Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

In 1577, her father died. This was a personal blow for her and a disaster for the family. Without his income and management, their lives fell to pieces. Existence in Paris was even more expensive than in Picardy, so they gave up the city life almost entirely. By 1580, Marie was confined to a provincial world. It did not suit her much, but — now a stubborn teenager — she did what she could to educate herself using the books in the family library. By reading Latin works alongside their French translations, she gave herself the best classical grounding she could. The result was a patchy knowledge, unsystematic but deeply motivated.

Montaigne might have approved of such an anarchic education — in theory. In practice, one cannot imagine him being content with what Marie de Gournay had, and it would have left him with less confidence in himself.

Montaigne could afford to be offhand about learning and wry about his father’s awe of books. Gournay took pride in her attainments because she had had to fight for them, and it was always easy to put her on the defensive. She often felt she was being laughed at. Yes, she said, of course people thought it funny to meet

a woman pretending to learning without formal schooling, because she instructed herself in Latin by rote, aided by setting the translations side by side with the originals, and who therefore would not dare to speak the language for fear of making a false step — a learned woman who cannot unequivocally guarantee the meter of a Latin verse; a learned woman without Greek, without Hebrew, without aptitude for providing scholarly commentary on authors.

Gournay’s tone remained angry and troubled all her life. In her Peincture de moeurs , a self-portrait in verse, she described herself as a tangle of intellect and emotion, unable to hide her feelings; her writing bears this out.

The same mixture emerges in what she tells us of her first encounters with Montaigne, first on the page and then in person. Sometime in her late teens, apparently by chance, she came across an edition of the Essays . The experience was so shattering that her mother thought she had gone mad: she was on the point of giving the girl hellebore, a traditional treatment for insanity — or so Gournay herself says, perhaps exaggerating for effect. Gournay felt she had found her other self in Montaigne, the one person with whom she had a true affinity, and the only one to understand her. It was the experience so many of his readers have had over the years:

How did he know all that about me? (Bernard Levin)

It seems he is my very self. (André Gide)

Here is a “you” in which my “I” is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished. (Stefan Zweig)

Gournay longed to meet Montaigne in person, but when she made inquiries, the rumor came back that he was dead. Then, when she was in Paris with her mother some years later, in 1588, she heard that he was alive after all. Not only that, but everyone was talking about him, for this was the time of his secret mission between Navarre and the king. At the height of this drama, Marie de Gournay boldly sent Montaigne an invitation to call on her family: an unorthodox thing for a young woman of her position to do, to a man of superior class and age who was currently the talk of the town. Evidently charmed by her chutzpah, and never the man to resist flattery from a young woman, Montaigne accepted the invitation and called on her the next day.

According to Marie de Gournay’s account, this meeting must have been emotionally intimate, though probably not physically so, for at the end of it he chastely invited her to become an adoptive daughter to him — an offer she leaped at. She says no more, so one can only imagine the conversation that led up to this. Did she rave at him about her feeling of “affinity”? Did she tell him the hellebore story? It would be in character for her to spill everything out in an incoherent torrent. In a late addition to the Essays , Montaigne describes an odd episode which apparently occurred at one of their later meetings. He saw a girl — and added remarks make it clear that it was Gournay—

to show the ardor of her promises, and also her constancy, strike herself, with the bodkin she wore in her hair, four or five lusty stabs in the arm, which broke the skin and made her bleed in good earnest.

Whether or not such self-mutilating intensity characterized their first meeting, one at least suspects that Marie de Gournay did most of the talking. The father — daughter idea was probably more hers than his. Perhaps he even attempted to take sexual advantage of her enthusiasm, and was persuaded to accept the adoptive relationship instead. From the first moment of reading the Essays , Gournay had felt that they were spiritually of the same family; now it became official. Montaigne would replace her lost father, and she would be welcomed into his own small entourage of women whom he did not quite understand.

Even if he agreed to play her père d’alliance mainly to humor her, he did not then brush her off. Marie’s invitation to stay with her mother and herself in the Picardy countryside gave him a welcome opportunity to recuperate from his illness, well away from Parisian political demands and any likelihood of being arrested again. It also gave him an opportunity to work. He and his new daughter settled down almost immediately to the job of adding revisions to the 1588 Essays . This must have thrilled her; her fantasy was never one of wrapping Montaigne in a shawl and nursing him peacefully into old age. She wanted him to write, so that she could be his apprentice. Her presence probably helped make this happen; having someone so enthusiastic at his side would have encouraged Montaigne to get back to the Essays almost immediately after publication, and to keep at it even after leaving Picardy. It set the tone for his last few years of writing.

In return, Marie de Gournay could never be accused of underplaying her alliance . When she came to write the preface to his posthumous Essays , she signed herself as Montaigne’s adoptive daughter, and described him as the man “whom I am so honored in calling Father.” She added: “I cannot, Reader, use another name for him, for I am not myself except insofar as I am his daughter.” In another work of her own she wrote:

In truth, if someone is surprised that, although we are not father and daughter except in title, the good will that allies us nevertheless surpasses that of real fathers and children — the first and closest of all the natural ties — let that person try one day to lodge virtue within himself and to meet with it in another; then he will scarcely marvel that it has had more strength and power to harmonize souls than nature has.

What Montaigne’s real daughter Léonor thought of this claim to surpass biological family bonds is anyone’s guess. One could not blame her if she felt put out, but it seems she did not. She and Marie de Gournay became good friends in later years, with Gournay calling her “sister,” as was only logical if they had the same father. When Marie de Gournay wrote of “surpassing,” she was probably thinking of the intensity of her own communion with Montaigne rather than of snubbing a rival. The one person she does seem to have felt in competition with was the long-dead La Boétie, with whom she did not hesitate to compare herself. Her dedication finished with a quotation from La Boétie’s verse: “Nor is there any fear that our descendants will grudge to enroll our name among those renowned for friendship, if only the fates are willing.” And in the Essays’ preface, she wrote, “He was mine for only four years, no longer than La Boétie was his.”