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

The hypothesis is neat; it accounts for both the survival of the Bordeaux Copy and its textual divergences. It accords with what is known of Marie de Gournay’s editorial practice; it would have been odd for her to pay minute attention to last-minute corrections, as she did, if she was so careless with her work in the first place. If accepted, the consequences are dramatic. It means that her 1595 publication, rather than the Bordeaux Copy, is the closest approximation to a final version of the Essays as Montaigne would have wanted it to be, and thus that most twentieth-century editing is a misguided blip in history.

Naturally, this debate has thrown the Montaigne world into turmoil, and has sparked a conflict every bit as heated as those of a hundred years ago. Some editors have now dramatically reversed the hierarchy by consigning Bordeaux Copy variants to the humble spot in the footnotes which Gournay occupied for so long, notably the Pléiade edition of 2007 edited by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-Simonin. Other scholars still support the Bordeaux Copy. It thrives particularly in a 1998 edition by André Tournon, which surpasses earlier editions in its devotion to the microscopic detail of that text. It incorporates Montaigne’s own punctuation choices and marks, previously glossed over or modernized — as if to emphasize its physical proximity to Montaigne’s hand and to his intentions. It is as if he is still holding the pen, dripping ink.

When the dust settles — assuming it does — a standard will be established for the coming century. There will be several consequences for all Montaigne readers. New editions are likely to foreground one text or the other rather than amalgamating them, since the importance of the variations is now so well appreciated. If Gournay wins, a page of Montaigne may also come to look simpler, for it could reduce the desire for the visually disruptive sprinkling of “A,” “B,” and “C” letters signifying different layers of composition. They would still be of interest, but they were first put in by editors working from the Bordeaux Copy whose motivation was partly to make their hard work fully visible. Gournay herself never thought of doing such a thing; nor did Montaigne. There would also be consequences for Montaigne readers in languages other than French. A new English translation would be urgently needed, since the two otherwise excellent ones that dominate the market now, by Donald Frame and M. A. Screech, are firmly of the Bordeaux Copy era. We would go back predominantly to the source text used by John Florio, Charles Cotton, and the Hazlitt dynasty.

Whatever happens, this is unlikely to be the end of the story. Disputes will continue, perhaps only about the placement of commas. It would be hard, now, to maintain the hubristic Strowskian belief that a perfect final edition can ever be created. In fact, the Essays can never truly be said to be finished. Montaigne the man may have hung up his boots and abandoned his quill, but, so long as readers and editors disagree about the results, Montaigne the author has never quite put that final ink mark on the page.

Montaigne knew very well that, the minute you publish a book, you lose control of it. Other people can do what they like: they can edit it into strange forms, or impose interpretations upon it that you would never have dreamed of. Even an unpublished manuscript can get out of hand, as happened with La Boétie’s On Voluntary Servitude .

In Montaigne’s and La Boétie’s time, the absence of copyright law and the admiration of copying as a literary technique allowed even more freedom than would be expected today. Anyone who took a fancy to certain bits of the Essays could publish them separately; they could abridge or enlarge the whole, strip out sections they didn’t like, rearrange the order, or publish it under a different name. A dozen or so chapters could be extracted and turned into a slim, manageable volume, providing a valuable service to readers whose biceps would not support the full tome. A decluttering service could be offered: confronted with a twenty-page Montaigne ramble, a bold redactor such as “Honoria” could cut it down to two pages which — un-Montaignean notion! — seemed to address the point announced in the title.

Some editors have been even more interventionist than this. Instead of slicing off choice cuts here and there, they have rolled up their sleeves and plunged their hands right into the Essays to dismember it like a chicken and make an entirely new creature of it. The outstanding representative of these is also the earliest and most famous: Montaigne’s friend and near-contemporary Pierre Charron, who produced a seventeenth-century best seller called La Sagesse (Wisdom). Montaigne would barely have recognized himself in it, but it is essentially the Essays by another name and in a different format. It has been called a “remake”; one could also call it a “remix,” but neither term captures quite how far it departs in spirit from the original. Charron created a Montaigne devoid of idiosyncratic details, of quotations or digressions, of rough edges, and of personal revelations of any kind. He gave readers something they could argue with, or agree with if they wished: a set of statements that no longer slithered away from interpretation or evaporated like a fog. From Montaigne’s rambling thoughts on a topic such as the relation of humans to animals, he put together the following neat structure:

Features common to animals and humans

Features not common to humans and animals

Features advantageous to human beings

Features advantageous to animals

General

Particular

Features of disputable advantage

It is impressive, and dull — so dull that La Sagesse met with immense success. Encouraged by this, Charron compressed it even further to produce an abridged Petit traité de la sagesse . This sold well too: both went into numerous editions. As the seventeenth century went on, more and more readers encountered their Montaigne in a Charronized form, which was partly why they were able to understand and tackle his Pyrrhonian Skepticism so analytically. (If Pascal still found him infuriatingly elusive, it was because he actually read the original.) Marie de Gournay, however, did not approve of Charron. In the preface to her 1635 edition of the Essays she dismissed him as a “bad copyist,” and remarked that the only good thing to be said for reading him was that he reminded you of the genius of the real Montaigne.

Charron’s successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remixed Montaigne even further, and sometimes they remixed Charron too. While the Essays remained on the Index , remixes and remakes were the only form in which the book could be published in France. The market was therefore flooded with slim, uncredited Montaignes, or with works whose titles evoked purified essences: L’Esprit des Essais de Montaigne (The Spirit of the Essays of Montaigne), or Pensées de Montaigne (Thoughts of Montaigne). This last purged him so thoroughly that the book runs only to 214 small pages, introduced by the remark, “There are few books so bad that nothing good can be found in them, and few so good that they contain nothing bad.”

Authors have always undergone abridgement. Reductions of great works still thrive in the publishing industry today, often under titles such as “Compact Editions.” A spokesman for one such recent British series was quoted as saying, “Moby-Dick must have been difficult in 1850—in 2007 it’s nigh-on impossible to make your way through it.” Yet the danger in cutting too much blubber out of Moby-Dick is that of being left with no whale. Similarly, Montaigne’s “spirit” resides in the very bits editors are most eager to lose: his swerves, his asides, his changes of mind, and his restless movement from one idea to another. No wonder he himself was driven to say that “every abridgment of a good book is a stupid abridgment.”