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

More recently still, there has been a shift in attitudes to her 1595 edition of the Essays —which fell into disuse for a hundred years or so, following its first three centuries of unquestioned dominance. Having sunk to the deepest sea bed in the twentieth century, remembered only in a few footnotes, it is now bobbing up again. It seems to have all the formidable resilience of Marie de Gournay herself.

The rejection of Gournay’s edition became most severe at the very moment that her general reputation began to revive. This strange fact has a simple explanation. Before that, her text had no rival; it was immaterial what readers thought of her personality. But in the late eighteenth century a different text did turn up in the archives of Bordeaux: a copy of the 1588 edition, closely annotated in Montaigne’s own hand as well as those of secretaries and assistants, including Marie de Gournay herself.

This “Bordeaux Copy,” as it became known, still did not attract much attention until the late nineteenth century, when scholars developed a taste for poring over the minutiae of such texts. It now emerged that the Bordeaux Copy and Gournay’s 1595 edition were similar in soft focus, but not in detail. Several thousand differences existed, scattered like grit through the book. Of these about a hundred were significant enough to change the meaning, while a few were very major, including the section praising Marie de Gournay herself. Actually all the differences were equally important, for they implied that Gournay had not been a careful editor after all. She had been incompetent at best, and fraudulent at worst. This conclusion sparked an anti-Gournay backlash, followed by a series of editing wars which ran through the early twentieth century, and which (after a lull) are raging again today.

The battle followed the rules of classical warfare, focusing on sieges of key strongholds and access to supplies. Armies of rival transcribers and editors attacked the Bordeaux Copy, working at roughly the same time, looking over each other’s shoulders, and doing all they could to block each other’s path to the precious object. Each contrived his own technique for reading the faded ink, and for representing the various levels of addition and augmentation, as well as different hands. Some got so bogged down in methodology that they made no further progress. One early transcriber, Albert Caignieul, wrote to his employers at the Bordeaux Library explaining why it was taking him so long to produce anything:

The separation of the various stages was effected by observation and analysis of clear material facts … We considered that this separation was duly effected when these two conditions were fulfilled: 1. to take into account all the elements furnished by the analysis. 2. to take only these elements into account. The results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the method …

When, a few years later, he was challenged again — there being still no sign of any completed transcription — he tried a different tack:

Everything which remains to be done has been prepared for the most part and could be finished in a relatively brief period of time which would be, however, difficult to ascertain because of special problems which arise suddenly and frequently.

Nothing ever came of Caignieul’s project, but others achieved better results. By the early 1900s, three different versions were in production, one an “Edition Phototypique,” which merely reproduced the volumes in facsimile. The other two were the Edition Municipale, directed by bumptious scholar Fortunat Strowski, and the Edition Typographique, directed by the equally opinionated and difficult Arthur-Antoine Armaingaud. They took it in turns to overtake each other, like two very slow racehorses on a long course. Strowski won the first lap, bringing out his first two volumes in 1906 and 1909. He then boasted that no other edition would ever be necessary, and persuaded the Bordeaux repository to impose tough new working conditions on Armaingaud, including finger-numbingly low ambient temperatures and the requirement that all pages be read through thick panes of green or red glass to protect them from light. Armaingaud struggled on; his first volume appeared in 1912—though he gave it the false date 1906 to make it look to posterity as though it had appeared at the same time as Strowski’s.

The game continued. For a while, Armaingaud edged ahead, but his subsequent volumes got stuck in the pipeline. He also isolated himself with his tendency to promote unusual opinions about Montaigne, notably the idea that he was the true author of On Voluntary Servitude . Not unlike Marie de Gournay before him, and many literary theorists after, Armaingaud liked to think of Montaigne as having secret levels of meaning which only he could decipher. As one of his enemies sarcastically put it: “He alone knows him in depth, he alone knows his secrets, he alone can speak of him, in his name, interpret his thought.” At least Armaingaud kept up a trickle of output, but Strowski now became distracted by other projects and failed to finish the last volume of his edition. The Bordeaux authorities funding him eventually passed the work to someone else, François Gébelin, who produced the final volume in 1919—fifty years after the idea had first been proposed. Volumes of commentary and concordance followed in 1921 and 1933, produced by the astute Montaignist who now took over the project, Pierre Villey, a man whose achievement was the more noteworthy because he had been blind since the age of three. He finished his work in time for Bordeaux’s celebrations of Montaigne’s four hundredth birthday in 1933—only to have the organizers of the festivities forget to invite him. Meanwhile, Armaingaud also finished his version, so the world was, at last, presented with two fine transcriptions of the Essays . Both books had a key feature in common: having worked so hard to get access to the physical Bordeaux Copy, their editors were determined to stick to it, and to ignore Marie de Gournay’s readily available published version almost entirely. They also shared a highly un-Montaignesque tendency to consider themselves the source of the final, unchallengeable word on all matters of Essays textual scholarship.

These two editions set the tone for the rest of the century. From now on, the 1595 version would be used only as a source of occasional variant wordings, to be flagged in footnotes. Even this was done only where the difference seemed significant. Otherwise, small variations were taken as a sign of Marie de Gournay’s poor editing, and of the 1595 text’s corrupt state. Gournay was assumed to have done just what they did — transcribe the Bordeaux Copy — but to have made a hash of it.

As long ago as 1866, however, an alternative explanation had already been put forward, by Reinhold Dezeimeris. Gournay could have done an excellent editing job, he suggested, but on a different copy. It took a while before this idea sank in. Once it did, it won increasing numbers of followers, some of whom worked out in detail how the switching of copies could have happened.

If this theory is true, the story probably began with Montaigne working on the Bordeaux Copy for several years, as its supporters always thought. At a certain point, however, it became so overloaded with notes that it was barely usable. Frustrated with its messiness, Montaigne had a clean copy made — no longer extant, but now dubbed the “Exemplar” for convenience. He carried on making additions to this, mostly minor, for he was almost at the end of his working life by now. When he died, the Exemplar —not the Bordeaux Copy — was sent to Marie de Gournay for her to edit and publish. This would explain why it does not survive: authors’ manuscripts or marked-up earlier editions were normally destroyed as part of the printing process. Meanwhile, the unused Bordeaux Copy remained intact, like the skin-shell left hooked on a tree when a cicada outgrows it and moves on.