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

The same passage also contains a strange, and perhaps revealing, remark about Montaigne: “When he praised me, I possessed him.” And evidently he did praise her. Her edition of the Essays includes some lines in which Montaigne speaks of her as a beloved fille d’alliance whom he loves with more than a fatherly love (whatever that means), and cherishes in his retirement as part of his own being. He goes on:

She is the only person I still think about in the world. If youthful promise means anything, her soul will some day be capable of the finest things, among others of perfection in that most sacred kind of friendship which, so we read, her sex has not yet been able to attain. The sincerity and firmness of her character are already sufficient, her affection for me more than superabundant, and such, in short, that it leaves nothing to be desired, unless that her apprehension about my end, in view of my fifty-five years when I met her, would not torment her so cruelly.

Finally, he speaks warmly of her sound judgment of the Essays —“she a woman, and in this age, and so young, and alone in her district”—and of “the remarkable eagerness with which she loved me and wanted my friendship.”

These sentences have fallen under suspicion over the years, since they appear only in Gournay’s edition and not in the alternative, personally annotated version of his final Essays known as the “Bordeaux Copy.” It is only natural to wonder whether she made them up. The tone seems more Gournay than Montaigne and, intriguingly, she herself deleted sections of this passage in a later edition. On the other hand, the Bordeaux Copy contains traces of adhesive in the place where these lines occur, together with a little cross in Montaigne’s hand — his usual symbol to indicate an insertion. A pasted-in slip could have fallen out on one of the occasions when the copy was rebound in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whether the passage is genuine or not, there seems no reason to doubt the affection Montaigne felt for his disciple, bodkins, hellebore, and all.

After that first year, however, with the burst of work in Picardy, he and Gournay kept in touch only by letter. In April 1593, Gournay told another of her literary friends, Justus Lipsius, that she had not met Montaigne for almost five years. Yet they did correspond regularly, for by the time of her letter to Lipsius she was concerned because Montaigne had not written for six months. She was right to worry. Montaigne had died during that time, and a final message sent to her via one of his brothers had not arrived. Lipsius had to break the news to her in his reply. He did it gently, adding, “since he whom you called father is no longer of this world, accept me as your brother.” She replied in shock: “Sir, as others fail to recognize my face today, I fear that you will not recognize my style, so utterly has the loss of my father changed me. I was his daughter, I am his tomb; I was his second being, I am his ashes.”

By now, she was going through difficult times in other ways too. Her mother died in 1591 and Marie inherited major family debts as well as responsibility for her younger siblings. Determined not to enter a loveless marriage for money, she set out to live purely by writing — a tough path, almost unprecedented for a woman. For the rest of her life, she wrote about any subject she thought might sell — analyses of poetry and style, feminism, religious controversy, the story of her own life — and used all the literary connections she could find. Justus Lipsius was one of the writers she sought out to help her promote her work. But none was more important than the mentor with whom her name would always remain linked: Montaigne.

Skillful use of his reputation brought about her first big breakthrough when, in 1594, she published a novel entitled Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne (The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne). The contents had nothing to do with him at all, apart from the fact that — as she wrote in the dedicatory epistle — it had been inspired by a story she had told him one day as they strolled in her family’s garden. In fact the Proumenoir ’s exotic romp of a narrative was stolen almost entirely from a book by another author. It did extremely well, and paved the way for the book which really began Gournay’s career: her great definitive edition of the Essays , published in 1595.

The idea of her becoming Montaigne’s editor and literary executor apparently arose only after his death, when his widow and daughter found one of his annotated copies of the 1588 edition among his papers. They sent it to Gournay in Paris, so that she might publish it. Perhaps they only wanted her to deliver it to a suitable printer, but she interpreted it as a major editorial commission and set to work. It proved a huge task, one so difficult that it still overwhelms editors more experienced and well equipped than she. To this day, no one can agree about it, so many are the variants, so complex the text, and so great the work of identifying all Montaigne’s references and allusions. Yet Gournay did the job brilliantly. Perhaps she yielded to temptation in adding those suspicious lines about herself, or perhaps they were genuine, but on the whole she was more meticulous about accuracy than most editors of her time. Surviving copies of the book’s first printing show that she continued to make last-minute ink corrections even while sheets were coming off the press, as well as after publication — a sign of how much she cared about getting everything right.

From now on, she would be less a daughter to Montaigne than an adoptive mother to his Essays . “Having lost their father,” she wrote, “the Essais are in need of a protector.” She put the book together, but she also championed it, defended it, promoted it, and — in this first edition — equipped it with a long, combative preface which set out to defeat any hint of criticism in advance. Most of her arguments were rational and tightly constructed, but she seasoned them with plenty of emotion. Against those who considered his style vulgar or impure, she wrote, “When I defend him against such charges, I am full of scorn.” And, concerning the allegation that he wrote in a disorganized manner: “One cannot deal with great affairs according to small intelligences … Here is not the elementary knowledge of an apprentice but the Koran of the masters, the quintessence of philosophy.”

Nor was she satisfied if people praised the Essays faintly. “Whoever says of Scipio that he is a noble captain and of Socrates that he is a wise man does them more wrong than one who does not speak of them at all.” You cannot write in measured tones about Montaigne: “Excellence exceeds all limits.” (So much for Montaigne’s idea of moderation.) You must be “ravished,” as she had been. On the other hand, you should be able to say why you have been ravished: to compare him point by point to the ancients and show exactly where he is their equal, and where their superior. The Essays always seemed to Gournay the perfect intelligence test. Having asked people what they thought of the book, she deduced what she should think of them. Diderot would make almost the same observation of Montaigne in a later century: “His book is the touchstone of a sound mind. If a man dislikes it, you may be sure that he has some defect of the heart or understanding.”

But Marie de Gournay had the right to expect a great deal from her readers, for she was an excellent reader of Montaigne herself. For all her excesses, she had an astute grasp of why the Essays were fit to place among the classics. At a time when many persisted in seeing the book mainly as a collection of Stoic sayings — a valid interpretation so far as it went — she admired it for less usual things: its style, its rambling structure, its willingness to reveal all. It was partly Gournay’s feeling that everyone around her was missing the point that created the long-lasting myth of a Montaigne somehow born out of his time, a writer who had to wait to find readers able to recognize his value. Out of an author who had made himself very popular while barely seeming to exert himself, she made Montaigne into a misunderstood genius.