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.
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 Gou
rnay/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.
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 EDITING WARS
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 se
nt 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.
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.
How to Live Page 33
