne’s lifetime. Some have wondered what role the author played in its production and whether it was authorized by him or by Simon Millanges, who still held the first printing privilege granted in May 1579 for a period of eight years starting from the date of publication. The 1587 edition was printed without a privilege, just after the expiration of Millanges’s privilege. No mention is made of a possible transfer or sharing of the Essais between Millanges and Richer—also a university-certified bookseller from 1572 to 1599 who was considered a partisan of the royal cause. It is probable that Richer took over, with Millanges’s agreement, the remainder of a pirated Rouen edition (which may be the missing edition) that had been seized by the authorities. Richer is then supposed to have put this counterfeit edition on sale after adding a new title page, as was often done at the time.

Most of the known copies of this 1587 edition of the Essais have modern bindings, and all the copies with sixteenth-century bindings (three in number) have the peculiarity of having a title page that has been replaced or is a facsimile, or is even handwritten. It has been suggested91 that Richer had planned to reissue the 1587 edition with an intermediate title, a plan he abandoned when the L’Angelier edition of 1588 was announced. There is another possible explanation, which takes into account the replaced title pages: the 1587 edition might have been instead a reissue of an earlier edition in which, in accord with a practice common at the time, the original title page was replaced by a title page bearing the new date when it was put on sale, in this case 1587. The “rejuvenated” earlier edition would be none other than the so-called missing edition, the one that was probably printed in Rouen, around 1583–84, and which La Croix du Maine mentions in his Bibliothèque françoise.⁹² At that time printers in Rouen had the unfortunate habit of publishing pirated editions that they sold in France, the Low Countries, Belgium, and Switzerland. It would therefore be logical to connect this fourth edition of the Essais published in Rouen with the Paris edition of 1587. This hypothesis explains why Montaigne considered the L’Angelier edition of 1588 the “fifth” edition of his Essais. In that case, the 1587 edition, traditionally seen as the fourth edition, would constitute the missing link between the “second edition” published in Bordeaux in 1582, the pirated edition printed in Rouen in 1583 or 1584, and the Paris edition of 1588.

In 1588, Montaigne had a different idea of his reader and his book. The presence of a third book and numerous additions had practically doubled the size of the Essais, which could no longer be contained in a single octavo volume. The growing prestige of Montaigne’s book now required that it be printed in the quarto format usually reserved for “more academic” books. In addition, the ample margins of L’Angelier’s edition—at a time when paper was the main cost involved in producing a book—made it look like a semiluxury volume. For the occasion, Montaigne reread attentively his preface to the reader. However, he made no major change and altered only one word: “aucune” replaced “nulle.” The most important correction changed the date from March 1, 1580, to June 12, 1588. Thus Montaigne updated his introductory text to make it correspond to the new publication date, but giving up the first date also marks a disillusionment with regard to the reader he had envisaged in 1580. Montaigne chose not to modify his preface to the reader, knowing full well that the 1588 edition was something very different from the book Millanges had published for him eight years earlier. Thus he deliberately opted for continuity, despite the development of his situation and the four years he had spent as mayor of Bordeaux. On the political level, Montaigne found himself almost back where he had started. Nonetheless, his hope for a diplomatic career had resurfaced since his secret mission to Paris, and for that reason the king remained his privileged reader, even if the additions written between the summer of 1585 and December 1587 demonstrate a certain distance taken from politics and public service. In the brief window of professional opportunity that presented itself in the spring of 1588, Montaigne once again had the feeling of being able to serve his king and play a political role at the highest level. Even though it had a new date, the Au lecteur remained valid and thus did not need to be changed.

The form and content of Montaigne’s book had been revamped, and after 1588 it no longer had anything to do with the Essais of 1580. Following his service as mayor of Bordeaux and the failure of his first negotiation between Henry III and Navarre, Montaigne had not thought it best to pursue the military and diplomatic developments in his first chapters. On the contrary, he had written much more about himself, his experiences, his personal judgments, even his eating habits and other details of his private life. After a negative experience in politics, the third book of the Essais reinforced what Montaigne had already announced in the preface to the reader of 1580: the Essais were now a more personal book (the book of Michel de Montaigne) and reflected political and literary itineraries that intersected but could not be superimposed.

On the material level, thirteen chapters in the first book of the Essais have been slightly modified with respect to the 1580 edition. However, several chapters include more substantial additions that make them longer than they were in 1580. Many chapters remain unchanged and are still relatively short—for example, “Of prompt or slow speech” (I: 10), “Ceremony of interviews between kings” (I: 13), “We should meddle soberly with judging divine ordinances” (I: 32), “Fortune is often met in the path of reason” (I: 34), “Of sumptuary laws” (I: 43), and “Of smells” (I: 55). These little-developed or slightly modified chapters, which number twenty, are drowned in the mass of the 107 chapters composing the three books of the Essais and are dominated by the big chapters, such as “Of the education of children” (I: 26), “Of friendship” (I: 28), “Of cannibals” (I: 31), “Of books” (II: 10), “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (II: 12), “Of presumption” (II: 17), “Of repentance” (III: 2), “Of three kinds of association” (III: 3), “On some verses of Virgil” (III: 5), “Of coaches” (III: 6), “Of vanity” (III: 9), “Of physiognomy” (III: 12) or “Of experience” (III: 13).viii

On the other hand, a small number of chapters, even though very short in the 1580 edition, have been greatly expanded in this new edition of the Essais. For example, “We taste nothing pure” (II: 20), which covered less than a page in 1580, is considerably longer in L’Angelier’s 1588 edition. The same goes for “Of the greatness of Rome” (II: 24), which was very short in 1580; it was revised for the 1588 edition, which includes a new quotation and two short additions, but a development that doubles the length of the chapter was added after 1588, in the margins of Bordeaux Copy. Other chapters, such as “Of evil means employed to a good end” (II: 23), were enriched with Latin quotations, but no new commentaries or developments were added to them in 1588. Apart from the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” which Montaigne continued to expand to a lesser degree, with respect to the appearance of the third book, the remaining ninety-four chapters in the first two books were on the whole left as they were. What should we think about this rather surprising “evolution” of the already existing chapters between 1580 and 1588?

After 1580, the work done on the chapters in the first book was far from even, and Montaigne “forgot” or even gave up on several chapters. And yet these short chapters that were present in the 1580 edition and were very little revised in 1588 have a considerable political significance. Their simple existence (with names that reveal Montaigne’s main interests between 1572 and 1580) allow us to better define the publishing goal of the first edition of the Essais and the way in which this goal changed considerably in the course of the following years and the successive editions. We might wonder why Montaigne neglected certain chapters after 1580. These forgotten chapters call for explanation. This neglect is generally associated with a lapse in memory—and Montaigne likes to remind the reader that he has a bad memory. Several chapters are little revised from one edition to the next (1588 and the Bordeaux Copy), as if Montaigne had given up on them without going so far as to omit them from his book. They are, in a way, orphans needing attention, but that fell into oblivion. It does not mean, of course, that the author did not glance at them from time to time, changing a word or modifying the punctuation, adding a sentence or a Latin quotation, but as a rule these interventions are minimal, and these chapters never really grew with time. These essays are the traces left behind by a different publishing project, by another Montaigne. It is in this sense that the edition that appeared in Paris in 1588 testifies to publishing choices.

The “forgotten” chapters in the Essais received little attention after 1580. However, it is difficult to present a qualitative argument and to offer any kind of generalization regarding the essays as a whole. Of course, a changed sentence or a spelling correction testifies to Montaigne’s continual work on all his essays. But we have to note that all the chapters are not equal in the eyes of posterity. The modern age has given priority to the chapters in which Montaigne portrays himself openly and exhibits the traits of his personality, more particularly in the last two chapters of the third book, “Of physiognomy” and “Of experience.” The expression of his subjectivity and his private self has become an end in itself, and the reader takes pleasure in picking out the contradictory judgments in a work associated with a modern form of impressionism. The short chapters are more rigid and do not display the “leaps and gambols”93 that delight a modern reader. They present themselves as fortuitous impressions, as if Montaigne had mistaken the value that had to be accorded them in his book or had wandered away from the themes originally chosen. These chapters arrest our attention as vestiges of neglected projects, discourses to be completed by new examples taken from contemporary history and quotations drawn from the Ancients. They are the traces of past preoccupations and appear as admissions of past expectations and hopes. Their subjects have to be understood in the context of the years between 1572 and 1580, because they represent an initial version of the Essais that was soon to become outmoded as a result of Montaigne’s direct experience with politics.

The work done by Montaigne for the 1588 edition thus consisted chiefly in the addition of a third book, and the changes he made to the first two books after 1580 are relatively modest. Thus, so far as the 1588 edition is concerned, we see that Montaigne did not change eight chapters and that fourteen other chapters in the first two books were expanded by less than 5 percent. Twenty-two of the fifty-seven chapters of the first book were left practically unchanged for the 1588 edition. In the second book, nine chapters out of twenty-seven have additions amounting to less than 5 percent of their length. Thus the first book was expanded by only 21 percent in 1588 and the second by 19 percent. Consequently, we can state that the goal of the 1588 edition was to introduce a third book of a kind rather different from the first two books of the Essais. Although most chapters of the third book were written after his second term as mayor, chapter 2 (“Of repentance”) and chapter 6 (“Of coaches”) seem to have been conceived at the end of 1584, at least in part.⁹⁴ After 1585, Montaigne developed his initial text very little and gave priority to the thirteen new chapters, which are on the whole much longer. Thus the work done on the 1588 edition of the Essais distanced Montaigne from his original plan. The Essais became a different book that was based on a different project.^ix Montaigne very quickly acquired the habit of concentrating his work on some chapters and neglecting others. An analysis of the content of the additions he made also allows us to state that after 1585, and especially after 1588, Montaigne talks more about himself and his experiences than he did in the 1580 edition. We can say that the 1580 edition gave priority to a “political Montaigne,” whereas starting with the 1588 edition, and a fortiori in the additions to the Bordeaux Copy, it was on the contrary the author’s private self that gained superiority over social, religious, and political reflections.

The time of publication and the time of politics coexisted, but they were not simultaneous. In this sense, the Au lecteur of 1588, even though it was very little revised, is truer than that of 1580. Montaigne strips and exposes himself to his reader more than ever; he returns to the initial intention announced eight years earlier, despite the fact that he now had a very different reader. On rereading his preface, Montaigne discovered that the ambiguity present in the 1580 edition now worked to his advantage. Whereas in 1580 the Au lecteur was clearly addressed to the Court and the king, in 1588 it could be taken literally, while at the same time sufficiently retaining the appearance of a curriculum vitae to still serve his professional and political ambitions, especially at a time when he was beginning to be known for his frankness and independence of mind. It was clear that this book still had an unexploited potential.

Montaigne’s readership had grown larger, and he was now confronted by an uncontrolled reception of his book, which led him to ask himself how the Essais might be read and interpreted by an audience he did not know. Although Millanges had foreseen a mainly local distribution for the book in a region in which Montaigne was beginning to be known, the Paris printing of 1588 created a new distance between the author and his readers. The consubstantiality of the subject and the object of writing was compromised, because the author was now separated from a text whose interpretation he could no longer control. Moreover, since Montaigne had gained more visibility during his two terms as mayor of Bordeaux, and then during the negotiations he conducted between Henry III and Navarre, his Essais were beginning to attract the attention of unscrupulous printers who were always on the lookout for a work that might allow them to make a quick profit.

In order to produce pirated books more rapidly, at lower cost, and under a false address, in the hope of making a quick killing, these counterfeiters were accustomed to ignore the publishing privileges granted to printers. However, doing so was not without dangers, because the counterfeiters were running the risk of having the unsold copies of the pirated book seized by the authorities, being subjected to a substantial fine, and even having their printing equipment confiscated. Many counterfeiters set up their operations abroad in order to escape the French authorities. Others, despite the risks they ran, chose to remain on French territory to sell their unauthorized printed materials more rapidly. Such illicit practices were particularly found among a small number of printers in Rouen. The publishing history of the Essais thus includes several counterfeit editions produced in Rouen, even though the place of publication was generally claimed to be Antwerp or Leiden, and which were to be distributed throughout Europe by the beginning of the seventeenth century. As we have already noted, it is likely that a pirated printing of the Essais was planned in Rouen in 1584, before the first edition published by L’Angelier in 1588. However, far from being seen as a problem, this counterfeit edition showed Montaigne the extent of his growing success as an author while he was still displaying some political pretensions and was trying to acquire even more visibility. After all, the more books that were printed that bore his name on the title page, the more his fame grew.

The pirated edition printed in Rouen shows the increasing success of Montaigne’s book after 1582. He now had a sufficient readership to allow an unscrupulous printer to invest money to reprint a relatively long book and publish it under a false imprint. Counterfeits are generally a good indication of the market for a book. Without being a best seller, the Essais—in Millanges’s editions or in its counterfeit edition produced in Rouen—were gradually coming to be read by a broader public than Montaigne had at first imagined. For example, Marie de Gournay declared that she read the Essais “toward the end of the period of two or three years that passed between her first view of the book and the first time she saw its author,”95 that is, between 1585 and 1586. The rare book market has made it possible to identify several of Montaigne’s “first readers” and to infer a certain sales success.96 Montaigne’s book was a “novelty” and as such put its stamp on the minds of its first readers. Its success was measured not so much by the number of copies sold as by the number of conversations generated by a relatively limited number of readers, because it was the difference between the content and form of the Essais and those of all other genres that made the reputation of the book and its author. The Paris edition of 1588 was to confirm Montaigne’s success as an author.

In 1588 Abel L’Angelier made sure that the reader knew what he was buying by stating on the title page that it was a “Fifth edition augmented by a third book and six hundred additions to the first two.” The six hundred additions listed by the publisher for the Paris edition of the Essais were very differently distributed.^x The introduction of numerous elaborations, in addition to the third book, was apparently necessary to enable L’Angelier to obtain a new privilege for the same title. He had to make it clear that he was publishing a book different from the Essais of 1580 or of 1582. This imposing quarto volume of 508 folios with broad margins in no way resembles the first two editions, which economized on paper and had been printed hastily. The engraved frontispiece is unique among the books produced by L’Angelier and other Paris printers of the time. An etching made with little skill, an oversize frame with relation to the printed page, it gives the book a baroque look. The ornamental plate is rather elaborate and executed in a style that contrasts with the simplicity of the 1580 title page. Frontispiece title pages, which were expensive, were not frequent, and this engraving (or at least its frame) was probably provided by Montaigne, who had miscalculated the volume’s size. L’Angelier was very active as a publisher in 1588, since he published twenty-two titles. The high number of extant copies of this edition (almost sixty in public libraries and more than 120 in private collections) indicates a larger print run than for the editions of 1580 and 1582, even though this difference in the number of copies inventoried is partly explained by the more imposing format that favored better preservation of the copies over the centuries. In accord with the practices of the time, copies of the book were sold in signatures or with a temporary binding—often simply a cardboard cover—and it was up to the buyer to have his copy bound at his own cost.

In 1588, Montaigne did not participate actively in the material production of the book. That was the disadvantage of having his book published in Paris. Furthermore, the very special circumstances of his stay in the capital during his secret mission on behalf of Henry of Navarre probably did not allow him to supervise the production of his book as he would have wished. Dissatisfied with the printing and the general presentation of the book, he wrote on the flyleaf of the Bordeaux Copy precise instructions for the printer of a future edition. He drew up a list of corrections to be made on points of language (Old French, for example), punctuation, the use of capital letters, and running heads on the printed page—all points of detail that he had not been able to check and correct during his stay in Paris in 1588. He gave particular attention to the general presentation of the book. Montaigne now called his writings a “record of the essays of my life”⁹⁷ and had mention of his public offices removed from the title page. The 1588 Essais seemed a more personal book. Since he was no longer mayor, references to his municipal offices were logically omitted and replaced by a concise presentation: “Essais de Michel seigneur de Montaigne” (figure 15). What is more surprising is that Montaigne also deleted his titles as knight of the king’s order and ordinary gentleman of the king’s chamber, as if these qualities were no longer essential for his book. Was this an early sign of the sharp separation that was soon to be effected between his public and private life? Montaigne began to situate his book clearly on the side of the private. It was thus logical that the traces of a work that was originally conceived as a collection of reflections on public life were removed in this first more private edition. The retention of the Au lecteur was in accord with this new conception of the book, and the recent call to serve the king as a negotiator once again had come too late to change the book’s orientation, which Montaigne had decided on after 1585. The Essais now existed outside politics, or at least it was no longer dependent on its author’s expectations in the service of the king or his patrons.

FIGURE 15. “Fifth” edition of the Essais, but the third edition revised by Montaigne, 1588 (private collection).

The edition published by L’Angelier in Paris was completed, according to its “achevé d’imprimer,” on June 12, 1588. The printer had taken about four months to produce this “fifth” edition. The work was probably done in the shop of Pierre Chevillot,98 who had been working for L’Angelier since 1578. The privilege granted L’Angelier for nine years is dated June 4, 1588, and Montaigne’s preface “To the Reader” is dated June 12. We must add that L’Angelier was not a printer but a publisher and bookseller. As the first Paris printing partly supervised by the author—he gave instructions regarding the format, choice of an ornamental plate for the title page, printing with large margins—Abel L’Angelier’s edition gave Montaigne a national scope. Like Millanges, L’Angelier emphasized the work’s “novelty” and explained in a prominent place on the title page that this was an edition enlarged by more than a third. Montaigne was rather proud of having reversed the terms of his relationship with the printer: “I buy printers in Guienne, elsewhere they buy me,”⁹⁹ he notes with delight. After having had the first edition printed at his own cost, he now received his book’s dividends. Through their length and content, the thirteen chapters of the third book gave a new direction to the Essais. The body occupied a much more important place in it, and over the subsequent centuries, chapters like “Of physiognomy” and “Of experience” succeeded in making Montaigne seen as one of the first “modern” authors. Whereas in 1580 his discourse consisted in promoting himself with a view to a possible public office and was based above all on essentially bookish experiences, in the third book published in 1588 the remarks on politics were based on real experiences gained in the field.

Thus the third book was written in a climate of retirement with respect to politics, during a difficult period (fighting on his doorstep, plague, flight on the roads of the region) that led the author of the Essais to distance himself from events and emphasize a more personal and autobiographical side. We also find less historical and more moral or ideological reflection in this third version of the Essais. This is best illustrated by the first chapter of the third book, “Of the useful and the honorable.” At a time when polemical pamphlets were being produced in large numbers and aggressive words and discourses were proliferating, Montaigne began his third book with an appropriate incipit: “No one is exempt from saying silly things. The misfortune is to say them with earnest effort.”100 The first sentence of the third book of the 1588 Essais sets the tone for the rest of the book. The whole work bears on the representation of man and the world, on the way of saying things rather than on reality. For the first time, Montaigne acknowledged a form of political indifference for which he had been reproached when he was mayor. What he had at first considered his political strength others saw as a form of naïveté that could lead to failure. Montaigne now chose to recapture these traits of his personality in a more general form and chose to “speak to [his] paper”: “I speak to my paper as I speak to the first man I meet.”¹⁰¹ For him, this was an unprecedented way of associating with his reader, and the chapter “Of three kinds of association” makes official this new de-historicized, de-socialized activity. Conversing with his book also offered him an opportunity to feel more independent.

For the occasion, Montaigne undertook to draw up an initial balance sheet of a life in which luck had not always been on his side. In a passage written after his experience in the mayor’s office, he divides his life into three distinct periods, and it is interesting that he does so in relation to money. Thus he speaks of a first period in which, having “none but casual means,” he depended on others. Montaigne considers this early youth to be the best part of his life, because he was “dependent on the authority and help of others, without rule or fixed revenue.” During this first part of his life, his “spending was done the more joyously and carelessly for being all at the hazard of fortune.”¹⁰² The insouciance connected with dependency procured a kind of happiness. And Montaigne concludes: “I was never better off.” This economic irresponsibility allowed the young man to escape any pecuniary worries and thus to avoid the “malady” of avarice, a constant preoccupation in the Essais.¹⁰³ Avarice leads to a very special state of imaginary satisfaction, because the desired objects remain accessible (through gifts made by others for example) without it being necessary to separate oneself from one’s money in order to acquire them. Sixteenth-century society and its commercial mentality had become very good at acquiring services and goods at little expense. In a perpetual state of accounting, the name of the game consisted in receiving more than was expended, at both the material and symbolic levels. Thus avarice was judged harmful to the proper functioning of society.

Montaigne goes on to explain his evolution with regard to money. His “second situation was to have money.”¹⁰⁴ During this period, Montaigne put aside a little nest egg and grew corrupt in the vile process of accumulating capital, which led him to hoarding, another form of avarice. It has been estimated that Montaigne saved more than 20,000 livres between 1570 and 1577.105 This immoral state led him to speak of his money only to lie, and his life was governed solely by his “strongbox”:

Was I going on a journey, I never thought I was sufficiently provided. And the bigger my load of money, the bigger my load of fear: now about the safety of the roads, now about the fidelity of those who had charge of my baggage, of which, like some others I know, I was never sure enough unless I had it before my eyes. Did I leave my strongbox at home, how many suspicions, how many thorny and, what is worse, incommunicable thoughts!¹⁰⁶

From Montaigne’s “strongbox” to Harpagon’s money box it is only a short step. This passage in the Essais should be compared with Marx’s analysis of the transformation of money into the universal commodity and the alienation of the subject with respect to this universal commodity. Montaigne himself admits that his relationships to society were redefined by his financial situation and the material goods he possessed. His sociability decreased in inverse proportion to the number of gold coins in his coffer. For this reason, at the end of the sixteenth century avarice was often associated with misanthropy. However, Montaigne had a kind of revelation that allowed him to change his relation to money, but the result of this belated realization was to make him spend with too great liberality. He refers more particularly to “the pleasure of a certain trip at great expense having overthrown this stupid fancy.”¹⁰⁷ Should this be seen as a direct reference to his stay in Rome and his ambassadorial ambitions? Probably. After 1577, he drew heavily on his coffer to cover the new expenses arising from his offices as gentleman of the chamber of the kings of France and Navarre.

Henceforth, that is, after 1585, in this third period of his life that followed his two terms as mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne was determined to live in the moment: “I live from day to day, and content myself with having enough to meet my present and ordinary needs.”¹⁰⁸ Avarice and excessive spending are countered by an economic equilibrium that consists in “regulating” profits and expenses: “I make my expense run abreast with my receipts; now one is ahead, now the other, but they are never far apart.”¹⁰⁹ However, this balance of receipts and expenses creates a new dependency: the individual conceives himself only as an economic subject whose leitmotiv (or even philosophy) is moderation erected into the supreme value.

We must nonetheless be wary of drawing hasty conclusions regarding this parallel Montaigne makes between money and his life’s trajectory. In the Essais, there are relatively few extended and reasoned commentaries directly connected with money, and our knowledge of the domestic economy of Montaigne’s estate is rather limited. It is impossible to make Montaigne a skinflint—even a miser who hoarded during a large part of his life—or a convinced mercantilist who sold his office as a magistrate in order to increase his savings.110 But we know—and he’s the one who says it—that Montaigne succeeded in getting away from this unhealthy and dangerous path of money (whether hoarding or spending) that would assuredly have brought him closer to the “other nobility,” that of the robins. Moderation logically appears to be the remedy for avarice and is transformed into a virtue in the Essais. Thus Montaigne devoted a chapter to moderation (I: 30), an essay that doubled in length after 1585, and was again greatly expanded after 1588.¹¹¹ Starting in 1585, moderation plays the role of a liberating force opposed to the servitude of avarice and extravagant expenses. Montaigne’s disappointments as mayor of Bordeaux and the period of hesitation that followed it enabled him to take a distance on the political and economic requirements of power, at all levels.

The third book draws up a balance sheet of a life and offers a direction unanticipated in 1580. Montaigne’s preface to the reader suddenly rediscovered a truth that was hidden in 1580. Of course, Montaigne pictured the possibility that his book might be a genuine best seller. He looked with confidence on the form of the essay becoming a genre of its own. He claimed to be close to the genre of memoirs, minus the history, and recounted his political experiences on the same level as his private experiences. He notes that professional politicians remain covert and masked, never showing their hands. On the contrary, he explains that he has always chosen to be transparent. The project he had of depicting himself naked now took on a more personal dimension. When one knows his style of “leaps and gambols,” he can justifiably be considered disorganized or, as the Spanish ambassador in Paris put it, “somewhat addlepated.”

Montaigne admits that he lacks flexibility, and he explains his mitigated political success by saying that he is too frank. Frankness can be perceived as a form of incivility, but it is more likely to be a kind of nonchalance or sprezzatura—to adopt the term used by Castiglione in his Book of the Courtier—but a nonchalance that is not feigned and does not make use of dissimulation. Often associated with a kind of “softness” (mollesse),¹¹² Montaigne’s nonchalance claims to be natural, and is for that reason not ideal in society—contrary to what the author of the Essais might have believed in his diplomatic experiences—because it represents an end more than a means. Despite this disadvantage of being really what he appears to be in the eyes of others, Montaigne took pleasure in seeing a continuity in his instinctive naïveté, which can be perceived as a defect in politics, but was a revelation for an author whose remarks are always located between discourtesy and candor:

When I display to great men the same extreme freedom of tongue and bearing that I exercise in my own house, I feel how much it inclines toward indiscretion and incivility. But besides the fact that I am made that way, I have not a supple enough mind to sidestep a sudden question and escape it by some dodge, or to invent a truth, or a good enough memory to retain something thus invented, and certainly not enough assurance to maintain it; and I put on a bold face because of weakness. Therefore I give myself up to being candid and always saying what I think, by inclination and by reason, leaving it to Fortune to guide the outcome.113

However, we have to recognize that stripping oneself naked is far from corresponding to the political or diplomatic practices then current. We have the feeling that in the third book, Montaigne also engages in an analysis of his political experiences, whose failure he tries to explain. Nonetheless, this political bankruptcy is quickly transformed into an asset for the essayist. That may be how we should read the chapter titled “Of experience,” at least in what could be considered the first draft of the 1588 edition, since this chapter was to be amply developed in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy between 1588 and 1592.

Starting in 1588, Montaigne made an increasing number of changes regarding the form of the Essais to the detriment of its content. People were beginning to praise his stripped-down prose and simplicity, and on this point, he was prepared to reply favorably to his critics. For instance, in 1588 the poet Tabourot des Accords praised the Essais and their “immaculate purity”:

Whoever sees the immaculate purity

Of your writings, reads them with such a heart

As if it were some gentle work

He had himself once meditated:

Then, delighted by its simplicity,

Recognizing your inimitable style,

Adores you as were you a divinity

Since you are like no one but yourself.¹¹⁴

Everything suggests that, at first, Montaigne had not properly assessed the reception of his book. He might have addressed the wrong audience, and the form of the Essais seemed to many people to be superior to its content. Then Montaigne greatly increased his reflections on the form of his writing, going so far as to confess that he had never been made for negotiations. In short, his discourse was more in tune with the reactions to his book, which was lauded less for its political contribution in the public domain and the context of the Wars of Religion than for its private style:

I have naturally a humorous and familiar style, but of a form all my own, inept for public negotiations, as my language is in every way, being too compact, disorderly, abrupt, individual; and I have no gift for letters of ceremony that have no other substance than a fine string of courteous words. I have neither the faculty nor the taste for those lengthy offers of affection and service. I do not really believe all that, and I dislike saying much of anything beyond what I believe.115

This passage, added in 1588, allowed Montaigne to conclude that his style was “a far cry from present practice.” From that time on, this became his principal claim. He felt that he had found a vein that had not been mined. After having known doubt and uncertainty, ignorance was soon to become his “ruling form” (forme maistresse). The author of the 1580 text now “smelled a bit foreign,”¹¹⁶ and Montaigne struggled to recognize himself in his book: “How often and perhaps how stupidly I have extended my book to make it speak of itself!”¹¹⁷—as if he were gradually detaching himself from the book conceived in the 1570s. In 1588, Montaigne was already beginning to work up a theory of the transformation of the moral and political content of his Essais in a form that would be self-sufficient: “by long usage this form of mine has turned into substance.”¹¹⁸

Imprisoned in the Bastille

In early May 1588, the printing of Montaigne’s book was almost completed. During this time in Paris public rumor announced the arrival of Swiss garrisons. The confrontation between the duke of Guise and Henry III was inevitable. In a last attempt to assert his authority, the king forbade the duke of Guise to enter the city, but he also wanted to avoid armed conflict. Public opinion was not on his side, and the king understood that on the military level the Catholic extremists could also count on the support of the Spanish. Lucinge confirms that Henry III lived “in continual alarm regarding the Spanish army.”119 A test of strength with the duke of Guise had begun. Despite the orders given by the king, Guise disobeyed the monarch to show his own authority. Citizen militias united with the League troops, and the common people of Paris daily defied royal authority. Guise was presented as the savior, the “new Moses” or the “second Gideon.” Accompanied by only seven gentlemen, he made his entrance into the capital on May 9 and was acclaimed as a liberator, “as if by a miracle,”¹²⁰ by the people won over to the League’s cause. Fearing he would be assassinated, Henry III had holed up in the Tuileries palace. Montaigne was wary of the common people, whom he considered manipulated by political men seeking popular support for their personal ambitions: “I have in my time seen wonders in the undiscerning and prodigious ease with which peoples let their belief and hope be led and manipulated in whatever way has pleased and served their leaders.”121 Events would prove him right.

Henry III found himself with his back to the wall, and he had no solution but to harden his position. He no longer had the option of negotiating, and finally decided to show determination in the face of the League. This decision was a turning point in a policy that, up to this point, he had wanted to be conciliatory toward the princes of Lorraine. The dissidents were plotting with the duke of Guise to seize the sovereign during Lent. Henry III was secretly planning to take Paris, but the public rumor led to a rebellion of League supporters and a popular uprising against the sovereign, who had ordered a garrison of Swiss soldiers to enter the capital. These movements of foreign troops into the capital threw the people into a great terror. In a few hours, on May 12, 1588, barricades were erected against the Swiss garrisons, which had entered the capital at three o’clock that morning. The alarm bell was rung, and the bourgeois of the city, who considered their privileges to have been violated, organized themselves to resist the king and his mercenaries. After a brief political hesitation in which Henry III and the duke of Guise tried by turns to seize the advantage by means of intimidating maneuvers, it was the king who yielded first, and fearing for his life, secretly left the capital. The die was cast, and Montaigne once again found himself at the mercy of events.

As a loyalist among loyalists, and perhaps at the request of the queen mother, Montaigne accompanied the king in his flight. He had hardly any other political option. If it was difficult for him to choose between the king and Navarre, he had no scruples about opting for the royal party faced with the revolt in Paris, which, as we have said, was less an overthrow by the League than an uprising of the bourgeois of Paris who had revolted against the lack of respect for their privileges. Before the famous Council of Sixteen set up in January 1589,¹²² the city of Paris was administered by forty or fifty bourgeois representing the sixteen quarters of the city. The bourgeois had expressed their resentment toward the royal government that had extorted considerable sums from them under cover of forced loans and greater and greater special tax levies (April 1576, September 1582, December 1583, January 1584), as well as a series of “free gifts,” as in March 1577 and March 1584.¹²³ The “honorable men” (rich merchants) who constituted the “people of Paris” had rebelled against a king “thirsting for money,”¹²⁴ to use Pierre de L’Estoile’s expression. By “people” we must thus understand the notables of the capital, chiefly the bourgeois who paid the municipal taxes and served in the militia. These men had their own idea of power, based on a sociability stitched together with common interests. They were not all rich (yet), but most of them were about to become rich. Their commitment on the side of the League was based on considerations that were more economic than religious, and they took hardly any interest in the political manipulations carried out by the zealous Catholics of the Guises’ party.

Following the famous day of the barricades, the public coffers had been closed with the seal of the Guises, and the Louvre, the Arsenal, and other strategic places in the capital fell under their command. Jacques Carorguy summed up the situation rather well in his journal: “People are angry at the government.”125 This revolt created a grave crisis for the state, whose legitimate power was being challenged. The printing of the Essais was nearing completion when Montaigne made a fateful decision. After the day of the barricades, he hurriedly left Paris with the king, who had yielded to panic and projected a poor image of his authority. Sully tells us that when he fled, Henry III was accompanied by sixteen gentlemen and twelve valets, including Montpensier, Longueville, the count of Saint-Paul, the cardinal of Lenoncourt, the marshals Biron and Aumont, and the lord of La Guiche.¹²⁶ Was Montaigne part of this little group of loyalists? It is likely that he was, because that would explain the reprisals taken against him when he returned to Paris two months later. Catherine de Medici had remained in Paris to negotiate with the Guises. Lucinge writes that this flight “was so stunning that most of His Majesty’s servants did not have time to take their boots, and worst fellows around him were the least confident. The King, with a very small entourage, went to sleep in a house owned by the lord of Rambouillet, and the next day slept in Chartres.”¹²⁷ The king, accompanied by Cheverny and “a few other”¹²⁸ gentlemen, including Montaigne, arrived in Chartres on May 14. We do not know with certainty whether Montaigne then followed the king to Mantes and on to Rouen, but it is probable. This rather extraordinary episode put him back at the center of the political scene; following the king was a real wager.

On May 24, the duke of Guise demanded that the Estates General be immediately convoked. The same day, Mendoza, the Spanish king’s ambassador, told the queen mother that the Armada had departed. The Spanish fleet had left Lisbon on May 9. The negotiations were going very badly for the king, whose image had been greatly tarnished by his flight. For a long time, his political and administrative decisions had seemed quite debatable, and this last incident didn’t help. He tried to react by stripping Épernon of the offices he had obtained after Joyeuse’s death.

Then began a period in which the Catholic extremists perceived each statement, each act as a provocation. The war was no longer between Navarre and Henry III but between the king the League. The king considered Navarre more than ever a potential ally to brake the League’s aspirations. Forced to explain his desertion and to move closer to a people who no longer understood royal policy, on May 29 the king accepted all the Parisians’ grievances and recognized that he had overburdened them with taxes; he regretted the disorders and admitted that he was in immense financial distress. According to him, all that was the fault of the heretics. After spending several weeks in Chartres, Henry III went to Rouen, where he made a solemn entry on June 13. During his stay in that city that had formerly been won over to the Protestant cause, he decided to convoke the Estates General to meet in Blois on September 15. In the Renaissance, the government usually traveled with the king. However, after his flight the Court ceremonial no longer had the same symbolic impact in the cities of the provinces, and in general the monarch’s image was suffering from the delocalization of government. When Henry III established his capital at Tours in March 1589, he distanced himself still further from the people of Paris, who were quite satisfied to have driven him out of the city the preceding year. Moving the Court and the parlement away from the capital amounted to cutting himself off from a place that was highly symbolic for royal authority and thus to weakening the legitimacy of his power. More than any other city, Paris represented the kingdom’s general interest, because historically it had enjoyed the privilege of speaking in the name of the other “good cities” of France.129

By the end of June, the king was ready to accept almost all the demands made by the princes of Lorraine: the formal renewal of the Edict of Union, a public declaration depriving the king of Navarre of his hereditary right, the appointment of Guise as constable, and the creation of secure places. These measures signified complete submission to the League, which thus put the king under its supervision. During this time, the religious purge had begun. In Paris, two sisters were hanged and then burned as “obstinate Huguenots.”¹³⁰ The Guises had once again managed to polarize the conflict and to lump Henry III and Henry of Navarre together as enemies of the kingdom. Since July, bourgeois, royal officers, and robins, all suspect, had been arrested in the capital. A “bunch of League rascals”—the expression is Pierre de L’Étoile’s—seized the reins of the city. Repression was rife. In this witch-hunt atmosphere, Montaigne decided to return to Paris. He chose a bad time, because the city was in a state of aggravated excitation. Several of the king’s officers were expelled from the city and a few were imprisoned.

Meanwhile, Navarre had allowed himself to be convinced that the explosive situation prevailing between Henry III and the duke of Guise favored the Huguenot party. He informed Queen Elizabeth of England of the latest political developments in France and told her: “It is time … to make use of the occasions that present themselves, and the opportunity has never been greater.”¹³¹ Henry of Navarre was aware that the French crown was faltering. Concerned about the Spanish fleet, Henry III had no option other than to make peace with the princes of Lorraine, to whom he granted eight cities out of the twelve they had demanded. But this peace forced on Henry III could only lead to the continuation of the war. Lucinge’s analysis is once again very accurate: “This peace will be the entry into a war, because the king promises everything and will not want to keep his promise, and the others [the League partisans] will be prepared to steal and carry off the prize at the slightest opportunity.”132 The people of Paris were backing the Guises more than ever, and the king was not about to set foot in the Louvre. Paris held financial power over the rest of the kingdom, and in the provinces the bourgeois in the capital were particularly detested, but they held the state’s purse strings.

Montaigne was not in Paris when his book appeared. He was probably in Rouen, where he had followed the king with a few of his faithful servants. While the book was being printed, he had left Paris for Chartres, and then Rouen, where the king stayed until the beginning of July.¹³³ Pierre de Brach, who also seems to have joined the Court in Rouen, was still in that city on July 8, the anniversary of his wife’s death, when he sent a letter to Justus Lipsius (who was living in Leiden), along with his portrait, which he had had engraved in Paris shortly before he fled.¹³⁴ We know that on May 10 or 11, 1588, Brach had his portrait drawn and then engraved for use as the frontispiece to his book.^xi He may have taken Montaigne with him to an artist’s studio.¹³⁵ Publishing history then coincides with history in general. Did Montaigne hesitate between two careers that suddenly appeared to open up to him? He was at the intersection of two distinct paths: author and political actor. He had to establish his priorities. On the one hand, he was concerned to oversee the printing of his book by one of the greatest Parisian booksellers, and on the other, he was tempted to follow a king in peril. He chose the second option. It was probably a poor choice, but he cannot be reproached for his loyalty during this decisive episode in the reign of Henry III. This man who was not inclined to rush into things found himself, for once, with no alternative. He had no liking for the Guises’ aggressive practices, and his decision to follow the king had to do with both his unshakeable fidelity to the established government and his well-known aversion to sudden attacks and other methods of intimidation in matters of politics or diplomacy.

Montaigne’s flight along with Henry III was the culmination of a political commitment that could have cost him his life. When he returned to Paris at the beginning of July, he took lodging in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where an attack of gout forced him to stay in bed for three days. Officially, peace prevailed between the king and the duke of Guise, but reprisals were frequent. This violence was highly symbolic, and its function was to solidify the League’s hold on the capital. On July 7, the king sent Alphonse d’Ornano to confirm to the Guises that the peace agreement was “resolved.” On July 9, Lucinge stated that “yesterday, at the queen mother’s apartments, the peace agreement was assured and the arrival of Mr de Villeroy alone confirmed that opinion.”136 On July 10, between three and four o’clock, in this climate of “apparent peace,” Montaigne was taken prisoner. He was immediately incarcerated in the Bastille, on the order of the duke of Elbeuf, Charles I of Lorraine, “by right of reprisal” against the king of France, who had had a gentleman of the League imprisoned in Rouen.¹³⁷

Villeroy, who was a state secretary, hurried to inform the Court and burst into a session of the Council with the result that the duke of Guise immediately signed an order releasing the prisoner and ending his incarceration. However, Montaigne was apparently not freed right away. On the evening of the same day, Catherine de Medici finally had Montaigne released as an “unprecedented favor.” Montaigne had been detained only a few hours, but he nonetheless reported this traumatic incident in his almanac:

1588, between two and three in the afternoon, being lodged in the Faubourg S. Germain in Paris and sick with a kind of gout that had first set in three days before, I was taken prisoner by the captains and people of Paris. This was at the time when the king had been driven out by Monsieur de Guise. Taken to the Bastille, and I was told that it was at the behest of the duke of Elbeuf, by right of reprisal and as a counterpart of a gentleman relative of his whom the king was holding prisoner in Rouen. The queen mother of the king, informed of my imprisonment by M^r Pinard, state secretary, obtained from Monsieur de Guise, who happened to be with her, and from the provost of the merchants to whom she sent (M^r de Villeroy, state secretary, taking great care in my favor) to see to it that at eight in the evening of the same day one of Her Majesty’s butlers came to free me by means of rescripts issued by the lord duke provost addressing the clerk then commanding the Bastille.¹³⁸

Montaigne was freed thanks to Catherine de Medici and Michel Marteau, lord of La Chapelle, city councillor, Seizexii of the Saint-Innocents quarter and provost of the merchants since May 20. Marteau had been head of the League in Paris since 1587 and, according to Pierre L’Éstoile, he could be considered a “creature of the duke of Guise.” Described as an “arch-Leaguer,” Marteau had met Montaigne a few years earlier—in April 1581—at Loretto in Italy. The two men had sympathized, and Marteau had been able to ascertain that Montaigne was a good Catholic who had left in the church of Our Lady of Loretto, in “a little house, very old and mean,” that had been transformed into a place of worship, an ex-voto that had cost nearly fifty crowns.¹³⁹ Recalling this mark of Catholic faith, Marteau facilitated Montaigne’s liberation.¹⁴⁰ Not long afterward, Marteau was investigated because he had been accused of embezzlement. Set free that evening, Montaigne was able to pick up copies of his Essais that had been printed a few weeks earlier.

This imprisonment left its mark and for that reason was a crucial moment in Montaigne’s political career. He offers a detailed account of this incident that contrasts with the brevity of other entries in his almanac. The circumstances of his arrest in Paris, a city controlled by the League, shook his confidence in a new approach to politics. His wager had turned into a fiasco, and once again, politics had not been good to him. Paris was a dangerous city that had been won over to the Guises’ extremism, and Montaigne may have been in greater danger then than at any other time. A Gascon could be there only at the risk of his life. He understood this fact while he was weakened by a high fever that had struck him a few days earlier. Pierre de Brach described the state in which he found his friend the day after this misadventure. Even the doctors gave him up for lost. In addition to his health problems there were partisan hassles, and Montaigne had just been caught up in politics that went far beyond his worst expectations. His mission for the king of Navarre had achieved nothing, and it was another gentleman, François de Montesquiou, lord of Sainte Colombe, who continued the talks between Henry III and Navarre.

Exhausted and disillusioned by this Parisian misfortune, Montaigne left the capital and its political turmoil. In July–August or perhaps August–September he undertook the “two or three journeys” of several weeks to Gournay-sur-Aronde, in Picardy, not far from Compiègne, in the company of Marie de Gournay, to her family home. On July 15, five days after Montaigne’s imprisonment, a peace treaty was signed, and the king finally resolved to publish, on July 21, the Edict of Union that sealed the reconciliation between Henry III and the League. He swore “never to make any peace agreement or truce with the heretics, or any edict in their favor.”¹⁴¹ Navarre was the great loser in this affair, and Montaigne could no longer expect anything from a situation that put an end to his ambitions as a negotiator. The Guises could savor their victory. Doubtless this was a defeat for the king and for Montaigne, and it is hard to imagine that Montaigne did not feel it to be such. In early September, Henry III dismissed all his ministers, abruptly separating himself from those who had counseled him for several years. Montaigne gave up on the past, accepted the invitation of the young Marie de Gournay, and accompanied her to her family’s estate. It was in Picardy, far from the capital, that he recovered from his psychological wounds and decided to become a full-time author.

“A Girl in Picardy”

Seriously affected by this political setback that could have cost him his life, Montaigne almost immediately left the capital and its intrigues. He later recalled this trial, offering the following analysis of his experience in Paris in one of the margins of the Bordeaux Copy: “I ordinarily assist the unfair presumptions against me that fortune sows about by a way I have always had of avoiding justifying, excusing, and interpreting myself, thinking that it is compromising my conscience to plead for it.”142 It was better to forget this incident. Montaigne’s imprisonment (at least as he relates it) likely caused him to become aware of the dangers of any political commitment, whatever it might be. His arrest led him to question his service to one party or another. After this failure, Montaigne visibly detached himself from the political affairs of his time. The “public ruin” anticipated a few years earlier, when he was entering politics on the national level, had just caught up with him and affected him personally. Public occupations were beginning to weigh on his physical and mental health. It was at this time that he met Marie de Gournay: a new chapter began for him and for his posterity.

Marie de Gournay was born in Paris on October 6, 1565, the first child of Guillaume Le Jars, the king’s treasurer since 1563, and Jeanne de Hacqueville. In 1568, the Le Jars de Gournay family moved into the manor of Gournay-sur-Aronde in Picardy.¹⁴³ Self-taught, Marie discovered Montaigne’s Essais in 1583–84, at the age of nineteen. She was bowled over by it, and fell in love with the book and its author. Marie de Gournay occupies a crucial place in the publishing history of the Essais. During the first half of the seventeenth century she worked tirelessly to have the work of her “adopted father” (père d’alliance) reprinted and accompanied throughout her life this “orphan entrusted to her,” as she called the text of the Essais in the preface she addressed to Cardinal Richelieu in 1635. Learning that Montaigne was residing in Paris in 1588, she sent her greetings to the man whose works she admired, to “declare her esteem for his person and his book.”144 In a short autobiography written in the third person, Marie de Gournay says that at the age of “about eighteen or nineteen, this girl read the Essais by chance: and although they were still new and enjoyed no reputation that could guide her judgment, she not only assessed them at their true value, which was very difficult to do at such an age and in a century so little likely to bear such fruit, but conceived a desire to make the acquaintance of their author, more than anything else in the world.”¹⁴⁵

Flattered by the young woman’s affectionate zeal, Montaigne came to visit her the following day. Thus began the relationship with the woman who became his “adopted daughter” (fille d’alliance) and who devoted herself body and soul to the publication of her “father’s” writings until her death in 1645 at the age of eighty. In a letter to Monsieur de Pellejay, Estienne Pasquier recounts their first encounter:

Demoiselle de Jars, who is related to several great and noble families in Paris; who never sought to have any husband other than her honor, enriched by the reading of good books; and above all others the Essais of the Lord of Montaigne; in the course of a long sojourn in the city of Paris in the year 1588, went expressly to visit him, to become acquainted with him personally. The Demoiselle de Gournay and her mother even took him to their house of Gournay, where he resided for three months in two or three trips, and was received with all the honor that could be desired.¹⁴⁶

Gournay tells us that she received the Gascon gentleman “with all the more joy” because despite the great difference in their ages she had felt “in her heart such a connection with him since the first time she looked into his book: and that [was true] regarding the proportion of their ages, and the intention of their minds and manners.”¹⁴⁷ It was truly love at first sight.

An impromptu, intense friendship formed between a man of fifty-five and his new admirer of twenty-three. More than ever resolved to get a change of air, Montaigne accepted the young woman’s invitation and followed her to Gournaysur-Aronde where, far from the tumult in Paris, he began to write further additions in the margins of a copy of the new edition of the Essais that had just been printed in Paris. Perhaps it was after having told her about the ups and downs of his secret mission to the king that Montaigne opened his book at the place where he had sketched a portrait of Navarre, without directly naming him:

I know a man [here Montaigne adds on the Bordeaux Copy: “of a very martial courage by nature, and enterprising”] whose fine career is being corrupted every day by such persuasions: that he should hear of no reconciliation with his former enemies, should keep apart and not trust himself to hands stronger than his own, whatever promise may be made him, whatever advantage he may see in it.148

In the margin of this text, Montaigne had Marie de Gournay write:

I know another who has advanced his fortune beyond all expectations by following a wholly opposite plan. Boldness, the glory of which they [princes] seek so avidly, displays itself, when necessary, as magnificently in a doublet as in armor, in a room as in a camp, with arm hanging as with arm raised.¹⁴⁹

In what is probably the first addition in the margins of what was to become the Bordeaux Copy, Gournay expresses a political observation through another person, as if Montaigne were no longer capable of making this political commentary himself (figure 16). He took pleasure in his role as author and commentator, and the young Marie was delighted to serve as his secretary.¹⁵⁰ Writing in the margins had just been born in him. At that precise instant, Montaigne found a new career: he would be a writer, period. An audience—other than the king and high government officials, and even his friends and relatives—existed for his book, and it was young Marie who made him aware of that.

At Gournay-sur-Aronde, Montaigne had plenty of time to discuss his experiences as a skillful negotiator and familiar of princes. Full of bitterness and still exhausted by his recent difficulties in the capital, he sketched portraits of the king and of Navarre that were not very flattering. In the first part of the passage quoted above, an allusion to Henry III and Henry IV has been seen in the description of the second prince added later on the Bordeaux Copy. However, one of Florimond de Raemond’s annotations suggests a different identification that corresponds better to the political reality of the moment and to Montaigne’s state of mind after his brief incarceration at the Bastille. Without hesitation, Raemond recognizes Navarre in the description of the first prince: “He is referring to King Henry IV, to whom he was very close when he was Henry of Navarre.” In the other prince, Raemond sees not Henry III but rather Henry of Guise: “He is referring to M. de Guise: but he is mistaken, since good fortune abandoned him [Guise] at Blois, where he was killed.”¹⁵¹ The first prince, more martial and enterprising, rational in nature but badly counseled by Huguenot warmongers, corresponds to Montaigne’s conception of Henry of Navarre in 1588. The passage about his martial courage and his enterprising character, added after 1588, could serve to ensure that the first prince mentioned would not be confused with Henry III. Since in that case the second description could not refer to Henry III, Raemond’s interpretation seems completely justified, because the person mainly responsible for France’s ills in 1588 was the duke of Guise. This contrasting, off-the-cuff political description of the second prince, made before the assassination of the duke of Guise in Blois on December 23, 1588, might have been written by Montaigne after his return to Bordeaux in November. Another passage in the Essais speaks in the same way of Catherine de Medici as if she were still alive, whereas she died only thirteen days after Henry of Guise. Montaigne accuses Henry of Navarre of having made the wrong choice, but it is Henry of Guise who is the object of Montaigne’s wrath. Without the duke of Guise’s implacable political rigidity, Montaigne might have been able to carry out his mission successfully. In the autumn of 1588, he no longer had any hope of playing a political role. Nevertheless, he had met a young woman determined to devote the rest of her life to spreading the fame of her “adoptive father.” Although he had not yet realized the consequences of this meeting, Montaigne had just found the ideal literary agent who was to allow him soon to be recognized as a major author of the French Renaissance.

FIGURE 16. Manuscript addition by Marie de Gournay, Bordeaux Copy of the Essais, f. 474. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux.

Without knowing it, Montaigne was going to go down in history thanks to Marie de Gournay. He claimed to be completely detached from the political world, and the separation between public and private life was clearer than ever. The famous Bordeaux Copy was born at Gournay, and Montaigne conceived at that time the possibility of an expanded edition. At Gournay, Montaigne guided the hand of his unconditional admirer to help her intervene directly in what was to become, seven years later, the first posthumous edition of the Essais. At least two manuscript additions on the Bordeaux Copy are in the hand of Marie de Gournay, including at least one that dates from this time.152 Montaigne’s first stay in Picardy, between mid-July and October 16—the date of the opening of the Estates General in Blois, which he attended as a simple spectator—influenced the orientation of the Essais, which was henceforth literary and personal.

Marie de Gournay’s temperament was demonstrative, indeed almost exuberant. Her lavish affection apparently did not displease Montaigne, who sojourned at Gournay two or three times during the autumn of 1588. He was warmly received at the Gournay’s family home in Picardy, about one day’s journey from the capital. In the dedicatory epistle of her Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne, dated November 26, 1588, Marie de Gournay reports that Montaigne had left Gournay-sur-Aronde three days earlier, that is, on November 23. One passage—different on the Bordeaux Copy and in the Exemplar^xiii—emphasizes that Montaigne saw Marie de Gournay before he went to the Estates General at Blois: “[1595: When I came from these famous Estates of Blois] I have seen [1595: I had just seen, in Picardy], 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.”¹⁵³ In the Bordeaux Copy, this passage includes no reference to the Estates General and does not identify the region where Marie de Gournay resided. On the other hand, the Exemplar that was used to compose the posthumous edition of the Essais, published in 1595, gives us this information. We can imagine that it was perhaps added by Marie de Gournay. Similarly, a long passage in the 1595 edition is also absent from Montaigne’s manuscript, but an X marks the placement of an addition that might have been written on a separate piece of paper (brouillar). However, Montaigne was not in the habit of writing on separate sheets and he had plenty of space to add this passage in the margin of the Bordeaux Copy. Doubts remain regarding the veracity of the information given by Marie de Gournay in the 1595 edition. In this passage in the posthumous edition of the Essais, Marie de Gournay is named, whereas her name does not appear in the Bordeaux Copy. She might have revised Montaigne’s text to give herself a more important role. We know that she had a tendency to take certain liberties in her work as an editor. For example, her rewriting of half the verses of Ronsard’s “Harangue du Duc de Guise aux Soldats de Metz” in 1624 deprives her of part of her editorial credibility. By trying to restore the prestige of the poets of the Pléiade in the time of Malherbe, she produced a counterfeit, claiming to have discovered a later version of Ronsard’s poem.154 It is thus permissible to have certain reservations about Gournay’s account.

In reality, Montaigne probably made three trips to Gournay-sur-Aronde: two during his sojourn in Paris and a final one after a brief stay in Blois. Long walks with her adoptive father led Marie de Gournay to write a book titled Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne (Walk with Monsieur de Montaigne). They read ancient authors together. Montaigne was fond of learned conversations. It was in the course of a walk on the grounds of the château, after reading Plutarch together, that Marie is supposed to have told him the story that she had put down in writing in 1584 and that she renamed Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne. This story was inspired by a work of Claude de Taillemont, Les Discours des Champs Faëz. We imagine the romantic scene, and it is probable that Montaigne and Marie had an amorous relationship. In a passage that she later omitted, Marie de Gournay admits that Montaigne “loved her much more than paternally.” In another passage in the Exemplar that was used to compose the posthumous edition of 1595—but which, suspiciously, does not appear in the Bordeaux Copy—we find the following reference to Marie de Gournay: “She is now the only one I see in the world.” Montaigne describes an affection for the young woman that is “more than superabundant.” He then lauds this young prodigy’s intellectual feats and gives her, in book II, chapter 17, the title of “adoptive daughter” (fille d’alliance). The compliments go far beyond simple marks of friendship and suggest a more romantic adventure: “Her judgment of the first Essays, as a woman, and in this century, and so young, and alone in her region, and the extraordinary vehemence with which she loved and long desired me on the sole basis of the esteem she had for me, before she had seen me, is a circumstance very worthy of consideration.”155 Critics have often maintained that this passage could not have been written by Montaigne, and accused Gournay of having invented and imagined a relationship that she never had with the author of the Essais. Even if these words might have been added by Marie de Gournay, nothing allows us to assert that they are the result of fantasizing.

To forestall the gossips who might be astonished by her relation with Montaigne, Marie de Gournay explains that “if someone is shocked by the fact that we were father and daughter only in name … we shall say to him that nature holds the scepter among animals, but among men reason must hold it.”¹⁵⁶ We can rightly speak of Marie’s fascination with Montaigne. At that time, she had not yet written anything, and it is not impossible that Montaigne found in her something other than an opportunity for erudite conversations about Plutarch and other philosophers. It has also been suggested that Marie de Gournay made use of him to advance her own career. That may not be entirely false, but Montaigne had done the same with La Boétie twenty years earlier. Hadn’t he given Marie to understand that he could help her in this domain? During his stay at Gournay, he even gave her a diamond: “the diamond bodkin he gave me bears the symbol of a double ‘m m’ in a circle.”¹⁵⁷ This gift was very costly for a simple friendship, and may have had a more sentimental value. Marie decided to return the jewel to Montaigne’s daughter after meeting her during her stay at the château after the death of her “adoptive father” in 1592. Marie Le Jars de Gournay’s will, drawn up in 1596, stipulates that if she happened to die in Gascony (one wonders why, since at that time she was living in Paris), she wished to be buried—like Montaigne—in the church of the Feuillants in Bordeaux, and she gave the convent a hundred crowns for her burial.^xiv But she was never buried there.

After a very hectic summer, Montaigne spent several months in Picardy, with Marie, and far from the political turmoil of the Court. This retreat “in two or three journeys” of several weeks each in the company of the demoiselle de Gournay helped him distance himself from the events of his time.¹⁵⁸ The 1588 edition of the Essais had transformed him into an author capable of independent judgment and detached from the affairs of the world. Ultimately, Montaigne was not a man who reacted hastily to events, or at least that was the image of himself that he sought to project between 1588 and 1592. The famous portrayal of the self—in its movement, but also in its atemporality—established itself as a goal. In the meantime, he could concentrate on the pleasures of a body that was returning to life. Was he seduced by the young woman’s grandiloquence, or did he see in her instead an opportunity for a more carnal than intellectual relationship? Today, Montaigne’s sexuality is dealt with prudishly; it is a taboo question, hidden behind his literary and philosophical renown. In contrast, Florimond de Raemond, who was close to the author of the Essais, sketches a portrait of a “wanton and debauched” man:

I have often heard the author say that he had married his very beautiful and pleasant wife while he was still full of love, ardor, and youth, and yet he had never played with her except with respect for the honor that the marital bed requires, without ever having seen uncovered more than her hand and her face, not even her breast, although with other women he was extremely wanton and debauched. I leave the truth of what I say about this on his conscience.159

La Boétie had made similar reproach to Montaigne in the early 1560s. As we have noted, Montaigne’s wife, Françoise de La Chassaigne, is one of the major absences in the Essais. Montaigne never confounds love and marriage, women and his woman. For him a married woman (his wife) lacks any feminine attribute, he transforms her into an asexual object. Marriage is a dead end that can give rise only to a series of banal comments; it is a fixed point that is not very compatible with Montaigne’s way of writing, which is all movement, freedom, and development. That may be why his wife has no place in his book. Only the entrance into marriage is free; the rest is only constraint; it is a contract that has goals other than love, because there are “a thousand foreign tangles to unravel, enough to break the thread and trouble the course of a lively affection.”¹⁶⁰

For example, in the chapter “On some verses of Virgil,” Montaigne reproaches Virgil for having depicted “a marital Venus,” “a little too passionate,” in terms too sensual.¹⁶¹ This contradicts his idea of sexuality in marriage. For “In this sober contract [marriage] the appetites are not so wanton [Bordeaux Copy: follastres]; they are dull and more blunted.”¹⁶² Sleeping alone seems to him the ideal way to spend one’s nights: “I like to sleep hard and alone, even without a woman, in the royal style.”¹⁶³ It was outside marriage that Montaigne gave birth to his only male progeny: the Essais long remained a bastard child, and Marie de Gournay first its nurse, and then its tutor. After 1588, Montaigne was more concerned than ever to ensure the transmission of his name through his book, which was born of the muses but was raised after his death by Marie de Gournay, who strove ceaselessly to make better known this “orphan” for which she felt responsible.

Like her adoptive father, Marie de Gournay became hooked on literature and published her first work, Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne, in 1594, which she says she sent to Montaigne in manuscript form in 1588. In 1589, after introducing herself as one of his close friends, she entered into regular correspondence with Justus Lipsius. This epistolary relationship lasted a decade before it began to deteriorate in 1601. In a letter in French addressed to Moretus and dated December 27, 1601, Justus Lipsius writes: “I once praised this French lady, and am not very happy about the judgment I made of her, and (perhaps) others are not, either. It is a deceiving sex, and it has more luster than substance.”164 Justus Lipsius was not the only one who quarreled with Marie, who was the object of the gibes and jeers of many of her contemporaries. The intellectual class gave her a hard time, going so far as to call her an “old maid,” a “bluestocking,” “witch,” “counterfeiter,” “old madwoman” or “old virgin” (she never married). She was the laughingstock of her time, and her “incestuous” relations (was she not his adoptive daughter?) with Montaigne were often stressed to prove her bad faith. She was violently attacked in an Anti-Gournay ou Remerciement des Buerrières de Paris, and was ridiculed in a Comédie des Académistes. Despite these sexist prejudices, Marie de Gournay took part in the intellectual life of her time and frequented the salons of libertine thinkers such as La Mothe Le Vayer and Théophile de Viau.

Although it is undoubtedly true that she was not very diplomatic, Marie de Gournay’s main misfortune was to be a learned woman in a period dominated by men of letters. She was one of the first to defend the cause of women, and after 1607 she reworked, for instance, a long passage of the Proumenoir in order to publish it under the title Égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622). Along with the “Grief des Dames” published in the first edition of her works in 1626, this text now gives her a justified reputation as a feminist. Her long walks at Gournay in Montaigne’s company were far more beneficial to her than has been thought, and like Montaigne, she never ceased revising her works to transform them and adapt them to the expectations of her period. Thus in 1634 a new edition of her works originally published in 1626 appeared under the title Les Advis, ou, les Presens de la demoiselle de Gournay, completely reorganized and enriched by previously unpublished pieces. In 1641, she published a final edition of her Advis, again rearranged. Montaigne had at least produced a follower in the way of conceiving a text in perpetual movement.

The encounter between Marie de Gournay and Montaigne allowed the Essais to be “transported” from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century.^xv Montaigne’s editorial work served as a model for the young woman who was in her turn driven to deal with editorial minutiae. She went over with a fine-toothed comb every printed copy of her “adoptive father’s” writings, correcting by hand the smallest typographical error and the defective punctuation or spelling on the copies she had in her possession. She was reproached for this excess of zeal, and the battle between the Bordeaux Copy and the 1595 edition that she prepared for Abel L’Angelier was a battle for the right to Montaigne’s text. What is its precise legitimacy? It can be justifiably argued that the practice of the margins resulted from Montaigne’s sojourn at Gournay-sur-Aronde, and that Marie de Gournay was a revelation that led to Montaigne’s distancing from politics and allowed him to recover the essence of life, namely, the body and its affects. The meeting—we might call it an adventure—between Montaigne and Gournay was short. In November 1588, he left the young woman and never saw her again. She seems also to have forgotten him for almost four years, because we have no correspondence between them. She learned of Montaigne’s death indirectly, and then she devoted herself entirely to her role as the editor of his Essais.

Observer at the Estates General of Blois

Under the constraint of the princes of Lorraine, Henry III convoked the Estates General in Blois for September 15, 1588, twelve years after the last session of this assembly in the same city. Since the death of the duke of Anjou in 1584, the League had benefited from considerable favor among the people, and a large number of cities and provinces had joined the ranks of the Union. On September 6, the king had dismissed all his state ministers. Bellièvre, Pinard, and Brulard had been sidelined in the hope of breaking with the royal policies of the preceding two years, thus marking an opening. He named Montholon, Ruzé, and Revol to replace them and kept at his side only his most faithful supporters, all of them devoted to his interests. The work of the Estates General began on September 16, the day after the king arrived in Blois. On October 2, all the deputies had not yet arrived. The meeting places were distributed and rooms were allotted to the representatives of the three orders: the clergy was lodged at the convent of the Jacobins, the nobility in the palace, and the third estate in the city hall.165 The nobility of the duchy of Guyenne and the sénéchaussée of Bordeaux were represented by Jacques d’Escars, lord of Merville, grand seneschal of Guyenne, governor of the château of Le Hâ—and Montaigne’s enemy. The third estate of Guyenne was represented by Thomas de Pontac, a councillor of the king on the Great Council and clerk of the parlement of Bordeaux; Fronton du Verger, a lawyer at the parlement of Bordeaux and a jurat of the city; and Pierre de Métivier, also a lawyer at the parlement. Mathurin Bertin, canon, archdeacon, and vicar general of the archbishopric of Bordeaux, represented the clergy. Publicly, the reconciliation the king sought started out well, but secretly the die was already cast. Out of the 191 deputies of the third estate, more than 150 were overt supporters of the League. Obviously, the clergy was almost entirely won over to the Guises’ cause. Only the nobility, with 180 representatives, was divided; nonetheless, it mostly supported Henry III.

After the usual protests and quarrels regarding questions of protocol and precedence between the deputies of the various provinces, the 505 members representing the three orders constituted themselves as a deputation. The kingdom’s nine governments still had to agree on the terms of the remonstrances that would be addressed to the king, the representatives of the third estate fearing for their security if they gave the impression of being won over to the clergy (controlled by the Guises) even before they had officially assembled. La Chapelle Marteau, the provost of Paris, was elected president of the third estate. This was the same Marteau whom Montaigne had met in Italy and who had helped get him released from the Bastille. Cardinal Guise and Charles I of Cossé, count of Brissac, presided over the clergy and the nobility respectively. The grand master of the Estates remained Henry of Guise, who made use of the Estates General to establish his power over the three orders. On October 5, while awaiting the opening of the cahiers,xvi debate began regarding how the complaints and remonstrances of the provinces and bailiwicks about the subsidies, tax levies, and past edicts would be reported. These preparations, which were customary on such occasions, in no way suggested the extreme violence that was to mark this assembly convoked by Henry III.

The official session opening the Estates General took place on October 16; it began with a speech given by the king “in which he did not forget to express his complaints, in covert words, concerning past things and the contempt and bypassing to which he was subjected.”¹⁶⁶ As agreed, in his inaugural discourse Henry III asked for the renewal of the Edict of Union, the defense of the Roman Catholic faith, and the abolition of the Protestant heresy, but he could not refrain from criticizing “all the other leagues [that] ought not to exist under my authority.” This remark was, obviously, badly received by the supporters of the League. Two days later, while the king’s speech was being printed, the duke of Guise insisted that this reference to the League be omitted. The queen mother advised her son to compromise, and the passage was finally suppressed. This new insult to royal authority set the tone for the rest of the assemblies’ work. After he swore to drive out the heretics, Henry III thought he had finally succeeded in rallying a majority of the representatives behind him. Étienne Bernard, a lawyer at the parlement of Dijon and a deputy for the third estate of that city, shared the king’s illusion and reported that all the princes went away satisfied, “accompanied by the common consent and the general voice of the whole people, crying vive le roi and displaying an extreme joy and delight.”167 On October 21, the king commanded the aldermen of Paris to set off fireworks, have the Te Deum sung, and fire a cannonade to thank God for the confirmation of the Union. The deputies of the three estates committed themselves to the firm intention to expel and exterminate the kingdom’s heretics. This joy was ephemeral, because the political and religious cleavages remained untouched.

During this time, Montaigne was still in Gournay-sur-Aronde. In his heart, he still believed in an entente that would make it possible to avoid the precipice that awaited the principal political actors of his age. Constantly seeking balance and moderation, over the past decade he had developed a new conception of politics, independent of simple conjunctural analyses and the bellicose reactions that almost always followed them. That was why the Estates General represented for Montaigne a true hope of reconciliation. Curious about the latest developments and the final negotiations, and to see a few friends who were attending as spectators or participating as representatives to these Estates General, Montaigne abandoned Marie de Gournay to go to Blois, where he met Antoine de Laval, Estienne Pasquier, and Jacques-Auguste de Thou, whom he advised to agree to replace André Hurault de Maisse as ambassador to Venice.¹⁶⁸

In his Mémoires, De Thou reports in great detail the remarks Montaigne made concerning his role as a negotiator:

Michel de Montaigne … had, before and after the sedition in Paris, accompanied the Court to Chartres and to Rouen, and he was then also present in Blois; he was a great friend of Jacques, and urged him every day to seriously consider the ambassadorship to Venice that had been offered him…. Montaigne was thinking of going to Venice himself, and said he was ready to keep Jacques company as long as he stayed in that city. Now, reasoning on the causes of these troubles, he said—for he had once served as an intermediary between Navarre and Guise when they were both at the Court—that Guise had tried to win Navarre’s friendship by means of all the good offices and all the zeal possible; but when, deceived and hypocritically rejected by the man whose friendship he had sought and whose favor he thought he had won, he understood that in him he had an enemy of the most implacable kind, and he had been obliged to take up arms as the ultimate resort to defend his person and the honor of his house; this enmity that had begun to oppose them to one another had flared up in the conflagration of this war, whose end he foresaw only with the death of one or the other. All this because Guise believed that as long as Navarre lived, and as long as he himself remained alive, neither of them could defend his right to succeed to the throne. As for religion, which they both emphasized, it was a good pretext for their followers, but neither of them cared about it. Navarre, had he not feared being abandoned by his people, would have been quite ready to return to the religion of his ancestors; and Guise, if he could have done so without risk, would not have hesitated to accept the Augsburg Confession, of which his uncle Charles, the cardinal, had once given him a foretaste. That was the state of mind in which Montaigne found them both at the time when he served as their intermediary.169

This conversation attributed to Montaigne makes him a passive actor at the Estates General, an observer who seems to have put the history of the civil wars behind him. It was as a spectator, and with a certain distance, that he met the representatives in private. Disillusioned, he broadened his analysis to religion, which he saw as accessory to politics. He did not imagine that he was in the eye of the storm.

The negotiations to which De Thou refers necessarily preceded the death of the duke of Anjou, and thus took place toward the end of the 1570s.¹⁷⁰ However, there is reason to doubt the remarks De Thou reported. Hasn’t he mixed up the nature of the missions entrusted to Montaigne? It is improbable that Montaigne was able to negotiate directly between the duke of Guise and Henry of Navarre, or to serve Henry III as a messenger, as he had done on several occasions in the early 1570s. De Thou seems to have confused Guise with Henry III.

One thing seems certain: in Blois, Montaigne did not get involved in such matters. He was more interested in the psychology of the historical actors. De Thou tells us that he even considered going to Venice to serve him as a guide. Disappointed by his own failures as a negotiator, Montaigne was convinced that religion had become a pretext, and that the true stakes involved were mainly political: “both of them are pretending [to be concerned about religion],”¹⁷¹ he said of Henry of Guise and Henry of Navarre. Estienne Pasquier also met Montaigne in Blois. Their discussion bore solely on the language of the Essais, and Pasquier offered the following comment on Montaigne’s book: “And as we were walking in the courtyard of the château [of Blois], I happened to say to him that he had somewhat forgotten that he had not communicated his work to a few of his friends before publishing it.”¹⁷² Thus we can say that Montaigne was in Blois more to promote his book and present himself as an author than truly to participate in the three orders’ debates. He certainly claimed to be an “expert,” because he had also been close to power, but his book now sufficed to make him a recognized and respected man.

On November 1, the nobility had compiled its cahier, but the third estate was behind schedule. Distressed to see the king’s authority ridiculed and “debased by his excessive patience,”173 De Thou thought of leaving Blois. On November 4, the clergy invited the third estate to join in the recommendations it planned to make to the king to send an army to Guyenne, “which was the most desolate and ravaged by the heretics.”¹⁷⁴ In line with the League’s positions, most of the deputies wanted to ensure that no heretical pretender could accede to the throne. The clergy was determined “not to accept as king, or swear obedience to any prince who is a heretic or an abettor of heresy” (article 3). Proposed by the clergy, the term “abettor of heresy” (fauteur d’ hérésie) sought to exclude the possibility of a conversion on the part of Henry of Navarre. Étienne Bernard wrote in his journal that the clergy even proposed to declare Navarre “guilty of lèse-majesté divine and human.”¹⁷⁵ Three-quarters of the clergy’s deputies being League supporters, they constantly presented proposals offensive to the sovereign, who nonetheless saw himself forced to remain impassive.¹⁷⁶ On November 5, 6, and 7, the situation in Guyenne was discussed. The three orders declared themselves resolved to “no longer seek the king of Navarre; that he was a rotten limb, and that being excommunicated, he could in no way be recognized by them.”¹⁷⁷ The representatives of the third estate passed a resolution asking the king to give the government of Guyenne to a Catholic prince and not to a heretic.

A proposal was made to exclude from the crown all those who had been heretics since the age of fourteen and those who, since 1585, had shown themselves to be heretical. This proposal aimed at Henry of Navarre without naming him was finally omitted, and it was decided to be satisfied with the Edict of Union. After these deliberations, each more absurd than the last, Montaigne understood that there was no longer anything to be expected from the Estates General and decided to leave for Gournay-sur-Aronde. In the course of October, he left Blois to visit Marie de Gournay one last time. The spectacle of a weakened king was sad, and the situation in Guyenne was more explosive than ever. After a brief stay at Gournay, Montaigne set out (without going through Blois again) for his château on November 23.^xvii He was back in Guyenne by the beginning of December, before Guise’s assassination.

The assemblies’ political work ended in late October, and the month of November was devoted primarily to economic questions. The third estate had become involved in a series of considerations regarding the analysis of the bailiwicks’ cahiers, the auditing of accounts, and various discussions on taxes and finances. On November 24, an agreement was reached among the three orders for the reduction of the tailles to the rate in force in 1576. The king promised to cut expenditures, requiring only three million crowns for “the maintenance of his royal dignity” and two million for his armies in Guyenne and the Dauphiné, out of a total state revenue of nine million crowns. However, these concessions made by the king were untenable on the financial level, but that was no longer what was at stake for a king who was now concerned only with his political survival. It was in accord with the same logic that, on December 3, the king granted all the third estate’s requests without worrying about their applicability. These unexpected concessions, which were more political than realistic, were followed by applause.

Henry III was gaining time, and he was prepared to make the boldest and most completely unrealizable compromises. The discussions got lost in endless negotiations. The question of the chamber of justice was one of the most laborious points to be settled. The king yielded to all the demands, and every day his humiliation became a little more evident. On December 16, the king decided to avenge himself for all these affronts. After three months of hesitations, one thing was clear: the majority of the representatives of the Estates General supported the princes of Lorraine. Henry III now believed that all his problems could be solved by the duke of Guise’s death. He could no longer bear the constant hostility during the endless mediations and he put together the conspiracy that hastened his end a few months later.

On December 23, during a general session of the assemblies, Henry of Guise fell into a trap. Brought in on the pretext of a private meeting in the king’s cabinet, he was stabbed to death. His brother Louis, Cardinal Guise, his son Charles, the archbishop of Lyon, Pierre d’Espinac, Cardinal Bourbon, and the chief supporters of the duke of Guise were all arrested. The following day, Cardinal Guise was assassinated in prison. The representatives of the Estates General were stupefied to learn of the assassination of the duke of Guise and his brother. Panic spread through the city. The representatives of the third estate slept in a single room because they were afraid to be alone. It was decided to close the cahiers as soon as possible. Several deputies of the third estate were held prisoner. Henry III tried to insert several articles relating to the crime of lèse-majesté, but the deputies refused to follow him in this and did not want to meet in conference. Threatened and fearful, they continued their work. The king had certainly regained his authority, but at what cost?

Thinking that he had the representatives of the three orders under his control again, the king ordered them to choose four deputies to deliberate on the cahiers, but he was met with a stinging refusal by the third estate. On January 4, 1589, the cahiers were finally submitted to the king. The deputies, fearing for their lives, now had only one thing on their minds: leaving Blois as soon as possible. The king took advantage of the situation to demand new subsidies, but again met with refusal. The closing session of the Estates General was held on January 15, and two days later all the sessions ended. By resorting to terror, the king had lost his prestige, or at least what remained of it. The results of this policy based on terror were obviously short-lived. Henry III had not obtained the subsidies he was counting on, and the cahiers presented to him did not lead to any true reform. Sully expressed rather well the state of mind that prevailed when the Estates General closed: “Every deputy returned to his province, his heart sick with hatred and vengeance.”178

“Actum est de Gallia”

The Estates General of 1588 singly effected a deepening of the already existing political cleavages. They were more an occasion for a theatrical political confrontation than for genuine negotiation among the constituted orders and the sovereign. When he learned of the assassination of the duke of Guise, the lieutenant of Blois turned to Étienne Bernard and said: “Actum est de Gallia.” “France is done for!” Reconciled, Henry III and Henry of Navarre besieged Paris in May 1589. The two kings were opposed militarily to the Catholic extremists and indirectly to the pope’s authority over the Roman Apostolic Church. A deep hatred for what was perceived as a betrayal was concentrated on the person of Henry III. In the people’s eyes, the king had become a tyrant. On August 1, 1589, seven months after the closure of the Estates General, Navarre abandoned the siege, more out of impotence than as a result of a strategic choice. The following day, on August 2, as the king was preparing a new attack on Paris, a young Dominican friar by the name of Jacques Clément, under the pretense of delivering documents to the monarch, plunged a knife in the abdomen of Henry, who passed away a few hours later. Before his death, Henry III had time to exhort those present to pledge allegiance to the new king: Henry of Navarre. This reconciliation was achieved at the expense of the League. Navarre had sought without success to retake Paris while at the same time showing consideration for the Catholics. Once he became Henry IV, he tried again to enter the capital, but without success. He had to wait until 1594 to set foot in Paris, and even then only after having publicly abjured his Protestant faith in Saint-Denis on July 25, 1593, almost a year after Montaigne’s death.

After the Estates General and the wave of assassinations that had decimated a great part of the political class, the time had come for Montaigne to note the failure of political talks to pacify Bordeaux, Guyenne, and France:

I once tried to employ in the service of public dealings ideas and rules for living as crude, green, and unpolished—or unpolluted—as they were born in me or derived from my education, and which I use, [Bordeaux Copy: if not] conveniently [Bordeaux Copy: at least surely], in private matters: a scholastic and novice virtue. I found them [Bordeaux Copy: inept and] dangerous for such matters. He who walks in the crowd must step aside, keep his elbows in, step back or advance, or even leave the straight way, according to what he encounters.179

This passage, written before 1588, but reworked after the dramatic events that took place after his return to his estate, serves as a political balance sheet. On rereading it, Montaigne was able to realize to what extent his analysis made him a visionary. He said he was disgusted with his experience of public life, but he retained all the same a little ambition deep within him. However, nobody seemed to attach much importance to him. Bitter at having been manipulated by Navarre and questioning Henry III’s political will, Montaigne attributed his failure mainly to the League, which was incapable of the slightest compromise. Although little inclined to criticize royal authority directly, he proved more discreet regarding Henry III’s political decisions and the tragic consequences of his multiple flip-flops.

Montaigne’s Parisian misadventure, which was ultimately connected with a bad choice, cannot be understood solely as the outcome of a turbulent political trajectory whose limits, and especially whose redoubtable consequences, he was beginning to perceive. He continued to write his essays, but they could no longer have the same goal or the same audience. The episode of his imprisonment in the Bastille in July 1588 had marked a decisive turning point for him. This ordeal hastened once and for all the end of his political ambitions. In the impassioned, violent context leading to “public ruin” between 1585 and 1588, his dependency on the “favors of others” led him to give up politics to begin a career as an author, the only career that could allow him to transmit his name down through history.

Rejecting the history outside his book, Montaigne chose to keep silent about the events that took place between 1588 and 1592. In his Essais, he mentions neither the duke of Guise’s assassination nor that of Henry III; on the other hand, in his almanac he reports the murder of Henry of Guise in a relatively neutral way, though finding the act regrettable: “Henry, duke of Guise, in truth one of the first men of his age [his generation], was killed in the king’s chamber.”¹⁸⁰ In one year, politics had taken a sinister turn. The “ruin” anticipated by Catherine de Medici when Montaigne was having his first Essais printed and making his entrance into politics had become a reality. Montaigne was subjected to politics more than he influenced it in his region. We can reasonably speak of a disappointment on his part when faced with the political setbacks that followed his journey to Paris in 1588. Thus we must consider his withdrawal in late November to be the only choice he had. Montaigne could now concentrate on a book that he had conceived in other times for other objectives. He took refuge in writing, in writing in the margins of a copy of his Essais of 1588 that he had shown to the young woman from Picardy after his imprisonment and before he attended as a witness—in October and November—the tragedy that was brewing in Blois. He was already back in Bordeaux when the test of strength between Henry III and the princes of Lorraine reached its bloody climax, and it was in his château that he learned the news of the assassinations of the Guises. The sovereign had won a battle, but the state could only suffer from this criminal expedient. Soon after, it was again in his château that he heard of the tragic death of his king. Montaigne voluntarily put himself on the margins of politics.

If Montaigne had at first been able to believe that the innocence displayed on his face could serve him in pubic offices like ambassadorships, after 1585 he recognized that his “private” style was ultimately not suited to public negotiations. We understand why on rereading the preface to the reader when the Essais of 1588 was published in Paris Montaigne identified himself—certainly in a somewhat different way—with the new practice of a much more private writing. Not without irony, the preface to the reader no longer corresponded to a desire, but rather to a reality that wounded. The prospect of a public career was behind him, and Montaigne had ended up convincing himself that he had to live a private life, for lack of something better. That was all that remained to him, and he thus wrote of individual experience and introspection in the chapters of the third book. In a long development, Montaigne recounts the history of his complicated relationship to public offices and public life. According to him, public life never represented a choice, but rather a milieu in which he had been immersed since he was a child:

This whole procedure of mine is just a bit dissonant from our ways. It would not be fit to produce great results or to endure. Innocence itself could neither negotiate among us without dissimulation nor bargain without lying. And so public occupations are by no means my quarry; what my profession requires, I perform in the most private manner that I can. As a boy I was plunged into them up to the ears. and it worked; yet I disengaged myself in good time. Since then I have often avoided becoming involved in them, rarely accepted them, never asked for them, keeping my back turned on ambition; but, if not like rowers who thus advance backward, yet in such a way that I am less obliged to my resolution than to my good fortune for not having embarked in them. For there are ways less hostile to my taste and more suited to my capacity, by which, if fortune had formerly called me to public service and to my advancement toward worldly prestige, I know I would have passed over the arguments of my reason to follow it.181

Montaigne is said to have been thrown into public life by force. We think here, obviously, of the influence of his father. When it was necessary to explain the translation of Raymond Sebond’s Theologia naturalis at the beginning of “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne exculpated himself by blaming an authoritarian father. Michel practiced what he calls politics “backward,” trying to model public life on his private life. Starting in 1585, and especially after 1588, Montaigne finally succeeded in separating private life and public life. The study of Montaigne’s experiments in politics nonetheless proves that this desired and stated “very clear separation” is more a literary invention than a biographical reality. Created rather late, during his last career as a writer, the artificial dichotomy between private and public life finally led Montaigne to present himself as a moralist and to judge politics from outside. His renunciation of public life marginalized him and no longer allowed him to influence the great political actors, but it also made it possible for him to avoid being associated with practices he deplored. He retained his privilege of expressing himself on all subjects without claiming to be an expert.

Montaigne might have chosen to write works in which the history of his time had a more important place. It has even been suggested that he engaged in that exercise, which was very fashionable in his time.¹⁸² It is incontestable that Montaigne was always interested in history and in the writing of it. In “Of the power of the imagination” (I: 21), he suggests what that might have produced: “Some urge me to write the events of my time, believing that I see them with a view less distorted by passion than another man’s, and from closer, because of the access that fortune has given me to the heads of different parties.”¹⁸³ Montaigne the author of memoirs! This admission tells us a great deal about what the Essais might have become. Significantly, Montaigne also admits the existence of a busy political life, a public life based on a model of allegiance (ambassador, negotiator, intermediary, a man behind the scenes) in which the spoken word plays a more important role than the written word. From 1588 on, Montaigne’s conception of politics gave priority to spoken communication rather than to pamphlets or treatises. This was a different idea of public life. Montaigne was not a Monluc or a D’Aubigné; his public life left few documents for historians. But does that mean that private life finally won out, allowing him to pass into posterity?

ⁱ The primary confession of the Lutheran Church (1530). [Trans.]

ⁱⁱ The term “Guelph” (Italian Guelfo) derives from the name of the Welf dynasty—of the family of Otto IV—and designates the faction that supported the papacy. The term “Ghibelline” refers to the Ghibello, a diminutive of Guibertus, an Italian form of “Waiblingen” in Baden-Württemburg, the name of a Swabian castle with which the supporters of the Hohenstaufen identified. The poet from whom Montaigne borrowed the expression has never been identified.

ⁱⁱⁱ A “white” Guelph was one who was aligned more with the rising merchant class than with the old aristocracy. [Trans.]

^iv Italian; “in his castle.” [Trans.]

^v This copy, which is in the BNF, includes this ex dono: “Charron, ex dono dicti domini de Montaigne, in suo castello, 2 julii, anno 1586.”

^vi A fourth son, Gaston, count of Fleix, who was also devoted to Henry of Navarre, died in 1591 as a result of a wound received during the siege of Chartres.

^vii Apparently an allusion to the Order of the Garter, England’s highest order of chivalry. [Trans.]

^viii The list of the chapters Montaigne “forgot” or neglected in the edition of the Essais published by Abel L’Angelier in 1588 is the following: “Of idleness” (I: 8)—two Latin quotations are added; “One is punished for defending a place obstinately without reason” (I: 15)—a sentence is added; “Of the punishment of cowardice” (I: 16); “One man’s profit is another man’s harm” (I: 22)—a single word is corrected; “It is folly to measure the true and false by our own capacity” (I: 27)—two Latin quotations are added; “Twenty-nine sonnets of Etienne de La Boétie” (I: 29); “To flee from sensual pleasures at the price of life” (I: 33)—no addition; “Of sleep” (I: 44); “Of the battle of Dreux” (I: 45)—one example taken from Antiquity added at the end of the chapter; “Of ancient customs” (I: 49)—two Latin quotations and two lines added at the end of the chapter; “Of the parsimony of the ancients” (I: 52)—one line added; “Of a saying of Caesar’s” (I: 53)—three Latin quotations added without commentary; “Of age” (I: 57)—one Latin quotation and two lines added; “Let business wait till tomorrow” (II: 4)—three lines added; “Of honorary awards” (II: 7)—one sentence added; “How our mind hinders itself” (II: 14)—no change; “Of freedom of conscien” (II: 19)—no change; “Of evil means employed to a good end” (II: 23)—six Latin quotations added but no other addition except for a few words to introduce the quotations; “Of thumbs” (II: 26)—a brief final sentence added. I have given the titles in English to be consistent with other titles of chapters given throughout the text.

^ix In 1588, three chapters in the third book stand out in contrast to the others by their length: “On some verses of Virgil” (16,300 words, to which 5,000 words were added in the Bordeaux Copy); “Of vanity” (17,000 words in 1588, increased by 5,000 words after 1588); and “Of experience” (also 17,000 words in 1588, with 4,800 additional words in the Bordeaux Copy). Most of the other chapters in the third book run to between 4,000 and 6,000 words, with additions of as much as 1,000 to 2,000 words in the Bordeaux Copy. Rounded numbers are given here.

^x The L’Angelier edition of 1588 runs to 312,978 words, which represents an increase of 132,416 words, or 73 percent, over the first edition of 1580.

^xi This engraved portrait was published only in 1596, on the occasion of his translation of Quatre chants de la Hierusalemme de Torquato Tasso, published by Abel L’Angelier. The custom was to have one’s portrait made first, in order to provide the engraver with a design. This portrait of Pierre de Brach was sketched shortly before the day of the barricades and was ready in its engraved form in June 1588. We can conclude that Montaigne’s famous portrait was made around the same time. The sketch of Montaigne, probably made by François Quesnel, was not engraved then, but rather taken back to Bordeaux to serve later on (after Montaigne’s death) as a model for the engraving made by Thomas de Leu. This portrait of Montaigne might have been preserved by Pierre de Brach and found after his death in 1605; that would explain why it appeared so tardily to be used in the Paris edition of the Essais published in 1608. This hypothesis allows us to understand why Pierre de Brach did not keep Montaigne’s engraving but rather an original drawing, probably made during their sojourn in Paris in 1588. It would then have been on the basis of this drawing that De Leu engraved—much later, between 1605 and 1608, after the death of Pierre de Brach—Montaigne’s portrait.

^xii The “Seize” (sixteen) was a council of bourgeois League supporters in Paris.

^xiii The Exemplar is the name given to another copy of the 1588 edition with marginalia and corrections in the hand of Montaigne that served to produce the posthumous edition of the Essais in 1595. Destroyed during the fabrication of the 1595 edition (as it was usual at that time), the Exemplar was a cleaner copy than the Bordeaux Copy. The Bordeaux Copy remained at the château. Since the two copies were not identical, slight variations exist today between the 1595 edition of the Essais and editions based on the Bordeaux Copy.

^xiv Marie de Gournay also returned to Léonor de Montaigne the receipt she had received from her for the furniture that she had left in the château before returning to Picardy in July 1595, after having prepared the posthumous edition of the Essais. She eventually made her a present of this furniture “both for the good offices and friendship received from her, for which I feel very obliged, and for being descended from an adoptive father and for offices which I can never return.”

^xv Numerous reprintings of the Essais revised by Marie de Gournay appeared in the early seventeenth century, up to the famous 1635 edition with its dedicatory epistle to Cardinal Richelieu. This was the last edition overseen by Gournay, and it marks the end of a journey in twenty stages: twenty editions of the Essais since Montaigne’s death in 1592, eleven of them under her direction.

^xvi The “Cahiers de doléance” were lists of grievances drawn up by each of the three estates. [Trans.]

^xvii In her dedicatory epistle in the Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne, dated November 26, 1588, Marie de Gournay states that Montaigne had left Gournay-sur-Aronde three days earlier.