CHAPTER 10

The Marginalization of Montaigne (1588–1592)

Toward the end of his life Montaigne wrote in a margin of the Bordeaux Copy: “My world is done for, my form is emptied; I belong entirely to the past.”1 That is a political observation, without any doubt. Montaigne’s political supports had disappeared one by one, and he felt more isolated and marginalized than ever. Since August 1589, France had a new king. But like his predecessor, Henry IV had not succeeded in making himself accepted by his people and was still not allowed to reside in Paris, which was in the hands of the League. Montaigne had retired to his château, for the fourth time. This time, his reclusion was final. As before, retirement was not the result of choice but of necessity. Fifty-five years old, Montaigne was having difficulty getting around, because he was suffering more than ever from kidney stones. He had long since learned to live with this problem he had inherited from his father: “I am at grips with the worst of all maladies, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable.”² As he grew older, the attacks came more frequently and their intensity no longer allowed Montaigne to consider long journeys. His tower had become a refuge, a place of exile by necessity. He was aware that he had little to hope for on the political level, and the time had come for him to think about the memory that he could bequeath to posterity. Montaigne commented on his situation: “It seems reasonable, when a man talks of retiring from the world, that he should set his gaze outside of it.”³ Looking outside the tower, outside the château, outside Bordeaux, Paris, the world—that was to give man a universal dimension, to grant him an imaginary space transcending the cultures and customs that shape him. Montaigne made his book an antiworld that helped him put his mind “in motion” (en bransle) the better to understand the world around him.

Lacking a male descendant who could perpetuate the name of the Montaignes, he had at least one sure asset: his book. This was no longer the same work it had been in 1580, and flattered by the favorable comments that had been addressed to him when his Essais appeared in 1588 expanded by a third book, Montaigne felt detached from current politics. He accepted the consequences and chose to emphasize his moral discourse and to increase the number of general reflections on man and the world. His experiences were no longer an end in themselves, but rather a means of universalizing his remarks and giving them the status of philosophical essays. The additions on the Bordeaux Copy are very different in nature from the first essays of 1580. Montaigne henceforth unapologetically dared to put himself at the center of all his reflections, and he took responsibility for the preponderance of his being in a particular form—the essay—that favored exhibitionism and that he transformed into a literary genre. This allowed Éstienne Pasquier to say that anyone who “deleted all the passages he used to speak about himself, and about his family, would have shortened his work by a quarter, at least, especially in his third book, which seems to be a history of his manners and actions.”4

This display of the self and the body even becomes Montaigne’s leitmotif. This “last” Montaigne is the one we treasure most today, because he is self-sufficient and accepts his subjectivity as an end. Montaigne also conceives his book in a completely novel way by putting the accent on the act of writing rather than on the content. He found this literary space literally in the margins of the book he published in 1588. The modern reader takes pleasure in discovering the multiple facets of a subjectivity that changes in accord with constantly renewed experiences. Montaigne sums up his new project this way: “I dare not only to speak of myself, but to speak only of myself; I go astray when I write of anything else, and get away from my subject.”⁵ Montaigne belatedly understood that his Essais was a book very different from others, and that this unique object would allow him to go down in history—literary history. He fully accepted the difference between private discourse and public language, and even developed a language and a style of his own always adapted to the situation and milieu—Paris, Rome, or his château—he found himself in.⁶

Whatever the author of the Essais tells us, there is indeed a difference between Paris (a public space par excellence) and Montaigne (the ultimate private sanctuary). He now judges people apart from the events that mark their time, in an ahistorical way. Montaigne is more interested than ever in the character and psychology of people and authors rather than in their actions or writings:

I adhere firmly to the healthiest of the parties, but I do not seek to be noted as especially hostile to the others and beyond the bounds of the general reason. I condemn extraordinarily this bad form of arguing: “He is of the League, for he admires the grace of Monsieur de Guise.” “The activity of the king of Navarre amazes him: he is a Huguenot.” “He finds this to criticize in the king’s morals: he is seditious in his heart.”⁷

In this addition on the Bordeaux Copy, Montaigne reproaches the people of his time for drawing political conclusions from the affective or moral judgments that their contemporaries formulate regarding human beings. He now claims the right to speak of people outside their historicity, and thus without being harassed. To last, one has to jettison history. From this time on, his discourse tends to examine only the private character of individuals and to seek in them the universal form of the human condition. That is the only niche that remained to him.

A Tranquil Life

“All the glory that I aspire to in my life is to have lived it tranquilly—tranquilly not according to Metrodorus or Arcesilaus or Aristippus, but according to me. Since philosophy has not been able to find a way to tranquility that is suitable for all, let everyone seek it individually.”8 Montaigne had not won glory on battlefields or in embassies; in the future, he saw his existence as that of a mild-mannered, apolitical fellow. Until recently a supporter of moderation in politics, he now advocated a settled way of life. His Essais were transformed into a haven of peace where he found quietude and tranquility. To do this, between 1588 and 1592 Montaigne pursued a literary perspective that he had not previously envisioned. The preface to the reader now expresses less a wish and an opening onto society and the world than a coming to awareness of the political reality that forced him to turn inward on himself: introspection for lack of something better, one might say. However, one cannot convey disillusionment without preserving the traces of disavowed practices that make it possible to grasp the career path that led Montaigne outside politics.

The time had come to assess a public life that was far from having met Montaigne’s expectations. Henry III had not kept all the promises he made in 1580, and Montaigne had been sidelined. Margaret of Valois spoke of her brother in these terms: “the king was of such a humor that he was offended not only by effects but also by ideas, and being resolved in his opinions he carried out everything that came into his mind without considering advice from either her or anyone else.”⁹ Montaigne left us a qualified judgment of Henry III, who he found lacking a “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 directions 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.”¹⁰ Often yielding to the pressures of the moment, Henry III changed his mind easily and had acquired the reputation of being as unpredictable as the weather. Navarre also seemed to practice this politics of perpetual hesitation; before his conversion at Saint-Denis, he had already changed his religion five times. His title as presumptive heir to the throne implied new duties and a faith in accord with the religious tradition of his country. The very notion of freedom of religion, which was so central to the Protestants’ demands, was deliberately relegated to the background of a political necessity that he deemed more important.11

The hope of acceding to the throne had required Navarre to abandon regional interests that had up to that point allowed him to base his political power on a local clientele. The next king of France had to unite a divided country and lead a weakened state with an iron hand. His conversion must not be seen as a religious decision, but rather as the obligatory transition from a regional power to a national responsibility. The reason of state prevailed. Montaigne had been a disillusioned witness to these religious reversals provoked by the political situation of the moment, and he had also been led to develop an essentially political view of religion, because, as he remarked after 1588, in these civil wars “religion serves as a pretext,”¹² and is often put in the service of political ends. Whereas all his neighbors were armed to protect themselves, Montaigne had chosen to cloister himself on his land, sheltered from military hostilities: “It is my retreat to rest myself from the wears. I try to withdraw this corner from the public tempest, as I do another corner in my soul. Our war may change forms all it will, and multiply and diversify itself into new factions; as for me, I do not budge. Amid so many fortified houses, I alone of my rank in France, as far as I know, have entrusted purely to heaven the protection of mine.”¹³

Like many of his contemporaries, Montaigne endured, powerless, events that rushed ever more rapidly toward his door. He turned inward on himself because he could not act. Introspection was simply one way of escaping politics. Adopting the ostrich’s strategy, Montaigne decided to close his eyes to the events of his time. His home offered him a relatively safe refuge, and he devoted himself to rereading his Essais with a view to a new edition. Many of the remarks and developments written during the years 1572–79 now seemed to him outdated, and he sought to find a clear separation between public life and private life. This reorientation had been begun in the essays written after 1585, but it became even more crucial after 1588. For this reason, the final “extension” (allongeail) of the Essais sought to transform a mainly political text into a new object that was essentially literary and philosophical. The generous margins of the Bordeaux Copy offered Montaigne an opportunity to invent a new private space in order to deliberately marginalize himself.

The political marginalization of Montaigne corresponds, grosso modo, to the “marginalization”—writing in the margins—of the Essais. Whereas he had formerly tried to impose his natural inclination toward justice and honor by demonstrating their compatibility with political practices, Montaigne now dissociated himself from politics, which he no longer considered as the “control of oneself.”¹⁴ Montaigne retained a deep respect for the great military leaders of Antiquity, particularly Epaminondas,15 but he formulated a more nuanced judgment of the princes of his own time. The Essais were no longer compatible with political practice, especially in light of the events that followed the assassination of the Guises at the Estates General in Blois. But it was once again on the regional scale that Montaigne felt the greatest bitterness. The military situation in Guyenne explains Montaigne’s failures in politics. Moved by a sense of honor, he had never ceased to make himself available to serve his king in his region, but his efforts were rather ludicrous in a context little suited to personal initiatives. Bordeaux and its region were more than ever given over to intrigues and machinations, and were subject to the growing influence of the League.

In March 1589, Bordeaux revolted, but Matignon more or less succeeded in maintaining order and locked down the city. The supporters of the League and the Protestants were fighting each other openly in Guyenne, and Matignon was in an uncomfortable situation, trying to prevent excesses on both sides. He attempted to renew the dialogue between the local factions. The supporters of the League were not fooled and denounced these illusory negotiations, in which Montaigne had not so long ago participated. Aware that he had been manipulated in the past, the author of the Essais no longer believed that politics and diplomacy could be defined by a strong soul filled with praiseworthy convictions. Far from thinking that he could impose a new practice of politics, Montaigne was then drinking the bitter cup to the dregs. More than ever, he became conscious that he had alienated both the supporters of the League and the Protestants.

Between 1588 and 1592, Montaigne was reduced to imagining himself as a simple author. That was the only activity he wanted to emphasize, and he was able to find arguments to convince himself: “The world is swarming with commentaries; of authors there is a great scarcity.”¹⁶ According to Montaigne, an author does not offer commentaries on his own time, he situates himself above the melee and speaks of man in the absolute. Did he have to erase this disagreeable past and do away with his old political conceptions or, on the contrary, did he have to put his youthful aspirations in perspective and transform them into positive experiences that led him to become an author? For Montaigne, the realization of his failure took a long time, but the ruins of politics could serve as a foundation for the literary edifice he intended to construct.

After 1588, Montaigne revisited the chapter “Of solitude” (I: 39) to add a commentary that looks like a confession: “[1588]: The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself. [Bordeaux Copy]: It is time to untie ourselves from society, since we can contribute nothing to it.”¹⁷ Knowing how “to belong to oneself” is less a choice than an observation, since the failures in politics led him to an inevitable realization. His book now had to emphasize the self without erasing his numerous judgments on public life. Besides, what would his book look like if he suddenly deviated from his initial intention? He would have to begin everything all over again. Montaigne was over fifty-five years old and lacked time. Doing away with half the text would certainly have made the position of the “last Montaigne” more coherent, but the mistakes one makes are an integral part of writing and have just as great a share in the form of the essay. After 1588, Montaigne found a solution to these problems. As he admits, “[He] produces Essays, who cannot produce results” (“faict des Essais qui ne sauroit faire des effaicts”).18 The pun on “essai” and “effet” is revealing.

Thus Montaigne decided to remain silent regarding the events that plunged Guyenne into chaos. He was now preoccupied with finding an ideal reader outside history. Aware of the contradictions between his first essays and the additions to the Bordeaux Copy that were beginning to fill the margins of what was becoming his working manuscript, Montaigne developed a theory of reading and writing: “It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room…. My style and my mind alike go roaming.”¹⁹ After 1588 Montaigne had his political career behind him; he no longer looked back and had given up his pretensions and aspirations of the early 1580s. He still recognized that “We corrupt the function of command when we obey through discretion, not subjection,”²⁰ but he offered a conclusion very different from that drawn in the first version of this chapter:

On the other hand, however, one might also consider that such constrained obedience belongs only to precise and stated commands. Ambassadors have a freer commission, which in many areas depends in the last resort on their judgment; they do not simply carry out, but also by their counsel form and direct their master’s will. I have in my time known people in command to be reprimanded for having obeyed the words of the king’s letters rather than the demands of the situation they were in.²¹

This discordant view of the ambassador’s function is in complete disagreement with Montaigne’s initial judgments regarding this profession. The statement also contradicts the example reported concerning Pope Jules II’s ambassador to the king of England. Similarly, after 1588, Montaigne had a very different view of public office. Thus he was soon to relate this knowledge to himself and no longer to a state or a king: “Moreover, it is a very useful knowledge, this knowledge of social dexterity. Like grace and beauty, it acts as a moderator at the first approaches of sociability and familiarity, and consequently opens the door for us to learning by the examples of others, and to bringing forth and displaying our own example, if it has anything instructive and communicable about it.”²²

On January 5, 1589, Catherine de Medici had died in the château of Blois at the age of seventy-two. Her death marked a genuine eclipse of the political practices of the 1570s and 1580s, because for more than twenty years she had managed to cope with the extremist Catholics and had succeeded in establishing a minimum of respect for the person of the king. A page in history had been turned. The supporters of the League were demanding total war against the Protestants. In the spring of 1589, the political situation was deteriorating from one day to the next in Guyenne and Languedoc. Bordeaux was threatening to go over to the League. Matignon took advantage of the revolt in Bordeaux to expel the Jesuits, who had been accused of fomenting rebellion. A few years before, Montaigne had accused them of not paying enough attention to the education of their pupils, but that may have been a pretext for more political reproaches connected with their meddling in the city’s affairs.23 There was a rumor that they had hidden weapons meant for the League supporters in an underground passage between their college and the church of Saint James. The king sent Matignon letters patent to expel the Jesuits from the city. The parlement of Bordeaux hesitated to follow the parlement of Toulouse, which had overtly declared its solidarity with the League and was trying to raise other cities against the king. The members of the Toulouse parlement distributed articles that they had the people swear to.²⁴ In their turn, Auch, Fleurance, and Moissac declared for the League, and the residents of Cahors expelled their bishop, who wanted to remain loyal to the king. On May 30, it was Périgueux’s turn to side with the Union. Agen joined the League in June. In Bordeaux, League supporters had tried to seize the city under the direction of a member of Pontac family, Thomas, lord of Escassefort, who had opened the Saint-Julien gate to let in the rebels, but Matignon succeeded in putting down the insurrection by going out into the street “with his sword in his hand and his head lowered.”²⁵ The leaders of the group of rebels, a barrel maker and a sergeant, were sentenced to death by the parlement on April 3, but the people really responsible for this sudden attack were not punished. On April 24 a formal session of the parlement of Bordeaux was held, at which Matignon, surrounded by his guards and a large contingent of the nobility, tried to reassert royal authority against the supporters of the League. To calm people down, from April 24 to April 30 a conference was held at Plessis-lès-Tours that resulted in a short-lived accord between Henry III and Henry of Navarre.

On August 1, 1589, Henry III was assassinated. Just before he died, he recognized Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, as his successor, in accord with the Salic law. France now had a Protestant king. Henry IV swore the oath at Saint-Cloud on August 4, surrounded by princes of the blood, dukes and peers, officers of the Crown and other officers loyal to the late king.²⁶ The news reached Matignon around August 8. It was brought by a messenger who urged Matignon to return to Bordeaux to prevent the city from falling under the control of the parlement or into the hands of the League. On August 18, after three stressful days during which Matignon tried to out-fox the parlement, which refused to hear of a heretical king, the lieutenant general and mayor of Bordeaux wrote to Henry IV to assure him of his loyalty. Upon learning of the death of Henry III, the Bordeaux parlement had entered into open conflict with Matignon. An envoy of Henry IV found “things very confused”27 in Bordeaux. A loyal servant of kings, Matignon supported the new sovereign, but in Bordeaux the sympathizers of the League caused him many difficulties. In the name of their neutrality, the members of parlement refused to recognize the king so long as he had not abjured his Protestant faith. Henry IV understood that it was nonetheless possible to buy them off, and he wrote to Matignon to tell him that “their wills are for sale.”²⁸ In the worst case, the king was prepared to imprison recalcitrant members of the parlement or simply to expel them from Bordeaux.

This crisis in the parlement lasted until early 1590. The members of the parlement finally yielded under Matignon’s pressure, saving face by sending a deputation petitioning the king to hasten his conversion to the Catholic religion. After many reversals, Henry IV was finally recognized in Bordeaux as the legitimate heir to the throne. From that moment on, the chronicler Estienne de Cruseau no longer calls the sovereign “the king of Navarre” but Henry IV. To reward the members of the Bordeaux parlement, the new king created a special tax designed to increase their salaries²⁹ and went even further by revoking Henry III’s edict providing for the establishment of a Chambre des Comptes in Bordeaux. The parlement had always refused to register this chamber and received the new king’s decision favorably. Henry IV could not afford to have cities like Bordeaux and Toulouse against him, and he was prepared to make concessions to bring the parlements onto his side.

What did Montaigne have to say about these developments in Bordeaux? In the course of 1589, just before Henry III’s death, De Thou and Schomberg had visited him in his château. They were received by his wife, because Montaigne was in Bordeaux, certainly to deal with private matters. Matignon was no longer consulting him, and he was not part of the group of the lieutenant governor’s advisors. It is clear that Montaigne did not approve of the concessions made to the members of the parlement, who had always put a spoke in his wheel. Similarly, the expulsion of the Jesuits seems not to have surprised him, because he, too, had had problems with them during his two terms as mayor. In Bordeaux, the new order of the Feuillants had taken their place and was propagating a message more respectful of the king’s person. The founder of this order, Jean de La Barrière, had taken refuge in Bordeaux after fleeing the revolt in Toulouse. The Feuillants had established themselves in the church of Saint Anthony, which the city had made available to them. They preached service to Henry III, and after the his death, La Barrière had even given a funeral oration in which he openly praised Matignon and advocated respect for royal authority.³⁰ The Feuillants offered an alternative less political than the Jesuits, and for that reason they were well received by Matignon and Montaigne, the latter having especially appreciated the abbot of the Feuillants’ political mediation between Henry III and the League in 1588–89.31 Several witnesses even claimed that, thanks to the Feuillants’ sermons, Bordeaux had experienced an unusual calm for several days after the death of Henry III.³² This political moderation fully corresponded to Montaigne’s conception of religion, and that is probably why he decided to have himself interred in their church.³³ Not long afterward, Montaigne’s wife took La Barrière as her spiritual advisor.ⁱ

In the second half of 1589, after preaching Lent in Angers, Pierre Charron came to Bordeaux, where he formed a friendship with Montaigne, whom he had already met in the Montaigne’s château two years earlier. We do not know much about this friendship, but Montaigne’s retirement attracted visitors of all kinds, eager to converse with the author of the Essais. The friendship between the two men has certainly been exaggerated, and Bayle provides no proof in support of his assertion that Montaigne allowed Charron to bear “after his death the full coat of arms of his noble family, because he left no male children.”³⁴ Charron’s outspokenness probably did not displease Montaigne. Their respective careers as members of parlements surely created a kind of complicity between the two men, because Charron had also worked for six years as a lawyer in the parlement (of Paris) before giving up this profession. There he had developed an ease of speaking and had proven to be a peerless orator. It was entirely natural that Charron later turned toward theology—a career choice rather than a true vocation—and entered orders. His first biographer, Gabriel de La Rochemaillet, tells us that Charron “had a ready tongue” and rapidly acquired great fame for his sermons. His facility as an orator was such that his reputation reached as far as the Court of the king of Navarre. Margaret of Valois had taken him as her ordinary preacher, and although he was a Protestant, Henry of Navarre liked to listen to the sermons of this eloquent Catholic monk. Charron’s outspokenness and his populist style made him a demagogue, but his independent judgment made him likeable.

The year 1588 had been turbulent for Montaigne and Charron alike. On his way to Paris, Charron made the error of stopping off in Angers, where events caught up with him. The League was gaining ground every day, and the king had decided to convoke the Estates General. In Angers, the elections were clearly favorable to the League. Charron preached on this occasion, in the church of Saint Peter, “a sermon full of great doctrine.”³⁵ Things took a very bad turn when the king suddenly decided to have the Guises assassinated before the assembled estates. Passions and hatred inflamed the residents of Angers, who had already been very agitated by Charron’s incendiary words. Charron gave sermon after sermon favorable to the League, more out of opportunism than real religious conviction, and he was partly responsible for the uprising of the people of Angers.36 In March 1589, when the duke of Aumont finally regained control of the rebel city in the name of Henry III, he hastened to punish the guilty parties. Charron was among the most prominent, and he was “forbidden to preach and arrested by the city,”³⁷ as he himself tells us in his correspondence. On May 12, 1589, he wrote to La Rochemaillet: “I now have permission to preach and yesterday I was restored to the pulpit on the day of the Ascension; but the arrest continues; I have not been able to obtain permission to leave.”³⁸ Between these two dates—October 1588 and April 1589—Charron had simply submitted by recognizing his errors. He made amends publicly on Easter—April 2, 1589—in the church of Saint Maurice, before the duke of Aumont and his officers, and publicly retracted his statements by beginning his sermon with the famous phrase: “I told you so, messieurs of Angers.” Charron had just saved his skin, but the members of the League interpreted his recantation as a betrayal. The lesson had cost him dearly, and Charron kept out of politics after taking this disastrous stand. In a letter written in April 1589 to a doctor at the Sorbonne, he concluded that it is not permissible for a subject, for any cause or reason whatever, “to league, band together, and rebel against his king.” He desperately tried to explain his actions: “There was a time when I was thinking about joining the League, and I put a foot in it. For in truth, I was never entirely in it, or resolutely; indeed, I was terribly offended by their actions.”³⁹ Thus in 1589, Charron was, like Montaigne, in retirement after an unfortunate political engagement that had almost cost him his life. As we see, the two men had things to talk about in the château. Their common trajectory outside politics had several similarities.

On September 17, 1589, Justus Lipsius sent a copy of his Politica to Montaigne. He enclosed a letter in which he asked for Montaigne’s judgment, considering that he had some expertise in the matter. An edition of the Politica printed in 1584 was already on the market, and Montaigne might have bought it earlier. It has been suggested that Lipsius’s Politica was an important source for the revised version of the Essais published in 1588.⁴⁰ Both the subject of the book and its illustrious author must have received the attention of Montaigne, who thought that politics needed to regain elevation and thus to be dealt with in a humanist discourse. However, Montaigne never embraced Lipsius’s conception of politics, and the third book of the Essais might even be seen as a refutation of Justus Lipsius.

Montaigne nonetheless felt obliged to praise Lipsius, who the preceding year had sent him dithyrambic letters about the Essais.ii Published during Montaigne’s lifetime, Lipsius’s letters to Montaigne testify to his admiration for the man whom he had called, as early as 1583, the French Thales.⁴¹ They also attest to Montaigne’s fame after 1588 and put him on the same level as Turnebus, Scaliger, De Thou, and Michel de L’Hospital, who were also members of Lipsius’s pantheon. Montaigne now had a reputation as an author that largely eclipsed his political notoriety. He was beginning to be considered a man of solid and upright judgment. Thus Lipsius placed Montaigne “among the Seven Sages, or a group still wiser than they, if it existed,” and praised “the rectitude of his judgment,” even implying that he had “not found in Europe anyone [except Montaigne] who on such subjects had sentiments that were in agreement with his.”⁴² Montaigne returned the compliment in his Essais, referring to those “who stand out in this sort of writing as well as in other kinds, as does Lipsius in the learned and laborious web of his Politics.”⁴³ He benefited considerably from his reading of the Flemish humanist after 1588, since a substantial number of the quotations in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy are copied from Justus Lipsius. Montaigne seems in particular to have read and used the Justi Lipsi adversus dialogistam liber de una religione, published in 1590. That said, the author of the Essais kept his distance from Lipsius, perhaps declining to enter into his game of honeyed praise and mutual back-scratching that corresponded so little to his temperament.⁴⁴ Pedantry has limits. Moreover, the ease with which Justus Lipsius converted from Protestantism to Catholicism—leaving Leiden for Leuven—might have seemed to be a form of opportunism contrary to his principles and certainly in contradiction with Lipsius’s famous treatise De constancia, which had made his reputation. The idols were losing their luster, and Montaigne was beginning to have a writer’s ideas and see himself as the equal of the best humanists of his time.

Whereas Montaigne had resigned himself to corresponding and conversing only with the great figures of humanism, the arrival of Henry of Navarre on the throne gave him new hopes. It is not so easy to rid oneself of the demon of politics. At that time, the easy-going king was not much loved by his people, and, as we have seen, he was still forbidden to enter Paris. The majority of the French did not recognize him as their king. Montaigne may have had advice to offer Henry IV. He wrote to him on several occasions to congratulate him on his succession to the throne and to offer him his services. However, this last effort to relaunch a political career that had come to a halt lacked determination. Besides, Henry IV may have needed him more than he needed the king at this point in his life. A reply from Henry in early January 1590 gave Montaigne an opportunity to write a fine letter in which he shows his joy at being read by the king who had “deigned to consider my letters and command a response.”45 Montaigne reminded him of the mutual trust that had long existed between the two men, and he took advantage of the occasion to show Henry IV that he was keeping up with political developments in Guyenne. After praising Matignon’s “sincere zeal and marvelous prudence,” he hinted that he would still be capable of working for the governor of Guyenne. Pretending to be well informed about the latest negotiations in Bordeaux, he declared that he knew that Matignon was sending good reports every day, as if he himself knew the content of the missives sent by the lieutenant governor and mayor of Bordeaux.

The letter from Henry IV to Montaigne brought out the demon of politics that still lived in Montaigne, but it was assuredly more an instinctual reaction than a genuine project. Montaigne would have liked to go to Paris or any other city where the king was residing, but that was a pious wish: too many factors prevented him from realizing it. The rapid deterioration of his health did not allow him to undertake a sojourn at the Court, and the times were not favorable to his conception of public occupations. He had resigned himself to pursuing a career as an author, and found it hard to imagine resuming political service. Negotiating with Henry III was one thing, but coming to an agreement with members of the League, the same people who had imprisoned him in Paris, was quite another. In the old days, Charles IX, thanks to the marquis of Trans, had allowed him to make his entrance into politics; Henry III had then promised him a diplomatic career before putting him at the head of a city on the edge of revolt; what could the heir to the throne of France promise him that he had not already experienced? Although he was flattered by the idea of serving a third monarch, Montaigne had nonetheless become realistic in matters of politics. He could still imagine himself in the role of a wise counselor, offering advice drawn from ancient examples and his personal experiences, but he no longer had the ability to be the king’s man on the ground. In another letter dated January 18, 1590, Montaigne made one last desperate attempt, without having much faith in it:

Sire, your letter of the last day of November reached me only just now, and beyond the period that it pleased you to set for me, of your sojourn in Tours. I receive as a singular grace that your majesty deigned to make me feel that you would be glad to see me, a person so useless, but yours, even more out of affection than duty. You have very laudably adjusted your external forms to the lofty height of your new fortune, but the calm and ease of your internal humors, you have just as laudably not changed. It has pleased you to have respect not only for my age, but also for my desire, to call me to a place [Tours] where you were somewhat in repose from your laborious activities. Will it soon be in Paris, Sire? And I will spare no means or health to go there.46

This question remained unanswered, because Henry IV was authorized to enter Paris only after having converted to the Catholic faith, nearly a year after Montaigne’s death. Despite his disillusionments, Montaigne assured the king once again of his unshakeable friendship and, despite his resolute choice of the Catholic religion, reminded him that he was always close to his political ideas: “Even when I had to confess to my priest, I did not fail to look to some extent favorably on your successes. Now [that you are king of France], with more reason and liberty, I embrace them with full affection.”⁴⁷ Just as if the king had Montaigne’s qualities, including the “sincere zeal” and “marvelous prudence” of the Marshal de Matignon, who also followed the model left by his predecessor as mayor of Bordeaux: “from whom I do not suppose that you receive every day so many good and signal services without recalling my assurances and hopes.” In short, Montaigne had prepared the ground for Matignon, and Henry IV was obliged to recognize the political and diplomatic qualities of a servant who was still putting himself at his king’s disposal. Montaigne shared with the king what he called a “common tranquility,” the theme he had decided to emphasize in his last essays.

On March 31, 1590, the parlement of Bordeaux sent a delegation to the king composed of Guillaume Daffis, président à mortier, and the councillors François d’Alesme, Gabriel de Tarneau, and Geoffroy de Bussaguet Montaigne—Montaigne’s cousin—to assure the king of their loyalty and obedience.⁴⁸ On Saturday, May 26, 1590, Montaigne’s daughter, Léonor, nineteen years old, married François de La Tour, who was thirty-one. Léonor’s dowry amounted to 20,000 livres tournois, two-thirds of which (6,000 écus from Montaigne, and 666 écus from Françoise de La Chassaigne) were payable after the respective deaths of the parents, who made their daughter their universal heir. This sum was considerable for the time and shows that the noble land of Montaigne and other possessions had allowed Montaigne to exploit his holdings and grow rich during the 1580s.

Montaigne took advantage of this family event to put his affairs in order and plan the future of his seigneury. He was fifty-seven years old and his wife was forty-six. Married for twenty-five years, they would not have any more children, and thus had to resign themselves to conveying their property to their sole daughter. In the marriage contract between François de La Tour and Léonor de Montaigne, Montaigne had included several clauses and provisions concerning the transmission of his house’s name and coat of arms.⁴⁹ He openly envisaged his own death and that of his wife, and the time had come to ensure that the seigneury of Montaigne would survive him. He bequeathed to his wife half the usufruct of the seigneury so long as she lived; Françoise de La Chassaigne did the same by granting to her husband a similar usufruct of her property. One provision in the marriage contract stipulated that if one of the parties involved refused to bear as the head of the family the name and coat of arms of Montaigne, the house would go to Léonor’s closest male descendent. However, Montaigne reserved the right, during his lifetime, to change this clause and to substitute anyone he pleased to bear the coat of arms of his house. This very detailed document allows us to sense the anxiety Montaigne felt with regard to the survival of his name, his coat of arms, and his seigneury. Nevertheless, he had to resign himself to foreseeing all the possible outcomes. Four weeks later, on June 23, Léonor left the family château to go with her husband to Saintonge.iii Montaigne found himself alone with his wife in his château.

On July 20, from his camp at Saint-Denis, Henry IV wrote another letter to Montaigne, asking him to come and occupy a position in his service. Two days before, the king had written a letter addressed to the mayor and the jurats of Bordeaux to reassure them concerning what he called the restoration of his authority. He told them that he was expecting to “recover within a few days our city of Paris or to win a battle,” and asked for their political support. As a reward for their fidelity, he revealed to them his intention to reduce the taxes on the entrance of merchandise into the city as soon as his affairs were going better. The terms of the contract with the city were sufficiently clear: “However, we desire that this [tax] now be paid, and without grumbling or opposition, if possible.”⁵⁰ This promise was tempered by another missive addressed to Matignon and dated July 20. Henry IV congratulated his governor—and not the mayor of Bordeaux—on his prudence (repeating Montaigne’s praise) and gave him instructions concerning the levy of a new tax of 40,000 crowns on the region for “the maintenance of the army.”⁵¹ The king also intended to bring the sénéchaussées of Armagnac, Quercy, and Rouergue into the parlement of Bordeaux and planned to nominate six new councillors, thus making it possible to establish a third Chambre des Enquêtes in the parlement. This was a way of foreseeing additional revenues for the crown. Aware that this would not be well received by the current members of the parlement, the king left it to Matignon to decide regarding this project of integrating the sénéchaussées into the parlement. He wanted to avoid alienating the members of the parlement, and he needed the political support of cities like Bordeaux and Toulouse. In this letter to Matignon, Henry IV also complains about having been deceived and poorly informed regarding the political situation in Gascony. Was he thinking about asking Montaigne to inform him about troop movements and political negotiations in the southwest? Matignon could have used an “assistant” who would serve as a liaison with the king. Henry IV was looking for an intermediary who could work with Matignon, and logically he thought that Montaigne had already occupied such a position with a certain success during the reign of Henry III. We can imagine that the job Henry IV offered Montaigne that same day—July 20, 1590—was connected with this.

Six weeks later, on September 2, 1590, Montaigne replied to the king:

Sire, the one [the letter] it pleased Your Majesty to write me on July 20 was delivered to me only this morning, and found me in the grip of a very violent tertian fever widespread in this area for the past month. Sire, I deem it a very great honor to receive your commands and I did not fail to write to Mr the Marshal de Matignon, very expressly three times, about my deliberations and the obligation I was under to go to see him, to the point of telling him the route I would take to safely meet him if he agreed. Having received no reply, I think he considered how long and dangerous the roads to be taken would be for me. Sire, Your Majesty, I beg you to do me the grace of believing that I shall never spare my purse on the occasions when I would not seek to spare my life. I have never received any boon from the liberality of kings, any more than I have asked for or merited [such a boon], and I have received no payment for the steps I have taken in their service, which Your Majesty knows in part. What I have done for your predecessors [Charles IX and Henry III] I will do even more willingly for you. I am, Sire, as wealthy as I wish to be. When I have exhausted my purse for Your Majesty, in Paris, I shall be bold enough to tell you, and then, if you deem me worthy of continuing to be part of your entourage, you will get a better bargain than from the least of your officers.52

Henry IV had probably asked him to put himself at Matignon’s disposal and allowed him to foresee a meeting in Paris or in Tours. Montaigne did not expect any remuneration for the services he could render to the king, declaring that he was rich enough to pay the expenses associated with his travel. However, his health did not permit him to realize his new political projects, and Montaigne did not set foot in Paris after 1588. Neither was he to meet with Henry IV.⁵³ This letter to Henry IV is Montaigne’s last political document. Matignon paid no attention to his offers of service, probably believing him incapable of serving as a negotiator between Charles I of Lorraine, the recognized leader of the League after his father’s assassination, and Henry IV. Moreover, Henry IV had little to negotiate, other than the renunciation of his Protestant faith. Only a conversion could allow him to enter Paris, but he was still reluctant to take this step. In the meantime, Tours served him as a provisional capital, and the king had resigned himself to establishing the seat of his government there, because in the autumn of 1590 Paris remained his main political problem. Henry IV had begun the siege of the capital on July 30, 1589, had repeatedly lifted it, and then resumed the blockade of the city between May and August 1590, without success. He had considered every means of seizing the capital, including having gentlemen and soldiers disguised as flour merchants enter through the Saint-Honoré gate.54 He did not take control of Paris until March 1594, but Montaigne was never to experience that moment.

At the end of 1590, the king’s authority was no longer respected in Guyenne, and the League had seized several strongholds. The parlement of Bordeaux sent a letter to the king concerning the disastrous condition of the province. In this letter the members of the parlement lamented the “ruin and subversion” that currently prevailed in Guyenne. On November 15 a further letter expressing the same fears was sent to the king. After the League forces took Rions and then Ayre de Mezin and Villandrault, the parlement considered Bordeaux “already under siege” and war imminent.⁵⁵ Royal edicts no longer had much effect, and most of the time they were not even applied. The confusion reached its apex, and the members of parlement considered the political situation anarchical. The League had infiltrated the city’s administrative apparatus and enjoyed an unprecedented influence in Bordeaux, including in the parlement, which endlessly debated the question of whether it should recognize the king of Navarre as the king of France. A motion presented during the “interregnum” proposed to declare Navarre “incapable of being king of France.”⁵⁶ The motion was made and debated from September 22 to September 26 before it was rejected, because the court judged that ultimately it had “few means … of making Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, recognized as king of France in Guyenne.”⁵⁷ At the end of October, the parlement still had not decided whether it should use the word “king,” or simply refer to his “Majesty” in addressing Henry IV. A vote followed “and approved, twenty-five to twenty, the use in memoranda of the word ‘majesty’ in order to put an end to the interrupted deliberation and still honor him with the title.”⁵⁸ Polarized more than ever, the parlement persisted in its rebellion against royal power. After many delays, and thanks to Matignon’s skill, the parlement of Bordeaux finally recognized officially, on December 26, Henry IV as king of France. However, on the same date, the supporters of the League proclaimed Cardinal Bourbon king, under the name of Charles X.

In March 1591, Montaigne attended as a witness, along with Geoffroy de Bussaguet Montaigne, his cousin, and Caumont de La Force, a Protestant, the drawing up, before a notary, of the last will and testament of the marquis of Trans, Germain-Gaston de Foix.59 The marquis died four months later, on August 7, 1591. Deeply distressed by the heroic death of three of his children during the battle of Moncrabeau, Montaigne’s protector had fallen into senility. He was over eighty years old. With him a major political force in the region disappeared. The marquis of Trans had asked Montaigne to accept the responsibility of serving as “honorary tutor” of his children and grandchildren. The political patron of the 1570s had made his client the executor of his will, forbidding his daughters to “contract marriage with anyone without the consent of the aforementioned [Montaigne, Geoffroy de Bussaguet, and Caumont de La Force].”⁶⁰ However, on account of his declining health, Montaigne no longer had the ability to play the role of tutor and protector for Germain-Gaston de Foix’s grandson, the young Frédéric, age eleven, because he found it increasingly difficult to go to Fleix on horseback. After twenty years of good and loyal service to his sponsor in politics, Montaigne was no longer capable of responding to this last request made by his neighbor and friend.

On March 31, 1591, Montaigne mentioned in his Éphéméride the birth of his granddaughter, Françoise de La Tour. This was the last entry in his almanac and the last known document from the last eighteen months of his life. The same year, Geoffroy Bussaguet Montaigne—who had usurped the name of Eyquem de Montaigne—obtained letters patent to have his son Raymond, lord of Saint-Genest,⁶¹ received as a councillor at the parlement of Bordeaux and to reestablish the office of Raymond Eyquem, Geoffroy’s father, who had been dead for twenty-nine years. Geoffroy de Bussaguet-Montaigne was the parlement’s deputy to Henry IV and used his acquaintances to get his son into the parlement. Anticipating difficulties in having the letters patent registered, Raymond de Bussaguet had Gabriel de Cruseau, president of the Cour des Enquêtes, and Geoffroy de Malvyn, who were able to hinder his election, recused in the parlement. A quarrel ensued in which thirteen councillors were recused, in accord with the usual mode of confrontation between clientelist cliques. The councillor Joseph d’Andrault proved to be particularly virulent in his speech against the Montaigne family and curtly opposed the appointment of Raymond de Bussaguet in order to nominate another candidate for the vacant post of councillor in one of the Chambres des Enquêtes.

This was the starting point for a series of increasingly extravagant denunciations and accusations. The “lord Aiquem de Montaigne” (Bussaguet) rose to denounce Antoine de Belcier, who, according to him, had tried to assassinate him in his house of Rignac. He now demanded reparations, if not vengeance against Belcier’s friends, who, still according to him, were forming a conspiracy against his family. The animosity between the members of parlement was such that insults were made on both sides. Finally, Geoffroy de Bussaguet Montaigne and Joseph d’Andrault were expelled for a time “from courts and trials” for fear that they might come to blows. This incident is reported by Estienne de Cruseau in his chronicle62 and shows that the parlement was still functioning in the same way, and that nothing had changed since the time when Montaigne had also had to battle every day against rival families that were trying to impose their relatives as councillors. There is no doubt that Montaigne heard about this quarrel that was tarnishing the Montaignes’ name. On May 15, 1591, the letters patent reestablishing the office of the late Raymond Eyquem were finally confirmed in favor of his nephew, Raymond de Bussaguet, the son of Geoffroy de Bussaguet Montaigne, “called Montaigne.” In 1595, three years after the death of Michel de Montaigne, by a ruling of the parlement, Raymond de Bussaguet officially obtained the right to bear the name “Montaigne.” On Friday, November 22, 1596, Raymond de Bussaguet Montaigne joined the Great Chamber under the name of “Bussaguet, sive Aiquem.” Finally, one year later, in 1598, Geoffroy appears under the name “De Montagne,” and his son Raymond under the name of “De Montagne fils.” Once again there were two Montaignes in the parlement of Bordeaux.

“The Only Book in the World of Its Kind”

Far from expressing the essence of the Essais, the separation between public life and private life Montaigne made after 1588—in the third book of the Essais and especially in the additions on the Bordeaux Copy—came late in his reflection and only after a series of political disappointments. After 1588, Montaigne no longer had any choice but to theorize about what has to be seen as a political failure. His preface to the reader did not need to be modified, because it also reflected an observation. That is the whole irony of this text that the author of the Essais left practically unchanged from one edition to the next. Montaigne always weighed his words, and the Essais certainly remain the antithesis of the pamphlet or any form of politically engaged literature, but the Essais were now loaded with a disapproving commentary and a hardly concealed, second-level critical appreciation. His book became, over the years and editions, the manifestation of his political disenchantment and his forced disengagement from public life. The goal of Montaigne’s book had never been to participate in or to settle the disputes and conflicts of his time, but rather to propose a counter-model for a different way of practicing diplomacy and politics. Similarly, current events had never occupied a central place in his reflections and judgments, but they were nonetheless present as a background. Montaigne drew most of his examples from Antiquity, but like Machiavelli, he had also found historical or political similarities to his own century. The absence of an immediate history now allowed him to reorient his book without the successive projects seeming too contradictory. It was simply a question of establishing an even greater distance from public life and of separating the private from the public, of theorizing this distance and emphasizing the form of the Essais rather than their content. It was from that moment on that Montaigne resolutely and consciously opted for form.63 He could also settle accounts with a public life that had more or less disappointed him. For this reason, the critique of this public life (across the ages and places) occupies a more important place in the work of the last Montaigne (1588–92); it is determined and influenced by his personal experience of diplomatic and political functions.

After 1588 Montaigne redefined the ideal reader that he had initially imagined as capable and candid. Confronted by a text that is paradoxical⁶⁴ and often contradictory, the reader is henceforth conceived as an active participant in what Montaigne was beginning to conceive as a unique genre of literature, “the only book in the world of its kind.”⁶⁵ Read in an essentially linear way in 1580, the text now includes multiple points of entry and subjects itself to the aleatory laws of the capable reader. The additions are only “overweights” that challenge the chronology of narratives and confuse the time of experiences in order to accentuate a more universal conception of human beings:

My book is always one. Except that at each new edition, so that the buyer may not come off completely empty-handed, I allow myself to add, since it is only an ill-fitted patchwork, some extra ornaments. These are only over-weights, which do not condemn the original form, but give some special value to each of the subsequent ones, by a bit of ambitious subtlety. Thence, however, it will easily happen that some transposition of chronology may slip in, for my stories take their place according to their timeliness, not always according to their age.⁶⁶

The goal of this late addition is to create the illusion of a harmony among chapters that are, however, very different in form and content. From this moment on, Montaigne asks his new reader to read differently, that, is to lend himself in his turn to the practice of feuilletage.^iv Reading has to adapt to the writing the better to blur the history of the text and its editions. However, the author also asks for greater concentration on the reader’s part; he requires a sustained reading that demands more attention. He conceives longer chapters to keep his reader captive. His Essais have slipped over to the side of leisure activities and entertainment: “Because such frequent breaks into chapters as I used at the beginning seemed to me to disrupt and dissolve attention before it was aroused, making it disdain to settle and collect for so little, I have begun making them longer, requiring fixed purpose and assigned leisure. In such an occupation, if you will not give a man a single hour, you will not give him anything.”67

These successive transformations of the reader—or at least of Montaigne’s conception of the reader—were influenced by the different conceptions of a text that is henceforth envisaged as an indissociable whole. We can say that, after 1588, Montaigne claims that his book has a coherence, but it is a formal rather than a conceptual coherence. The logic of this homogeneity escapes understanding, but that matters little because Montaigne is offering an unprecedented book. The reader will have to let himself be persuaded to read in a different way the text he is given. The coherence of the text has to do solely with the fact that it emanates from an individual who assures us of the well-foundedness of his project and who presents himself as a model for the reader. The famous “strata” of the Essais, generally indicated in modern editions, must necessarily disappear in Montaigne’s conception of his book after 1588. It is no longer a didactic or evolving text, but simply a mirror in which the author’s self becomes an other in the construction of the reader’s self.

Between 1588, the beginning of a definitive retirement to his château, and September 13, 1592, the date of his death, Montaigne acquired the habit of working in the margins of several printed copies of the 1588 edition of the Essais. Printed on large sheets of paper with wide margins, these working copies allowed him to add new commentaries and reflections, and also to correct his text for a printing that unfortunately did not take place during his lifetime. In the Bordeaux Copy, Montaigne modified the Au lecteur one last time, going so far as to delete and then to rewrite one sentence, cross out two words, and change the punctuation. The Essais were no longer seen as a way of gaining access to coveted careers; instead, they now represented a career in themselves. Writing was no longer a means but an end in itself. We can finally speak of retirement, but a retirement that must not be confused with an exile because from this time on the tower became the place of creation, the seat of a new career.

Whereas earlier Montaigne had to leave his château to reach the sites of power he dreamed about (the parlement, embassies, the Court), going to Rome, Bordeaux, and Paris, he now fashioned an image of a recluse that better served his final career. The tower is worth visiting, because in it one finds the famous library where the author now spent most of his time:

It is on the third floor of a tower; the first is my chapel, the second a bedroom and dressing room, where I often sleep in order to be alone. Above it is a great wardrobe. In the past it was the most useless space in my house. In my library I spend most of the days of my life, and most of the hours of the day. I am never there at night. Adjoining it is a rather elegant little room, in which a fire may be laid in winter, very pleasantly lighted by a window. And if I feared the trouble no more than the expense, the trouble that drives me from all business, I could easily add on to each side a gallery a hundred paces long and twelve wide, on the same level, having found all the walls raised, for another purpose, to the necessary height.68

This late description of his workroom locates Montaigne in his château. The travel that went hand in hand with political or diplomatic careers gives way to another sort of movement, this time in books. Montaigne no longer moves through the world, the world comes to him. Whereas the first essays responded to a centrifugal movement, pushing Montaigne outside his book toward active and public life, now, inversely, the additions to the Bordeaux Copy form a centripetal force that directs Montaigne toward the interior, into his book, the only place of his existence as an author.

We have several texts testifying to visits to Montaigne, where the author of the Essais lived, between 1588 and 1592. It was fashionable to visit the writer closed up in his tower; that had already become a kind of pilgrimage for scholars in the region. Montaigne was in the process of acquiring a high opinion of himself and of his career as an author. Marie de Gournay attests to Montaigne’s fame in her preface to the posthumous edition of the Essais published in 1595, but was he really aware of the true nature of these visits? Marie de Gournay seems clear-sighted when she reports an anecdote that reveals this gap between Montaigne’s conception of himself after 1588 and the perception that his guests had of him:

My father [Montaigne], wanting to displease me one day, told me that he thought there were thirty men in our great city [Paris], where he then was, who were as smart as he was. One of my arguments to refute him was that had there been someone, he would certainly have come to greet him, and, it pleased me to add, to idolize him; and that so many people received him as a man from a good house, a man of renown and rank: none of them as Montaigne.⁶⁹

Did people come to visit Montaigne for his reputation as an author or simply because he was a gentleman? Gournay answers this question when she comments on Montaigne’s attitude toward his book and his new career: “I shall tell you [the reader] that the public favor he talks about is not the one he believed he was owed, but rather the one he thought all the less about obtaining because a fuller and more perfect one was due him.”⁷⁰ This surprising declaration on the part of Marie de Gournay reveals a wide gap between Montaigne’s perception of his own work from 1588 on and the reality of the reception of the Essais. On the one hand, Montaigne declares that he enjoys the public’s favor, and on the other hand Gournay tells us that Montaigne was short-sighted when he imagined his audience and took his desires for realities. In a letter, Estienne Pasquier confirms that Montaigne had a high opinion of himself: “while he pretends to disdain himself, I never read an author who esteemed himself more than he.”71

Whereas he had formerly tried to make his inclination toward justice and honor jibe with the political practices of his time, Montaigne now detached himself from politics and from public service to devote himself to his “back room,” the curiosity cabinet that his book had become. Freedom and idleness are reconciled in a model that recovers its title to nobility: “Freedom and laziness, which are my ruling qualities, are qualities diametrically opposite to that trade [public service].”⁷² The tower was no longer a refuge that allowed him to let the crises that inevitably punctuated political life pass him by, but rather an experimental laboratory where a new literary genre was taking form. After 1588, the Essais were constructed in opposition to the first Essais based on a strong conviction that politics and diplomacy could be improved. After having erased (or rather “drowned”) the references to the political events that punctuated his first Essais, Montaigne now took an interest in the human condition in its universality and atemporality.

Let us consider Montaigne in his library after 1588. He had accumulated on his shelves several editions of his Essais as objects independent of each other, all bearing witness to publishing projects that had evolved over time. These objects/books reminded him of his different intentions. This observation offers us an opportunity to look into the relation that Montaigne might have had with the books in his library (including those that had his name on the title page). The author of the Essais provided a remarkable number of details regarding the arrangement of his books and his way of consulting them. As we have seen, historians “came right to his forehand” and certainly occupied a privileged place in the layout of his library. The fitting out of the second floor of his tower corresponded to an organizational logic derived not only from his reading habits but also from his own work as an author after 1588. We can imagine a deliberate organization of the shelves allowing rapid and repeated access to the books he used most often. Montaigne then took his own book as the starting point for new textual developments. From one year to the next, the author “Montaigne” occupied more and more space—as new editions of the Essais came out—on the shelves of his library. The production of the Essais was based not only on the consultation of other people’s books but also on the recasting of his own works.

After 1588, the author “Montaigne” occupied one shelf, or even a whole bookcase, because he kept several copies of each edition of the Essais that were reserved for the work of correction, constituting proofs, as well as others that were intended as presents to be given to visitors passing through. From a simple Montaigne shelf, we have passed to a Montaigne bookcase. In fact, we have to add to this list the “Montaignes” (Essais of 1580, 1582, and 1588), the two editions of Sebond’s Théologie naturelle (1569 and 1581), the edition of La Boéties’ works (1571), and the manuscript of the journal of his travels in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. These objects must have occupied a place of choice in his library. They represented singular objects, but they were also separate texts, each of which had a different goal and a different audience. For that reason, we must lay to rest the myth perpetuated since the nineteenth century, according to which Montaigne was the author of a single book. The Essais existed in their plurality and their variety, and they never had the unity that is assigned to them today. How, for example, can we understand the long chapter “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (a book within a book) without the editions of Montaigne’s translation of the Theologia naturalis by this same Raymond Sebond?

As Montaigne acknowledges, books that he seldom looked at were also in his library. These are the ones that occupied a place on the periphery of his shelves. Montaigne took care to inscribe a few notes and brief commentaries at the end of these works in order to refresh his memory in the event that he decided to consult them again. Among these peripheral volumes, Montaigne placed “his Guicciardini” (La Historia d’Italia) and “his Philippe de Comines” (Mémoires). Over time, these books disappeared from his memory and fell into oblivion. Thus Montaigne more than once happened “to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes.”73 However, we must be wary of the importance assigned to the books annotated in Montaigne’s hand that have been found. The fact that they are extant today does not mean that they had a central place in Montaigne’s library. The hundred or so books that belonged to Montaigne and that have been accounted for are naturally more revered than the ones that have been lost. However, the tree hides the forest. In Montaigne’s case, one book bearing his signature may mask many more. We must therefore question the relative importance of the few books containing “reading notes” that have been put on sale over the past two centuries and that are too often presented as if they played a determining role in the development of his thought. It is not a matter of minimizing the importance of these works, but only of putting into perspective the significance of these notes in Montaigne’s hand in relation to the totality of a collection of books of which we now have only about one-tenth.⁷⁴

In 1588, the Essais were already established as the book of books, a library in itself; they became the antithesis of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude the moment Montaigne denied his text any possibility of being used for political purposes. It was in accord with this logic of distancing from history that Montaigne claimed that he presented only opinions produced by “a tumultuous and vacillating mind.”75 Whereas for La Boétie the Discourse was a work of his “boyhood” written “only by way of an exercise,”⁷⁶ after 1585—and especially after 1588—the Essais was a text that expressed Montaigne’s maturity, his political resignation, and his sense of a history that he no longer made and that was behind him. La Boétie could now disappear from the Essais. The few traces of him that remained in the first editions of the Essais gradually faded away. La Boétie’s twenty-nine sonnets had remained like a wart on Montaigne’s face, and we can imagine his relief when he discovered that these verses had been published “elsewhere”—perhaps in the famous description of the Médoc area that has now been lost.^v It had become pointless to reproduce these verses any longer, and Montaigne crossed them out. After all, La Boétie was known as an orator, not as a poet. Each person has his abilities: La Boétie became a politician again and Montaigne now erected himself into a literary man. Deleting these sonnets full of “originality and beauty”⁷⁷ was an obvious move, but once again, instead of omitting the whole chapter, Montaigne cut only the verses. The title—“Twenty-nine sonnets of Etienne de la Boétie”—remained as a remnant of another time, another conception of the Essais. The sonnets had initially replaced a treatise on political philosophy, and the time had come to do away with this “false space” that might leave the impression that La Boétie still had a place in the book. Paradoxically, this La Boétie, who existed “outside the Essais,” had become a herald of the Protestant cause, and Montaigne no longer saw any reason to keep him in his own writings. Since politics had been relegated to the space outside the book, La Boétie obviously had to pay the price for this disappearance and could be eclipsed in his turn.

The Bordeaux Copy marks a decisive turning point toward the practice of the margins that now defines Montaigne. But it would be wrong to see in the editions of 1580, 1582, and 1588 the origin of a literary and philosophical tendency that asserted itself only after 1588, following the disastrous, traumatizing experience of his brief imprisonment and his failure as a negotiator between Navarre and Henry III. When Montaigne wrote or dictated his first essays, he did so under the weight of history and the events of his time. Later on, in his library, Montaigne was able to create an independent work space, sheltered from the troubles outside. His past works reminded him of past publishing intentions; they constituted the memory of a social and political itinerary that went back more than twenty years. Each edition of the Essais offered itself to the public as a singular object that replaced the preceding editions. In Montaigne’s case, and by way of his library, all the editions of the Essais had their own lives that corresponded to distinct and often contradictory stages; we have only to compare the work repeatedly done on the 1580 text with the addition of new chapters in 1588 and the addition of copious manuscript developments on the Bordeaux Copy. Montaigne slowly became aware of the political failure of the years between 1588 and 1592.

Montaigne evolved into an author by accident, at least that is what he says. But let us be wary of legends. According to him, he cared little about his audience and wrote only to live on after his demise, in the memory of his relatives and close friends. Moreover, he was not really an author: “Authors communicate with the people by some special extrinsic mark; I am the first to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian or a poet or a jurist.”78 This universality of being corresponds to a late construction and reflects an observation rather than a choice, because Montaigne had tried hard to assert himself by some “special extrinsic mark.” We might even say that his book is the precise opposite of a writing that is “unpremeditated and accidental.”⁷⁹ Thus we must take with a grain of salt Montaigne’s repeated statements concerning his private and particular publications—for his father in the case of the Théologie naturelle, for his deceased friend in the case of the Mesnagerie de Xenophon, or simply “dedicated to the private convenience of [his] relatives and friends”⁸⁰ in the case of the Essais. Montaigne’s book naturally grew over time, but it developed in divergent directions. For that reason, the maturity of the text coincides with its monstrosity, because the Essais are pieced together and do not necessarily form a harmonious whole. But the manuscript additions of the last four years, written in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy, gave the book a more personal character that transformed forever our judgment of the book and allowed it to become a canonical work. The Virgilian epigraph, Viresque acquirit eundo (“As it goes on, it gathers strength”) is written by hand on the title page of the Bordeaux Copy and henceforth served as a motto for the Essais, because Montaigne had understood that his text had arrived at maturity.^vi The quotation Montaigne chose to introduce and summarize his Essais comes from the Aeneid, where it refers to the propagation of rumor. Montaigne gives this Virgilian fragment a new meaning by associating this phrase with the growth of his book as a result of his successive additions; the Essais, like rumor, progresses and becomes stronger thanks to the additions Montaigne made to his text.

The different editions of the Essais correspond to distinct moments, but not to the stages of some kind of coordinated evolution. While the 1580 edition was addressed to a limited audience and can be considered a private edition published to make himself known to a small circle of influential men (which is not very different from the model prevalent in the Middle Ages, in which the only thing that mattered was the personalized presentation of the book to the prince), the 1582 edition responded to a very different logic and benefited Millanges as much as it did Montaigne in the context of his election as mayor of Bordeaux. These first two editions nonetheless remained firmly anchored locally or regionally, and their printing had as its principal goal to establish the author’s political role while at the same time asserting his membership in the nobility. After 1585, Montaigne’s political pretensions were significantly compromised, though his career had not come to a complete end. The difficulties he experienced as mayor of Bordeaux led him to consider a different orientation of his activity as an author. The third book of the Essais offered several testimonies to this disillusionment with public office, but Montaigne nonetheless retained the hope of a political career in the service of princes. The year 1588 brought a rupture and revealed a new attitude toward the “duties of honor” and “civil constraint.” Far from considering this last Montaigne as the outcome of the years from 1570 to 1588, we must see in his work on the Essais after 1588 a form of resignation and the expression of a realization of a political misfortune that is explained by the author’s political biography.

This failure led to a late revelation. In fact, after 1588 the positive reception—on the qualitative and not the quantitative level—of the Essais allowed Montaigne to glimpse the possibility of a career as an author. From this time on the staging of Montaigne as a daily author, a practician and theoretician of the “textual extension,” began. The 1588 edition certainly marks an important moment in the construction of this image to which we are now accustomed, but it has the defect of obscuring the independent projects of 1580 and 1582 without having yet fully accepted the writing of the self as its main object. The tumultuous events in Paris at the time of the barricades and Montaigne’s imprisonment in 1588 put an end to any political pretensions. The myth of the lord retired to his estate and to his tower could then take on substance. Once and for all, the private was given precedence over the public.

The writing in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy marks the beginning of a new project, and it is this work that defines Montaigne today. But it would be a mistake to seek in the publication of the editions of 1580 and 1582 the origins of a tendency that truly asserted itself only starting in the period between 1585 and 1588. That is why the Essais of 1580, 1582, 1588, and the text of 1595 form very different political and literary projects and must be understood in relation to the political and religious climate in which Montaigne lived before and after his return from Italy and his two terms as mayor of Bordeaux. One of the last additions to the Bordeaux Copy offers a disappointed, a posteriori commentary on his political commitment to Henry III his allegiance to Henry IV, the new king of France. It was now with a greater concern for himself and a certain detachment that the author of the Essais judged these two kings and, more generally, politics: “I look upon our kings simply with a loyal and civic affection, which is neither moved nor removed by private interest. For this I congratulate myself.”81 A salutary, but belated distance for someone who had earlier boasted of having developed a privileged friendship with the two Henrys.

Montaigne’s different publishing projects were determined by different political logics and must be studied sociologically. These projects may seem cumulative, but they respond to strategies that varied over time. It is here that Montaigne’s biography allows us to distinguish precisely what the successive stages of writing and publishing the Essais from 1570 to 1592 represent. Montaigne’s books have an undeniable presence and temporality, because they testify to the materiality of a text subject to publishing operations determined in space and time. Montaigne was always aware of the materiality of his Essais, going so far as to change the form of their presentation—I refer to the development of the formats (octavo, quarto, and folio for the printings of 1580–82, 1588, and 1595, respectively). Earlier publishing choices no longer corresponded to Montaigne’s idea of his book and his reader.

Generally speaking, we can also say that the first two books of the Essais are now placed under the preeminence of the third, which is associated with the “last Montaigne.” The thirteen chapters of the third book, almost five times less numerous than those in the first book, provide the overwhelming majority of the passages cited by critics over the past fifty years. In particular, this “qualitative” and selective practice of Montaigne gives special priority to the additions to the Bordeaux Copy, that is, to the manuscript part of the Essais that arrogantly dominates the short chapters in the 1580 edition. We note, for example, that after 1588 Montaigne is more inclined to make additions to the third book, almost all of whose chapters include rather copious additions made in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy. A single chapter in this book stands out as an exception: “Of the disadvantage of greatness” (III: 7), which is not as long as the others and appears to be the third book’s poor relation.

Montaigne’s work on the Bordeaux Copy tends to unite the three books in a vision of the writing of the self. Contradictions and digressions abound, but they are now the proof of a self in movement and a kind of writing that gives priority to intuition at the expense of reasoning. The chapter “Against do-nothingness” (II: 21), which is very short in its first version in the 1580 edition, is significantly expanded in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy in order to make it more personal and allow Montaigne to offer a few more philosophical reflections on the subject. Similarly, the chapter “Of riding post” (II: 22), although very short in the editions of 1580 and 1588, undergoes a new development that establishes a certain balance among the three strata of the text (approximately equal in length). Montaigne now puts the accent on the private character of his reflections and displays himself as “nakedly” as possible, often showing a kind of exhibitionism. Thus the chapter in the third book most extensively reworked after 1588 (in terms of the percentage of words added) is “Of physiognomy,” with about two-thirds of the final text appearing in the 1588 edition and one-third written after 1588, whereas in the case of the other chapters in the third book only between 20 and 25 percent of the text was added after 1588.

Very early on, Montaigne perceived and commented on the foreign character of his first writings. Thus in 1588 he noted that “of my first essays, some smell a bit foreign.”82 In the Bordeaux Copy, he returns to this observation, which can now no longer escape the reader, as if to reassure us regarding the unity of his project after 1588. The neglected chapters we have already discussed now raise the question by their simple presence, even if they continue to be ignored. Montaigne accepts in a way their difference and considers them an integral part of the Essais. They testify to what Montaigne called, toward the end of his life, an “ill-fitted patchwork.”⁸³ Publishing the same text under the same title, on several occasions and with extensive revisions of the chapters, calls for a clarification that is not always obvious for the reader. The Essais are a model of the genre insofar as recycling text is concerned, and Montaigne ends up bringing the contradictions and digressions of his book together in a general theory of the essay. He has an overall view of his book and labors to explain it.

Insofar as the Bordeaux Copy is concerned, only five chapters of the first book and four of the second include no additions to the 1588 text, while nine chapters are left unchanged (as compared with twenty-two in the 1588 edition in its relation to the 1580 edition). The posthumous edition of the Essais published by Marie de Gournay in 1595 reveals the extent of the work done by Montaigne after 1588. Generally speaking, we can say that starting in 1588 Montaigne accorded equal attention to his three books.

In the posthumous 1595 edition (whose text is not very different from the Bordeaux Copy), the Essais have 408,790 words distributed in the following way: 45 percent in the 1580 text, 33 percent added in 1588, and 22 percent added by hand on the Bordeaux Copy, most of them incorporated in the 1595 edition. In the latter, the first book includes 26 percent additions, the second 20 percent, and the third 22 percent. These figures testify to the homogeneous work done by the author, who modified the three books in an almost uniform manner during the last four years of his life. Thus after 1588, Montaigne reread and added as much to his first two books: 30,783 words added to the first book, 33,251 to the second and 28,318 to the third.

These additions are distributed relatively equally among the three books and make it possible to conclude that by this point Montaigne had fully accepted the major differences in content between his first two books and the third published in 1588. After 1588, his work consisted primarily in harmonizing the whole of his text while at the same time respecting its contradictions as an integral part of the form of the essay as he understood it toward the end of his life. Montaigne now sought to establish transitions that were not obvious in the 1588 edition. The Essais acquired a greater coherence, and the self, placed at strategic places in the first two books, represents a kind of leading thread running through the three books. The highlighting of the self and the writing of Montaigne’s experiences serve as a common denominator and make it possible to connect editions that were conceived in different ways over time.

After 1588, Montaigne reread his book with a new conception of writing that tended to highlight personal judgment and minimize the political discourse that was overrepresented in the Essais of 1580. He deconstructed his original political discourse in order to resituate it in a private perspective in which the subject is freed from social constraints. He de-historicized his first essays and transformed them into an enduring discourse on himself and systematically eliminated politics and history from his remarks. His own experiences are presented as universal and now pertain to the human condition. Thus between 1588 and 1592 Montaigne engaged in a systematic work of rereading (and rewriting), with the goal of making his book more homogeneous and coherent.

If the Essais of 1580 and 1588 were, at least for the most part, certainly dictated to a secretary, the Bordeaux Copy perpetuated the idea of a “manual labor” that, for purely material reasons, could not be carried out on the Essais before 1588. To illustrate the constant contemporaneity of his various publishing enterprises, we have only to cite the instructions Montaigne gave the printer on one of the flyleaves of the Bordeaux Copy: “Put my name all along on each page Essays of Michel de Montaigne liv. I”84 (figures 17 and 18). Montaigne did not like it that his name had been truncated in the running heads at the top of each page and asked the master printer to restore his full name in the planned new edition of his Essais. He also advised the compositors to use capital letters only for proper names and to see to it that the same word did not appear sometimes with a capital letter and sometimes without one. He also insisted on the quotations in Latin or Greek prose being made more visible and more clearly distinguished from his own text by using italics. Similarly, verses were to begin on separate lines and thus be differentiated from prose. He also made recommendations regarding spelling and the use of parentheses, and he left the printer little discretion, reminding him that the presentation he had chosen for his book was of great importance: “In addition to the corrections that are on this copy there are countless others to be made of which the printer may become aware, but pay close attention to the points that are of great importance to the style.”⁸⁵ Montaigne was more concerned than ever with the physical and visual aspect of his book. He addressed the printer directly and gave him a series of precise instructions regarding the format and physical presentation of his book. The title page also included additions in Montaigne’s hand that designated the Bordeaux Copy as the manuscript to be used for the printing of a future “sixth” edition.

FIGURE 17. Running head, Bordeaux Copy of the Essais. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux.

The manuscript part of the Bordeaux Copy represents almost a quarter of the whole text of the Essais.vii These additions made during the last four years of Montaigne’s life are now predominant when passages are cited from the Essais. We can see why, since this last “stratum”⁸⁶ of the Essais is generally considered the final stage of a supposedly premeditated and coherent route, a Montaigne who is both personal and wise, who emphasizes his subjectivity and is a precursor of modernity. This image of the last Montaigne is quite distant from the first Montaigne, who was more attentive to his period and prepared to participate in political life. Montaigne’s work on the Bordeaux Copy is important, because it allows us to reconstruct the practices of writing (which were limited periods of writing often separated by several years) that testify not only to Montaigne’s personality but also, more generally, to the relationship authors of the late Renaissance had to their books. For a little more than four years, Montaigne continued to add, delete, and correct passages in the Bordeaux Copy, because the 1588 edition was not supposed to be the last.

The Bordeaux Copy is a writer’s manuscript with all the problems of legibility that this kind of text implies.⁸⁷ It is not easy to decipher the additions and pentimenti Montaigne formulated. All Montaigne’s editors, from the sixteenth century to the present day, have faced insurmountable editorial obstacles in trying to establish the text of the Essais on the basis of the Bordeaux Copy. A quick glance at this document makes it easy to judge and gauge the difficulty.^viii Moreover, for more than two centuries Montaigne specialists have been debating the final state of the text of the Essais and thus the editorial status of the Bordeaux Copy. Today we can be certain that when Montaigne died there were two copies of the Essais of 1588 that included additions written in his hand. The Bordeaux Copy has the particularity of having been two distinct things at two different moments: first the copy that was to be used for the printing of a new edition (which explains the instructions to the printer), and then a copy abandoned by Montaigne in favor of another copy—the Exemplar—on which he made a clean copy of his changes to the 1588 edition.

FIGURE 18. Manuscript correction by Montaigne. Bordeaux Copy of the Essais. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux.

First, Montaigne wrote on the Bordeaux Copy precise, scrupulous annotations addressed to the compositors. For example, he marked in the margins of the first folios of the Bordeaux Copy the corrections to be made by the compositors, and these are still followed today. He noted changes of characters, deleting a large number of capital letters for titles and institutions: “seigneur” instead of “Seigneur,” “comte” for “Comte,” “parlement” for “Parlement.” At one point Montaigne gave up the systematic rereading of what he had formerly considered the equivalent of printer’s proofs. From then on, the Bordeaux Copy was transformed into a rough draft manuscript that would allow Montaigne to transfer his additions in more legible form to another copy of the 1588 Essais. This explains why this second copy was sent to Marie de Gournay to be used for the composition of the posthumous edition of 1595. Initially, Montaigne considered the Bordeaux Copy the basis for printing a new edition. But when he decided to postpone this printing, he continued to write directly in the margins of the Bordeaux Copy, often in a less legible hand no longer meant for a third party but only for himself. In order to register his text on a second copy, and because he wanted to provide more legible corrections and additions for the printer, Montaigne later made a clean copy of the “textual extension” of the Bordeaux Copy in another copy (the Exemplar), which, after being checked by Pierre de Brach (whose task was to ensure that the two copies were “practically” identical), was sent to Marie de Gournay. During the making of this clean copy, Montaigne corrected himself, giving special attention to the punctuation and segmentation of the printed text,88 even though in disparate ways in the two copies available to him—the Bordeaux Copy and the Exemplar.

From History to the Essay: Commynes and Tacitus

We have argued that the author of the Essais of 1580 was situated in a tradition of memoir-writers more than he was already a true essayist. Montaigne conceived his book and his career in direct relation to current history. Thus the reading of historians was essential in preparing Montaigne for the political and diplomatic responsibilities he envisioned. It was during this period of reflection on the subject matter of history and on historical thought that Montaigne wrote many passages in which he asserts that “History is more my quarry,”89 or again “the historians are the true quarry of my study.”⁹⁰ The inventory of Montaigne’s library shows a pronounced taste for historical works. The first Montaigne had a very broad conception of history: “the reading of history … is everybody’s business,”⁹¹ because in the category of history he included all kinds of cultural or anthropological writings. Montaigne literally fed on others’ stories to arrive at the essay, which, thanks to a universalization of the self, ends up leaving history behind in order to propose a new form of narrative, that of a life sufficient unto itself.

The reading of Commynes’s Memoirs contributed to this disintegration of traditional history to the advantage of a “better history.”⁹² For that, Montaigne followed with interest Commynes’s career in the service of kings, and he was able to evaluate the way the chronicler had slowly inserted himself into the history of those about whom he was supposed to be writing. In the fifth book of his Memoirs, Commynes clearly differentiates his enterprise from the chronicles of his predecessors: “Those who write Chronicles, frame their stile commonly to their commendation of whom they speake, omitting divers points, sometimes because they know not the truth of them. But as touching myself, I minde to write nothing but that is true, and which I my selfe either have seen or learned of such parties as are woorthie of credite, not regarding any mans commendation.”93

There can be no doubt that initially it was this sincerity that Montaigne liked in Commynes’s work, ten years before he entered politics. However, Montaigne’s “good faith” slipped away in the course of his political experiences, and he became aware that deception and Commynes’s banishment prefigured his own political career. At first, Commynes’s concern to preserve his independence with regard to the established government lent a certain credit to this distancing from the clientelism associated with historical writing. Montaigne believed he had finally found an example in which the subject inscribed his place in history, or even in spite of history. The tormented and often unpredictable course of a life greatly influences the theories that authors may construct to explain—after the fact—a literary practice that is basically connected with the demands of a career. Commynes and Montaigne resemble each other to a certain extent, because both had political ambitions and developed new literary genres.

Commynes and Montaigne both claimed, each in his own way, to have broken with earlier political practices. Certainly they operated at the Court and, with different degrees of success, they belonged to the inner circle of government before experiencing setbacks and finally finding a new space (both political and literary) where they could assert themselves in a different way. But what links the two authors is that after a long practice of the memoir or essay, they realized that their true subject was their experience of themselves. The prince’s counselor had things to say about himself, and so did the mayor of Bordeaux. What matters is the transformation that takes place over the years in genres that can be conceived only in a long-term perspective and bear on a life consisting of highs and lows. It is impossible to provide a stylistic analysis of Commynes’s Memoirs and Montaigne’s Essais without understanding these authors’ individual situations in their immediate political context. The genre of the memoir, like the genre of the essay, as developed by Commynes and Montaigne, are intrinsically connected with their political experience.

Commynes and Montaigne explored literary genres different enough to account for their relations with their princes. Commynes’s Memoirs—though written between 1489 and 1491, and then between 1497 and 1498—cover a historical period of thirty-five years (from 1464 to 1498), while Montaigne’s Essais bear on more than twenty years of religious conflict (from 1570 to 1592). It is hard to maintain ideological and political unity over such long stretches of time. For that reason, the two men needed to include political points of view that were sometimes contradictory and—without really admitting it, but perhaps more importantly—career concerns that accompanied their paths toward becoming authors. In both cases, the lack of unity is more an obvious fact than a preference. For Commynes and Montaigne, the goal was to explain contradictory positions in light of a different conception of the individual, a being in movement who assumes in response positions regarding which we will, moreover, never know the whole truth. The coherence of the analyses made within a particular situation in which the author is supposed to present himself as a sage fades to make way for a self that occupies a growing place in a text that is slowly dispossessed of its initial function, depicting (or discussing) history or politics. In the work of both Commynes and Montaigne, the history of princes is transformed, through good times and bad, into a history of the self. The events that were the commentary’s point of departure are relegated to the background the better to show that history results from a series of situations that can be understood only in their immediate context and on the basis of an analysis that is more psychological than truly historical.

The chronology of princes is secondary, and only the temporality of the counselor or the mayor transformed into a narrator lends a simultaneously punctual and universal dimension to these “great men”: Louis XI, Charles the Bold, Henry III, Henry of Navarre, and the dukes of Guise, who are presented with their peculiar character traits. Digression and narrative disorder then make it possible to cover the tracks of an impossible coherence. Repetitions have a paradoxical historical value, because they discredit the chronological narrative. Contradictions, repetitions, and digressions serve to establish the basis for a new form of writing in which the subject is self-sufficient. The commentary on government and society has value only because it serves as a starting point for the interpreter, who presents his judgment as the only possible history. To serve princes is to be capable of putting things in perspective, to place oneself above the historical object while constantly asserting that one’s own authority is based only on a particular, subjective experience. Personal opinion serves history because, thanks to a general leveling of humanity, the prince, the memoiristix and the essayist are all on the same footing. Memoirs and the essay lower kings in order to raise the interpreter who plumbs the depths of his unconscious; the historian and the essayist become psychologists in the name of a principle that makes each individual, no matter what his rank, the essential reference point for understanding human beings in their universality. This human dimension of historical actors implies a fragility inherent in man, and this fragility explains failures, even those of Commynes and Montaigne. They cannot be superior to those whose decisions and actions they relate. Instability of judgment is not uniquely an attribute of princes; it defines human beings in general. Thus nothing must be excluded from history, because everything is meaningful and can illuminate situations to come.

Following Commynes, Montaigne made a deliberate choice to get lost in digressions, with the same will not to hide anything. This logic of saying everything merges the history of others with one’s own experiences. The self transforms history into stories, because stories play a fundamental role in putting the self and its writing in movement, and they are indispensable for voicing opinions. Commynes had exploited history by transforming it in accord with his own needs: history became at once topos and example. It is the repetition of experiences that explains what is essential in human actions. Montaigne seems to have adopted Commynes’s lesson, which he made into a principle in his Essais after 1585. It is not the quality of the information, but the quantity of information that makes it possible to select, classify, and rank events with the necessary distance. Commynes’s Memoirs and Montaigne’s Essais offer us the best examples of this phenomenon of reinterpretation and rewriting bearing on events that had already been commented upon by the memoirist or essayist at a time when they occupied a different position with respect to political power. If Commynes did not reject points of view that were now in contradiction with a different reality on the ground, he did depart from them in order to offer an object of analysis that demanded its own autonomy. In his turn, Montaigne came to discover the fundamental role of the interpreter; it is the interpreter’s point of view or the impression made on him that gives meaning to political acts and historical events. Without the memoirist or the essayist, no history or politics would be possible. Commynes’s Memoirs had been to history what Montaigne’s Essais were becoming for politics.

In both cases, the reader is faced with a fundamental opposition between the form (memoir or essay), which refers to stylistics, and content (history), which has to do with politics and ideology. The two genres, even though they claim to acquire a certain autonomy with regard to this content, are fundamentally connected with it. Form asserts itself at the expense of content without, however, renouncing or rejecting it. Here we must not confuse Commynes’s Memoirs with the memoirs written in the second half of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century.94 What unifies the memoir genre created by Commynes is the instability of the status of history—the instability of particular and rather negative experiences concerning the history he is interpreting, but in which he was not able to be a genuine actor. Seventeenth-century memoirs reconnected with a certain stability of history and had a very different partisan function. In this sense, the memoir genre, after Commynes and Montaigne, acquired a positive conception of history in which the interpreter felt himself to be fully engaged. It is no longer content that makes history; on the contrary, history is made by the interaction between the historical object (the example invoked) and the work done on the historical material by the reader-author, who espouses a form and denies the authority of these histories to claim a univocal view and understanding.

The distance necessary to report a “truer” history consists in the reification in the present moment of all past historical experiences. At the opposite pole, the confrontation between the event and the self of the narrator provokes a reaction that is simultaneously ideological and stylistic. This reaction to the history of the other (the prince and the king) and its inscription in the self was already present in Commynes, but it became crucial in the genre of the essay. To this distancing with regard to history, Montaigne added an abandonment of politics and an extreme theory of the separation between public and private. The transition from memoirs to essays thus implies a disenchantment with regard to history and a saving turn toward personal opinion. For Montaigne, relating his past experiences raised a series of questions both conjunctural (ideological) and universal (stylistic). Conjunctural, first of all, because every discourse needs a reference point that is essentially historical, that is, an object that is identifiable and accepted by all. No expression of an opinion, whatever it might be, can escape its historicity. And stylistic, because Montaigne transformed the political content into a particular form that was supposed to express the point of view of a singular, private individual.

The composition of the Memoirs required an active participation on the part of the author that might be seen as a kind of historical investment. He needed the other (the prince) to make his self appear. This transformation of an earlier self into another form is an essential component of the Essais. Montaigne crossed swords with the alterity of his former self; he could enter into conflict with it and thus produce new “essays” (attempts to write the self) that remained incomplete. Time was an obstacle to the form of the essay, and the author always exceeded his writing, which was constantly transcended by the present moment, the moment that puts in question past experiences and objectifies them as the history of another person, which is most often verifiable (usually a topos) and thus becomes “historical.” History, which is necessary to put the self in motion, is at the center of the genre of the memoir, and it could not be otherwise for Montaigne. In the essay, this history occupies an increasingly central place, but only the better to be ultimately denied. It is this negation of history and the posture of retirement adopted by the historical actor that distinguishes the form of the essay and that of the memoir. Commynes’s Memoirs lead to a questioning of the event-logic of the great figures, while the Essais bear witness to its failure; in both cases, the outcome is a new literary form and reflects a personal itinerary in history. Feeling essential in history while at the same time feeling marginalized (for different reasons, to be sure: treachery or a bad political choice) by this same history marks and structures the writing of both Commynes and Montaigne.

Two tendencies with regard to objectivity and history emerge from the Memoirs: first, a certain detachment with respect to the verification and veracity of the stories that Commynes uses. This was amply theorized by Montaigne in 1580: “I refer the stories that I borrow to the conscience of those from whom I take them.”95 Commynes uses history to find in it the topoi that authorize him to speak. The examples of the great military commanders found in various historical writings give him an opportunity to begin a dialogue with an other in himself, but this dialogue transcends the territory defined by the historian. Each time, Commynes moves outside the framework of the story he has in front of him in order to make of it an object that he ultimately relates to himself. Montaigne proceeds in a similar way by using chapter titles that are only pretexts for talking about something else. The memoirist, perhaps like the essayist—but without the explicit awareness we find in Montaigne—had understood that history did not exist as an immobile object; it begins to exist only when it passes through the work of memory. In Montaigne’s work, one of the meanings of the word “essay” (essai) refers precisely to the idea of examining and testing, because history takes form only when it is put to the test of memory by the essayist.

By denying the history of the other, the essay universalizes the self and proposes a history that reduces the experience of the other to the advantage of the experience of the self. In his Memoirs, Commynes had opted for a “better history,” truer and resolving the contradictions inherent in the expression of particular points of view. But this “better history” (which starts after Commynes had rejoined Louis XI) was possible only because he had had the experience of writing a less accurate history (the one he had written in the service of Charles the Bold). The experience of the self served to select, group, sift, and organize the historical material within a form that gave priority to repetitions and digressions and rid itself of chronology in the name of a rediscovered unity of historical truth, of which the universalized self was the only guarantor. The image of the counselor in the service of two princes (Louis XI and Charles the Bold) who were opposites in every way had not failed to catch Montaigne’s attention before 1580. Montaigne also imagined that he could serve two princes at once, not one after the other, as Commynes had done, but at the same time. After the break with politics in 1588, Montaigne no longer had anything to accomplish, and his professional situation was compromised. It was at that moment that Montaigne seems to have changed his mind about Commynes, who according to him had betrayed one prince to rejoin another. Montaigne had never betrayed his king.

A specialist in covert operations, Commynes had perhaps gone too far; his book could even be seen as a traitor’s confession. After abandoning his first patron, Charles the Bold, he had joined Louis XI, apparently without hesitation. Montaigne had not betrayed anyone, and he was proud of not having sunk into treachery. Commynes’s Memoirs represented two moments of power. The fact that he combined them in a single work initially pleased Montaigne, but this conglomeration later seemed problematic to him. He had, in a way, gone beyond Commynes, and after 1588 he preferred to ignore that fact. For him, the historian was no longer a model, even if the form of the Memoirs had strongly influenced his writing and allowed him to conceive the genre of the essay. Montaigne’s conception of politics was now at the antipode of Commynes’s idea of public life. He questioned Commynes’s good faith, even thinking he had found an instance of plagiarism in the historian’s work: “When some years ago I read Philippe de Commines, certainly a very good author, I noted this remark as uncommon: that we must be very careful not to serve our master so well that we keep him from finding a fair reward for our service. I should have praised the idea, not him; I came across it in Tacitus not long ago.”96 Although it is undeniable, Commynes’s influence on Montaigne has more to do with the memoir form than with the political lessons Montaigne learned from his reading of the Memoirs. Commynes ceased to be a model for Montaigne at the moment when Montaigne’s own political career was beginning to slip away. Tacitus thus logically replaced Commynes after 1588. Each in his own way, the two historians and counselors of princes had shown great political prudence, a quality Montaigne valued.⁹⁷ Montaigne had long believed in Commynes’s good faith, but he had recently found an even more elevated expression in Tacitus. After the belated discovery of Tacitus, Commynes was no longer a political model.

Nevertheless, the absence of references to Commynes after 1588 merits reflection. Montaigne took his political models chiefly from Antiquity. Among the historians, Tacitus occupies a privileged place, even though Montaigne read him rather late in his life. After 1588, he came to regard the historian and Roman senator as the best example of the separation of private life from public life, a separation that he now emphasized in his Essais. Tacitus perfectly embodies the figure of the politician who has withdrawn from society, a salutary attitude when faced with the events of his time.⁹⁸ The Roman history of which Tacitus gives a lively and colorful account spoke directly to Montaigne. Just as in ancient Rome, tyrants, dictators, assassins, poisoners, rebels, and agitators abounded in late sixteenth-century France, and Montaigne had no difficulty in drawing a parallel between the two periods. The massacres and delusions of power were in no way exceptional and were part of the same political logic. On this point, Tacitus’s writings were a revelation for Montaigne. The suggestion that he read the Roman historian had been made by “a gentleman whom France esteems highly,”99 during a dinner with Antoine de Laval and Charles Paschal at the time of the Estates General at Blois in 1588. Paschal had just published a political commentary on Tacitus’s Histories. The guests at this dinner may have seen in this book a form of therapy for the affliction Montaigne was suffering from in the wake of his misadventure as a negotiator between the Catholic and Protestant parties.

Descended from a great patrician family, Tacitus was the historian par excellence of troubled times. After beginning his public career as a lawyer, he had become a member of the “Council of 26” under Vespasian, a quaestor under Titus, legate to Belgian Gaul, consul under the emperor Nerva, senator, and finally governor of the province of Asia, before retiring from politics to devote himself to writing history. Today, he is criticized for being more a writer than a historian, but after a rich political career, writing had become for him the last refuge from an unsettled history and represented the logical outcome of a series of negative political experiences. The parallel with Montaigne’s political career is striking, or at least it was for Montaigne, who identified with Tacitus. This relationship to a text constructed on the ruins of a calamitous history pleased Montaigne after 1588, a time when the author of the Essais was also in a situation of exile or political retirement. He recognized himself in Tacitus and saw in his critical, concise style a model of writing.

The Histories of the Empire—the dynasty of the Flavians—cover a period of almost thirty years, between 69 and 96 CE. Tacitus had been able to combine private discourse and public discourse, whereas Montaigne advocated a sharp separation of the two. Tacitus criticized the regimes in which he had participated and was pessimistic about politics after having lived through the time of the plebs and the tyrants. Even Tacitus’s name (in Latin “tacitus” means “he who has kept silent”; it is the past participle of tacere, “to keep silent”) caught the attention of Montaigne, who accorded great importance to proper names and observes, in the chapter “Of names” (I: 46), how convenient it is to have a handsome name that is easy to remember. Montaigne was attracted by Tacitus, and he liked the way the Roman writer skillfully combined a description of the manners of his time with more personal reflections: “I know of no author who introduces into a register of public events so much consideration of private behavior and inclinations.”¹⁰⁰ Tacitus became a model for Montaigne, whereas Commynes had disappointed him. Tacitus had found his voice as an author when his political career was behind him, and Montaigne was about to do the same.

Furthermore, in contrast to Commynes, Tacitus had not committed treason and had been able to make a wise withdrawal from political practices of which he no longer approved. The Catholic Church of the sixteenth century considered him suspect. For example, the humanist Marc-Antoine Muret was severely reprimanded by the cardinals when he announced, in 1572, his intention to introduce the reading of Tacitus into the courses he taught.101 A few years later, however, things had settled down and the first books of the Annals were the subject of lectures Muret gave in Rome in 1580 and 1581.

Muret had his commentaries on Tacitus printed in the form of opuscules, but it was Charles Paschal who published the first political commentary on Tacitus, in 1581. A few years earlier, Abel L’Angelier had published a French translation of the Annals, soon followed by Tacitus’s Works. A short time before, Justus Lipsius’s first edition of Tacitus’s Histories had been published by Plantin.¹⁰² This body of Tacitus’s works, published by the greatest European printers, had made him known to sixteenth-century readers. He spoke to their concerns because his political history offered numerous points that could be compared with the political situation in France at that time. For these reasons, Tacitus enjoyed enormous success in the 1580s. The publisher Abel L’Angelier wrote that “France was eager to read such a historian, and showed that his study pleased many people.”¹⁰³ The historian of Tiberius offered a critical model for analyzing events and actions that were distant in time but that were also analogous to current ones through the universal aspect of human behavior. The notion of tyranny was central to the debates, because the tyrants’ acts could not be separated from their biographies. Montaigne saw in this a way of writing a commentary on the events of his time via a general portrayal of the human being.

Whereas after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre Machiavelli quickly came to be considered a rather unsavory author, the interest in Tacitus gave new credit to many of the subjects taken up by the Florentine historian. The author of the Annals provided material for understanding, in a broader framework, political and religious developments in France. Montaigne wrote:

This form of history is by far the most useful. Public movements depend more upon the guidance of fortune, private ones on our own. This is rather a judgment of history than a recital of it; there are more precepts than stories. It is not a book to read, it is a book to study and learn; it is so full of maxims that you find every sort, both right and wrong; it is a nursery of ethical and political reflections for the provision and adornment of those who hold a place in the management of the world.¹⁰⁴

A book to be studied rather than read, a book full of sententiae and moral precepts for those who hold public office. We have the feeling of finding in Tacitus the very form of the essay as Montaigne conceived it. It was Tacitus’s judgments, rather than his long narratives, that held Montaigne’s attention. The Bordeaux Copy offers the following commentary on the passage quoted earlier:

And it seems to me, in contrast to how it seems to him, that having specially to trace the lives of the emperors of his time, so strange and extreme in every way, and the many notable actions that their cruelty in particular produced in their subjects, he had a stronger and more attractive matter to treat and narrate than if he had had to tell of battles and universal commotions. So that I often find him sterile, skimming over these noble deaths as if he were afraid to bore us with their number and length.105

This criticism of the military narrative produced at the expense of human psychology led Montaigne to better understand the originality of his Essais. What he values in Tacitus is above all his ability to judge people, whatever their rank might be, and to sketch a psychological portrait that leads to an explanation of their motivations and acts. Nonetheless, he finds fault with him for his reticence to speak of himself, “For not to dare to speak roundly of oneself shows some lack of heart.”¹⁰⁶ Montaigne did not hesitate to speak of himself in his Essais, and neither did Commynes in his Memoirs. After 1588, for reasons mainly connected with these authors’ respective biographies, Tacitus replaced the historian Commynes, in whose work Montaigne had formerly appreciated the originality of the genre of the memoir, but whom he now reproached for not having been able to distance himself from the kings he had served. Tacitus’s attitude with regard to his former patrons corresponded better to Montaigne’s own situation, because his sharp breaks with politics led Montaigne to formulate an independent judgment and to distance himself with respect to history. However, we must recognize that Montaigne’s political disillusionment after 1588 considerably reduced his interest in history, and that, in the end, he preferred Plutarch—Tacitus’s contemporary—and his particular taste for the private lives of the great figures of Antiquity.

Socrates or Political Suicide

One of the essential aspects of the “political knowledge” in the Essais is connected with what Montaigne calls “the knowledge of opposing” (la science de s’opposer, knowing how to oppose or contradict) without ending up in a confrontation. Opposing requires skills, cleverness, and diplomacy. On this point, Socrates served Montaigne as a model, at least at first. But the capacity for political opposition can also produce blatant defeats if it is not restrained by a form of moderation or compromise. This observation allowed Montaigne to interpret the trial of Socrates in the light of his own political experience. In the first edition of the Essais, Socrates is mentioned seventeen times, almost always positively. In 1588, the name of Socrates appears forty-eight times, or almost three times more often. After 1588, the text of the Essais includes a hundred and fifteen references to the Greek philosopher. The references to Socrates were thus multiplied by seven between the 1580 edition and Montaigne’s last text with his handwritten additions. There are several sources for his knowledge of Socrates—notably Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius—but the two principal ones are doubtless Xenophon’s Memorabilia and of course the various dialogues of Plato, in Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation. Montaigne seems to have studied first the Socrates of Xenophon, whom he read very early on, before later discovering Plato’s Socrates after 1588, when he was looking for historical details regarding the Greek philosopher, and more particularly regarding his death.107 How can this growing interest in the inventor of moral and political philosophy be explained? Socrates’s constant questioning of preconceived ideas offers an initial answer. After 1588 Montaigne recognized that Socrates, “always asking questions and stirring up discussion, never concluding, never satisfying … says he has no other knowledge than that of opposing.”¹⁰⁸ Socrates, a philosopher who had the spirit of contradiction, understood “argument” as a goal in itself, always revisiting established wisdom: “I shall question him and examine him and test him,”¹⁰⁹ he exclaims in Plato’s Apology. We understand Montaigne’s interest in this kind of permanent questioning of knowledge, but is there really a “knowledge of opposing” in politics? And would Socrates be the best example of that knowledge? There again, Montaigne’s political experience and the historical events of his time somewhat complicate the perception of the ancient philosopher.

Montaigne often associates individual experience with the ability to discuss things in general, and Socrates provides him with the ideal example for exploring the relation between what might at first seem to be an idiosyncratic discourse and universal truths expressed in the philosopher’s dialogues: “What does Socrates treat of more fully than himself? To what does he lead his disciples’ conversation more often than to talk about themselves, not about the lesson of their book, but about the essence and movement of their soul?”¹¹⁰ We find here a theme often taken up in the Essais, namely, the lessons to be learned from an individual life, and their influence on the principles worthy of being made into a morality that transcends their simple subjective expression, to the advantage of civil society. Systematic opposition to every truth expressed by another person is then transformed into knowledge in the service of all. Knowledge is a permanent questioning that allows Montaigne to formulate his famous “What do I know?” (“Que sçay-je?”). The repeated expression of a disagreement that seems at first individual consequently leads to a model beneficial to the whole of human society. Thus it suffices to speak of oneself to speak about human beings in general. Here we arrive at the fundamental principle endorsed by Montaigne, the consubstantiality of the writer’s body and his book, a consubstantiality that the author of the Essais thinks he discerns in Socrates in the passage quoted above. Sixteenth-century readers of the Essais had for this reason no difficulty imagining Montaigne as a “French Socrates.”x

Very early in the writing of the Essais, notably in a passage of the chapter “Of cruelty” (II: 11) that was written for the most part between 1578 and 1580, Montaigne drew a parallel between the form of the essay and Socrates’s way of proceeding: “Socrates, it seems to me, tested himself still more roughly, keeping for his exercise the malignity of his wife, which is a test with the naked blade [that is, without mercy].”¹¹¹ We recognize the style Montaigne advocated—straightforward, without ceremony or decorum; a direct style that contrasts with the diplomatic practices that Montaigne was intent on overthrowing. Was this opposition the result of an apprenticeship, of a modus vivendi, of an interpretive procedure, of a rhetorical effect, or was it the product of a personal intuition? Socrates said he was inhabited by a daimon who whispered in his ear all his principles in the domain of both philosophy and his private life. His confidence in this prophetic inspiration allowed him to show, in his intercourse with others, a flawless self-assurance and what we have to see as a kind of arrogance. Socrates claimed to communicate directly with the gods, who, through the medium of his daimon, conveyed truths to him, making him a sage. His conversations with the youth of Athens could be considered prophecies, or at least they far transcended the expression of particular opinions. That was precisely what his judges accused him of at his trial.

Socrates’s daimon can be perceived as the expression of an insolent and impertinent character. If the evocation of the daimon turns out to be a considerable advantage in an exchange between one individual and another (and for Socrates, this is by far the privileged mode of interaction), the daimon’s spell is more problematic when Socrates is expressing himself before a large audience. Here we are referring to Socrates pleading before his judges during his trial. In this case, he was addressing an audience of about five hundred people. The tried-and-true strategies of opposition he used when questioning a single individual, in a relationship that Socrates always conceives as one between equals, are no longer the same when one is addressing a larger audience that is, moreover, the legal representative of the city of Athens. However, Socrates refuses to change registers and claims to have only one language, that of the public square: “One thing, however, I do most earnestly beg and entreat of you. If you hear me defending myself in the same language which it has been my habit to use, both in the open spaces of this city—where many of you have heard me—and elsewhere, do not be surprised, and do not interrupt. Let me remind you of my position. This is my first appearance in a court of law, at the age of seventy, and so I am a complete stranger to the language of this place.”112

Socrates does not separate the language of his private conversations from that of his public defense. He explains himself before the Athenian authorities as if he were talking to a young man met in the street: it is difficult to distinguish the private man from the public philosopher. Montaigne distinguishes on the one hand, the “diligent reader” (in his singularity), and on the other hand, what might be called “the man being represented,” that is, the reader (or the judge) in his social dimension. It is the citizen of Athens in his public incarnation, and not the person in his individuality, that must be considered here. Montaigne seems to be aware of this nuance. When Socrates expresses himself before his judges, he should have understood this essential distinction between private and particular assessment and public judgment. However, he denies that he ever established a difference between his private relations and public affairs: “You will find that throughout my life I have been consistent in any public duties that I have performed, and the same also in my personal dealings.”¹¹³ By rejecting such a separation, Socrates left his judges no choice; they were obliged to consider the public Socrates. In fact, for the Athenians, Socrates existed chiefly as a philosopher and not simply as an individual. The philosopher and Socrates are always one, contrary to Montaigne, who created a distance (artificial, of course) between himself and his various public functions.

Ultimately, and since every person is intrinsically social in the eyes of others, the famous consubstantiality Socrates claimed could never be more than an inconsequential rhetorical effect in a defense that sought to merge the man and his work. In his turn, Montaigne claimed this consubstantiality between the man and his public writings (because they were printed), but in flagrant contradiction with this principle, he also articulated a sharp distinction between the public and the private. This kind of friction is visible, for example, in the preface to the reader, where Montaigne declares that his Essais are dedicated to the small number of his friends and relatives, but nonetheless conceives the possibility of a much broader audience and an anonymous reader whom he addresses in generic way. These fundamental and sometimes contradictory aspects of Montaigne’s Socratism (the duality of the private man and the public man that is opposed to the consubstantiality of the man with his words), considered in the light of the trial of Socrates and in the social and political context of the period in which Montaigne wrote, allow us to understand better how we should understand la science de s’opposer. Opposition has its limits, above all in politics.

Although Montaigne had no trouble revealing himself to an idealized reader, he nonetheless found it difficult to express his feelings and opinions—through a text that inevitably transcended him—to the same reader reified and objectified in relation to his religious and political beliefs. On this precise point, the author of the Essais theorizes that “Montaigne” and “the mayor of Bordeaux” are indeed two distinct entities—a practical separation when it was a matter of reaching a politically and religiously unstable audience. Unlike Montaigne, Socrates seems not to have understood this essential distinction when he was on trial. The least one can say is that on that day his daimon failed him, perhaps because he mistook his audience. Montaigne was interested in this failure—a lack of political judgment—that led to a death sentence for the philosopher. Socrates’s demise was directly connected with his conception of his daimon, a daimon that turned against him and made his case worse.

For Montaigne, this observation is drawn from the Apology of Socrates, a text he must have known well, because he refers to it on many occasions in the Essais, including four references to Socrates’s daimon. The question is whether this daimon, when it is connected with what Montaigne calls “the knowledge of opposing” (without, however, distinguishing the levels on which this opposition occurs), does not constitute an uncertain and equivocal authority. Montaigne offers several reflections on this subject. All these analyses derive from his own conception of politics and his experience in public offices. Montaigne’s Socratism would thus be limited to a dialogue between peers, between the author and the reader, but have no possible application or anything to teach us from the moment that the author (Montaigne) is considered a political or religious agent. The knowledge of opposing—frontally and directly, without gloves, we might say—seems to be an absurdity. Opposition requires moderation and taking the political into account. That is why “Montaigne” and “the mayor” had to be separated. In diplomacy and politics, the knowledge of opposing inevitably involves prior negotiation and compromise, terms that Socrates found indecent.

The first book of the Essais shows a marked affinity for Socrates’s ideas, which Montaigne describes as “vivid,” in other words, impromptu thoughts inspired by the daimon. Following Socrates, Montaigne believed, even before he entered diplomacy and politics (from 1572 to 1588), that he too was inhabited by a guardian spirit that allowed him to get himself out of delicate situations. However, what is striking is that the situations Montaigne describes are always based on a personal relationship established between two persons in an almost complete equality (initially symbolized by his friendship with Estienne de La Boétie). In such a case, the exchange is based on a form of innocence visible in a person’s face. Two anecdotes Montaigne reports, and which we have already commented on, illustrate this quality of candor and human simplicity. During an armed group’s abortive attempt to take over his château, Montaigne used his “natural innocence” to force the brigand to give up his original intentions. During a second, rather similar incident, after being robbed of his property in a forest, Montaigne also believed that his innocent, naive face had saved his life a second time.

Like Socrates, Montaigne thought at first that his “imagination” could help him in his judgment and actions: “For my part I hold that whoever has a vivid and clear idea in his mind will express it, if necessary in the Bergamask dialect, of, if he is dumb, by signs: ‘Master the stuff, and words will freely follow.’”114 On the Bordeaux Copy, after “I hold,” Montaigne added “and Socrates makes it a rule.” His natural inclination (in the Essais of 1580) was later associated (in the Bordeaux Copy) with Socrates’s attitude. This conduct that left room for intuition and imagination, even in the most delicate episodes of a life, is historically situated in the lineage of Socrates. Plato’s Apology demonstrates a rather similar acceptance of intuitions, without premeditation or consistent development. However, this kind of naïveté proved fatal to Socrates. Montaigne had the advantage of being able to learn the lessons of Socrates’s mode of behavior. Although up to the beginning of the 1580s the author of the Essais expressed an ideal vision of the “knowledge of opposing,” his political and diplomatic experience soon caused him to discover a quite different reality after 1588. This quotation is rather typical of the position Montaigne defended in the 1580 edition, at a time when he seemed still to believe that his frank, direct language was a definite advantage in politics and in any diplomatic relationship. However, over the years this self-assurance with regard to a language that is non-premeditated and that develops by itself in all sorts of situations, accompanied by a blind faith in his power of persuasion, without recourse to reason or to rhetoric, was transformed into a disappointment. Montaigne’s initial absolute Socratism needed to be seriously moderated.

A connection can be made between Socrates’s daimon and Montaigne’s “imagination.” However, imagination encounters limits that proceed from the domain of authority in the end. Regardless of one’s wishes, the knowledge of opposing can be expressed solely in a power relationship:

My thinking [mon imagination] so often contradicts and condemns itself that it is all one to me if another does the job, especially seeing that I give to his criticism only as much authority as I wish. But I break off with a man who bears himself as high-handedly as one man I know, who regrets having given advice if it is not accepted, and is affronted if you balk at following it. That Socrates always smilingly welcomed the contradictions offered to his arguments might be said to be due to his strength and to the fact that, since the advantage was certain to fall on his side, he accepted them as matter for new glory. But we see on the contrary that there is nothing which makes us so sensitive to contradictions as the idea of our superiority and the disdain for our adversary and that in reason it is rather for the weaker to accept with good grace the criticisms that correct him and set him right.115

This addition on the Bordeaux Copy expresses a disappointment, a new recognition that, in the end, might is right. The weak have no choice in this relationship of authority Montaigne describes so well. Let us also be wary of these “contradictory ideas” to which the author alludes. Contradiction is hardly tolerated in the public domain, even if it is a natural aptitude worthy of being reported when it is a question of describing humans in their instability and transience.

Political or religious truth is located on the side of the person who can impose it on others. This strategy, which consists in combining the discourse on human beings and a critique of it within a precise social and religious system (in this case, Athens or the period following the assassinations of the duke of Guise and Henry III) seems to have worked well for Socrates so long as he limited himself to dialogue with young people, but the latter were also members of the polis. Facing the Athenians gathered together in an administrative and juridical body—his judges—Socrates discovered in a rather dramatic way the essential distinction made by the representatives of civil society, that is, by the political power. Montaigne went through a similar experience—which of course turned out better—and his disenchantment with politics after 1588 led him to recognize that giving free rein to his imagination, which he associated for a time with Socrates’s daimon, could end up being dangerous: “I once tried to employ in the service of public dealings ideas and rules for living as crude, green, 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.”¹¹⁶ The new way of practicing politics and conducting negotiations at the highest level had proven to be a clear failure. The subtle reinterpretation in the Bordeaux Copy shows to what point Montaigne now distinguished between public affairs and private affairs.

Although Montaigne did not believe in an external force (his imagination depended on him and his experiences alone) that could inspire him in difficult moments, he nevertheless repeatedly adopted an unconventional attitude that made the most experienced diplomats uncomfortable. By his own admission, his remarks are jerky and sometimes contradict one another. This natural impulse of the way he spoke could look like a kind of frankness. For example, Montaigne acknowledges Socrates’s impetuousness: “The daemon of Socrates was perhaps a certain impulse of the will that came to him without [Bordeaux Copy: waiting for] the advice of his reason,”117 but was this “impulse of the will” really a sign of frankness or wisdom? Impetuousness, repartee, and systematic questioning are hardly appropriate in public life. It is not even certain that such attitudes are in conformity with the work of the judge or member of a parlement, and that might explain Montaigne’s limited success in that profession. To La Boétie’s eloquence, Montaigne opposed his outspokenness as an expression of a gentleman’s freedom, because in contrast to the grandiloquence of the tribunes and other public officials, his language displayed no high-flown or superfluous turns of phrase.

However, the prince and all those who hold public offices are urged to heed the “advice of reason.” Thus we find here a contradiction inherent in the Essais. For example, Montaigne had a very special idea of himself, and of what he could accomplish thanks to his disjointed, straightforward style, which he associated with Seneca’s. However, this image does not seem to correspond completely to the opinions that others had of him. Although he quickly came to be considered an excellent painter of himself and of humanity, in the sixteenth century he was sometimes seen as no more than a mediocre mayor of Bordeaux. His contemporaries’ judgments on this point are not all flattering. There were offices in which eloquence still had a place, especially if the office consisted in representation. In politics, there is often a greater need to bring together than to oppose. Besides, what is the outcome of that famous “knowledge of opposing” Montaigne alludes to in speaking of Socrates? Is it a question of convincing one’s adversary or of shaping public opinion? Is this knowledge directed toward an end, or is it rather a means? What would be the point of that kind of knowledge if it did not lead to tangible advances recognized by a part of society or a political group? Finally, what is the function of this knowledge of opposing? The answers offered by Montaigne and by Socrates diverge increasingly as the writing of the Essais advances. Socrates’s daimon was still the guarantor of a universal truth; it implies certainty regarding what is said. But in Montaigne the opposition so necessary to the form of the essay is more a principle than a certitude. For example, we know the difficulty Montaigne had in conceiving of universal truths. His relativism was not expressed in a method of discourse (dialogue, for instance), but he did move beyond the superficiality of rhetorical effects.

The paradox of this knowledge of opposing—at least for someone who is writing after Socrates’s death—consists in recognizing that it cost the philosopher his life, unless we believe that Socrates himself was fully aware of his failure and had anticipated it. That is one of the possible readings of Plato’s Apology, but I do not think it was Montaigne’s after 1588. Montaigne returned to this text at several points in his life and in his political career. The possibility that this knowledge of opposing might lead to a dramatic failure is thus expressed in the Essais on several occasions after 1588. In a passage reworked in the Bordeaux Copy, Montaigne comments on Socrates’s natural inclination and his knowledge of opposing:

In a well-purified soul such as his, prepared by a continual exercise of wisdom and virtue, it is likely that these inclinations, [Bordeaux Copy: although instinctive and undigested], were always good [Bordeaux copy: important] and worth following. Everyone has [Bordeaux Copy: felt] within himself some likeness of such stirrings [Bordeaux Copy: of a prompt, vehement and accidental opinion. It is my business to give them some authority, since I give so little to our wisdom]. And I have had some [Bordeaux Copy: as weak in reason as violent in persuasiveness—or in dissuasiveness, as was more ordinary in Socrates—] by which I let myself be carried away so usefully and fortunately that they might be judged to have in them something of divine inspiration.118

This passage that Montaigne extensively rewrote stresses the moments of vehement agitation emanating from a divine inspiration. These violent opinions are certainly desirable when one seeks to express a point of view fully without censuring it, but are they really effective when it is a question of convincing parties who are opposed to these “instinctive and undigested” views? Quick temper and impetuosity rarely produce the results sought. Montaigne’s personal experience since 1581 had led him to recognize this evident political fact, and to qualify his initial declarations regarding what could henceforth be seen as Socrates’s naïveté.

On the basis of this passage, which dates from 1585, Montaigne offered the following commentary in the Bordeaux Copy: “It is my business to give them some authority.” This addition allows us to clarify a few crucial points: first, the recognition of the fortuitous aspect of thought—the emphasis on the famous portrayal of change; then the obvious fact that this kind of intuitive writing reaches its limits when an effort is made to express political or social ideas that always have to be “put in authority” (mises en autorité). Letting oneself be carried away by passions has nothing to do with divine authority. After 1588, Montaigne draws a clear distinction between private speech and public speech—the first Essais were governed by a completely different logic. He underlines the particular and private aspect of his writings while at the same time recognizing the importance of decorum and the rules of discourse so far as the public sphere is concerned. It is here that Socrates’s daimon—or Montaigne’s—can be considered a disadvantage.

Besides, for Montaigne, wisdom and virtue have little meaning when the subject is situated in a social or political framework. This observation was already present when Montaigne first began writing his Essais, that is, between 1570 and 1580. At that time, he anticipated the impossibility of applying Socratism in the domain of public service. To succeed in politics, one has to have a dose of “vicious appetite”;119 in 1580, Montaigne thought he had found this in Socrates. In the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” Montaigne pursued his analysis of Socrates’s virtue and concluded that it was above all a personal quest detached from political reality. Socrates’s “imaginations” (ideas) are formless and thus impossible to convey: “Just as the virtuous actions of Socrates and Cato remain vain and useless because they did not direct them toward the end of loving and obeying the true creator of all things, and because they did not know God; so it is with our ideas and reasonings: they have a certain body, but it is a shapeless mass, without form or light, if faith and divine grace are not added to it.”¹²⁰ The same goes for Montaigne’s “imaginations.” The author of the Essais distinguishes between the private character of his “imaginations,” which are only tryouts (essais) or intuitions, on the one hand, and their transformation into a more didactic discourse, on the other hand. For example, Montaigne refers to La Boétie’s text as if it were a discourse, whereas his own writings are only essays. By becoming a public figure, Socrates is supposed to have committed the error of transforming his “imaginations” into moral precepts for the youth of Athens.

But perhaps Montaigne had gone a little too far in this first apology. After 1585, he had less political ambitions on the national or international scale. He had just ceased to be the mayor of Bordeaux and expressed himself freely regarding the excesses of theology. The apology for Sebond remained, but it took a very different turn. The text of the Essais of 1588 directs more criticism at theology and at the Christian religion in general: “Compare our morals with a Mohammedan’s, or a pagan’s; we always fall short of them. Whereas, in view of the advantage of our religion, we should shine with excellence at an extreme and incomparable distance, and people ought to say: ‘Are they so just, so charitable, so good? Then they are Christians.’”¹²¹ After 1588, Montaigne went further: “All other signs are common to all religions: hope, trust, events, ceremonies, penitence, martyrs. The peculiar mark of our truth should be our virtue, as it is also the most heavenly and difficult mark, and the worthiest product of truth.”¹²² Religion can even lead to lying: “Some make the world believe that they believe what they do not believe. Others, in greater number, make themselves believe it, being unable to penetrate what it means to believe.”¹²³ Montaigne was hardly a theologian in 1580, but we see that after 1588 he was no longer a theologian at all; for him, theology had become a “science of guzzling”¹²⁴ like any other; his truths are only appearances and believing comes down to making people believe. Like the theologians of his time, Montaigne could give free rein to this “imaginations” in his turn: “‘If God is, he is animal; if he is animal, he is sentient; and if he is sentient, he is subject to corruption. If he is without body, he is without soul, and consequently without action; and if he has a body, he is perishable.’ Isn’t that a triumph?”125 Ironically, Montaigne’s theology had moved on, far beyond Sebond.

While at first Montaigne had been interested in Socrates’s daimon, going so far as to justify it when he reported his personal experiences, he was soon forced to wonder whether inspiration was suitable for the arguments that sought essentially to convince others, not individually, but as a group, a class, or an order. In contrast to classical rhetoric, the discourse en pointe (straightforward), as Montaigne defines it, is far from being compatible with a discourse of the political or diplomatic type. Socrates’s daimon had simply forgotten this important dimension of human beings, who live in society and must sooner or later explain in public their private positions. Finally, can the knowledge of opposing be transmitted to others, to the youth of Athens, for example. Can it be taught? Socrates defends himself by stating that he addressed only individuals and never the people: “It may seem curious that I should go round giving advice like this and busying myself in people’s private affairs, and yet never venture publicly to address you as a whole and advise on matters of state.”¹²⁶ He distinguishes the individual opinion from public expression and does not understand how the two might be linked in the eyes of his judges. He also declared that he had never busied himself with public affairs: “You may be quite sure, gentlemen, that if I had tried long ago to engage in politics, I should long ago have lost my life, without doing any good either to you or to myself.”¹²⁷ The idea that the public and the private are inseparable completely escapes him, and his principal defense consisted in reasserting a division that he alone was defending. Montaigne did the same thing toward the end of his life. However, Montaigne could not deny that he had engaged in public business, and he decided simply not to mention it.

Can Socrates—or any individual—be sacrificed in the name of the maintenance of the social order? The same question arises when it is a matter of finding out whether Montaigne’s Essais represent solely the expression of a particular life. Do they have didactic value or are they dedicated only to “a domestic and private” end? Socrates’s trial—as it is described by Plato—hardly offers a good example of a kind of knowledge that would be worth transmitting. Montaigne accepts the possibility of a negative judgment of the daimon that inspired Socrates and holds against the philosopher his supposedly natural mode of argumentation:

Besides, isn’t the method of arguing that Socrates uses here equally admirable in its simplicity and its vigor? Truly it is much easier to talk like Aristotle and live like Caesar than it is to talk and live like Socrates. There lies the extreme degree of perfection and difficulty; art cannot reach it. Now our faculties are not so trained. We neither essay them nor know them. We invest ourselves with those of others, and let our own lie idle. Even so someone might say of me that I have here only made a bunch of other people’s flowers, having furnished nothing but the thread to tie them.128

Montaigne draws a distinction between what Socrates and he tried to accomplish, on the one hand, and on the other the reception others gave to these “essays,” which might in certain situations be considered failures. We are always judged by others in relation to a result that is often unpredictable, and despite our good intentions; Socrates found that out only too soon. By definition, our natural faculties do not allow us to put things in perspective; the truth arises from an interpretation inscribed in time, because in this world straddling two systems—the Aristotelian and the Cartesian—“fabulous testimonies, provided they are possible, serve like true ones. Whether they have happened or no, in Paris or Rome, to John or Peter, they exemplify, at all events, some human potentiality, and thus their telling imparts useful information to me.”¹²⁹ Montaigne did not set out to say what happened in his time, as a historian or chronicler might have done, but rather “what could happen,” in the manner of a Machiavelli who considers politics to be a science oriented toward the future rather than toward the past. It is also the science of diplomacy, which consists in predicting reactions and anticipating the effects of political actions.

Direct, simple, and vehement opposition (to adopt Montaigne’s expression) is not always the best way to proceed in the domain of politics. Either Socrates was pertinently aware that he was losing his case when he addressed his judges, or he was sure of himself and underestimated his opponents’ strength. Frankness is not sufficient and appearances often override reality: these two observations put a deep mark on the late Renaissance. Socrates’s appearance turned out to be decisive during his trial. On this subject, Montaigne notes: “About Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, it vexes me that he hit on a body and face so ugly as they say he had, and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul.”¹³⁰ Only appearances matter when one is being judged by others, and it is better to have a “fine face” than an “ugly mug.” In this sense, Socrates’s and Montaigne’s experiences are diametrically opposed. This sharp break between reality and appearances had been commented upon and theorized at length by Machiavelli, and Montaigne must have known that. Moreover, he was aware of the power of appearances in juridical matters. Reality passes through language and produces a truth that can no longer be anything but social. The exception Socrates represented, neglecting the importance of appearances, was no longer tenable in Montaigne’s time. The feeling the Greek philosopher inspired in him was limited to the strictly personal.

By experience, Montaigne was less idealistic than Socrates; that is why he was a little better at politics. Between death and exile, one must choose exile, and on this point Socrates was wrong right to the end: “What Socrates did near the end of his life, in considering a sentence of exile against him worse than a sentence of death, I shall never, I think, be so broken or so strictly attached to my own country as to do,”131 Montaigne wrote in “Of vanity” after 1588. Times had changed, and Socrates’s haughty, noble attitude was now incompatible with the realpolitik that marked the end of the Renaissance. In the age of the Wars of Religion, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the assassination of the duke of Guise and Henry III, Montaigne drew the practical conclusions: “The version of the sayings of Socrates that his friends have left us we approve only out of respect for the universal approval these sayings enjoy, not by our own knowledge. They are beyond our experience. If anything of the kind were brought froth at this time, there are few men who would prize it.”¹³² Socrates and Socratism belonged to the history of philosophy; they were anachronisms in the period when Montaigne was writing. Montaigne’s own political experience simply no longer allowed him to preserve this idealized aspect of Socratism. Thus one critic has spoken of a “strategy of self-preservation” in Montaigne.¹³³ Socrates is supposed to have paid the price for having been incapable of grasping the political stake involved in his philosophical teaching.

The references to Socrates’s daimon acquired a different connotation after 1585. Montaigne certainly continued to emphasize his points in common with the philosopher, notably with regard to his imagination, sometimes associated with a mild form of madness: “A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid,” a sentence before which Montaigne added after 1588: “My style and my mind alike go roaming.”¹³⁴ A little dose of madness is a good thing if it applies only to the individual alone and does not extend to the public and political domain: that is perhaps the lesson Montaigne learned. If one wants to play a role in society, one must recognize that “fantasy” and imagination conflict with the common good. At least that is what Montaigne seems to have understood after 1585, and especially after 1588. Now that politics was behind him, Montaigne accorded a very different place to imagination in his Essais.

In the Essais there are two very different conceptions of the imagination and of Socrates’s daimon. These two conceptions correspond to different periods: from 1570 to 1585, Montaigne was relatively sure that his imagination and his casual, unpremeditated style would be an advantage in all sorts of situations, both individual and political, but after 1585 his own political experience proved to him that this conviction was an illusion. From that time on he gave a different dimension to Socrates’s death, which he no longer perceived as a willful choice or a conscious, unconditional strategy for defending a universal truth expressed by the daimon. Montaigne now considered Socrates’s death a failure or, worse yet, a suicide. The Greek philosopher had put too much trust in his daimon and was simply mistaken, not understanding that the dynamics of persuasion must necessarily be different when one is facing a constituted group or even individuals who refuse to accept a logic of dialogue based on a relationship of authority (the sage confronting the people or the reader).

Montaigne adopted another of Socrates’s mottos: “‘According to one’s power,’ that was the refrain and favorite saying of Socrates, a saying of great substance. We must direct and fix our desires on the easiest and nearest things.”135 The author of the Essais chose this middle way. His political experiences modified his initial Socratism, which over the years became more practical because he had learned to adapt to the philosophical demands of his time. A significantly reworked passage in “Of physiognomy” tells the story of the reception of Socrates’s death.

After 1585, Montaigne argues that Socrates, before being a philosopher, was first of all an Athenian. After 1588, the author of the Essais takes his analysis still further, emphasizing that Socrates owed his life “to the world as an example,” and that his defense was of an “unstudied and artless boldness and a childlike assurance,” showing even an “ignorance” with regard to the political reality of the polis:

[Bordeaux Copy: he owed his life not to himself but to the world as an example. Would it not be a public loss if he had finished it in an idle and obscure fashion?] Assuredly, such a nonchalant and mild way of considering his death deserved to have posterity consider it all the more on his behalf; which it did. And there is nothing in justice as just as what fortune ordained for his glory. For the Athenians held those who had been the cause of his death in such abomination that they shunned them like excommunicated persons; they considered everything they had touched as polluted; no one would wash with them at the baths; no one greeted them or said hello to them. So that finally, no longer able to bear this public hatred, they hanged themselves. If anyone thinks that among the many examples of the sayings of Socrates that I might have chosen to serve my purpose I selected this one badly, and if he judges that this speech is elevated above common ideas—I chose it deliberately. For I judge otherwise, and hold that it is a speech which in its naturalness ranks far behind and below common opinions. [Bordeaux Copy: In an unstudied and artless boldness and a childlike assurance] it represents the pure and primary impression [Bordeaux Copy: and ignorance] of Nature. For it may be believed that we are naturally afraid of pain, but not of death for its own sake; it is a part of our being no less essential than life.136

Montaigne had learned to adapt, to pretend to be simple and to conceal his thoughts if he found himself in a politically unfavorable situation. Knowing how to oppose has its limits, and questioning depends on the power relationship in which one finds oneself. A distinction has to be drawn between private “imaginations” and public discourses. These two levels could no longer be confused. The example of Socrates, reassessed in the light of particular experiences, allowed Montaigne to resolve the problems inherent in the consubstantiality he had initially claimed—the man and his work are always one: whoever touches one, touches the other—by distinguishing in practice the public from the private in his Essais, while at the same time preserving the ideal principle of this consubstantiality. By reaffirming the subjective and private nature of his writings, Montaigne solidified Socrates’s vain defense before his judges: “I have never promised or imparted any teaching to anybody, and if anyone asserts that he has ever learned or heard from me privately anything which was not open to everyone else, you may be quite sure that he is not telling the truth.”¹³⁷ This defense Socrates offered could also serve as an apology for Montaigne, if not as his defense.

Montaigne’s Death

In the chapter “That to philosophize is to learn to die” (I: 20), Montaigne suggests that if he had been a “maker of books” he would have written a register of deaths worthy of being reported, for the good reason that anyone who “would teach men to die would teach them to live.”138 The deaths of philosophers, like those of great men, must necessarily match the level of their lives, insofar as they determine their last image for posterity. If Socrates’s death can be considered a failure of philosophy confronted by politics, Montaigne’s death gave a different dimension to the consubstantiality he so ardently sought. Montaigne had earlier declared that he would write “as long as there is ink and paper in the world”;¹³⁹ he had finally run out of ink and paper. His life ended on September 13, 1592, at a time when his future renown was uncertain. His death concluded his Essais forever, but they were given a new breath of life by Marie de Gournay’s limitless devotion.

The death of philosophers is hardly different from that of ordinary people, at least so far as the medical causes are concerned. In Montaigne’s case, kidney stones were mentioned, but it does not seem that Montaigne died from this hereditary disorder that had caused him pain for more than a decade. A letter from Estienne Pasquier to Claude de Pellejay, a royal counselor and master of the king’s Chambre des Comptes, provides us with a few details concerning Montaigne’s last three days. Probably written in 1605—that is, thirteen years after Montaigne’s demise—this letter was first published in 1619 in Les Lettres d’Estienne Pasquier (Paris: Laurent Sonnius and Jean Petit-Pas). Pasquier refers to a “quincyxi on the tongue that for three days made Montaigne unable to speak, though he remained fully conscious.”¹⁴⁰ This sudden loss of the capacity for speech that left him able to communicate only in writing—“to resort to the pen,” as Pasquier puts it—reminds us of La Boétie’s long death agony. Each had received the death that suited him: La Boétie as an orator, and Montaigne as an author.

In 1996, a group of physicians met to determine the causes of Montaigne’s death. After finding a few symptoms in the Essais and in the travel journal, and considering several diagnoses, they concluded that Montaigne probably died of a stroke followed by aphasia.¹⁴¹ Montaigne had in fact had other attacks of this kind that indicated vascular impairments. While he was in Italy, on Sunday, June 18, 1581, he had been “seized with cramp in the calf of the right leg. The pain was sharp, intermittent, and not continuous, and lasted about half-an-hour.”¹⁴² This transitory ischemic event presaged others to come. That was probably what happened to him again on September 10, 1592, when he lost part of his ability to express himself verbally. Then came a second stroke, which proved fatal on September 13. So much for Montaigne’s medical-legal death.

The question is not, however, what caused Montaigne’s death but how he died. The finest deaths must be represented as in a painting. On this point Montaigne’s death was a success. The very Christian death described by Pasquier allowed Montaigne’s first biographers to make him a model of saintliness and, in the wake of the Wars of Religion, to anchor him once and for all in the Catholic camp:

He was forced to resort to his pen to make his desires understood. And when he felt his end approaching, he asked his wife, by means of a little note, to summon a few gentlemen who were his neighbors, so that he might bid them farewell. When they arrived, he had the mass celebrated in his bed chamber; and when the priest was about to elevate the Corpus Domini, the poor gentleman lurched up as best he could, headlong, on his bed, his hands clasped: and in this last act rendered up his spirit to God. This was a fine mirror of the interior of his Soul.¹⁴³

This silent death contrasts with the exuberant death of La Boétie, an eloquent speaker who had talked right up to his last breath.144 Montaigne had “tried” (essayé) to speak, but without success, and had finally resigned himself to writing “little notes” meant for his relatives and friends. These late “notices to the reader” (avis au lecteur) permitted him to continue to his last breath his habit of “speaking to the paper.” Montaigne could be said to have died with his pen in his hand. In the early seventeenth century, Bernard Automne even chose the image of a Montaigne-manager, concerned primarily with questions of legacy in his last moments: “The late Montaigne, the author of the Essais, feeling the end of his life approaching, rose from the bed in his shirt, put on his chamber robe, opened his strongbox, called in all his valets and other legatees, and paid them the legacies he had left them in his will, foreseeing the objections his heirs would have to paying his legacies.”¹⁴⁵ This portrait did not correspond to what people wanted to hear about Montaigne. In 1635, Marie de Gournay preferred to speak of a “very constant and philosophical death.”¹⁴⁶ The Romantic painters and illustrators of the nineteenth century loved it.

Alexis Joseph Pérignon (1806–1882), a painter of history, religious subjects, and battle scenes, a student of Gros, by whom he was influenced, left us a representation of this death that completes the picture of the young Montaigne in the company of kings at Saint Denis that his teacher had painted twenty-four years earlier. Gros had chosen to represent Montaigne’s political birth, and it is striking that his pupil left us a painting of his historical death. This picture, painted in 1836, shows Montaigne with a priest at his side.^xii In the center of a large room in the château, where we can make out a monumental fireplace at the right of a canopied bed, Montaigne lies in that bed; he has raised himself slightly on his left elbow, his hands clasped, waiting to receive the last sacraments. His wife, kneeling, is already wearing mourning clothes and reinforces the moral and religious composition of this scene. Her daughter, Léonor, is to the right of her mother, her face turned backward in a kind of contortion, showing her grief and despair. On the left, gentlemen (relatives and friends) present their last respects. The priest is elevating the host: this is the moment when Montaigne returns his soul to God. This painting was interpreted and reproduced several times throughout the nineteenth century.¹⁴⁷

Nothing marked people’s minds like cheap illustrations and engravings. A lithograph published in L’Illustration in 1854 was to immortalize Montaigne’s last moments and make the essayist’s death exemplary (figure 19). Jules Laurens (1825–1901), an illustrator, lithographer, watercolorist, and painter, a pupil of Paul Delaroche, created this interpretation of Pérignon’s painting, dramatizing still further the scene of Montaigne’s death by depicting a kind of chaos in Montaigne’s bedchamber.xiii Laurens added well-stocked bookshelves the better to emphasize the bookish setting of Montaigne’s last moments. He considerably reduced the size of the room to give more intimacy to this historic event. The room (is it in the tower?) is too small to accommodate all the visitors, and in the doorway we can make out a crowd waiting to render a last homage to the philosopher. This time, Françoise de La Chassaigne stands, her hands clasped, while her daughter is absent and it is the men who are prostrate. Most of them wear a ruffled collar, a sign that they are gentlemen. The political elite of Guyenne—twelve gentlemen, if we count those who cannot get into the room—is present to witness Montaigne’s death, for as Pasquier puts it so well in the conclusion of his letter to Pellejay, “the life of this Gentleman could not have ended with a final act more beautiful than this one.”¹⁴⁸ But who did people come to see? The public man or the private man? Is Montaigne surrounded by his friends, family, and neighbors alone? Maybe not. The artist has deliberately chosen to represent a public death in harmony with Montaigne’s youth as depicted in Baron Gros’s painting of 1812. These two scenes chosen by the artist form a diptych of Montaigne’s public life—his political birth and historical death—and they are characteristic of the ambivalent reception of Montaigne’s work over the centuries.

Montaigne’s legacy was estimated at 60,000 livres in land and 30,000 livres in receivables, producing an annual revenue of 6,000 livres. According to the preface to the posthumous edition of the Essais published in 1595, Montaigne had asked his brother, Pierre de La Brousse, to write in his place a farewell to Marie de Gournay. It was up to his wife to find a burial site suited to his status as a noble lord. His heart was placed in the Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne church, and his body went to the convent of the Feuillants, in accord with the desires of Françoise de La Chassaigne, who ordered for the occasion a funeral monument that was supposed to be built in the Saint-André cathedral. However, this initial project was not realized, perhaps in order to respect one of the Council of Trent’s rulings that prohibited burials in places of worship. Montaigne’s tomb was finally erected in the convent of the Feuillants, in 1593. A contract dated January 27, 1593, between Jean-Jacques Bertin and the lord of La Brousse, acting for Françoise de La Chassaigne, stipulates that the monks authorized Montaigne’s wife to “have built in front of the main altar of the church of the said monastery a crypt, and to place in it the body of the said lord of Montaigne, of the said lady, and of their posterity, and to place and erect thereupon a sepulcher.”¹⁴⁹ In exchange for this authorization to construct a sepulcher with an effigy, Madame de Montaigne promised to pay the monks a certain sum annually and to have the inside of the church of the Feuillants whitewashed. The Feuillants agreed “to say … two high masses … and two low masses, namely one every thirteenth day of each September, which is the same day that the said lord of Montaigne died, and the other on the selfsame day that the body of this late lord shall be placed in the aforesaid crypt.”^xiv

FIGURE 19. The Death of Montaigne. Lithograph by Jules Laurens, 1854, based on the painting by Joseph Robert-Fleury (private collection).

Montaigne’s body was therefore interred on May 1, 1593, in a crypt constructed in front of the church’s main altar. We do not know whether the tomb was ready for this occasion or was constructed shortly afterward. When the church was enlarged in 1614, the tomb was moved to a chapel dedicated to Saint Bernard. In January 1616, the body of Montaigne’s daughter Léonor was buried in this same tomb, and in 1627, Françoise de La Chassaigne joined her husband and her daughter. In 1871, a fire in the church of the Feuillants (which had become the Lycée de Bordeaux) somewhat damaged the cenotaph, which was rebuilt in 1886 in the vestibule of the Faculty of Sciences and Letters. Today, Montaigne’s cenotaph resides in the Museum of Aquitaine in Bordeaux. This cenotaph in the form of an altar supports a recumbent sculpture representing Montaigne as a man-at-arms. The monument itself is made of Taillebourg marble and is rectangular in shape; it rests on a base that supports the recumbent sculpture of Montaigne wearing a coat of mail and his knight’s armor; a lion lies at his feet. Montaigne’s coat of arms is engraved on both sides of the cenotaph, and above them we see two epitaphs, one in Greek couplets, the other in Latin prose.150 Today, there are still a few doubts regarding the sculptor of this monument, because the contract between the artist and Montaigne’s family has never been found. The names of the Bordeaux master masons and sculptors, Jacques Guillermain and Pierre Prieur, have been proposed, but this tomb was very probably made by Louis Baradier.^xv

The face of the sculpture is quite similar to those in other known portraits of Montaigne, especially Thomas de Leu’s engraving and François Quesnel’s drawing. Montaigne is represented wearing his necklace of the Order of Saint Michael, his hands are clasped for a prayer, and he has all the attributes of a noble knight. Nobility and Christianity are the two themes emphasized. Montaigne’s coat of arms is inscribed in a medieval composition surrounded by laurels, and the necklace of the Order of Saint Michael frames the coat of arms of Montaigne’s family. It is indisputably a baroque work made by talented ornament makers who received precise instructions as to what should appear on the monument. This image of the Lord Montaigne is also in accord with the ideal that the essayist had set for himself, and that his close friends and relatives thought it desirable to hand down to posterity. However, this kind of cenotaph is fairly unusual for a member of the minor nobility. Montaigne had probably never worn armor during his life, at least not on a battlefield. The recumbent figure must therefore be seen as a final homage rendered to his father, the only member of the Eyquem family who had actually waged war. The transformation of Montaigne into a noble gentleman was completed only after his death.

The Latin epitaph engraved on the monument gives Montaigne’s chronology and lists his titles and offices. It also lauds his moral values, notably his affability and broad-mindedness:

To Michel de Montaigne, born in Périgord, son of Pierre, grandson of Grimond, great-grandson of Raymond, knight of the order of St. Michael, Roman citizen, former mayor of Bordeaux. Destined to be the glory of the human race by the gentleness of his manners, the penetration of his mind, his lively eloquence, and an incomparable judgment. Although he had as friends not only great princes and the most distinguished figures in France, but also the leaders of a party that had formed there, he was nonetheless attached to the laws of his country and to the religion of his forefathers; and without flattering or annoying anyone, he was able to make himself likable to everyone. As during his life, he constantly professed, in speech and in writing, a philosophy that had fortified him against all troubles, when his end approached, after having courageously struggled against the attacks of a lengthy and cruel illness, and conforming his actions to his principles, he finally concluded, when it pleased God, a fine life and a fine death. He lived fifty-nine years, seven months, and eleven days, and died on September 13, in the year of our Lord 1592. Françoise de La Chassaigne, mourning the death of this faithful and constantly cherished husband, devoted this monument to him as an eternal testimony to her attachment and her regrets.151

Montaigne, the friend of princes, lived a beautiful life. The Greek epitaph, whose author is unknown,¹⁵² concludes without any possible ambiguity that Montaigne has entered posterity and joined the immortals: “I have gone to take my place among the immortals, where my homeland is.”^xvi

ⁱ In 1614, Françoise de La Chassaigne sent the Bordeaux Copy to the Feuillants without her daughter’s agreement. She was probably trying to make people forget the “misunderstanding” (legal suit) that made the Feuillants oppose her during the construction of the new chapel.

ⁱⁱ These letters are dated April 15 and August 30, 1588.

ⁱⁱⁱ On March 31, 1591, thus during Montaigne’s lifetime, Léonor gave birth to a daughter, Françoise de La Tour. Her husband died in 1594. With her second husband, Charles de Gamaches, Léonor had another daughter, Marie, in 1610. Marie de Gamaches (1610–1782) married Louis de Lur Saluces in 1627. Since she had no direct descendants, it was Louis de Lur Saluces’s nephew, Jean de Ségur, lord of Montazeau, the son of Madeleine de Lur, who ensured Montaigne’s heritage down to 1811, the date at which the château and the land of Montaigne were sold to a third party outside the family.

^iv Roughly, “leafing through.” [Trans.]

^v In the eighteenth century, in Bibliothèque historique de la France (1768) by P. Lelong, published by Févret de Fontette, we find under no. 2230 the following item: “Historique description du solitaire et sauvage pays de Médoc (dans le Bordelois), par feu M. De La Boétie, Millanges, 1593, in-12°.” In a note, we read: “A few verses by the same author have been added to this description, which are not found in the edition of his works Michel de Montaigne published.”

^vi This motto was not added on the Exemplar used for the printing of the posthumous edition of 1595. On the other hand, Marie de Gournay added this quotation on the copy she sent to Justus Lipsius (known as the “Antwerp Copy”). It was only starting in 1535 that this inscription gave way to the motto “Que sçay-je?” (“What do I know?”) on the title page of the Essais.

^vii The manuscript additions on the Bordeaux Copy run to 91,552 words, or 22 percent of the total text of the Essais.

^viii The problem of the reproduction of the manuscript additions and pentimenti contained in the Bordeaux Copy was already raised in 1862, when Reinhold Dezeimeris and Jules Delpit approached the Bordeaux printer Gounouilhou concerning a possible printing of the Bordeaux Copy in his workshop. In a letter to Dr. Payen, Dezeimeris wrote: “M. Delpit must have written to you about Montaigne. The sight of the copy that bears his copy preparation for the printer literally floored Gounouilhou’s compositor. He saw it as an inextricable typographical labor, and felt sorry for the typographer who would be forced to reproduce this text.” Reinhold Dezeimeris, letter to Dr. Payen, BNF, Fonds Payen, dossier Z Payen 656 (correspondence).

^ix I use the term memoirist instead of memorialist since I want to emphasize the genre of mémoire writing, not to be confused with the genre of memorial writing. In French such a distinction does not exist and the noun mémorialiste applies to both genres.

^x A manuscript (Codex Vaticanus 9693) from the Vatican Apostolic Library presents Montaigne as a “Socrates from France.” This document was written on the occasion of Montaigne’s Roman citizenship, while he resided in the Eternal City. It is mentioned by Ferdinand Gregorovius in Alcuni cenni storici sulla cittadinanza romana (1877, p. 30) and by Alessandro D’Ancona in his edition of Montaigne’s Journal de voyage (1889, p. 321). I have not been able to consult this manuscript.

^xi A peritonsillar abscess. [Trans.]

^xii This painting (oil on canvas, 128 × 193 cm) is now in the Museum of Cambrai (inventory no. 324 P).

^xiii Laurens’s lithograph reproduces another painting of Montaigne’s death by Joseph-Robert Fleury, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853.

^xiv The original of this document has now been lost, but a copy is found in one of the Feuillants’ registers. Archives départementales de la Gironde, fonds des Feuillants, H. 620, f. 8v–10v.

^xv Born in the sixteenth century, Louis Baradier died in Bordeaux in 1608. He was the king’s project supervisor and official master mason of Bordeaux. We know that he worked for Feuillants of Bordeaux on several occasions in the late sixteenth century.

^xvi This Greek epitaph was translated into Latin by Bernard de La Monnoye for the edition of the Essais published by Pierre Coste in 1725.