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

Gournay was happy to acknowledge that she remained in Montaigne’s shadow: “I cannot take a step, whether in writing or speaking, without finding myself in his footsteps.” In reality her own personality comes through loud and clear, often in ways that are at odds with his. When she extols Montaignean virtues such as moderation, she does it in her crashingly immoderate way. Advocating the arts of Stoic detachment and of slipping quietly through life, she does it emotionally and abrasively. This makes her edition a fascinating wrestling match between two writers, just as happens with Montaigne and Florio, or even Montaigne and La Boétie, in the first stirrings of the conversation that became the Essays .

In many ways, this was a literary partnership of the same sort, but very much complicated by the fact of Marie de Gournay’s being a woman. It annoyed her that it was never taken as seriously as other such relationships — and neither was she. Ridicule followed her through life; she never found a way of shrugging it off. Instead, she raged. Some of this rage finds its way into the Essays’ preface: the writer sometimes seems to reach right through the page to grab male readers by the lapels and berate them. “Blessed indeed are you, Reader, if you are not of a sex that has been forbidden all possessions, is forbidden liberty, has even been forbidden all the virtues.” The most fatuous men are listened to with respect, by virtue of their beards, yet when she ventures a contribution everyone smiles condescendingly, as if to say, “It’s a woman speaking.” Had Montaigne been subjected to such treatment, he might have responded with a smile too, but Gournay did not have this gift. The more she let her anger show, the more people laughed. Yet this sense of strain and anguish makes her a compelling writer. The preface is not just the earliest published introduction to Montaigne’s canonical work; it is also one of the world’s first and most eloquent feminist tracts.

This may seem odd for a text introducing Montaigne, who was not obviously a great feminist himself. But Gournay’s feminism remained closely tied to her “Montaignism.” Her belief that men and women were equal — neither being superior to the other, though different in experience and situation — was in tune with his relativism. She took inspiration from his insistence on questioning received social assumptions, and his willingness to leap between different people’s points of view. For Gournay, if men could exert their imagination to see the world as a woman sees it, even for a few minutes, they would learn enough to change their behavior forever. Yet this leap of perspective was just what they never seemed to manage.

Shortly after publication, alas, Gournay had second thoughts about her blistering preface. By this time she was staying on the Montaigne estate, as a guest of Montaigne’s widow, mother, and daughter, who had apparently taken her in out of friendship, loyalty, or sympathy. From their home, she wrote to Justus Lipsius on May 2, 1596, saying that she had written the preface only because she was overwhelmed by grief at Montaigne’s death, and that she wished to withdraw it. Its excessive tone, she now said, was the result of “a violent fever of the soul.” Shortly after this, sending copies to publishers in Basel, Strasbourg, and Antwerp, she axed the preface and replaced it with a brief, dull note just ten lines long. The original stayed in Gournay’s bottom drawer, and parts of it resurfaced in a different form in a 1599 edition of the Proumenoir . Later still, she repented of her repentance altogether, perhaps coming to a late Montaignean sense of defiance. The last editions of the Essays in her lifetime restored the preface in all its excess and glory.

All these successive Essays editions, together with a sequence of lesser and often more contentious works, kept Gournay going through her advancing years. Somehow, she did what she had set out to do: she lived by her pen. By now she had returned to Paris, and there occupied a garret with a single faithful servant, Nicole Jamyn. She ran an occasional salon, and threw herself into friendships with some of the most interesting men of her day, including libertins such as François le Poulchre de la Motte-Messemé and François de La Mothe le Vayer. Many people suspected her of being a libertine and religious freethinker herself. She did write, in her autobiographical Peincture de moeurs , that she lacked the deep piety she would have liked to have, perhaps a hint that she was an out-and-out unbeliever.

Gournay’s books sold, but the publicity that made it happen often took the form of scandal or public mockery. This never focused on the Essays , at least not in her lifetime, nor even on her various feminist writings. Mostly, she was ridiculed for her own unorthodox lifestyle or her lesser polemical works. At times, she gained a grudging respect. In 1634 she became one of the founders of the influential Académie française, but two great ironies hover over this achievement. One is that, as a woman, she was never admitted to any of that organization’s meetings. The other is that the Académie associated itself for centuries with exactly the arid, perfectionist style of writing that Gournay herself detested. It lent no support either to her own views on literary language or to her beloved Montaigne.

Gournay died on July 13, 1645, just before her eightieth birthday. Her graven epitaph described her just as she would have liked: as an independent writer, and as Montaigne’s daughter. Like his, her posthumous reputation was destined to be twisted into bizarre shapes by changing fashions. The exuberant writing style she preferred remained out of favor for a long time. One eighteenth-century commentator wrote: “Nothing can equal the praise she received in her lifetime: but we can no longer give her such eulogy, and whatever merit she may have had as a person, her works are no longer read by anyone and have slipped into an oblivion from which they will never emerge.”

The one thing that continued to sell was her edition of Montaigne. But this in turn attracted jealousy, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries started to see her as a leech on Montaigne’s back. This interpretation had some truth in it, since she did use Montaigne to survive, but it ignored the extent to which she promoted and defended him as well. The sheer intensity of this devotion could attract suspicion. In the twentieth century, she was still being described by one Montaigne editor, Maurice Rat, as “a white-haired old maid … who made the mistake of living too long” and whose “aggressive or grumpy attitude” did more harm than good. Even the judicious scholar Pierre Villey, who generally took her side, could not resist poking fun sometimes, and he resented her attempt to set her friendship with Montaigne alongside La Boétie’s. In general, the Gournay/Montaigne friendship continued to be judged by different criteria from the Montaigne/La Boétie one. The latter is lauded, deconstructed, theorized, analyzed, eroticized, and psychoanalyzed to within an inch of its life. Gournay’s “adoption” has long passed with little more than one of those patronizing smiles that used to annoy her so.

In recent years much has changed, mainly because of the rise of feminism, which recognizes her as a pioneer. Her first great modern champion was a man, Mario Schiff, who wrote a full biographical study in 1910 and published new editions of her feminist works. Since then the journey has been ever upwards. Marjorie Henry Ilsley ended her 1963 biography, A Daughter of the Renaissance , with a chapter entitled “Marie de Gournay’s Ascending Fortune”; since then, she has climbed even higher, with fresh biographies and scholarly editions of her works coming out regularly, as well as novelizations of her life.