From the Perspective of the Self: Montaigne's Self-Portrait 9780823295739

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From the Perspective of the Self

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE SELF Montaigne's Self.. Portrait by

CRAIG B. BRUSH

Fordham University Press New York 1994

Copyright © 1994 by Fordham University Press All rights reserved LC 93-43527 ISBN 0-8232-1550-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brush, Craig. From the perspective of the self : Montaigne's self portrait / Craig B. Brush. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-1550-4 1. Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592. Essais. 2. Self in literature. I. Title. PQ1643.B78 1994 844' .3-dc20 93-43527 CIP

PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK WAS AIDED BY A GRANT FROM THE HENRY AND IDA WISSMANN FUND

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Likenesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Self-Portrait Is Not an Autobiography . . . . . . . . . . . . The Form of the Portrait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beginnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Animal that Reasons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I Have Nothing to Say About Myself Simply ........ Modest Me ................................... Making It Personal ............................. Study Without a Book .......................... 11. The Portrait of Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12. Living for the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13. The Portrait of the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 11 23 37 55 85 103 119 149 173 191 215 241

Notes ....................................... 265 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Index ........................................ 315

I

Introduction A FRENCH READER in the second half of the year 1580 in Bordeaux, picking up a recent publication from the local press of Simon Millanges, would have come upon a puzzling title page, reading: Essays of Messire Michel Lord of Montaigne, Knight of the Order of the King, and Gentleman Ordinary of his Chamber. This was the first work from Montaigne's pen. He had been involved in two previous publications, but had played a subordinate role in each, first acting as the translator of a Spanish theologian from the previous century, later composing five dedicatory epistles for a volume containing three opuscules along with a handful of Latin and French poems, all by his deceased friend Etienne de La Boetie. Whatever literary reputation he had (I suspect it was little) would have derived from the single translation. His family, 1 the Eyquems, enjoyed a certain local celebrity as recent members of the aristocracy of Perigord; and his father, Pierre Eyquem, had been mayor of Bordeaux from 1554 to 1556. Beyond the confines of the immediate provincial area, he was quite unknown, except for his sallies into the courts of Henry III of France and of Henry of Navarre, later to become Henry IV. The average reader of this first edition of the Essays, then, had little, if any, idea who their author was. But what would the sixteenth-century reader make of the perplexing word2 "Essays"? No author had ever before used it as the title of a book. It was the noun form of the French verb "essayer"allied to the English "assay"-which had a variety of meanings: "to try to do something," "to experience a thing," "to suffer something disagreeable," or "to test something, putting it through trial runs." The verb could be used to refer to a servant tasting a prince's meat for poison; it also applied to a consumer sampling a product to test its quality, such as the durability of a fabric or the weight of coins from the mint. The expression "coup d'essai," used by Clement Marot3 to refer to his first published collection of poems, designated the first product of an artisan who had recently finished his ap-

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prenticeship. Nonetheless, the word essais alone as a book title (without the word les, "the Essays," as it has appeared since Montaigne's death) was an innovation, sure to give pause. Today we speak of "the second essay of Book Three," but it is not certain that Montaigne himself would have used the word in this way. He usually employed it in the plural, referring to his whole project, particularly to the mental process involved in producing that book. Montaigne appropriated for himself a word that had many connotations, none of them literary. When he makes of it a literary term, he brings with it all the colorings it had had in other domains, 4 so it is difficult for us to sort out precisely what he was getting at. One context for the word that turns up twice in his text strikes me as potentially close to his meaning. As a schoolboy5 he had been given passages in garbled Latin as a test (essai) for him to turn into proper Latin. Elsewhere6 he says that he puts forth his fancies as children put forth their "essais" for judgment by their instructors. Montaigne offers his book to the world under a title that, whatever else it means, designates his modesty, implying that he is a beginner or amateur, sending out trial balloons, testing his judgment, and submitting it to his readers to assess. So, piqued perhaps by the unusual title, our early reader might turn the page to see if he could determine what sort of book he held in his hands. Instead of the usual dedication to a powerful patron, he would find a short one-page address "To the Reader." "This is a book7 of good faith, reader. It warns you from the onset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one. I have had no thought of serving either you or my own glory. My powers are inadequate to such a purpose." The first thing Montaigne wishes to tell the world is that his book speaks honestly, without dissimulation, although what about we have no way of knowing. From a strictly logical point of view, one taken by many current critics, it is inaccurate to attribute human qualities like "honest" to a text. According to such critics, it is meaningless to call a text "of good faith" or "of bad faith." The first thing such a current critical view eschews is any discussion of the author, especially what his intentions may have been or how his biography may have influenced the text. The second thing such criticism omits as much as possible is the role of the reader in the literary experience, how the reader may interpret the passage, how the passage may seek to influence the reader or set up a relationship with him. A third aspect ofliterary

INTRODUCTION

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creation that may be neglected in such an approach is the study of the historical background of the text in order to understand its meaning in its own times. In my opinion, all these aspects-the author, the reader, the historical context-deserve to be considered in the study of the Essays; for Montaigne clearly conceived his work as the communication of a special individual, the author, as a literate man, to his readers, themselves literate, via a text meant, in theory at least, to be as little literary as possible. His first sentence personifies his book; the second sentence continues that personification: "It warns you . . . that in it I have set myself no goal. ... " Montaigne's choice of the familiar form tu as his word for "you" follows classical literary convention and implies at the same time a one-to-one communication between his book and its reader. The essayist is not addressing a crowd, as is Erasmus in the Praise of Folly or Rabelais in his prologues to Gargantua and Pantagruel. The relationship between the author and his book takes on a certain complexity when he declares that the book tells us what his intentions in it are ("it warns you that in it I ... "),thereby reversing the usual procedure where it is the author who tells us about his work ("I tell you that it ... "). Likewise, instead of proclaiming the book's value and usefulness, it warns the reader not to expect too much. Of course, this ploy is hardly an innovation, as the "modesty topos" had a long literary tradition. It is not immediately clear what Montaigne is being modest about; when he says his only goal is a "domestic and private one," no reader could tell what purpose he had in mind. In fact, the French words are almost a rude rejection of the reader ("nulle consideration de ton service") followed by a casual disclaimer of thoughts of renown ("ny de ma gloire"). A most peculiar sales pitch! "I have dedicated it to the private convenience of my relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me (as soon they must), they may recover here some features of my qualities and temperament, and by this means keep the knowledge they have had of me more complete and alive." Although to "publish" a book means to make it public, Montaigne claims here that his work is actually private, written on his own initiative for friends and relatives with the purpose of providing an aide-memoire to keep alive their knowledge of him. Montaigne wants to be known, not remembered; the distinction, while slight, is significant. Apparently, the need to provide such a book was spurred in part by the conviction that he did not have long to live.

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The final chapter of the Essays will tell us that he has recently fallen victim to kidney stones, exactly as his father had before him. His father had lasted seven years after the first attack, from which the essayist infers that he may have no further to go himself (in fact he lasted fourteen years). The preface appears to be advising readers who did not already know the author to put down his book, as it was not written with them in mind; indeed, in a sense any reader is put somewhat in the position of an interloper in a family matter. "If it had been to seek the world's favor, I should have bedecked myself with borrowed beauties, or should have made myself tense and stiff in my best posture." In the expression "if it had been to seek the world's favor" (that is to say, the glory that he has already once disclaimed as a motivation), there is no discernible antecedent for the "it," which remains fuzzily defined in the reader's mind, although the general drift of the sentence is clear indeed. For a public work he would have put on his best clothes, an image implied in the word "bedecked" (pare) and his ceremonious manners. But in this work, a private one, he will appear without "borrowed beauties." In a literary context, the "borrowed" riches are most likely to be quotations from the great authors of Latin antiquity. Every writer of the time interspersed classical citations in his prose, following the practice of the very classical models he was citing. In 1580 Montaigne's book itself contained 315 citations,8 an average of one every three and one-third pages-not a very heavy dosage for the times. Subsequently, with each augmented edition, the number and frequency of citations grew until the final form included 1,328 in all, averaging more than one a page in modern printings. Since his book had become fairly laden with quotations, Montaigne finally crossed out the words "borrowed beauties" from later versions of his preface and reworded the end of the sentence. His principal point is at last made in direct, positive form in the next sentence. "I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without study or artifice; for it is myself that I portray." After eleven lines of preamble Montaigne explains what his book is about: "it is myself that I portray." And he wishes to be seen, "without study or artifice," a wish that is eminently natural if he is in fact not writing for an unknown reader, but for friends and relatives who already know him. As far as he knew, there was no other book in the world with this goal: to portray its author,

INTRODUCTION

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to depict a single, private human being who had no particular claim to fame, and no desire to appear better or more significant than he was. "My defects will here be read to the life, my imperfections, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked." The first quality we expect in a portrait is fidelity; hence one aspect of the book's good faith will be its willingness to convey the defects of its subject as well as his better points. How far Montaigne succeeds in revealing his shortcomings is a matter of some debate; for the moment let us simply note that his declared intention is not to conceal any faults. He would have painted himself fully naked, he says. The word is meant to startle the reader. After all, he has just said he has remained within the confines of decency, so there is no need to transgress these bounds and evoke a picture of nudity that the Essays themselves will not provide. Montaigne displays a certain coquetry9 in his wit; perhaps he is even making a subliminal sexual gesture toward his reader. In actuality, he was quite modest about displaying his body; 10 I doubt he would have disrobed for his readers, including Mile de Gournay, his first, and conceivably greatest, fan. But here he is writing about candid self-revelations, not disrobing. Is his image an accurate depiction of his book? The Essais in their first edition (the one we are considering for the moment) contain few self-revelations that appear intimate by modern standards. However, in its final form the book is outspoken, occasionally pushing the rules of decorum to the extreme. The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries judged it licentious, and sometimes bowdlerized its pages. Today it appears relatively tame, even reserved in matters of detail. In his concluding lines, Montaigne encapsulates the whole logic of his preface: "Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject." Are we expected to give literal credence to an author who tells us his subject is frivolous and vain, and not worth our time? Why address one's reader only to tell him that one has really written the book for someone else? In that case he would hardly deserve the title "reader." In this short dedication to his

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reader Montaigne makes several claims that may well appear difficult to accept literally. Was his intended audience only his family and friends? Did he really write the book without any thought of enlightening his reader? Clearly, in the many chapters where he is not talking about himself at all, but is writing in the Renaissance tradition appropriately named a "lesson" in French, he must have intended to teach. Did he never think of gaining glory while composing his work? No one, least of all another author, is likely to accept his statement as literally true. One could conclude that each of the other statements in the preface undermines its initial claim to be a book of good faith. "To the Reader" has all the earmarks 11 of a self-consuming artifact, where the author lays a series of booby traps which turn his invitation into a rejection. To my mind, it is the only such artifact in the Essays. It is possible and legitimate to see devious practices 12 at work in this preface. But it is equally possible and legitimate to see Montaigne's preface as his attempt to grapple with some genuine problems. The heart of the matter is his intention to create a self-portrait. A fairly sizable portion of the 1580 text had been written without this purpose in mind. But Montaigne neglects, or simply forgets, these chapters as he prepares his reader for the truly original portions of his work. The little preface indicates what was uppermost in the essayist's mind on March 1, 1580 when he considered his brainchild. And that was that he had done something new and audacious by writing a book that was primarily about himself. He was most distressed by the matter of publication: how could he expect the general public to be interested in such private matters? One answer he offered in the essay "On Giving the Lie" (II, 18) was quite simply that he did not expect the public to care and that he did not write for it. "All the contact I have with the public in this book is that I have been constrained to borrow their tools of printing, as being swifter and easier. I had to have this image cast in print to exempt myself from the bother of having several copies made by hand." 13 This chapter conforms entirely to the spirit of "To the Reader." In it, he claims to write only for a limited circle. "I am not building 14 here a statue to erect at the town crossroads, or in a church or a public square. My purpose is to hide it in the nook of a library, and to amuse someone who has a personal interest in knowing me, a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take

INTRODUCTION

7

pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image .... What a satisfaction it would be to me to hear someone tell me, in this way, of the character, the form, the qualities, and the fortunes of my ancestors! Truly it would spring from a bad nature to be scornful of even the portraits of our friends and predecessors, and to disdain them." For Montaigne, offering a portrait of oneself is a friendly gesture, appropriate between people who know each other or wish to get acquainted. The lame assertion that he was writing for friends and relatives (which he makes only in this chapter and in his preface) was never literally true. At the same time it is not far from conveying the spirit incarnate in the book. Two other statements of "To the Reader" arouse suspicion in critics: that Montaigne does not seek glory, and that he is a vain and frivolous man. It seems hard for anyone, myself included, to accept that he might not have had fame in the back of his mind as he published his work. He surely did; otherwise he would not have been human. But it is not certain that celebrity was foremost in his mind, or that he valued it highly. If he had been primarily concerned with gaining a reputation from his book, he might well have chosen a publisher in Paris, where two presses 15 had already released works of his, instead of Bordeaux, a less likely place to publish a book aimed at a world-wide audience. If he had sought renown among the learned, it is highly probable that he would have refashioned the Essays to make them more dignified; how likely is a man to attain glory by telling us about his kidney stone? It would appear that the desire to speak honestly and naturally of himself outweighed the interest in seeking the admiration of his readers, though the two impulses apparently coexisted in him. Most readers may not consider themselves vain and frivolous, but it is possible that Montaigne did think of himself as such, or at least strove to resist the tendency to forget this lamentable fact. He would have much to say about vanity in a future essay, and he valued frivolity in a rather special way. If he was vain and frivolous, his portrait should make clear just how much so. The fundamental problem is one of sincerity, raised in the first sentence. Having raised the matter, the essayist opens himself to the accusation of not being honest in his dealings with his reader. This is a most difficult accusation to answer. The tactic adopted by Montaigne was to display his work in its least flattering light, to make the fewest claims possible (no utility, no artifice, no weighty

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subject matter), and to stress the novel goal of self-portraiture, all conceivably in the hope that the reader would ultimately disregard the essayist's admonition not to read his work. What fascinates me 16 is precisely the idea of writing a portrait of oneself, and I shall examine as many aspects of the matter as I can: how Montaigne came to the project, how he conceived it, how he practiced it, what he had to say about it, what he learned from the strange practice, how it became a way of life for him. Virginia Woolf17 began her short appreciation of Montaigne with the following words: "Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which Rene, King of Sicily, had painted of himself, and asked 'Why is it not, in like manner, lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon?' Off hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful, but nothing could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task, the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty." We must not think that Montaigne takes the matter of portraiture casually, that it is simply an image that occurred to him in passing; for not only is the image the central theme upon which his preface is built, it recurs some sixteen times in significant passages in which he discusses his book. "Whatever these absurdities 18 may be, I have had no intention of concealing them, any more than I would a bald and graying portrait of myself, in which the painter had drawn not a perfect face, but mine.... I aim here only at revealing myself.... " Expressions like "this dead and mute portrait," 19 "having here to portray myself to the life," 20 "the lines of my painting," 21 "my life, which I have to portray," 22 and "I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public"23 occur in each successive version of the Essays. Just what should the first sentence of a self-portrait be? "I was born on such a day in such a place"? Is that part of my portrait? Then what comes next? My family? My studies? My profession? My face? How can I describe that effectively? My religion? My philosophy oflife? My social security number? Clearly a great many things may contribute to the portrait, and it is difficult to decide which comes first and how much weight to give each. Precise accounts of my height, weight, skin color, hair color, eye color, physical chemistry, body structure, and distinguishing marks would add up to only one sort of picture, and a lifeless one at that. How to get life into the picture! The more we write or say, the more we

INTRODUCTION

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are likely to be haunted by the feeling that somehow the essence of ourselves, what we are seeking to capture, remains elusive, always beyond our expression. Perhaps it will be necessary to clarify somewhat our thinking on what we mean by our self, if we can only hold it down for observation, to find out better what it is like. Painters, limited to a static and external likeness, must find ways to embody character in a pictorial representation. It should be easier to convey personality through the use of words. Our instincts confirm Descartes's intuitive feeling 24 (he would say self-evident demonstration) that whatever we are, it is primarily a mental thing, aware of our feelings, and thoughts; we tend to disregard our body as a constituent of our being, possibly out of some unexpressed conviction that everybody has a body much like our own. So we want our portraits to capture the internal self. Virginia Woolf saw clearly that the act of writing raised genuine difficulties in the achievement of this goal. We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to some one opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light. Face, voice, and accent eke out our words and impress their feebleness with character in speech. But the pen is a rigid instrument; it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own. It is dictatorial too: it is always making ordinary men into prophets, and changing the natural stumbling trip of human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens. 25

As Woolf points out, even in face-to-face conversation we fail to express our thoughts adequately. The format of the television interview is instructive because it appears to have been designed to create the conditions under which subjects can present an informal (quasi-) private self-portrait. Apparently, dialogue succeeds somewhat better than monologue, and two people interacting are more likely to produce a valid portrait than one. Anyone who has watched such shows has observed that few people, even accomplished people, can talk interestingly about themselves.

II

Likenesses at a time when portraiture was already a familiar art form; 1 in fact, he had had more than one portrait painted of himself. 2 He would probably have agreed with the brusque response given by Samuel Johnson when asked by Boswell what portraits he preferred: "Sir, their chief excellence is being like," 3 for such is the initial, unthinking reaction of us all. If we reflect for a while, we will realize that the portrait is not quite the simple matter we thought, and that in fact it is a highly evolved art form, based on a series of conventions that are by no means obvious. 4 Let us, for the moment, consider a photographic portrait. The camera is the most mechanical of media, the most accurate, and one which seems to require the least participation or control by the artist. In actuality, every photographer makes a series of judgments before pressing the shutter. Will the photograph be in color, or black and white? Will the color and light be natural, or will it be enhanced by spotlighting, or by the choice of a filter? Will the portrait be taken in a studio? in the outdoors? at the model's home? Will the camera be directly in front of the sitter, or to one side, or above, or below? Will he be looking straight into the camera? Will the sitter be alone? clothed or naked? How much of the subject will be visible? What sort of animation or expression is to be sought in the face? In every portrait the sitter invariably assumes a position. We have few if any portraits of people leaving a room, sleeping face down, or having a bowel movement. Painters have demonstrated their virtuosity in depicting the human body from every conceivable angle, even the oddest imaginable, such as the angels or putti seen from beneath as they soar into the heavens; 5 but it would seem a peculiar perspective to most spectators if a man's portrait showed him from an angle where what we first see is the soles of his feet. Before going to a sitting for his portrait, the subject has combed his haiti and selected his clothing in the belief that the resulting portrait should present a slightly formal view of himself seen from

MoNTAIGNE LIVED

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the front in a natural pose (delicate paradox) that manages to suggest vitality in repose (another paradox). Clearly, then, undertaking a photographic portrait is a complex matter, and the person who enters the little cabinet at Woolworth's, pulls the curtain, and deposits his coins in order to have his picture taken has wittingly or not made many decisions of an artistic nature about what constitutes the portrait he desires. A totally realistic portrait is an unachievable goal in any medium whatsoever. Realistic art, as is well known, can aspire to no more than creating the illusion of reality; 7 and even this appears an unworthy goal to many theorists. Oscar Wilde claims almost perversely in The Picture of Dorian Gray that every portrait painted with feeling is a portrait of the painter, not the sitter. 8 Wilde is on the right track. A portrait, in whatever medium, is a work of art and ultimately succeeds or fails because of the skill of its creator. When we look at a Rembrandt, or a Van Dyke, our pleasure comes largely from the fact that it is beautiful and moving, the work of a great artist who has managed to seize our attention by his genius. This is as true of Montaigne's literary self-portraits as of Rembrandt's in oil. 9 Many cultures have existed which never produced portraits. How did the idea of making a portrait first occur? Our first reaction may be that every one is interested in portraits. After all, we human beings are curious, and nature has devoted a disproportionately large part of our cerebellum to the task of recognizing faces. So subtle is this portion of the brain that when the only difference between two faces is the degree of dilation in their pupils, the brain senses a different look about the visage. 10 This natural curiosity about our fellows does not necessarily carry over to portraits by artists. Museum custodians would corroborate the fact that exhibitions limited to portraiture do notoriously poorly.U If we value the person being portrayed, we might treasure his or her portrait. Literature is populated with swains who sigh over portraits, presented or stolen, depicting their inamoratas. Pliny attributes the first portrait to such motives in an admirable tale. 12 Erasmus dispatched a series of portraits of himself by artists like Holbein the Younger and Quentin Massys to his correspondents all over Europe. 13 The gift of our portrait to another expresses many things: our friendship for that person, our confidence that he is well enough disposed to us to appreciate the gift, and the high value

LIKENESSES

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that we place on his regard for us. I call these portraits domestic portraits. Such portraits lose their primary function as soon as no human survives capable of recognizing their subject. I would say that the factors at work in the exchange of domestic portraits are also present in Montaigne's remarkable idea of giving the reading public a written portrait of himself. 14 Official portraits, on the other hand, belong to public life, representing public figures, celebrating the greatness of their subject. Originally they were painted or sculpted by artists who had never seen their model, as is true of every painting of Jesus. Likeness is far from the first requirement of the official portrait; in fact, it frequently takes second place to some other consideration. The requirement of fidelity shrinks, sometimes simply disappears, as the needs of officialdom increase. Ramses II left myriads of statues and pictures of himself, perhaps more than any other human in history. And not one of them looked like him; all present him in a timeless youthfulness and exaggerated beauty. Let us look for a brief moment at how portraiture developed in the great artistic cultures of the past before coming to Montaigne's era. 15 Each culture uses its arts for its own purposes. In ancient Egypt artists created a great tradition of representation, which was for many centuries entirely in the service of burial magic. 16 It drew and sculpted images of humans which were sealed up in tombs with no intention of their ever being seen by mortals. There the representations-pictures or statues-stood for human bodies which would somehow be available for the buried master in his afterlife. Certainly the images bore little resemblance to their human subjects. We know enough about Egyptian artists to be certain that they could have produced far more realistic portraits had they so desired, for they were accurate observers from the start, as their depiction of animals and objects shows. We even have the evidence of unfinished reliefs and life masks used as first sketches by the artists in their studios. These incomplete works show clearly that as the artist proceeded, he transformed his naturalistic raw materials into stylized representations. The art of Ancient Greece strove to rise above everyday considerations to a more abstract and more ideal level ofbeing. Its statues present human beings in perfected exempla. Nonetheless, within this general tendency to idealize, Greek art produced the first genuine portraits: replicas of individual humans presented for their own

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sake. In the fourth century B.C., we find the first genuine portraits appearing, with Plato's being perhaps the earliest made from a living model. According to James D. Breckenridge, whom I am following here, the highpoint of Greek portraiture is embodied in a statue of Aristotle, and in the artistic vision behind that portrait. Breckenridge makes the important point that a representation of a human being will mirror the way each culture defines human-ness and the way it sees men and women. Plato regarded the body as dross, the prison of the immortal soul, which belonged in a higher world. Hence Plato held in contempt all artistic efforts to imitate the body, the least worthy part of a man. In Aristotle's view, however, a human soul could not exist without a body (some Aristotelians would deny that the philosopher held this position); the soul was not a body, but something relative to a body, always in a body, a specific body. The only way we have to perceive a soul, then, is to observe its effects in the appearance and movements of its particular body. Aristotle's view of reality justifies mimesis. It is this view that sets for Western civilization the definition of a successful portrait: a recognizable replica of a unique individual that displays the mind (or soul, or character) visible in the flesh. That is a very precise formula, easier in the saying than in the executing, and one that could be reached only in a culture with certain values. (I might note that these are public portraits; the domestic portrait developed later.) To quote Breckenridge: "Thus the portrait becomes possible only when the sentient portion of society, having reached the point of appreciating the importance of the individual for his own sake, comes to consider that a portrayal of visual appearances is itself a satisfactory means of representing what is truly significant about that individual; in other words, when it considers that the physical body is a fit and proper vehicle for the accurate expression of the total personality." 17 Producing a portrait of this nature entails a delicate balance of physical and spiritual elements. It would not be accurate to say that from this moment on Western civilization adopted the realistic portrait. In fact, for many centuries the idealized representation and the realistic portrait competed for primacy, with idealization tending to win. We must avoid the oversimplified idea that because a portrait has been made more ideal or generalized, it has become less recognizable. Distortions need not reduce our recognition. All caricatures are founded on the principle that exaggerating charac-

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teristic details helps us recognize the whole model. Such distortions may debase the model, as in caricature, and subject it to ridicule, or elevate the model, as in flattering portraits, and raise it to esteem. One of the outstanding accomplishments of Roman civilization, perhaps its greatest artistic achievement, was the creation of the realistic bust portrait. The Roman portrait (often sculpted by Greek artists) concentrated on the face alone rather than the full figure, producing statues that seem to breathe with life as those of the Greeks seldom had. At the same time, the original Greek tendency to idealize or heroize the subject could never be suppressed for long. Typically enough, we find two traditions of portraits of Julius Caesar preserved from his own time, one showing him gaunt, lean, and bald, the second idealizing his features and restoring his hair. In the long run, it was the idealizing tendency that won out, as Roman verismo was replaced by Byzantine mysticism. It would be wrong to attribute this revolution in artistic style to a failure on the part of artists somehow too unskilled to maintain the ancient realistic tradition. The transition in portraiture from late Roman to Byzantine took place in Italy in the course of a single century and can be followed quite clearly. The change in artistic execution resulted from a change in taste, in philosophy, a change in what the artist wanted to achieve, not from a loss of his capacity or a diminution of his understanding. The remarkable fact is that realistic portraiture disappeared totally from the arts during the Middle Ages. Portraits were painted or carved throughout the Middle Ages, many of them exciting works of art; but they were not executed with the intention of reproducing a unique likeness. The central places of a tableau, whether in a painting, a sculpture, or an illumination, are filled by religious or allegorical personages; and people from real life are relegated to the status of observers, piously looking on from the sidelines. Prominent among them there may be a prince or a donor who kneels, his attention entirely projected toward the more dominant figures. A typical example would be the portrait of King Richard II on his knees on the left of the diptych reproduced by Alistair Smith. 18 The monarch is identified by the symbols of his office more than by his personal appearance. The artist presents him in profile, devoid of expression or individuality. His principal characteristic, his piety, is manifested conventionally by his hands clasped in prayer. Such group pictures celebrating some significant event, usually religious

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rather than historical, became a major art form, and the format survived well into the Renaissance. The viewer who concentrated his attention on a single portrait occupying a minor place in the larger composition would be violating the intention of the artist, who sought to place the emphasis elsewhere. Nonetheless, it was these bystanders who furnished the first examples of painted portraiture in both Italy and the North. In Italy of the fifteenth century we find whole families of aristocrats being depicted on the periphery of larger murals or chapel freschi. 19 A wealth of examples of this sort of thing can be cited, such as the various paintings of the Gonzaga family, rulers of Milan, by Mantegna. Soon, rather than peripheral onlookers, the family would become the central subject of a large painting depicting several generations of a large Italian clan, with its batteries of uncles, cousins, sisters, and aunts. We have one instance where Ghirlandaio twice painted the same portrait of one woman, in the same pose, wearing the same gown, sporting the same hair style, first as one of many figures in a fresco meant to be admired by the public, and then as a single figure, against a neutral background, framed and hung on the wall of some private room. 20 In a symbolic way, modern portraiture begins in Italy when that young lady came off the public wall into the private home, where she could be admired for herself alone, without the distractions of a larger mural. It was in the 1400s that the first paintings of a single human being, independent of any surrounding or other material, were produced. In the North, instead of painting on walls, most artists worked with wooden panels, often in altar pieces. 21 The medium was oil, the invention of which Vasari incorrectly attributed to Jan Van Eyck. Oil presented certain advantages over the Italian tempera: it allowed for more layers to be applied, it dried to a harder, glossier finish that produced brighter colors; and above all, it could be painted over, so that the artist could change his mind about a pose if he wished. X-rays show how Van Eyck changed the position of the husband's hands in his famous Arnol.fini Marriage, a double portrait showing a husband and wife (already pregnant, it appears) in a domestic setting. 22 Another very significant work of Van Eyck's, A Man in a Turban of 1433, may indeed be the first "autonomous" painted portrait; for it presents nothing more than the face of the subject, which occupies the whole canvas, leaving little background area. 23 There are no hands, no rings, no crests or badges of office

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or trade, nothing except a large red turban to distract the viewer's gaze from the face, presented in three quarters position with the eyes staring out at the on-looker. In this remarkable painting, "the central concern of portraiture is stated for the first time-the face and its relationship to the spectator." 24 Antonello da Messina voyaged to the North, where he studied the works of Van Eyck. When he returned to Venice in 1475 for a two-year stay, he brought with him the techniques of oil painting and produced at least one significant autonomous portrait in oil. His elegant portrait is known to have changed the style of Giovanni Bellini, and through him later Italian painters. 25 The ultimate technique in portraiture of the Italian Renaissance was the discovery, usually attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, of ways to suggest the motions of the mind, far more signifcant and far more subtle than the mere depiction of external subject matter, such as patrician noses or sumptuous fabrics. 26 This development can be seen clearly in the contrast between two portraits by the Florentine artist. The first, of Ginebra de' Benci, is a marvelously detailed painting, displaying exactly every curl of her hair, elegantly finished with a maximum of precision and fine detail. In the background we identify some juniper plants, chosen because her first name means juniper. The whole effect is very elegant, refined, evincing a remarkable mastery of surface and of subtle coloration. But she is a cold piece, hardly enticing. In his later portrait depicting Cecilia Gallerani holding a weasel, the smile and the gaze, directed offstage as it were, are intended to depict someone who visibly has some thought preoccupying her mind, or who is listening to someone speaking. The Mona Lisa has intrigued critics, who exclaim over the mysterious smile that convinces them that something is going on in the subject's mind, even if we cannot say exactly what it may be. The autonomous, private portrait came into being as an established genre only with the Renaissance. Tracing its development, we can see the increasing emphasis placed on the human individual, separate from any social or religious context, a subject worthy of contemplation for its own worth. Many of the values of Renaissance culture, the ones we call humanist, are embodied in this new (or revived) art form. Montaigne accepted the art form, perhaps without being aware of its presuppositions, and attempted to transfer its functions to a different medium. His written portrait is domestic

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in spirit, not public; it concentrates on one human; as we shall see, it seeks to present him in as much isolation as possible, divorced from social context; it describes his physical being, but stresses the motions of his mind. Among the many portraits, it is only natural that some should be self-portraits of the artist. Apparently the self-portrait was hardly ever practiced in antiquity. The earliest example is surely the Egyptian wall painting from the tomb of Ptah-hotep at Sakara depicting the artist Niankhptah. 27 But for the text on the wall we would have no idea that this is a self-portrait; the artist is seated in a boat in one of those impossible Egyptian profiles. His activity is in no way associated with his profession, for he is drinking from a vase offered by a servant. Since Egyptian art was produced in studios, as was Italian Renaissance art, it is even possible that Niankhptah designed the mural, but left its execution largely or entirely to apprentices. Still, this painting deserves recognition for a certain priority in selfportraiture. We hear of one or two self-portraits among the Greeks and Romans, but they were clearly exceptional. From the Middle Ages we have several sculpted self-portraits, including the striking one of Master Matteo in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (1180} as well as others in Prague and Halle. 28 In fact, they are primarily the artists' way of signing their works. This is not said to diminish in any way the artistic accomplishment, stunning in the case of Matteo, involved in reproducing oneself in the round. 29 Surprisingly enough, then, sculpture may claim priority over painting here, even though the achievement would appear to require greater technical mastery. In fifteenthcentury Florence several sculptors left statues of themselves, including Andrea Orcagna, Niccolo Pisano, and especially Lorenzo Ghiberti, who incorporated his own portrait twice in panels of the great baptistery doors, again as a sort of signature. 30 The pose in both cases is the same, as the head, from the neck up, leans out at an angle sufficient to give the entire skull in the round. In the first instance, on the South gate, dated approximately 1415, he figures himself in a turban, and the face is generalized, rather formal in expression. In the second instance, created some thirty years later in 1447 on the Gate of Paradise, much more frequently reproduced in art books, the smiling, bald man, recognizably the same person, is portrayed with considerably greater skill, more individual, and more animated.

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In painting, as in sculpture, the earliest identifiable self-portraits occur as incidental figures in larger compositions, whether illuminations for manuscripts, freschi, or altar compositions, whether in the North or in Italy. In northern Europe, we have a number of paintings depicting Saint Luke executing a portrait of the Virgin Mary. Not infrequently, artists painted themselves in the role of Saint Luke, who was the patron of their guild. Roger Van der Weyden, Dirk Bouts, and Jan Gossaert, to name the principal practitioners, each painted a Saint Luke, traditionally considered selfportraits. 31 In Italy the number of painters to include themselves as by-standers in major compositions is great-if, that is, we can rely on the identifications: Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Pontormo, Raphael, Signorelli, Perugino, Veronese, Titian, and on and on. 32 Artists soon became willing to paint themselves alone. One early self-portraitist of particular interest to Montaigne scholars is Rene of Anjou (1408-1480}, whose penciled self-portrait Montaigne saw at Bar-le-duc in September 1559.33 The sketch in question has been lost; indeed, although no one denies that King Rene painted, as yet not one surviving work can be surely attributed to him. Nonetheless, he deserves to be counted among the first artists to portray themselves, autonomously. By the early 1500s clearly, independent self-portraiture was an established pracice, and from that time on we see it in many examples. Why would an artist choose to paint himself? There are a wide variety of reasons. 34 Some are trivial, such as the artist who paints his picture for the dustjacket of a book, or to fulfill a membership requirement for the National Academy of Design. 35 For young artists lacking in funds, the model has the special advantage of being cheap and patient, as well as readily available. So the youthful Rembrandt sketched himself in order to practice depicting a variety of different emotions. Or the artist may be in love with his own face, or anxious to immortalize himself. More serious motives are at work in other artists who have found expression for their ironic amusement in their own self-scrutiny. Still others have sought an occasion for profound introspection and self-examination, as would be the case with Rembrandt, undoubtedly the supreme master of the selfportrait. Is it possible to tell that a painting is a self-portrait just by looking at it? No. We find in self-portraits the same variety of media, the

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SELF-PORTRAIT

same variety of poses, the same variety of conceptions, of execution; whatever has been done in regular portraiture has been done also in self-portraiture. Mannerist Italian artists produced some highly original forms for the self-portrait. In 1524 Francesco Mazzola, called Parmagianino, painted his reflection as it appeared in a convex mirror, hence with a certain amount of distortion. 36 The beautiful visage of the artist, unperturbed, seems to dominate the distortions of the whole. Later, in a celebrated example, Michelangelo, who was not particularly interested in portraiture, whether of himself or of others, gives us one of the first self-caricatures in the Sistine Chapel's Last judgment, where Saint Bartholomew's flayed skin is being held up, presumably prior to resurrection. 37 The skin hangs limply in folds, like a piece of rubber, and the face, though hideously distorted, has been recognized as the artist's. Simone de Beauvoir called this the "cruelest description that an elderly man has made of himself. " 38 Caravaggio found a particularly grisly and unflattering manner of including his portrait in a major painting when he used his own face as the model for the agonizing severed head of Goliath being held up by David. 39 Amid the welter of self-portraits, one thing remains clearly true: the artist does not change his style when he undertakes the unique subject, himself. A Van Gogh portrait of himself is immediatley recognizable as a Van Gogh. There are, however, special problems faced by any artist undertaking self-portraiture. 40 The first involves the degree to which he can know himself. He can learn what he looks like only in special ways, and in special positions. One immediately thinks of a mirror; but other possibilities are available, such as a photograph, or a portrait by another artist. 41 Artists frequently sketch themselves from memory also. But the most common practice is to rely on the mirror. Even then certain parts of his body are almost impossible for him to see, the small of his back, between the shoulder blades, the inside of his ear, and his profile, to name a few. For these he must go to unusual sources of information. With two mirrors placed at a fiftydegree angle, I am told, an artist can see his own profile. If you place your mirror to the right of the easel, you see a three-quarter visage facing to the right with the eyes looking somewhat to the left, out of the surface. A portrait depicting this pose produces an eerie effect on the spectator; for its eyes seem to follow him as he moves around the room. It is interesting to note that just this position and just this effect are true of Van Eyck's Man in a Turban.

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It has therefore been suggested, though it is far from proven, that

this very early autonomous painting that confronts the viewer so directly is in fact a self-portrait, that the discovery of portraiture coincides with the discovery of self-portraiture. Whatever the case, the pose is the one most typical of self-portraits-certainly the easiest one for the artist to work with. One complication arises from the fact that a mirror reflects a mirror image, in which right and left have been reversed, but up and down remain normal. Since the right side of the face differs from its companion on the left, a mirror image is always a partial distortion, different from what other people see. In certain cases, this reversal can make a significant difference. Van Gogh cut off his left ear in order to wrap it up and present it to a lady; but in portraits painted after this disfigurement, the ear seems to be there again, though in fact it is his right ear being reflected on the right side of his mirror that is being painted. 42 An allied problem arises when the artist proceeds to depicting his own body, which he ordinarily does not see in mirror image. There exist self-portraits where it is clear that the body has not been reversed. Durer sketched a full-length figure of himself in a loincloth, his finger pointing to the spot where he hurts, on the left side below the rib cage (if it is a mirror image, it would be on the right side). Since we are dealing with only a sketch, surely drawn very rapidly, there is no reason to expect that Durer disrobed and got out the full-length mirror in order to make this note for his doctor. 43 He worked from memory, and had the best of reasons not to reverse left and right. Does Montaigne need some analogue of the mirror for his written self-portrait? One might argue (I would not) that he did. The argument would run as follows: his only way of knowing or seeing himself would ultimately depend on seeing himself through others. We know ourselves in the last analysis by using words to describe ourselves, words which we learn from others. Our social codes, our expectations for ourselves, all are instilled in us by others who are the mirror without which we could not see ourselves. The self cannot exist and could not be aware of its being without this context. While there is some truth to this way of thinking, it is a truth that does not particularly illuminate Montaigne's case. As we shall see in a later chapter, his self-study depended on introspection, memory, and the study of mankind in general.

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Other distortions or inaccuracies result from more subtle factors at work on portraitists as they try to present themselves recognizably to the world. Seeing oneself accurately in a mirror is actually all but impossible. We pose; we are staring and the act of staring composes our physiognomy in a special way, eliminating muscular tics and other characteristic features; certain movements of the eyes or positions of the head cannot be observed by someone peering in the mirror. Moreover, human vanity may make it difficult to assess objectively what we see. Painters are likely to portray themselves as younger or handsomer than reality would allow. The most striking example of wish-fulfillment is surely the series of self-portraits by the rich and overly sheltered Beatrice Turner, who continued to represent herself as nubile and voluptuous in nude sketches that had nothing to do with a more flabby reality. Macdonald Critchley concludes: "Self-portraits do not confirm the view that we know ourselves better than others." Manuel Gasser makes a similar remark: "There is no denying the fact that self-portraits rarely attain the degree of honesty we are accustomed to look for in autobiographies. With few exceptions, indeed, painters clearly sought to present a handsome, attractive, or imposing exterior to later generations-one that the facts can hardly have justified with quite such a high degree of regularity." 44 Most experts in autobiography would want to assure Gasser that men and women are every bit as subject to embellishing reality with a pen in their hands as with a brush. Self-knowledge, even of something so superficial as our external appearance, is not so easy as one would think, either to acquire or to maintain. At the same time it should be noted that there are artists, both in the fine arts and in literature, who appear to have been less impelled than most to falsify their natures or their looks; and these are often the greatest artists of all, determined to present themselves as close to the way they are as they can. The essayist would be one of these.

III

A Self. . Portrait Is Not an Autobiography SELF-PORTRAITURE, a form of mimesis, does not correspond to the principal concerns of the more recent schools of criticism. While critics striving to make the study of literature "objective" shun references to a work's author or his life, Montaigne strives to make his work as personal as possible. He hoped to create in his book a replica of his self, with the least possible distance between work and creator. To do so, he claimed to be writing naturally, without art (an illusion he persisted in); he invited his reader to look behind his words to find him, all strategies persistently rejected by the most theoretically inclined critics of today. 1 A major achievement of the Essays is their depiction of an individual character. Character analysis is an area in which literary criticism has made little progress, and furthermore one in which there is not much interest today, unless a critic is concerned to apply a particular school of psychology, such as the Freudian, to a text. Only a few critics have undertaken psychological analyses of the Essays. 2 The traditional methods of discussing character in fiction tend to be useless in the case of the Essays, for there are no actions or decisions made by the protagonist, no moral crises. One branch of literary studies provides an exception: the newly flourishing study of autobiography. Autobiography is suddenly in the air academically. 3 Scholarly journals have devoted issues to the topic; 4 studies of autobiography in Britain, in America, of autobiography written by women, of autobiography by blacks, by Puritans, by politicians, bibliographies of autobiographies have all surfaced. Where there had been only a slim output of studies, some monumental, others distinctly second-rate, there is now a constantly growing supply of serious, informative work. Just what is an autobiography? How does one decide whether to include a work in a bibliography of autobiographies? As the word

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is composed of three Greek roots meaning "self," "life," and "write," its basic meaning must be the life of a person written by that person. It seems perfectly normal to consider autobiography to be a subcategory of biography, hence belonging to the domain of history. The writer then becomes his own historian and adds a dimension of knowledge otherwise unavailable in standard histories, the subjective view of events. What is the life to be written down? Clearly, it cannot be complete, for no man can write competently of his own death; nor can it be given in its totality, for the Shandean problem arises that it would take far more than thirty years to record every aspect of thirty years of a life. Since it must then be selective, as any written work must be, the question arises what to select. Before writing, and very often while writing his life, each author must determine for himself what constitutes his life, and these decisions are made with varying degrees of subtlety and awareness, producing a gamut of works differing widely in form. Once the autobiographer has some idea of what life he wishes to write down, he must make further decisions about what form to use. Georg Misch, the first great scholar of autobiography, and a historian, noted: Hardly any form is alien to it. Historical record of achievements, imaginary forensic addresses or rhetorical declamations, systematic or epigrammatic description of character, lyrical poetry, prayer, soliloquy, confessions, letters, literary portraiture, family chronicle and court memoirs, narrative, whether purely factual or with a purpose, explanatory or fictional, novel and biography in their various styles, epic and even drama-all these forms have been made use of by autobiographers; and if they were persons of originality they modified the existing types of literary composition or even invented new forms of their own. 5

Autobiographers, at least until well into the nineteenth century, had few previously published autobiographies on which to model their own works. Autobiography, ordinarily the product of an aged writer who has finished his career, is written only once by each author {there are some exceptions). Autobiographers, with few models to emulate or depart from, grope their way in the literary dark, seeking new modes of writing if they are especially creative, or slipping into established modes, whether of history or of literature, if they are not. 6

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The third component of the term "autobiography," the self, is the source of the greatest riddles. Historically, the concept of the self has changed constantly; an Athenian citizen, a member of a great Roman family, a Christian anchorite, a Renaissance artist, a Romantic poet, a Freudian psychologist, and an existentialist philosopher will have vastly differing concepts of what constitutes their self; and their works will inevitably reflect their assumptions about its nature. One of the crucial dividing lines here is the matter of religion. A pious man or woman cannot possibly write about himself or herself without constant reference to his or her relationship to God, in whatever terms conceived. And it is very common for that relationship to have undergone some form of conversion or intensification, so that the contrast between the erring sinner and the practicing Christian is a frequent one in such works. Leaving aside the question of confessional literature, critics such as William Shumaker, Roy Pascal, Paul Delany, Elizabeth Bruss, and Philippe Lejeune agree on the general lines of the conventional genre definition. 7 Lejeune's definition is characteristic: "a prose narrative in retrospect that a real person makes of his own existence in which he accents his individual life, especially the history of his personality. " 8 This definition is formulated in a way to eliminate from the category of autobiography the following forms: memoirs, because they place emphasis on events and personages other than the author; biographies, because they are composed by a third person; the personal novel, because it does not deal with a real person; the autobiographical poem, because it is not in prose {English critics are likely to object to this restriction in order to save Wordsworth's Prelude); the intimate journal, because it it not written in retrospection; and the self-portrait or essay, because they are not narratives and are not written in retrospection. What has all this to do with Montaigne? He wrote a book very much concerned with his self; hence, two of the components of autobiography concern him greatly. Indeed, some of the significant critics of autobiography have included him in their fold; though others exclude him. Georg Misch, whose net is cast wide when fishing for works to classify as autobiographies in his huge seminal opus, throws the Essays back into the sea, barring them from consideration. "Montaigne's Essays are surely no autobiography, but they are one of the most personal philosophical books ever written."9 Major scholars of autobiography, particularly James Olneyt 0

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and Karl J. Weintraub, 11 have made genuine contributions to the literature on Montaigne. But I would like to demur on their use of terminology, for I think it is actively harmful and misleading to refer to the Essays as an autobiography or as autobiographical. The second term in particular is catching on among the new generation of Montaigne scholars. What Montaigne wrote was a self-portrait, and he called his work such again and again. That is a far different animal from an autobiography. While similarities exist between the two beasts, especially in content, the differences are essential, not accidental; and Montaigne calls our attention to them. It is highly indicative, I believe, that autobiographers themselves have not often turned to the French essayist as a source for acquiring a vocabulary, a style, or a form for their own works. One curious illustration of the fact that Montaigne did not write an autobiography is the strange enterprise of Marvin Lowenthal, a work entitled The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne, Comprising the life of the wisest man of his times: his childhood, youth, and prime; his adventures in love and marriage, at court, and in office, war, revolution, and plague; his travels at home and abroad; his habits, tastes, whims, and opinions. Selected, arranged, edited, prefaced, and mostly translated anew from his Essays, etc., withholding no signal or curious detail. 12 Lowenthal put together twenty-four chapters that were composed entirely of Montaigne's own words, excepting only a few he had to insert editorially and one short passage from de Thou. The material comes predominantly from the Essays, but also from the Travel Journal, the Ephemerides (an album of family events), the prefaces of 1570 to La Boetie's works, and even the Latin inscription on his library wall. We find chapters on Montaigne's father, on his "peculiar education," his lost friend, his marriage, his house, its tower, his reading, his essays, a jumble of habits, his kidney stone, his travels, and the like. Each is a patchwork of citations, centering on four or five major passages from various essays. But the reader has no way of determining where the citations come from, or where they begin or leave off. The result is an apparently continuous narrative, highly readable, for the words are Montaigne's. Examination of the text shows that Lowenthal's editorial pen was seldom idle; even the largest chunks of material-for example, the passage from I, 14 concerning the essayist's fashion of managing his money-have been reworked in various unobtrusive ways that might seem unnecessary:

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snippets have been excised, a verb tense changed here, a sentence from some other source introduced elsewhere, phrases reordered, Latin quotations expunged, references to historical exempla reduced in number. 13 Lowenthal felt compelled to perform this enormous job of rewriting to help Montaigne's readers: "the game of piecing together a continuous narrative from the helter-skelter . . . was much like solving a jigsaw puzzle, containing literally hundreds of fragments. " 14 It was far from easy to turn the Essays into a biography; consequently, even after Lowenthal's scissors-and-paste job, what remains is largely a depiction of Montaigne's personality, not a recital of his life. In fact, so much is missing that Lowenthal felt constrained to preface this "autobiography" with a twenty-ninepage introduction of his own composition outlining the essayist's life! "So I am compelled to tell something of Montaigne's negotiations between princes whereas he himself will tell what he eats for dinner and how he likes to scratch his ear." 15 While the Essays succeed in fulfilling Lejeune's definition of an autobiography in major respects, they fail in two respects: they are not a narrative and they do not take a view in retrospect. These are not casual differences, or simple failures on the part of Montaigne to do his work conscientiously. The incapacity, or disinclination on his part, to make an orderly account of events was one of the crucial factors that discouraged him from writing a history of contemporary France. 16 "Some urge me to write the events of my time, believing that I see them with a view less distorted by passion than another man's.... There is nothing so contrary to my style as an extended narration." 17 At the root of his rejection of a continuous narrative lie some basic tenets of his worldview, both the conviction that human knowledge cannot attain the degree of precision and certitude implied in a grand historical overview and the belief that life is not an orderly purposeful succession, more a disjointed series of episodic moments. Most critics of autobiography designate as one of the crucial components, if not the crucial aspect, of "an autobiography worthy of the name, " 18 the effort made by the writer to bring his life into focus, to make sense of it, and to portray himself as he examines himself and his past. Montaigne simply has no desire to see his career as a whole. He seeks no other grand scheme in his life beyond the universal one imposed by nature-birth, youth, maturity, age, death. Of course, he realizes that he has changed with time; but he sees no consistent pattern in the change. One advantage

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of writing a series of self-portraits over an extended period is that the alert reader will recognize the sequence of changes. Montaigne wishes he had started earlier so that more variability would have been recorded. "I want to represent the course of my humors, and I want people to see each part at its birth. It would give me pleasure to have begun earlier, and to be able to trace the course of my mutations. " 19 His career is frankly not interesting as far as he can see. "I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions; fortune places them too low." 20 It cannot be overstressed how much ofMontaigne's life does not appear in the Essays. He was a jurist for sixteen years, and nary a word about them, not because he wished to sweep them under the carpet, but because no occasion arose to expatiate on them. He was Mayor of Bordeaux for four years; and he tells us nothing about what happened while his terms lasted; for the few facts we do have, we must go elsewhere. This antipathy for an orderly account of his life is based on a firm conviction that recital of events, of his actions, would not portray himself, and portrayal is his goal. "What I chiefly portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not lend itself to expression in actions.... My actions would tell more about fortune than about me. They bear witness to their own part, not to mine, unless it be by conjecture and without certainty.... " 21 Rightly or wrongly, Montaigne decided not to give us a factual account of himself. For the historically minded, the Essays make poor reading. This is not to say that he refuses categorically to speak of his past. One thinks of many memorable passages in which he doesfor example, the long account of his education. 22 In other cases Montaigne even surveys his past to uncover personal evolution as his attitudes change, for example, on superstition, or on studies, or on spending money. 23 Sometimes he implies that the development has been an improvement, but unlike most autobiographers his usual tendency is to see no betterment, merely changeability. "My first edition was in the year 1580. Since then I have grown older by a long stretch of time; but certainly I have not grown an inch wiser. Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two; but when better, I simply cannot say."24 It is instructive to compare his procedure with Rousseau's in the Confessions, a work frequently cited as the first genuine autobiography. Rousseau believed that he had been persecuted because his

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contemporaries misunderstood his character; he concluded that in order to dispel their hatred, he had only to furnish a totally accurate portrait of himself. 25 It seemed to him that the only honest and effective way to let the world know his self was to pass in review his entire life. " ... I have promised to depict myself as I am; and to know me in my later years it is necessary to have known me well in my youth .... But by relating to him [the reader] in simple detail all that has happened to me, all that I have done, all that I have felt, I cannot lead him into error.... His task is to assemble these elements and to assess the being who is made up of them. " 26 Rousseau believed he was presenting the unadorned facts of his life in an objective account of his deeds, which he considered an essential part of his portrait, especially as they contributed to the evolution of his character-or, as he would see it, the debasement of his natural goodness. In fact-and this. is one of the most original qualities of his autobiography-he intended to narrate more than mere acts, for the essential in his mind lay not in the deeds alone, but in the feelings that accompanied them. When we understand his feelings (feelings that may not be evident in the acts themselves), then we will be in a position to judge him as he asks in his opening pages. For a number of reasons Rousseau could never have fulfilled literally the objectives he lay down for himself. The obstacles in his way arise in part because he set impossible goals, such as completeness of narrative and objectivity, in part because he was temperamentally ill-suited to achieve others. One factor in particular distorts his every page, namely his need to justify his deeds. In contrast to Rousseau, Montaigne consciously and consistently (for him) excluded recitals of his past deeds or passions from his self-portrait. Steven Rendall finds only two instances, both in the last pages of "Of Physiognomy," where the essayist uses narrative of past events to prove his character. 27 The mere fact of composing a narrative may entail serious drawbacks for a writer intent on self-portraiture. Shumaker points out most astutely that in the first-person discourse of novels it is frequently the speaker who is the most shadowy of the principal characters: who is clearer to us, Manon Lescaut or Des Grieux? 28 The "I" is looking out at the world and telling it as he sees, or saw, it; the spotlight is turned elsewhere. Where the writer's intention is to create a self-portrait, the spotlight is turned much more directly

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on the subject, though in Montaigne's case it is hardly pinpointed exclusively on himself. Clearly, the self-portraitist faces the danger of disintegrating into a catalogue of personal details that hold little interest for the reader as they proliferate; I would say that Cardano's De vita sua sometimes suffers from this failing; and private journals notoriously require blue-penciling. A private person, such as Montaigne, runs the risk of triviality, a charge that has, in fact, been leveled by some readers of the Essays. He chose to recount what his table manners were like, how he liked to talk, to walk, or ride horseback, what form of bedding most pleased him, what hour he rose, what times he preferred for making children. How different this is from autobiography! "Most autobiographers live in no houses, work in no rooms, sleep in no beds, . . . never suffer from minor illnesses or irritations; live, in short, in a quite inhuman and impossible way." 29 To escape from being mired in trivia, Montaigne ascends from personal detail to the universal portrait of human nature. Autobiographers generally find other ways of avoiding triviality. One form that autobiographical writing frequently takes is. the memoir of the "My-Life-Among-the-Great" sort, in which the author makes no claim to be of particular interest himself, but justifies his narrative by the fact that good fortune has allowed him to be witness to the lives of important people. At their very best, memoirs are composed by great artists such as Saint Simon, whose many volumes depicting the life at Versailles present one of the most vivid pictures ever painted of an aristocracy working diligently at the serious business ofbeing court ornaments. The French call this sort of thing Ia petite histoire, and, perhaps more than other peoples, have entertained a national myth that the underside of every political decision rests on affairs of heart rather than affairs of state. The great tragedies of the classical age of French literature share this assumption; and it is indicative that while the conventional title for a standard biography in the English tradition is The Life and Times of. . . , the equally standard French equivalent is La Vie passionnee de .... Montaigne proceeds in a far different manner from that of the memorialist. He is no name-dropper; quite the opposite, his normal practice conceals the name of his actors. The Essays burgeon with expressions such as "a gentleman whom France esteems highly, " 30 "a gentleman who has acquitted himself worthily in several

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charges," 31 "a gentleman, a very fine man, and my friend," 32 and "a lady whom I hold in singular honor and esteem. " 33 Montaigne traveled in noble circles, a fact which he neither hides nor flaunts; and many of his tales do concern figures of great historical stature. But in the majority of cases he conceals their identity, reducing modern scholars to silence or guesswork. A friend and neighbor of his, Florimond de Raemond, a man whom history has not particularly esteemed, transcribed the names of twenty-one of these anonymous figures in the margins of his copy of the Essays. 34 We could wish that Florimond de Raemond had been more industrious or thorough in his annotations. Who is, or was, the "man whom all we Frenchmen know" 35 who read some of his verses aloud to Montaigne? Our curiosity is piqued when we read of "a great lord in my time, a personage of high enterprises and famous successes," 36 who consumed nearly ten quarts of wine at his regular meals. Surely the "widow of a prince"37 mentioned in "Of Three Good Women" (II, 35) would have wished to be named if she had known that she was to be called "a good and very beautiful lady." But these and many others were destined to remain nameless. In one particularly frustrating instance, Montaigne dedicates his longest chapter to an unnamed princess. Although she has been fairly certainly identified as Marguerite de Valois, it is still possible to dispute the identification, even to speculate that the princess is a fabrication on Montaigne's part. 38 If we were to make a list of all the people Montaigne mentions in this anonymous way, we would conclude that the company he kept consisted of royalty, grandees, lords, a bishop, several ladies, a president (by which he means a judge), a councillor, many gentlemen, and a handful of learned men. Montaigne was guided by no consistent policy in the matter of whether or not to name names. When dealing with classical figures, he usually gives the name; when dealing with people he knew, he usually does not, but there are many exceptions to both practices. Had he been writing with a historical mentality-or had he written memoirs-he would have been concerned to give precise details whenever possible. When he alludes to his noble or royal acquaintances, it is not with the intention of self-aggrandizement; he is never guilty of gossip-columnist mentality; he does not write things like "My friend the Count de Foix told me ... " though he comes perilously close once or twice. His acquaintances remain anonymous because they are cited in evidence of general principles of human

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nature; and for such purposes their identity is more or less inconsequential; their experience informs us as fully as more illustrious examples from the storehouse of history. "I, who do not disbelieve men's mouths any more than their hands, and who know that people write just as injudiciously as they speak, and who esteem this age just as if it were another that is past, I quote a friend of mine as readily as Aulus Gellius or Macrobius, and what I have seen as what they have written. " 39 His practice concerning proper names resembles that of a conversation: sometimes we say, "I have a friend who ... "; at other times we say, "My friend Howard Gray," avoiding naming our friends when it is their indiscretions we are revealing, often avoiding also naming our more famous acquaintances from considerations of good tone. Reading the Essays, we meet a special world inhabited by Montaigne and the great figures of antiquity, the Pompeys, the Caesars, an Apollodorus here, a Lycurgus there, who appear in many ways his equals, and thereby endow him in the reader's eyes with a stature he did not necessarily intend to imply. So unhistorical is his perspective that the figures of the past seem a part of his present world, as if the centuries separating them had been obliterated. His friends are there, too, but they remain rather more shadowy figures because unnamed. So Montaigne puts himself even more center stage as he leaves his acquaintances in the wings. His anecdotes and narratives (personal or otherwise} frequently lack exactly the sort of specific detail that modern historians consider essential for the historical consciousness. It is no accident that Montaigne preferred Plutarch's moralia to his Lives; they corresponded more to his interests. He intends to provide a folio of portraits of himself, each of which depicts a single moment in the present, the principal tense of his discourse, a most unhistorical tense. Steven Rendall points out correctly that the present tense has various functions: in one it describes an event or a state that is true specifically for a special moment, now, as in the statement "I am sitting down" or "I am thirty years old": in another it refers to more general truths such as "I am inclined to avarice," which does not have a particular time reference, and is a less historical usage. 40 This second is the principal way Montaigne uses the present tense in his portrait, but it does not exclude the other, for he is aware that he changes, and stresses this awareness. "I cannot keep my subject still .... I take it in this condition, just as it is at the moment I give my attention to it. I do

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not portray being; I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute." 41 Furthermore, he is not impelled by the feeling, frequent in autobiographers, that his lite has some special significance that will justify the effort he makes to order it and to record it. "Yes, but someone will tell me that this plan of using oneself as a subject to write about would be excusable in rare and famous men who by their reputation had aroused some desire to know them. That is certain; I admit it; ... Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I have found mine so barren and meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan. " 42 Suspicious readers may doubt that Montaigne is being entirely candid here; but it is at least true that he made no effort to transform his deeds into significant events, that, quite the contrary, he chose to recount the everyday side of his life rather than its more spectacular moments. For example, when he received Henry of Navarre in his chateau, he recorded the royal visit in a family document, not in his essays. His chapter on his service as Mayor of Bordeaux is especially informative. He could easily have made it into an account of his activities, the delicate negotiations necessary for the magistrate of a Catholic city in a largely Protestant region, the skirmishes over the chateau de Trompette. Instead he avoids specifics and discusses the general question of to what degree one should become involved in politics and public service. He would like us to believe that he kept Montaigne and the Mayor quite separate from each other, and that his first interest was in the former, not the latter. His choice of self-portraiture sidesteps one of the major perplexities faced by autobiographers, the dangers of memory. A naive autobiographer is likely to believe that his memory is reliable, as Cellini in his life of himself. But the slightest sophistication leads to the realization that memory is a complex, deceptive instrument. It is no accident that the first great autobiography, Saint Augustine's, delves profoundly, indeed as profoundly as any since, into the problems of how one finds the selfby searching the memory. All serious critics insist that memory is inevitably inaccurate, distorted by the interests of the present, remembering mind, and is indeed almost as much creative as recreative. On a few occasions Montaigne puts himself at the vantage point most typical of the autobiographer,

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namely, at the close of his career. "I have chosen the time when my life, which I have to portray, lies all before my eyes; what is left is more related to death. " 43 But he does not use this position as the basis of a summing up, and thereby escapes some o£. the problematics of autobiography. Any self-portrait, however, must be based on a vision of the self, on self-knowledge, and self-awareness; and all of these require the functioning of memory in various degrees, so that some of the difficulties that have been ushered out the front door enter surreptitiously by the side window. In his portrait of himself, for example, he writes that his judgment has often gone wrong (past: memory), from which he learns (specific present: self-portrait) that it is weak by nature (general present: portrait of himself and, by extension, of mankind). Clearly this is a matter of keeping the past and the present both in mind. Nonetheless, the artistic challenges faced by a portraitist seeking to describe how his thoughts are working at the time he writes differ radically from those faced by the autobiographer concerned with recreating the self of the past, its thoughts, and the attendant circumstances that affected it. The kinds of illusion at play are far from the same-1 mean both the illusions the artist seeks to create in his reader's mind by his narrative, and the illusions about his own self that he seeks to avoid in order to be truthful. In a rich, suggestive article on the self-portrait, Steven Rendall addresses himself to this question. The dynamics of autobiography most frequently derive from the interplay of two visions, that of the writer who perceives his life in a broad scan and that of the subject who is being recreated by the writer. Rendall asks if there is not an analogous interplay in the Essays between two figures, the essayist who is writing the portrait, and the subject who is sitting for the portrait. "The man described in the self-portrait has studied little, forgets everything, bores those to whom he speaks, and is slow of wit, but the Montaigne who speaks of him has read widely, quotes from memory, writes entertainingly on a thousand subjects and displays a nimble intellect."44 Rendall is fully aware that the contrasts between speaker and subject can be overstated, as he does in the sentence just quoted, and that subtle distinctions must be made, as he does in his later discussion. 45 If critics succeed in locating genuine differences between Montaigne the speaker and Montaigne the subject, they will have uncovered a crucial defect in Montaigne's

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achievement, for he states unequivocally that his intention is to make his book and himself as nearly identical as possible, given the limitations imposed by his medium, language. He asserts confidently that he and his book are consubstantial, if variable, both of them. We as readers may decide that the identity is not there; but we do so at our own risk; for firm evidence is very hard to find. According to Rendall, whether the essayist intended to or not, he created a personality (a persona) that readers gradually construct in their minds as they progress through the Essays. Wayne C. Booth says much the same thing in The Rhetoric of Fiction, when he concludes that the coherence of the Essays derives from the "created fictional character who pulls the scattered thoughts together. " 46 According to Rendall, this personality-which exists in the reader's mind, perhaps more than in Montaigne's-dominates the text and guides the reader's reactions, conscious or unconscious. This may explain how some readers, or even most readers, read the Essays. But it is not how Montaigne tells us to read them, and we may be falling into habits that he is trying to dispel, namely, the idea that each human has a coherent personality which accounts for his individual acts or thoughts. If there is a significant difference between the subject of the Essays and the speaker of the Essays, then Montaigne has failed to do what he claimed to do, and failed in something essential, not accidental. Once he learned what his intent was, he set about it consistently. And he knew that a self-portrait is not an autobiography.

IV

The Form of the Portrait WHAT IS the literary genre appropriate for an author determined to create a self-portrait in words? Montaigne is surely the first man of letters to set himself that goal, and as a pioneer had no precedents to follow. In the course of his career he created and named his own genre. It would be a sterile exercise to debate whether or not that genre was the most apt for his self-portrait. A serious look at that genre as he practiced it may illucidate some of the problematics of self-portraiture. In his first years as an author, he followed the formula of the lefon ("lesson") practiced by anthologists and compilers of his day. 1 These "lessons" assembled aphorisms or anecdotes from history and literature grouping them around a single subject, such as men who had met death while seeking to avoid it, or while in sexual congress. Not a few of Montaigne's shortest chapters are constructed in this way, three or four anecdotes on a central theme taken from his recent reading, sometimes preceded or followed by a personal reflection on his part. Most of these chapters are quite short, revealing little if anything about their author, and clearly were not designed with an eye to self-portraiture. When he came to the realization that the subject of his book was himself, he continued his practice of dividing his work into "chapters" (his word; he does not call them essays individually). He never decided to compose a continous discourse about himself. In Book Three {the only one composed entirely with self-portraiture in mind) Montaigne consciously made his chapters somewhat longer, demanding at least an hour's attention from his reader. 2 Three of them are over forty pages in length, the remaining ten running from four to twenty-three pages. The average for the entire book is twenty pages per essay. Other than this increase there is no ostensible change in the form of his work. The titles continue to refer to general topics: "Of Repentance," "Of the Art of Discussion," "Of Experience." He never writes "On My Presumption" or "On Husbanding My Will." In contrast, some three centuries

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later when Nietzsche came to write his self-portrait in a not-somodestly titled book comparing himself to Jesus, his first chapters had titles like "Why I Am so Wise," "Why I Am so Clever," or "Why I Write Such Good Books." 3 While it resembles the treatise in some ways, the essay investigates a topic in a far different manner. Webster defines a treatise as "a systematic exposition or argument in writing including a methodical discussion of the facts and principles involved and conclusions reached." As Montaigne practices his form, the essay, every chapter (of the mature ones) discourses on two subjects, the ostensible topic, and a second topic, the person of its author, which may surface at any time, in any context, and intervene for any length of time. Authors of treatises organize their material carefully, arguing systematically, and staying on topic. In contrast, Montaigne's essai derives much of its charm from the digressive, apparently rambling treatment it affords its subjects. This intentionally disorganized quality is no mere happenstance, but a conscious artistic decision of Montaigne's, allied to his purpose of self-portraiture. Another crucial contrast: a treatise aspires to present the definitive truth about its subject, so that a successful treatise would make it unnecessary for any author to handle the same topic again. Essays have no such pretensions, for they present a personal view ("what I think about this matter") as the mind muses, reflects, rambles, conjectures, retracts its conjecture, re-examines, concludes perhaps, but always with the proviso that the conclusion is subject to change or modification. Besides declaring what he thinks, Montaigne also intends to reproduce on paper the amble of his mind as it thinks, a far more difficult task and a quite unusual one, for we ordinarily assume that an author ought to take the trouble to organize his opinions before recording them in a final, coherent form. Montaigne chooses another artistic goal and follows it consistently, without perhaps realizing the extent of his originality. One of his artistic discoveries is that the mind does not proceed with composure, it staggers, leaps, somersaults, limps, sometimes racing, sometimes dawdling. Reproducing its various gaits in writing is a delicate and exacting task, as the artist must impose enough order and regimentation on its chaotic movement to make sense of it, but not so much as to make the final product too formal or too regular.

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This is, of course, as true of the unfolding of a single sentence as it is of the general organization of an entire chapter. One of his consistent mannerisms is to write a sentence as if it were evolving spontaneously, capturing the movement of the mind as it thinks. Let us look for a moment at a sentence with which he experimented until he felt satisfied. He first wrote "There is nothing so grossly and ordinarily faulty as the laws." He then corrected this to "There is nothing so dangerously faulty as the laws," changing his meaning considerably. He returned to his original thought in a new form, composing the final sentence: "There is nothing so grossly and widely faulty as the laws," to which he then appended "nor so ordinarily," ending almost where he began. Besides the reversion to his original content, two things stand out in this final version: first, he has found a doublet of adverbs that both rhyme and alliterate (lourdement et largement)-he loves such phonic word play, going out of his way to fashion his sentences to include it-and second, he has reordered his sentences in such a way that the phrase "nor so ordinarily" comes at the end, grammatically and structurally an afterthought, though in fact it had been present in its normal position in the earliest form of the sentence. He has abandoned the finished sentence structure of his first and second forms in favor of a sentence that looks as though it requires revision if it is to express its content in an organized manner. Where most authors revise to give a tighter structure, Montaigne preferred to appear spontaneous. Here is a magnificent example of a sentence that, once launched, becomes clogged as the mind gropes to make its thought clearer by adding new circumstances. Montaigne's topic is the traps that await liars as they try to remember what their story was, how much of the truth they admitted, and how much they concealed. I will try to reproduce the stumbling movement of the original: "When they disguise and change [the facts], putting them back often in the same story, it is hard for them not to get tangled up, because the thing as it is having lodged itself first in their memory and having imprinted itself there by way of consciousness and knowledge, it is hard for it not to present itself to the imagination, dislodging the falsehood which cannot have so firm a foothold there, or secure, and for the circumstances learned first, slipping into mind every minute, not to make them lose the memory of the false or corrupted parts added on. " 4 What a quagmire! Most writers would have abandoned the whole mess and started over again, breaking the idea up

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into more palatable segments, as Frame does when he makes it into three sentences in his translation. When I read such a sentence, I realize at a certain point that the structure has gotten lost and I am swimming in uncertain waters; at the same time some brand of sense remains as the elements pile up and I feel, rather than understand, the situation being described. Faulkner's marathon sentences work along the same principles. Montaigne's sentence survives because it contains all the elements of a clear thought as it contrasts two or three situations. What is lacking is the logical articulation of those elements into a tight structure. Instead of joining the elements by conjunctions and other rhetorical means, Montaigne uses the least structured forms of syntax, absolute elements, like an infinitive with no subject, or participles with their own subjects but with no connection to the main sentence. Those who have studied Latin will recognize the ablative absolute, a construction that exists in French as in English, but always sounds a little strange in both languages. Another source of confusion in this sentence is the several subject shifts which force the reader to work out for himself just who is acting. Worse than that, at least one of the structural elements that should function to make the meaning clear actually adds to the obscurity. When Montaigne repeats the phrase "it is hard for it," we naturally expect the similar words to apply to similar situations, but in the first case he is talking about people and in the second about things, and the meaning of "it is hard" has changed slightly. The net effect of all this is a density of ideas, crammed into a somewhat breathtaking sentence, as they spill forth too fast for the author to marshall them into a neat pattern. The very appearance of the Essays in the first edition betrayed their inchoate nature, for their pages were not broken up into paragraphs, but ran continuously except for the verse citations. 5 (All modern editors are faced with the somewhat traitorous task of breaking the text up into paragraph units.) "My style and my mind alike go roaming. " 6 Montaigne is depicting, he says, "the continual agitation and changes of my thought," 7 "a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas." 8 The French word for "record," contrerolle, which he employs frequently, refers to an exact copy, "the copie of a roll (of accounts, etc.)," according to Cotgrave's Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611). And his essays are to be more

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or less exact copies of his mind's progress. "As my fantasies present themselves, I pile them up; now they come pressing in a crowd, now dragging single file. " 9 A writer concerned with systematic organization will scrupulously banish any material that he feels is beside the point. Montaigne's artistic practice runs in precisely the opposite direction. "Any topic is equally fertile for me.... Let me begin with whatever subject I please, for all subjects are linked with one another." 1° For the student of the Essays this can be maddening. Where did Montaigne speak of witches? (Answer: in "Of Cripples," Ill, 11.} Of his management of money? (Answer: in "That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them," I, 14.) Of torture? (Answer: in "Of Conscience" II, 5, in "Of Cruelty" II, 11, and elsewhere.) There is no way to be sure where a particular topic will surface, for he has carte blanche to speak of anything anywhere. And yet, he frequently refers to his "subject," even as he points out that he has strayed from it.U "This stuffing is a little out of my subject. I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness." 12 In "On Cannibals" (I, 31), four pages into his essay, Montaigne admonishes himself "to return to my subject," 13 when in fact he has not once mentioned the cannibals beyond the tide itself. Literary critics often find the most haphazardly constructed chapters fascinating, particularly "Of Coaches" (III, 6} and "Of Vanity" (III, 9), both of which have been analyzed in many articles, some stressing their fundamental disparity, others searching for some subterranean unity. 14 All things considered, what I find remarkable is that, while the essayist allows himself to digress to any subject whatsoever, the majority of the chapters, even those in Book Three, never simply abandon their topic, which, I believe, Montaigne succeeds in covering before he finishes. 15 Sometimes his penchant for digression requires prodigies of diligence on his reader's part: twelve pages after citing some verses of Virgil, he refers to "our poet"; 16 twenty pages after the same quotation 17 he refers to some of the Latin words in the passage and their poetic force. In the same chapter, in order to know what Montaigne means by the phrase "this passion," 18 the poor reader has to remember back four pages, where the essayist had discussed jealousy. It may take the essayist some time to reach his topic, as in "Of Freedom of Conscience" (II, 19), where the chapter is almost eighty percent introduction

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before Montaigne comes "to the subject of my discourse," 19 announced in the title. In general, I would conclude that he planned in advance the course his chapters would take, even those in Book Three, and that no matter how far he allowed himself to wander, he kept his general direction firmly in mind. 20 To the reader, who has no such privileged information, he often appears to be ambling aimlessly. As usual, Montaigne describes his practice better than anyone else. "My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a side-long glance."21 Most of us feel instinctively that a literary work, such as a chapter or an essay, should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that these divisions are not reversible or interchangeable, just as the foot comes before the ankle, which is followed by the calf, knee, and thigh in that order. In a well-formed composition, as in a wellformed body, there will be appropriate proportions between the parts themselves, a tiny ankle will not accompany an enormous foot. Montaigne does not consider his essay in this way at all. His practice violates all the laws of proper composition-if such laws exist. Montaigne himself writes "What are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental?"22 "Fine materials are always in place, wherever you sow them. I, who have more concern for the weight and utility of the arguments than for their order or sequence, should not fear to place here, a little out of the way, a very beautiful story. " 23 In a delightful passage he compares his essay to the excrements of his mind. "Thus I knew a gentleman who gave knowledge of his life only by the workings of his belly; you would see on display at his home a row of chamber pots, seven or eight days' worth. That was his study, his conversation; all other talk stank in his nostrils. Here you have, a little more decently, some excrements of an aged mind, now hard, now loose, and always undisgested. " 24 If I may continue Montaigne's image, his chapters may be excrements, however undigested; but they are not diarrhea, that is to say they do have a certain form, no matter how often the essayist parades their formlessness. 25 Left to itself, the mind roves; Montaigne imposes a slight discipline, namely his topic, upon its roving, and then lets his mind stretch the rules of pertinence and of order to the absolute limit,

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without ever totally abandoning them. He expected the final product to be readable as a whole, assisted by the indulgence of a reader willing to stroll along with his author, whether or not with a clear sense of direction. This involves a considerable artistic gamble; for each section must bear the responsibility of being interesting on its own, as its connection with the general subject and its appropriateness may be obscure to the reader. The literary pleasure-and it is a very real one-of following a tightly composed development as it unfolds does not obtain for the essay. In its place we find the willingness to include a good story at any moment, the right to divert the flow of thought to the personality of the essayist, and the pleasure of wandering. Does the mind put first things first? Or does it lunge directly to its conclusion, then think of a counter example, then return to the premises of its reasoning, then repeat the conclusion, but in a different form? Montaigne's intention, clearly expressed, was to convey this movement. The intention, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the intention to portray himself; for the most interesting part of himself, as of any human being, is his brain at work. How did he decide on the topics that he would handle so cavalierly? Many of the early chapters have been shown convincingly by Villey to have been derived in a general way from Montaigne's current reading. 26 Otherwise, we have little precise knowledge of what inspired him to select his subject matter. In III, 7 he tells us coyly that he has a reason for choosing his topic, but does not reveal it. 27 He assembled the "Apology" because of a request from a princess for a defense of Sebond's book. 28 "Of the Education of Children" (I, 26) originated from the suggestion of a friend who had read of "Of Pedantry" (I, 25) and proposed that Montaigne give his views on pedagogy. 29 A traveling sideshow inspired "Of a Monstrous Child" (II, 30). Other than that we have little information about the origin of the individual chapters. He gave each chapter a title. It seems likely that he usually decided on his titles in advance; four essays open with sentences that make no sense whatsoever except as follow-ups to the title. 30 The titles of his earliest chapters clearly indicate their subject matter. A large number of them in Book One and a few in Book Two are quite cumbersome: "How the Soul Discharges its Passions on False Objects When the True are Wanting" (I, 4), "That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them"

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(I, 14), "It is Folly to Measure the True and False by Our Own Capacity" (I, 27), "We Should Meddle Soberly with Judging Divine Ordinances" (I, 32). It also happens, though rather rarely, that Montaigne is playful with his titles. No one could possibly be expected to divine that "A Custom of the Island of Cea" (II, 3) treats suicide, or that "Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers" (II, 37) savages the medical profession. But the total number of misleading titles is relatively low: not one out of the fifty-seven in Book One, only two out of thirty-seven in Book Two; four out of thirteen in Book Three. 31 If we were to add those titles that indicate poorly the topic of their chapters, we would raise the figure by ten only (my count; the matter is a question of judgment). Several of the more puzzling titles appear to me to represent second thoughts that came to Montaigne only as he finished writing his chapter. The essay "Of Cripples" (III, 11) furnishes the clearest example of such a procedure. Apparently what happened is this: Montaigne composed a chapter on man's credulity; the very last example he cited is one about the lubricity of cripples. Fortunately for cripples, the rumor that they make especially exciting sexual partners has existed for more than two thousand years. The essayist introduces the matter of cripples with the phrase "Apropos or malapropos, no matter." 32 But wait a minute! If cripples appear in the title, how can the story about them be malapropos? The one explanation I can see (I suppose there are other plausible ones) is that only after having completed his essay did Montaigne realize that the cripples were a stunning illustration of his main point, and changed his original title, presumably a less piquant one, to the more enigmatic "Of Cripples." Exactly the same sequence of events may hold true for "A Custom of the Island of Cea" (II, 3), which examines the question of suicide, and only mentions Cea in the closing pages. Perhaps the same last minute shift of title is true of "The Story of Spurina" (II, 33), in which her history appears after more than three quarters of the essay. 33 I suspect that the clumsiest of all of Montaigne's titles, "Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law" (I, 23), evolved in a similar manner: that its original form was simply "Of Custom," but that Montaigne enlarged the title to make it correspond, as it does, to the content of the whole chapter that emerged as he wrote. I would be willing

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to believe that the title "Of Physiognomy" {Ill, 12) was also a latecomer, but the question here is especially murky. If Montaigne fashioned his titles and his openings carefully, I cannot believe he really gave a damn about how he ended an essay. Writers who concern themselves with the structure of their works, myself included, ponder seriously their conclusions. The simpleminded, myself included, seek to end on a climax, something socko. More practiced artists often prefer the diminuendo-I think of the Greek tragedians, of Homer. Montaigne simply stops, period. Again and again, I would say that his conclusions are at best anticlimaxes. What could be feebler than the closing of "Of Books" (II, 10), where he copies out verbatim the handwritten comments he had jotted down in books he had read some years earlier. (The audacity of the self-portraitist! To dare to expect that we will be willing to read something written so casually, totally unrehearsed, so personally.) "Of Cruelty" (II, 11) opens with a fascinating discussion on the nature of virtue, and follows with some great pages of selfportraiture concerning Montaigne's distaste for man's cruelty to other humans and to animals; but its conclusion contains some of the most forgettable sentences in all literature: "Cimon gave honorable burial to the mares with which he had three times won the prize for the race at the Olympic games. The ancient Xantippus had his dog buried on a headland on the seacoast which has since retained its name. And Plutarch had scruples, he says, about selling and sending to the slaughterhouse for a slight profit, an ox that had long served him. "34 One of the factors that contributed to these watery conclusions is Montaigne's practice of adding fresh anecdotes to his essays-the easiest place to put them was the end. The twenty-fifth chapter of Book Two is built along add-a-pearl principles: "But let us lengthen this chapter and variegate it with another piece,"35 then an incident from Pliny, followed by "Let us add one more story close to this subject ... " quoted from Seneca, with this final sentence appended: "That is what Seneca says, which has carried me away from my subject; but there is profit in change." Did he arrange the sequence of his chapters according to some overall plan? 36 I doubt it. I can imagine him going to the cupboard, finding them piled up there and simply following that order, making only a few modifications, placing side by side chapters on clearly related topics. One piece of organization is clear: chapter twenty-

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nine of Book One contains twenty-nine sonnnets by La Boetie; Montaigne himself tells us that it is the mid-piece of Book One, hence he chose to place twenty-eight chapters on either side of itY I have said that Montaigne planned his openings carefully, and showed little care for his conclusions. As for the mid-sections of his chapters, no book in Western literature, at least that I know of, has undergone quite the changes in text that the essays suffered at the hands of their author. In 1580 he divided his work into two books with fifty-seven essays in the first and thirty-seven in the second. 38 Two years later he published a second edition, basically the same as the first, with no new chapters, but containing some forty-odd additional passages, none longer than three pages and many no more than one or two lines. 39 Then, in 1588, Montaigne published a much enlarged edition containing Book Three with thirteen entirely new chapters. Moreover, he expanded the old essays by inserting a total of 641 patches of new material in the first two books. 40 As a result, the original essays in Books I and II were augmented by almost one third. As soon as he had a printed copy of this third, expanded, text in his hands, he began a new cycle of revisions and additions, writing out the new material in the margins with the evident intent of future publication. 41 We can be sure of the date because one such marginal comment gives his age, thereby placing its composition slightly before February 28, 1589. 42 His emendations are preserved in his own copy still extant in the municipal library of the city of Bordeaux. 43 It is fascinating to watch Montaigne as he goes over his text word for word, seeking the strongest expression of his ideas, or putting down new thoughts, many of which he crosses out to reshape. No detail was too small to escape his attention. (On the reverse of his title page he wrote instructions to his printer, indicative of his concern for certain minutiae and of his intention to have the revised text printed. 44 One of the changes involved the spelling of his last name; in his signature he spelled his title with the ending aigne, as we do today. It is most likely that he pronounced it as if the letter i were not there, hence like the modern French word montagne, "mountain" (rhymes with "on yuh," not with "en yuh," as modern Frenchmen pronounce his name). Ironically, his own efforts succeeded in attaching all the renown that his Essays have earned to a name he would not have recognized as his own.)

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When the modern reader skims a page of the Essays, he is looking at the result of a multilayered composition containing side by side sentences that may have been composed at four different times; and within each sentence individual words or phrases may be editorial modifications. In a statement often cited by critics, Montaigne claims: I add, but I do not correct.... My book is always one. Except that at each new edition, so that the buyer may not come off completely empty-handed, I allow myself to add, since it is only an ill-fitted patchwork, some extra ornaments. These are only overweights, which do not condemn the original form, but give some special value to each of the subsequent ones, by a bit of ambitious subtlety. Thence, however, it will easily happen that some transposition of chronology may slip in, for my stories take their place according to their timeliness, not according to their age. 45

The first point to note is that in Montaigne's mind (and I think he is accurate in this) what he was doing was adding to his former works, not correcting them. 46 He did not wish to override what he had previously said; to do so would imply that his earlier account was wrong or somehow inadequate. But if a new slant on the matter, or another interesting point of view by a significant thinker like Plato or Cicero came to his attention, he was not loath to add it to enrich the original material; and if Montaigne were still alive, it would be entirely consistent for him to be still tinkering with his text. His longest intercalations could reach five or six pages, seriously altering the progress of the original work. 47 The tiny chapters of the first period can be expanded as much as six times by later insertions. 48 Describing a dilemma in 1580 Montaigne wrote: "If we were placed between the bottle and the ham with a similar urge for drinking and eating"; 49 in the margins of 1588 he changed the expression to "with an equal appetite for eating and drinking." There are literally hundreds of such modifications. I am willing to grant Montaigne his claim that they are not changes in the substance or sense of his original. Even when the essayist composes new material and inserts it in his old bottles, we may still be willing to conclude with him that he is adding, not changing. He seldom suppressed as much as a sentence from his original text. Let us return to his previously cited pronouncement of his general practice: "I add, but I do not correct. First, because when a man

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has mortgaged his work to the world, it seems to me that he has no further right to it. Let him speak better elsewhere, if he can, and not adulterate the work he has sold.... Second, because, as far as I am concerned, I fear to lose by the change: my understanding does not always go forward, it goes backward too. " 50 That is to say that to alter substantially his works of the past would be tantamount to falsifying his portrait of himself. The only explanation for certain peculiarities of his published text is precisely this unwillingness to alter something he had already penned. When the Protestants appropriated Etienne de La Boetie's Voluntary Servitude for their own purposes, Montaigne decided against publishing it in the Essays as he had originally intended. To mark his decision he appended a short paragraph to "Of Friendship" (I, 28) rather than_ reshaping his original chapter. 51 The resultant essay raises the reader's expectations concerning La Boetie's treatise, and then lets him down off-handedly. The structure of the essay "Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers" (II, 37) displays a similar indifference to the usual procedures of composition. In it, after twenty-six pages of text, Montaigne suddenly introduces a two-page dedication to his neighbor Madame de Duras, who had visited him while he was writing his chapter. He then completes his essay in a page and a half more. How simple, and how natural, it would have been for him to place his dedication in its normal place at the head of the chapter, especially as he had so little more to say before finishing. Apparently when Montaigne composed his first drafts, he simply sat down to write (or dictate) until he was interrupted, or felt disinclined to continue, and then resumed later, content to go on without much concern for what had preceded. In June 1586, working on "Of Physiognomy" (III, 12), he was interrupted by the outbreak of war in his neighborhood and then by the arrival of the plague, which forced him to leave his chateau with his family for a period of six months spent journeying in great distress. Upon returning in April 1587 to his tower, where presumably his unfinished chapter had lain all the time, he resumed with these words: "I was writing this about the time when a mighty load of our disturbances settled down for several months with all its weight right on me. " 52 He had written four pages, and had twenty-four more to go. When he resumed writing, not unnaturally he devoted the first eight pages to reflections inspired by his experiences during the interim, to condemnation of the viciousness

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of civil strife, and to praise of the valor of the peasants, a topic he had alluded to often before, but never with such conviction. He did not discard the barely begun chapter, nor did he wait to finish it before getting off his chest his most recent preoccupations; he simply went on almost as if nothing had occurred and eventually got around to making the points that had preoccupied him nine months earlier. 53 We have reason to believe that at every period of composition Montaigne followed these practices of retaining what was there, but modifying it. The late material in the margins of the Bordeaux copy amounts to almost one fourth of the whole Essays and deserves special study for what it can tell us about how he wrote. Readers of the Essays are likely to receive the impression that the marginal material concentrates on the self-portrait and the person of their author. We overlook the surprising fact, pointed out by Etienne Lablenie, 54 that almost sixty percent55 of the marginal additions consist primarily of material lifted from whatever work Montaigne was reading at the moment. A significant number are Latin quotations, both prose and poetry. What determined Montaigne to insert new material on a page? It is natural to imagine him musing in repose, suddenly inspired by an appealing idea and rushing to his copy of the Essays to note his new insight in their margins, but this does not appear to be what actually happened most often. Nor is it likely that he reread his book chapter by chapter in the intention of enriching each essay with new material, although something like that may have happened at the point when enough marginalia had accumulated to make him consider preparation for publication. 56 Examination of the additions suggests instead that the most plausible scene would feature Montaigne reading a favorite author alone in his tower library, being struck by a particular passage, and reaching for his copy of the Essays to find the proper place to incorporate its content in his own work. Finding that location could be difficult, and he sometimes changed his mind about the right home for a sentence, transferring several from their original seat to another page. 57 In not a few instances his reading permitted him to rectify an imprecision in his first text. So the name "Xenocrates" replaces the vaguer term "philosophy." 58 Paradoxically, the marginal glosses contain both some of the most highly personal and some of the most highly derivative material.

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A small number of marginal additions show signs of careful composition. At the end of "Of Practice" (II, 6), Montaigne managed to fit a two-and-a-half page excursus on his self-portrait into the margins of one page. His handwriting is very small and orderly as it covers three margins fully, with very few editorial second thoughts. I suspect that he wrote his text out in advance and then copied it with great care into the cramped space available. The little room left over allowed him to insert a few new sentences to his prepared text, for he was totally incapable of leaving well enough alone (thank goodness!). The total text was longer than some of his earliest chapters. Several other long passages of a similar nature exist. 59 It is my suspicion that Montaigne adopted this procedure only at the point where he began seriously considering republication. As I examine the photocopy of the Bordeaux text, I notice three principal categories of passages: the long orderly ones just mentioned; the long disorderly ones, editors' horrors, where Montaigne crosses out, rewrites, restores, reorders; and finally, the shorter passages. In these, it is not unusual for him to write out sentences a and b, and then cross them both out to rewrite in the order b, a. 60 My general impression is that Montaigne either wrote quickly and easily or stopped and started endlessly in passages where his topic apparently discomfitted him, as in three cases where he discusses how his book depends on material taken from other books. 61 It happened not infrequently that he started scribbling out his supplement in a margin already partly filled by another insertion from an earlier time. In such a case he was naturally under a certain pressure to complete his statement in the space available. Otherwise, constrained for space, he moved to another blank spot, say at the top or the bottom of the page, or even on the next page, and devised a system of marks to indicate where he had left off and where he resumed. 62 There are many, many examples of his doing just this. The conditions of writing in a margin necessarily nudged him toward making his insertions brief. If they are to be impressive, then, they must be particularly dense. In fact, density of subject matter is a characteristic of the Essays as a whole, but especially of the marginal passages in question. The style of these passages is frequently choppy to the point of obscurity. Writing an insertion is apparently not quite the same as writing a text from scratch; in most cases the principal idea has

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already been expressed in the main text, and the addition may seek particularly concise or pithy re-expressions or elaborations of the same material. What is often lacking is the progressive development of an idea; instead we find a series of isolated, autonomous formulae without junctures or articulations. Once the sentence or sentences have taken up the space of the margin there is no room left to add, modify, or reorder the text in the interests of continuity. This composition by cloisonne is indeed typical of the Essays in general, of its paragraphs, even of whole chapters; nonetheless, I have the distinct impression that it is more prevalent in the C stratum and that it stems in part from the realities of composing in a margin. The net result was to preserve his thought more nearly in the disorderly form in which it first occurred, exactly what he intended his Essays to do. Perhaps this is one of the factors contributing to the common feeling that these passages are particularly impressive. Another serious consequence of composition by strata is what Montaigne calls the "transposition of chronology," 63 which concerns me particularly, for it violates one of the principles of the self-portrait, namely, that each age, indeed each moment, has its own portrait. A portrait of a bald fifty-year old cannot be superimposed on the portrait of a curly-haired adolescent without doing damage to the likeness, although they may be placed side by side. By mixing his thoughts from different periods indistinguishably, Montaigne falsifies his portrait; and the fact that he lets himself do so indicates that in the long run his essays are centered on the topics they discuss more than on the portrait of his state of mind at a particular moment. 64 Montaigne did not expect his readers to be aware of his insertions, which were to take their place unobserved alongside the older material. Such is not the case in modern editions of the Essays, largely because of the influence of two epoch-making editions, those of Fortunat Strowski and Pierre Villey. 65 By a complex scholarly apparatus Strowski's Municipal Edition made it possible for the first time to see the different layers of composition of each page of the Essays. Since then all modern editors have adopted some printing device designed to differentiate the strata of composition. Most frequently the letter A designates sentences that first appeared in 1580 or 158~; the letter B, material published in 1588; and the letter C, additions made by Montaigne in the margins of his copy.

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This practice is enormously helpful for scholars, permitting the serious reader to compare the style and the content of the different layers of composition; and I would not be without a text with the indicators; but after years of reading Montaigne I have become increasingly aware how obtrusive those little letters can be and how they can distort our experience of reading the essays. Modern editions sacrifice the uninterrupted flow of the text's thought, one of the essential characteristics that Montaigne sought to capture in the new literary form he created. It is quite common to encounter sentences such as: "Aif we want to believe Pliny cand Herodotus, Athere are species of men in certain places who have very little resemblance to our kind. " 66 There is simply no way to read this without the impression that Herodotus is an intruder. Those superscripts produce a slight hiccough in the rhythm of our reading that cannot be avoided. There is a second way in which the presence of the strata indicators distort our reading of the Essays. They tend to enhance the value of the latest additions. It is only natural for the reader to assume that the last words of a great artist or thinker are his best and wisest, that they display greater mastery or maturity than his earlier words. After all, if he appended them, it must have been because he himself felt a certain dissatisfaction with the text in its earlier state. Surely the last symphonies of Hayden or Mozart are superior to works of the middle years. I am not convinced that such thinking is any more valid for the Essays than for the music in question. In this book, I will follow Montaigne's lead and not clutter the text with strata indicators except in the rare instances where we are dealing with matters in which chronological aspects seem significant. There will be times when it is important to catch Montaigne in his original words, rather than their later amended form; in such cases I will give the earliest text. For the curious, strata indicators will be given in the backnotes. This review of some of the principles of the essay genre shows that Montaigne consistently chose to write about himself as an adjunct of writing about some external topic, that he planned the course of his individual chapters in a general way before actually writing, that he consciously permitted himself to digress and to append, that he cared about how he began his chapters, but was often indifferent about how he ended them, that he revised in detail,

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that he was determined to reproduce on paper the irregular rhythms of thought, that he scorned all the rules of regular or orderly composition. The chapters of the 1580 essays display a remarkable variety in conception. Some are long; some are tiny; one is big enough to be a book in itself, and has been so published both in English and in French. 67 Some are furiously digressive; some are rather tightly structured. Some are intensely personal, with self-portraiture making up ninety percent of the content. The majority reveal much about their author, but only indirectly. The chapters of Book Three present a more uniform picture. Montaigne made them longer on the whole, more personal on the whole, and more ambling in their structure. Yet even among these there is enough variety of tone and content to make it difficult to say "In chapter y Montaigne does very much what he had done in chapter x." One tone is appropriate for approaching the subject of repentance; another is fitting for vanity. Remarkably enough, writing in an apparently off-hand way, Montaigne succeeded in creating chapters that do not all resemble one another; not a few display distinct personalities of their own as they reveal the mind that composed them.

v Beginnings "IN THE YEAR of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out. If the fates permit he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquillity, and leisure. " 1 So runs the inscription in Latin painted on the wall of the small annex to Montaigne's library commemorating somewhat officiously his retirement from public life. The previous year he had sought promotion to either of two higher judiciary chambers in Bordeaux and had been rejected on the grounds that close relatives of his wife held seats in both. Rather than seek a royal dispensation, which would in all likelihood have been routinely granted, he sold his seat to Florimond de Raemond, took a lengthy voyage to Paris to publish various minor works of his deceased friend Etienne de La Boetie, and returned to his home in the Perigord countryside and a life of leisure in retirement. Perhaps he intended only to study in an effortless way in his retirement, but I suspect that he had other vaguely formulated aspirations to publish something more clearly his own, though he was not quite sure what. He may have toyed with the idea of writing on historical subjects-at least some of his earliest chapters are compatible with such a hypothesis. He started writing almost immediately after his retirement and nine years later published the first edition of his Essays, two books of fifty-seven and thirty-seven chapters each, varying in length from less than a page to 248 pages. French literary terminology classifies Montaigne as a moraliste, a term commonplace in French criticism, but likely to be unknown in English circles. It has quite different connotations from its English analogue "moralist." In English, according to Webster, the term

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has three meanings: "one who leads a moral life," "a teacher or student of morals," or "one concerned with regulating the morals of others." The last meaning, a moral traffic-director, seems the most prevalent in English. In French, the term moraliste refers to a man of letters concerned with the study of human nature in the interests of understanding human conduct, perhaps improving it. The moralistes are not quite psychologists, not quite theologians, not quite philosophers, but usually a blend of all three, often with one aspect predominating. They are all writers, but the literary forms they choose vary considerably; they often move back and forth over the boundary that divides fiction from non-fiction. La Rochefoucauld writes maxims; La Fontaine writes fables or tales; Rousseau composes discourses, novels, dramatized tracts on education, and philosophical treatises; Voltaire expresses himself in almost any genre: novels, dramas, history, philosophical dictionaries, pamphlets, poems, and what have you; Diderot experiments with various forms-novels, dramas, dialogues, satires, essays; Sartre's oeuvre ranges from the heaviest of philosophical treatises to plays about respectable prostitutes, and includes novels, essays, literary criticism, political diatribe, as well as autobiography; Camus alternates between works of non-fiction and works of fiction incorporating many of the same ideas. With the exception of Sartre and Rousseau, none of these men writes works of systematic philosophy. All of them share the belief that understanding human nature will help to direct, perhaps reform, human conduct. The list of moralistes that I have given includes many of the most glorious names of French literature, which has always had a high degree of intellectual content. No nation in modern Europe has produced so many moralistes; in fact, they seem to be a product indigenous to French soil. In English literature one thinks of Swift and perhaps Shaw, both Irish; then maybe Pope and Johnson. In German literature Nietzsche comes to mind-he always admired French civilization and detested Teutonic culture. Perhaps we would wish to include Goethe among the moralistes. But no one seems to do this sort of thing as well as the French. The founder of this distinguished line uncontestably is Montaigne; he became immediately a classic in his own country, and no educated Frenchman has been able to escape his influence. His own account of his decision to take up writing lays the blame at the door of idleness. The life of a country gentleman in his day

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was in fact rather uneventful, occupied largely with matters of domestic management, which did not stir his interest. His estate was large and included some hundred men2 working his lands and vineyards, but he preferred to leave the details of administration to his stewards. 3 Intellectual company was totally lacking, for most of his neighbors did not understand the Latin of their paternoster and French even less {they spoke the Perigordin dialect). 4 When he ran out of company, feeling at loose ends, he could have recourse to his books, in the library of his tower, where all the Essays were composed. 5 His books,6 ranged on five layers of shelves in the central round room of the tower, were numerous; he estimates a thousand volumes 7 (almost surely an exaggeration; Montaigne was not good at figures) and accurately claims that it is a fine library for a village. 8 He read in short doses-never more than an hour at a time, he says (with exceptions, as when he read Tacitus through rapidly). 9 He shares with us his life in his tower, which he describes almost poetically as a haven for the self. There I leaf through now one book, now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments. One moment I muse, another moment I set down and [Frame: or] dictate, walking back and forth, these fancies of mine that you see here .... In my library I spend most of the days of my life, and most of the hours of the day. I am never there at night.... Every place of retirement requires a place to walk. My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it. Those who study without a book are all in the same boat. The shape of my library is round .... It offers rich and free views in three directions, and sixteen paces of free space in diameter. [Did Montai'gne count them in order to give an accurate measure in this passage?] In winter I am not there so continually; ... There is my throne. I try to make my authority over it absolute, and to withdraw this one corner from all society, conjugal, filial [Montaigne had a daughter, but no son], and civil. Everywhere else I have only a verbal authority, essentially divided. Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide! 10

Two expressions in this account of his give us pause. That he should characterize his activity as "to study without books" implies more intensive effort in his thinking than he will usually admit to. We know full well that he is somewhat misleading when he implies that he composes without books, for he relied on them as a stimulus

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to fashion and refashion his own book. More difficult to interpret is Montaigne's use of the verb "dictate," which in his day could mean simply "to dictate to a scribe," as it means nowadays, or "to compose a work (usually in verse)." Montaigne uses the word only in the first meaning in his Essays.U When he writes that he "registers and dictates, walking back and forth,'' he seems to be sending out contradictory signals, for one verb implies he is alone and the other implies he has a secretary; one is compatible with pacing back and forth and the other is not. The fact that he regards his tower as a retreat has led some scholars to assume that he would not have tolerated the presence of a secretary there. 12 Did he, or did he not dictate his Essays! External evidence is slim, and again ambiguous; the marginalia, being in his handwriting, could not have been dictated, except for the two or three places where he actually did dictate to Mile de Gournay as she inscribed his words in the margins of his book.n In 1580, Montaigne informs us of several essays that he had composed but had neglected to rewrite 14 after they had been stolen by "a valet who served me by writing them under me [Frame: at my dictation]." 15 This last statement would convince me that the essays were dictated but for the fact that Montaigne confides elsewhere. that he writes his letters himself, being unable to find anyone capable of following his rapid dictation. 16 Even in Book Three he uses the word "redicter" to describe writing new essays. 17 Conceivably we will never know with certainty whether or not he relied on a scribe. Did he dictate the many passages where he is following his source word for word, or did he copy them out by hand himself? How he created would make a difference, for I am convinced that something composed out loud will have a different sound from something written, even if it is tidied up by a little editing. Montaigne's style abounds with mannerisms that belong to the spoken word more than to written texts. I personally believe that parts of the 1580 material were dictated, other parts almost as surely not dictated. It is difficult to imagine him dictating the paragraphs later intercalated in Books One and Two. It is possible that his practice changed over the years, that he began working by dictating to a secretary under him, but that with time and age he preferred to work alone in his tower. Montaigne had no clear idea of his literary goals when he started writing; it was only gradually that the moraliste aspect of his essays began to take precedence among the several voices of the apprentice

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essayist. The practice of self-portraiture seems to have grown slowly; the realization that this was what he wanted to do may have been sudden. Using the meager clues available, we can trace the process leading up to this realization. To do so we must rely on the findings of Pierre Villey. With awesome scholarship and rigorous logic he sought to date the ninety-four chapters of Books One and Two (which were not published in the order in which they were composed). Using Villey's dates, we can now read them in more or less chronological sequence. With varying degrees of certainty, Villey dates the composition of a large group of forty chapters in the first years after Montaigne's retirement, 1572-1574. 18 A smaller group, five essays in all, appears to be slightly later than this first group, perhaps 1573-1574. 19 Three essays centered on skeptical ideas are dated around 1576.20 Twenty-nine essays can be dated in the period 1578-1580,21 and two more just before publication: 1579-1580. 22 This leaves fourteen for which no evidence exists. On the basis of his discoveries Villey elaborated a theory of how the essays evolved in thought, in form, and in purpose. His theory of evolution has been the subject of some debate and criticism among scholars. No one denies that changes took place, but there is disagreement over how radical they were, and how closely they correspond to the fairly linear progression formulated by Villey, from impersonal chapters, stressing bizarre or unusual aspects of human life, to the highly personal chapters, stressing the more universal aspects. Villey's characterization of the early chapters as impersonal may be something of an exaggeration, as Raymond C. La Charite has demonstrated. 23 For even in his first efforts Montaigne made himself present in small ways, mentioning what he has been reading, or a recent conversation, or an event that impressed him-above all, giving vent to his opinions, approving or disapproving of a policy, preferring ancient practice to modern. Still, the persona he adopts does not have a rich individuality; instead, in the early chapters we meet a public, literary man, a man of worldly experience and judgment, reflecting on history, on human conduct, and on human psychology. What he reveals about himself, such as his age, comes as incidental information. To illustrate this first style, I will use "A Trait of Certain Ambassadors" (I, 17), less than two pages long. Its general topic is whether an ambassador should doctor his report in a way pleasing

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to his sovereign, or present the disagreeable truth. As I am concerned with the persona of the author, I will cite only those sentences in which Montaigne speaks of himself. In order always to be learning something by communication with others (which is one of the finest schools there can be), I observe in my travels this practice: I always steer those I talk with back to subjects they know best.... in the reading of history, which is everybody's business, I make it a habit to consider who are the authors. If they are people who have no other profession than letters, I learn mainly their style and language; if they are doctors, I believe them most readily in what they tell us about the temperature of the air, the health and constitution of princes and wounds and maladies; ... For this reason, what I should have passed over in another without stopping, I noticed and considered in the history of the Seigneur de Langey, a very wise man in such matters. [Here follows a story of an ambassador submitting an incomplete report to the King of France.] Now I found it very strange that it should be in the power of an ambassador to make his choice of the information that he should give his master. . . . It seems to me that the function of a servant is to represent things faithfully .... For to alter the truth or to hide it ... such conduct seems to me proper for him who gives the law, not for him who receives it; . . . However this may be, I should not like to be served in this way, in my little doings. 24

Montaigne presents himself as a penetrating reader, exercising his judgment on both the author and his narrative. Fourteen firstperson pronoun forms adorn this less than world-shaking declaration. In the last analysis, the exercise is purely literary, as the final sentence admits. Montaigne, who is not an ambassador, is talking of things foreign to his manner of living, his "little doings." We have a particularly interesting demonstration of how far he was from self-portraiture in the opening of "Of Liars" (I, 9}, which I quote in its original version. "There is no man who has less business talking about memory than me. For I recognize almost no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is one in the world so monstrously deficient. All my other faculties are low and common; but in this one I think I am singular and very rare, and thereby worthy of gaining a name and reputation. I could tell some marvelous tales about it, but for the time being it is better to follow my theme." 25 Here he commences his chapter on a personal note that invites him to continue with some tales about his memory, as in fact he does

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at some length in "On Presumption" {II, 17); instead he lets the need to keep to the theme of his title prevail over the chance to continue speaking of himself, and refuses to indulge in self-disclosure. In the later versions he cannot resist the invitation to speak of himself and adds nearly two full pages on his forgetfulness. If we look at the subject matter in the lesser chapters from this period, we find Montaigne searching for his topic and his voice, treating briefly a bouquet of diverse matters, sometimes historical, sometimes psychological, sometimes ethical, sometimes military, sometimes diplomatic. A few significant chapters deal with questions appropriate for a moraliste, notably death. The moraliste will gradually crowd out the historian, the soldier, the courtier, and the diplomat in order to come to center stage, where he will soon engage in dialogue with a new-comer, the self-portraitist. Among those early essays that "smell a bit foreign" 26 one could list "Of Smells" {I, 55). Here is the 1580 text in its entirety. 27 It is said of some, as of Alexander the Great, that their sweat emitted a sweet odor, owing to some rare and extraordinary constitution of theirs, of which Plutarch and others seek the cause. But the common make-up of bodies is the opposite, and the best condition they may have is to be free of smell. The sweetness even of the purest breath has nothing more excellent about it than to be without any odor that offends us, as is that of very healthy children. That is why, says Plautus, A woman smells good when she does not smell. The most perfect smell for a woman is to smell of nothing. And perfumes are rightly considered suspicious in those who use them, and thought to be used to cover up some natural defect in that quarter. Whence arise these nice saying of the ancient poets: To smell good is to stink: You laugh at us because we do not smell. I'd rather smell of nothing than smell sweet. And elsewhere: Men who smell always sweet, Posthumus, don't smell good.

This brief compilation adheres to one point only, illustrated by facts from Plutarch as well as three Latin verse citations, one from Plautus, who is named, and two from Martial, who is not. It contains not one allusion to Montaigne, even though the essayist counted

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himself among those who had no body odor. 28 He did not disdain this chapter, but quadrupled its length with later additions, none directly related to the 1580 material. I would like to quote what he saw fit to add in 1588 to illustrate the very different ways of composing for the artist accomplished in self-portraiture. (I will omit the more bookish and less interesting C material.) However, I like very much to be surrounded with good smells, and hate bad ones beyond measure, and detect them from further off than anyone else: My scent will sooner be aware Where goat-smells, Polypus, in hairy arm-pits lurk, Than keen hounds scent a wild boar's lair. Whatever the odor is, it is a marvel how it clings to me and how apt my skin is to imbibe it. He who complains of nature that she has left man without an instrument to convey smells to his nose is wrong, for they convey themselves. But in my particular case my mustache, which is thick, performs that service. If I bring my gloves or my handkerchief near it, the smell will stay there a whole day. It betrays the place I come from. The close kisses of youth, savory, greedy, and sticky, once used to adhere to it and stay there for several hours after. And yet for all that, I find myself little subject to epidemics, which are caught by communication and bred by the contagion of the air; and I have escaped those of my time, of which there have been many sorts in our cities and our armies. The doctors might, I believe, derive more use from odors than they do; for I have often noticed that they make a change in me and work upon my spirits according to their properties; which makes me approve of the idea that the use of incense and perfumes in churches, so ancient and widespread in all nations and religions, was intended to delight us and arouse and purify our senses to make us more fit for contemplation. The principal care I take in my lodgings is to avoid heavy, stinking air. Those beautiful cities Venice and Paris weaken my fondness for them by the acrid smell of the marshes of the one and the mud of the other. 29

One Latin citation (from Horace) and thirteen sentences, all but one referring in one way or another to the essayist; nine conveying peculiarities of his make-up, three registering personal opinions. Twenty-three occurrences of forms of the first person singular pronoun. Hardly a subject on which he does not express endorsement or disfavor in one form or another: "I like very much," "I hate,"

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"he who complains ... is wrong," "I find myself little subject to ... ," "doctors might derive more use ... ," "which makes me approve of the idea that ... ," "those beautiful cities weaken my fondness for them.... " Although everything he says is germane to his topic, the least of the five senses, how he skips around! Underarm odor-his remarkable sensitivity-clinging smells-his mustache-kisses-his immunity to epidemics-some original advice to doctors (as yet to be followed)-incense-religion and the sense of smell-his choice of taverns-two distant cities noted for their stench. The lurching from topic to topic is not as aberrant as may seem. The comments on medicine and incense share the general notion that our physical sensations may sway our mental state imperceptibly. The taverns and the stinking mud of Paris both belong to travel reminiscences. Montaigne could easily have linked them with a connective clause such as "in my journeys, the worst air I have encountered" or "the same consideration has dampened my love for two cities"; but he is disinclined to such orderly writing. His discourse is not limited to purely personal detail; he manages simultaneously to allude lightly to more general considerations: smells affect humans strongly, so much so that he would propose a school of medicine using odors to promote cures; and he allies himself with Catholic religious practice in the use of incense as an aid to raise our souls to contemplation. Above all, his vigor impresses us, his delights, his hates, how he marvels at smells, how he describes kisses in succulent terms. In what is almost certainly the last chapter composed in 1580, Montaigne says that he writes "only when pressed by too unnerving an idleness. " 30 Some eight years earlier he had composed (or dictated?) a short chapter entitled "Of Idleness" (I, 8) in which he attributed his literary occupations to the same cause. I shall quote this short chapter in the entirety of its original version, as it gives us the earliest depiction of his own view of himself as a writer. It has been suggested convincingly that Montaigne may even have thought of these words as a preface to his future publication. If so, he intended from the start to publish. Just as we see that idle lands, if rich and fertile, do not cease teaming with a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless weeds, and that to set them to work we must subject them and sow them with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce mere shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good

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and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not produce in this agitation: Like a sick man's dreams, They form vain visions. The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere. Lately when I retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life I have left in rest and seclusion, it seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time. But I findEver idle hours breed diverse thoughts. -that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself. 31

This is a bravura piece of writing involving three images-uncultivated fields, barren women, and runaway horses-two of them extended, all representing Montaigne's state of mind, all handled quite surely and with wit. The indefatigable Villey has found the agricultural image in Pierre Messie's Divers Lessons (in a section with the same title) and more significantly the image of women's fertility in a work of Plutarch's translated by Etienne de La Boetie and published by Montaigne himself,32 a fact that in no way reduces the skill with which the essayist makes use of the image. He recalls his title and fixes the theme in his reader's mind by using the word "idle" in the opening line. With enough circumstantial detail Montaigne makes the point of his first image: that to be of use, fallow lands need cultivation, sowing, and subjection. Then he repeats his opening words "as we see that" to underline the parallel between it and the new image about to be given. At a certain point the reader is jolted as he realizes what the essayist is saying, that like

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fields, women must be plowed and sown with another seed (the translation "made fertile" misses the force of the French embesoigner, "given the business"). This indirect allusion to sexual intercourse in polite terms gives rise to a smile, all deftly and tastefully brought on. The parallel between ladies and prairies is not perfect; for women do not, to my knowledge, produce "shapeless masses and lumps of flesh" on their own. Montaigne lifted this "fact" from Plutarch; perhaps we can overlook its biological imprecision in order to appreciate the humorous usage he put it to. Having made his joke, Montaigne explains the purport of his similes rapidly to the point of obscurity: "so it is with minds." Without a "certain subject" (recalling the phrase "subject them with certain seeds" in the field image) they run astray in the fields (another recall) of the imagination. While still referring to his earlier images, Montaigne has, without letting his reader know it, introduced some terms of this third image, that of the runaway horse ("bridle," "disorder," and "field"). The blending is subtle, though it entails sacrificing total correspondence between the behavior of the mind and the behavior of the fields (or the women). Montaigne returns to the fertility simile with the word "produce" (used previously of women) and introduces the "mad or idle fancies" (the translator goes Montaigne one better by bringing in the word "idle") that are the weeds of his imagination and which now can be associated with agitation, a word inappropriate for fields, but right for horses. The Latin verse repeats the "fancies" {French: reverie) with its somnia. At this point Montaigne seems done with his similes and states his idea bluntly: a soul without direction loses itself. He then refers to his recent retirement and implies that he was deluded ("it seemed to me") in his hope that left to itself in idleness the mind would settle down. At this point the horse run amok appears explicitly for the first time, and the images get a trifle mixed, for the runaway horse keeps itself busy giving birth (the women, again). Its offspring, chimeras and monsters, lack order as the lumps of flesh lacked form. Then the thought takes a turn nowhere foreshadowed, as Montaigne decides to put the monsters on paper to contemplate their strangeness and ineptitude in order to shame his mind, a goal not particularly appropriate for any of the three images. The long preparation, delightful, witty, learned, subtly (if not perfectly) constructed, leads to a quick, apologetic statement that he has put his

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thoughts on paper. If Montaigne had carried his images to their logical conclusion, he would have said writing was tantamout to bridling the horse or cultivating the :field; but he sticks with the weeds and monsters, contemplating them. It is not that Montaigne is incapable of pursuing an image to its :fitting conclusion; but that at this point he felt a literary need to make his justification for his writing modest in tone. In later years he would say explicitly that writing essays did indeed have the effect of giving order and firmness to his mind, of bridling it and making it fruitful. But in "Of Idleness" he lacks the confidence to say this; in fact, he has had precious little experience with creating essays. This little chapter betrays in embryo form many of the traits of the mature Montaigne. Underneath the cascade of images, Montaigne is talking about himself much more than about his book. He does not describe its contents, or its usefulness, or its application to the reader; he describes the circumstances, both external and internal, that brought him to write. His ultimate subject, while not exactly a self-portrait, is his own frame of mind. From the outset, Montaigne believes that putting his thoughts-odd, disorderly, thoughts-in written form will allow him to see them better; and he expects all this to teach him, if no one else, some lesson, perhaps only his own foolishness. As to the style, it is highly structured, contary to Montaigne's wont. He is indeed a master of images, but rarely indulges in ones so extended or so complex as here (unless, as here, he is borrowing from a classical author, not infrequently Plutarch). In my analysis I have attempted to show some of the subtleties of effect and at the same time to intimate that these similes are not perfectly calculated, as they would be in a Descartes or a Racine. Montaigne is capable of a wide spectrum of styles; but this rhetorical, almost Ciceronian, compression of images and thought in carefully balanced succession is not home territory for him. I do not mean to denigrate this chapter-it is, after all, fun-nonetheless, it remains, as I have said, a bravura piece, a virtuosity. Montaigne created a truly original literary genre in the personal essay, but in doing so he also had classical antecedents on which to draw. Two writers in particular, Seneca and Plutarch, exercised profound influence on whatever he penned, and he acknowledged his debt generously and often. He links their names frequently and in important ways. When he takes up serious reading "by which

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I learn to arrange my humors and my ways, the books that serve me for this are Plutarch, since he exists in French, and Seneca. They both have this notable advantage for my humor, that the knowledge I seek is there treated in detached pieces that do not demand the obligation of long labor, of which I am incapable."33 The first edition of Plutarch's Moralia in Amyot's French translation appeared in 1572, a year after Montaigne went into retirement and began writing. The qualities Montaigne admires in Plutarch frequently turn out to be the ones he displayed in his own Essays, particularly the ancient historian's judicious mind and his brief literary form. One trait likely to displease many readers charmed Montaigne, namely, his predecessor's willingness to leave matters undecided: "How diversely he discourses on the same topic! How many times he presents us two or three contradictory causes for the same thing, and divers reasons, without choosing the one we should accept,"34 "and I see that he sometimes deliberately tells the same story in different ways, like Hannibal's judgment of the three best generals that ever lived: it is one way in the 'Life of Flaminius,' and another way in that of Pyrrhus. " 35 Besides this "doubting and ambiguous manner," 36 Montaigne delights in the ancient's digressive composition: "There are works of Plutarch's in which he forgets his theme, in which the treatment of his subject is found only incidentally, quite smothered in foreign matter. See his movements in 'The Daemon of Socrates.' Lord, what beauty there is in these lusty sallies and this variation, and more so the more casual and accidental they seem." 37 Subject matter, poetic images, digressive form, a doubting mentality, penetrating judgment, all these Plutarch contributed toward the formation of the essays. At some point after he had composed a certain number of chapters and was thinking seriously of publication, Montaigne decided to grace his own book with a short work by his friend Etienne de La Boetie. To introduce this opuscule, he composed a separate chapter entitled "Of Friendship" (I, 28), of special interest to us because it deals with a very personal topic, Montaigne's own experience of friendship. This chapter has become a locus classicus for the literary treatment of the subject which occupies so important a place in our lives and so small a place in modern literature. Sixteenth-century Humanists, taking their cue from the ancients, made a certain cult

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of high-minded friendship. 38 Montaigne would add to this literary tradition, bringing his own personal dimension. Without a doubt the deepest emotional experience in Montaigne's life was his all-too-brief friendship with Etienne de La Boetie, like him a counsellor in the Parlement of Bordeaux. 39 They had known each other for only four or five years when La Boetie died after an illness of nine days, during which his friend was at his side. La Boetie was slightly more than two years older than the future essayist, married, educated in the humanist tradition (that is to say, in the love of Latin and Greek letters), disposed to literary endeavors of several sorts, including love poems in French, personal poems or satires in Latin, translations from Greek, and political treatises in French. He was, above all, austerely moral, inspired with admiration for the great Stoic exemplars of virtue in antiquity. In one of his Latin poems, he takes Montaigne gently to task for his frivolity and womanizing, likening him to Alcibiades, a man incapable of mediocrity, but as liable to consecrate his capacities to trivial ends as good ones. We have accounts by both Montaigne and La Boetie of their friendship, and it is clear that they each regarded the relationship as quite special, a revival of the great experience so valued in ancient times. Shortly after his companion's death, Montaigne wrote a literary epistle addressed to his father giving a lengthy and moving account of the final days, including La Boetie's edifying deathbed counsels. 40 The picture of La Boetie in the Essays, written from memory ten, twenty, even twenty-five years or more after the event, shows some signs of idealization, as is only natural for emotion recollected in tranquillity. "Of Friendship" belongs to the early period of composition, and as is often true of this group, it is possible to detect a concise organization in the original version of this chapter. After a prologue on the Voluntary Servitude and the other literary works of La Boetie, Montaigne states that their friendship was based on such a rare combination of chances that it is lucky if one such occurs in three centuries. Friendship is the most perfect form of human association; then the chapter ticks off other forms, explaining why each is unable to reach the heights of friendship: association between fathers and sons, between brothers, between men and women in love, between husbands and wives, and lastly "that other licentious Greek love ... justly abhorred by our morality. " 41 He devotes not a little energy to proclaiming that other "common" friendships (the word occurs

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three times) have no bearing on the "perfect" union (the word occurs four times), which is a "mystery," "divine," and "sacred," "inconceivable to anyone who has not tasted friendship. " 42 Montaigne speaks without a hint of modesty here, to the point where he is all but insulting to his readers. "So I should like to talk to people who have experienced what I tell. But knowing how far from common usage such a friendship is, and how rare, I do not expect to find any good judge of it. " 43 The remainder of the chapter deals with what it means to have two souls so merged that no seam is visible at the juncture, a timehonored definition for either classical friendship or romantic love. Montaigne gets carried away and says that friends hold everything in common-"wills, thoughts, judgments, goods, wives [!), children, honor, and life." 44 He concludes his chapter with a very moving passage that life has been barren since La Boetie's death. "For in truth, if I compare all the rest of my life . . . with the four or five years which were granted me to enjoy the sweet company and society of that man, it is nothing but smoke, nothing but dark and dreary night. Since the day I lost him, Which I shall ever recall with pain, Ever with reverence-thus, Gods, did you ordain I drag on a weary life. And the very pleasures that come my way, instead of consoling me, redouble my grief for his loss. We went halves in everything; it seems to me that I am robbing him of his share.... " 45 When speaking of true friendship, in which he qualifies himself as expert,46 he writes, and thinks, in superlatives-always a risky approach if one wishes to be convincing. He employs a transcendental vocabulary that he uses nowhere else except when speaking of poetry or of divinity. As for his own experience, "If you press me to tell you why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed; beyond all my understanding, it seems, beyond what I can say about this, there was I know not what divine and fateful force that was the mediator of this union. It is not one particular consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand: it is I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, having seized my whole will, led it to plunge and lose itself in his." 47 At a loss for how to convey his profound sentiment, Montaigne borrows much of his vocabulary from the stock of poetic love: "this cannot be expressed,"

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"beyond all understanding," "I know not what fateful force," "this union," "my whole will," and "lose itself in his." He considered the phenomenon of unique friendship something mystical, beyond explanation, requiring a special terminology. When he writes of other profound human relationships, such as love, marriage, or parenthood, his tone remains judicious and unimpassioned. Since he is speaking of an intense experience in his past, Morttaigne might well have written an autobiographical account, but in fact the chapter as he originally published it offers little recital of the course of the friendship, other than the fact that Montaigne knew the Voluntary Servitude before meeting its author and that the two called each other "brother," both facts introduced only incidentally in extraneous contexts. Self-portraiture also is conspicuously lacking here. For that we must look elsewhere, as in this passage from 1588 with no autobigraphical content whatsoever, but with accomplished self-portrayal: "I am very capable of forming and maintaining rare and exquisite friendships, inasmuch as I grasp so hungrily at any acquaintances that suit my taste, I make advances and throw myself at them so avidly, that I hardly fail to attach myself and to make an impression wherever I land. I have often made happy proof of this. In ordinary friendships I am somewhat barren and cool, for my pace is not natural if it is not under full sail."48 True to his title, "Of Friendship," Montaigne handles his theme in general terms. We are likely to consider "Of Friendship" as if it were really "Of My Friendship," which it is not. Although it afforded Montaigne the occasion to write about himself personally, he made the literary decision to transform that occasion into a discourse centered on a general topic. "Of Friendship" in its original version oscillates somewhat disconcertingly between ecstatic exclamation and casuistic calculus. Though Montaigne avoids repeating the greatest cliche of ancient theory, that true friendship is founded on virtue, much of the chapter is rather arid disquisition. The magical passages of lyricism, excepting one or two cited above, belong to later additions. The accidents of chronology ruled that he would set about writing on what was for him the most personal topic of all before he decided to write about himself. The resultant essay contains some autobiography, some eulogy, some personal detail, and large doses of rather platitudinous abstractions.

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The opening pages provide further information about Montaigne's career as author. As I was considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him. He chooses the noblest spot, the middle of each wall, to put a picture labored over with all his skill, and the empty space all around it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness .... I do indeed go along with my painter in this second point, but I fall short in the first and better part; for my ability does not go far enough for me to dare to undertake a rich, polished picture, formed according to art. It has occurred to me to borrow one from Etienne de La Boetie, which will do honor to all the rest of this work .... He wrote it by way of essay in his early youth .... 49

Montaigne compares his little discourses to a form of painting here, though not to a self-portrait. When he calls them grotesques, he characterizes them with much the same vocabulary he had used in "Of Idleness": they are "monstrous" beings, notable for their "strangeness." Moreover, when he calls the center of the wall the noblest part, he obviously intends to situate La Boetie's work at the mid-point of his own book. Probably he did not at the time realize that he would eventually have enough material for two volumes. Michel Butor, starting from the singular fact that Montaigne chose carefully the position accorded La Boetie's work within Book One, has suggested that the entire project of writing essays grew out of the project to publish the Voluntary Servitude. As he went about trying to compose his grotesques, according to Butor's account, the undertaking ran away with itself, and suddenly Montaigne had a whole series of chapters on his hands. If this is true, and I doubt it, it is precisely the opposite of what Montaigne says; for as he describes it, he had the grotesques on hand before it occurred to him to grace them by the presence of La Boetie's Discourse. Patrick Henry more cautiously proposes that the essayist grouped his strongest chapters around the one dealing with his intimate friend. 50 The chronology is significant here. In 1570 Montaigne published all the minor works of La Boetie that he had on hand, but not the Voluntary Servitude, which he admired and cherished specially, perhaps because he did not have a copy of it. Shortly thereafter, he resolved to make it the keystone of a book of his own little works. But then La Boetie's youthful treatise was put to use by the Protestants, in part in 1574, then in 1576 in its entirety, in their cam-

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paign to prove that the individual had the right to resist a tyrant. Montaigne must have been horrified at the misappropriation of his beloved friend's work and at the company it had been forced to keep. He decided-for the second time, apparently-not to publish the pamphlet but to defend La Boetie from the accusation of sedition, as he did in pages he appended to "Of Friendship." There can be no question that writing essays was in part at least a compensation for the void left in Montaigne's life by his friend's death. At one point he claims that if he had had a good friend to address, he would have chosen to write epistles rather than essays, and that he suspects he would have been more successful, more confident in his undertaking.st Vain as the hope to find a true replacement for La Boetie may have been, the essays themselves seek to locate one. "If ... I knew of a man who was suited to me, truly I would go very far to find him; for the sweetness of harmonious and agreeable company cannot be bought too dearly, in my opinion. Oh, a friend! How true is that old saying, that the enjoyment of one is sweeter and more necessary than that of the elements of water and fire!" 52 It seems likely that La Boetie's death contributed also to the specific project of the self-portrait. That the Voluntary Servitude could have been used in a way to make La Boetie appear seditious was a travesty of the truth, an injustice of monstrous proportions. Perhaps during his friend's lifetime, but certainly after his death, Montaigne felt called upon more than once to defend him from slanders: "And if I had not supported with all my strength a friend that I lost, they would have torn him into a thousand contrasting appearances. I know well that I will leave behind no sponsor anywhere near as affectionate and understanding about me as I was about him. There is no one to whom I would be willing to entrust myself fully for a portrait; he alone enjoyed my true image, and carried it away. That is why I myself decipher myself so painstakingly."53 (Montaigne crossed out the last three sentences after 1588 in deference to Mlle de Gournay.) This is as blunt a statement as any he makes on why he writes about himself. Aghast at the calumny his friend's reputation endured, he could not help wondering if the same might not happen to him, and who would then survive to defend him. .The date of the next essay that concerns us is fairly clearly fixed at the end of 1573 or early 1574; hence it belongs to the handful

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that can be shown to have been written somewhat later than the first years. 54 "Of Practice" (II, 6) wins the hearts of all its readers with the inherent drama of its events and the charm Montaigne gives to their narration. 5 5 To appreciate fully its contribution to the portrayal of the self, it is worthwhile to backtrack for a minute and consider one of the major themes of concern to the moraliste of the first essays: death. In his first literary composition, he describes Etienne de La Boetie's stoic firmness of character as he faced death. He told his friend on his deathbed, "that up to then I had thought that God gave us no such great power against human calamities, and I had had difficulty believing what I had come across on this subject in the histories; but ... I praised God that this had been in a person by whom I was so loved and whom I loved so dearly; ... He interrupted me to beg me to use it in this way, and to show in action that the talks we had had together during our health had been not merely borne in our mouths but deeply engraved on heart and in soul, ... adding that this was the true object of our studies, and of philosophy." 56 Montaigne expressed much the same mentality some nine years later in essays entitled "That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die" (I, 20), "That Our Happiness Must Not Be Judged Until After Our Death" (I, 19), and "Of Judging of Death of Others" (II, 13). In the first he has this advice to offer about death, perhaps as much to himself as to anyone: "Let us learn to meet it steadfastly and to combat it. And to begin to strip it of its greatest advantage against us, let us take an entirely different way from the usual one. Let us rid it of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death .... And thereupon let us tense ourselves and make an effort. Amid feasting and gaiety let us ever keep in mind this refrain, the memory of our condition.... " 57 He denigrates unthinking nonchalance about death, recommends preparing for it by fixing our mental set, and culminates his chapter with a discourse by Nature in which she gives many arguments to convince us that death is not as frightful as we think at firstarguments of a wholly classical bent, taken from Lucretius and Seneca in large part. In the original version there is not a single allusion to Christian concepts of the afterlife or of preparation for death through prayer or seeking God's grace and remission of sins, or of the performance of Christian worship. This chapter contains one of the essayist's

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rare references to Jesus Christ, but in a context having nothing to do with religion; for he is cited as one example of the many great men who died before thirty-five. 58 In passing, Montaigne also remarks that "our religion has no surer human foundation than contempt for life." 59 To devote twenty-odd pages to preparing for death without once seriously invoking Christian doctrine or practice is eloquent evidence of the pagan nature of the moraliste as Montaigne conceived him and of the immense weight of humanist culture in his thought. He may make distinctions between the great schools of the past-Stoic, Epicurean, and Skeptic-but he shares the common assumptions of them all, that philosophy aims at the pursuit of happiness through exalting the mind above circumstances and withdrawing the individual into himself. He considers the Essays a strictly human work, and therefore all but banishes theology (in which he is hardly versed, he says60) from it. "That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die," which so pleased the nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve that he noted, "This is one of the most beautiful chapters, one which keeps its promise best,"61 expresses a variety of consolations to face death with, but stresses most the apprehensive Stoical position that the sage will prepare himself by steeling himself for the ultimate rendez-vous, which will be a sort of final examination in which the soul will prove its worth. 62 In later years, Montaigne's perspective is considerably altered. A splendid death, he then feels, would be an unfitting conclusion to his unspectacular life, and he wants no part of it. "It is not my idea to prove or display my fortitude in this act of dying .... I am content with a collected, calm, and solitary death, all my own, in keeping with my retired and private life. " 63 As for preparing for dying, he states unequivocally that "it is certain that to most people preparation for death has given more torment than the dying. " 64 "Of Practice" contributes significantly to our understanding of the shift in perspective in Montaigne's thoughts concerning death. The chapter opens with a statement about moral instruction: reasoning and education do not suffice to implant the lessons of philosophy in us; we must practice them, as certain philosophers did when they abandoned their riches, even blinded or castrated themselves in order to test their capacity to confront adversities. But in the case of dying, "which is the greatest task we have to perform,"65 we have no way to practice it in advance. Montaigne hopes that his own death will be painless and effortless, and that in general death

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"is not worth the trouble I take, the many preparations that I make, and all the many aids that I invoke and assemble to sustain the shock of it. But at all events, we can never be well enough prepared. " 66 All this is entirely in keeping with the mentality of "That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die." At this point he recounts an incident on horseback which I shall leave to him to tell. I went riding one day about a league from my house, which is situated at the very hub of all the turmoil of the civil wars of France. Thinking myself perfectly safe, and so near my home that I needed no better equipage, I took a very easy but not very strong horse. On my return when a sudden occasion came up for me to use this horse for a service to which it was not accustomed, one of my men, big and strong, riding a powerful work horse who had a desperately hard mouth and was moreover fresh and vigorous-this man, in order to show his daring and get ahead of his companions, spurred his horse at full speed up the path behind me, came down like a colossus on the little man and little horse, and hit us like a thunderbolt with all his strength and weight, sending us both head over heels. So that there lay the horse bowled over and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword, which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having no more motion or feeling than a log. It is the only swoon that I have experienced to this day. Those who were with me, after having tried all the means they could to bring me round, thinking me dead, took me in their arms and were carrying me with great difficulty to· my house, which was about half a French league from there. On the way, and after I had been taken for dead for more than two full hours, I began to move and breathe; for so great an abundance of blood had fallen into my stomach that nature had to revive its forces to discharge it. They set me up on my feet, where I threw up a whole bucketful of clots of pure blood, and several times on the way I had to do the same thing. In doing so I began to recover a little life, but it was bit by bit and over so long a stretch of time that my first feelings were much closer to death than to lifeY

His recital of the accident, though not absolutely clear in several details, is enlivened by humor as the events befall the weak and defenseless pair, two little creatures overthrown by a single colossus. The French verbs Jondre ("came down") and Joudroyer ("hit us like a thunderbolt") both emphasize the helplessness of the victims. He

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exonerates graciously from blame both his own mount and his assailant. Note that he also excuses himself for being momentarily on an ill-chosen mount. Taking the perspective of an outsider, Montaigne paints the pathetic situation of the beleaguered horse and man, both head over heels (in French, their feet to the skies). The horse is in bad shape, stunned (a word for humans), but the human, having been thrown farther, is in worse shape, insensate like a piece of wood-in fact, dead. Those with him (he does not say servants}, thinking him no longer alive, dragged him two long hours (not short hours), during which he was considered deceased. Nature aroused him, and he recovered a little life, though his first feelings were much closer to death than to life, whatever that could mean. In fact, of course, this whole description is largely invention, or at best second-hand knowledge, for Montaigne was totally consciousless during the two-hour trek (which may well have been shorter in duration, but exaggerated in the accounts given him later). Although the opening remarks of the essay carefully make clear that his experience was definitely not the same as dying, when he comes to describing the event, the choice of words in his narrative undermines his intellectual precision and transforms his accident into a genuine death. He does the same thing later as he describes his painful return to life: "and I felt so bad two or three nights after that I thought I was going to die all over again, but by a more painful death." 68 The translator is at a loss to render fully the playfulness of the terms remourir ("to re-die") and une mort plus vifve ("a livelier death"). Behind the playfulness, the words equate his accident with actually dying, and I suspect that in some deep-seated fashion that was Montaigne's belief. The most intriguing parts of his account, however, are his descriptions of his state of mind as he meandered in the no-man'sland between life and death. Montaigne's prose usually deals with ideas or anecdotes, and it is rarely that he turns his efforts to depicting feelings. (The lyric and elegiac tones present in "Of Friendship" are the most significant exception.) He acquits himself here very well. With great sensitivity he describes how his mental faculties had been dulled along with the physical, so that he was not conscious of any pain at all. In fact, modern biology recognizes that in extremis the nervous system simply stops recording pain, as the sensation can no longer lead to any constructive reaction. Lewis Thomas, an avid reader of the Essays, recalls Montaigne's accident

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as he recounts a war-time experience: "The worst accident I've ever seen was on Okinawa, in the early days of the invasion, when a jeep ran into a troop carrier and was crushed nearly flat. Inside were two MPs, trapped in bent steel, both mortally hurt, with only their heads and shoulders visible. We had a conversation while people with the right tools were prying them free. Sorry about the accident, they said. No, they said, they felt fine. Is everyone else okay, one of them said. Well, the other one said, no hurry now. And then they died. Pain is useful for avoidance, for getting away when there's time to get away, but when it is end game, and no way back, pain is likely to be turned off, and the mechanisms for this are wonderfully precise and quick." 69 At the time of the accident, Montaigne functioned in ways that departed from our normal self-possession: his fingers sought automatically to open his doublet; he was under the misimpression that he had suffered a head wound; he answered words addressed to him without full awareness of their import; he called for a horse for his wife without realizing what he was doing; he reached his seigneurial abode without recognizing it. Much of this information, obviously, was learned later, but appears in his narrative without this dimension of hindsight. He is concerned with a state where we act, but without fully willing our acts or even being fully aware of them. He lists a variety of activities analogous to his gestures at the time: the muscular convulsions of freshly killed bodies, the instinctive movement of our hands to break a fall, or the reach to scratch where we itch, and finally the conduct of the male sex organ, quite dissociated from movements of the will. In fact, he is peering into the "edges of the soul. " 70 His choice of words shows that this is alien territory for him; as one who is primarily concerned with self-possession rather than dissolution of the self, he commits several imprecisions. "Now these passions which touch only the rind of us cannot be called ours. To make them ours, the whole man must be involved; and the pains which the foot or the hand feel while we are asleep are not ours." 71 No statement could imply more clearly his assumption that an experience is made real only by our active awareness of it, by the mind's seizing it and examining it. But when we look at his words closely, we cannot help wondering what that pain is that the foot feels while we are asleep. I do not believe he is referring to a pain that we feel in our foot during a dream, for

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such a pain would be ours in some sense or other, and would not fit his argument. What are the pains he is referring to? How could they be felt? And whose would they be, if not ours? I think he means that a painful condition in the foot that we have felt all day long disappears once we go to sleep and is no longer part of us. But that is not what he says-he speaks of the pains that a foot or a hand feel in sleep; he makes a gaffe here, and his words taken literally make no sense; taken more generally, they mean that man can only be what he is conscious of being, a fundamental point in Montaigne's vision of human nature. He stresses three things about his dazed condition: that all his actions were performed without volition on his part; that his capacity to feel pain having been dulled along with his other capacities, the total impression of his condition was agreeable (at a loss for vocabulary he uses the word "sweet" four times in fifteen lines); and that he was only partially unconscious. Three times he indicates how he would explain his actions while he was semi-comatose; they stemmed from his senses only, without the presence of his self (his ''je"; just where was it?) It would seem that this consideration [for his wife] must have proceeded from a wide-awake soul; yet the fact is that I was not there at all. These were idle thoughts, in the clouds, set in motion by the sensations of the eyes and ears; they did not come from within me. I did not know, for all that, where I was coming from or where I was going, nor could I weigh and consider what I was asked. These are slight effects which the senses produce of themselves, as if by habit; what the soul contributed was in a dream touched very lightly, and merely licked and sprinkled, as it were, by the soft impression of the senses. 72

It is impossible to read this passage reflectively without admiring the artistry with which Montaigne conveys the insubstantiality of his experience; "empty [vains] thoughts," "in the clouds," "as in a dream," "lightly touched," "licked," "sprinkled [!] by the soft impression of the senses." He formulates this brilliant evocation by the stylistic device of accumulation, rather than by seeking le mot juste. He does the same thing frequently, as in the already cited passage on the kisses of youth. The crucial subject, his semi-consciousness, comes up twice, not once. It is as if the first time he looked at the event he had not

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gone deep enough into it (he was describing his pleasant state of consciousness on the road), so he came back to it a second time for another, deeper look {he recounts his involuntary actions upon arrival outside the chateau). We find Montaigne moving forward and backward, circling around his topic, examining this experience from different perspectives, then returning to his narrative-in short, the manner of proceeding typical of essaying a subject. He then resumes with the recital of his recovery, and arrives at the ultimate lesson that living, not dying, is painful. If the approaches of death are relatively painless, as is the moment of death always, what can we learn from analysis of this experience? Montaigne does not leap to the unconditional conclusion that all preparation for death is unnecessary and that dying is always easy, as that would be an oversimplification like all unconditional statements. What he does say is that "this recollection, which is strongly implanted on my soul, showing me the face and idea of death so true to nature, reconciles me to it somewhat. " 73 Writing this essay had the significant effect of shifting the emphasis in his thinking by giving added weight to one of the several ideas he entertained concerning death; it brought into particular prominence the fact that much dying is painless, even pleasant. This realization, bolstered by his own personal experience, grew to such importance in his mind that it eventually took precedence over traditional classical Stoicism. "Of Practice" occupies a unique place in Montaigne's career as essayist. It is the only chapter of the 107 to concern itself with selfstudy exclusively. Although the essay is intensely personal, selfportraiture is absent as a goal. Self-study is obviously an important topic for Montaigne. No valid self-portrait could be composed without having its foundations in self-knowledge, which in turn is founded on self-study. Here, and here alone, he studies himself with no apparent awareness of any intent to portray himself. The final sentence contains a clear statement of what he is doing: "Now as Pliny says, each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up. What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me." 74 "Of Practice" is the most significant half-way house I can see in the evolution from the early moraliste to the later portraitist. Whether he knew it or not, this chapter had a signal in-

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fluence on him. For the first time he was writing exclusively about himself. And it turned out to be a highly rewarding experience. We can watch his thinking developing and becoming more profound as he writes, specifically in his growing awareness of the moral to be drawn from his accident. He begins hesitantly about practicing death: "It seems to me, however, that there is a certain way of familiarizing ourselves with death and trying it out to some extent"; 75 then, as he finishes the first half of his account, he states more confidently, ~·I believe certainly that this is the same state in which people find themselves ... in the agony of death"; 76 finally, he claims with absolute conviction "Now I have no doubt, now that I have tried this out by experience, that I judged this matter rightly all along. " 77 His expression "now that I have tried this out [French: essaye] by experience" deserves comment. One may wonder why he writes "now [a present] that I have tried this out" when his experience is four years old. The answer, I believe, lies in the intensity of mental effort in his examination of his accident. Self-study, as Montaigne practices it, involves a very deep, searching scrutiny of his experience. Montaigne's accident could hardly be classified as an everyday experience, no matter how much he may refer to it as "so trivial an event. " 78 As a tyro at self-study, he not unnaturally chooses a remarkable experience to scrutinize. Later, with more practice, he will realize that profound understandings can be drawn from the simplest ingredients of life, provided one knows what to look for. Knowing what to look for is not an easy matter. After all, most human beings have a brush with death in one form or another in their lives; but how many succeed in profiting from it in the way Montaigne did? His study was not casual, and only the fullest immersion in his experience yielded fruit. The grace of his narrative conceals from us how intensely he is thinking. Two slight anomalies in his words reveal the profundity of his concentration: "I was letting myself slip away so gently, so softly and easily, that I scarcely feel that any action was as pleasant as that one" 79 and "I could not weigh and consider what I was asked: these are slight effects that the senses produce of themselves. " 80 Did you notice what happened? In each case, speaking of an experience in the past, the essayist shifted, slightly inappropriately, into the present tense-evidence of how intimately he was reliving the moments, how "present" they were for him.

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One of the secrets of being a successful essayist is knowing how to move from purely personal matters to matters of more universal interest. Tell me about your recent broken leg, or about the only time in your life you lost consciousness, and my reaction, stifled if I am being polite, will be "Ho hum." Tell me about the act of dying and I am all ears. So we see that Montaigne took what could have been truly boring subject matter and made it reading that has delighted its audience for four centures now. In doing so, he exercised enormous artistic skill, more than he was ever aware of. He wrote that this was the only time in his life that he had lost consciousness. But in this chapter he mentions three times a much more ordinary experience that is not entirely dissimilar, namely, going to sleep. The analogy between dying and sleeping is far from perfect and perhaps far from obvious. I often ask students if they can think of experiences that resemble dying. They almost never name going to sleep; and when I mention it, their response is to contest the analogy, usually on the grounds that consciousness is not wholly extinguished in sleep. In fact the analogy is not a bad one, but most people are so accustomed to losing all touch with reality every night that they fail to examine this weird phenomenon closely. Literature tends to neglect the commonplace until an original mind reveals its richness. Proust has demonstrated at considerable length that going to sleep is an experience well worth our consideration. Montaigne sees from the start that the analogy between sleep and death is justifiable. But he .lets it go in order to reflect on a less ordinary experience, a heart attack. Three pages later, he returns to sleep, this time describing it somewhat: "it was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, . . . in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves be carried off into §leep."81 On the third occasion, one page later, going to sleep is given a careful, even more extended description, one of the subtler passages of psychological depiction as Montaigne portrays a rather complex experience of semi-voluntary speech (not dying). Conceivably he is thinking of dozing off during an after-dinner conversation. "So it happens to us in the early stages of sleep, before it has seized us completely, to sense as in a dream what is happening around us, and to follow voices with a blurred and uncertain hearing which seems to touch on only the edges of the soul; and following the last words spoken to us, we make answers that are more random

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than sensible. " 82 More than fifteen years later, by now a highly practiced adept at self-study, Montaigne recognized the rich dimensions in a topic he had handled largely tangentially, and inserted new material, giving the analogy of sleep to death its most detailed treatment: "How easily we pass from waking to sleeping! With how little sense of loss we lose consciousness of the light and of ourselves! Perhaps the faculty of sleep, which deprives us of all action and all feeling, might seem useless and contrary to nature, were it not that thereby Nature teaches us that she has made us for dying and living alike, and from the start of life presents to us the eternal state that she reserves for us after we die, to accustom us to it and take away our fear of it. " 83 In this rather minor example, we can see a characteristic development in Montaigne's powers of selfstudy and a typical movement of the mind as it "essays" a topic. A subject related indirectly to the main theme surfaces as if at random, is mentioned, and then is abandoned as the mind continues exploring its principal topic; the subject re-emerges for a second look; finally, as Montaigne's judgment continues circling his topic, sleep appears for the third time and is given a fresh, more perspicacious examination. Even this is not sufficient, for there is more to say as, many years later, he reduces it to its fundamental element-loss of awareness and actions-and places it in a larger, more philosophical context. Interestingly enough, this apparently rambling method of inquiry produces results, sometimes rather unexpected ones that take the author by surprise. In the course of his account, Montaigne claims that it had "always"84 been his opinion, even against Etienne de La Boetie, that people in death agonies were not really suffering. This would mean that before his friend's death in 1563 he had been aware of this significant fact, even argued over it. And in 1569, when he had the fall from the horse, he had a profound personal experience capable of confirming his belief. Nonetheless, two or three years later we find him writing chapters like "That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die" in which he expresses his apprehension at the thought of dying. The question naturally arises: if he had already had the accident, why did he not take its lesson more to heart? Why did he write essays about death, neglecting to give proper weight to the clear meaning of his personal experience? He could easily have seen the import of the event; for even before it occurred, he had been aware of the diminished sensibilities of the

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moribund. The answer to these questions, I would say, lies in the fact that it was the effort of writing, of converting his experience into an essay, that changed Montaigne's mind, or at least gave him the confidence to rely on his own experience in the face of Seneca's lessons. It is conceivable that if he had not written down his reflections, he might never have fully digested the lesson of the horseback accident. If self-study deepens experience and gives it meaning, writing essays turns out to be the most effective enforcement of self-study, perhaps an essential step in any truly effective self-examination. Our sure knowledge of the chronology of events surrounding this chapter permits us to see here perhaps the clearest single example of how writing the Essays changed Montaigne himself. We must take his concluding words quite literally: "What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me."85 The essay's ultimate lesson is that writing about one's experience {and one's self) is the richest way oflearning, richer even than the "practice" recommended in the essay's title and opening paragraphs.

VI

An Animal That Reasons AMONG HIS representative men, along with "Shakespeare; or, the Poet," and "Plato; or, the Philosopher," Ralph Waldo Emerson included "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic" in one of the most eloquent appreciations of the essayist ever written. 1 Emerson's insight, and it is a defensible one, persuaded him that no figure in Western civilization incarnated skepticism as well as Montaigne. Most people use this term "skeptical" with only the vaguest sense of the more precise definition it once had. It comes from a Greek verb meaning to look about carefully, to examine. The fundamental question for skeptics, upon which all other matters depend, is "can reason distinguish the true from the false?" And the answer given by skeptics is negative. From this premise-which is simply unthinkable for the majority of human beings, who tend to be ardent admirers of rationality-the ancient skeptics drew various conclusions about the mentality appropriate to the human condition. Being philosophers, and furious debaters, they naturally divided into different sects, depending on how assertively they responded "no" to the basic question whether it as possible to determine the truth. The oldest school of skepticism claimed as its founder Pyrrho, a pre-Socratic philosopher. 2 Montaigne enlists himself in the camp of Pyrrhonism (in fact, his name for his philosophy is "Pyrrhonism," not "skepticism"). Precise philosophical usage restricts "skepticism" to one major matter, the question of the criterion, or how we know something. In actuality, classical skepticism considered many other questions and attempted to construct a style of living consistent with the skeptical mental set. Beside the fact that reason was incapable of determining the true from the false, skeptics also maintained that it fell down miserably in distinguishing the good from the bad; all moral values were therefore relative. Skeptics lived comfortably with such doctrines; they even preached that the skeptical mentality led to a special kind of inner peace or tranquillity, known as "atar-

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axy," which developed from the habit of refraining from passing judgment in matters of truth or falsity. While there were many distinguished skeptical philosophers in antiquity, the works of all but one of them have been lost. That one is Sextus Empiricus-who reads him today? Sextus left two major works, which repeat each other tirelessly: the Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Against the Mathematicians. Henri Estienne published the first modern edition of Sextus' works in 1562 and 1569 in Latin translation. Montaigne read these powerful arguments and was influenced by them enormously. He demonstrated the impression they made on him in three ways. He had two medallions3 struck, one of which has been lost, on which he had inscribed the Greek word epecho ("I abstain from judging"), according to him the "sacramental word" 4 of the Pyrrhonians. The dates of the two medallions differ slightly, specifying his age as 32 or 33, hence as before or after February 28, 1576. Again, on the rafters of his library he had a series of 57 mottos painted. Of these, ten or eleven come from Sextus. Finally, in his longest, most philosophical essay, "The Apology for Raymond Sebond" (II, 12), he used many expressions and reasonings taken directly from Sextus. It seems accurate to say that reading Sextus Empiricus influenced him profoundly and brought his skepticism to a point of flood tide somewhere around 1576, although he did not put the final touches on his written credo, the "Apology," until later. 5 Skepticism is not a passing phenomenon in Montaigne's spirit. From the beginning of his career to its end, we find the essayist championing skeptical ways of thinking: resolutely opposing dogmatism, denouncing the pretensions of human reason, recording assiduously its follies, delighting in unmasking reason as it succumbs to more powerful forces, such as habit, mocking the reasoning of philosophers and would-be scientists, deflating the human self-importance that regularly vaunts the prowess of our rationality. For Montaigne, philosophy rightly understood meant moral philosophy, the discipline that teaches us to live well and to die well, in the manner of Socrates. 6 To do his thought justice, we must make the crucial distinction between reason as the instrument of moral discipline and reason as the seeker of natural truths; or, in other terms, between Kant's practical reason and Kant's pure reason. In the field of ethics, Montaigne found in reason a helpful partnerfor example, as it helped moderate passions. But the other reason,

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the one we think of almost instinctively as the quintessential reason, the one that explains how things happen and why-for that reason Montaigne had unending scorn and mockery. His position then is the opposite of twentieth-century thinking, which makes something of an idol of reason's greatest triumph, the scientific method, as it discovers the true, but at the same time remains profoundly suspicious of reason's capacity to come to demonstrable certitude as it strives to prove the validity of ethical standards. The polarity between modern perspectives and those of the essayist is a natural result of the remarkable successes of the scientific method in explaining natural phenomena and in controlling them. It is almost literally true that in Montaigne's time science had attained no truths of significance. The essayist declares as much: "I am mistaken if it grasps one single thing straight as it is; and I shall depart hence more ignorant of everything else than my own ignorance. " 7 In his day, mathematics, the cornerstone on which all the physical sciences are founded, was an arcane discipline for specialists only; long division was beyond the powers of all but the experts (things have perhaps not changed that much since). To regard astronomy as a tissue of miserable speculations, the one as wrong as the other, was not far from the truth at the time. Montaigne refused to become entrammeled in the technicalities of philosophy, but he saw keenly the weak spots of uncritical trust in reason. Out of the 170 or so pages in modern editions of the "Apology" it is possible to extricate key passages where with typical density he argues essential philosophical points in few words, without strictly logical organization. By sifting carefully, the critic can winnow these arguments and present them systematically. In this way we can admire Montaigne for being, though in a disheveled manner, something he never aspired to be: an epistemologist. Following Sextus Empiricus he divides all philosophers into three groups: those who claim to have found the truth, or the dogmatics; those who claim that it is impossible to find the truth by human means, or the Academics (as dogmatic in their negations as the first in their assertions); and finally, those who claim they are still seeking-the Pyrrhonians, who find the first group infinitely mistaken and the second rash. 8 In the "Apology" itself Montaigne defends extreme forms of skepticism (sometimes Academic, sometimes Pyrrhonian, perhaps both, perhaps neither). Pyrrhonians, he says, will argue on any side of a matter; if you argue snow is white, they will

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argue that it is black, or both, or neither. 9 If you affirm something, they will try to make you admit that in fact you are in doubt, and then they will show you that you cannot positively assert that you doubt. Obviously we are descending in a whirlpool of argument, counterargument, contradiction, and paradox. In the long run, Montaigne, I suspect, was happiest with a middle position that conceded the possibility that human reason, while incapable of firmly establishing the truth of any proposition, might still be able to distinguish the more probable from the improbable. A capital argument for the essayist as for the ancients focuses on the human senses and their fallibility. "After all we would know no more than a stone, if we did not know that there is sound, smell, light, taste, measure, weight, softness, hardness, roughness, color, smoothness, breadth, depth. These are the base and the principles of the whole edifice of our knowledge.... Whoever can force me to contradict the senses has me by the throat; he could not make me retreat any further. The senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge. " 10 A professional epistemologist would certainly carp at the list Montaigne gives here, pointing out that it includes categories that are wholly incompatible, such as "sound" and "measure," that "roughness" and "hardness" are qualities belonging to the object, whereas "taste" resides in the observer, and "light" in neither. Moreover, the essayist is guilty of frivolous calumny when he suggests that philosophers grab you by the throat. All this is true, but it is also true that Montaigne's point cannot be dismissed lightly; the fallibility of the senses, if it can be established, undermines seriously human claims to knowledge. We grasp an apple by almost all our senses; we find in it redness, smoothness, smell, and sweetness; besides these it may have other properties, like drying up or shrinking, to which we have no sense that corresponds. The properties that we call occult in many things, as that of the magnet to attract iron-is it not likely that there are sensory faculties in nature suitable to judge them and perceive them, and that the lack of such faculties causes our ignorance of the true essence of such things? ... Let an intelligent man imagine human nature as produced originally without sight, and think how much ignorance and confusion such a lack would bring him, how important to our knowledge of the truth is the privation of another such sense, or two, or three-if this privation is in us. We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but

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perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence. 11

Montaigne does not formulate his argument as rigorously as Descartes does in his dream hypothesis. But if we look at the passage above as students of human nature, as moralistes, not as epistemologists, we may find it gives us pause. Behind his jumble of illustrations we can discern that Montaigne has a sound position: information provided by the senses is subject philosophically to challenge, and that challenge shakes the foundation of all knowledge derived from experience. Our view of the universe is limited and finite, constructed with only five tools, each of which is easily deceived. Montaigne had little understanding of the second form of truth, abstract or axiomatic truth, which some philosophers argue is not derived from the senses or experience. He does consider it twice briefly in the "Apology." 12 In the first instance, he argues that all systems, such as geometry, rhetoric, physics, or metaphysics (peculiar list!), are built upon axioms, what he calls "principles." If we concede these principles, we are inevitably committed to accepting their consequences. "It is very easy, upon accepted foundations, to build what you please .... For our masters occupy and win beforehand as much room in our belief as they need in order to conclude afterward whatever they wish, in the manner of the geometricians with their axioms; the consent and approval that we lend them giving them the wherewithal to drag us left or right, and to spin us around at their will. " 13 Clearly then, we can subvert any such system by challenging its first principles; for human beings are unable to establish conclusively the validity of any single first principle. Only a higher authority, such as God, can validate them. In the second passage he cites something he had learned from Jacques Peletier du Mans, that it was possible to have two lines perpetually approaching each other but never meeting, even at infinity.14 Mathematics, the ultimate axiom system, arrives at conclusions that are patently absurd, or more precisely, reason produces an entity in total contradiction with experience. Montaigne instinctively trusts experience over reason. The third argument against reason was the one that most impressed him, namely, the total disagreement among philosophers. The fact is simple: men, using their rational powers, debate on every topic imaginable. Every time that two humans maintain different

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sides of any topic whatsoever, it can be said that reason has not succeeded in determining the truth; for it vigorously proposes and defends both sides of the argument. To document this is easy, and a wonderful game, one that squares totally with Montaigne's compiler mentality. He enumerates and enumerates, furnishes long strings of contrasting opinions, until his point is made. He cites fifteen different definitions of the soul dreamed up by philosophers, and eleven divergent accounts of where it is lodged, not to mention the welter of opinions over what happens to it after death. 15 In a late addition, he lists twenty-seven definitions of God, taken from Cicero. 16 "Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen." 17 All this is grand; Montaigne has no trouble showing that reason has supported all sorts of doctrines, and with laughable arguments to boot. He delights in repeating the senseless reasoning used to support them. Chrysippus argues that the soul finds its seat near the heart because when we swear to something we place our hands on our breast, and that when we pronounce "ego," meaning "I," we drop the lower jaw in the direction of the breast. 18 We do not begin to understand Montaigne's skepticism unless we recognize his gleeful conviction that the human animal is seldom as funny as when he reasons. How amusing that he should claim to understand the heavens, and how distressing that we should take him seriously when he does! "There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind." 19 "Anyone who shrewdly gleaned an accumulation of the assinities of human wisdom would have wonders to tell. I collect them with enjoyment as a display no less useful to consider, from a certain point of view, than sane and moderate opinions ... I say ... about philosophy: it has so many faces and so much variety, and has said so much, that all our dreams or reveries are found in it."20 As human reason has produced in philosophy every doctrine conceivable, so its dazzling fecundity has fashioned every social institution conceivable. Customs vary infinitely and ingeniously from land to land, every one of them endorsed by human reason. "I think that there falls into man's imagination no fantasy so wild that it does not match the example of some public practice, and for which, consequently, our reason does not find a stay and foundation." 21

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What a piece of work is reason! The prodigality of the human mind stuns us. From such a perspective, reason astounds us by its total fertility; like the miracle of creation, it builds on nothing at all. "Our reason is capable of filling out a hundred other worlds and finding their principles and contexture. It needs neither matter nor basis; let it run on; it builds as well on emptiness as on fullness, and with inanity as with matter .... " 22 (One thinks of some of the great triumphs of reason, such as biorhythms or astrology.) Montaigne unmasks reason's flexibility and fickleness again and again, but his position is offensive to many readers, who are convinced rationalists; despite all the power of his rhetoric, despite all his sarcasms, despite all the human inanities he parades, they remain perplexed or unconvinced, finding it difficult to take him at his word, sometimes accusing him of muddle-headed inconsistency or, worse, of dissembling. Perhaps nothing Montaigne wrote is more likely to arouse resistence than his onslaught against human reason. Man is by nature an assertive animal, and the perpetual suspension of judgment simply sticks in human craws. Montaigne himself-and in the "Apology," no less-admits that this position is odd: "And the Pyrrhonians use their arguments and their reason only to ruin the apparent facts of experience; and it is marvelous how far the suppleness of our reason has followed them in this plan of combatting the evidence of the facts. For they demonstrate that we do not move, that we do not speak, that there is no weight or heat, with the same force of arguments with which we prove more likely things. " 23 When Montaigne levels criticisms against Pyrrhonism, he is practicing the purest form of Pyrrhonism; having striven to prove the truth of the proposition that reason cannot find the truth, he now expresses astonishment at the dexterity of reason as it establishes such an unlikely proposition. If it can demonstrate such far-fetched positions, how can we seriously place confidence in reason? I doubt that Montaigne had any playful ulterior motives when he wrote the passage in question, but I am persuaded that he would have enjoyed the flimflam, had he seen it. Skeptics appear to be ensnared in an inescapable contradiction: at the very moment they are disparaging reason, they reason furiously, relying on the very instrument they denigrate to make their case. How can we take them seriously when their method undermines their conclusion? In fact, the skeptics deserve to be given

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credit for using the one method reason is likely to listen to, namely, rational discourse, to bring reason to its own knees. It is a grand argument, but it encounters resistance; for while we all have had the experience of recognizing poor reasoning, we all have also had the bracing experience of being right when other people reason badly and we reason well. As so often in Montaigne, it all boils down to self-knowledge (here: reason's knowledge of its own limitations}. He makes the very perceptive remark that it is the affirmative nature of language itself that gets in the Pyrrhonists' way. Their arguments against affirmations must be expressed in language, but language itself affirms. 24 When Pyrrhonists say "I doubt," they are affirming. Recognizing this, Montaigne concocted a motto of his own, just as the ancient Pyrrhonians had their own series of favorite mottoes. He had his cast on a medallion that unfortunately has not come down to us; it said "What do I know?", the famous "Que s,ay-je?", which rightly or wrongly has been considered the byword of all Montaigne's thought. 25 It is an admirable formula for his skeptical position; being in the interrogative, it avoids assertion and complacency as it stimulates the mind into ever-continuing inquiry and questioning. This may help us to understand the glaring contrast that many critics find between his practice and his theory when he claims that he is not trying to teach his readers, only to portray his thinking. The Essays burgeon with expressions like "we must," "we must not," "the worst condition of man is when ... ," "away with violence and compulsion. " 26 But however peremptory the essayist may sound, he is not dictating, but inviting us to assay his subject matter with him. If there is one lesson he proposes without qualification, it is probably that essaying is the proper use to put a mind to. There is a sizable collection of apothegms in which Montaigne tries to sum up the nature of reason. I am going to repeat them all, despite the danger of monotony, to show how intently he tried to make his point: See how reason provides plausibility to different actions. It is a twohandled pot, that can be grasped by the left or the right: ... 27 There is nothing so supple and erratic as our understanding: it is the shoe of Theramenes, good for either foot. 28

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... reason, which is a supple tool, pliable, and adaptable to any form. 29 Human reason is a tincture infused in about equal strength in all our opinions and ways, whatever their form: infinite in substance, infinite in diversity. 30 I was just now musing, as I often do, on how free and vague an instrument human reason is. 31 I am calling reason our reveries and dreams, with the dispensation of philosophy, which says that even the crazy man and the wicked man are mad with reason, but it is a particular sort of reason. 32 ... reason always goes its own way, even though crooked, lame and broken-hipped, and with falsehood as with truth .... I always call reason that semblance of intellect that each man fabricates in himself. That reason, of which, by its condition, there can be a hundred contradictory ones about one and the same subject, is an instrument of lead and of wax, stretchable, pliable, and adaptable to all biases and all measures; .. ,33 Our mind is an erratic, dangerous, and heedless tool. . . . It is an empty body, with nothing by which it can be seized and directed; a varying and formless body, which can be neither tied nor grasped.... The mind is a dangerous blade, even to its possessor, for anyone who does not know how to wield it with order and discretion. 34 Human reason is a two-edged and dangerous sword. 35

Even in the area of ethics this faculty can mislead us. It apparently troubles the natural tranquillity of life more than it serves it. 36 Are we better off than the animals for having a greater degree of intellect? Along with the understanding come "inconstancy, irresolution, uncertainty, grief, superstition, worry over things to come, even after our life, ambition, avarice, jealousy, envy, unruly, frantic and untamable appetites, war, falsehood, disloyalty, detraction, and curiosity." 37 To this list can be added "sin, disease, irresolution, confusion, despair," 38 which, taken together, constitute a painful price to pay for the blessings conferred upon us by our mental faculties. Mr. Hyde inevitably accompanies Dr. Jeckyl. More than that, reason can increase our misery when it meddles with our moral life: "I am ill-disposed toward that kill-joy reason; and ... if those wondrously subtle ideas have any truth in them, I consider it too

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expensive and inconvenient. On the contrary I apply myself to make use of vanity itself, and assininity, if it brings me any pleasure, and let myself follow my natural inclinations without examining them too closely." 39 All this may seem a long way from the self-portrait, but it has significant connections to it. A good portion of any man's portrait must be how his mind works, and nothing is more fundamental for understanding Montaigne than his brand of skepticism, one that he experienced some difficulty elucidating. Montaigne was freed by his skepticism of the responsibility of being right; he could be simply himself. He felt at liberty to play with ideas, he could proffer hypotheses of all sorts without being ultimately committed to them, he could write things he was not sure he would want his own son to believe. 40 He could change his mind later, and feel no compunction about leaving untouched the opinion he had put to paper earlier. Perhaps no man has enjoyed the strange process of thinking more than he did. His skeptical mentality allowed him to indulge in that pleasant pursuit and forge an art form to portray it at work. Few works in world literature display such a range of opinions, welcomed cordially to the banquet, though seldom embraced in wedlock. None is turned away-except those that pontificate or try to impress us with their authority. As a moraliste, or student of human nature, Montaigne tends to look at reason from a special perspective. He inquires into the dynamics of human conviction. Ask a man why he believes something and he will give reasons; for no man is willing to admit that his opinions are unreasonable, except perhaps in religion. Montaigne points out that forces other than reason often provide the foundations for our opinions, forces such as habit, imagination, authority, or the influence exercised by the passions or the senses on the understanding. Reason, always willing to be of assistance, then adds its support, finding arguments to prop up the belief. And if we change our minds tomorrow, reason, ever serviceable, will defend the new opinion with all the fervor it applied to the former. This is precisely the opposite of the way we usually look at reason. We imagine a person faced with a puzzle-Montaigne says he never solved a riddle in his life41 -enlisting his reason to find the solution, working his way through trial and error toward the truth, perhaps with a little help from inspiration. Montaigne suggests that this picture is an illusion. In "Of Cripples" (III, 11) he examines the

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psychology of gullibility. Men have a curious and tenacious compulsion to find explanations for phenomena. To live simply with raw facts without attempting to account for them makes them uncomfortable and deprives them of the real pleasures of exercising their most distinctive capacity, reasoning. Instead of investigating whether or not a "fact" actually happened, men find ways to explain how it happened. It is strange but true that we tend to believe a man relating an occurrence that even he finds hard to believe. Teleportation-traveling faster than the speed of light-we have a word for it, and a definition, therefore it must exist, let us find out how it works. I am ordinarily obliged to play the fool for company's sake and

discuss frivolous subjects and stories which I entirely disbelieve. Besides, it is truly a little rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny a statement of fact. And few people fail, especially in things of which it is hard to persuade others, to affirm that they have seen the thing or to cite witnesses whose authority stops us from contradicting. Following this custom, we know the foundations and causes of a thousand things that never were; and the world skirmishes amid a thousand questions of which both the pro and the con are false. 42

Once launched, reason's enthusiasm snowballs. Montaigne finds that when he gets excited in a cause (as in the cause of skepticism in the "Apology"?), he inflates his arguments, both by his voice and his movement and by amplification of his allegations. 43 How many of us have had the experience Montaigne describes below, and how few of us have derived his conclusion from it? "Many times (as I sometimes do deliberately), having undertaken as exercise and sport to maintain an opinion contrary to my own, my mind, applying itself and turning in that direction, attaches me to it so firmly that I can no longer find the reason for my former opinion, and I abandon it. I draw myself along in almost any direction I lean, whatever it may be, and carry myself away by my own weight. Nearly every man would say as much of himself, if he considered himself as I do." 44 Psychologists have demonstrated repeatedly that the way to make subjects change their minds is to pay them to write essays taking sides against their own opinions. Montaigne has learned his wisdom at his own expense. "How diversely we judge things! How many times we change our notions! What I hold today and what I believe, I hold and believe it with all my belief; all my

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tools and all my springs of action grip this opinion and sponsor it for me in every way they can. I could not embrace or preserve any truth with more strength than this one. I belong to it entirely; I belong to it truly. But has it not happened to me, not once, but a hundred times, a thousand times, and every day, to have embraced with these same instruments, in this same condition, something else that I have since judged false?" 45 Montaigne's skepticism reposes upon a rather special vision of the nature of truth. Almost a century later Pascal will expound the opposite vision of the truth: "Justice and truth are two pinpoints, so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly. If they reach them, they crush their points and press down all around more on the false than on the true. " 46 This idea of one truth, a slender point of perfection, difficult to reach, and distinguished from a thousand false theorems, is the same as Descartes's definition, one congenial perhaps to mathematical minds in general, and one central to seventeenth-century classical doctrine in France. Montaigne would have disagreed heartily. In his view, the truth about any matter, physical or moral, would be better represented as a globe, and reason as a rapier too short to penetrate to the center of the globe. By no tactic whatsoever could the rapier seize the entire globe, but it could circle it, making stabs as often and as deep as possible in the hopes of penetrating different aspects of the truth and exposing different dimensions of it. Each rapier, or human mind, differs from each other, though they all share the quality of penetration, and they all fall short of reaching the center of the truth. It belongs to a greater power than man to see the truth and know it. Our inquiries will have their end in this world; but truth resides in another world: 47 "for true and essential reason, whose name we steal on false pretenses, dwells in the bosom of God; there is her lair and her retreat, it is from there that she issues when God is pleased to let us see some ray of her, ... " 48 Humans seek to attain truth through reason, or failing that, experience, a second pathway, less exalted. Neither of them is single, stable, or unequivocal. Nature is infinitely diverse; there is equal diversity and duplicity in experience and in reason. "As no event and no shape is entirely like another, so none is entirely different from another. . . . All things hold together by some similarity; every example is lame, and the comparison that is drawn from experience is always faulty and imperfect . . . ." 49 "Example is a hazy mirror, reflecting all things

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in all ways. " 50 These are not careless exaggerations on the part of the essayist; each particle of nature is unique, presenting more aspects than we can master; likewise, human experience is too multiple to be held within reason's categories or definitions; like quicksilver, the more we try to confine it, the more it escapes our efforts. Every comparison that the mind draws has some truth to it, but never the whole truth. There are no general laws, natural or positive, to be deciphered by reason; or at least, if there are, we will not be able to comprehend them. The nominalists, who have been called the skeptics of the Middle Ages, received their name from the debate they roused over what reality lay behind universals like "the good," "the truth," "man." 51 To oversimplify their position, we may say that they argued that a term like "man" has no reality, but is merely a generalization derived from our experience of individual men. Nominalists locate all reality in individuals. It must be pointed out that they did not deny that a genuine reality underlay generic terms such as "apple." Apples do share common qualities, and words may convey them conveniently and accurately. But for a nominalist "appleness" itself does not exist. The term "nominalism" may be used stricto sensu to designate a moment in medieval intellectual history highlighted by a major scholastic debate in the fourteenth century, a debate in which the nominalists were defeated by their realist opponents; or we may expand the definition into a more loosely conceived one, designating a way of envisioning the world which germinated into many modern trends of thought, notably empiricism and individualism, moral, political, and economic. While Montaigne's philosophy clearly conforms to the second, larger definition, I find it hard to believe that he formulated any of his ideas from reading the nominalists themselves. 52 The term "nominalist" describes a major component of his thinking without necessarily indicating the source of his thinking. Must we then abandon reason completely? Hardly; it is just that we must teach it to look at itself with jaundiced eyes. Since there is no way to determine if an opinion is true or not, we may then choose our opinions for their usefulness or agreeableness. 53 We may expound any opinion we desire, provided we do not intend to endoctrinate. And besides, reasoning is such a pleasant pastime; it would go against our nature to renounce it; so let us learn that the interplay of ideas is one form of play, and a most enjoyable one.

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Let us play with all ideas, banish none from the game, enjoy the fracas as they hurtle against each other, make judgments of them as we have to, always with the reservation in mind that our judgments are reversible. Montaigne borrows a delightful story of Democritus, taken from Plutarch, who can always be relied on to come up with the clinching illustration. 54 Democritus was trying to figure out why his figs had a sweet honey-like taste. When his maid bid him stop his search, explaining that they had been in a pot which once held honey, he scolded her, and continued his quest for a natural reason. His resolute determination to find some rational cause represents what all philosophy is about; and Montaigne, savoring his action without condemning it, makes an embellishment in the marginal addition: "And he willfully sought and found some 'true' reason for a false and supposed effect." 55 Like junk food, philosophy may be insubstantial but highly satisfying. Two statements in the "Apology" illustrate the more positive side of Montaigne's thoroughly skeptical mentality, and place his distrust of reason in a broader context. "I would rather follow facts than reason" 56 and "Man can be only what he is, and imagine only within his reach. " 57 Facts, not reason. Facts about the stars make little difference except to highlight our insignificance in proportion to them and their lack of involvement in our affairs. 58 Facts about nature or about animals are more interesting because closer to us, and perhaps instructive about us. The facts of history and the study of human institutions are the most revelatory and the most complex. The facts of everyday experience being the closest to us are the hardest to see in perspective, but contain as rich material for study as any. To study facts, to interpret them, requires the greatest delicacy and caution. Our interpretations are by nature simplifications of the multiplicity of each fact, and to that extent they are also falsifications. When reason tries to explain a fact, it sets it in a larger intellectual system, thereby depriving it of its vitality and collapsing it into a pre-set mold. On the occasions when Montaigne does try to account for a fact he may evoke certain forces that are inherently , general and unfathomable, like "nature," "God," or "fortune," precisely because they explain nothing. He does indeed indulge in trying to find interpretations (or "reasons") explaining facts, though as modestly and hesitantly as possible, frequently offering more than one interpretation without

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choosing. He realizes that to attempt to eliminate all interpretation would impose an impossible, unhuman, constraint on the mind, which must exercise its legitimate functions. But he is wary of reason, for it may enslave us and deprive us of our liberty to think. "It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its powers of achievement.... Its pursuits are boundless and without form; its food is wonder, the chase, ambiguity." 59 Not one word in the preceding passage could be cited as an indication that the "spirited mind" Montaigne is talking about is his own; yet the whole description applies so well to what he is doing in the Essays that I would say that these words are part of his self-portraiture. Having recognized the absolute dissimilarity of all things, he then recognizes the limited validity of generalizations such as those that lie behind words. "All things hold together by some similarity; every example is lame, the comparison drawn from experience is always faulty and imperfect." 60 A logician might well complain that this statement is self-contradictory, that it tries to have its cake and eat it, that it calls things black and white at the same time. If it were objected to Montaigne that he contradicts himself, I suspect his answer would be something like "Well, I should hope so." Montaigne's contradictions have given rise to various critical reactions. According to one view, he speaks out ofboth sides of his mouth to mystify his readers, inviting the more clear-eyed to sweep away the camouflage and unearth the real Montaigne. The difficulty here is to find the criterion for sifting protective coloring from natural hues. By stressing one set of declarations or another, critics have created a wide range of real Montaignes according to how cryptic they believe he is. For example, in the matter of religion, by disregarding his repeated assertions of his loyal Catholicism, critics have found in him a crypto-Protestant, an atheist, a deist, a monotheist with mystical tendencies. Another view simply accepts his contradictions, claiming that Montaigne's Protean mind takes no consistent side on any subject whatsoever and prides itself on its variety. This is somewhat exaggerated, but understandably tempts scholars frustrated as they seek to impose order and system on his statements concerning a particular topic. A third school would attempt to eliminate the contradictions, either by organizing them into a scheme of evolution ("it is not that he

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contradicts himself; it is just that he changed his mind") or by making distinctions which explain them away ("if we put his declarations in context, giving each proper weight, we arrive at a complex, nuanced thought with no contradictions"). Montaigne himself makes unequivocal statements that can be cited to support each of these three methods of handling his contradictions. While my own sympathies incline toward the last method in both forms, it seems clear to me that at some point the critic must draw the line and admit that the essayist holds contradictory opinions. We must not accuse him indiscriminately of inconsistency. Some of the criticisms raised against him seem to me to be pseudo-contradictions. For example, in the area of religion, Montaigne's skepticism lends itself to miscomprehension because of modern preconceptions. The third definition of skepticism given by Webster reads "doubt concerning basic religious principles (as immortality, providence, revelation)." The French Encyclopedists, somewhat loosely called skeptics, waged war on superstition and tended to equate it with traditional Christianity. Their considerable successes have transformed the term "skeptical" to mean "disbelieving," or more loosely, simply "unreligious." Nothing could be further from Montaigne's mind; in fact, he follows a long line of skeptics who accepted whole-heartedly the religion of their upbringing, and not necessarily out of prudence or indifference. Pyrrho himself exercised priestly functions in one of the local sects of his day with no sense that his philosophy was incompatible with his religion. Montaigne's position, technically known as fi.deism, holds that none of the articles of belief can be demonstrated by reason, not even the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. 61 He did not suspect that his doctrine was in the least heretical; nor did his contemporaries, including many dignitaries of the church who endorsed exactly Montaigne's position. The cardinal sin of dogmatics is their presumption; skepticism fosters intellectual modesty, and in Montaigne's case, spiritual humility as well. He felt no contradiction between denigration of reason and spiritual faith. His most skeptical chapters are also his most religious ones, difficult as that may be for many modern minds to understand. Equally difficult is the political conservatism that accompanies his Pyrrhonism. His intellectual skepticism strikes us as avant-garde, liberal, and modern. When he documents relativism in social and moral behavior with impressive lists of variant customs from all over

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the world, it seems to us that he should conclude that we ought to be willing to change our local customs, whose sacrosanct character has been destroyed. 62 When he comments that no one has undertaken to expose the defects of traditional usages without succeeding, we expect him to stand for social amelioration. 63 When he condemns the legal and judicial systems of his own time, we imagine he must want to reform them. 64 But he claims to have no · such intentions; social engineering is abhorrent to him, for in general he finds that innovations do not heal the ills they are supposed to, and instead introduce dissention in society. There is no contradiction betweeen his intellectual daring and his social timidity; both are founded on the belief that he does not have a monopoly on the truth. The most "modern" political doctrine of the Renaissance gives rise to this comment by the essayist: Machiavelli's arguments, for example, were solid enough for the subject, yet it was very easy to combat them; and those who did so left it no less easy to combat theirs. In such an argument there would always be matter for answers, rejoinders, replications, triplications, quadruplications. . . . For the reasons have little other foundation than experience, and the diversity of human events offers us infinite examples in all sorts of forms .... And therefore, to my mind, in public affairs there is no course so bad, provided it is old and stable, that it is not better than change and commotion. . . . If I could put a spoke in our wheel and stop it at this point, I would do so with all my heart. 65

It would be unfair to Montaigne, having indicated how he slanders human reason, not to show how he contradicts himself and praises it. Only in the "Apology" does he argue that reason is of no service in making us good or happy. Elsewhere, in the earliest and the latest chapters, it appears to him to play a vital role, although his concept of that role changes from one of confronting human adversities to one of reconciling ourselves to the human condition. Here is an example from "Of the Affection of Fathers for Their Children" {II, 8), composed in 1578-1580, which contradicts the theses of the "Apology" in several ways: "Since it has pleased God to give us some capacity for reason, so that we should not be, like the animals, slavishly subjected to the common laws, but should apply ourselves to them by judgment and voluntary liberty, we must indeed yield a little to the simple authority of Nature, but not let

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ourselves be carried away tyrannically by her: reason alone must guide our inclinations. " 66 Speaking of his ideal educated man, the essayist has this advice: "Let his conscience and his virtue shine forth in his speech, cand be guided only by reason. " 67 Even in politics, his conformism does not cripple his reason: "What I myself adore in kings is the crowd of their adorers. All deference and submission is due to them, except that of our understanding. My reason is not trained to bend and bow, it is my knees." 68 When princes ask of him services that he cannot comply with, he respectfully declines, for he can be a slave to reason only, and is having trouble succeeding in that. 69 When speaking of the search for truth, nine times out of ten Montaigne uses the word ''judgment" rather than "reason" in the later years; but there are exceptions, as when, in the opening paragraph of"OfExperience" {III, 13), he designates reason as the superior of the two routes to knowledge. It is statements such as these from the last years that temper some of the assault upon reason in the "Apology" without, however, reversing the general lines of the essayist's remarkable skepticism. Like any human faculty, reason can be used properly, or abused. Like any human faculty, it shares in the general weakness and vanity of human nature. Since it provides the foundation for most human presumption, we must shake it fiercely and keep it in its place. Montaigne loves to reason as much as the next man. But when he withdraws from the debate and looks closely at human beings, himself and others, as they reason, as they dare to dictate how the world should be run, to proclaim forever what is true and what is false, he cannot suppress a smile.

VII

I Have Nothing to Say About Myself Simply MoNTAIGNE FELT that the most original feature of his book was the project of portraiture; he retained the values and aims of the portrait in painting, but his new medium raised different problems, opened new opportunities, and imposed new restrictions on what he could hope to accomplish. Like all artists he had to live with the imperfections of his medium, responsible only to show his awareness of them. In this chapter I will be concentrating largely on the obstacles before him and his ways of confrontihg them. As far as Montaigne knew, only two or three ancient writers, whom he does not name, had undertaken to record their personalities in words; and their works are lost. 1 He had no literary predecessors to point out the way to capture a person on paper. Apparently he was not familiar with Augustine's Confessions, though he knew The City of God very well. If he had once read the Confessions, they left little impression on him, for he wonders if Augustine had children; and any attentive reader cannot fail to notice the presence of Adeodatus in his father's book. 2 He must have read works of confessional literature by other authors in his lifetime, but apparently they exercised no literary influence on him that we can trace. He even refers to his project as "confessing" himself to the public, but he distinguishes his goal from that of Saint Augustine, Origen, and Hippocrates (strange trio!) in that they confessed the errors of their opinions, while he goes further to include the errors of his character (or "conduct"; meurs in French). 3 In literature, pioneers often achieve more than their successors. Homer's epics have been the despair of the legions of writers who have tried to equal or surpass him. Cervantes' novel, unique and inimitable, injects life into the comic narrative as fully as any novel since. Montaigne also belongs to the small circle of literary innovators; no one before him chose precisely his subject, no one before

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him wrote in precisely his form. His successors have tended to follow one of two paths. On the whole, essayists reproduce the moraliste in him, regarding their goal as the study of human nature. Such was his first English imitator, Sir Francis Bacon, whose bitesize disquisitions are almost totally impersonal. Self-portraitists have been far fewer in number. One could maintain somewhat perversely that despite the number of books bearing the word "self-portrait" in their tide no author since Montaigne has consistently kept the goal of self-portraiture in mind. Other authors yield to the temptation to write an autobiography, or a journal, or memoirs. Montaigne chose words as the vehicle to incorporate the movement of his thought on paper; he implies {I believe) that unformulated thoughts are not composed of words, and that converting them into language amounts to casting them in a foreign medium, thereby distorting them to some degree. 4 "It is all I can do to couch my thoughts in this airy medium of words. " 5 Words are an impoverished, unsubstantial medium that are likely to fall short of the richness of thoughts. 6 The clearest expressions, whether the words of God or of man, are inherently imperfect and give rise to divergent interpretations. 7 Montaigne cites disagreements over the meaning of the words of laws, of the Bible, of Luther. 8 The grandest of all the illustrations of the unreliability of words occurs when Montaigne informs us that he even has trouble interpreting his own words when rereading the Essays, and that it has happened that an outsider understood his own text better than he did himself. 9 Words are not the only source of multiplicity of interpretation; readers do their share. Reading involves the meeting of two minds via the medium of the text. The text has its own proper existence, independent of its creator, and may give rise to any number of reflections in the second mind, richer perhaps than the thoughts of the original writer. 10 Just as each person owns one half of a conversation, the author and the reader each have certain rights over a text. 11 Communication under such conditions becomes a trickybusiness. The writing mind wrestles to find words; the reading mind wrestles to find meanings. If either mind is weak, it will quickly take a fall, and in no circumstance will be able to rise above its capacities. That is one of the reasons why conversation, where the two minds can interact in turn testing each other, is a far more successful means of communication. The medium of words is neither transparent nor opaque, but rather, translucent. Meaning does

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not get through undistorted, but something does get through. Montaigne does not despair of making himself comprehensible. In the case of his beloved poets, this human medium can even attain a degree of perfection, a miraculous accomplishment. "Gallus speaks simply, because he conceives simply. Horace ... sees more clearly and deeply into the thing. His mind unlocks and ransacks the whole storehouse of words and figures in order to express itself; . . . Plutarch says that he saw the Latin language through things. It is the same here [in Lucretius]: the sense illuminates and brings out the words, which are no longer wind, but flesh and bone. The words mean more than they say." 12 Language, regardless of its inherent deficiencies, is sometimes capable of glories; in such cases the reader's mind is overwhelmed by the vigor of the text and is no longer really an active participant in the reading process. In his own prose Montaigne will prefer to give precedence to things, or subject matter. . . . it is for the words to serve and follow; and let Gascon get there if French cannot. I want the substance to stand out, and so to fill the imagination of the listener that he will have no memory of the words. The speech I love is a simple, natural speech, the same on paper as in the mouth [an impossible goal); a speech succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, ... rather difficult than boring, remote from affectations, irregular, disconnected and bold; each bit making a body in itself; not pedantic, not monkish, not lawyer-like, but rather soldierly, as Suetonius calls Julius Caesar's speech .... 13

If you reread the citation, you may notice a significant shift in its perspective. The context of the sentence is unmistakable; Montaigne is speaking of a conversation and describing the kind of talk that he would like his putative pupil to practice ("the imagination of the listener," "the speech I like"). Without any transition that talk becomes the same on paper as in the mouth. Where did the paper come from? Montaigne is suddenly talking about writing. Is he in fact referring to his own Essays? His next sentence confirms that the change in topic has taken place in his mind, for it could hardly apply to conversation to say that he does not want the seams (French: liaisons) and stitches to show in the fabric. Critics always cite this passage as an account of Montaigne's taste in prose style, as a declaration of his own aspirations for his work, and more than that, as a fine depiction of his achievement. Strictly speaking, the sentence

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is not self-referential; but it is legitimate to regard it as referring to the Essays, provided we notice the indirection in the selfportraiture. Let us examine this passage in order to spell out in greater detail how much it reveals indirectly about its author. Ostensibly, the subject centers on how to conduct a discussion properly. But it also reveals the essayist's taste as he declares bluntly his preferences ("I want," or "the speech I love"). Beyond that, a series of lesser clues further depict the speaker: his interests include Suetonius, Gascon, prose style. He likes nature, but hates pedants, monks, and lawyers, or at least their styles. He admires a soldier's style-who could say that of today's military?-or is he deluding himself about soldiering? He talks well about style, no small achievement in itself. Most people can say no more about style than that it is "flowery." What flowers? peonies? gardenias? forget-me-nots? Venus fly traps? He has imagination enough to strew his own words with images; I count seven in this passage, though you may find fewer or more. As the French shows clearly, he likes to play with rhyming words. He also has the nerve to invent several new words. There is one paradox, or contradiction, about this particular sentence: if it refers to itself, it undermines itself, for it could hardly be characterized as "simple and naive" or "soldierly." It is worth pausing a moment over the matter of indirection. It is almost impossible for anyone to write any sentence, this one included, which does not portray its author indirectly. If seven different students each wrote out the demonstration of a theorem for their geometry class, we could still say that the proofs contributed to the portrait of each writer; for they could only have been composed by a person trained in the special language of Euclidean logic and willing to exercise that capacity. Admittedly, the seven proofs would not help distinguish one student from another, hence could hardly supply a complete or sufficient portrait, but they would not be irrelevant in the total portrait. From a theoretical point of view, every sentence written by every human may be considered self-description by indirection. Apparently impersonal utterances, such as "The absence of another here-and-now, of another transcendental present, of another origin of the world appearing as such, presenting itself as irreducible absence within the presence of the trace, is not a metaphysical formula substituted for a scientific concept of writing," give away far more about their authors than self-

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description such as "I have blue eyes and high cheekbones" or even "I want a true friend who will like me for myself." Moreover, sentences that refer directly to oneself ("I have never been to Katmandu'') may also contribute indirectly to the portrait (the speaker knows some geography, travels, might conceivably have hippy propensities). We must not simply conclude with the tautology that self-portraiture is an inevitable consequence of writing, for that would overlook the startling originality of Montaigne's undertaking. Some writers, among them academics, strive mightily to create a totally impersonal style-and, heaven help them, they almost succeed. Other writers prefer to speak bluntly of themselves, yet they do not necessarily manage to portray themselves adequately. What is fascinating in Montaigne is his belief that he is always talking about himself and his conviction that one of the best ways to present himself is indirectly, by talking about other things and about himself simultaneously. His. purpose, self-portraiture, would seem to imply that he should isolate himself, as a painting does, focusing only on himself. In fact, he realized that just as it is impossible to have a pure thought which is only itself and not a thought about something, so it is impossible to find a pure self, a self in a vacuum, without a context, without surroundings; and so he must paint himself in context. He was unique in his time in believing that he had the right to divert himself from any topic whatsoever in order to digress on himself, his likes and dislikes, his opinions, his temperament, his ideals, his "philosophy." To return to my subject, the pitfalls inherent in Montaigne's goal of self-portraiture, the essayist, 14 fully realizing the ineptness of words to convey his more subtle meanings, cherished a natural style; we could even say he affected one. His way of circumventing the obstacles before him-here as in other favorite topics: such as knowledge, judgment, or presumption-:-is to admit in advance the impossibility of his project, and to proclaim at the same time that he has achieved his goals. If awareness does not dissipate the inevitable difficulties, at least it dilutes them-or does it? Montaigne chose to use French words. He could have written in Latin, which he had learned before French, but lack of practice over forty years had made him lose his facility in speaking or writing it. 15 He always spoke of it as his mother tongue; in moments of shock, 16 it was Latin exclamations that were likely to rise from his

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innards; in moments of reflection, Latin words came to his mind as he struggled with rich concepts, beyond his French to expressY He claims to understand Latin better than French, an enigmatic comment, in which he may be thinking of the Latin verse he so dearly loved. 18 As a literary vehicle, Latin had more stability than the French language, which he says had changed by half in his lifetime. 19 Above all, Latin had more prestige. 20 He admits that its dignity still impressed him beyond its worth. 21 One consideration apparently overrode all others in his choice of the tongue for the Essays: the only language he spoke was French. His pronunciation and usage was tainted by provincialisms. 22 In fact, Etienne Pasquier, book in hand, pointed out several Gascon solecisms to him, 23 but Montaigne made little effort to correct them, presumably on the grounds that to do so would falsify the veracity of his portrait. French was the appropriate language for his self-depiction: it represented his natural way of speaking, it saved him from sounding pedantic, it was the primary language of the people with whom he wished to communicate. The most serious drawback with French in Montaigne's view was that it lacked an artistic and cultural tradition. Certain instruments perform better the more they are used, like the clay cooking pots treasured by French housewives in which hundreds of cassoulets have simmered. So from the standpoint of the humanists and poets of the Renaissance, the French language stood in need of curing. "Handling and use by able minds give value to a language, not so much by innovating as by filling it out with more vigorous and varied services, by stretching and bending it. They do not bring to it new words, but they enrich their own, give more weight and depth to their meaning and use; they teach the language unaccustomed movements, but prudently and shrewdly.... I find in our language plenty of stuff but a little lack of fashioning .... I find it sufficiently abundant, but not sufficiently pliable and vigorous. " 24 Speak for yourself, Montaigne. Most critics would agree that what he defines here so precisely is his own accomplishment: filling his language out with more vigor, teaching it new movements. A second limitation of the medium Montaigne chose was simply that his words are written. "Movement and action animate words, notably in men who move about briskly, as I do, and become heated. Bearing, countenance, voice, robe and posture can give value to things which in themselves are nothing but babble. " 25 He feels

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strongly the reduction in vigor that the mute march of letters represents. He can strive to overcome this only by making his written style evoke his spoken style as much as possible. "I speak to my paper as I speak to the first man I meet. " 26 After all, he may well have dictated his book, or a large portion of it. Erich Auerbach, a sensitive reader of the Essays, was so impressed by this quality in Montaigne's style that he could write: "I had been reading him for some time when I finally acquired a certain familiarity with his manner. I thought I could hear him speak and see his gestures. " 27 The written sentence is a far different animal from speech, which is considerably less lengthy and much more disorganized. Listen to anyone speaking, even a college professor, and you will be aware how little speech is comprised of complete sentences, much less finely constructed ones. Human speech, especially when it quits the safety of an exchange of colloquialisms and cliches to venture into the thickets of ideas, breaks down into a series of starts and stops, rewordings, cut-off developments, confessions of ignorance, and admissions of inadequacy. Feeling that short sentences conveyed best the rhythms of speech, Montaigne constantly replaced semicolons on the Bordeaux copy by periods and capital letters. When he undertakes long sentences, they are likely to lack the finish of polished prose; many are so chaotic that they break down, leaving the reader to follow along somewhat helplessly. The written word usually organizes its subject matter, divides it into meaningful units, elaborates continuous developments, moves from point to point without omission, employs a formal vocabulary, tolerates complex syntactical structures, suffers no lapse of memory. Speech is interrupted by replies, or by the need to have a drink, or to urinate. One of Montaigne's goals, though not the only one, when he decided to write a portrait was to make those written words reproduce somehow the more lively reality of the spoken word. Hence he cultivates certain informal rhythms, certain informal vocabulary, a certain laxity of structure. Language in formal dress might conflict with his goal of naturalness in his portrait. On the other hand, language in its pajamas, as informal as speech, would never hold a reader's attention. So he faces some very special literary problems: how to write a book that sounds as little like a book as possible without descending to chitchat. Recent studies have brought to the fore a third aspect of Montaigne's artistic vehicle. 28 His words were printed, which is not at

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all the same thing as being written out in manuscript form. Far more than he realized, he was a product of what we now call print culture. To appreciate how greatly printing changed the intellectual potentiality of European civilization one must be acquainted with Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as Agent of Change. To cite just one example of the reshaping of the intellectual climate that resulted from the practices of printing, most readers had never seen a map of any sort before the invention of movable type; and if they had seen one, it was piteously inaccurate. It took almost a century for the immense revolution implied in the fact of printing to take hold, and Montaigne was born at a time that made him among the first to live entirely within the print mentality. A century earlier it would have been impossible for a provincial noble to have the well-stocked library that surrounded him as he wrote. Manuscripts do not lend themselves to building librariesthey are too expensive and difficult to procure, since they can be made only by copying someone else's manuscript. Montaigne exploited the encyclopedic lore stored in anthologies and compilations produced on the new printing presses. He turned to the lists of customs, of opinions, of historical exempla assembled by the industry of authors who themselves relied on the wealth of material opened up to them by yet other books that were plentiful, cheap, and accurate. Twenty years earlier, Montaigne could not even have read Plutarch in French. His particular brand of study, self-study, required the isolation of retirement and idleness for his introspection, but also required the availability of the vicarious experiences of mankind storehoused in books. That his own words would be printed, not copied out by hand, made a real difference. A printed word, disseminated in thousands of copies, is more stable, less subject to change than is a handwritten manuscript. Five different manuscripts inevitably contain five different versions of the same text. There is no way, short of Massoretic precision, to prevent variations from creeping in. The uniform letters on the page of a book may lack personality, but the printer's capacity to proofread them and to prepare lists of errata make them accurate. Montaigne's habit of constant marginal accretions modified the static character of the printed page, but not in a way his reader could be aware of. Print depersonalizes, a gross disadvantage for an author undertaking to write the most personal book yet composed. Paradoxically,

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the new impersonal medium appears to have encouraged the creation of a new personal literature. 29 For it was one-to-one communication. Montaigne wrote for a reader of an intellectual background similar to his own. Without print, he would have in all likelihood written with a different audience in mind, for the cultivated gentleman did not exist before the advent of the printing press, and was indeed still a rare creature in Montaigne's own time. A manuscript can be produced in a small number of copies and left to a limited audience of family and friends. But Montaigne was writing a book and could expect its audience to be numerous, farflung, unknown to him, not necessarily homogenous at all. This audience grew rapidly with each successive edition of the Essays, extending far from his native Gascony when he acquired a Parisian publisher. He imagines himself closeted with his reader. He assumes that his reader reads much as he does, alone, silently, reflectively. (No matter how much he wished it to sound like a man speaking out loud, I do not think Montaigne imagined his book being read out loud.) In Book Three, he says that he wants his reader to give at least an hour's attention to each session. 30 And the delicate subject matter of"On Some Verses of Virgil" (III, 5) leads to the quip that he expects the ladies to move into the boudoir, rather than the parlor, to hear him out. 31 The reader might wish to make marginal notes in response to the text of the Essays, as Montaigne annotated his own books. One hesitates to scribble in the margins of a manuscript, more likely to be read by foreign eyes. Above all, rather surprisingly, print encourages authors to confide their most personal feelings to paper; Montaigne is far from being the only writer to admit that he lets himself publish to the world things he might scruple to say to his friends. A little reflection will show why this is possible: in a conversation with a particular person, we are likely to tailor our comments to conform to our partner's tastes. What we say to clergymen differs from what we say to psychiatrists and from what we say to prostitutes. This kind of reticence disappears when talking to a piece of paper. We fear to offend others' ears, less so their eyes. Born at a time when print culture was making its alterations felt in the intellectual world, Montaigne used the new technology (which did not seem new to him) in a way without precedent, one that appears paradoxical: an intimate letter to a world of strangers.

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He saw the principal obstacle that the printed page represented: it codified his thinking, endowing it with an oracular status he did not aspire to: "We dignify our stupidities when we put them in print. It carries very different weight with this people if you say 'I have read it' than if you say 'I have heard it.' " 32 Nonetheless, his awareness did not stop him, for he sows maxims thickly on his own pages. The moraliste in him often assumes the tone of the sage, inescapably impressing his readers, and setting an example that future French authors would emulate, though seldom equal. No one I know dares talk in the tone of the following sentencesmagnificent ones, but belonging to a book: "Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. " 33 "The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being. " 34 "The worst condition of man is when he loses knowledge and control of himself. " 35 "The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. . . . Like appetites move a mite and an elephant. " 36 "The plague of man is the opinion of knowledge." 37 "He who lives not at all unto others, hardly lives unto himself. . . . The main responsibility of each of us is his own conduct; and that is what we are here for. " 38 The collection could be extended ad [ibidem. Every one of these sentences, as they are personal opinions, contribute to the portrait of the essayist's mind; at the same time their style makes him sound more like an authority, more like a voice for the pulpit, than he would have wished. "I have not committed myself not to say stupid things, provided I do not fool myself and recognize them as such. " 39 Although he tells us in the opening sentence of his third book that he writes "silly things," we are likely to disbelieve him because he says so many things that seem profoundly wise. 40 Far more dismaying than the limitations imposed on the essayist by his medium are the innate complexities of the very task of selfportraiture. Just what is that thing, the self, that we intend to depict? And what is unique about our own, personal, self? The closer we look at our character, the more it tends to dissolve and disappear. One of the most satisfying chapters Montaigne ever wrote, "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions" (II, 1), illustrates how very difficult the portraitist's job is. Both the opening and the conclusion of this chapter express an unchanging premise of the essayist's. "In view of the natural instability of our conduct and opinions, it has often seemed to me that even good authors are wrong to insist on fashioning a consistent and solid fabric out of us. " 41 What was said of

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Perseus, king of Macedonia, that his mind presented so flighty a character that no one could know him, seems more or less applicable to every human being, according to Montaigne. 42 "Never did two men judge alike about the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly alike not only in different men, but in the same man at different times." 43 Each moment is unique. "Man, in all things and throughout, is but patchwork and motley." 44 As a result, it is generally an error to proceed from the working assumption that our acts reflect our "character." Acts cannot be judged simply by their surface, for it may be deceptive, and is always simpler than the motivations contributing to it. Pure courage, pure virtue, unadulterated generosity-these things do not exist; and if they did, they would not be human. "Metrodorus used to say that in sadness there is some alloy of pleasure. I do not know whether he meant something else, but for my part I indeed imagine that there is design, consent, and pleasure in feeding one's melancholy; I mean beyond the ambition that can also be involved. There is some shadow of daintiness and luxury that smiles on us and flatters us in the very lap of melancholy." 45 No sadness without a little enjoyment in it, or without a little willful assent on our part. How much of this account comes from Montaigne's introspection? He says elsewhere that he is not particularly subject to melancholy. Here, while he attributes the general idea to Metrodorus, the amplification is all his. There are so many components to our selves that there is no real way to determine what motivates us in a particular instance. The lecher may act chastely, and he may be behaving sincerely at the time. Dominant traits occasionally yield the place of honor. For although most of our actions are indeed only mask and makeup, and it may sometimes be true that an heir's tears are a laugh behind the mask, yet in judging these accidents we must consider how our soul is often agitated by diverse passions. And just as in our body they say there is an assemblage of diverse humors, of which that one is master which most ordinarily rules within us, according to our constitution; so in our soul, though various impulses stir it, there must be one that remains master of the field. Its advantage is not complete, however; because of the volatility and pliancy of our soul, the weaker ones on occasion regain the lost ground and make a brief attack in their turn.... No quality embraces us purely and universally. If it did not seem crazy to talk to oneself, there is not

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a day when I would not be heard growling at myself: 'Confounded fool!' And yet I do not intend that to be my definition. 46

The last section of the preceding quotation, the part on Montaigne calling himself a fool, is self-portraiture added in 1588. I am particularly fond of the sentence; for in fact it has occurred to me sometimes that I have behaved foolishly; and I, like the essayist, have yet to conclude that "fool" defines me. Perhaps no lesson in all the Essays is as far-reaching as this. We must recognize that out of our own mouths we condemn ourselves as foolish again and again (would you admit "daily"?), but still, thank God, that does not mean we are nothing but fools. The fact that human motives are always a compound of diverse, even contradictory, factors vastly complicates the subtle task of assessing just how virtuous a particular deed is, the ultimate function of the moraliste. Montaigne dissects most virtuous acts to find at least some tainted qualities in their underside. "Although I am always minded to say good of what is good, and inclined to interpret favorably anything that can be so interpreted, still it is true that the strangeness of our condition makes it happen that we are often driven to do good by vice itself-were it not that doing good is judged by intention alone. " 47 Even among the heroes of antiquity Montaigne can find no one consistently brave, consistently good; and his judgment of his contemporaries is even more harsh. "There are no more virtuous actions to be seen; those that wear virtue's appearance do not for all that have its essence; for profit, glory, fear, habit, and other such extraneous causes lead us to perform them. " 48 Montaigne is not a great cynic, and accords to the ancient sages all the greatness of soul he can imagine, but he recognizes that the depreciation of the cynics may have some foundation. "What great subtlety! Give me the most excellent and purest action, and I will plausibly supply fifty vicious motives for it. " 49 His self-observation discloses that he is no exception to the general rule. "When I confess myself religiously to myself, I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice." 50 All this tends to the conclusion that virtuous motives of a pure nature perhaps do exist, or better, did exist, but that man's complex nature tends to sully all motivations. How then can we judge human motives? Is there any stability? "Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstance carries us. We think of what we want

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only at the moment we want it, and we change like that animal which takes the color of the place you set it on.... We do not go; we are carried away, like floating objects, now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm. . . . We float between different states of mind; we wish nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly." 51 As he continues in this remarkable chapter (we are still following the thought in "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions"), he points out several sources for the variability in human conduct, one possible explanation for which is the variation in circumstances, another explanation being the equal variability of our desires. Whatever the cause, the fact is undeniable. "Not only does the wind of accident move me at will, but, besides, I am moved and disturbed as a result merely of my own unstable posture; and anyone who observes carefully can hardly find himself twice in the same state. " 52 Our instinctive reaction, as readers and as human beings, resists Montaigne's assertion that we are so very variable. On the contrary, we feel strongly that our self is unitary, growing perhaps, but at least single. I am the same that I was last year, except more so, and improved. Montaigne's extraordinary belief that we are more variable than consistent flouts our most deeply rooted concept of ourself. The essayist cites his own experience of his own variability on many occasions. One glorious example may seem trivial to us, but does not to him: "There are changes that take place in us irregular and unknown. Radishes, for example, I first found to agree with me, then to disagree, now to agree again. In several respects I feel my stomach and appetite vary that way: I have changed back from white wine to claret, and then from claret to white. " 53 He cites his reading as another example: "When I pick up books, I will have perceived in such-and-such a passage surpassing charms which will have struck my soul; let me come upon it another time, in vain I turn it over and over, in vain I twist it and manipulate it, to me it is a shapeless and unrecognizable mass. " 54 Since the text has not changed, the reader must have changed. What reader has not had Montaigne's experience? My first exposure to Madame Bovary left me disappointed and unmoved. Three years later I worshiped the book. What will I think twenty years from now? It is an easy explanation to say that in the interval between my first and second reading I had matured (I had) and so discount the earlier experience, to say that the second reaction reveals the real me; but Montaigne

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would find no shelter in such rationalization. For him, both selves are the real self; and the real self is ever subject to change. In a singularly impressive passage he says of his own self: All contradiction may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion. Bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever; stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; liberal, miserly, and prodigal: all this I see in myself to some extent according to how I turn; and whoever studies himself really attentively finds in himself, yes, even in his judgment, this gyration and discord. I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word. Distinguo is the most universal member of my logic. 55

He culminates his exposition with a generalization: "We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others." 56 It is difficult to conceive any declaration more likely to arouse denial. Has anyone ever said to himself, "Why, come to think of it, I am as different from myself as I am from my father, or my wife, or my lawyer?" Such a thought is almost literally unthinkable. It is so unusual that it would not be surprising if some psychologist solemnly declared that such insecurity about one's personal identity is characteristic of a certain type of character disorder in its more extreme manifestations. Taken literally, this comment makes the very concept of the self all but senseless. To make his idea a little less unpalatable, Montaigne puts this startling statement in the plural: we are as different from ourselves as from others. The collective and somewhat anonymous pronoun avoids the more unacceptable formulation in the singular, "I am more different from myself than from others," or the totally unacceptable "You are more different from yourself than from others." All this puts a self-portraitist in an embarrassing quandary. How can he possibly portray himself if he has no distinctive self? If the whole spectrum of qualities can be found in him, even contradictory ones, if he is both truthful and lying, both ignorant and learned? Underneath all those qualities, where is the self? Looked at from one perspective, these remarks do no less than eliminate any possibility of a self-portrait: there is no self, there is no constancy. Looked at from a different perspective, these opinions

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qualify Montaigne as a portraitist of the self. He sees the complexities of his job better than anyone else, particularly because he has not been duped into finding himself consistent. The nominalist picture of the self presented by this essay was written before Montaigne became interested in the self-portrait, but it depicts a permanent aspect of his mentality. Knowing the limitations of his medium and the near impossibility of his goal, Montaigne set forth foolhardily. Starting from disiecta membra, he would write the poetry of the self.

VIII

Modest Me "To THE READER" does not accurately describe the two books which it prefaced in 1580. Only a very limited number of chapters-in Book One, numbers twenty-six and fifty, and in Book Two, numbers eight, ten, eleven, sixteen through eighteen, and thirty-sevenclearly practice self-portraiture; more than that, each of them discusses as well as practices it. 1 Villey dates the decision to write a self-portrait in the vicinity of 1578 (or perhaps later). We cannot determine whether it came gradually or as a sudden revelation. Various components of Montaigne's final formula, portraiture via essay, had been present, dispersed, in the earliest chapters. Indeed, if one looked hard enough, and read industriously between the lines, one could find the kernel of every idea and every literary procedure of the final product somewhere in the minor essays of the first period. But cheese, eggs, milk, and flour are not a souffle unless you know how to assemble them, and the fascinating thing is Montaigne's recipe. He perhaps did not recognize the force of his compulsion to leave behind him traces of his presence. For years it had been his custom to annotate books he had read, sometimes giving the date of reading and his age at the time, sometimes summarizing his reactions to a book he expected not to read again. 2 He commemorated major moments in his life, as in an inscription on the reception of La Boetie's library, similar to the one consecrating his retirement. When he traveled, he ordered his coat of arms to be painted and left at inns along the way at least three times; and at Loreto he came provided with ex-votos from himself and his family which he had affixed to the shrine's wall. The most glorious of all his mementos are the Essays. 3 I have distinguished the two major voices of the Essays, the voice of the portraitist, with his topic, Michel de Montaigne, an individual man, and the voice of the moraliste, with his topic, mankind in general. I have suggested that the formula for the essay, as practiced

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by the first essayist, was to mix these two voices in any proportion and in any order as they ruminate on a theme. It would perhaps be more accurate to add a third voice, less frequently heard: that of the "essayer," whose topic is his own book, its aims, its method of inquiry, and its production. The "essayer" portrays The Essays. Unlike the other two voices, which are essential ingredients of an essay, the third voice need not be present in every chapter. Nonetheless, it is surprising how frequently Montaigne writes about his book in later years-in fact, in all but three of the thirteen chapters in Book Three. In 1580 he published one very short chapter, "Of Democritus and Heraclitus" (I, 50), which opens with a preamble giving one of the best explications of the nature of his new method, "essaying." Judgment, the first word of the text, is also the central concept of this me_thod. "Judgment is a tool to use on all subjects, and comes in everywhere. Therefore in the tests [French: essais] that I make of it here, I use every sort of occasion. " 4 The sentence has a familiar ring, for it reminds us of the many times Montaigne has said that reason was a tool that could support any proposition. But here his word is judgment, the instrument of the moraliste, not the philosopher, not the scientist, not the rationalist. Judgment is required in cases where the issue is murky, where weighty arguments can be presented on both sides, where any conclusion is doubtful; that is to say, judgment is the instrument of the skeptic who is forced to decide, however hesitantly. One does not call on judgment to assess what the probable product of eight times four is. But in matters where there is doubt or indecision, judgment adjudicates between conflicting parties. Judgment is of necessity more modest than reason; reason is likely to be dogmatic, to condemn as false all other doctrines, to launch a campaign to reform others and society in its image, to legislate. Judgment moves more cautiously, comes to a tentative decision, if it can, or it may simply prefer to remain suspended. Judgment constantly questions its competence to judge on matters; reason seldom examines its own credentials. When speaking of himself, Montaigne will never say good things of his reasoning capacity, but he will pride himself on his judgment, which in his opinion is the principal faculty of a well-educated man. Montaigne refers to his book as the tests (essais) that he makes of his judgment, one of the best accounts of his puzzling title. This faculty needs training; like the body's muscles, the mind's muscles

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profit from exercise; much of the renowned chapter "On the Education of Children" (I, 26) is devoted to a program for training the judgment. Since judgment can function on any subject matter, it makes no difference what topic one offers it. "If it is a subject I do not understand at all, even on that I essay my judgment, sounding the ford from a good distance; and then, finding it too deep for my height, I stick to the bank. And this acknowledgment that I cannot cross over is a token of its action, indeed one of those it is most proud of." 5 He "is proud" (literally: boasts) of the fact that his judgment knows its own inadequacies, for it is the hallmark of a sound judgment that it lacks intellectual presumption, the cardinal sin of the dogmatic. Having said that, he can continue, describing how it handles its subjects: "Sometimes in a vain and nonexistent subject I try to see if it will find the wherewithal to give it body, prop it up, and support it. Sometimes I lead it to a noble and wellworn subject in which it has nothing original to discover, the road being so beaten that it can walk only in others' footsteps. There it plays its part by choosing the way that seems best to it, and of a thousand paths it says that this one or that was the most wisely chosen." 6 Sometimes he takes an apparently barren subject-such as smells, of all things-and tries to give it some substance. Most authors take significant subjects, and manage to make trivial comments unworthy of the weight of their subjects. The point, but it is a hidden one, is that if he can make of a subject like smells something weighty, the weight will be his, not the subject's; and he will be writing as much about himself as about smells. At other times he takes a well-worn topic, such as Democritus and Heraclitus, a pair that any educated man of the'time would immediately recognize as the laughing philosopher and the crying philosopher. As in the case of the trivial subject, again he manages to make the topic his own, or, better, an exercise of his own judgment, by picking the best insight among many. "And further, I do not undertake to treat them in their entirety and to the bottom of the barrel. Of the thousand faces they each have I take the one that pleases me. I gladly choose them by some extraordinary and fantastic aspect. I would select richer and fuller subjects if I had proposed some other goal than the one I have." 7 Essayists, as skeptics, know that it is impossible to cover a topic completely, impossible even to cover one's own judgment on a topic completely. One takes one aspect of a topic, goes as deep as one

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can, and if possible chooses an unusual aspect, for that will make the judgment more personal. Montaigne expanded on this passage in the margins of his personal copy. I would like to quote this reworking because it illustrates how his skeptical mentality was intimately entwined with the whole concept of writing an essay. I never plan to develop them [his subjects] completely. Cfor I do

not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. I would venture to treat some matter thoroughly if I knew myself [not: it] less well. Scattering a word here, there another, samples separated from their context, dispersed, without a plan and without a promise, I am not bound to make something of them or to adhere to them myself without varying when I please and giving myself up to doubt and uncertainty and my ruling quality, which is ignorance. 8 How richly compact this statement is, like so many of Montaigne's. Ignorance: I do not see any subject in its entirety. Skepticism: neither do other writers who promise more than they can deliver. Nominalism: every subject has a thousand sides. Individualism: I like to choose the untried aspects. Self-awareness: it is because I know my limitations as I do, that I do not presume to know any subject to its depths. Amateurism: I write in a disorganized fashion, and am not required to make definitive pronouncements. Independence: I can change my mind, and my conclusions, at will, not being beholden to any man or doctrine. Socratic mod-:esty: I know I am ignorant. The themes so rapidly touched upon here with typical density amount to Montaigne's declaration of independence, very politely telling the reader that this book is entirely his. Essaying one's judgment is a long step toward self-portraiture; but putting on display his intellect amounts to only one part of portraying himself fully; beyond that a self-portraitist displays other aspects of his being, what we might call his "character," what Montaigne calls his "humors. " 9 Did Montaigne first formulate the concept of the essay of judgment and then resolve upon self-portraiture? Perhaps, but the reverse order is conceivable, though less

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likely. What probably happened is that the two concepts-the selfportrait and the essay of judgment-evolved simultaneously, reinforcing each other until they merged. His account of how he came to self-portraiture reads as follows: "It was a melancholy humor, and consequently a humor very hostile to my natural disposition, produced by the gloom of the solitude into which I had cast myself some years ago, that first put into my head this daydream of meddling with writing. And then, finding myself entirely destitute and void of any other matter, I presented myself to myself for argument and subject. " 10 This is the sole version he gives of his discovery of the portrait; like everything he wrote about his book at this date (1580), it is more apologetic than his later statements would be, for at the moment he had no idea how the world would receive his peculiar project. His claim that he was his only subject is simply not true. He has two subjects: himself and man in general. The two subjects are closely interconnected. He could not know mankind without starting from himself; he could not know himself without having a model of man in general to contrast himself with. In most of the essays of the 1578-1580 period, the self-portrait appears to play an unobtrusive role, as in "Of Cannibals" (I, 31), where its presence will go largely unnoticed, except for the reader who is looking for it, and who will then find it more widespread than at first appears. In yet other chapters, like "Of the Education of Children" (I, 26), a casual reading would indicate that Montaigne keeps to his topic, pedagogical goals, until the very end of the essay, where he recounts autobiographically how his father had him instructed to speak exclusively Latin in his earliest childhood. But at the same time the chapter is impregnated on every page with elements of both the self-portrait and the portrait of man in general. If we scrutinize Montaigne's ideal gentleman, we become increasingly aware that his intellect, and to a lesser extent his social and physical being, bear an astonishingly close resemblance to a certain nobleman of Perigord with whom we are beginning to be acquainted. A particularly brilliant example of melding the self-portrait with the general depiction of humankind while adhering to a specific topic would be the last chapter of Book Two, "Of the Resemblance of Fathers to Children," which deals with medicine in general and with the essayist's experiences with his kidney stone

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in particular. In this chapter the moraliste and the portraitist are fused into the complex figure of the essayist. Montaigne comments more than once on a habit of his: he likes to confess his defects-he is always believed-and this technique disarms those who would be inclined to be critical of him, for he has beaten them to the punch and already covered the ground. "Instead of retreating from the accusation, I advance to meet it and rather enhance it by an ironic and mocking confession.... " 11 This sort of mentality lies behind the tack he takes as he formally announces his aim to portray himself and composes the first and only attempt at a total portrait. Three chapters, "Of Glory" (II, 16), "Of Presumption" (II, 17), and "Of Giving the Lie" (II, 18),12 belong together and comprise his first explicit self-depiction. Any author may be accused of seeking renown; hence, the "glory" in the title of the first essay in question. But to write of oneself, especially if one has no claim to distinction, must surely betray a presumptuous character; so the second, and principal, chapter addresses presumption. Finally, we naturally suspect anyone speaking of himself of being less than honest. In these three chapters, above all the second and longest, the portraitist pleads his case before the · tribunal of the moraliste. "Of Glory," 13 which he may have conceived as a preamble to "Of Presumption," addresses the matter of fame. It does not mention the self-portrait specifically. He makes two principal points; first, that virtue and honor count more than reputation, and second, that renown, an empty title, attaches itself to our name, not to our selves. And that name itself is hardly truly ours; how many people share his first name Michel? 14 It is not rare for a famous personage to change his name and be known under a form he seldom used himself. What is to keep Montaigne's groom from calling himself Pompey the Great? 1S As for the charge of presumption, that one hit home, and he strove in very way to fend it off. To devote a whole book to oneself immediately implants the suspicion in any reader that the writer holds himself in immoderate esteem. Montaigne faces a dilemma. To portray himself seems presumptuous; to defend himself, he must show that he is not presumptuous; to show he is not presumptuous he must portray himself. Such paradoxical circles come to the fore frequently when the subject is the self, and his chapter "Of Presumption" has an unusually large share of them. But such circles

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can work in different directions. In order to convince us he is modest, he will speak of himself at length; however, if he fails, and unwittingly displays his presumption as he tries to deny it, he has still succeeded because he has portrayed himself, and that was his goal from the start (although he has lost some credibility, having demonstrated a quality that subverts credentials as a self-portraitist, namely a lack of awareness of his own traits). There was no absolute need for Montaigne to defend himself on the question of presumption. He could have simply said "This is presumptuous on my part; but read on anyway and see if your time is well spent." Instead he chose to undertake the apparently impossible task of making his reader believe him as he tries to argue: "The more thoroughly I examine myself, the more I am persuaded that I am extraordinarily modest." He is implicated in one form of what are known as the paradoxes of self-reference. 16 For philosophers the very term "self-reference" immediately brings to mind the term "paradox," but it would be quite wrong to assume that all instances of self-reference automatically bog down into paradox. "I am thirty-nine years old" raises no problems. But the thorniness of the paradoxes, when they do arise, has given self-reference a bad name among logicians. The archetype of all these paradoxes is the liar enigma, sometimes called the Epimenides paradox. A Cretan himself, Epimenides said "All Cretans are liars." This statement destroys itself in a whiplash. Is he telling the truth, or lying? He cannot be speaking the truth; for in that case his own veracity would make a lie of his statement. If he is lying, his conduct confirms his statement and he is telling the truth. The incompatibility arises because his statement concerns a class of statements of which it is itself a member, and the double function of being itself and referring to itself introduces a contradiction, especially as it is a mixture of a positive assertion and a negative content. "All generalizations are false" would be another such statement. Adding the amplification "including this one" only draws attention to the self-destructive quality of the generalization, but does not alleviate it. Adding the proviso "except this one" would eliminate the self-reference and the paradox at the same time. It is diverting to experiment with self-reference. Some examples, taken from an article by Douglas Hofstadter, will give a savor of its intriguing nature. 17 Try to disentangle the following: "This sentence contradicts itself-or rather-well, no, it doesn't." "Disobey

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my commands" becomes an impossible order to follow. What question will serve as its own answer? Since the Essays contain many sentences referring to themselves, and Montaigne's creed centers on self-study, self-knowledge, and self-evaluation, such traps will turn up rather more frequently than in other works. Montaigne brings up the liar paradox in the "Apology" as an example of how language itself hobbles Pyrrhonian rhetoric. 18 In another chapter he reiterates the famous dilemma of Buridan's Ass, which is immobilized because it is balanced between two equal desires-to move toward drink or toward food. 19 Instead of pondering over the riddle, Montaigne smiles, calls it an "amusing conception" with no remedy but to have the ass die of thirst and hunger. Then he points out that it is all foolishness anyway, being founded on an impossible premise, for the two desires never could remain suspended in static equality. Such conundrums neither distress him nor delight him; they only confirm his belief that reason trips over itself. So too, in the chapter on presumption he will draw our attention to paradoxes when they arise, but will not allow them to impede his progress. To say "I am deeply modest" does not involve a logical contradiction such as the one in the liar paradox. Nevertheless, the sentence seems to destroy itself. The difficulty arises because convention forbids self-praise, calling any outspoken self-assessment immodest. At the very beginning of his text Montaigne points out this quandary, and dismisses it: "I find myself here entangled in the laws of ceremony, for she does not allow a man to speak well of himself, or to speak ill. We will let her alone for the moment." 20 It is out of policy, not out of ignorance, that Montaigne refuses to take a paradox beyond its first level, to the point where a statement undercuts itself, what the French call mise en abime. Other great Renaissance figures, such as Sir Thomas More, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Cervantes experimented with various forms of the mise en abime. Walter Kaiser is so impressed with this phenomenon that he considers it a new kind of irony, developed first in this period. It is essential to realize that Montaigne has no taste for such strategies and consistently rejects them when he encounters them. His conviction that reason was incurably incapable of recognizing the truth did not prevent him from continuing the quest for truth; the social prohibition against talking about himself did not prevent him from

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composing and publishing a portrait of himself. He would not let any intellectual conumdrum immobilize him. The ethical question, for Montaigne, is one of self-knowledge. 21 If we know ourselves well, we cannot be presumptuous. Caesar should think he is the greatest general in the world. "If I seemed to myself good and wise or nearly so, I would shout it out at the top of my voice. To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty. " 22 Assuming, then, that he wants to demonstrate that he does not have a swollen opinion of himself, how can he proceed? Many readers simply refuse to give credit to the more or less constant selfdisparagement in the Essays, and regard all his claims to modesty as simple window-dressing or, as we say today, a literary topos. (I sometimes suspect that the reason for this distrust is, in part at least, that when these readers lay claim to modesty, they feel that they are indulging in rhetorical flourishes, their own topoi.) One factor contributing to the incredulity of his readers is his unabashed assertiveness and self-confidence, the imperious tone in which he discourses. There are skeptics, and I think Montaigne is one of them, who express their opinions all the more forcefully because they regard them as no more than opinions. Such men do not confuse vigorous assertion with dogmatism. Montaigne follows his own counsel fairly consistently and praises himself where he thinks it warranted, for example in his comments on his capacity for friendship,23 or in his claim to be able to judge poetry well, 24 or in his boast that no man ever left less cause for offense than he, 25 or in his statement that his book is unique, without precedent, the only one of its kind in the world. 26 In the last analysis the text of the Essays cannot provide us with conclusive evidence about the degree of his presumption, for it is his construct, and could be contrived, no matter how much he tells us it is not. What we can say is that he clearly sees the issues at stake. In his eyes that would suffice. More than that, the little we know of his biography tends to confirm that in his book at least, he avoids immodesty. In one instance he suppresses his own heroism as he recounts two similar incidents in the history of Bordeaux. 27 In the first, occurring in 1548, Monsieur de Moneins, whom Montaigne refrains from naming, was killed as he attempted to quell an angry crowd. According to the essayist, Monein's failure to put up a courageous front when facing the assemblage caused his death. Without giving any details,

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Montaigne shifts to the second incident: a discussion on how to face an unhappy populace and militia. Montaigne's counsel was to show no signs of hesitancy or distrust, and the results were gratifying. What the essayist fails to mention is that in the second incident, so vaguely recounted, he, as Mayor of Bordeaux, was the very man who risked his life as he put up a brave appearance. Here, at least, he underplays-hides even-his own valor. Whatever the case, in the chapter which concerns us he has the presumption to tell us he is modest. To demonstrate this he catalogs his capacities, mental and physical, as he understands them, leaving it to the reader to decide whether he has too high or too low an opinion of himself. For almost the entire length of the essay, with one major exception at the end of his inventory, he announces gleefully that he is of average or below average capacity. This chapter is unique in that nowhere else does Montaigne attempt a complete portrait of himself. The average reader, or the average author, when asked for a selfportrait, would in all likelihood begin with a description of his physical appearance and then proceed to the thornier matter of describing his character. During the seventeenth century, for a short while, composing self-portraits was in vogue in court circles, and a collection of them has come down to us, including one by La Rochefoucauld. 28 It follows the standard formula. Montaigne never did this sort of thing. His concept of making himself known was subtler, more sophisticated, and relied on considerable indirection. Let us consider the physical description. In "Of Presumption" Montaigne provides us with a physical selfportrait, or several physical self-portraits, but not in the way that we might expect. Here is how he sidles up to his subject: Beauty is a great recommendation in dealing with men; it is the prime means of conciliation between them, and there is no man so barbarous and surly as not to be somewhat struck by its charm. The body has a great part in our being, it holds a high rank in it; ... The first distinction that existed between men, and the first consideration that gave some men preeminence over others, was probably the advantage of beauty: ... Now I am 8 a little Abelow medium height. This is not only an ugly defect, but also a disadvantage, especially for men in command or in office; for the authority given by a fine presence and bodily majesty is lacking. . .. cLittle men, says Aristotle, may well be pretty, but not handsome; ... Alt is a

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great annoyance to be addressed in the midst of your servants with the question: "Where is the master?" and to get only the tail end of the salute made to your barber or your secretary.... The other kinds of beauty are for women; the beauty of stature is the only beauty of men. Where smallness dwells, neither Bbreadth and Aroundness of forehead, nor clarity Band softness Aof eyes, nor the moderate form of the nose, nor small size of ears and mouth, nor regularity and whiteness of teeth, nor the smooth thickness of a beard brown as the husk of a chestnut, Bnor curly hair, Anor proper roundness of head, nor freshness of color, nor a pleasant facial expression, Bnor an odorless body, Anor just proportion of limbs, can make a handsome man. For the rest, I have a strong, thick-set body, a face not fat but full, a temperament Bbetween the jovial and the melancholy, moderately Asanguine and warmMy legs are stiff with bristles, my chest with shaggy hair -sound and sprightly health ... ,29

Before coming to his own qualities, Montaigne prefaces his comments with considerations concerning beauty in general, on the corporeal nature of man, on the Christian after life (omitted in my quotation); then finally says his height is below average, a defect both unattractive and inconvenient, for only tall men can be handsome, an opinion held probably by all short men {was Aristotle then short?). He even manages to introduce humor in his self-description as he comments how annoying it is when "you" pass unnoticed among your taller servants, when "you" receive the tail-end of the greeting offered your barber. He avoids using "I," but is referring indirectly to himself behind the pronoun "you." Then follows the long list of things that, taken together, cannot compensate for the capital defect of being short. Again Montaigne does not indicate that it is himself he is describing, but then gives the game away with the words "for the rest, I have a strong, thickset body." That he finds a way to portray himselfwithout mentioning himself requires a certain amount of rhetorical skill, and it is, stylistically at least, modest. It will happen frequently that Montaigne appears to be discoursing on a hypothetical man or on man in general, but is actually speaking of himself. For example, in this passage he implies strongly in a B addition that he does not have body odor. In the A text for "Of Smells" lack of body odor was the principal topic, though Montaigne never once {in the A, B, or

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C stratum) hinted that he considered himself free of odor. He is not always so discreet, and achieves varying degrees of indirectness. The anecdote about being lost among his servants reveals indirectly his social class, though that is hardly a point about himself that he is trying to make. He is conceivably thinking of himself when he speaks of "men in command and in office." He wrote this text before his appointment as Mayor of Bordeaux; and several pages later, he commented that he had "never" 30 (later changed to "hardly ever") had to manage anything but himself. Maybe he thinks of himself as in command, maybe not. One could delve slightly more deeply and say that Montaigne is also portraying himself indirectly when he gives the opinion that the first distinctions of rank among men were based on beauty. This idea might not occur to others, such as me, who would expect strength to have been the first badge of distinction among men. But probably that view tells something about me. Others might choose intelligence, or foresight, or guile, or aggressiveness, or charisma. This indirection is present in the Essays in many ways. We must learn to listen closely, if we are to pick up all the clues; it is not that they are hidden, but that we are heedless. Here is a moral portrait taken from a later essay, undeniably describing the essayist, but never admitting it. It is no slight pleasure to feel oneself preserved from the contagion of so depraved an age, and to say to oneself: "If anyone should see right into my soul, still he would not find me guilty either of anyone's affiiction or ruin, or of vengeance or envy, or of public offense against the laws, or of innovation and disturbance, or of failing in my word; and in spite of what the license of the times allows and teaches each man, still I have not put my hand either upon the property or in the purse of any Frenchman, and have lived only on my own, both in war and peace; nor have I used any man's work without paying his wages." 31

Every one of the elements mentioned here turns up elsewhere as part of Montaigne's vision of himself. By putting his words into the mouth of an abstract, faceless speaker, he succeeds in using the pronoun "I" without actually speaking directly in his own name. Among the countless instances, where he is portraying himself without our being particularly aware of it, I will choose an example from an area that has fomented many debates, namely, Montaigne's

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religious convictions. Critics divide on the question whether or not to give credence to his repeated assertions of his orthodoxy. Concerning the perils of the religious wars that he endured along with everyone else, he writes: "I have gone to bed a thousand times in my own home, imagining that someone would betray me and slaughter me that very night.... And after my Paternoster, I have cried out.... " 32 Some eight years earlier, in "Of Prayers" (I, 56} he had commented that the Lord's Prayer was practically the only prayer he used, appropriate before and after meals, on going to bed and on rising. 33 When he later penned his remark about going to bed in fear, he had no conscious intention of making a declaration of religious sincerity, but his casual allusion to his bedtime prayer provides, for me, a most convincing corroboration of his religious belief. Among other things worth noting in the passage describing his appearance is the large number of tiny emendations he made in the original text. I have indicated several miniscule additions in the B stratum that are not noted in standard editions; but I have not spelled out other minor forms of tinkering, such as substitutions of words, or the suppression of several words in the original version. Now it is generally true that these changes in minutiae-we should perhaps resist the temptation to call them insignificant-alter words from passages published in 1580 more frequently than words from 1588. I suspect that what lies behind the great number of such corrections in this particular chapter is that as Montaigne became increasingly sure of his self-portraiture, he felt the need to change the tone or the content of his earlier portraits more often than his later ones. In "Of Presumption," for example, he eliminates the phrase "it seems (to me)" four times, a sign that he was more willing to speak assertively of himself as time passed. One final comment: when he reveals very intimate bodily or sexual details, he is likely to do it in Latin, as here, where Martial covers him with body hair. He seems to have been able to find a Latin verse somewhere or other to express any number of things that stuck in his craw in French: for example, that he can hardly remember having had six orgasms in one evening 34 (neither can I), that the quadruped position is most conducive to conception, 35 that he is hardly able to rise to one occasion nowadays; 36 that nature short changed him in endowment. 37 He can be frank in French, too, but he calls on his poets disproportionately when speaking of

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the male member. There is a certain prudery in his practice here, not unlike Victorian classicists who would switch from English to Latin when their translations of Greek literature came upon the saltier passages. This essay has always fascinated me as I struggled to get some kind of hold on its matter, its organization, its strategies. What I will do is follow its movements (in its original 1580 form), adding comments on the way, in the hope that this will help to put his first self-portrait in a clearer light than Montaigne apparently ever really intended. He does not open with the physical portrait. His first consider.ation deals with a sort of presumption that any man may have yet be unaware of, a way of bearing oneself physically that is interpreted by others as a "vain and stupid pride. " 38 The moraliste, who has been the principal spokesman so far, breaks presumption down into categories; and the portraitist tries to determine if they apply to him. Has not everyone been accused at one time of being standoffish or unapproachable? Inasmuch as the arrogant bearing, if it exists, is beyond his control, he passes on to what is always central in his ethical position: those traits he can be aware of, those of his soul. At this point he gives an outline of how he will treat his topic, an outline that he lives up to-an indication that he planned his chapter in advance, as he did all others, in my opinion. There are, he says, two kinds of presumption: thinking too well of oneself and thinking too ill of others. The first form occupies more than three quarters of the total chapter. His first argument to prove that he does not have too high an opinion of himself depends on an unexpressed syllogism, which runs: I have a low estimate of mankind in general; I include myself in mankind; therefore, I cannot have a high estimate of myself. The logic is sound, but I doubt that it is necessarily very convincing. From general considerations, he turns to himself, as so often. His formula is the neatest imaginable. "But to come to my own particular case, it would be very difficult, it seems to me, for anyone else to esteem himself less, or indeed for anyone else to esteem me less, than I esteem myself. " 39 Having set his theme, the rest of this long development is in a sense no more than a catalogue of all his capacities (or incapacities), and his judgment of them, high, low, or middling, in other words, self-portraiture by inventory. In the first category that he considers

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are the products of his intellect, fittingly enough (though he does not make the connection explicit), since the accusation of presumption is based on his publishing his book. He knows himself well enough to realize that if he has produced anything good, he owes it to fortune. He will later strike out this comment about fortune, probably from a feeling that to attribute the Essays to chance would be a betrayal of his role in creating his portrait. The literary standards he measures himself against are the highest, namely, the classics. This is the first time in this essay, but far from the first time in his book, that he has found himself wanting when compared to the ancients, whether he is comparing his moral stature or his capacity as an author. Like so many humanists of his time his admiration of the figures of the ancient world is enormous. In his education, it was the history of Rome, not Paris, that he studied; and it left the impression in his mind that the people of antiquity were simply greater in every single way. This lesson in humility applied to his entire century, which he never ceased condemning as decadent and, above all, dishonest. The ancients were always there in his mind to remind him of his ineptitude. 40 To demonstrate his own mediocrity and inadequacy, his first ploy is the easiest: he says he does not write great poetry, and, more important, that he knows it. Having been modest, he must now be honest. What he finds passable in his works (he does not name which works, and he may not be thinking only of his essays, which have not yet been published, but of his legal opinions, his letters, his youthful attempts at poetry) is not their intrinsic value, but that they stand up well compared to weaker works that are appreciated in his time. Like every author since, he is humbled by the fact that he knows he could do better. "I have always an idea in my mind, and some blurred picture, which offers me as if in a dream a better form than the one I have employed, but I cannot grasp it and exploit it. And that idea itself is on only a mediocre plane. From that I conclude that the productions of those great rich minds of the past are very far beyond the utmost stretch of my imagination and desire. Their writings not only satisfy and fill me, but astound me and transfix me with admiration. I judge their beauty; I see it, if not to the utmost, at least enough so that I cannot aspire to it myself." 41 Such examples hardly prove Montaigne modest, for anyone could reach the same conclusion, but they do show that he has good sense.

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He continues to disparage his linguistic skills in terms that most readers find impossible to agree with: I do not know how to please, or delight, or tickle: the best story in the world dries up in my hands and becomes dull. I do not know how to talk except in good earnest, and am wholly devoid of that facility, which I see in several of my acquaintances, of entertaining the first comer and holding the attention of a whole group, or tirelessly amusing the ear of a prince with all kinds of talk, matter never failing them, because of the gift they have of knowing how to use the first subject that comes to mind, and accommodating it to the humor and capacity of the people they are dealing with. 42

This passage is frequently cited as proof positive of Montaigne's false modesty. How can the author of the Essays, which entertain us even now after four centuries, expect us to believe him when he says he cannot tell an anecdote amusingly? His whole book belies the statement. There can be no denying that he tells a story well. Perhaps, however, his statement still does contain some truth. It is clear that he is comparing himself to others who have the ability to entertain strangers or royalty spontaneously in conversation. He pleads his incapacity, but in such a way that at the same time he is saying that he is incapable of fawning, unwilling to truckle to the humors of another. By the time he has finished defining his shortcoming, the capacity he lacks is hardly a desirable one. The strategem here is a frequent one in this chapter: to confess to inconsequential weaknesses in a way that amounts to indirect praiseY There is some truth to Rousseau's charge that Montaigne only confesses to faults that are likeable. 44 We may ask further whether Montaigne is speaking accurately here. After all, the qualities he is disclaiming resemble very much those of an essayist: to be able to take one topic after another and discourse on them in an interesting way. Here is one subject, his artistic skill, in which it seems to me Montaigne may not know himself well. In a whole series of remarks about his own book he describes his style accurately, perhaps better than anyone else; for he is the first author to publish the literary analysis of his own work. But he assesses it so modestly that he appears to fail to see, or at least to admit, the depth of his artistic vocation. He refuses to speak of his prose as anything but casual. His concern with the artistry of his words probably grew with the years-his meticulous

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attention to detail in the Bordeaux copy suggests this. He was hardly as nonchalant about his essays as he thought he was. After his comment on his generally good health, he continues: "Such I was, for I am not considering myself at this moment, when I am well on the road to old age, having long since passed forty . . . . What I shall be from now on will be nothing but half a being, it will no longer be myself." 45 He assumes that the real Montaigne, younger, more vigorous, existed in the past, and that what is left is somehow not himself, but half himself. He has in mind some static picture of his self, a portrait that subsumes all periods. Almost nowhere else do the Essays betray such thinking, for one of the first insights he has as a portraitist is that his subject changes rapidly from day to day, even from moment to moment, and that what he is providing is a series of portraits, not a single composite. "Of Presumption" betrays the hand of a novice self-portraitist. He runs rapidly through a list of his physical ineptitudes: he totally lacks athletic coordination; he cannot sing or play an instrument; he cannot swim, fence, or high jump, and is awkward at dancing, handball, and wrestling. His handwriting is so bad he sometimes cannot read it (that is rarely true of his marginal notations). With gusto he recites the litany of his mediocrity. Turning to his mental make-up, the first trait he gives is his nonchalance, which has often been associated with the sprezzatura of Castiglione's Courtier, and is frequently regarded as a pose, one fitting for a nobleman who wishes to stress his amateur status in all matters. How much of Montaigne's professed nonchalance is a pose, how much is self-deception, and how much is genuine? Self-assessment and self-description are full of such quagmires; nobody is totally nonchalant; nobody is totally committed (I hope). However accurate or inaccurate it may be, Montaigne's description of his easy-going nature and its sources is brilliant: Otherwise, if I am not lured to it by some pleasure, and if I have any other guide than my own pure free will, I am good for nothing. For I have come to the point where except for health and life, there is nothing for which I am willing to bite my nails, nothing that I am willing to buy at the price of mental torment and constraint. . . . Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art. I would as soon lend my blood as my pains. I have a soul all its own, accustomed to conducting itself in its own way. Having had neither governor nor master forced on me to this day, I have gone

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just so far as I pleased, and at my own pace. This has made me soft and useless for serving others, and no good to anyone but myself, being besides of a heavy, lazy, and do-nothing nature. 46

Again we find that the fault being confessed-uselessness and unwillingness to serve-is the reverse side of an admirable quality: independence of spirit. So he dislikes having to run affairs, and in general leaves as much management as he can to fortune or to servants. Ambition, he claims, has not tempted him for some time. He keeps in mind the saying of Chancellor Olivier that "the French are like monkeys who climb to the top of a tree, from branch to branch, and never stop moving until they have reached the highest branch, and show their rear ends when they get there. " 47 In this context he presents another indirect portrait, here listing his good moral qualities in such a way as to make them seem detrimental in times such as his: "My easygoing ways would have been called cowardice and weakness; fidelity and conscience would have been thought squeamish and superstitious; frankness and independence, troublesome, thoughtless, and rash. Misfortune has its uses. It is good to be born in a very depraved time; for by comparison with others, you are considered virtuous for a cheap price. . .. By such a comparison I would have been moderate in my revenge, slow to resent offenses, very faithful and religious in keeping my word, neither double-dealing nor shifty, nor accommodating my faith to the will of others or to the occasion. " 48 By editing the last sentence, Montaigne was able to make its reference to himself even more indirect and less boastful, as he introduced an ancient to whom he ascribes his qualities: "by this comparison [to my contemporaries] I would have been found great as I find myself a pygmy compared to past times when it was common to find a man moderate in his revenge, etc." The virtues he lays claim to here are the ones he mentions throughout the Essays: lack of ceremony, slowness to take offense, fidelity to his word, outspokenness, scrupulous honesty, stubborn independence. He has gone to considerable rhetorical lengths to avoid a blunt assertion that might offend. Everything is cast in that vaguest of tenses, the conditional perfect (in French, the pluperfect subjunctive) "I would have been," and he says nothing about himself except in comparison to his fellow citizens or to the ancients.

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He proceeds to the question of honesty. He condemns both dissimulation in social or court situations and double dealing in politics. Twice in this chapter he rejects Machiavelli's chicanery in politics, once on the somewhat Machiavellian grounds that a prince who has acquired a name for treachery can never again expect to hoodwink anyone or make another firm alliance. As for personal dishonesty or hypocrisy, he says that he hates it, that it is cowardly to mask ones feelings: "A generous heart should not belie its thoughts; it wants to reveal itself even to its inmost depths .... cMy soul by nature shuns lying and hates even to think a lie. I feel an inward shame and a stinging remorse if one escapes me, as sometimes it does, for occasions surprise me and move me unpremeditatedly. AWe must not always say everything, for that would be folly; but what we say must be what we think; otherwise it is wickedness." 49 Veracity is an essential quality in an earnest selfportraitist. To a certain extent, his truthfulness would guarantee the fidelity of the portrait. An alert reader will recognize familiar rhetorical ploys: the maxim, the attribution of qualities he is proudest of to nature, the admission of moral lapses {under the pressure of circumstances). Montaigne takes firm moral positions, carefully states complex issues, and finds one brilliant formula: "My soul hates even to think a lie." {What does it mean, one cannot help wondering, to think a lie?) He has been accused of dissimulation in various degrees and in various domains. Is there any way to be sure that he is telling the truth about himself? Gerard Defaux argues forcibly that no one, neither Montaigne nor any of his readers, will ever be able to assess precisely the accuracy of the portrait. 50 Ultimately, he is right, but we do have some evidence to adduce in the matter. Let us marshall some of the evidence against him. Pose number one: a nobleman. He was the first in his family to give up the surname Eyquem in favor of Montaigne, after his chateau. He calls his castle the birthplace of his ancestors, though in fact he was only the second generation to be born there. 51 This affectation apparently had deep roots in Montaigne's mind, for it appears even in a private family document where he writes that his father was buried at Montaigne, the tomb of his ancestors. 52 In the seventeenth century Guez de Balzac made fun of his pretention when he speaks of a page of his who had died. 53 In general, the essayist appears guilty on several

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relatively insignificant occasions of exaggerating his status as a noble. Pose number two: a soldier. Allied to his depiction of himself as a peer is his less obvious tendency to enlarge his status as a soldier (the so-called nobility of the short robe, the higher nobility) and to underplay his career as a magistrate (the lesser nobility, of the long robe). His allusions to military life are discreet, so much so that when he refers to "my profession," his English editor feels constrained to indicate in a footnote what he means. 54 Montaigne was clearly interested in military matters, and wrote on them often in the Essays. For several reasons the average reader is likely to be unaware of the extent to which these concerns reappear. They do not strike us because they have little relevance today, the nature of warfare having changed so radically. Moreover, the passages are especially frequent in the least interesting chapters. Unobtrusively, Montaigne passes himself off as qualified in military matters. If it is a pose, it is hardly a visible one. In fact, we simply have no information at all about how much military service Montaigne saw, how many battles he participated in, and therefore no way to decide how much his allusions to soldiering are exaggeration or understatement. Pose number three: a man of little learning. Montaigne detested pedants, perhaps more than any other human type. At the same time, he loved and revered the same books they adulated. But, as Plato remarks, the corruption of some thing good, like letters, produces the worst monstrosities, like professors. In his day as in ours, academics were remarkable, often admirable people; but there is no fool like a learned fool. In Montaigne's opinion, most learned people were fools. He wished to bear his learning gracefully. So he never paraded it, and strove even to hide it. When he says he is less a maker of books than anything else, he is almost surely thinking of erudite books or scholarly compilations; but he puts us, his readers, on the spot because it is solely as a maker of books that we know him. 55 More than that, his book displays not a little erudition. Pose number four: nonchalance. In one aspect of life after another, he depicts himself as uncaring, casual, an archenemy of all formality. One of the indisputable deceptions in the Essays is his account of how he received his certificate of Roman citizenship, which he copies out word for Latin word in his essay "On Vanity" (III, 9) (another memento). His comment that it was "granted with all

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gracious liberality" creates the false impression that he made no efforts to acquire the honor. 56 In the Travel Journal, he admits to using all his five natural senses in surmounting the obstacles before himY Just how nonchalant was he when it came to defending his prerogatives? Is he absolutely truthful when he says he has never failed to cede place in any dispute over precedence? 58 "Never" and "always" are dangerous words. On two occasions he tells us that he had never been involved in a lawsuit .in court, once adding that he has not had any "quarrels. " 59 This would indeed be remarkable for a man with as many properties as the head of a noble family. He may never have been involved in a suit in court that he could avoid, as he says; but we have at least one record of a curious family quarrel over a gold chain60 and several indications of strained relations with his mother as well as a minor incident in his Travel Journal 61 in which he appealed to the local mayor to settle a wage dispute. Beyond these there are only a few statements-insignificant in my opinion-where Montaigne's accuracy or honesty can be challenged. 62 Should we try to convict him of lying when he says that never has a horse failed him that has been able to carry him for one day? 63 How serious a misstatement is it when he twice claims that his handwriting is intolerably bad? 64 In the Essays we can identify few outright misstatements. Larger matters, such as misrepresenting himself as a soldier, are simply too complex and subtle to allow for definitive assessment. His pronouncements on his veracity leave room for interpretation. His normal practice is to proclaim his unequivocal truthfulness. But he also makes several other statements that invite his readers to extrapolate and read beyond the text. He speaks the truth, he says, not as much as he would like, but as much as he dares. 65 Naturally we wonder what sort of thing he does not dare to say, and what reasons keep him silent. The context here leads me to suspect that literary conventions of decorum, not the fear of censorship, lie behind his silences. Elsewhere he declares that he says everythingor at least hints, for what he does not express, he points to. 66 In a third statement, the most provocative, he announces that he leaves some of his stories or citations without comment though they contain seeds of a bolder material, both for Montaigne, who does not wish to go any farther, and for the reader who gets his drift. 67 "Besides, perhaps I have some personal obligation to speak only by

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halves, to speak confusedly, to speak discordantly." 68 If some of his readers have exercised themselves mightily reading between the lines, he justifies their attempts by such statements. He is especially sensitive about honesty in keeping promises. He feels inexorably bound once he has given his word; for his word is part of himself, and to go back on it is to go back on himself, contrary to his ethics of selfhood. "A notary ties me down more gently than I do myself. Is it not reasonable that my conscience should be much more firmly bound in matters in which someone relies on it alone? ... I would much rather break the imprisonment of a wall and of the laws than that of my word." 69 Obviously, such a man must give his word only cautiously; for once it is at stake, he is totally committed. The Essays abound with incidental remarks that reflect his deeprooted need to be honest. Montaigne tells with humor the story of how he helped a friend and neighbor who had been so distraught by threats of enchantment that he became impotent on his wedding night. 70 Montaigne obligingly provided him with a medallion and instructions concerning the rituals to follow to undo the evil spell, all of which was pure flummery on his part, but no less successful for that. Having rescued his friend, he is distressed by only one thing, that he had to resort to deception in order to produce the desired effect. It is a sign of his commitment to honesty that he draws our attention to this defect, which would not have occurred to most readers as a commentary on a highly diverting success story. Even cheating at cards is abhorrent to him. "In all things and all places my own eyes are enough to keep me in line; there are none that watch me so carefully, nor that I respect more." 71 But of all the remarks on honesty the most revelatory is the one he makes concerning a promise given under duress. 72 As any lawyer knows, no such promise is binding; and from Aristotle down to the present, ethical philosophers have agreed that a commitment made under force does not bind. 73 Montaigne, alone as far as I know, disagrees: "Robbers have seized you; they have set you free again after extracting from you an oath to pay a certain sum. People are wrong to say that an honest man will be quit of his word without paying, once he is out of their hands. Nothing of the sort. What fear has once made me will, I am bound still to will when without fear. And even if it has forced only my tongue without my will, I

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am still bound to make good my word to the last penny. " 74 It is extreme positions such as this that best reveal an author's mind. Nevertheless, intransigent as the essayist is on dishonesty, he does make concessions that help round out the total picture. He admits, for example, that in the game of courtship, women have no choice but to dissemble. 75 Montaigne has sometimes feigned an anger he did not feel in order to run his staff of domestics. 76 While traveling in Augsburg, he was willing to let himself be taken for a greater noble than he actually was, though his wont was to pass unnoticed in foreign lands. 77 He admits that he has many times amused himself by reporting symptoms of illness that he did not have in order to hear what doctors would prescribe, secure in the knowledge that he would not have to follow their advice. 78 He concludes his remarks in "Of Presumption" on honesty with the kind of declaration that any reader can agree with. "Now for my part I prefer to be troublesome and indiscreet than flattering and dissembling." 79 To this he appended the following passage in 1588, a particularly good example of the rhetorical ploys repeated throughout his declaration of modesty. I admit that a touch of pride and stubbornness may enter into keeping me sincere and outspoken without consideration for others; and it seems to me that I restrain myself a little less whenever it would be appropriate to restrain myself more, and that I react against the respect I owe by growing more heated. It may be, too, that I let myself follow my nature for lack of art. When I display to great men the same extreme freedom of tongue and bearing that I exercise in my own house, I feel how much it inclines toward indiscretion and incivility. But besides the fact that I am made that way, I have not a supple enough mind to sidestep a sudden question and escape it by some dodge, or to invent a truth, or a good enough memory to retain something thus invented, and certainly not enough assurance to maintain it; and I put on a bold face because of weakness. Therefore I give myself up to being candid and always saying what I think by inclination and by reason, leaving it to Fortune to guide the outcome. 80

The defect of character being confessed (outspokenness and bluntness) is presented in several sympathetic ways, as in the picture of Montaigne being all but disprespectful to grandees. His conduct is made to seem the result of inadequacies: he is not clever enough to lie well; he cannot put on a false face; in the long run he leaves

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everything to fortune. And Montaigne cannot decide whether his behavior is the result of his policy or simply of his nature (his skepticism always recognizes that his reasoning may be merely window dressing). His conduct may stem from less than admirable characteristics, such as pride, or simple laziness. As ever it is difficult to judge these matters and his account is full of uncertainties, alternative explanations, and qualifiers like "perhaps" and "it seems." In the last analysis, it may simply be that he is "made that way," which is justification enough for him. All human motivation is complex; Montaigne avoids immodesty by highlighting the unflattering side of his conduct (it is not so much honesty as blunt outspokenness) and by stressing the unflattering components that may contribute to it-pride, laziness, chance, ineptitude. By such devices, none of them dishonest, he manages to make the claim that he is truthful without seeming excessive, deluded, or boastful. He moves abruptly to the topic of memory, without mentioning the association in his mind that to lie requires a good memory. "Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgment does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me. " 81 His humor is nowhere more skillfully employed. "Now the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine. " 82 His helplessness and his memory's volatility, nicely personified, are converted into a little drama. As he is appealing to experiences shared by all his readers, his portrait of his inadequacies, harmless ones, raises a sympathetic smile. As a moraliste he is concerned with how memory aids the functioning ofjudgment, namely, by supplying it with facts. It is an instrument, no more. Such thinking lies behind his comments about his reading, that he forgets details such as names, places, authors, and like circumstances, but retains what has profited his judgment, often not remembering that the idea came from someone else. 83 That amounts to saying that his memory forgets the inconsequential, but keeps the essential. Montaigne evidently had suffered frequently when called upon to memorize, as any human has. Most of the formal education of his time consisted of rote memorization, and he had disliked his own schooling intensely. His critique of contemporary pedagogy centered on the fact that teachers crammed their pupils'

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memories without forming their judgments. As a magistrate apparently he had had to make official speeches, again memorized; and he found that a painful experience. With the word "memory" comes the context "memorization," and his complaints about his own failures are conceivably justified. Most scholars refuse to accept Montaigne's statements about his memory. The Essays are replete with quoted lines of poetry, with rich lodes of fact and example taken from history and philosophy, all of which come ultimately from the essayist's memory. Although Montaigne insists that he is not learned, his book belies him, they say. I am less impressed than some by the feats of memory incorporated in his book. The stories from antiquity and their details that he cribbed from his reading, sometimes word for word, do not demonstrate that his memory was crammed full of information; they simply prove that he often wrote with books open in front of him. His erudition is second-hand, and he admits it. Moreover, his memory hardly retained everything that he had written; in a passage added to "Of Presumption" he says that he forgets his own work, and is quoted to himself without recognizing his own Essays. "Cit is no great wonder if my book follows the fate of other books, and if my memory lets go of what I write as of what I read, and of what I give as of what I receive. " 84 The most impressive argument I have seen that Montaigne has a remarkable memory is Lino Pertile's observation that in the course of twenty years of composition Montaigne never once repeated a line of Latin verse that he had already cited in his book. 85 Since there are some 815 Latin verse citations, 86 that amounts to a remarkable feat of memory. In fact, the Essays do contain one such repetition of Latin verse, 87 and more than one of Latin prose. 88 Montaigne is far less meticulous about his own prose; he uses the same exemplum or anecdote more than once; the story of Pyrrho's pig is told twice, with different conclusions drawn; 89 in the "Apology" the essayist twice refers to the multiple worlds in Epicurus' universe, 90 and many other such examples of repetitions could be cited. Montaigne confesses to real concern about the danger of repeating himself. "Also in these ramblings of mine I fear the treachery of my memory, lest inadvertently it may have made me record something twice. I hate to reexamine myself, and never reread if I can help it, what has once escaped me . . . . Repetition is boring anywhere, even in Homer."91 His concern about repetitions was great, so great that among his instructions to

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his posthumous printer is this one: "if he finds the same thing in the same sense twice (Montaigne then specifies: finds a citation], let him remove the one where he sees that it is of less service. " 92 I do not know if Montaigne had some method to avoid repeating his verse citations. In cases where he read a poet-say, Lucan-only once and inserted all his borrowings at one time, it would be easy to avoid double usages. But his practice was more complicated than that, for he frequently found his citations in secondary sources. The Essays furnish ambiguous evidence, and can be cited as proof either of a strong memory on the part of their author or of lapses of memory. At this point comes his discussion of the self-portrait: "One day at Bar-le-Duc I saw King Francis II presented, in remembrance of Rene, king of Sicily, with a portrait that this king had made of himself. Why is it not permissible in the same way for each man to portray himself with the pen, as he portrayed himself with a pencil?"93 It is on the same page that he calls his book the essays of his judgment, the final faculty, in his inventory of his mental capacities. One of the functions of judgment is to make decisions in practical matters. Decisiveness he totally lacks, and he calls this defect a "scar" that must appear in his likeness. Having pointed out the impracticality of his judgment, he then claims that it is the one quality in himself that he esteems. He becomes trammeled immediately in the paradoxes of self-awareness, analogous to those of Pyrrhonism. The proof that his judgment is sound is that it knows how often it is unsound. He can trust it because he knows enough not to trust it. He says foolish things, but is no fool because he can recognize that they are foolish. He is ignorant except in the fact that he knows he is ignorant. In all these concepts, as in self-referential paradoxes, the same phenomenon is being looked at from two different levels, or perspectives. Besides the I who says foolish things, there is another I-who is in fact the same I-who recognizes that they are foolish. It is a helpful oversimplification to say that there is an I who observes and an I who is observed. The quality of the observer is self-awareness and self-assessment. He is not sufficiently different from the other self to be something distinct, but it is his nature to withdraw from the other self as much as possible. Montaigne feels that he has this quality more than most people. But how make such an outrageous claim? The proof must be the entire book of the Essays, for the reader can decide if Montaigne's

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judgment is sound from the samples ofjudgment and self-awareness in the book. Montaigne does not say this explicitly here. After all, that would be presumptuous. His tactic is as complex as the paradoxes involved, and includes a minor sleight of hand. "All in all, to return to myself, the only thing that makes me think something of myself is the thing in which no man ever thought himself deficient: my recommendation is vulgar, common, and popular, for who ever thought he lacked judgment?"94 He announces that he is going to reveal the one thing that he esteems in himself and then designates it in a way that poses a little riddle for his reader: what is the quality no man ever felt deficient in? The delay of his announcement creates a momentary suspense; and as he frequently does, he makes sure to set the tone of his discourse (denigration: his quality is vulgar and common) before making its content explicit. Even then he asks a rhetorical question about all mankind rather than stating baldly that his judgment is superior. In a marginal correction he changed his original term "judgment" to "sense": from "who ever thought he lacked judgment?" to "who ever thought he lacked sense?" The new term may be somewhat more precise, but it also slightly falsifies his argument. It is probably more accurate to say that every human feels he has been endowed with sufficient sense than to say the same thing of judgment. I assume that "sense" in his mind did not quite have the feature of self-examination that the word ''judgment" implies. But it is not really "sense" that Montaigne prides himself on, and his succeeding thoughts all apply to judgment as he conceives it. "Who ever thought he lacked judgment? That would be a proposition implying its own contradiction. cit is a disease that is never where it is perceived; it is indeed tenacious and strong, but it is pierced and dispersed by the first glance from the patient's eye, like a dense fog by a glance from the sun. ATo accuse oneself in that subject would be to justify oneself, and to condemn oneself would be to absolve oneself. " 95 He continues to deal with this paradox at some length. We will grant that we are outclassed in beauty, in strength, in other qualities, but not in this one. "I think my opinions are good and sound, but who does not think as much of his? One of the best proofs I have of mine is the little esteem I have for myself; for if these opinions had not been very firm, they would easily have let themselves be fooled by the singular affection I have for myself, being one who

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concentrates nearly all his affection upon himself and does not squander much of it elsewhere .... Now I find my opinions infinitely bold and constant in condemning my inadequacy." 96 Here he concludes the long development designed to show that he did not have too high an estimate of himself. The culmination may indeed be presumptuous, for it makes two rather enormous claims fairly straightforwardly: to have sound opinions (not quite as presumptuous as to claim to have the truth) and to have formed them independently of others. Experienced readers of the Essays are likely to grant the first claim; they may divide on the second. There remains the second form of presumption: thinking too little of other men. Montaigne may well be somewhat guilty of this charge. But when judging friends, he tends to be generous; if he finds some valor in them, he credits them with more than they have. He lists the moderns he has known or admired the most: the Duke de Guise, the Chancellors Olivier and Michel de !'Hospital, the neo-Latin poets Daurat, Beze, Buchanan, l'Hospital, Montdore, and Turnebus, and the French poets Ronsard and Du Bellay. The only virtue he finds widespread in his day is the valor that has risen to the many opportu~ities for its display provided by the civil strife in France. This final section, less crucial and less interesting than the previous one, brings the chapter to a rather limp ending. "Of Giving the Lie" (II, 18), which immediately follows it, opens on the theme of the self-portrait, attempting to refute, or sidestep, the argument that self-portraiture is justifiable in men of illustrious achievement but not in everyday men. Montaigne takes the attitude we found in "To the Reader" that he is writing for a very few friends and acquaintances who will have some desire to know him better. His portrait, or bust-both images occur here as well as in the later marginal supplement to this passage-belongs indoors, not in the public square. Montaigne suggests the library as the appropriate domicile for his work, naturally enough as it is a book. I would suggest that it belongs there all the more because it reflects the bookish interests and classical learning of its author, a suggestion likely to give rise to a howl of protest from him, for he never wanted to seem bookish. Nonetheless, authors and their books are one of his most frequent topics. As I understand it, the friend-relative reader for whom the Essays were composed is a fiction offered by Montaigne on occasions when he feels defensive about his project of occupying outsiders with

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himself. At such moments, and they occur almost exclusively between 1578 and 1580, he may adopt the pose that he is writing only for acquaintances. If Montaigne had actually been writing for friends, his book would have certainly been different in both tone and subject matter. Once in Book Three he says he is writing for few people97 (does that necessarily imply that the few are acquaintances?) and few years, and therefore allows himself to make comments meaningless to most readers. But such passages are far outnumbered by the others in which it is clear that he is writing for the general public. First of all, three-quarters of the chapters in Books One and Two were composed and intended for publication with no thought of self-portraiture at all. Obviously Montaigne envisaged the reading public as he penned them. By 1588 he felt secure enough to abandon his pretense of writing for acquaintances and calls for men of his humor, 98 who know him through his book, to come meet him in the flesh. He uses expressions like "I let fly my caprices ... in public"99 to describe his book-clearly thinking of a general reader, unknown to him. So the arguments in "Of Giving the Lie," while partially accurate, are greatly overstated. After all, we enjoy and appreciate many portraits of people whom we never knew. Statues of Caesar still interest us though we have never laid eyes on him, partly because of his renown, but also because of their artistry. These three chapters set out to persuade the reader that Montaigne seeks no renown, is justifiably modest about himself, and is truthful, hence eminently reliable as a self-portraitist. There is no convincing way to prove any one of the three propositions by direct argument, though indirection may succeed in the long run-as I believe it does. The brunt of his argument (on all three points?) is concentrated in the middle chapter. I would say that "Of Presumption" is flawed as an argument; it has failed to convince the majority of its readers, even those most sympathetic to Montaigne. If Montaigne had not catalogued so exultingly his mediocrities, we might believe him more. If he had not been so canny in his deployment of rhetoric's arsenal to camouflage or understate his serious claims to worth, especially in his judgment, we might take him more at his word. The portraitist is a tyro here, somewhat insecure, and seeks to persuade by dazzling-inevitably a risky procedure. As the portraitist

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becomes more assured, he will defend himself in a variety of different ways, including taking the offensive against moralizers. Custom has made speaking of oneself a vice, and obstinately forbids it out of hatred for the boasting that seems always to accompany it. Instead of blowing the child's nose [a typically humorous, depreciative image for self-improvement] as we should, this amounts to pulling it off.... I find more harm than good in this remedy. But even if it were true that it is presumptuous, no matter what the circumstances, to talk to the public of oneself, I still must not, according to my general plan, refrain from an action that openly displays this morbid quality, since it is in me; nor may I conceal this fault, which I not only practice but profess. However, to say what I think about it, custom is wrong to condemn wine because many get drunk on it. We can misuse only things which are good. 100

He is at his best when he speaks out with more confidence, even with humor. "I do not find so much good in myself that I cannot tell it without blushing."tot Having said that the argument and the rhetoric in "Of Presumption" fail somewhat for some readers, totally for others, and hardly at all for me, I must add that the artistry and wit of this major essay have captivated its readers for four centuries, even if it leaves them unpersuaded. Montaigne is a master at detecting human foibles, including his own, and exposing them with unaffected glee. "If you give me all the equipment of a kitchen, I shall starve." 102 His prose savors with delight his frustration before his memory's volatility, his discomfiture at being short, his general lack of physical skill, his dislike of making decisions. He is an expert in human clumsiness, which has never been expressed so gracefully; his mind, moreover, naturally turns to the less exalted aspects of our nature, aspects that we all share. This is one of the reasons that his appeal is universal; his talk comes back instinctively, and marvelously, to the commonplace, to what is all too human. And beyond that, this chapter displays the penetration and profundity of his understanding of human nature, for it affords him an occasion to meditate on some of his finest topics: judgment, memory, and honesty, both public and private.

IX

Making It Personal follow certain rules for correct writing instilled in them through formal education and through long acquaintance with polished prose. A self-portraitist may select any one of several styles, including affectation, the most appropriate one for fops. Not a few have chosen to write of themselves in the third person, such as Julius Caesar or Giambattista Vico, giving their narrative a certain stylistic objectivity intended to correspond to their mental objectivity. Montaigne desired to present himself subjectively. Speaking of his Essays as he dedicates one to Madame de Duras, he writes: "You will recognize in them the same bearing and the same air that you have seen in [my] conversation. Even if I had been able to adopt some other style than my own ordinary one and some other better and more honorable form, I would not have done it; for I want to derive nothing from these writings except that they represent me to your memory as I naturally am. " 1 One of the miracles of Montaigne's style is just that: generations of readers have felt overwhelmingly the presence of the essayist in his book. I am persuaded that Pascal had him in mind when he wrote, "When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man. " 2 To accomplish this, the essayist fashioned a style quite different from that of his classical models. We frequently find his genre referred to as the "personal" essay; in this chapter I will be concentrating on how he manages to make his essays sound like a person, not like a book, fully aware that no amount of analysis can account satisfactorily for the mysteries of Montaigne's art. Unlike a novelist or a dramatist, an essayist does not create a world of fictive characters interacting with each other. Generally, one would not expect to find dialogues in essays, nor expect their author to display a flair for reproducing human speech. Yet Montaigne peoples his pages with humans addressing each other, possibly in the interest of stylistic variety, but also surely in order to AuTHORS INEVITABLY

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make his work more alive, more like people. In the majority of instances he is dramatizing an anecdote with direct speech, often, but not always, found in some form in his source. I have counted two hundred and four such dialogues, and the count is surely short. As a raconteur Montaigne preferred dialogue to the easier, more lifeless form of reported discourse. Somewhat more idiosyncratic are the frequent occasions where the text itselfbreaks into dialogue, asking itself questions, proposing alien positions, responding to putative critiques, addressing mankind in general, or the reader. I count ninety instances of this; another reader's count would differ. Sometimes it is Montaigne admonishing himself, calling himself a fool, 3 excusing his lack of vigilance in the civil war, 4 congratulating himself on having kept his probity during dangerous times. 5 In such cases (they are not numerous) there are two "I's present, the one addressing and the one addressed, and his text reproduces the common experience of talking to ourself, one of the many ways the Essays represent self-awareness. More interesting to me are the many short passages of speech that Montaigne creates for any number of speakers. He endows human gullibility with its own voice: "They ordinarily begin thus: 'How does this happen?' What they should say is: 'But does it happen?' " 6 He excoriates contemporary adulation of book-learning in a series of outcries: "Exclaim to our people about a passerby 'Oh, what a learned man!' and about another 'Oh, what a good man!' They will not fail to turn their eyes and their respect toward the first. There should be a third exclamation: 'Oh, what blockheads!' " 7 (I find it somewhat piquant that this little interchange is not entirely Montaigne's creation, but is lifted from Seneca's Epistles, not known the world over for their liveliness. Montaigne has adapted Seneca's version quite personally, adding the third speaker.) An imaginary interlocutor appears again and again in the pages of the Essays. 8 In "Of Vanity" (III, 9) it is this interlocutor who gives the chapter direction as he raises one objection after another concerning Montaigne's penchant for journeying. Frequently the snatches of speech incorporate opinions of others, dramatizing them, usually as a prelude to a critique by the essayist. Sometimes the speaker is named; more often, he is anonymous, characterized only by his words-indeed, by the opinion he defends. Unaccompanied by a phrase such as "someone might say," these speeches seem autonomous, spontaneous, as if the page itself began speaking

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on its own. " 'What am I to choose?"What you like, provided you choose!' There is a stupid answer, to which nevertheless all dogmatism seems to come, by which we are not allowed not to know what we do not know. " 9 The examples I have cited are somewhat atypical in that they recreate a conversation in which Montaigne takes no part. It is more usual for there to be only one voice in addition to that of the essayist. The next example includes Montaigne dramatizing himself, and contains the piquant fact of a speaker who cites Latin verses in the manner of the Essays. "I want to get away from those fine excuses: 'I did it in play: This work unfinished from the anvil came;

I was not an hour at it; I have not looked at it since.' 'Well, then,' I say, 'let us put these pieces aside, give me something that represents you fully, by which you would like to be measured.' And then, 'What do you think is finest in your work? Is it this part or that? ••• ' " 10 In this way the essayist avoids the impersonality and lifelessness of expository prose. The discourse is thoroughly his, but he fills it with voices speaking their pieces in their own words. Reporting a confidence made to him by the military leader Mandue, 11 Montaigne composes a moving soliloquy, worthy of a great dramatist, a speech much admired by Mme de Sevigne12 and quoted in full by Chateaubriand. 13 Readers have no difficulty figuring out who the speaker is. But when Montaigne puts the lessons of philosophy in the mouth of Nature toward the end of "That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die" (I, 20}, using the pronoun "I," it only natural that the boundary line between "!-Nature" and "1-Montaigne" occasionally evaporates in the reader's awareness, especially as Nature's lesson is substantially the same as the essayist's. This and the passage in "Of Experience" (III, 13}, where the essayist's reason attempts to list the good sides of his kidney stone, are the two principal examples of the classical device of prosopopoeia. 14 The sixteenth-century reader had to be alert to disentangle the many voices coming at him, for there were no quotation marks in the Essays, no paragraph indentations to separate one speaker from another. The "I" in one sentence (Montluc) may not be the same as the "I" in the following sentence (Montaigne). Here is a passage in the "Apology" that has misled most of his readers; it expresses an apparently plausible opinion, but is in fact one that Montaigne wishes to reject: "Having found by experience that where one man

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had failed, another has succeeded, . . . I do not leave off sounding and testing what my powers cannot discover; . . . I open up to whoever follows me some facility to enjoy ... which is the reason why difficulty should not make me despair, nor my impotence either, for it is only my own. " 15 Who is the "I" here? The mental attitude resembles rather closely Montaigne's concept of an essayist testing his experience (indeed, the verb essayer appears twice in the French); but if we examine minutely the context in which this speech appears and the development of the argument of the "Apology," it becomes clear that Montaigne is putting this position in another man's mouth in order to argue against it. The passage should be in quotation marks, though I know of no editor of the Essays who uses them. At another point in the "Apology" Montaigne apostrophizes man, using the singular pronoun "tu." 16 I defy anyone to determine where the address finishes and the regular discourse resumes. In this case he simply continued writing, or dictating, dropping the address to the reader without being aware himself of the shift. Aside from the ever-present Montaigne, there is another figure, indistinct, invisible even, whose presence is felt on every page of the Essays, endowing the work with the vivacity of one human being communicating with another. This figure is the reader, you and me. Sometimes the essayist puts words into the reader's mouth, and then responds to them. He addresses him in a hundred different ways, employing questions, commands, exclamations, apostrophes, all the strategies of classical rhetoric and many of those identified by modern speech act theory. The mere fact of asking a question, especially if it remains unanswered, implies that it is directed to someone, and also may have the effect of making that someone reflect to find the answer. Montaigne uses this device constantly; it is particularly appropriate for a skeptic who wishes to avoid excessive assertiveness, and it is nowhere so widespread as in the "Apology for Raymond Sebond," whose principal purpose is to make the reader question reason's validity, something likely to be an unfamiliar experience for many. Exclamations, so frequent in Montaigne, whether a single word or a complex sentence, again give sinew and vigor to the thought as it reacts to what it is saying, unable to confine itself to unimpassioned exposition, unconcerned if it speaks in fragments. Montaigne cannot believe that any man in his right mind could be an

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atheist. "Miserable and brainless men indeed, who try to be worse than they can be!" 17 He displays aristocratic scorn for money-grubbers. "Oh, what a vile and stupid study it is to study one's money, to take pleasure in handling it, weighing it, and counting it over and over!" 18 In the next citation the essayist succeeds in employing the three prime tricks of classical rhetoric, the rhetorical question, the exclamation, and the apostrophe, launched by the fact that Diomedes filled six thousand books on the subject of grammar alone. "What must prattle [he means the Essays] produce, when the stammering and loosening of the tongue smothered the world with such a horrible load of volumes? So many words for the sake of words alone! 0 Pythagoras, why did you not conjure away this tempest?" 19 That Montaigne never forgets his reader is most clearly indicated by the addresses made directly to him, to "you," either the singular, familiar pronoun tu or the formal/plural form vous. When he actually uses the word "reader," 20 he addresses him with the singular pronoun, perhaps a slight Latinism on his part, for in two places the use of tu occurs in passages translated from Seneca. 21 When addressing mankind as a whole, particularly in speeches intended to remind him of his folly or insignificance, Montaigne tends to use the somewhat disdainful tu. 22 The vous form turns up everywhere; it is not always visible, for its most frequent usage is in commands. In the longer selections to be quoted in the remainder of this chapter, I will italicize all first- and second-person pronoun forms, for it is easy to read a text without noticing their presence. The pages of the Essays are peppered with a diversity of ways in which the essayist speaks directly to his reader, sometimes in the small stock phrases of the trade of rhetoric, including formulaic imperatives such as "see how people ... ,""listen to Cicero," "compare the life of a man ... ," or "find a man who .... " 23 He asks a question: "do you think that ... ,""would you like an example?" "what is the use of your setting out in quest.... " 24 He implies complicity between himself and his reader: "you would think ... " or "you would say. . . ." 25 He suspects that letters tailored to a specific correspondent would have suited him more than the Essays. But he refused to pen fictional letters to an imaginary friend. "For to talk to the winds, as others do is beyond me except in dreams; nor could I fabricate fictitious names to talk with on a serious matter, being a sworn enemy of any falsification. " 26 So he tries to keep in

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mind "the various tastes [or: aspects) of a whole public," and sets himself the difficult task of satisfying everybody.27 He knows he is addressing a huge audience, but he treats it as if it were a single person. Like English, the French language tolerates the use of the word "you" in a general sense, where it means no more than "anybody," as in "If you beat egg whites long enough, they will stiffen." Teachers of English composition constantly admonish students to avoid this usage. If anyone ever gave Montaigne the same advice, it did not take. Modern French uses the more neutral impersonal pronoun "one" (on), but in the sixteenth-century "one" and "you" flourished side by side, more or less interchangeably. There are cases where it is clear that the "you" form is meant generally, "the worst of these wars is that the cards are so shuffled that your enemy is distinguished from yourselfby no apparent mark." 28 Sometimes what seems like a general usage of "you" turns more concrete as the sentence proceeds. "It is unfortunate that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and trust yourself, and always sends you away discontented and diffident, whereas opinionativeness and heedlessness fill their hosts with rejoicing and assurance. " 29 Moritaigne claims not to be teaching his readers. If he is not teaching, he certainly does give a great deal of advice. His advice in the later essays sometimes differs from that of the first chapters: "If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it." 30 In this passage, and in many others, the everyday vocabulary and the simple sentence structure, broken into small units, add to the impression that this is someone speaking a natural language. Montaigne could easily have written this passage without its personal pronouns. But while he frequently employs such an impersonal style, he cannot write for long without assuming the more personal tone. It is remarkable how often he makes "you" assume a role he disdains. On different occasions, he casts "you" as a dueler, a jealous lover, a seducer, an angry man, even a torturer31 -as in "Are you not unjust when, in order not to kill him without cause, you do worse to him than kill him?" 32 Twice in "Of the Useful and the Honorable" (III, 1), he puts "you" in the position of the villain subborned by the prince to commit a crime. 33 "Now if by good fortune you are rewarded for a base act ... , he who rewards you

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will without fail consider you an accursed and execrable man, unless he is one himself; and he will think you a worse traitor than did the man whom you have betrayed. For it is with your own hands, undenying and unprotesting, that you prove to him the malignity of your heart. But he employs you on your business just as one employs the scum of society.... " At one point the essayist makes a change of one letter that has been much noticed. "Each one of us [nous] has made someone a cuckold" he wrote originally on the margins of his own copy, but then had second thoughts, and exculpated himself by substituting "each one of you [vous]. " 34 He could have simply written "everyone" but elected to retain the accusatory form. You tell me why. Because "everyone" would have included himself? Surely he could have found a way to say what he intended without the risk of offending his reader. Sheer negligence on his part? There are many signs of negligence elsewhere, but it is an unlikely explanation for this passage, where he saw a blooper and reflected on how to alter it to say what he meant. Montaigne's use of pronouns is fluid. I have altered Frame's translation of the next quotation to make this profusion of pronouns more visible. "One proceeds badly when one opposes this passion [grief] .... ~see in ordinary conversation that if I have said something casually, if someone comes to dispute it with me, I become impassioned, I espouse it, and much more so anything I am interested in. And then, by doing so, you make a rough approach to your operation, whereas the first greeting of the doctor to his patient should be gracious, gay, and agreeable. " 35 Among the more interesting recent developments in our understanding of language and literature is speech act theory, as formulated by J. L. Austin and John R. Searle. 36 Of the many contributions of this theory, I wish to examine here only two. I am most concerned with two fundamental aspects of any speech act that Searle draws our attention to: the "point" of an expression and the "fit" of words to the world implied in an expression. There are various possible points behind a speech act: two in particular apply to Montaigne's personal style. One category of sentences, "directives" in Searle's terminology, seeks to make the hearer perform some act; a second category, which Searle calls "commissives," look forward to a future act by the speaker. The second category, "fit," considers commissives and directives from a slightly different angle.

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Searle explains that in assertions words are intended to fit the world as it is; and if the fit is not exact, we change the words to more accurate ones. In directives and commissives, on the other hand, it is the world that must change to fit the words. If I say "open the door," I expect my hearer to make a change in the status of the door so that it will fit my command. I am struck, when reading the Essays, at the widespread.use that Montaigne makes of directives and commissives, which add to the impression of vigor in that they seek to make the world fit their words, not vice versa, and add to the impression of communality between the reader and the writer in that they seek to make one or the other act. Among directives are all commands, all invitations, all permissions, and all questions; for these last direct the hearer to respond and, occasionally, to act. The essayist invites his readers to come to their own conclusions-"[ leave you to judge"-about the piety of a seducer saying his prayers. 37 Commands come in three imperative forms, all used extensively by the essayist. Second person imperatives have already been mentioned. They can be relatively hollow ones, such as "see," or "consider"; but others come close to more complex speech acts, such as a wager. "Take the most famous theory, it will never be so sure but that in order to defend it you will have to attack and combat hundreds of contrary theories. " 38 Sometimes the intensity of the narrative leads to commands that are more literary than realizable. Of all the commands Montaigne gives his reader, my favorite is the following, though I do not necessarily recommend obeying it. "A man of prodigious fortune, coming to add his opinion to some light discussion that was going on casually at his table, began precisely thus: 'It can only be a liar or an ignoramus who will say otherwise than' and so on. Pursue that philosophic point, dagger in hand. "39 The hortatory, first-person plural imperative-"let us do so-andso-is a tried and true rhetorical device, one that Montaigne does not neglect. It appears in rather bloodless forms, such as the standard "let us see" and also in somewhat more expressive exhortations: amazed at the philosophical courage of the common people before death, he exclaims "For Heaven's sake, if that is so, let us henceforth hold a school of stupidity." 40 Its frequency testifies to its utility. It makes of the author and the reader a team. In my judgment, Montaigne makes more effective usage of the third person imperative, which is particularly suitable for a self-

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portrait in that it reveals a man's wishes, how he would want the world to be. It is everywhere in the Essays, adding to the impression of a confident, assertive thinker who gives frank and sincere expression to his opinions. In the following passage, in typical fashion, Montaigne combines several of the rhetorical strategems I have pointed out. "Take a Master of Arts, converse with him: why does he not make us feel this artificial excellence? ... Let him strip off his hood, his gown, and his Latin; let him not beat our ears with pure and undigested Aristotle; and you will take him for one of us, or worse." 41 Speech acts are more typical of humans than of books; the Essays are exceptional in that they perform so many more speech acts than most books, proposing agreements, making renunciations, extending invitations, making promises. "When do we reach an agreement and say 'There has been enough about this book; henceforth there is nothing more to say about it'?"42 (The history of criticism would suggest that no such agreement can be reached, even about Montaigne's Essays.) Montaigne makes several humorous renunciations. When advised to seek amorous partnership with people of his age and condition, he leaves that to the Emperor Galba, who favored tough old meat. 43 He extends invitations to his reader, giving him license to expand beyond the text of the Essays and invent flaws in Montaigne's character not mentioned there. 44 Following a practice common in the first century of printing, he uses his book to ask anyone who has unpublished manuscripts of La Boetie's to send them to him. 45 He makes several interesting promises. He will come to the help of a sick friend who has put himself in the hands of doctors: "If your doctor does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat such-and-such food, don't worry: rll find you another who will not agree with him. " 46 The subject of friendship occasions the brilliant promise: "If there are any persons, any good company, in country or city, in France or elsewhere, residing or traveling, who like my humors and whose humors I like, they have only to whistle in their palm and I will go furnish them with essays in flesh and bone."47 We come now to the first-person pronouns, both "I" and "we," used in varied and sometimes surprising ways. Let us begin with the least spectacular usages. First, the so-called "editorial we," a stylistic flourish that has always set my teeth on edge. Considering

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the impressive number of "we" forms in the Essays, I find very few of this artificial sort: phrases like "within our memory," "of whom we are speaking here," "let us continue our examples," "Let us speak of myself." 48 There are hundreds of cases (I haven't counted them, and will leave that to another) where Montaigne uses "we" to serve his purposes as a writer moving from topic to topic: "let us see if," "let us consider man," or "let us return to our subject,"49 all the more useful as essays love to stray from their ostensible theme. Rather infrequently Montaigne reverts to the interrogatory form "do we think" or "shall we believe." 50 These trivial usages, established by centuries of rhetoric, are so familiar that no reader bothers to ask who the "we" refers to. One of the factors that conceals the essayist's rhetoric is the muscularity of his content, which monopolizes the reader's attention, eclipsing the effect of the stylistic forces at work on him. An opening phrase like "Just consider the evidence of this in our experience" seems of little import, but in these words the essayist sets his tone as he extends an invitation to the reader, requests that he engage in some self-examination, and establishes a bond with him in mutual experience, "our" experienceY In other instances-again, very few when one eliminates the marginal or uncertain examples-the essayist unquestionably designates himself as "we." I find three incontrovertible cases of such pomposity: his friends speak "as we do"; 52 if he suffers from new diseases, "we" will find new consolations; 53 and "we" will gladly let women laugh at us after we are dead, provided they "smile on us during life. " 54 In a few cases he uses the "we" form for experiences that he can never have had, such as poverty, or the sense that his heirs want to take over his properties, or the desire to escape from duels by saving appearances. 55 We may legitimately ask ourselves if any personal experience lies behind the statement that "we" feel the surgeon's razor more than ten sword wounds in the heat ofbattle. 56 No matter how hard Montaigne strove to write naturally, he could not evade all such flourishes. A book is a book, and willy-nilly has a language apart. One French expression, "we others" (nous autres), creates an ingroup which clearly is meant to include the reader and the essayist as they contemplate from a distance those who belong to the main group. Montaigne usually employs this expression to disparage him-

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self, or to set up a bond between himself and his reader, both of whom recognize that they are lesser men, incapable of the virtues of the others. Having mentioned figures of distinction, ancients or philosophers, he is prone to revert to himself and those like him with a phrase such as "nous autres, plus foibles," literally "we others, weaker," which Frame translates "we who are weaker," a fine translation, but it leaves out the French word "others," which does not work in English and is therefore omitted in the seven other cases where the structure appears in FrenchY The most common usage of "we" by far in the Essays is the meaning "we human beings," the usage appropriate to the moraliste in his quest for human nature. "Most of our actions are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own. We cannot distinguish the skin from the shirt. " 58 "As for the opinion that disdains our life, it is ridiculous. For after all, life is our being, it is our all. Things that have a nobler and richer being may accuse ours; but it is against nature that we despise ourselves and care nothing about ourselves. " 59 Montaigne frequently speaks of human nature in the third person, formulating great generalizations about "man" or "men." But the more usual way for him to discourse on mankind relies on some form of the pronoun "we." Although "we" can designate a great diversity of groups, it is this signification-you and me and all the rest of humanity-that predominates. The form "we" is called upon frequently to castigate, or to confess vicious practices of which "we" are all guilty. Unlike the use of "you" where "you" commits various crimes, this form "we" is accusatory without being superior, though a cautious reader may question how much Montaigne feels he belongs to the culpable category. An extended passage early in the "Apology" contrasts the practices of Christians with the teachings of their religion, and the condemnation is so severe that it has led some critics to assume that it is Christianity itself that is being attacked covertly. We ought to be ashamed that ... so divine and celestial a teaching as ours marks Christians only by their words. Do you want to see this? Compare our morals with a Mohammedan's, or a pagan's; you always fall short of them. Whereas, in view of the advantage of our religion, we should shine with excellence at an extreme and incomparable distance, and people ought to say: "Are they so just, so

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charitable, so good? Then they are Christians." . . . There is no hostility that excels Christian hostility. Our zeal does wonders when it is seconding our leaning toward hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion .... Our religion is made to extirpate vices; it covers them, fosters them, incites them. 60

Montaigne must proceed with delicacy; too much self-accusation would be false; too much castigation of his readers would be repellent. On more than one occasion he exonerates himself in varying degrees from the sins of "we" by a neighboring sentence declaring his own practice. Directly after denouncing "our" habit of speaking dogmatically and didactically, he exculpates himself: "It makes me hate probable things when they are planted on me as infallible. I like these words, which soften and moderate the rashness of our propositions: 'perhaps,' 'to some extent,' 'some,' 'they say,' 'I think,' and the like. " 61 "We" can also represent a subgroup of mankind to which Montaigne belongs, and to which the reader also presumably belongs. When the essayist uses the word "we" to designate Gascons, or short men, or old men, obviously he cannot expect all his readers to share these qualities with him; in most other cases, however, we may infer that he is portraying both himself and to a certain extent his reader. There is nothing surprising when the pronoun "we" designates "we Frenchmen,'' "we Europeans," "we contemporaries,'' "we humans" (as distinct from animals or from divinities) or "we males." That he envisaged a masculine reader is evidenced by the no less than thirty times when the word "we" associates him with men and dissociates him from women. Furthermore, one exclusively masculine usage of "you" (he advises his readers never to give "your wives" charge of raising their sons) confirms the fact that the essayist clearly envisaged men, not women, as his readers. 62 (He must have been somewhat surprised that his most devoted reader should be a very young woman; however, that did not prevent him from accepting her as a friend and "adopting" her as his daughter.) A series of forms of "we" place him-and his reader-at the upper end of society, as a gentleman, as one who can live free from sovereignty because of the independence allowed him in his home by French law,63 as one who hunts, 64 as one who bears armor, 65 as one who must finance the protection of his house, 66 as one who has a domestic staff,67 and is distinct from the common herd [le vulgaire]. 68 "We" can also mean "we Christians," and at least five times sep-

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arates Catholics from Protestants. 69 Montaigne groups himself with parents on three occasions,7° and then once puts himself on the side of the children. 71 The special intimacy with which he identified himself with ancient culture shows up when he twice refers to the god Apollo at Delphi, either counseling "us" or "speaking to us unequivocally." 72 Most astounding of all is the statement in which he condemns Tacitus for judging Pompey too severely; Montaigne counters that there was nothing in Pompey's life that threatened "us" with such deliberate cruelty and tyranny. 73 Taken literally, this would make the essayist and his readers citizens of Republican Rome. By drawing inferences from such pronoun usages and from direct comments made to his readers, or about them, we can construct a picture of the person Montaigne expected to respond sympathetically to his Essays. He says that he is addressing a small group of his contemporaries: "I write my book for few men and few years." 74 Although this sounds like window dressing, a peculiarly exaggerated instance of his modesty pose, it is sometimes true. I cannot help wondering for whom the following sentence from the margins of the Bordeaux copy was written: "The most expert horseman, the surest and most graceful at breaking a horse that I have known, was in my opinion the sieur de Carnevalet, who performed this service for our King Henry 11."75 Only a contemporary, indeed an aged one, could have shared Montaigne's experience. Why then did the essayist feel it was appropriate to publish this remark? The most likely answer is that this is precisely the sort of sentence we would say to a friend in conversation. We readers cannot avoid underlining the most impressive passages of the Essays as we read. I doubt anyone has ever underlined the sentence just quoted. I am pleased to alert some readers to its neighborly qualities, otherwise ignored. Obviously, Montaigne imagined a reader well versed in classics, capable of appreciating Latin prose and poetry in the original. Since he also quotes in Greek and Italian, and even cites a very few expressions in Spanish and Gascon, he expects his reader to be unfazed by these languages in small self-explanatory doses. He employs single words in Greek type in confidence that they will be understood or recognized, but of the sixteen citations in Greek, he provides his own French translation or paraphrase for fifteen. 76 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he is showing off just a bit.

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Montaigne expects to be able to ask his reader with impunity rhetorical questions like "Who does not know the denunciation [French: sentence] by Fabricius of Pyrrhus' doctor?" 77 I for one do not. He alludes casually to "the new and well-shaped shoe of the man of days gone by," hardly a very explicit reference to an incident in one of Plutarch's Lives. 78 How many people, even in Montaigne's day, would understand him when he mentions Plato's "supposed relations with Phaedo, Dion, Stella, and Archeanassa"?79 I have studied Plato somewhat in order to teach him, but I have no idea at all what Montaigne could be referring to here, except for Dion. In short, the essayist expected all of classical history and philosophy to be familiar to anyone fully comprehending his book. He tells us more about the reader he envisioned in a marginal addition to "Of Presumption." "And then, for whom do you write? The learned men to whom it falls to pass judgment on books know no other value than that of learning .... Anyone who does not know Aristotle, according to them, by the same token does not know himself. Common, ordinary minds do not see the grace and the weight of a lofty and subtle speech. Now, these two types fill the world. The third class into whose hands you come, that of minds regulated and strong in themselves, is so rare that for this very reason it has neither name nor rank among us; it is time half wasted to aspire and strive to please this group. " 80 It should come as no surprise that Montaigne is writing for himself or for other selves like his, moralistes, potential essayists, for such is the nature of the self-reflective mentality. In a delicate and astute reading of Mme de Lafayette's novel La Princesse de Cleves, Albert Camus compliments the author on her consummate artistry, noting that it is given to the greatest geniuses only to be able to construct an entire world on a small number of building blocks. 81 As Newton required only four laws to form an entire universe, so Mme de Lafayette succeeded in making her world out of endless changes rung on three or four themes. While I would not say that Montaigne proceeds in precisely the same way, it remains true that experienced readers of the Essays begin to notice that beneath the brilliance and vigor of his prose lies a world-wiew which returns constantly to a small group of elite themes, notably, the primacy of self-awareness, the dignity of the everyday, the vanity of man, and, most importantly, the experience of the skeptical mind essaying its judgment.

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This brings us to the final pronoun, the most significant of all: "I." One of the first rules of ancient rhetoric, and one that has persisted doggedly, is the dictum that good taste requires a writer to avoid speaking of himself in the first person. As a result, in order to avoid the tabu words "I," "me," and "my," we have developed a series of stratagems, many of which are, in my opinion, hardly worth the effort. Montaigne gayly flouts the literary convention against the first person pronouns. Though highly capable of finding ways to speak of himself by indirection, he does not hesitate to speak of himself directly; indeed, he goes out of his way to assert his personality at every point-like a painter who, having portrayed himself, sticks his head through the canvas to be sure he is not overlooked. Just to check, I took sample counts of the frequency of the personal pronouns in their various forms in four chapters, taking into consideration the A, B, and C texts, but not counting the narrative passages in which a figure like Diogenes uses "I" to refer to himself. In "Of the Inconsistency of our Actions" (II, 1), composed in the very first period, the "we"s outnumber the "I"s by forty-eight to thirty-one, with only four "you"s. In "Of Drunkenness" (II, 2), perhaps of the same period, the figures are almost exactly the same, with the "we"s having it over the "I"s by forty-six to thirty, with four "you"s again present. In "Of Repentance" (III, 2) there is a strikingly different ratio, with more than four times as many "I" forms as "we" forms, three hundred and twenty-four to sixty-nine. The second person forms, thirteen in number, are still very much in the minority; but I would be willing to say that they have become more frequent as Montaigne's style becomes more personal. "Of the Disadvantage of Greatness" (III, 7) reveals much the same proportion, four to one, or sixty-three "I" forms, sixteen "we" forms, and nine "you" forms, a result that does not confirm our subjective impression of the impersonality of the chapter as a whole. It is clear that though the proportions of the mix vary, the pronoun of the portraitist has taken over the precedence once held by the pronoun of the moraliste. In some of the most interesting passages, the "I" speaks of its practices as it writes. Among the hundreds of examples available, let me cite here only one: "I have no doubt that I often happen to speak of things that are better treated by the masters of the craft, and more truthfully. This is purely the essay of my natural faculties,

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and not at all of the acquired ones; and whoever shall catch me in ignorance will do nothing against me, for I should hardly be answerable for my ideas to others, I who am not answerable for them to myself, or satisfied with them. " 82 Such a passage could be converted into impersonal language only with the greatest ingenuity, for here the author has made himself almost indistinguishable (grammatically at least) from his book: "whoever shall catch me in ignorance" means approximately "whoever catches an error of ignorance in this book"; but in the next words, "will do nothing against me," the "me" is hardly the book, and we have a firmer sense of the man behind the text because the words themselves use one word to designate both. What is particular to Montaigne is the quasi-interchangeability of the writer and his book. Inasmuch as the Essays are designed to display Montaigne's judgment at work, it is only natural that they should abound with phrases to signal his opinion, formulas such as "I find," "I esteem," "I judge," "I believe," "in my opinion," "to my knowledge," "to my taste." They help characterize his mind as skeptical, assertive of itself without being dogmatic about the truth. How many times he adds the superfluous words "I say" to a sentence! Other phrases indicate approval or disapproval with greater or lesser forcefulness: "I agree that," "I advise," "I warn," "I am pleased," "I praise," "I love," or "I would tell them," "I am displeased," "I am offended by," "I accuse," "I greatly dislike," "I condemn extraordinarily," "I abominate," and "I hate." Montaigne was probably unaware of one of the subtle effects created by the bluntness with which he gives the nod or the frown to philosophers and princes alike. "I heartily agree with Plato."83 Listen to how he treats Saint Augustine (without naming him): "However, if we are to believe a Church Father, Death is not an evil unless that which follows it is. And I should say, still more probably, that neither what goes before nor what comes after is an appurtenance of death. " 84 There was no need for the essayist to draw our attention to the fact that he is disagreeing with a Church Father; when he does, he risks sounding more presumptuous than modest. In his book, he hobnobs with the choicest company, even when all he is doing is telling us that he avoided houses of prostitution: "Not only because of the danger to health (and yet I did not manage well enough to escape having two touches of it, slight, however, and incipient), but also out of scorn I did not addict myself much

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to venal and public intimacies. I wanted to make the pleasure keener by difficulty, by desire, and by a certain glory; and I like the way of Emperor Tiberius, who in his love affairs was won by modesty and noble birth as much as by any other quality.... " 85 Me and Tiberius. A rather unsettling pair, for Tiberius does not enjoy very good press, especially for his sexual conduct. We modern readers, with our sense that no revelation is too intimate to make in print, are frustrated when Montaigne neglects to provide more detail concerning his bouts with venereal disease. What was it? Did it play a role in the fact that so many of his children died shortly after birth? Leaving aside such unanswerable questions, we may well ask what Tiberius is doing here. To drag him in is either pedantry or self-inflation. The same thing, I believe, could be said of the following sentence: "Not because Socrates said it, but because it is really my feeling, and perhaps excessively so, I consider all men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as I do a Frenchman, setting this national bond after the universal and common one. " 86 Why mention Socrates at all when the attitude is conceived in terms that hardly remind one of the Greek philosopher? Besides his judgments, Montaigne communicates his experiences to his reader. He entitled his last, arguably his best, essay "Of Experience" (III, 13). Even outside this chapter, phrases like "I want to tell my experience in this matter [handling money]," "it is easy to see by experience that ... ," "I know by experience," "this I know by experience," betray the truth that for him experience was the ultimate authority. 87 We never find an expression like "I don't know if your experience will bear me out, but ... "-probably because Montaigne assumes that human experiences are more or less universal. Only the most observant reader will notice how often he invokes his personal experiences in little elements introducing his sentences: "I have seen," 88 "I once noted," and the like. They add nothing to the general sense of what he is saying, but Montaigne simply cannot do without them. A minuscule marginal insertion in "Of Ancient Customs" (I, 49) is particularly revealing, for its only function is to put Montaigne into his text: the Romans "had portable kitchens, csuch as I have seen, Ain which everything needed to serve a meal was carried. " 89 I hope my indulgent reader will permit me to quote a longish selection concerning how to test a conversational partner's mind (to essay it) to see if he knows what he is saying. Montaigne's reader

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is subjected to an avalanche of strategems: twice the text breaks spontaneously into dialogue, there are two colloquialisms, five commands addressed to "you" and two to "us," one classical citation, one classical allusion, two rhetorical questions, one use of the ethical dative, at a conservative count fourteen images, two appeals to Montaigne's personal experience, one strong expression of his personal preference, a moral maxim-to name only the most obvious. Notice particularly the subtle movements from "I" to "we" or to "you," for they create an interesting pattern. It is safe to exclaim "That is beautiful!" after hearing an entire page of Virgil. In that way the shrewd ones save themselves. But to undertake to follow him step by step and to try to note with a specific and selective judgment where a good author surpasses himself, where he rises high, weighing the words, the phrases, the ideas, one after the other-get away from there. ~ must see not only what each one says, but also what he thinks, and also why he thinks it. Every day I hear stupid people say things that are not stupid. They say something good; let us find out how far they understand it, let us see where they got it. We help them to use that fine remark or that fine reason, which they do not possess; they only have it in keeping. They have probably brought it forth by accident and gropingly; we give it authority and value for them. You lend them a hand. What for? They are not grateful to you for it and become all the more inept for it. Do not second them, let them go; they will handle the matter like men who are afraid of getting scalded; they do not dare change its setting or its lighting, or go into it deeply. Shake it ever so little and it escapes them; they abandon it to you, strong and fine as it may be. They are fine weapons, but they are badly shafted. How many times I have seen this by experience! Now if you happen to enlighten and confirm them, they promptly seize and steal from you the advantage of your interpretation. "That is what I meant to say; that is just my idea; if I did not express it so, it was only for lack of words." Empty wind! We must use even malice to correct this arrogant stupidity. The doctrine ofHegesias that we must neither hate nor blame but instruct is right elsewhere; but here it is injustice and inhumanity to aid and set right a man who has no use for your help and is the worse for it. I love to let them get mired and stuck even more than they are, and so deep that, if it is possible, they may recognize themselves at last. 90

The general strategy of this passage is to join Montaigne and his reader ("you") in a conspiracy to unmask the ineptitude of a fool.

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At the outset, with apparent sympathy, Montaigne describes a procedure that is always safe (to express admiration for Virgil), but in the next sentence imputes this method to "shrewd ones," who we now realize are the source of the exclamation of admiration. Then follows a list of specifics beyond the competence of the shrewd ones, but without a subject pronoun, so that we readers are moving in a vague world, not knowing who is doing what. The syntax is abruptly fractured as Montaigne, in an everyday colloquialism, tells his reader "go look somewhere else." (The French almost means "Scram.") The next words shift the tone radically as Cicero's Latin appears from nowhere. Then Montaigne (using words that rhyme in French) introduces himself and a daily experience of his with fools-the shrewd ones seen now from a different angle. He illustrates his frequent experience by imagining a specific example, without making the transition clear, and then invites the reader to join him as they examine together the capacity of the fools. By now the three main actors of the drama have been introduced, the villains first-and they have increased in villainy from shrewd ones to fools-the reader, who has been directed to keep away from the villains, and finally the "I," who immediately makes a partner of the "you" in his investigation, and concedes that both are guilty of lending a hand to the fools by giving them more credit than they deserve. After four "we" forms "I" disappears, leaving the actual unmasking to "you"; "we help them" is transformed to "you give them a hand." "I" continues to advise "you" as step by step "you" withdraws support, leaves the fools to their own devices, which makes them fidgety, until they abandon the field. "I" reenters the scene, to assert that he has had this experience many times, reminding us in a way that it was his scenario all along. Using the same dramatis personae, he conjures up a new scene, in which "you," instead of leaving the fools alone, comes to their help, whereupon they try to seize the advantage. "I" brings this to a rapid halt with a single scornful word, Soujlez, the imperative of the verb "blow," a vulgarism whose meaning defies translation. Frame says "empty wind"; I might say "hot air"; but neither conveys the imperative force, or the presence of "you." At this point the tone changes from the most vulgar to the most lofty, as the voice of "I" asserts itself authoritatively in a maxim, giving blanket permission to proceed maliciously against fools. He then mentions a classical doctrine (why not a Christian one?): that

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we ought to edify, rather than hate or condemn-the fools being implied. Who is this Hegesias he refers to? Has anyone ever heard of him? (He is in Diogenes Laertius' Life of Aristippus, Villey tells me. 91 ) Is the "I" asserting his intellectual ascendancy by mentioning him? Or is he complimenting his reader by assuming that the allusion needs no clarification? What about Hegesias' lesson, a magnanimous one? It is precisely the position to which Montaigne, who never suffered fools gladly, is taking exception. Its presence serves to point out that Montaigne knows just how far he is flouting the standard moral conventions, and also convinces us that his advice, right or wrong, is made in awareness of its ramifications, not simply spewed forth in the heat of the moment. Montaigne tests his own advice, and concludes that Hegesias' principle, while normally valid, does not apply when dealing with fools, who will in the long run benefit more from being made to recognize their inadequacies. "I" has taken over the discourse now, and pronounces exultantly that he loves to let fools sink into their own stupidity. We readers, long since firmly aligned on his side and flattered by his high opinion of us, pardon his malice and recognize that his procedure will actually do the opponents good if they are brought to an awareness of their own foolishness. As we examine in detail how Montaigne masterminds his minidrama, we see the sureness with which he sets the scene, distributes the roles, involves the reader to a great extent in his unmasking of fools, so that at first it seems as if "you" is the protagonist. At the conclusion of the scene, Montaigne-the-moralist takes over again as he extracts a general moral, the consequences of which he fully recognizes, and reveals his ultimate concern to help even his adversaries by increasing their self-awareness. While it is a brilliant piece of manoeuvering, I have given it here primarily to illustrate how he succeeds in making his presence palpable in his book. Behind all the subtleties or manipulations that I have spelled out lies the simple truth that Montaigne always kept his reader in mind, respected him, wished to engage him in the process of essaying, never forgetting that it made no sense to express his own self and individuality unless he was communicating with someone worthwhile, his intellectual equal, his reader. Strange phenomenon of style: to make us believe in his existence, Montaigne must write as if he believed in ours.

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Montaigne's literary goal was to seem as unliterary as possible in a book. Still, when he came to writing, he adopted, somewhat unwittingly, a literary persona, an authorial voice that masks the man behind the book, or distorts him in artistic ways. I do not mean that Montaigne deliberately falsifies. He made his portrait as accurate as he could, perhaps as anyone could. But to do so, he had to adopt certain artistic means, in his case literary means. His portrait is good literature; therefore, it is perforce literary. The proof of this lies in the journal that he composed as he traveled in Italy. 92 There he was writing for no eyes but his own, with no intention of publication at all. The opinions and the personality depicted in the public work match those of the private diary, though in the second, Montaigne appears somewhat more impressed by medicine and doctors, more sociable and gregarious, more concerned with money and household management (perhaps natural while journeying), and, above all, more interested in religious beliefs and practices than the Essays might suggest. Naturally, the content of his journal is dictated to a certain extent by the mere fact that he is traveling and notes the sort of thing that intrigues all travelers; nonetheless, the contrast with the Essays is startling. The man revealed by the Journal resembles the man portrayed in the Essays, but he speaks of quite different matters and in an entirely different language. Writing for himself, he alludes almost never to classical lore. Socrates, Alexander, Cato, Epaminondas, the moral heroes and villains of antiquity, populate the pages of the Essays. They do not exist for the Journal. In the diary ancient authors are mentioned in passing if at all, with one notable exception, when Montaigne repeats the substance of a conversation among men of letters which he steered onto Amyot's translation of Plutarch. 93 While he was in Rome-of all places-the essayist did not commit to paper one single reflexion on the great figures of the past with whom he is so intimate in his book. He did not quote any of his favorite poets other than two insignificant phrases, presumably borrowed from a guide or guidebook. Yet he had included 281 verse quotations in the first edition of the Essays, published three months before he departed on his voyage, and he would add 508 more in the 1588 edition. 94 Clearly, he quoted his beloved poets because he delighted in them, not merely as a concession to contemporary literary ways; for as he became surer of what he wished to accomplish in his Essays, he intensified the practice. When he came to

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writing for a public, he could not escape his instinctive conviction that a worthwhile book must be rich with learning. Much as he intended to portray himself as a human being, he also intended to portray himself as a humanist, a man of erudition-not a scholarwho had assimilated the riches of the classical heritage and- made them his own. The two principal voices of the Essays, the moraliste's and the portraitist's, surface rarely in the diary. One could say that the curiosity with which Montaigne investigates and documents human diversity as he travels represents the moraliste at his field work, but we see little beyond documentation, no study of human nature. Montaigne's abstention from personal commentary-for example, on exorcisms he witnessed in Rome-tantalizes modern scholars, for we wish he had assumed the role of moraliste more frequently. 95 In a passage inspired by extreme suffering from his kidney stone he sounds somewhat like the essayist as he admonishes himself to prepare for death, which is at his heels, 96 to suffer the ills God sends us humanly, or to bring them to a halt promptly. But we see little of the exercise of judgment that is the heart of essaying. If we look for self-portraiture in the pages of the Journal, we might cite only two brief passages, one describing his activities in Rome, 97 which dispel boredom, idleness, and melancholy, and later one concerning his pleasant stay at Lucca, where he slept, studied (what? I wonder), and distracted himself. 98 How different all this is from the essays! Equally remarkable is the contrast in the styles of the diary and the Essays. In the Journal we find (more or less) "a simple, natural speech, the same on paper as in the mouth," 99 and it is poles apart from the vigorous style of the essayist. The diary is totally denuded of the literary embellishments of the sort I have been discussing, largely because Montaigne envisages no reader whom he is addressing. No rhetorical questions to himself; only one exclamation, other than pieties such as "God be thanked. " 100 No voices interrupting the movement of the text. Nugatory usage of the pronoun forms "we" and "you." One joke. No playfulness, either with ideas or with words. No alliterations. No ribaldries-or perhaps one mild one-despite the fact that Montaigne reports more than once that he sought conversations with prostitutes (to his dismay, in Rome they charged as much for their talk as for their other services). 101 And astoundingly, no images, with one major exception. 102 Montaigne himself notes that his essays are thick with images; 103 indeed

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they are one of the most striking features of his style, so much so that one of his most sensitive readers concludes that images are the native form of his thought. I would say rather that they are the native form of his public style, 104 but that his private style, that of the diary, is devoid of them. When he came to write "On the Resemblance of Children to Fathers" (II, 37}, which deals with medical matters closely akin to those of his journal, he depicted the reasoning of one doctor by using a vivid image: "It is good not to pass water often, for the heavy excrements it draws along with it will not be carried away unless there is violence, and we see by experience that a stiffly rushing torrent sweeps the place through which it passes much cleaner than does the course of a gentle and sluggish stream. " 105 In his Journal, Montaigne noted for weeks on end the daily quantity of waters he drank and the quantity he urinated, with nary an image such as this. On many occasions Montaigne declares that his Essays reproduce his manner in conversation. Since the purpose of his book is to depict himself, "It cannot happen here as I see it happening often, that the craftsman and his work contradict each other: 'Has a man whose conversation is so good written such a stupid book?' or 'Have such learned writings come from a man whose conversation is so feeble?' " 106 Elsewhere he gives an inventory of criticisms that he or others have made of his work: too full of figures, too many Gasconisms, ignorant or paradoxical thinking, a playfulness apt to be taken in earnest. So what? "Isn't this the way I speak everywhere? Don't I represent myself to the life? Enough, then. I have done what I wanted. " 107 I doubt seriously that Montaigne's conversation was as studded with Latin verse as his Essays are, or quite as plentiful in classical and historical allusions. The kind of conversation he has in mind resembles perhaps the one described in Rome, among men of sound learning, with whom one could discuss Plutarch in confidence and in detail. When he speaks of his book as conversation on paper, we must not think that he is denigrating it as trivial. Far from it; conversation in his opinion is "the most fruitful and natural exercise of our mind.... I find it sweeter than any other action of our life. " 108 It is so important to him that considering the joys of discussion leads him to the expression of a most unusual and revelatory opinion, one that I doubt many of his readers would share: if given the choice, he would rather be blind than deaf. 109 He writes one of his

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finest chapters on the art of discussion, or conversation. In it he envisages a one-to-one encounter, a vigorous, even rough, interchange between outspoken minds in quest of the truth, stimulated more by the exercise than the results. To describe his ideal he often resorts to images taken from jousting, for he wanted it rough-andtumble. The furthest thing from his mind would be the polite parlor games of the literary salon. People in agreement do not discuss; they scratch each others' backs in compliment. An opponent whom we beat easily makes for dull play. He does not care what the subject matter is; he is offended by no opposing opinion.U0 Has the point occurred to you that just as Montaigne wants the Essays to represent the best form of conversation he wants the best form of conversation to resemble the mind essaying a subject, except that in a conversation there are two minds at work? A good conversation, like an essay, can go vagabonding far from the original point of departure, sure in the fact that strong minds (not necessarily learned ones) will stick to what is pertinent and know how to return to the crucial matters. The soundest way Montaigne could conceive of portraying himself was to create somehow on paper a one-way conversation, which is no easier to construct than a one-way pendulum.

X

Study Without a Book IN THE "Apology for Raymond Sebond" Montaigne argues that the one thing man might be expected to know best is his own nature, for it is closest to him, and can be studied without the mediation of the senses. "We are nearer to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stone are to us;" 1 furthermore, if we know anything, it is likely to be first our souls, next our physical makeup. He then denies vigorously that we can have this sort of knowledge any more than knowledge of exterior objects. His theory affirms categorically that we cannot know our essence objectivelytoday we would say scientifically; his practice, however, would indicate that we can nonetheless study our inner nature in the hope of attaining a special brand of knowledge: self-knowledge, subjective and imperfect. Obviously, without such knowledge no accurate self-portrait could be made. Montaigne can endorse self-study under the aegis of Socrates and the immense reputation of the Delphic command "Know thyself. " 2 It seems clear that when Socrates appropriated this dictum of traditional Greek wisdom, he endowed it with a more philosophical than religious content, emphasizing its intellectual aspects, "KNOW thyself," allied in a general way to his belief that the unexamined life is not worth living. Both Plutarch and Seneca, the essayist's favorites, also refer repeatedly to the saying "Know thyself." Plutarch, at one time a priest of Apollo at Delphi, wrote a treatise (now lost) on the saying. In a second work, 3 this one preserved, and carefully studied by Montaigne, he refers to "Know thyself" as God's injunction that man should remember his lowly status and abandon presumption. The oracular God speaks to mankind, saying "Know your place and keep to it." In his Epistles Seneca describes how he examined his conscience at the end of each day to assess his conduct, 4 a ritual derived probably from the Pythagoreans-and one that Montaigne seems not to have adopted, per-

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haps because his dislike of routine was uncomfortable with such regimented self-interrogation. A Septuagint mistranslation of a verse of The Song of Songs 5 permitted Christians to discover the phrase in the Old Testament, then later to see it implied in a verse of Deuteronomy.6 Following patristic literature, medieval theologians such as Bernard de Clairvaux disseminated the saying through their exegesis. The list of writers who refer to it could be extended almost endlessly, as the maxim is made to mean whatever the commentator wills. By the time of the Renaissance everybody was familiar with the expression, which was used indiscriminately on all sides. Authors as diverse as Calvin and Erasmus cited it, each employing it or distorting it in characteristic ways. Erasmus, not surprisingly, consecrates an article in his Adagia to the famous saying. 7 He is concerned not so much with probing its content as with assembling the sort of information likely to appeal to a humanist interested in the history and usage of the maxim in classical times, and so lists passages from antiquity which quote it (such as Ovid) or purvey a similar idea in a slightly different context (as Pindar). While he seems to concur with the standard interpretation that it is a lesson in modesty, he cites Cicero's belief that it alludes to our qualities as well as our defects. The capstone of his presentation is a quotation from Menander that it might be more to the point for men to know others rather than themselves! The treatment is generally disappointing, impersonal, lacking in genuine commentary. The adage does not seem to have impressed the Dutch humanist as much as the succeeding maxim, "Nothing in excess," 8 a saying also enjoying prominent display on the temple at Delphi. Montaigne's thought, broad and diverse as it is, includes aspects of various past interpretations of this famous dictum, but he introduces a fresh personal approach that has a typically modern cast. His skeptical conviction that man cannot know the nature of reality, whether external or internal, transform the force of the first word "know." The distinction made in Romance languages between two kinds of knowing, between savoir, to know indisputable facts, and connaitre, to be acquainted with something that has a character, such as a person or a nation, is particularly apt here; for what Montaigne seeks is acquaintance, not science. Still more significant is the increased emphasis he places on the second word "thyself," and the new dimension he gives it. He aspires to appreciate his own per-

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sonality, unique and special, as if the maxim read "Know THY SELF." He glories in his uniqueness without in the least denigrating the uniqueness of his neighbor. "I do not share that common error of judging another by myself, I easily believe that another man may have qualities different from mine. Because I feel myself tied down to one form, I do not oblige everybody to espouse it, as all others do. I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life; and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us. " 9 This is individualism as the Renaissance discovered it, where each person is valued for himself in the richness of his own secular life. I do not mean to say that the individual soul's uniqueness was unknown prior to the Renaissance. The Judeo-Christian tradition had always recognized that each soul was unique; but the drama and the worth of that soul depended ultimately on its relation to God, not to itself or to its fellow human beings. Dante created a throng of highly individualized beings, then placed each of them in a fixed niche assigned by God according to the moral condition of their souls. But the Essays neglect the drama of the individual man's relation to God, probably because it presented no problems for Montaigne. He alludes to the Greek maxim "Know thyself" on five different occasions, all in the B and C strata. He makes this comment on a Latin paraphrase of the Timaeus: "This great precept is often cited in Plato: 'Do thy job and know thyself.' Each of its two parts generally includes our whole duty, and likewise includes its fellow. He who would do his job would see that his first lesson is to know what he is and what is proper for him. And he who knows himself no longer takes extraneous business for his own; he loves and cultivates himself before anything else.... " The entire program of living proposed by Montaigne, and indeed proposed by the vast majority of all succeeding French moraliste literature, is encapsulated in this succinct statement. Sound action and self-knowledge are but two sides of the same coin; self-knowledge, the first duty of man, provides the surest basis for appropriate living; and a man who knows himself may cultivate his self without necessarily being selfish, without encouraging presumptuous self-love. In fact, self-study, properly conducted, will deflate the human ego. "Because Socrates alone had seriously digested the precept of his god-to know himself-and because by that study he had come to despise himself, he alone was deemed worthy of the name wise. Who ever knows him-

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self thus, let him boldly make himself known by his own mouth. " 10 Self-study, or self-knowledge, justify the project of self-portraiture, if one is Socrates-and Montaigne uses the Greek philosopher to exemplify his own opinions. Without question, the context proves that he is thinking of himself here, using the indirection we have noted before. I am intrigued that he persists in the oral image-the wise man makes himself known by his own mouth, not pen-when for over a decade Montaigne had been practicing self-portraiture in writing. He instinctively regarded his work as speaking to someone, not writing. In his account of his fall from the horse he had demonstrated that we can profit from self-study; but the project of self-portraiture must have lent considerably greater impetus to his practice of selfstudy. "A man must see his vice and study it to tell about it." 11 For several years, he notes, he has had only himself as the object of his thoughts, only himself as subject for study; or at least, if he studies something else, it is only in order to turn it to himself. 12 He is his own physics, his own metaphysics. 13 In "Of Presumption," he gives a voluptuous account of this constant preoccupation: "The world always looks straight ahead; as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself. Others always go elsewhere, if they stop to think about it; they always go forward; ... as for me, I roll about in myself. " 14 He has a rich storehouse of images to express the process of introspection, nowhere more densely displayed than here. Most people would think of self-examination in terms of looking at one's self, a visual image; and in fact that is the most recurrent image in the Essays, exploited thirteen times in my hasty count, surely too low a figure. 15 But all the other senses, excepting smell, I believe, are called upon as the essayist refers to tasting himself (once), to touching himself {three times), and listening to himself (six times). 16 On five occasions he uses verbs of probing or penetrating deeply; just as frequently his image is based on the idea that he keeps himself company (note the implication of doubleness)Y Elsewhere he speaks of opening up his soul's diseases, tearing them from his breast to handle them in the daylight, 18 or of brooding over his thoughts like a hen. 19

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Despite all his disclaimers that he is not teaching, Montaigne cannot avoid admitting that he publishes his book "not without ideas of instructing the public." 20 That self-study, and the selfknowledge he hopes to achieve through it, provide the richest of lives is perhaps the single most important lesson of all for him. He seems to have been destined for it by his very temperament; unlike most humans, he says, he does not avoid studying himself or shrink from contemplation of his ineptitudes; 21 on the contrary, his most laborious study is of his self, so much so that he requires distractions to give his mind a break from the intensity of his self-examination. Quite immodestly, he states that not every mind is equally equipped to undertake vigorous self-study. "Meditation is a powerful and full study for anyone who knows how to examine and exercise himself vigorously; I would rather fashion my mind than furnish it. There is no occupation that is either weaker or stronger, according to the mind involved, than entertaining one's own thoughts." 22 Most people consider that they know themselves sufficiently well; but the Socratic paradox of ignorance applies as forcefully here as in any form of knowledge: those who claim to know themselves well are showing that they do not in fact know themselves, and vice versa. 23 Montaigne agrees; only someone who has striven to assess himself can be aware of the complexities of self-study. "I, who make no other profession, find in me such infinite depth and variety, that what I have learned bears no other fruit than to make me realize how much I still have to learn. " 24 In the study of other men conducted by the moraliste in him, he came to appreciate the involutions of human behavior and character, and above all its stunning diversity; in the study of himself conducted by the portraitist, he is overwhelmed by wonderment as he observes the mysteries of his own self. "I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself. "25 Self-study is a thorny enterprise of extreme difficulty; 26 more than that, it is a practice quite contrary to man's natural inclinations. According to Pascal, who studied the Essays intently, human beings will go to any extreme to avoid being closeted with themselves, for then they will have to examine their own nature and recognize the traces of original sin in it. 27 Unwilling to face his own corrupt being,

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man struggles-desperately, according to Pascal-to distract his mind with any activity. Dancing, hunting, ping pong (not mentioned by Pascal), philosophy, mathematics, scholarship-all are ways of escaping the discomforts of introspection. Montaigne says somewhat the same thing, though not in the context of sinfulness. "We are an object that fills us with discontent; we see nothing in us but misery and vanity. In order not to dishearten us, Nature has very appropriately thrown the action of our vision outward. We go forward with the current, but to turn our course back toward ourselves is a painful movement: thus the sea grows troubled and turbulent when it is tossed back on itself. Look, says everyone, at the movement of the heavens, look at the public, look at that man's quarrel, at this man's pulse, at another man's will; in short, always look high or low, or to one side, or in front, or behind you. " 28 Montaigne provides no clear recipe for how to go about selfstudy. He appears to believe that all we need do is simply to listen attentively to ourselves, to examine ourselves. If Plato had listened to himself (and he did, the essayist later adds), he would have noted that even his exalted virtue was tainted with touches of vice. 29 Montaigne says again and again that if others listened to themselves as he does, they would come to the same perceptions he came to. He does not conceive any necessity to dissect his thoughts, to analyze them as Freud might. For the essayist, self-delusion finds its locus in neglecting to pay heed to what is going on inside ourselves, not in forces within ourselves that compel us to be deaf and blind to our own passions. Listening attentively requires a discerning sensibility, but apparently Montaigne feels that with practice we can learn to hear the subtler undertones of our make-up. "However good a judge's intentions are, unless he listens closely to himself, which few people amuse themselves in doing, his inclination to friendship, kinship, beauty, and vengeance, and not only things so weighty, but that fortuitous instinct that makes us favor one thing more than another and that assigns us, without leave of our reason, our choice between two like objects, or some shadow of equal emptiness, can insinuate insensibly into his judgment the favor or disfavor of a cause, and tip the scales." 30 Observing is difficult first because the mind shifts so rapidly, and then because we are wont to look for great and dignified forces at work within us when it is petty and vain considerations that underlie our conduct.

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This second matter can be illustrated in a variety of ways. The habit of self-study led Montaigne to a deeper comprehension of his own nature and human nature in general. Compare these two remarks on human attitudes toward death. He is asking why are we never ready to die, why does death always seem to arrive at just the wrong moment? "One man complains not so much of death as that it interrupts the course of a glorious victory; another that he must move out before he has married off his daughter or supervised the education of his children; one laments losing the company of his wife, another of his son, as the principal comforts of his being. " 31 Montaigne argues that these complaints are foolish; for wives, sons, daughters, careers are adjuncts to our self, not essentials, not really worth great concern. After he had been brought to the brink of death often by his bouts with his kidney stones, he wrote more personally, and I would say much more perceptively: "I considered by what slight causes and objects my imagination fostered in me the regret for life; out of what atoms the gravity and difficulty of this dislodgement from life built itself up in my soul; for what frivolous thoughts we made room in so great an affair: a dog, a horse, a book, a glass, and what not, counted for something in my loss. With others it is their ambitious hopes, their purse, their learning-no less foolishly, in my opinion.... The tears of a lackey, the distribution of my old clothes, the touch of a well-known hand, a commonplace phrase of consolation, make me disconsolate and sorry for myself. " 32 I am not ready to die yet; I have an important appointment for a haircut next Tuesday. Such are the petty considerations that bear weight with mankind; and Montaigne sees them clearly in himself. We are by nature frivolous and paltry; it is therefore frivolous, paltry things that impress us, that matter to us. Self-study leads to this kind of honesty, which allows Montaigne to be universal in a way peculiar to himself as he discourses on the trivia of everyday life, giving them the importance they actually have for us all. Surely one of the reasons that the Essays continue to seem relevant to their readers is that Montaigne has found a kind of humanism that is common to us all, the significance of everyday life; the life he writes about is real. The second step in self-study would involve comparing the evidence of the present with that of the past, for judgment cannot work without some assistance from memory. We forget our past errors, or neglect to keep them in mind when we stumble again.

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He who calls back to mind the excess of his past anger, and how far this fever carried him away, sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceives a more justified hatred for it. . .. He who remembers having been mistaken so many, many times in his own judgment, is he not a fool if he does not distrust it forever after? When I find myself convicted of a false opinion by another man's reasoning, I do not so much learn what new thing he has told me and this particular bit of ignorance-that would be small gainas I learn my weakness in general, and the treachery of my understanding; whence I derive the reformation of the whole mass. With all my other errors I do the same, and I feel that this rule is very useful for my life.... To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing; we must learn that we are nothing but fools, a far broader and more important lesson.... If each man watched closely the effects and circumstances of the passions that dominate him, as I have done with the ones I have fallen prey to, he would see them coming and would check their impetuosity and course a bit. 33 This page expresses Montaigne's formula for self-study and his conviction of its worth in greater clarity and with more detail than any other. I like the example already quoted-how many times a day do we call ourselves "confounded fool" {the French is strong, something like "horse's ass") without taking the next, crucial, step and concluding that we are often foolish-not totally foolish, but fundamentally so. 34 We must become wise at our own expense. 35 With practice, this pattern of self-discovery apparently becomes easier and easier to reiterate. In the "Apology for Raymond Sebond," expounding on the weakness of human judgment, Montaigne makes, two pages apart, quite contradictory assessments of how discernible this crucial defect is: first, "It is easy to see by the confusion that our judgment gives to our own selves, and the uncertainty that each man feels within himself, that it has a very insecure seat"; 36 but later, "moreover this malady is not so easily discovered, unless it is wholly extreme and irremediable. " 37 Is the fallibility of our judgment easy to see or not? I would suggest that it is readily visible only for one steeped in self-study. Besides comparing our self of the present with our self of the past, we may also compare our self to the great figures of history. While Montaigne insists that reading within the book of our self provides far more vivid lessons than reading in Aristotle, it remains true that reading, especially in the vast store of human experience

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retained in history and in the moralistes of the past, can assist us in our self-study. In his description of his library Montaigne designates himself as one of "those who study without a book" [ceux qui estudient sans livre], 38 but it would be immensely misleading if we were to overlook the role of reading in Montaigne's search for himself and for human nature. The first lessons one draws from self-study are the unpalatable ones, not human weakness and vanity in general, but our own personal weakness and vanity; not the foolishness of all, but our own foo1ishness. These results, and perhaps these results alone, guarantee the profundity of the self-searching. "I who spy on myself ... closely, who have my eyes unceasingly intent on myself, as one who has not much business elsewhere ... I would hardly dare tell of the vanity and weakness that I find in myself." 39 Besides vanity, in the Ecclesiastes sense of the word, one finds the changeability so brilliantly portrayed in "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions": "Anyone who observes carefully can hardly find himself twice in the same state .... Whoever studies himself really attentively finds in himself, yes, even in his judgment, this gyration and discord. " 40 But more positive results also come with continuing usage. Nature's lessons are powerful, if we can read them; we may learn to die; we may strengthen our weak judgment by recognizing its fallibility. Montaigne is so confident about the power and significance of self-study that he asserts more than once that nature furnishes mankind all the material necessary to live wisely and well. "Let us only listen: we tell ourselves all we most need." 41 If he had been properly trained, he would have found the consolations for death in himself, not in Plato. 42 Perhaps as challenging as learning to die, or even more so, is the matter of learning to age; for it takes a great provision of study if one intends to handle the imperfections, both physical and moral, that age imposes upon us. 43 He has recently noticed that it is harder to read at the end of the day: "Here is a step backward, just barely perceptible. I shall draw back another step, from the second to the third, from the third to th~ fourth, so quietly that I shall have to be confirmed blind before I feel the decadence and old age of my sight.... And so I doubt that my hearing is on the verge of growing dull, and you will see that when I have half lost it, I shall still be blaming the voices of those who are speaking to me. We must really

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strain our soul to make it feel how it is ebbing away." 44 Perceptions such as these prove that Montaigne has learned to strain his soul. The conscientious student of the self learns above all to let no moral reflection pass without checking first if it applies to himself. If, as we who study ourselves have learned to do, each man who hears a statement immediately considered how it properly pertains to him, each man would find that it is not so much a good saying as a good whiplash to the ordinary stupidity of his judgment. But men receive the advice of truth and its precepts as if addressed to the common people, never to themselves; and each man, instead of incorporating them into his behavior, incorporates them into his memory, very stupidly and uselessly. 45

Not just counsel from others, but even the good advice we give others may apply equally to our unheeding selves. Let us always have this saying of Plato in our mouths: ... "Am I not myself at fault? May not my admonition be turned around against me?" A wise and divine refrain, which scourges the most universal and common error of mankind.... Every man likes the smell of his own dung. Our eyes see nothing behind us. A hundred times a day we make fun of ourselves in the person of our neighbor and detect in others the defects that are more clearly in ourselves, and wonder at them with prodigious impudence and heedlessness. 46

Such advice is not meant to cripple us with a feeling of guilt every time we start to criticize another; for if we resolve to speak only when we are innocent, we might never dare open up; and it is a function of charity to draw another's attention to his defects. 47 But our judgment must not exculpate ourselves. Apparently he treats his friends in the same way, putting them to the same test. "When I want to judge someone, I ask him how satisfied he is with himself, to what extent he is pleased with his words or his work.... For I notice generally that people are as mistaken in judging their own work as that of others, not only because of the affection that is involved, but also because they have not the capacity to know and distinguish it for what it is. The work, by its own power and fortune, may second the workman beyond his inventiveness and knowledge and outstrip him. For my part, I do not judge the value of any other work less clearly than my own;

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and I place the Essays now low, now high, very inconsistently and uncertainly." 48 What thickets of complexity one engages in the moment one takes on the task of knowing and judging oneself! With books as with humans, it is hard to sift out what is genuine and what is accidental. The goal of self-study is clearly self-knowledge, upon which it should be possible to fashion our conduct to remain in harmony with our nature and capacities. Montaigne does not claim to have attained his goal, only to have made progress. Although he says "I know myself well" at one point, 49 he seems to be speaking of a limited context. More typically he admits that he is "as doubtful of myself as of anything else"; 50 for in this field of inquiry as in all others, there can be no end to our search. The advantage of selfstudy is that each man is the expert in his subject, for only he can see if he has been base or cruel or loyal or devout. 5 1 My friends may know better than I whether I have the tact and circumspection to pass on good advice (the only kind I give) without offending the sensibilities of others. Several of Montaigne's friends have called him on the carpet without reserve, either on their own or at his request; he welcomes such criticism; 52 but if the truth were to be known, "the fact remains that all in all, it seems to me that I am as often praised as dispraised beyond reason. " 53 Experience shows that even those who know us fairly well are likely to go astray when they assess our motivations. "I have sometimes seen my friends call prudence in me what was merely fortune, and consider as an advantage of courage and patience what was an advantage ofjudgment and opinion, and attribute to me one title for another, now to my gain, now to my loss. " 54 In keeping with the great philosophical tradition of antiquity, and somewhat in contradiction with Christianity, Montaigne's morality resides in intellectual accomplishments. Living well is a matter of knowing well-more specifically, knowing oneself. He finds no need to reform the heart or to uproot sin. To attempt to become an angel appears to him to be wasted effort, for we cannot change our nature. 5 5 It is equally unsuitable to try to live as a horse. Nature is an imperious master, and drags along those who resist her; 56 the wise man strives to attune himself to the limits imposed upon him by nature, to accept them, and to maximize his potential within them. In his discussion of his public role as Mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne maintains that our ·private responsibilities to ourselves

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are more important than the duty of public service. There exist certain secrets of wisdom that perhaps should not be shared with everyone for fear they might be abused. "It is likely that among the latter is to be found the true point of the friendship that each man owes to himself. . . . He who knows its duties and practices them, he is truly of the cabinet of the Muses; he has attained the summit of human wisdom and of our happiness. This man, knowing exactly what he owes to himself, finds in the part he plays that he must reap benefits from the use of other men and the world, and because he does so must contribute to public society the duties and services suitable to him. " 57 The ultimate wisdom for mankind lies in the act of friendship, of being a good friend to ourselves. Twice the verb "know" appears in this crucial statement, as it does in other seminal passages, such as the following: "It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully." 58 "The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself. " 59 Virtue "knows how to be rich and powerful and learned and lie on perfumed matresses. She loves beauty and glory and health. But her own particular task is to know how to enjoy those blessings with temperance, ... " 60 "The judgment of an emperor should be above his imperial power, . . . He should know how to find pleasure in himself apart, ... " 61 "The cannibals, who lead as nearly natural a life as possible for man, possess "that great thing, the knowledge of how to enjoy their condition happily and be content with it. " 62 At the conclusion of the chapter "Of Vanity" (III, 9) Montaigne composes his own paraphrase of the proverb "Know thyself," with which this chapter opened. It was a paradoxical command that was given us of old by the god at Delphi: "Look into yourself, know yourself, keep to yourself; bring back your mind and your will, which are spending themselves elsewhere, into themselves; you are running out, you are scattering yourself; concentrate yourself; give yourself support; you are being betrayed, dispersed, and stolen away from yourself. Do you not see that this world keeps its sight all concentrated inward and its eyes open to contemplate itself? It is always vanity for you, within and without; but it is less vanity when it is less extensive. Except for you, 0 man," said that god, "each thing studies itself first, and according to its needs, has limits to its labors and desires. There is not a single thing as empty and needy as you, who embrace the

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universe: you are the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and all in all, the fool of the farce. " 63 The advice opens on the obvious note-examine yourself-but as it proceeds it expands to include other counsels, most of which direct man to bring his concern back to himself, not to dissipate his energies on projects beyond himself, not to spread his vanity, but to contain it, and then, most significantly, to cherish and cultivate it. By putting his own thoughts into the mouth of the god, Montaigne manages to make a strong personal exhortation to his reader and to the world, but ostensibly not in his own name. The self is something precious that deserves better than the neglect it receives from most men. Human vanity expends its efforts on the wrong goals, directing its gaze away from itself and vainly attempting to understand and to master the universe, impossible aims both. There is more important business at home. When Montaigne calls the oracle's command paradoxical, I would say he has one of two things in mind, or both. Paradoxical, first, because the admonition seems unnecessary, most human beings believing that they already know themselves; second, because it asks men to be consciously selfcentered-advice that would seem superfluous for most, if not actively dangerous. Montaigne appears to have gone overboard in the statement that man alone has his eyes turned outward while the rest of the universe contemplates itself, for we do not find zebras contemplating themselves, or zinneas. In fact the eyes of other creatures function in exactly the same way man's do. Montaigne's image makes no literal sense; a rare thing for him, who usually keeps his imagery in rather precise control. For centuries, ever since Aristotle, 64 -countless commentators had utilized this image of vision to illustrate "Know thyself," but in precisely the opposite way; for them the eyes were used to symbolize physical vision, which could peer outwards only, in contrast to mental vision, in which the mind turns its gaze inward. Over time this image had become familiar to the point of platitude. Why he refashioned it so clumsily here perplexes me. However confused his image may be, his point is clear: of all nature's creatures man alone aspires to impose himself on the cosmos, meddles with the outer world, does not limit his desires, but extends them to the external universe. The most remarkable change in emphasis, as his exhortation develops, is the transformation of the injunction from "know thyself" into "cultivate thyself." This is

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the new dimension, one that could be called typically Renaissance, celebrating the formation of the whole man. Montaigne takes such an attitude even one step further into the modern world by recommending the formation of an individual self, not necessarily a uomo universale. We saw that in "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions" (II, 1) the essayist's conclusion that we are a patchwork is tantamount to a radical denial that any genuine enduring self exists, for we are as different from ourselves as from other men. The concluding pages of the "Apology for Raymond Sebond" go even further. In a twopage quotation, essentially word for word, from Plutarch, Montaigne asserts that man is ineluctably imprisoned in the realm of becoming, never capable of attaining being or stability, always astraddle between the receding past and the encroaching future. To God alone does it belong to be. The result of Montaigne's candid examination of mankind is that we are nothing but variability, change, folly, weakness-in a word, vanity. When Saint Augustine examined himself, he found equal mystery, equal instability, equal vanity; but he sought some way to pitch out an anchor into the sea of evanescence and come to fixity, a stability man could have only in God, according to his way of thinking. Montaigne appears content to float, unanchored, on the surface, fascinated by the flux, the variety, the infinite play of possibilities. He sees that all life is farce; 65 that we are all ceremony, 66 playing one role after another. He is satisfied to record the roles, the unconnected snippets that are life. But man has a special capacity that is not given to all beings in the same degree. He can observe himself. The statement "I am a patchwork composed of unique moments, each different" can be expanded to "I know that I am a patchwork." While the "I" that is being observed fluctuates constantly, the "I" that observes, that can say "I know," has stability in his awareness of instability. To give himself some fixity, some being, a human must cultivate the "I" that observes. All experience is in one sense little more than awareness of self, for without the double quality of sensing and being aware we are sensing, we could not be said to have any experience at all. A television camera receives an image of the external world, but it experiences neither that image nor that world; for it is single; a receiver, not a perceiver. We are double: passive receiver, active perceiver. All our mental activity has this character; and it is precisely this sense of awareness that Montaigne makes the central

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doctrine of his vision of man. In order to deepen what being we can have, we must cultivate the observer in ourselves. At the end of King Lear Edgar states that ripeness is all; 67 for Montaigne, awareness is all. When we cultivate our awareness of ourselves, we enrich our experience and we establish something new and important, a more stable being, a self that is more itself. In his search for human nature, Montaigne arrived at the central human experience: simply being aware. He does not ask "What is aware of what?" or "How can this awareness exist?" It is useless to ask him to tell us what self-awareness is; his inquiry stops there. Every profound vision has its pivotal concepts, its first principles, the unchallenged pilings upon which the entire doctrine rests. Montaigne builds upon selfawareness. How can I increase the dose of being in myself? Make myself ever more aware of myself; examine myself; listen attentively in order not to miss the slightest shade of myself. What is the single most fascinating thing in the world? My self, whatever that is. The program of studying that self has remarkable consequences. To study the patches, one must seize the moment as intently as possible, try to grasp the formless fluid of experience, intensify the doubleness of living, observe harder, fortify the capacity to observe. As a result, the fact of living intently on the surface of life succeeds in achieving a particular kind of depth in the appreciation of the moment and our awareness of it. John Stuart Mill wrote: "Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. " 68 His dismal conviction was that we are all Hamlets, made miserable by thinking about ourselves. Montaigne, more optimistic by disposition, felt that we could not be genuinely happy unless we developed the habit of looking intensely at ourselves. Mill concluded that the human predicament boiled down to choosing between being a pig contented or Socrates discontented. Montaigne would have judged the dilemma false; he imagined Socrates contented. "Even voluptuousness and happiness are not felt without vigor and spirit: ... The goods of fortune, even such as they really are, still need taste to enjoy them. It is the enjoying, not the possessing, that makes us happy ••• " 69 Or again: "It takes management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it.... Others feel the sweetness of some satisfaction and of prosperity; I feel it as they do, but it is not in passing and slipping by. Instead we must study it, savor

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it, and ruminate it, to give proper thanks for it to him who grants it to us. " 70 I can imagine no more startling experiment in how to extend one's awareness to the limit than the one Montaigne mentions next. "They enjoy the other pleasures as they do that of sleep, without being conscious of them. To the end that sleep itself should not escape me thus stupidly, at one time I saw fit to have mine disturbed, so that I might gain a glimpse of it. " 71 He probably found that he could not learn anything about sleep; but I would like to know how early in his life he dreamed up this strange endeavor. If he asked himself this question in his youth, then he had been studying his awareness for many years before he began writing his essays. Here is another illustration of how total his commitment to awareness was. In an important marginal notation he violates his customary practice and contradicts the idea expressed in the original 1580 text. There he had written "So I say that if simplicity leads us on the way to having no pain, it leads us to a very happy state for our condition. " 72 He is attacking the claim that philosophy can make man happy and arrives at the pessimistic conclusion that the best humans can hope for is lack of pain. There is no more dejected assertion in the entire Essays: "Our well-being is but the privation ofbeing ill."73 Nothing in this statement would shock a Renaissance reader: it simply repeats the well-known (in the sixteenth century) Epicurean definition of pleasure: to feel no pain. In later years, Montaigne felt constrained to affirm that he could no longer accept this idea: "CI have no praise for this insensibility that is neither possible nor desirable. I am glad not to be sick; but if I am, I want to know I am; and if they cauterize or incise me [without anesthetics in those days), I want to feel it." 74 His earlier dismal view of the best that human life could offer was vastly changed as he began to value his consciousness, even its painful feelings. We have not comprehended the depth of Montaigne's acceptance of the human condition unless we have understood that he joyously embraced all the components of our feeble nature. How many of us would wish to have pain as part of our nature? The average person would rather have his dentist drill his cavities without pain. Montaigne might have disagreed; he was living with the worst pain known to medicine, kidney stones-and he passed some huge ones, stones that he felt as they scarified each inch of his insides as the pressure of his own urine built up until it could force a passage and push them

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out. It was after at least ten years of excruciating pain that Montaigne wrote that if he was ill, he wanted to feel it. That is putting a high value on awareness. Some critics-I think of Mansell Jones 75-find the essayist's introspection shallow. Montaigne expresses no anguish, no torment, no loss of confidence in what he is about. He even takes pleasure in discovering and exposing his defects. We tend to find melancholy and despair profound, somehow more perceptive and penetrating than self-acceptance. Being maladjusted to one's self and to the human condition seems (especially since the days of the Romantics) to be proof positive of depth of character. Now this is really somewhat surprising, if we consider it for a while. A healthy attitude of self-affirmation need not be a sign of stupidity or insensivity. Human intellectual history repeats constantly the dramatic contrast between the classical mind, affirming the human lot-whether it is comic or tragic does not matter-and the romantic, striving to reject the limitations imposed on us by being human. Sophocles versus Euripides; Camus versus Sartre. What I resent-and resent is not too strong a word-is the contemporary assumption that no one who accepts the human situation, or the social situation, can have been profound. Montaigne looks deeper into his consciousness than most of us who study him; that is why we study him. Distress at the human lot is not the only sign of depth; in fact, it is often the young, with the least experience, who betray the greatest disaffection for the human condition and the least capacity to enjoy it. Wisely or not, the more he became acquainted with extreme pain, and with the gradual, nearly imperceptible debilitation that age brings, the more he embraced every aspect of his condition, pain and age included. Montaigne did not perceive as clearly as Freud the mind's capacity to delude itself, nor did he try to delve in the unconscious. But he penetrated deeper than most of us into what was conscious. Self-study and self-knowledge are the essence of the lesson that Montaigne has to teach as a moraliste; they are also the prerequisites of self-portraiture. The relationship is clearly reciprocal: each reinforces the other; without self-knowledge and self-study it is impossible to write a valid self-portrait. But rather more interesting to me is the fact that the determination to write a self-portrait is the greatest possible stimulus to self:-study. If Montaigne had not

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decided to write about himself, he might have written a more shallow book. Much of what I have said here about increasing one's awareness to augment one's sense of being is extrapolation. Montaigne does not spell out in detail his program because he implies it everywhere. Out of the thorns of variability he plucks the rose of stability. "Now from the knowledge of this mobility of mine I have accidentally engendered in myself a certain constancy of opinions, and have scarcely altered my original and natural ones. " 76 His knowledge of his flightiness produces "accidentally" the somewhat unexpected result of fixing his opinions without transforming them. Self-awareness adds to one's nature, expanding it more than modifying it. Despite the vigor of his assertions that he differs from himself, other assertions claim equally strongly that his house is not divided against itself. Even in the A stratum he admits, "I do not know how to foster quarrels and conflict within me," 77 implying that his lack of disarray comes from his inborn temperament only. In later years he attributes this robust inner unity rather more to his selfawareness. "I customarily do wholeheartedly whatever I do, and go my way all in one piece. I scarcely make a movement that is hidden and out of sight of my reason, and that is not guided by the consent of nearly all parts of me, without division, without internal sedition. " 78 In a cautious way, Montaigne hopes his increased understanding of his self may better that self's functioning. "If others examined themselves attentively as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off-though I don't know." 79 The final "I don't know" is awareness being aware of itself, the concession that its efforts for amelioration may be futile, defeated in advance by intractable natural forces. Montaigne finds great pleasure in contemplating his vanity as he strives to determine, through hard scrutiny, just what is the nature of his most precious possession, his unique self.

XI

The Portrait of Man MoNTAIGNE FOUND his voice as a moraliste before turning to selfportraiture. The same order of events appears constantly in the essays themselves; only after discussing drunkenness in general does Montaigne tell us of his own penchants; after dividing virtue into three types he describes his own virtue. One might argue that this literary order is the contrary of what actually happens, that before knowing mankind, we all start out knowing ourselves, that any idea we have of others we must have noted first in our own being. This is somewhat like the question of the chicken or the egg: which came first? Biologically it is indisputable that the egg came first; but I doubt that such a clear determination can be made here, and suspect that our knowledge of human nature and our knowledge of our selves interact with each other, each dependent somewhat on the other, each contributing something to the other. In fact, understanding human nature in general may be easier to achieve because our own ego or self-esteem is less compromised. The moraliste must function somewhat as a portraitist of mankind as a whole. It is that portrait that is the subject of this chapter. With the possible exception of The Romance of the Rose, Montaigne had no precedent in French literature of what it was to be a moraliste; nor does he even have a word for this role, unless it is "naturalist," which he uses once where we would probably use "psychologist. " 1 Perhaps the first task facing the student of human nature is to define its limits, which are far from clear. 2 It was Plutarch who said that the difference between one animal and another seemed greater than the distance from one man to another. 3 Montaigne goes him one further and finds the distance from one man to another greater than the distance from certain men to certain animals, thereby blurring the boundary between human and animal nature. Cataloguing extremes of human behavior is an integral part of learning about human nature, for the crucial question is to find what is humanly possible. 4 Plutarch's rich documentation of man-

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kind's vagaries furnished an abundant fund of data for the essayist. Sixteenth-century historians or travelers, especially those to the New World, also added to his anthology of human customs, and provided evidence to demonstrate either the diversity or the repetitiousness of man's institutions. Historians furnish the moraliste's laboratory: "man in general, the knowledge of whom I seek, appears in them more alive and entire than in any other place-the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in detail, the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him. " 5 The essayist compares life to a great Olympic game. There, while the athletes compete, others engage in commerce, and yet others observe. "There are some, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to see how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the life of other men in order to judge and regulate their own. " 6 As this passage indicates, the ultimate concern of the moraliste is always practical: how to conduct himself, "the rules for right living and right belief. " 7 Certain texts in the Essays actually show Montaigne in the process of observing others: "thinking about the poor beggar at my door, often merrier and healthier than myself, I put myself in his place, I try to fit my mind to his bias. " 8 From his observations the moraliste must eventually form a picture of human nature and the human condition; in Montaigne's case, this invariably means underscoring the weaknesses of mankind; in fact, in the early years, he used the word "human" consistently to mean "merely human," as in expressions such as "human reason," contrasted to divine reason. The first doctrine he expounds (in the very first chapter) is contained in the famous sentence "Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. " 9 Most of his wonderfully quotable sentences about man in general display this deprecatory tone: "But to speak in good earnest, isn't man a miserable animal?" 10 "For all his wisdom, the sage is still a man: what is there more vulnerable, more wretched, and more null?" 11 "Man, in all things and throughout, is but patchwork and motley." 12 "The most vulnerable and frail of all the creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant." 13 "We are all hollow and empty." 14 In "Of Democritus and Heraclitus" (I, 50) Montaigne considers the often repeated contrast between the two ancient philosophers, the one laughing at human nature, the other weeping over it. "I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to

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weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve.... I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of insanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless." 15 While negative, this attitude cannot be characterized as cynical or anguished. If nature makes man weak, foolish, flawed, presumptuous, and vain, it does not necessarily make him corrupt, evil, or sinful. Though Montaigne denounces human weakness, he never castigates himself for participating in that weakness. His response is to laugh, not only at other men but also at himself. There is no greater index of a robust mental constitution than the pleasure in laughing at oneself. This vision of the human animal is precisely one that runs counter to our instinctive beliefs about ourselves. We do not think ourselves insignificant, much less laughable. In his famous essay Comedy, Henri Bergson makes the distinction between the logic of reason and the logic of the imagination, pointing out that there are things that reason tells us which the imagination refuses to believe. 16 Bergson draws our attention to our unexpressed, even unfelt, assumption that the actions we see when we watch humans behave are the outward manifestations of an inner force that is living, constantly alert, constantly thinking, unpredictable. Bergson's insight was that when we see humans behaving like machines, we laugh, because the logic of our imagination has been violated. Montaigne's perspective on man's nature is fundamentally comic, and frequently flouts the logic of our imagination. There is hardly a cherished delusion of mankind's that he does not dismantle. Our dearest beliefs about our nature suffer dissolution under his analysis as they are dispelled by the facts of human conduct. The first of the concepts to go is man's rationality. Delusion: "By reasoning I am capable of discerning the nature of things and their causes." Fact: "Men do reason. Indeed, it is all but impossible to make them stop reasoning; but there is nothing that they agree on. Reason functions every bit as well proving false propositions as true ones." Our reason is like a clock that has stopped; it will be right twice a day, but we have no way of telling when. Delusion: Man is the lord of creation, the center of the universe, superior to the animals, the apple of God's eye. Fact: The same nature that made man made the animals, and treats them both even-

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handedly according to the same laws. The superiority you crown yourself with is non-existent. Borrowing shamelessly from Plutarch, Montaigne disgorges a stream of tales about animals and their feats, intending to show that they often equal, sometimes surpass, man. 17 Fish stories, we say. And some of them are. In other places, he pulls in his horns and admits that certain human qualities, 18 notably reason, make man different from the animals, and confer on him certain responsibilities to them, to plants even. 19 Delusion: Nature teaches us to distinguish right from wrong; man is instinctively a moral animal. Fact: If nature has implanted a moral conscience in us-it seems to have-then another force, custom, exercises such great power that it replaces our first nature by a second nature, no less powerful than the first, which it all but obliterates. There is no form of behavior not sanctioned by custom in some corner of the world. "The laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature, are born of custom. " 20 Delusion: Man can shape his life by exercising his judgment and good counsel. There is nothing our experience demonstrates more clearly. We spend much of our lives making decisions on how to behave, molding events, in little matters and large. I determine to improve my skills, and I succeed. On good days all my instincts whisper to me, "I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul." Fact: It is fortune that determines the outcome of events, not our planning. Two essay titles, if taken literally, embody Montaigne's thought here: "By Divers Means We Arrive at the Same End" (I, 1) and "Various Outcomes of the Same Plan" (I, 24). They complement each other as they consider human planning from opposed optics: one tactic may produce a variety of outcomes; one outcome may result from any of several tactics. In the last analysis it is not our efforts, but Fortune's intercession, that determines our failures and our successes. "So vain and frivolous a thing is human prudence; and athwart all our plans, counsels, and precautions, Fortune always maintains her grasp on the results." 21 Needless to say, Montaigne draws on his extensive acquaintance with history for facts and anecdotes to support this contention, for he is expert at summoning up a counter-example for every example. The topic of fortune engrosses him, so much indeed that the Papal censors22 suggested he reduce his reliance on the term (he did not), which appears no less than 349 times in the final text. 23

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Delusion: If I am not in charge of events, at least I can control my mind; it is up to me to decide how to interpret things, for I give them their meaning through the power of my soul. Fact: It would be beneficial24 for humankind if that ancient Greek view were as true for us more common beings as it is for strong souls; but if we look at actuality, we find our minds the captives of other forces, some external, some internal. Montaigne is very impressed by the power of the mind to cast its own reading upon the data of experience, and he frequently refers to this power, or to this potentiality. But he is even more impressed by how many factors work to prevent the human spirit from exercising its powers. The forces that hobble our freedom are many: habit, already mentioned; passion, the villain of classical philosophers; our imagination, which is taken in by appearances and hoodwinks us; our general susceptibility to the circumstances around us; our education; even more intractable, our inborn temperament; and finally, chance, which can always exert its dominion in all matters human. All this is hard for man to see; he assumes his thoughts are his own, freely formed. Montaigne's self-observation leads him to declare about himself and about men in general: "I will say more, that even our wisdom and deliberation for the most part follow the lead of chance. My will and my reasoning are moved now in one way, now in another, and there are many of these movements that are directed without me. " 25 I have already mentioned that he was so struck by how circumstances control our reactions that he concluded that normally one could account for our conduct by looking to the surrounding conditions and no more. Inner propulsions are just as likely to sway us in ways we do not recognize, for we take them for ourselves. Discussing a political assassination that demonstrated both valor and foolhardiness, Montaigne writes, "The motives for so powerful a conviction may be various, for our fancy does whatever it pleases with itself and with us. " 26 This presents quite a picture of fancy, for it seems totally free and at the same time powerful enough to shape both itself and us. Whatever the source of our fancy's whimsicalities, it does not seem to be our selves, something within our control. How little we are the masters of our own movements and our selves inspired in Montaigne one of the most diverting, yet profound, passages of the Essays in "Of the Power of the Imagination" (I, 21}. He has just finished a series of tales about masculine impotency, a disageeable situation that intrigued him. "People are

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right to notice the unruly liberty of this member, obtruding so importunately when we have no use for it, and failing so importunately when we have the most use for it, and struggling for mastery so imperiously with our will, refusing with so much pride and obstinacy our solicitations, both mental and manual. " 27 Montaigne imagines himself called upon, and paid, to defend this member from the accusations of the other parts of the body. The first point in his defense would be that there does not seem to be a single bodily organ that does not often act in defiance of our will. Our faces betray thoughts we would rather hide. The heart, lungs, and pulse too are stirred by the stimulus that arouses the sex organ. We have no control over our hair when it stands on end, or over our skin as it shivers, or over our hand as it scratches. The organs that serve to eliminate our wastes move according to their hours, not ours. "To vindicate the omnipotence of our will, Saint Augustine alleges that he knew a man who commanded his behind to produce as many farts as he wanted, and his commentator Vives goes him one better with another example of his own time, of farts arranged to suit the tone of verses pronounced to their accompaniment; but all this does not really argue any pure obedience in this organ; for is there any that is ordinarily more indiscreet or tumultuous?"28 The ultimate indictment, however, and the most surprising one, concerns the will itself. "But as for our will, on behalf of whose rights we set forth this complaint, how much more plausibly may we charge it with rebellion and sedition for its disorderliness and disobedience! Does it always will what we would will it to will? Doesn't it often will what we forbid it to will, and that to our evident disadvantage? Is it any more amenable than our other parts to the decisions of our reason?" 29 Montaigne would not be Montaigne if he did not see that there are redeeming features to be found in this portrait of frailty. First, the very vanities and vices he finds may even have their uses, since nature tolerates nothing totally harmful. "Our structure, both public and private, is full of imperfection. But there is nothing useless in nature, not even uselessness itself. . . . Our being is cemented with sickly qualities: ambition, jealousy, envy, vengeance, superstition, despair, dwell in us with a possession so natural that we recognize their image also in the beasts-indeed even cruelty, so unnatural a vice.... Whoever should remove the seeds of these qualities from man would destroy the fundamental conditions of

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our life .... Vices ... are employed for sewing our society together, as are poisons for the preservation of our health. " 30 Montaigne is thinking primarily of social behavior here, as he recognizes that private vices may perform public services; but he also includes the innate pettiness of the private self in his vision. Further, we must not overemphasize the portion of ourselves that is composed of vices. We cannot overlook the undoubted existence of virtues in human beings. There are some men capable of greatness, of valor, of self-control, of consistency, of reasonableness even. Heroes have existed, especially among the great sages and warriors of antiquity, and to neglect them would be to underestimate the range of possibilities open to men. "For my part, I consider some men very far above me, especially among the ancients; and although I clearly recognize my inability to follow them with my steps, I do not fail to follow them with my eyes and judge the powers that raise them so high.... "31 In his sequestered life he exercises the various functions of the moraliste, who is expected to realize "what it is to know and not to know, and what must be the aim of study; what are valor, temperance, and justice; what the difference is between ambition and avarice, servitude and submission, license and liberty; by what signs we may recognize true and solid contentment; how much we should fear death, pain and shame ... what springs move us, and the cause of such different impulses in us. " 32 We try then to trace a man or ourselves to our normal state, but it is doubtful that such a thing can be said to exist, or be identified. "No eminent and lusty virtue is without some unruly agitation. " 33 Montaigne discerns an equal indeterminacy in the correspondence between conduct and belief. "Saying is one thing and doing is another.... A man of good morals may have false opinions, and a wicked man may preach the truth, yes, even a man who does not believe it. " 34 The portrait of human nature that emerges underscores two facts about the human condition: that the mind habitually looks outward rather than inward and that no human experience is purely one thing or another, but always a mixture. The moraliste's psychology as it shows up in the earlier chapters frequently centers on man's propensity to look outside of himself, hence to avoid knowing and studying himself. Some of the longer chapter titles (long titles, short chapters) indicate what I have in mind here: "Our Feelings Reach Out Beyond Us" (I, 3), "How the Soul Discharges its Passions on

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False Objects When the True Are Wanting" (I, 4), "That Our Happiness Must Not Be Judged Until After Our Death" (I, 19), "To Flee from Sensual Pleasures at the Price of Life" (I, 33), and "That Our Desire Is Increased by Difficulty" (II, 15). Montaigne himself was guilty to a certain extent of sharing in these views, for he assigns as his greatest task preparing to die-in other words, neglecting the art of living in the present as he anticipates a future test, which he hopes to pass honorably. We have already seen in our discussion of self-knowledge that he regards this compulsion to cast our looks elsewhere as a part of human nature, and one that is better rectified. In 1580 he treated his second theme in the chapter "We Taste Nothing Pure" (II, 20), which comprised no more than twentyone lines of text; successive additions expanded it to four times its original length, as Montaigne saw more and more evidence that there is no pleasure without some mixture of pain or discomfort, no justice without some injustice, no virtue without a tincture of vice. In the A stratum this seemed an indictment of the perversity of our nature, but in the later additions it appears more as a fundamental quality of man's middle position in the universe, one to be accepted more than regretted. Extremes of any kind do not square with our being. When he is thinking in this vein, Montaigne's mind turns frequently to pleasure and pain to illustrate his point. He could well be called the first modern hedonist, 35 for he takes pleasure very seriously and dissects its nature with typical acuity. We believe almost instinctively that pleasure is pleasure, and the more the merrier; not so Montaigne, who sees the shallowness of such an attitude. He is far from the first to do so, as the classical philosophers had long scrutinized pleasure in its various guises, though without the realism and honesty of the essayist. Ancient philosophers, one and all, endorse pleasure, and not infrequently redefine it until it becomes unrecognizable or unappetizing. Instead of genuine pleasure, it becomes the lack of pain, or the lack of feeling, or purely spiritual pleasure, or the self-congratulation of a righteous conscience. Montaigne would count the last two forms among the genuine pleasures, but largely because he intends to include all forms of pleasure in his survey and exclude none. But he insists on scrutinizing the facts about pleasure. If we look carefully, we note that pleasure in its extremes is painful; 36 what is more, sensual pleasure often actively

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seeks pain as a stimulusY Not even the dream of pure, unadulterated pleasure deludes him, so foreign would such an experience be from the reality of human nature. "When I imagine a man besieged by desirable delights-let us put the case that all his members should be forever seized with a pleasure like that of generation at its most excessive point-1 feel him sink under the weight of his delight, and I see him wholly incapable of supporting a pleasure so pure, so constant, and so universal. In truth, he flees it when he is in it, and naturally hastens to escape it, as from a place where he cannot stand firm, where he is afraid of sinking. " 38 I suspect that in the last sentence the essayist is saying that males have prompt orgasms, as if unwilling or unable to remain at such a high peak of excitement. (It is worth noting that Montaigne, who has frequently been regarded as licentious, can be prudish, as in his euphemisms here.) He never seeks to deny the exaltation, even supremacy, of spiritual pleasures, going so far as to call the hermit's life in the desert, dwelling on religious hopes, the "sole constant and incorruptible pleasure." 39 Sainthood is invited to the feast of the Essays as a gesture of courtesy, for Montaigne has no acquaintance, that I can see, with such fervid zeal. Purely spiritual pleasures furnish him no sustenance, and do not seem fully human. Notice how charily he praises them from a distance. "The pure pleasures of imagination, as well as the pains, some say, are the greatest, as the scales of Critolaus [in Cicero's Tusculanes] expressed it. No wonder; it composes them to its liking and cuts them out of whole cloth. I see signal, and perhaps desirable examples of this every day. But I, being of a mixed constitution, and coarse, am unable to cling so completely to this single and simple object as to keep myself from grossly pursuing the present pleasures of the general human law-intellectually sensual, sensually intellectual." 40 Man, being by nature simultaneously corporeal and spiritual, is the host of pleasures that always share something of that dual quality. It is typical of the essayist's corporeal vision of mankind that he does not relegate physical pleasures to the foot of the table, but rather places them on an equal plane with the spiritual. That he gives them their due makes it seem at times as though he highlights them, for most serious ethical thinkers are prone to undervalue them. He is willing elsewhere to call sexual pleasure the "only true pleasures of bodily life," ones that the years and the kidney stone have denied him, a release that he is hardly grateful

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for. 41 Physical pleasures are solid ones, and he recommends that we increase their importance by savoring them and appreciating them. Behaviors associated with bodily pleasures are usually exiled from polite society, except for eating and drinking, which are legitimized by highly structured codes of etiquette. How many authors discuss scratching? Montaigne uses scratching for some verbal fun as he puns on the French words gratterie (scratching) and gratijication, but his intent, rather than to deprecate mankind, is to elevate scratching to its proper position. "I do not remember ever having had the itch; yet scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any." 42 Still, the pleasures of the mind take precedence, if only by the smallest margin, and he admits that he would rather have a well-formed child through intercourse with the Muses than with his wife. 43 In order to have pleasure, we must pay the double price of having both the desires that precede it and the pains that accompany or follow it. So be it. The pleasures he cherishes are the simplest and most readily available: eating (especially in company, as all pleasures are enhanced by sharing), love, reading, discussion-and greatest, though rarest of all, friendship. It takes considerable art to live with the deepest pleasures. Simple maximizing will not do, for maximizing one pleasure almost surely means restricting another. Some pleasures must be avoided-those entailing hurt to ourselves or to others. Some pains must be accepted-those that lead to greater pleasure, such as medication. In relations with women, one may rush to consummation and its attendant release; but the greatest pleasure will come from an extended courtship and extended intercourse, in which the struggle-and eventual conquest-add sauce to the meat. It is typical of Montaigne's hard-headedness that he should assign its proper value to the discreet joys of good health, which is not simply the absence of illness, but a vigorous and fundamental form of pleasure. "Our masters are wrong in that, seeking the causes of the extraordinary flights of our soul they have attributed some to a divine ecstasy, to love, to warlike fierceness, to poetry, to wine, but have not assigned a proper share to health-an ebullient, vigorous, full, lazy health, such as in the past my green years and security supplied me with now and then. The blaze of gaiety kindles in the mind vivid, bright flashes beyond our natural capacity, and some of the lustiest, if not the most extravagant, enthusiasms. " 44

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(For "The blaze of gaiety ... " Montaigne had first written: "What fire, what life, what fury of enthusiasm did it not engender in my soul. I could not keep to myself. This frenzy and condition of the imagination bore me far from my ordinary disposition. " 45 ) What he has done in this passage is a double re-evaluation. First, he has recognized that "simple" good health contributes in ways unperceived to our conduct. We notice symptoms of illness, not symptoms of health. Montaigne suffered from a disease most likely to make him appreciate the qualities of normalcy, for he could pass in a day's time, indeed in less, from exquisite misery to commonplace vigor. Secondly, beyond his acute sense that good health is to be prized, he performs some radical stylistic operations in this passage; everyday physical soundness-how humdrum a thing!-is described in superlatives: "ebullient," "full," "the blaze of gayety," "bright flashes," "the lustiest enthusiasms." Speaking of the pleasures involved in the basic act of eating, he exposes much of his art of living. "I think it is healthier to eat more slowly and less, and to eat more often. But I want to give its price to appetite and hunger. I would take no pleasure in dragging out three or four puny meals a day, regulated as if I were taking medicine. . . . The greatest benefit that good health gives me is sensuous pleasure; let us stick to the first pleasure that is present and known. I avoid consistency in these laws of fasting. He who wants to make a habit be of service to him, let him avoid continuing it.... " 46 Repeated doses of moderated pleasure, prizing desire, even privation, determination not to be enslaved by any habit, even a pleasurable one-present-day psychologists would immediately recognize this as the mentality of an anal retentive. I wonder how Montaigne would have reacted to our ways of characterizing behavior-probably with amusement and savoring. In his view, pleasure must not make slaves of us, but serve us. He tries to measure his pleasures out in coffee spoons-small doses in a variety. How well we can know a man by his gut! Fundamental to the creed of a moraliste is the conviction that the better we know our nature, the better we will be able to live in accord with it. So many of our desires are no more than the fancy that it would be nice not to have to live with the insufficiencies attendant upon being human. Isn't the principal component of all our daydreams invariably the effortless satisfaction of our yearnings? Wouldn't everybody like to be a king, to have such great authority

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that his least desires were granted? When Montaigne imagines the status of a monarch, he is not beguiled. "It is a pity to have so much power that everything gives way to you. Your fortune repels society and companionship too far from you; it plants you too far apart. That ease and slack facility of making everything bow beneath you is the enemy of every kind of pleasure. That is sliding, not walking; sleeping, not living. Imagine man accompanied by omnipotence: he is sunk; he must ask you for hindrance and resistance, as an alms; his being and his welfare are in indigence. " 47 Our aspirations to purity, to a higher or more powerful nature, blind us to the genuine potential of our actual being; such aspirations, by misdirecting our efforts, render them futile. The first secret of living, predictably, is to know our nature and live according to it. "Life is a material and corporeal movement, an action which by its very essence is imperfect and irregular; I apply myself to serving it in its own way." 48 The final formula mixes both active and passive motions on the part of the moraliste, who applies himself (note the reflexive verb so typical ofMontaigne) actively to serving life-to being, therefore, material, imperfect, and irregular. Neither angel or beast, man is assigned to the middle region, and Montaigne would have it no other way. One final point about the nature of Montaigne's vision. It is totally lacking in cant; moral precepts, even those he most firmly espouses, never blind him to the realities of human nature or human history. When he preaches, it is never to ask us to be more than is possible. "Be ye therefore perfect as is your father in Heaven"49 is totally foreign to his spirit or his convictions. Both Christianity and ancient philosophy may be guilty of making unrealistic demands, and he condemns both when they do, though he handles Christianity more gently. The villains in philosophy are the Stoics, not always named: "What is the use of these lofty points of philosophy on which no human being can settle, and these rules that exceed our use and our strength? I often see people propose to us patterns of life which neither the proposer nor his hearers have any hope of following, or, what is more, any desire to follow." 50 When his critiques of Christianity sound the same note, he usually has in mind Protestantism, especially its Puritan strain, which aspires hopelessly to make man all spiritual. Man must always keep in mind that "it is a wonder how physical his nature is" [the French is delightful: merveilleusement corporelle]. 51 Inasmuch as Luther can be

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said to have held that faith alone justifies man (with or without works), it is impossible to read a sentence such as the following without seeing in it a reference to the Reformation. "It is a ruinous teaching for any society, and much more harmful than ingenious and subtle, which persuades the people that religious belief is enough, by itself and without morals, to satisfy divine justice. Practice makes us see an enormous distinction between devoutness and conscience. " 52 Montaigne understands clearly the psychological configuration of figures such as Tartuffe and Elmer Gantry, as he whispers to his reader "Between ourselves, these are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct. " 53 He condemns minds that strive to dissociate themselves from the body during the short span of life-what he calls trying to "escape from the man"; 54 he stigmatizes the attempt as madness which transforms men into beasts rather than angels. It is because the moraliste functions primarily as a student of psychology rather than as a sermonizer that Montaigne is so free of the commonplaces of the censors of his day. 55 His treatment of Alcibiades56 and of Julian the Apostate exemplify the objectivity of his approach and the originality of his judgment. In standard literary texts both were unceasingly reproved as villains, Alcibiades by classical historians and Julian by Christian authors ad infinitum. Montaigne admires each for his virtues, not without noting his faults. He completely avoids the traditional denunciations that are trotted out by serious authors oflesser stature. Nero may be a "scoundrel" 57 and a "living image of cruelty," 58 but the essayist also shows the less familiar side of the the tyrant's nature, as he repeats the story of how the emperor exclaimed, 59 when he had to sign a criminal's condemnation, that he wished that he had never learned to write. Montaigne cites the emperor Heliogabalus' preparations60 for a sensuous death as an example of human self-deception, not as an object lesson to denounce pagan depravity. The oft-alleged tales of Xerxes whipping the sea, of Cyrus taking vengeance on the river Gyndus, and of Caligula defacing a bordello where his mother had suffered indignity are cited as illustrations of the psychological principle that we discharge our passions on scapegoats,61 but Montaigne differs from most of his contemporaries in that he refrains from expressing the platitudinous condemnation of pagan obliquity. He studies hu-

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man phenomena unflappably, with realism, without cynicism, without rancor, often without commentary. The most exciting aspect of Montaigne's career as a moraliste is his dramatic discovery of the high drama to be found in everyday life. The remarkable transformation of his concept of moral heroism is best symbolized as his admiration shifts from Cato, the exemplar of stern, severe, Republican Roman virtus to Socrates, who teaches us how to live according to nature. Alexander the Great knew how to conquer the world; 62 Socrates knew how to live duly in conformity with his natural condition, under the most trying of all afflictions, a difficult wife. Montaigne can imagine Socrates accomplishing Alexander's feats, but not the converse. The special virtues of everyday life are orderliness (hal orderliness is hardly a virtue he practices or preaches in his art) and regulation. "It is a rare life that remains well ordered even in private. Any man can play his part in the side show and represent a worthy man on the boards; but to be disciplined within, in his own bosom, where all is permissible, where all is concealed-that's the point. The next step to that is to be so in our own house, in our ordinary actions, for which we need render account to no one, where nothing is studied or artificial. ... Few men have been admired by their own households. " 63 True to his doctrine, Montaigne finds the first, and the hardest, struggle is to live within the self; close to that comes managing our private life, so much more taxing than playing the role of a public figure. How can we learn to be good parents, or good children, or good friends? Does not that require more delicacy, more judgment, more self-control, more wisdom than deciding on public policy? "To win through a breach, to conduct an embassy, to govern a people, these are dazzling actions. To scold, to laugh, to sell, to pay, to love, to hate, and to deal pleasantly and justly with our household and ourselves [nota bene: this too is a duty], not to let ourselves go, not to be false to ourselves, that is a rarer matter more difficult and less noticeable. " 64 As the years passed, Montaigne became increasingly adept at writing about day-to-day life and its high seriousness, about conversation and its riches, about eating, about being angry, about losing a tooth. It is the moraliste's perception that these are important; it is the artist's secret to write about them naturally, without exaggeration, making literature of them without artificiality. Only Montaigne could have written: "We are great fools. 'He has spent his life in

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idleness,' we say; 'I have done nothing today.' What, have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious [!] of your occupations. 'If I had been placed in a position to manage great affairs, I would have shown what I could do.' Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all. ... To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. " 65 If we look only at what his book says-and it is almost all we have as evidence-we must conclude that nowhere does Montaigne's attitude evolve as much as in this area of moral heroism. I am impressed by one passage written in the margins that betrays both his new conviction and his unwillingness to condemn out of hand his former point of view. The culmination of II, 33 is the tale of Spurina, whose extraordinary beauty had enflamed so many a heart that he grew to hate its power and carved himself with a knife on purpose to disfigure his good looks. Rereading his orignal account of this tale, in which he praised Spurina, Montaigne obviously had second thoughts, and felt uncomfortable with the Roman's gesture of self-abnegation. A relatively long addition reveals his new mentality and suggests at the same time that he still would not repudiate totally what he had once thought. "To speak my mind about this, I wonder at such actions more than I honor them; these excesses are enemies to my rules. The purpose was fine and conscientious, but, to my mind, a little lacking in wisdom.... It would have been more just and also more glorious to have made of these gifts of God a subject for exemplary virtue and regulated conduct.... It is in a sense dying to escape the trouble of living well. . .. Enjoyment conducted according to reason is more arduous than abstinence. Moderation is a virtue that gives more trouble than suffering does." Those phrases, "to speak my mind," "to my mind," "I think," and "perhaps," 66 far less assertive than other passages saying much the same thing, indicate that examples of extreme virtue never lost a certain appeal for Montaigne. In a somewhat paradoxical way, only anonymous acts can be proven to be virtuous. "In proportion as a good deed is more brilliant, I deduct from its goodness the suspicion I have that it was performed more to be brilliant than to be good; put on display, it is half sold. " 67 In his new morality, Montaigne looks at humble

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deeds for the best evidence of a man's character. "If a man has any good in him, let him show it in his conduct, in his ordinary talk, in the way he loves or quarrels, at play, in bed, at table, in the conduct of his affairs and the management of his household. Those whom I see composing good books in poor breeches should have tended to their breeches first, if they had asked me. Ask a Spartan if he would rather be a good rhetorician than a good soldier. As for me, I'd rather be a good cook, if I didn't have one to serve me."6B Since he had performed no glorious deeds, he could not claim that his achievements validated his doctrines; but in the unglamorous role of a private man, he could experience and study everyday life. "I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man's estate. " 69 Within this declaration lie the seeds of a radically new ethics. Philosophy had always been elitist, never egalitarian; Christianity is theologically egalitarian, but despite certain important social reforms inspired by the equality of all men before God, the Christian religion never fully translated the equality of souls into a social program. Montaigne, perhaps first, makes philosophy a leveler. I doubt that he would ever have gone so far as to embrace egalitarian social reforms, but his thought revised the natural ethic in the direction of the common man. "The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents. Let us only listen: we tell ourselves all we most need. " 70 In his Essays, Montaigne practices what he preaches, and I would like here to spend a moment looking at what he has to say on one of the most trivial of all possible subjects, games; for in them we can see how deeply he perceived that trivial things reveal our essence. Games, often the simplest ones, fulfill human needs and offer that great gift, a genuine and innocent pleasure. "My philosophy is in action, in natural and present practice, little in fancy. Would I might take pleasure in playing at cobnut or with a top!" 71 Obviously, spinning tops does not suffice for him, but he has no scorn for such entertainments; nor would he, perhaps, for Pac-Man. The games of childhood may seem harmless to adults, but nature speaks in them, and habits acquired young will last. "I know very well from having trained myself in my childhood always to walk

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in my own straight open road, and having had an aversion for mixing trickery or ruse in my childish games-as indeed it must be noted that children's games are not games, and must be judged in children like their more serious actions-that there is no pastime so trivial that I do not bring to it, from within, by a natural and unstudied propensity, an extreme repugnance to cheating. " 72 So when describing how a child should be raised, he looks to see if the pupil will show "prudence in his enterprises, if he shows goodness and justice in his conduct, if he shows judgment and grace in his speaking, fortitude in his illnesses, modesty in his games, temperance in his pleasures. . .. " 73 How much passion, how much concentration enter into our games! "Who has not seen people chew and swallow the cards or stuff themselves with a set of dice to avenge the loss of their money?" 74 His comments on games, taken together, show a great deal about him, just as he expected to learn about Alexander by watching him at play. Why shall I not judge Alexander at table, talking and drinking his fill, or when he was playing chess? What sinew of his soul is not touched and employed in this silly and puerile game? I hate it and avoid it, because it is not enough a game, and too serious an amusement; I am ashamed to devote to it the attention that would suffice to accomplish something good. He was no more absorbed when he prepared his glorious expedition to India; nor is this other in unraveling a passage on which depends the salvation of the human race. See how our mind swells and magnifies this ridiculous amusement; how all its muscles grow tense; what ample opportunity it here gives everyone to know himself, and to judge himself rightly. In no other situation do I see and check up on myself more thoroughly. What passion does not excite in us this game: anger, vexation, hatred, impatience and a vehement ambition to win in a thing in which ambition to be beaten would be more excusable. For rare and extraordinary excellence in frivolous things is unbecoming a man of honor. What I say of this example may be said of all others: each particle, each occupation, of a man betrays him and reveals him just as well as another. 75

Montaigne prized pastimes and pleasures highly, but not to the point that they made a man lose himself in them; hence, his somewhat distrustful attitude about games.76 We might-indeed, often dolose our sense of proportion. He also betrays his class prejudice: a man of honor (read: of the leisured aristocratic class) seeks excellence in matters worthy of him, not in croquet.

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So imperious is his urge to extricate himself from emotional entanglements that he renounced gambling. "I used to be fond of games of chance with cards and dice. I gave them up long ago for this reason only, that however good a face I put on my losses, I did not fail to feel stung by them within. " 77 One may not agree with Montaigne's ideas or practice here, but he gives us strong evidence of how serious he is both by alerting us to the significance of games in general and by disclosing why he gave them up. Revealing his attitudes about gaming, he shows himself a bit of a stick-in-themud. It is also striking here, as everywhere else, that the behavior of the mar. depicted by the portraitist conforms totally to the principles embraced by the moraliste; both place a high price on selfpossesston. The moraliste and the portraitist are inseparable, if only because Montaigne chose to present himself to his reading public as a moraliste, not as a nobleman, not as an advisor to kings, not as a father, not as an author, but as a student of human nature and of moral philosophy. In his final chapter, so much a summing up, he says people sometimes have asked him what kind of work he would be good for. " 'For nothing,' I said. And I readily excuse myself for not knowing how to do anything that would enslave me to others. But I would have told my master home truths, and watched over his conduct, if he had been willing. Not in general, by schoolmasterly lessons, which I do not know-and I see no true reform spring from them in those who know them-but by observing his conduct step by step, at every opportunity, judging it with my own eyes, piece by piece, simply and naturally, making him see how he stands in public opinion, and opposing his flatterers. " 78 He imagines this as an office without name for one man only, one who could keep his mouth shut. With no modesty at all he gives his credentials: "This long attention that I devote to studying myself trains me also to judge passably of others, and there are few things of which I speak more felicitously and excusably. It often happens that I see and distinguish the characters of my friends more exactly than they do themselves. I have astonished at least one by the pertinence of my description, and have given him information about himself. By training myself from my youth to see my own life mirrored in that of others, I have acquired a studious bent in that subject, and when I am thinking about it, I let few things around me which are useful for that purpose escape my notice:

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countenances, humors, statements .... So I reveal to my friends, by their outward manifestations, their inward inclinations. " 79 Of course, carrying out his program would require great tact, for nobody likes a sententious or censorious adviser. The Essays demonstrate his tactfulness on every page. Clearly, though, one of his favorite roles was that of giving good advice. Erasmus repeats a delightful anecdote concerning Thales, who, upon being asked to name something difficult, responded, "To know oneself," and, when asked to name something easy, replied "To give advice to others. " 80 Montaigne's vision of human nature did not change remarkably as the years passed, but his assessment of that vision turned from negative to positive. As he got older and as he suffered from the most painful disease known to man, he came to love life more, and he studied intensely how to live it vigorously, or at least to savor it with all his declining powers. He still saw that most of life was vanity; that humans by nature lived and died for frivolous causes; but he found great joys in living harmoniously within those limitations. "I know that I am a series of patches; I know that all my activities are vanity," can lead to establishing a certain stability in the observer of the self. It can also produce the joy of possessing the truth, even if it is not a flattering one. Once having recognized one's vanity, one may perhaps learn to love it, as Montaigne did. Pain, disease, death, old age-these are the prices we pay for being alive, and he pays them gladly without wishing futilely that they were not exacted. "I have seen the grass, the flower, and the fruit; now I see the dryness-happily, since it is naturally." 81 It is the moraliste, more than the self-portraitist, who reaches the wisdom and the art of living of the final pages. He himself tells us that, provided we know how, we have only to study ourselves to learn all the lessons of nature. I am not sure. Rousseau studied himself fervently and profoundly without reaching the ardent love of life that Montaigne found. Let us listen to an example of the essayist's words as a mature inquirer into human nature: "We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say? He must know how to use them together and blend them. And so must we do with good and evil, which are consubstantial with our life. Our existence is im-

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possible without this mixture, and one element is no less necessary for it than the other. " 82 The tone of this passage is somewhat selfprotective; if you don't like nature, you will have to learn to live with it. But later in the same essay he takes a more positive attitude: "As for me, I love life and cultivate it just as God has been pleased to grant it to us .... I accept with all my heart and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud of myself that I do. We wrong that great and all-powerful giver by refusing his gift, nullifying it, and disfiguring it. Himself all good, he has made all things good. " 83 This could legitimately be termed philosophical optimism; "whatever is is good." Montaigne's thought had always betrayed a strong streak of philosophical optimism from the beginning, for example, he had always defined the proper attitude for a Christian toward God as gratitude for the bounty of living. However dark his view of the human lot may have been at certain moments, he finished his days in an exultant acceptance of God's goodness to mankind. Religious faith may come in many forms. Faith can mean the acceptance of certain dogmas on faith-and if we are to be strictly logical, these dogmas must be contrary to reason, or above it; otherwise, they could be accepted on grounds other than faith. Montaigne claims to have that kind of faith, a belief in the non-rational dogmas prescribed by the Catholic Church. Beyond that, he accepted on faith the religious practices of the Church. He was willing to act according to them when required to, as when taking an oath of loyalty in 1562.84 He made a special journey to the shrine of Loreto and left there ex-votos that he had brought with him all the way from Bordeaux. He even went so far as to express his pleasure at attending sermons in Rome during Easter week. 85 Despite these facts, some readers, even Catholic priests, have denied that a genuine inner conviction lay behind Montaigne's acts. 86 But there is a second kind of faith, which is not belief in dogma so much as trust in the Almighty. That kind of faith-in my mind the more interesting one, as I have little brief for the first kindthat kind of faith Montaigne surely had, and never for a moment, that I can see, thought of questioning it. I believe that his love of life was a profoundly religious experience; at least, that is how he expresses himself. Many critics have characterized his religion as pagan. I would demur; pagans did not necessarily trust God (or the gods). They feared them, respected them, and in some cases revered

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them; but to love them would have seemed a little peculiar to pagans, except perhaps for cases like Hippolytus, who chose the goddess Artemis as his patron. Montaigne affirms his faith in God frequently in his assertions of the open-handed generosity of nature. To condemn what nature has done for us offends him deeply. "The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being. " 87 One of the most beautiful passages of his final essay, in which Montaigne speaks rhapsodically-a tone quite rare in his book-declares his total adjustment to the position old age has brought him. [My soul] measures her debt to God for being at peace with her conscience and free from other inner passions, for having her body in its natural condition, enjoying controlledly and adequately the agreeable and pleasant functions with which he is pleased to compensate by his grace for the pains with which his justice chastises us in its turn; how much it is worth to her to be lodged at such a point that wherever she casts her eyes, the sky is calm around her: no desire, no fear or doubt to disturb the air around her, no difficulty, past, present, or future, over which her imagination may not pass without hurt. 88

Montaigne's readers admire him for his wisdom, a word which seems to surface naturally concerning the Essays. Since he has the presumption to speak of his own wisdom,89 to allude to the wisdom of his lesson, 90 to say that he is wiser than his book (which is more learned than he), 91 we cannot deny that wisdom is a quality he aspired to. He set out from the start to write wisdom prose, daring to populate his text with maxims or adages of his own making. Though we recognize intuitively that the Essays are a wise book, we are baffied when we strive to define just what wisdom is. Wisdom differs from mere sophistication; wise-crackers do not seem wise. Two quite different sorts of thinking are usually taken for wisdom. Some people find other-worldly pronouncements wise (species: Kahlil Gibran). Such sayings tend to be highly abstract, and somewhat obscure. Others conceive of wisdom as a supremely this-worldly brand of insight, founded on experience, typical of older people, a mixture perhaps of practicality and spirituality. This sort of wisdom can be profitably contrasted to learning, which is technical, detailed, and frequently second-hand. Wisdom is none of these; it requires no expertise, no arcane knowledge, no specially acquired intellectual skills, such as grammar or chemistry, which

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are quite irrelevant. It is a philosophy of living, not a philosophy of the mind. It is inconceivable (to me, at least) to speak of the wisdom of a Descartes, or a Kant; for their glory lay in being consistent and constructing huge superstructures of system based on their insights. Our characteristic reaction on reading them is "How brilliant!," not "How wise!" The books of the Old Testament that have been traditionally classed as wisdom literature are strikingly unreligious, including their watchword: "Vanity of vanities. All is vanity."92 Rather than a life of saintly exaltation, these books prescribe a life lived with caution. This brand of wisdom has been characterized as the philosophy of the underdog, of the peasant, who strives to survive as best he can. The chorus of Greek tragedies frequently expounds such a point of view, a worldly prudence. Such wisdom tends to be moral in nature-can one be wise about the stock market? or about diesel engines? Perhaps associated with such wisdom's deep moralism is a certain pessimism about humans and a touch of skepticism. Whether we are inclined toward wisdom literature in its mystical garb or in its practical dress, it expresses itself in short, pithy declarations, not in extended prose analysis, in sentences, not in paragraphs. Mystical wisdom literature inspires respect or awe in its audience; practical wisdom literature, Montaigne's sort, inspires assent, producing quite another aesthetic reaction, something like "Ah, yes. That is true, and cannot be denied. I recognized its validity immediately and liked the way it was expressed." In a sense, such wisdom is not so much something that we do not know as something that we are reminded of, something that we had forgotten to consider, or that we feel we could have found within ourselves, given time to reflect. It does not surprise or shock; rather, it raises the smile of recognition. Of this kind of prose Montaigne is one of the undisputed masters. With the passage of time, with the growing familiarity with his art as essayist, with the depth he achieved from his self-study and self-portraiture, both his book and his philosophy were transformed. What had been the impulsion for solitude and retirement at the outset became a sense of his solidarity with all mankind; his keen insight into human inconsistency developed into an affirmation of his own unity of being; his pessimism about humanity became optimism about God and nature; his distrust of fortune was transformed into confidence in natural living; his dread of death evolved into love of life; his skepticism took on the tones of wisdom.

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I like to quote the following as an example of wisdom: "When I dance, I dance; and when I sleep, I sleep."93 What Montaigne means is that the human mind-flighty, foolish thing that it isdoes not stay at home, where it should be; it persists in looking elsewhere. So, while dancing, he would prefer to put his whole being into dancing, appreciating it for what it is. (I cannot help asking myself if he danced very often. The answer appears to be no.) What does he mean when he writes "when I sleep, I sleep"? Is that worth saying? As a student of the human condition, he mentions sleep often in interesting and sometimes perplexing ways. This is one of three cases94 where he speaks of sleep as if it were something we can do consciously. That is not my experience of sleep. The only way I can account for this remark is to say that he wrote something that did not make much sense because he was attracted by the alliteration of the French verbs (dance ... dance; dors . .. dors}, that the force of the sound outweighed the sense. Some of the beauty of this sentence lies in its rhythmic repetitions, meant to embody simplicity and naturalness. We readers catch its sense-that he strove to act as a whole being; the illustration which follows, a walk in his garden, while less pungent in its form, provides a fuller and firmer content. "Yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of the solitiude, and to me." While walking, he allows his mind the whole gamut of human concerns; it thinks a while of foreign matters (its usual proclivity, but not its wisest), but he brings it back home to the beauty, to the solitude, and ultimately to the center of Montaigne's world, himself, where all his thoughts seem to come to rest in the end. Vanity is our condition; to forget that is to court disaster; but we need not despise vanity. In one passage, where Montaigne finds value in vanity, he compares our activities to those of the wind. He used the term "wind" again and again, some eighty times, usually figuratively, as the archetypal metaphor for something empty, shifting, or insubstantial. Of fatuous books he says he finds only wind in them, not juice and substance. 95 As for philosophy, "it is nothing but wind and words. " 96 When belittling human prowess, he resorts to images of the wind in several ways. "Men inflate themselves only with wind, and go bouncing around like balls."97 "We have nothing

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but wind and smoke for our portion,"98 "We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind. " 99 In "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions" {II, 1) Montaigne expressed human lack of character in images drawn from the wind: "Our practice is to follow the inclination of our appetite, ... as the wind of circumstance carries us," 100 "that man goes before the wind, as the motto of our Talbot says," 101 and "not only does the wind of accident move me at will, but, besides, I am moved and disturbed as a result merely of my own unstable posture. " 102 But in the passage I am referring to, perhaps my favorite in all the Essays, Montaigne reverses his usual attitude toward the wind, and finds it admirable, even more wise than mankind. "I, who boast of embracing the pleasures of life so assiduously and so particularly, find in them, when I look at them thus minutely, virtually nothing but wind. But what of it? We are all wind. And even the wind, more wisely than we, loves to make a noise and move about, and is content with its own functions, without wishing for stability and solidity, qualities that do not belong to it." 103

XII

Living for the Self THE moraliste is not purely an observer; from his understanding of himself and of human nature he draws a pattern for living the fully human life. Montaigne professes that his aim is "to be wholly contained and established in myself," 1 his personal equivalent of Aristotle's self-sufficient man. Self-possession appears from the earliest chapters as a major concern of his, at first in the Stoic tradition of Seneca, later in a more original form. The greatest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself, 2 he says; conversely, to lose knowledge and control of oneself, as in drunkenness, 3 is the worst condition for man. Montaigne's ethic is perhaps the first to be based solidly on the construction of a private life in conformity with a private self. He dared to write openly that his self came first, that he wished to forge it 4 and cultivate it. Paradoxically, he had no word for the self; the closest he comes is expressions like "my essence" 5 or "my general being." 6 According to Littre, the modern French term "le moi'' came into usage in 1583, but was not widely used until the following century. It is perhaps lucky that he lacked a term for the self, for with one he would perhaps have asked himself how to define it and would have entered a thicket of perplexities, as Saint Augustine did when he asked "Who am I?" 7 What a disaster if we should formulate a clear and simple definition, and then seek to model ourselves on it, reducing the breadth and depth of our life! Extrapolating from a handful of passages, we can formulate a rough outline of the parameters of his concept of the self. In the "Apology for Raymond Sebond" (II, 12) he devotes a major section to the argument that philosophy has not succeeded in knowing man's own nature, either the soul (considered at length) or the body (treated in only a few pages). 8 1t is clear that his instinctive intuition would be that our self is made up of the union of the body and the soul, equal partners, whose separation constitutes the death and ruin of the self. 9 He rejects any doctrine, such as Plato's, that would

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cancel out the body's half and distribute rewards or punishments in the afterlife to the soul alone, for that would no longer be us, only a part of us. Christianity, he argues, is clearly superior to Plato's view of the afterlife because it recognizes that the whole man deserves recompense and resurrection. In a recent study Robert Nozick examines seriously the philosophical definition of the self. 10 A question raised long ago asks how we could decide where my self would be if my mind with all its memories were somehow transferred into another body. I am amused by the possibilities of my memories lodged in Marilyn Monroe's body-how confusing, since I am a male, and have memories that she is most unlikely to have had and that would be difficult to reconcile with her physical characteristics. Philosophers, however, ask themselves such questions because their very strangeness may stimulate a penetrating response. Authors of fiction also raise such considerations, though less systematically. In The Tin Woodman of Oz, L. Frank Baum imagines two tin men who were once fleshand-blood human beings. Each had been enchanted so that one by one he cut off his own limbs, which were then replaced by the tinsmith Ku-Klip with tin artifacts until nothing of the original body remained. As the story develops, the Tin Woodman has the unnerving experience of speaking to his former head, which has been preserved in a cupboard and has developed into a rather cranky and unsociable person quite unlike the kind-hearted tin man. To compound the complexities, Ku-Klip created a third body made of flesh from a hodgepodge of parts taken from the two originals. What kind of self does this third creature have? and how much of it belongs to the two tin artifacts, whose fleshy components he has borrowed? And who is the rightful husband of the woman all three have courted? Baum supplies the sensible answer that each of the three bodies has had unique experiences, which constitute the distinguishing characteristics of the different selves. Science fiction also provides philosophers with food for reflection as it conceives a means to transport humans across the universe at the speed of light. All you have to do is manufacture a machine that would scan accurately a human body, mapping its every cell, molecule, and atom. This information could then be transmitted by electro-magnetic waves to a receiver somewhere in space which would have the capacity to reconstruct the body exactly. Would the new body, made of different atoms in a far-away place, be, or

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have, the same self as the original? If the original body on earth has died in the interim, would the succeeding one have the same self? Let us complicate the matter somewhat by making the reproduction take place here on earth without dissolving the original. Which of the two would be the real self? What self would the copy have? I would respond to such questions somewhat slyly: "I know the answers you seek, but will reveal them only when you produce those machines." The point is that a problem based on an impossible assumption (like "when did the continent Atlantis sink?") cannot produce a serious response. The organism, its modifications, and its interactions with its environment constitute a unique thing, the self, composed of continuity and variation. To attempt to clarify the definition of the self by thought experiments, eliminating one by one the components, seems doomed to mislead. Montaigne's first lesson is to cement the fraternal partners, body and soul, into a firm whole. "Those who want to split up our two principal parts and sequester them from each other are wrong. On the contrary, we must couple and join them together again. We must order the soul not to draw aside and entertain itself apart, not to scorn and abandon the body (nor can it do so except by some counterfeit monkey trick), but to rally to the body, embrace it, cherish it, assist it, control it, advise it, set it right and bring it back when it goes astray.... " 11 His own view of the self-one-half body, one-half soul-could hardly be called a world-shaking discovery, except that Montaigne takes the equality of the portions seriously. And he no more claims to be able to define or comprehend precisely the nature of these two components of the self than he claims to define or comprehend the self as a whole. In fact, he clearly perceives that the interaction upon each other of body and soul mystifies our understanding; we see our finger move at our bidding. "But how a spiritual impression can cut such a swath in a massive and solid object, and the nature of the relation and connection between these wonderful springs of action, no man has ever known." 12 All of Descartes's magnificent philosophical structure will run aground on this one question. Montaigne likes to contrast the two constituents of our self. In general, the body is more solid and reliable, less likely to mislead us, giving us the realest of pleasures; the soul is more flighty, variable, impressionable, but it provides us with pleasures of richer diversity than the body's, sometimes indeed preferable; moreover,

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properly trained, the soul has the remarkable power to interpret the body's experience and impressions as it will. If objects have intrinsic qualities, which is doubtful, the soul's powers can transform them into whatever impression it wills: death is frightful for Cicero, desirable for Cato, a matter of indifference for Socrates. 13 Of course, when the body is genuinely laid low, the soul seems to accompany it, and no amount of cozening can overcome the effects of a cold or, much more serious, stem forever the process of aging. 14 Although he distinguishes between the different faculties of the soul, such as imagination, reason, and judgment, and often conceives them in conflict, he nonetheless rejects by implication all doctrines that make of the soul a republic composed of many citizens. 15 He finds within the body and within the soul the same unitary nature that he finds in the self. It seems most probable to him that seated in the brain there is one controlling faculty, like a navigator whose directions guide an entire vessel. 16 He says somewhat the same of the body in quite a different context. Considering a goat which had produced stones in its stomach not unlike the ones Montaigne produced in his kidneys, he conjectures that the stones are the result of the connivance of all the body's parts working together as a unit, with one part perhaps directingY Montaigne's usual bent inclines him toward multiplicity rather than unity; in fact, the two chapters which include these declarations contain other passages apparently arguing in the opposite direction. Evidently Montaigne's strong sense of his own wholeness as an individual dictated these relatively uncharacteristic opinions; he could not imagine human nature, or his own nature, deeply divided by chasms of any sort. Many-sided, definitely; cleft irretrievably, never. In general, he finds it healthier and sounder to keep the two principal components functioning as closely as possible, so that mental awareness can augment physical pleasures when they are innocent, or moderate them when necessary; or conversely, so that physical good sense can curb mental enthusiasm. On other occasions, however, the needs of self-possession may require either to dissociate itself from the excesses of the other. The more volatile soul demands greater restraint, especially as it is unlikely to know itself well, even to condemn its mate, the body, for its own defects. "And yet hear our soul triumph over the misery of the body, over its weakness, over the fact that it is a target for all kinds of injury and alterations. Truly it has a fine right to talk!" 18

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Montaigne is convinced that his own self is seriously on the decline, as it has passed its prime. "My world is done for, my form is emptied; I belong entirely to the past, and I am bound to recognize it.... " 19 It would be nice if we got wiser as we got older, but there is little evidence to suggest this is so. 20 His own introspection informs him that since the age of twenty (or perhaps thirty, the text suffers both interpretations), it has all been downhill for him, as for most humans. 21 From his position as an old man, he can see that there is no longer any prospect for real change in his ways, a disadvantage for the moraliste, but perhaps beneficial for the portraitist. 22 But the art of living in old age, perhaps more taxing than the art of living in youth, follows different rules. The besetting sins of youth are no longer available to him, and that may be a blessing, for he doubts that he has the strength of character to resist them. 23 What he is now faced with is the besetting sins of old age. He names garrulousness, avarice, testy humors, foolish arrogance, envy, malice, and injustice. 24 His philosophy teaches moderation in pleasures, not renunciation. That is probably a fine lesson, but it is intended for a hot, boiling youth with more desires than it knows what to do with. To his consternation, Montaigne finds that he need no longer preach lessons of self-control to his body, which now leads his spirit toward reform, and much more imperiously than the spirit had ever dictated to the body. 25 How should we live with growing decrepitude? Let the years drag him on, if they must, but let him be facing backwards. 26 I am not sure that Montaigne has succeeded in making the majority of his readers respect the urgency of this aspect of his thought: his old age and his perplexity at how to manage it. Most readers are unlikely to find much pertinence in his ideas, for how many are willing to admit to themselves that they are over the hill, that their mind no longer retains all its youthful freshness, even if their body is just now beginning to show the first signs of decline, such as the need for reading glasses? "I have made up my mind to my inability to run any more; it is enough that I crawl. Nor do I complain of the natural decay that has hold of me ... any more than I regret that my term of life is not as long and sound as that of an oak. " 27 The awareness of his decline with passing years produces an interesting set of sentences in which we see the word "I" change meaning from one part of the sentence to another. "What I shall

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be from now on will be nothing but half a being; it will no longer be myself; I escape and steal away from myself every day. " 28 The two forms "myself"-in "no longer be myself" and "steal away from myself" -clearly refer to a vigorous, whole person, one who was, but who is becoming less and less whole each day. But the word "I" represents that diminished self. The French is even more complicated than the English, for it contains more pronoun forms: "I steal myself away from me." Trying to disentangle the different "I"s in that expression can be dizzying. In one of his most marvelous passages Montaigne contemplates a tooth he recently lost and learns from it that after a certain age we begin dying a little each day until the self that is left for death to carry off is a fraction of the original whole. "Thus do I melt and slip away from myself. " 29 Again we see the two different forms "I" and "myself" having different referents. Just when are we most ourselves? How much of the me of the present was actually there twenty-five years ago? Between an eight-year-old child and the eighty-eight-year-old man that he becomes, what is constant besides the name and a certain portion of the memory? Lewis Thomas, inspired in part perhaps by his study of the Essays, writes a warm account of his own self as a committee, or a parade of different selves, jostling each other to take their turn running the show. 30 He lives comfortably, with the belief that he is many selves. Montaigne's view, more implicit than explicit, conceives a single, multifaceted self that grows, peaks, then declines. At approximately fifty-four he wrote, "I have portraits of myself at twenty-five and thirty-five; I compare them with one of the present: how irrevocably it is no longer myself! How much farther is my present picture from them than from that of my death!" 31 There are not many statements so explicit that the real Montaigne belonged to the past, but the handful that do exist show that he could· not shake himself from the belief that he had known better days, that the self portrayed in his book was his second-best self. It is a very common human experience to talk to oneself. What part of the self is addressing what other part? Writers from time immemorial have found one of the most intriguing moments in the soul's history that moment when it is divided against itself, as Achilles' in Book One of the Iliad. 32 We may account for this division by saying that reason contends against passion, or against the will, or against sinfulness, or that reason is divided and inde-

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cisive, or that the will is divided. However much Montaigne believed in the fundamental unity of his own self, he constantly refers to such situations. We find sentences in which it is difficult to determine which "I" is in charge of which "me." "Since it is the privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age, I advise mine to do so as strongly as I can. Let it grow green, let it flourish meanwhile, if it can, like mistletoe on a dead tree. But I fear it is a traitor. It has such a tight brotherly bond with the body that it abandons me at every turn to follow the body in its need. I take it aside and flatter it, I work on it, all for nothing. " 33 Here the "mind" and the "I" are differentiated. The "I" apparently assumes that the mind can rise above old age; and so the "I" tells the mind what to do. When it abandons "me," what is it abandoning? My wishful thinking? but where do we find wishful thinking if not in the mind? "I take it aside," "I work on it"; what is the "I" that works on the mind? We meet again the ubiquitous observer that seems to accompany every phenomenon of our being, that participates while at the same time remaining at a certain distance, which distance we term "self-awareness." It is to this "I" that Montaigne turns when he wishes to work upon himself, and in the long run it is this "I" that will achieve some improvement in his life, perhaps even in his self. Many comments reflect this context: "I sharpen my courage toward endurance, I weaken it toward desire," 34"1 try to keep my soul and my thoughts in repose.... And if they sometimes veer under some rough and penetrating attack, it is in truth without my consent. " 35 His thoughts then, in special circumstances, behave without his assent, beyond his control. Again, we ask, where do they come from, and what is the "I" that has no control, but is distinct from the thoughts? Sometimes this inner agent strikes him as too weak to exercise any control over the self, as when he says that it is not external circumstances, like bad weather, that sway him: to them he can be indifferent: "Only the inward troubles that I produce in myself get the better of me .... " 36 Is the "I" who is gotten better of the same as the one who produces those troubles? And so self-control, itself a paradoxical concept, preoccupies him, and he becomes involved in verbal knots, as when he strives to regulate his reason as it goes astrayY He gets himself ensnared in a real mare's nest of "Button, button who's got the button?" in the famous passage, already cited in part, about his instability. "I am moved and disturbed as a result merely

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of my own unstable posture; ... I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. " 38 Perhaps this means no more than that in his description of himself, Montaigne sometimes places himself in one angle of vision, sometimes in another. In that case the different "I"s would be the "I" in print and the author of that "1." But I cannot feel that this is all Montaigne is saying. I think he also believes that something in himself, something like his attitude toward himself, has the effect of changing that self, not in any permanent way, but from moment to moment. His inner instability results in part from circumstance, the conditions around him and the conditions within him; but it also results sometimes from his own action upon himself, a different, more complex situation. The biologist and moraliste Lewis Thomas probes into the nature of the self, or the individual, in biology and is constantly confronted by the fact that individuals, be they cells, or single animals, simply cannot exist alone, that living matter, and perhaps inanimate matter as well, organizes itself into societies of mutually interdependent members, each contributing to the other, so that none can be genuinely isolated. 39 By its etymology the very word "self" means something cut off, separate from other things; but nature works by ecosystems, not by individuals. We tend to think of an ecosystem as a large geographical unit, an island somewhere in the Pacific, or perhaps a lake with the misfortune to have a factory as a neighbor; but even the tiniest cells function as a society of individuals performing the delicate but enriching balancing act of preserving their separate identities and creating the larger environment of the cell. The cell wall binds them together, protecting them from the outside, defining their entity, but at the same time acts as the portal through which they exchange nourishment and refuse with the outside. It is always a two-way affair; no cell is an island. Henry James put somewhat the same truth in Madame Merle's mouth in The Portrait of a Lady: When you've lived as long as I you'll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our "self"? Where does it begin, where does it end? It overflows into everything that

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belongs to us-and then it flows back again. I know that a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things! One's self-for other people-is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps-these thing are all expressive. 40

The Essays are laden with references to the minutia of their author's daily existence, reflecting his awareness of their contribution to our acquaintance with him. But he is not as taken by the importance of material things in making ourselves known as Isabel; they are appendages to his mind that surface as it expresses itself in conversational essays. The new field of artificial intelligence approaches the self in a different way as it endeavors to construct intelligence in computer software. Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, the best primer for the uninitiated in this field, shows how computer theorists run into problems analogous to Montaigne's efforts to define his awareness. The characteristic that apparently distinguishes a mind from a machine is the mind's capacity to examine what it is doing as it is performing, of ''jumping out of the loop" and inspecting itself. "Our facility for making instances out of classes and classes out of instances lies at the basis of our intelligence, and it is one of the great differences between human thought and the thought processes of other animals. " 41 Hofstadter utilizes the conduct of the Sphex wasp to illustrate a mind that cannot examine its conduct. The wasp leaves a paralyzed cricket in its burrow beside its eggs, so that when the eggs hatch, the cricket will provide the young with food. The wasp's mind is programmed to follow a certain order of steps as it leaves the future food in the burrow. First, it brings the cricket to the narrow entrance at the burrow's threshold, then leaves it and enters the burrow to inspect it before introducing the cricket's corpse. If an experimenter moves the cricket's body away from the entrance while the wasp is inside inspecting, it drags the body to the threshold again, lays it aside again, enters again, and inspects again. It can be made to repeat the routine up to forty times, for it has not examined its act of inspecting, has no sense of having already completed a required step more than once. It has no awareness, no memory. Recent experiments have shown that some animals' brains have attained a degree of complexity sufficient to give them a sense of self, but that this concept must be learned (with the help of a

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mirror). At the same time, profoundly retarded humans, at any age, appear unable to recognize their mirror image. Clearly, then, selfawareness represents one of the last achievements of cerebrality. The greatest perplexities and paradoxes arise when the mind's loops become "tangled," as when language begins discussing itself, where something within a symbol system appears to step out of the system and act upon itself, as in the self-referential paradoxes. Toward the end of his long analysis of intelligence, Hofstadter suggests that "the upshot is that the total picture of 'who I am' is integrated in some enormously complex way inside the entire mental structure, and contains in each one of us a large number of unresolved, possibly unresolvable, inconsistencies.... Godel's Incompleteness theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Theorem, Tarski's Truth Theorem-all have the flavor of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that 'To seek self-knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on any map, will never halt, cannot be described.' " 42 The most modern scientific comprehension appears to confirm the intuitions of less systematic investigators: total selfknowledge is impossible; inconsistency and contradiction are inherent in self-awareness. Elusive as the self may be, Montaigne is sure that it exists and that it deserves solicitous cherishing. Much of his ethical program is devoted to isolating the impressionable self from the forces that may smother it, giving it room to live and breathe, to grow, perhaps to blossom. "I have nothing of my own but myself, and even there my possession is partly defective and borrowed. I cultivate both my courage, which is the stronger, and also my fortune, to find in them enough to satisfy me if everything else should forsake me. " 43 Clearly this is not a triumphant shout of self-affirmation, but a counsel of prudence. It seems natural to characterize such an attitude as stoic; a man cannot be called his own if the adversities of fortune can bring him to his knees. But Montaigne does not share the disdain for living of the Stoics, who strove to live without involvement, without feelings-their goal of apathy. In his view that would amount to renouncing living, period. His concern is simply that every time we become committed to something outside ourselves, we are in danger of losing control of the self, since it is prone to rent itself out to external causes and neglect itself. So we must strive not to get excessively involved; in a sense we must be married to

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ourselves, not to our wives, not to our children, not to our goods, not to our duties or allegiances to outside causes. One may assume such duties, even to the point of shedding one's blood if need be, but never to the point of sacrificing one's self. The initial concern of any one who will cultivate his self (again the question arises, who cultivates what?) must be to segregate that self from the insistent and improper demands of other selves. Born in a privileged class, Montaigne naturally expected himself to take part in the management of his nation, but finally chose to prize his private life above any public role. The desire for power or success is a tyrannical mate. "I do not aim in that direction. I love myself too well. " 44 He takes for granted that the best use of his honor lies in public service, but he has now passed that period of his life. 45 "I am of the opinion that the most honorable occupation is to serve the public and to be useful to many.... For my part, I stay out of it; partly out of conscience ... partly out of laziness. " 46 The private life suits his tastes. "I love a private life because it is by my own choice that I love it, not because of unfitness for public life, which is perhaps just as well suited to my nature. " 47 When elected to the position of Mayor of Bordeaux a full decade after retiring, his initial reaction was to refuse; 48 when he subsequently learned that it was the wish of the King, he accepted, but spoke of being "pushed"49 into the job. He is proud to say that he took his position into his hands, not into his liver. "I have been able to take part in public office without departing one nail's breadth from myself, and to give myself to others without taking myself from myself. " 50 In a somewhat simplistic formula, Montaigne would like to think that by conforming outwardly to the laws (even unjust or unwise ones) he can preserve his freedom to think inwardly whatever he wishes. 51 As he says, he would gladly offer one candle to Saint Michael and one to the dragon. 52 Living in the crowd is confining: "He who walks in the crowd must step aside, keep his elbows in, step back or advance, even leave the straight way, according to what he encounters. He must live not so much according to himself as according to others, not according to what he proposes to himself, but according to what others propose to him, according to the time, according to the men, according to the business. " 53 Ceremony, roleplaying, dissimulation, and lying await the man in the public square; most of our acts are masquerade. 54 "We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance

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we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own. " 55 So much for sincerity; it is desirable, especially in private discourse, but we cannot avoid the fact that social beings by their nature must play roles. As long as they are aware that they are acting out roles, their awareness may exempt them from a charge of hypocrisy. "Whatever it is, whether art or nature, that imprints in us this disposition to live with reference to others, it does us much more harm than good.... We do not care so much what we are in ourselves and in reality as what we are in the public mind." 56 Not long after renouncing his own public life, Montaigne composed an essay on solitude, defending his practice and laying down the strictest requirements for a genuine solitude. He repeats, almost gleefully, the story of Stilpo, whose wife, children, and property were all consumed in the fire of his city. He escaped and thanked god that he had not lost anything of his own. "We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. " 57 While most people consider it good fortune to have children, Montaigne considers their absence good fortune. 58 Life without them, in his view, could be complete and contented. This opinion, unusual in his day, but much less so than in ours, is one of those touchstones that indicate the depth of his need to disengage his self from involvements. Not for Montaigne is the worldreforming spirit of his literary contemporary Don Quixote, whom he would have judged truly mad, if admirably so. As the essayist sees it, our service to ourselves comes first. Striving, as so often, to include both sides of the problem in his formula, he concludes: "He who lives not at all unto others, hardly lives unto himself.... The main responsibility of each of us is his own conduct; and that is what we are here for.... He who abandons healthy and gay living of his own to serve others thereby takes, to my taste, a bad and unnnatural course." 59 Far more taxing to the philosopher is the requirement to break the inner shackles that confine the self. One of the most insidious is habit, which may at first be imposed from the outside, but is soon internalized until we cannot distinguish what is habit from what is our nature. Anyone who has tried to reverse a habit, either a deeply embedded one, such as smoking, or a simpler one such as wearing the wristwatch on the left arm, will have noticed how implacably habit enchains us. Montaigne admits that most of his

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acts, even his marriage, are conducted by habit, not choice. 60 He detests the infringement on his freedom that every acquired habit becomes. Just to show he is not enslaved by the need to eat, ever since his youth he has done without a meal every now and then. 61 He sternly disapproves of being so attached to one type of cooking that one cannot do without sauces, or without red wine. Although his bowels move predictably at the same hour each day, he regrets this regularity that could be a hindrance for a soldier. 62 Intellectual habits, known as opinions or doctrines, are every bit as tyrannical, and equally imperceptibly. We call other people's habits prejudices; our own we call judgments or opinions. It was Montaigne's belief that his opinions (outside the matter of religion) were his own choices, and that he maintained the right to shuffle them whenever he wished. Devoted to classical poetry, history, and philosophy as he is, admiring without adulating the moral superiority of the ancients as he does, he nonetheless declares his independence of antiquity at the same time as he declares his reverence. His opinions are fully his own, he says, not derived from reading the great thinkers of the past. What he owes to ancient authors is the reinforcement that they provide him, making him more articulately himself, lending to his obscure opinions the glory of their prestige. "I produced them crude and simple, with a conception bold and strong, but a little confused and imperfect. Since then I have established and fortified them by the authority of others and the sound arguments of the ancients, with whose judgment I found myself in agreement. These men have given me a firmer grip on my ideas and a more complete enjoyment and possession of them. " 63 Every phrase in this citation is constructed to place the essayist in the forefront with the ancients as auxiliaries; he does not trail after them, saying "aye," even if he does borrow their ideas and their words. 64 A marginal gloss to the "Apology" makes the same point with equal vigor; when he came to writing down his opinions, it was marvelous to see how they conformed to the best minds of the past. Like Monsieur Jourdain, who had been speaking prose all along without realizing it, he had been philosophizing without knowing in what great company. "A new figure: an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher!" 65 He arrived at the complex conclusion that he repeats other authors the better to speak his own mind. 66

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He is impressionable, as all men are. A doctor friend of his had invited him to visit a sick man in the hope that his youthful vigor would impress itself on the patient. Montaigne worried, on the contrary, that the sick man's debility would infect him, for he knew the power of his imagination to rule him. 67 In fact, he wrote an essay about it (I, 21}, in which he took pleasure in repeating tales of its prowess that we moderns find quite incredible-he finds imagination at work in the case of the man who dreamt of a bullfight and grew horns on his forehead overnight, and in the case of the man who changed to a woman on his wedding day, and perhaps also in the case of Saint Francis' stigmata. More significant, and more traditional in the literature of moralists, is the need to find a way to free ourselves from the dominion of our passions. Montaigne's recipe for this: catch the passion at the moment of its birth, when it is at its weakest, and distract the mind from it to another subject. It is not that Montaigne aspires to extirpating or even dominating all passions; the point is to retain a certain amount of self-control, to feel the passions, but not to be drowned in them. "There is no passion that so shakes the clarity of our judgment as anger.... Why is it ... permissible for fathers and schoolmasters to whip and chastise children when they are in anger? ... It is passion that is in command at first, it is passion that speaks, it is not we ourselves. " 68 Everyday language indicates this mentality when we say "I just wasn't myself then." It is a matter of the will, and Montaigne devotes an entire chapter to the topic of self-control, "Of Husbanding Your Will" (III, 10}. His opening paragraph defines the problem as well as any other passage. "In comparison with most men, few things touch me, or, to put it better, hold me; for it is right that things should touch us, provided they do not possess us. I take great care to augment by study and reasoning this privilege of insensibility, which is naturally well advanced in me. I espouse, and in consequence grow passionate about, few things .... As much as I can, I employ myself entirely upon myself; and even in that subject I would still fain bridle my affection and keep it from plunging in too entirely, since this is a subject that I possess at the mercy of others, and over which fortune has more right than I have. " 69 This passage typifies the way that a self-portrait blends into an exemplar, for Montaigne would gladly have us follow his example, or strive for the same self-possession he aspires to. As usual, he attributes his virtues first to natural

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inclination (in this case insensibility), and then asserts that he struggles to fortify this inclination by his reason. Even "affection" for himself {the only term he uses for self-centeredness) must be kept in reins, not because self-love is vicious, but because the self can be lost or harmed by outside forces, and one should be prepared to look upon such misfortunes with equanimity. "So that even in regard to health, which I so esteem, I ought not to desire it and give myself to it so frantically as to find illnesses therefore unbearable. . . . But the passions that distract me from myself and attach me elsewhere, those in truth I oppose with all my strength. My opinion is that we must lend ourselves to others and give ourselves only to ourselves. " 70 It is desire that is the villain here, for what we desire with all our being possesses all our being. We must study our desires to determine which are natural and which are artificial. "Desires are either natural and necessary, like eating and drinking; or natural and not necessary, like intercourse with females; or neither natural nor necessary. Of this last type are nearly all those of men; they are all superfluous and artificial. For it is marvelous how little Nature needs to be content, how little she has left us to desire.... The delicacy of our wines is no part of her teaching, nor the embellishments that we add to our amorous appetites. . . . These extraneous desires, which ignorance of the good and a false opinion have insinuated in us, are in such great number that they drive out almost all the natural ones; ... " 71 This argument, with its classifications and examples, comes from Plutarch, but represents an opinion that Montaigne will repeat in later years. 72 When humans prescribe for themselves goals that are not purely natural, he finds that the satisfaction of one desire only gives rise to new unfulfilled ones. For Goethe and other Romantics the unending Faustian dissatisfaction, the constant striving upwards, constitutes the greatness of man, whatever its drawbacks may be. For Montaigne, who is conceivably the most totally un-Romantic soul ever to exist, the implacable quest is a sign of human perversity. "The more we amplify our need and our possession, the more we involve ourselves in the blows of fortune and adversity. The range of our desires should be circumscribed and restrained to a narrow limit of the nearest and most contiguous good things; and moreover their course should be directed not in a straight line that ends up elsewhere, but in a circle whose two extremities by a short sweep

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meet and terminate in ourselves. Actions that are performed without this reflective movement-the actions, for example, of the avaricious, the ambitious, and so many others who run in a straight line, whose course carries them ever forward-are erroneous and diseased actions."73 "Erroneous," "diseased,"-these are strong terms for Montaigne; he uses them for actions that are not self-concerned. At one point he reaches the ultimate paradox in his search for the autonomy of the self and recommends liberating ourselves from the limitations of our own character, from our self itself. "We must not nail ourselves down so firmly to our humors and disposition. Our principal talent is the ability to apply ourselves to various practices. It is existing, but not living, to keep ourselves bound and obliged by necessity to a single course. The fairest souls are those that have the most variety and adaptability. . . . Life is an uneven, irregular, and multiform movement. We are not friends to ourselves, and still less masters, we are slaves, if we follow ourselves incessantly and are so caught in our inclinations that we cannot depart from them or twist them about." 74 This course could be interpreted as simply a plea to avoid excessive adhesion to our habits, somewhat misleadingly designated as our "humors" and "ourselves." I think Montaigne is saying something far more radical, advising us to recognize that we could often be richer than we are if we could learn not to restrict ourselves to our inclinations. This would constitute the final step beyond which one cannot go, to encourage the self to enrich itself by pushing itself outside its own nature every now and then. The commitment to being always one's self is a commitment as much as any other and therefore a form of enslavement that must be broken on occasion. Working with the self can lead to bizarre paradoxes such as these. Andre Gide, an ardent fan of the Essays, would designate such extreme measures as disponibilite and see in them the sole path to a full life. "My trade and my art is living."75 Much of Montaigne's plan of cultivating the soul seems to boil down to the sort of stratagem we have been considering, namely, keeping out the interlopers who try to tyrannize the self, as well as the counsel to put oneself first, though not in a way to exclude others. "Men give themselves for hire. Their faculties are not for them, they are for those to whom they enslave themselves; ... This common humor I do not like. We must husband the freedom of our soul and mortgage it only on the

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right occasions; which are in very small number, if we judge sanely. " 76 If we wish to determine just what that self is or just how we can cultivate it, Montaigne comes up with few specific answers for us. I have already suggested that the most significant measure to take is to increase our awareness of every aspect of our selves, of the life that is going on within us. In this study, he will discover his own unique nature, what Montaigne calls his "complexion," which is usually translated by "temperament" or "character." In the key chapter "Of Repentance" (III, 2), which I often call the most profound of the essays, Montaigne makes two statements that are frequently cited; first, that "each man bears the entire form of man's estate," 77 and second, that "there is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a pattern all his own, a ruling pattern, which struggles against education and against the tempest of the passions that oppose it. " 78 Every man bears the entire form of the human condition, but at the same time has his own personal form; or as we would say, every man has his own nature and human nature. Whenever I ask a class if these two statements contradict each other-can we have the entire form of human nature and still each one of us be unique?-! get a furious discussion for an answer. I do not think there is a contradiction, and cite as an analogy Montaigne's solution (taken from Augustine's City of God, XXI, 8) to the matter of universality and individuality: "An ingenious mixture on the part of nature. If our faces were not similar, we could not distinguish man from beast; if they were not dissimilar, we could not distinguish man from man. " 79 Although no man has exactly the same nature as Adolf Hitler, each man contains in him some degree of the racial hatred, monomaniacal egotism, militarism, sadism, and masochism that played such important roles in his constitution. So Hitler's nature cannot be totally foreign to us; nor can Socrates'. Nonetheless, each man has his own constellation of human traits, his own pattern. This pattern is apparently ineradicable. Not even education can raise a human being above this nature. Education was a crucial question for the sixteenth century, for the most creative intellectual force of the time was humanism, and the humanists were educators devoted to the belief that the proper study of classical culture could bring about a reform in the quality of life. Montaigne cannot shake himself loose from a deep-seated disillusionment with

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the education of his day, much as he loved some of his teachers. Its goal, he remarks, ironically, is to make men learned, and in that it has succeeded. 80 But it has not made them wiser or better. In "Of Pedantry" (I, 25) he asks himself how to account for the fact that learned men seem so foolish, so lacking in admirable qualities. The answer that finally comes closest to satisfying him is that education has no formula for making silk purses from sow's ears, and many scholars belong willy-nilly to the porcine breed. We usually think of education as improving or forming the character of the student; Montaigne hedges somewhat, distinguishing carefully. "Natural inclinations gain assistance and strength from education; but they are scarcely to be changed and overcome. " 81 In fact, he remarks humorously, a thousand natures in his time have escaped the influence of their education and turned out vicious, or virtuous. 82 He believes, then, in education of a very special sort, designed primarily to develop the student's judgment-in fact, to fashion in him many of the mental qualities of an essayist. One question Montaigne asks himself is what to do with the student who is temperamentally incapable of responding to the education, who prefers light reading to sage advice, who is more stirred by the hunting horn than the cavalry bugle. The essayist's answer is-if no one is looking-to strangle him; failing that, to make him a pastry chef. 83 The stubborn, innate temperament is the bedrock of the moraliste's science. Because it is different in each man, each man must conduct his own inquiry into his self. Self-study will uncover our natural character, draw it in brighter colors, and allow us to live with the inevitable, in harmony with our nature. Montaigne, for example, felt that he was indolent by nature; any policy intending to make of him an achiever, or to involve him in the maelstrom of political or social activism, would have eventually run aground on the shoals of his innate inertia. "Men are diverse in inclination and strength; they must be led to their own good according to their nature and by diverse routes."84 It is quite possible that in a certain way "character is destiny," as an ancient Greek saying had it, that our achievements are those of our molecules, not of our mind. Montaigne never rejects this possibility, a sort of moral determinism, an iron law of character, that we are only what we were born to be. Rereading a page concerning the origin of his own virtuous qualities, he was jolted into writing this: "Could it be true that to be wholly good we must be

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so by some occult, natural, and universal property, without law, without reason, without example-as if by some inexplicable quintessence of our natural being?" 85 Perhaps the only way we can be good is to be born that way. Such a hypothesis throws much of moral philosophy out the window. Even more distressing, much as it disparages human efforts at self-improvement, it stands more chance of being true than the generally accepted platitude that the efforts of our reason can make us good. This determinist account of human conduct always tempts the essayist; it may contain the whole truth; it surely contains part of the truth. In a sentence rather overlooked by Montaigne scholarship, the essayist admits that his own practice has evolved from attempts at moral self-improvement to a more relaxed self-acceptance. "I draw back as much as I can into the first and natural stage, which for naught I attempted to leave." 86 The ultimate question for a moraliste must be whether human effort can ever succeed in improving our selves. Our nature may be circumscribed by certain limits which it cannot transcend, but within those limits are there possibilities for reform? On this fundamental matter Montaigne wavers; one side of him hopes, even affirms, that self-improvement is possible; the other side tends to discount the possibility. His indecision shows in what he says of Socrates; three times he credits the Greek philosopher with reforming his character; but then he once specifically rejects this assertion on the grounds that Socrates' soul, being inherently great, had no need of amelioration. 87 On yet another occasion he arrives at a mixed formula according to which the Athenian's already rich and beautiful nature acquired virtue by the long exercise of philosophy. It is instinctively human to believe that we can reform ourselves, and in several statements made in passing the essayist betrays almost unwittingly his assent to this belief; for example, "Day by day, I rid myself by reflection of that childish and inhuman humor that makes us want to arouse compassion and mourning in our friends by our misfortunes," 88 or "My susceptibility is naturally tough; and I harden and thicken it every day by force of reason. " 89 Montaigne has something like this in mind when he writes one of the more perplexing sentences in a book full of puzzlers. "What those men [the Stoics] did by virtue, I train myself to do by disposition. " 90 I do not see how to make sense of this statement unless one believes that one's nature can be modified through the rein-

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forcement of an innate quality (here, insensitivity), though not by reason, for that was the Stoics' way. On the frontispiece of the copy of the Essays he was preparing for printing he handwrote a Latin motto from Virgil for his whole book: viresque acquirit eundo, "he gains strength as he goes. " 91 So, Montaigne believes that humans can reform themselves, a doctrine that seems to be shared by all of us whenever we strive to improve. And yet, like few of us, he wonders at the same time whether such striving may not be wasted effort, given the power of our natures. Whatever the truth in this dense matter, he felt certain that only one human method could work: ever-increasing self-knowledge. So we must learn what our nature is (it will be more trivial and baser than we expected). Once we know ourselves, and begin to place a proper value on our "lower" nature, perhaps reason or self-knowledge will fortify one aspect of our nature or repress a less desirable aspect. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" would seem to be Montaigne's motto. One form of self-enrichment that Montaigne does not seek, as far as I can see, is pure consciousness, the awareness of the mystic, who clears his thought of all temporal content in order to reach a sort of pure being, transcendent and ineffable. Such a state might appear to be the only logical result of clearing our mind of the alien forces, habit, custom, imagination, passions, prejudice, and the like, that clutter it with foreign elements and distract it from its self. This attractive state has been described by mystics of all civilizations, occidental as well as oriental; and the similarity of the descriptions, coming from such vastly diverse cultures, lends credence to the idea that it is a fundamental human experience, albeit a very rare one. Michael Baraz, undoubtedly one of the most respected Montaigne scholars practicing today, finds the seeds of mystical thinking in the essayist. 92 Mystics seek to enter the timeless world of being through various practices, notably meditation. They stress the multiplicity and variability of every aspect of life as we know it, while at the same time reminding us that every thing that exists (which means exists in time, in changeability) participates in being also, and could not have its share of mutable existence unless it were rooted in immutable being. Baraz writes as well as, or better than, anyone on Montaigne's sense of the diversity and transience of this world. But I cannot agree with him when he says that Montaigne aspires to contacting the being that lies beneath diversity. 93 When the

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essayist writes of being as it is in God, his point is that such being is totally out of reach for man, and beyond his limited comprehension. Never once does he ascribe attainment of being as a legitimate goal for mankind; rather, he seeks self-conscious acceptance of human weakness and fallibility, not shedding human nature, but embracing it; not ascending, but descending. Moreover, the mystic's contact with universal being involves a radical reorientation of the self away from uniqueness into a special kind of oblivion; every man turns from himself to the universal. Montaigne's ethic, as I understand it, reposes on the uniqueness of the individual, intending to enhance that uniqueness, not reduce it, to fortify it, not to escape it. Baraz argues that the essayist seeks to :find universal wisdom through contact with nature, and that the descent into the deepest folds of natural being is in fact tantamount to the mystic's ascent into timeless being. 94 Now we are always in trouble when we start talking about being-or Being-in abstraction, for it is impossible to say anything very clear about it, and perhaps impossible to say anything true about it, or at least verifiable. Montaigne believes in a transcendent world, and he speaks often of tranquillity as the ultimate goal of living, but never characterizes that tranquillity in the ways typical of mystics. Montaigne did not sink into the reality of human existence to lose himself, but to :find himself. The self, which appears so fragile before the forces of habit, imagination, passion, and external circumstances, turns out to have its vigorous side, once it is uncovered. Nature provides every self with a special brand of wisdom in which Montaigne has unshakable confidence. "As she has furnished us with feet to walk with, so she has given us wisdom to guide us in life: a wisdom not so ingenious, robust, and pompous as that of [the philosophers'] invention, but correspondingly easy and salutary, performing very well what the other talks about, in a man who has the good fortune to know how to occupy himself simply and in an orderly way, that is to say naturally. " 95 That he wants tranquillity above all appears in countless ways. His inscription on his library commemorating his retirement speaks of it as his goal. His essays say so again and again, in every period. In fact, when a book that aspires to be "lofty and subtle speech" shouts repeatedly that one's only goal is to live in peace, it speaks with candor amounting to courage. 96 Most of us do not notice the less than simple honesty it takes to publish such a thought. "All

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the glory that I aspire to in my life is to have lived it tranquillytranquilly not according to Metrodorus or Arcesilaus or Aristippus, but according to me. Since philosophy has not been able to find a way to tranquillity that is suitable to all, let everyone seek it individually."97 There are hosts of similar expressions, such as "I try to keep my soul and my thoughts in repose," 98 or "the aim of all solitude, I take it, is the same: to live more at leisure and at one's ease."99 "Of Vanity" (III, 9) has a collection of them: "my principal profession in this life was to live it comfortably, and rather relaxedly than busily," "I seek only to grow indifferent and relaxed," or "I am content to enjoy the world without being all wrapped up in it. " 100 He sounds almost as if he means some sort of passive secondbest living in the sentences above; not so in the one that follows, where he exaggerates his agility some little: "I, who have no other aim but to live and be merry, would run from one end of the world to the other to seek out one good year of pleasant and cheerful tranquillity. A somber, dull tranquillity is easy enough to find for me, but it puts me to sleep and stupefies me; I am not content with it." 101 Clearly, tranquillity is not inactivity; it must be accompanied by pleasure and virtue, which are not all that distinct. In fact, Montaigne likes to beat philosophers' ears with the word "voluptuousness" (volupte, from voluptas, the Latin word for pleasure in classical philosophies], as it is the ultimate goal of virtue itself. 102 "If anyone tells me that it is degrading the Muses to use them only as a plaything and a pastime, he does not know, as I do, the value of pleasure, play, and pastime. I would almost say that any other aim is ridiculous. I live from day to day, and, without wishing to be disrespectful, I live only for myself; my purposes go no further. " 103 Montaigne's ethic is one of the first great affirmations of the self; therein lies a major element of its modernity. He was quite content with his self, with his life, with his character, and says so without qualification, though he does attempt to palliate the audacity of the remarks by prefacing them with reminders to his reader that he is painting himself, not portraying a model man. "Of Repentance" (III, 2) asserts point-blank that Montaigne seldom repents, that he makes no apologies for his acts of the past or any advice he may have given, for they were as good as they could have been under the circumstances. 104 "Repentance is nothing but a disavowal of our will and an opposition to our fancies, which leads us about in all directions. " 105 In other words, repentance is not an act of moral

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health; for in it the individual denies his self of the past, rejecting it in a form of personal self-betrayal which discloses that he does not possess himself. Once he has committed a deed Montaigne may praise or blame it, but he will not renounce it. He makes a crucial distinction between regret and repentance. 106 We can regret that we are not better by nature than we are; for example, that we cannot fly. But that is not repentance, for it wishes for something beyond the capacity of our will to accomplish. We might wish to have the strength of character of Cato, but that will not give us the power to elevate ourselves to his level. When Montaigne examines the past, he finds that he proceeded with order and according to himself-all that he can ask. "I have my own laws and court to judge me, and I address myself to them more than anywhere else. " 107 In short, he is a thoroughly impenitent man, unaffected by the judgment of others. Montaigne was not a scoundrel, and the laws of his own court could be stern (as for example in the matter of keeping his word); but his philosophy provides the perfect justification for total rascality. "Both in health and sickness I have readily let myself follow my urgent appetites. I give great authority to my desires and inclinations. " 108 The context behind this remark is relatively inconsequential; it is a question of whether or not Montaigne will take medicines that taste bad or follow uncomfortable regimens imposed by doctors; but the principle of assenting to his own prescriptions only, and basing them on his inclinations, amounts to a declaration of total independence from any authority whatsoever, in this domain at least. It is not often that Montaigne asserts his unwillingness to follow Socrates' example, but in one such instance he rejects self-correction in favor of self-affirmation. "I have simply and crudely adopted for my own sake this ancient precept: that we cannot go wrong by following Nature, that the sovereign precept is to conform to her. I have not, like Socrates, corrected my natural disposition by force of reason, and have not troubled my inclination at all by art. I let myself go as I have come. I combat nothing." 109 The terms he chooses-"have not troubled my inclination," "have let myself go," "I combat nothing"-all contribute to a picture of passivity and nonchalance, of spiritual laziness. And they may all be literally true, but they are slightly deceptive to the extent that they mask the firm self-assertion that lies behind them-it would have been equally accurate to say "I have not troubled my inclination because I value it more than any

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doctrinaire morality" or "I combat nothing because I cherish my God-given nature." If these statements were not balanced by others of a different tendency, we would have every reason to accuse Montaigne of fomenting moral anarchy, of preaching the complacent self-satisfied man, indifferent to ethical considerations, capable always of justifying every whim and indiscretion, or worse. Pascal was outraged by his moral laxity; 110 and other critics since him have agreed that the essayist sets an example for amorality, whether we call it disponibilite a la Andre Gide or the higher morality of a Nietzschean superman. Fausta Garavini, reading boldly between the lines, holds that his nonchalant tone invites transgression and that by indirection the essayist implies the total destruction of all values. 111 With this I cannot agree. To read an invitation to irresponsible self-indulgence in Montaigne is to read only certain passages of the Essays and to read them tendentiously. If we wish to determine just what example Montaigne intends to set for us, we should, in the interests of being equitable, look at the whole example and not reject selectively some aspects of his nature to emphasize others disproportionately. There is not a trace of the superman morality in Montaigne. Never does he suggest that rules applying to others do not apply to him, except the rule that we should not talk about ourselves or think too much about ourselves. The impenitent man in Montaigne is constrained by a set of convictions as deeply rooted as his resistance to repentance. First, his willingness to make his conduct conform to laws and to customs as well, even more to let the Catholic Church dictate to his thoughts where it will. This leaves him little room for vagrancy. He was a thorough-going conformist in action, however daring his mindand he allows his mind to be all the more daring because he curbs his conduct so vigorously. Second, his high regard for genuine virtue, even if it lies beyond his reach, tinctures every judgment made by the inner magistrate, who alone passes sentence on the essayist's conduct. When he appeals to his conscience, it affords him self-acceptance, but little self-satisfaction. An attentive reader notices how very frequently and very firmly he asserts that he comes first. His assertiveness, if not moderated by his skepticism and modesty, would have made of him an arrogant bore; but he is not an arrogant bore. To justify his philosophy of cultivating his self he highlights the drawbacks of the conduct of

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most men, who differ from him not so much by putting their selves in second place (almost no one does that) as by concealing from themselves and from others their true practice. "I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do, and I dislike even thoughts that are unpublishable. The worst of my actions and conditions does not seem to me so ugly as the cowardice of not daring to avow it. Everyone is discreet in confession; people should be so in action. Boldness in sinning is somewhat compensated and bridled by boldness in confessing. " 112 He would hope that God might grant that his example of frankness would lead others to abandon dissembling. "The wisdom of my lesson is wholly in truth, in freedom, in reality; disdaining, in the list of its real duties, those petty feigned, customary, provincial rules; altogether natural, constant, and universal; of which propriety and ceremony are daughters, but bastard daughters." 113 Self-cultivation-or authenticity, as it has been christened in this century-must entail a certain denial of social constraints, usually a liberation from tradition by rejection of convention. It is not easy to assert one's self by conforming. Montaigne comes at the beginning of the modern era, where the self for the first time assumes primacy. From the time of the first Romantics, such as Rousseau, to the present, the self has affirmed itself by rejecting social values with increasing stridence. Rousseau prided himself on being an eccentric; it is almost as if he could not have felt his own individuality in any other way than by revolting against society. Jean Genet represents Rousseau's concept of being oneself pushed to twentieth-century extremes, defying every accepted code, identifying his self by defiance, even criminality. Most modern thinkers face this perplexity: is there any other way to be certain one is a real person than by being an outsider, an off-horse? Montaigne was not haunted by such a dilemma. He felt he could be himself totally without being an eccentric. His self was cultivated outside of social service, outside of social servitude, but not outside of social conformity. He was not distressed at the fact that he might resemble other men. His nominalist thinking assured him that he was different from every other human being; that went without saying. No one else could be Michel de Montaigne; only he could. He let the world he lived in define his parameters, for that left him considerable freedom to think as he would, and to forge his self. A sailboat exercises its capacities best running before the wind in conformity with the laws of physics, under the guidance of its

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skipper. Should it decide to buck against the winds, or to be a submarine, it will end up achieving nothing. It may be that human nature grows most when it accepts most. A self that defines itself only by :fighting back lives only in contrast, and cannot exist on its own. Montaigne had no fears about the integrity of his self, and he dared to confess openly that he lived to cultivate it in every way.

XIII

The Portrait of the Self WHEN MoNTAIGNE wrote that his book was "the only book in the world of its kind," 1 he was referring to his project of self-portraiture, whose originality impressed him increasingly. "Authors communicate with the people by some special extrinsic mark; I am the first to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian or a poet or a jurist. " 2 He broke the literary ice. 3 He uses a variety of expressions to designate his project: "I decipher myself," 4 "I here make known my inclinations and feelings,'' 5 "telling my feeble humors," 6 "the desire to tell it [my behavior] seized me." 7 Sometimes he is stressing the fact of publishing his portrait: "I let fly my caprices ... in public,"8 "the publication of my behavior. " 9 More frequently his words underline the fact of putting his portrait down in a written, stable form: "a record of my life," 10 "an enduring account, " 11 "a register of so many little thoughts, " 12 and "a record of various and changeable occurrences. " 13 When thinking in such a vein, Montaigne is likely to contrast the fixity of the record [French: registre] with the fluidity of the thoughts being registered, implying the difficulty of his achievement. He calls this "describing the continual agitations and changes of my thoughts, whatever subject they light on. " 14 But if the primary procedure of self-portraiture is some sort of transcription of the free ranging mind, it also involves the depiction of character (for which Montaigne has no single term). Perhaps the best phrase summing up his subject matter is "these are my humors and opinions." 15 "Humors" would include his habits, his temperament, or his characteristic conduct (often represented by the difficult-to-translate word meurs, which can mean "conduct," "manners," "behavior,'' or "personality"). Although he refers to the Essays at one point as "the story of my life," 16 he clearly has no intention of writing autobiography. It is the private man that he presents, one who can make essays, but not deeds [French: e.lfaicts]. 17 Acts [e.lfaicts or gestes] did not seem to him

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sufficiently revealing of himself. Existentialists would disagree, and argue that acts alone reveal the man. Something can be said for both sides. I imagine that most of us would use our deeds as evidence of our character: "I have always been generous with my friends; for example, when I was young and poor, I . . . ." This kind of reasoning is largely absent in the Essays. Reactions count more than actions for Montaigne, the inner life far more than the outer, especially in matters moral. "It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence." 18 "I expose myself entire; my portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its place." Montaigne felt, with no modesty at all, that he had succeeded in presenting his essence on paper-a major accomplishment, 19 and perhaps one that many readers would be willing to accord him. "At least I have one thing according to the rules: that no man ever treated a subject he knew and understood better than I do the subject I have undertaken; and that in this I am the most learned man alive. Secondly, that no man ever penetrated more deeply into his material, or plucked its limbs and consequences cleaner, or reached more accurately and fully the goal he had set for his work. " 20 With an assurance that he displayed only after he knew that his book had been well received, Montaigne is convinced that he has succeeded in his portrait: "Everyone recognizes me in my book, and my book in me." 21 If any man finds Montaigne's humors to his taste, he will have the advantage of knowing the essayist from his book, and in three days' reading can gain a knowledge that would have required long acquaintance. 22 Even greater than that, reading the Essays lets us know their author "more surely and exactly" than meeting him would. When he writes that he is presenting his essence, the choice of term is significant; for in the sixteenth century the definition of genuine knowledge was knowledge of the essence of a thing. His assertion that he is reporting the essence of himself in his Essays is tantamount to boasting (whether or not consciously) to having real knowledge of himself, not necessarily complete knowledge-he always insisted that he had more yet before him than he had attainedbut at least that he knew where the essence was, largely in his thoughts, and that it was this essence that he was putting on paper. "I dare not only to speak of myself, but to speak only of myself; I go astray when I write on anything else, and get away from my subject."23 This is clearly an overstatement; Montaigne portrays not

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only himself, but also mankind. The second portrait may apply indirectly to himself in that what one thinks of human beings shows as much about oneself as it does about one's fellow men. In fact, to speak only of himself would run the fatal risk of boring his reader. So he writes about the human condition in highly general terms, which is, after all, one way of talking about his reader as much as about himself. After discussing humankind, his mind returns to the ever-present topic of the self, lurking in the shadows of his thought, waiting to take its place center stage, where it performs its gracious soliloquy and retires, never far from the spotlight, ready to do another turn on the merest pretext. Let us not forget that as he talks of himself, the essayist is not talking to himself, or only very rarely, but constantly inviting his auditor, or reader, to take part in the inquiry. Consider, for example, "Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers" (II, 37), in which he broaches a topic fraught with danger: "Let me tell you all about my illness." While some of the chapter is devoted to a circumstantial account of Montaigne's kidney stones and his visits to health spas, the majority places the topic in larger contexts, such as how to live with the reality of disease and the menace to the health of mankind represented by the medical profession. The citation that follows shows a typical movement of the essayist's thought as it shifts from one level to another, from philosophy, to Socrates, to us, to others, to me-yet the entire passage contributes to the portrait of the essayist. While Montaigne seems to be talking impersonally, he is far more present than appears at first reading. (I will again underline the first person pronouns.) I have always considered that precept formalistic which so rigorously and precisely orders us to maintain a good countenance and a disdainful and composed bearing in the endurance of pain. Why does philosophy, which has regard only for real substance and actions, go playing around with these external appearances? As if she were training men for acting in a comedy, or as if it were in her jurisdiction to prevent the movements and alterations which we by nature are forced to accept. Then let her prevent Socrates from blushing for affection or for shame, from blinking his eyes at the threat of a blow, from trembling and sweating in the fits of fever.... Let her confine herself to governing our understanding, which she has taken upon herself to instruct. In the attacks of the stone, let her preserve the soul's [i.e., my soul's] capacity for knowing itself, for following its

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accustomed course, combating the pain and enduring it.... In such extreme accidents it is cruelty to require of us so composed a bearing. If we play a good game, it is a small matter that we make a bad face. If the body [i.e., my body) finds relief in complaining, let it do so. If it likes agitation, let it tumble and toss at its pleasure. . .. I say this to excuse those whom we see ordinarily crying out and storming in the shocks and attacks of this sickness. As for me, I have passed through it until now with a little better countenance. Not that I give myself trouble, however, to maintain this external decorum; for I take little account of such an advantage. . .. I test myself in the thickest of the pain, and have always found that I was capable of speaking, thinking, and answering as sanely as at any other time, but not as steadily, being troubled and distracted by the pain. 24

We see here many of the traits of Montaigne's art of being personal, the unobtrusive presence of phrases like "I have always considered" and "I say this," the appeals to "us" which expand the person to include the reader, the hortatory forms {"Let her confine herself" and the like) which express a personal view or wish, and finally the "as for me" which introduces Montaigne's own conduct. We might also note that the philosophy expounded squares with the characteristic views of the essayist: he is discussing a matter of everyday conduct, though he finds in it dimensions of great philosophical import; he chastises philosophy for trying to neglect or surmount the simple corporeal reality of human nature; he advises men to cling to their capacity for self-awareness; he points out that he constantly studies himself in attacks of pain; and he condemns putting up a false front; better to betray human weakness than to dissimulate. Lastly, and most subtly, his point of view gives ample allowance for our frailty, and demands no heroic displays from the affiicted. But when describing his own conduct, he gives away the fact the he behaves according to strict criteria which he does not impose on others. Montaigne felt he had presented a complete portrait, or almost so, of himself. I would have to disagree, for there are large areas of his experience that he omits, either because they do not interest him or because he feels them inappropriate. Nowhere does he mention his fantasy life; it is as if he had never had a daydream or nourished any fancies. His self-examination completely neglects this dimension of human experience, one that modern psychology finds so revelatory, perhaps as revealing as any other. Inasmuch as Mon-

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taigne claims to be registering the movements of his mind, it is remarkable that he totally overlooks this particular kind of movement. He regards himself intellectually, and so presents himself. I doubt that he ever speculated about daydreaming and what it tells us about human nature. Nor does he ever recount an incident of which he was truly ashamed; one thinks of Rousseau, who did tell such stories about himself and who singles out their absence in the Essays. 25 We all have had several experiences that cause us great discomfort when we remember our conduct. Our extreme embarrassment is likely to seem excessive to our friends, if we ever get over it to the point of recounting our behavior; but that in no way diminishes the intensity of our feeling. When Rousseau relates the incident of the stolen ribbon, he is undoubtedly speaking of a memory that caused him excruciating pain, one that required great courage to confess. 26 When Montaigne writes that he rarely repents, 27 he perhaps gives the game away; his conscience did not blame him much and his memory tended to obliterate unhappy reminiscences. He confesses no sins, no perversity, no viciousness, at least no specific incidents involving any of these. He does admit again and again to having been foolish, but his book is so far from being foolish that we find it somewhat hard to believe. He devotes very little space to the analysis of sentiments; he is more concerned with his daily conduct and with his opinions than with his feelings. The effect of these omissions is to portray a cerebral personality. He heightens this quality by presenting himself as the moraliste, the man of judgment engaged in a serious conversation. Intimate disclosures subtly describing the nuances of introspection are not the subject matter of conversation, and hence have· no place in the Essays. This does not preclude certain rather exceptional passages, such as those concerning Etienne de La Boetie or his descriptions of anger, in which he demonstrates great finesse in depicting emotional states. The most accessible aspect of the portrait is the intellectual portrait. Most scholarly studies of the Essays treat some component or another of Montaigne's thought, that being the most remarkable and the most visible facet of his book. The chapters written before he discovered his vocation for self-portraiture treat principally of uncommon events, battles, sieges, ambassadorial missions, quirky tricks of fate. These topics all but disappear as the essayist shifts his

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focus and directs his attention to self-depiction. His "humors," as he calls them, are a subject somewhat harder to talk about, harder for him to a certain extent, and much more so for his critics, in part because his humors are idiosyncratic, in part because he tends to present them as opinions, in part because critics have not developed a fixed vocabulary for character portraiture. How much comment can one make concerning the fact that he likes melons, or that he scratches his ears? All men eat, all men drink, all men converse; so he discusses eating, drinking, and conversing. "Each one of my parts makes me myselfjust as much as every other one. " 28 Consequently he will write of all his parts, including his kidneys, or more delicately, his penis, the part being referred to here. Montaigne, and most of the rest of humanity, believes that the first criterion of a good portrait is that it makes a recognizable representation of its subject, a mimesis, reproducing in an artistic medium an acceptable copy of the original. In principle, the artist does not have the right to invent or distort. The challenge is to create the illusion of wholeness within the limitations of the chosen medium. For a self-portraitist this requires a certain amount of objectivity, which Montaigne claims to have. "I do not love myself so indiscriminately, nor am I so attached and wedded to myself, that I cannot distinguish and consider myself apart, as I do a neighbor or a tree. " 29 The trait that permits him to see himself without excessive self-admiration is his judgment, every bit as essential for the proper functioning of the portraitist as it is for the moraliste. "Judgment holds in me a magisterial seat, at least it carefully tries to. It lets my feelings go their way, both hatred and friendship, even the friendship I bear myself, without being changed and corrupted by them. If it cannot reform the other parts according to itself, at least it does not let itself be deformed to match them; it plays its game apart." 30 One of the guarantees that he presents for the validity of his portrait is his imperious need to communicate, to make himself known more than revered. I am hungry to make myself known, and I care not to how many, provided it be truly. Or to put it better, I am hungry for nothing, but I have a mortal fear of being taken to be other than I am by those who come to know my name.... Praise a hunchback for his handsome figure, and he is bound to take it as an insult. If you are a coward and people honor you as a valiant man, is it you they are

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talking about? . . . As for me, if someone praised me for being a good pilot, for being very modest, or for being very chaste, I would owe him no thanks. And similarly if someone called me traitor, robber, or drunkard, I would consider myself offended just as little. Those who have a false opinion of themselves can feed on false approbations; not I, who see myself and search myself to my very entrails, who know well what belongs to me. I am pleased to be less prized, provided I am better known. 31 "Hungry" hardly seems too strong a term for Montaigne's urge to make himself known. "Flattery will get you nowhere" says the popular expression which no one believes; indeed, we are likely to consider flattering statements about ourselves good judgment, and not likely to object vigorously if others hold us in high regard that exceeds on the side of generosity. Montaigne prizes his self so greatly that he repudiates unearned praise-or blame-because it is more important to be himself than to be particularly admirable and also because his sense of self is so robust that the opinion of others means little to it, provided the opinion is accurate. His example, being admired as a good pilot, is playful; but the thought is serious. His attitude bespeaks a man fully assured of his self, without apologies, without delusions (he says), without unfounded expectations about himself. "Whatever I make myself known to be, provided I make myself known such as I am, I am carrying out my plan.... Blame my project if you will, but not my procedure." 32 Pascal took Montaigne up on his suggestion and blamed his self-portraiture: 33 "That stupid project of his to portray himself." Voltaire's defense of the essayist-that in portraying himself, he also portrayed mankind-misses the point, for he does not exonerate Montaigne's intention to portray himself as much as he praises a by-product of the procedure. 34 The essayist welcomes criticisms from his friendsthough he does not always believe them-as one of the true functions of friendship. "I could stand to be rudely jarred by my friends: 'You're a fool, you're dreaming.' ... I take such great pleasure in being judged and known that it is virtually indifferent to me in which of the two forms I am so. " 35 He asserts that his frank confession has provided critics with sufficient ammunition to blame him. Twice he goes so far as to invite his readers to amplify the frailties he publishes, making trees of the roots of vices he has revealed. 36 "If people are to talk about me, I want it to be truly and justly. I would willingly come back

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from the other world to give the lie to any man who portrayed me other than I was, even if it were to honor me. " 37 He has not yet fulfilled his promise to come back, though I suspect some of his critics have slandered him. They cannot all be right, for they disagree totally on some matters. In principle he would like to present himself in his entirety, with no reservations, naked. But he makes concessions to the laws of decency, and to his own natural modesty, which he mentions less often. He had no intention of presenting a sexual autobiography any more than any other autobiography. Casanova-like confessions were unknown in his day. At the same time, in passing, he will disclose, piecemeal, a good deal of his intimate life with a frankness that may not satisfy all our curiosity, but which borders on indiscretion, even by today's standards. His formula is fairly accurate: "At all events, in these memoirs, if you look around, you will find that I have said everything or suggested everything. What I cannot express I point to with my finger: I leave nothing about me to be desired or guessed. " 38 In a marginal gloss on one page he admits to confiding to his book things that he would not tell anyone; but then on the following page, his original text states that he would make himself better known and more freely by word of mouth than on paper (in the second case he is speaking of matters that decency normally silences). His portrait is not a formal state affair, but shows him as naturally as possible, "standing and lying down, front and rear, on the right and the left, and in all my natural postures. " 39 His ideal, then, would be a book "without knowledge and without art." 40 His reality is far different, for his book is packed with knowledge, and his style displays consummate art, wittingly or not. He would have us believe that he could go on writing essays "without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world."41 I find it startling, and somewhat frightening, that he could think of Book Three as a creation that he tossed off without effort. Did he write rapidly, almost spontaneously? The apparently aimless structure of his chapters would tend to confirm such a hypothesis, as would the various indications that once he had composed a p,s&C!-ge he seldom suppressed it or rewrote it beyond a little tinkering. On the· other hand, the fidelity with which he followed his historical and philosophical sources, the number of citations in foreign languages would indicate that on some occasions he referred scrupulously to his books as he wrote. All in all, I am

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inclined to believe that the Essays were written with astonishing rapidity. The only passage in which Montaigne displays a certain awareness of how extraordinary his accomplishment was and how delicate his artistic procedure was occurs in the remarkable coda to "Of Practice" (II, 6), one of the two most significant texts concerning self-portraiture, the other being the introductory pages to "Of Repentance" {III, 2). "There is no description equal in difficulty, or certainly in usefulness, to the description of oneself. Even so one must spruce up, even so one must present oneself in an orderly arrangement, if one would go out in public. Now, I am constantly adorning myself, for I am constantly describing myself. " 42 The French form for "spruce up" means more or less to comb one's hair. What Montaigne seems to have in mind here, is that before sitting for a portrait, one decides what clothes to wear, combs one's hair, and in general presents one's best appearance, not a false one, but an appealing one, out of respect for oneself and for one's audience. He does not portray himself in pajamas; he dresses for company. His book is not mere chitchat, though it contains some of that; his conversation with his reader has the intensity of seriousness. One might say that it is not natural, but that it is heightened nature. One of the reasons self-portraiture is so exceedingly difficult may be simply that we have little practice. Certainly we seldom try to write out a portrait of ourselves. There is, however, one human situation which involves an exchange of information about the self, namely two people getting to know each other. "What do you do for a living?" "Do you have any brothers and sisters?" "Can you believe what the present Administration is doing?" "I have to have my coffee in the morning before I am decent company." Human beings meeting for the first time probe each other through a special kind of social badminton, sending questions (always discreet at first) and information back and forth. The range of matter covered is large, from the everyday and trivial to grander philosophical questions {if they are indeed grander), moving fairly rapidly from one level to another, from one topic to another, descending to anecdotes ("dirty stories" for some), rising to more serious questions about how to maintain decent human relations and to less personal matters, such as solving the problems of the world. Montaigne attempts to do somewhat the same thing in his Essays. Since he lacks all the supports of conversation, the food or drink shared, the silences, the tone of voice or movement of facial features, he must try to furnish

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their equivalents through a style resembling the random nature of conversation and of speech. Most of all, he has to do it all alone without an interlocutor to answer, to react, to ask questions, to disagree, to change topics, to add new dimensions, new perspectives. So he plays all of those roles himself, or creates imaginary partners. It would be wrong, I think, to regard the Essays as a dialogue between Montaigne and himself. Because of the presence of B and C strata indicators in modern texts, readers are easily tempted into such a reaction, hearing different voices from different eras interacting. Without such printer's signs, however, the effect disappears. Montaigne is conversing with his reader, not himself. An author who talks at length about himself without giving the impression that he is yielding to self-adulation, an author who talks at length about himself without creating the suspicion that he regards himself as superior to his reader, an author who talks at length about himself without arousing the feeling that he is posing, exaggerating, putting on an act in order to impress, or concealing certain Achilles' heels, such an author has achieved the trickiest and most delicate feat of establishing the tone of genuine, friendly communication. The tone he aspires to cannot come from a man dominated by an intense desire to please, an unfulfilled yearning to be liked or loved, or a need to establish any form of ascendancy over his reader-partner. It cannot be infused with the impulse for selfjustification or apologia. Rather, it should be based on a degree of self-sufficiency that establishes a certain independence from the reader, no need to court him, or to curry his favor. The attitude is "Here I am; take me or leave me; I can be no otherwise than I am. I won't be offended if you disagree, or stop reading, or call me a fool. But if your humors resemble mine, I will converse with you for a while, not too long, and we can put my opinions to the test together. For I feel happiest when sharing myself, my pleasures, my thoughts, my caprices." Maintaining such a tone consistently, seldom or never slipping into cant or self-aggrandizement, apparently came easily to Montaigne. It has escaped many authors since his time when they came to writing about themselves; I will forbear from the nasty exercise of naming names. The one tone that Montaigne failed to eliminate completely from his discourse, try as he might, was the authoritarian tone of the preceptor. His bluntness, his assurance, and the inescapable authority of the printed word make him appear to legislate.

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There are, of course, occasions when he does defend his project of talking about himself, being aware that it is contrary to customary politeness, being aware also that not to defend himself would be a sign of insufficient self-awareness. These occasions present severe problems of tone which he does not always solve satisfactorily, too apologetic a tone being his most frequent failure. We are not convinced by the handful of announcements that at least he can provide an example for others to avoid. "In fine, all this fricassee that I am scribbling here is nothing but a record of the essays of my life, which, for spiritual health, is exemplary enough if you take it as instruction in reverse." 43 Montaigne starts to fall into the same trap in another essay but succeeds in extricating himself by a series of familiar strategems. "My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.... The parts that I most esteem in myself derive more honor from selfaccusation than from self-commendation. That is why I fall back into the former and dwell on it more often. But when all is said and done, you never speak about yourself without loss. Your selfcondemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited. " 44 Self-depreciation rings false in most readers' ears, and Montaigne is more successful when he asserts modestly his right to speak of himself. As the favorable reception of his work increased his confidence in his project, he began to suggest mildly that the Essays might provide real instruction (or be "useful," following the Horatian term), usually with a disclaimer that at least they would do no harm, as people are hardly likely to follow their example. The best defense is, as ever, an offense. Although he is prone to "avoiding justifying, excusing, and interpreting myself, thinking that it is compromising my conscience to plead for it," 4545 the essayist confesses honestly in his marginal additions that if the truth were known, he cannot help condemning the practice of the majority of mankind, who would do well if they learned to speak and think of themselves as he does of himself. "If the world complains that I speak too much of myself, I complain that it does not even think of itself."46 Custom frowns upon speaking of oneself; saints, philosophers, theologians, and above all Socrates speak boldly of themselves, and rightly so, because they do not do so shallowly, without genuine self-examination. "I hold that a man should be cautious in

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making an estimate of himself, and equally conscientious in testifying about himself-whether he rates himself high or low makes no difference.... To be immoderately pleased with what you are, to fall therefore into an undiscerning self-love, is in my opinion the substance of this vice [presumption, or conceivably stupidity]. The supreme remedy to cure it is to do just the opposite of what those people prescribe who, by prohibiting talking about oneself, even more strongly prohibit thinking about oneself.... It seems to them that to be occupied with oneself means to be pleased with oneself, that to frequent and associate with oneself means to cherish oneself too much. That may be. But this excess arises only in those who touch themselves no more than superficially.... " 47 He criticizes Tacitus for lacking the courage to speak forthrightly about his term of office in Rome. "For not to dare to speak roundly of oneself shows some lack of heart. A stout and lofty judgment which judges sanely and surely uses its own examples on all occasions as well as those of others, and testifies frankly about itself as about a third party. We must pass over these common rules of civility in favor of truth and liberty."48 He is willing to dispense with the rules of politeness, not the rules of morality. This is no place to make a restatement of the self-portrait presented in the Essays. I am not so foolhardy as to compete with Montaigne, who knew better than anyone how to bring himself alive. A reader wishing to know what he was like should examine the Essays. I would, however, like to draw attention to some of the procedures and a few of the salient characteristics he most stresses. He encounters particularly tricky problems when he tries to proclaim to the world the virtues he finds in himself. It is bad enough to talk incessantly about oneself, but how talk about one's good qualities? First, he consistently denies that he has attained the solemn virtues of the philosophers of the past, specifically the Stoics. Cato flies in the moral stratosphere; Montaigne pictures himself "crawling in the slime of the earth,"49 looking up and admiring the achievements of such model men. On those occasions when he finds his conduct conforming to the canons of virtue, he seeks modest ways to account for it. Either he says it comes to him through the temperament given him by nature, in which case he calls it innocence, or he categorizes it as the inability to commit a vice. "My virtue is a virtue, or I should say an innocence, that is accidental and fortuitous. " 50

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Second, he attributes his virtues to a variety of causes, but not to strength of character. In "Of Cruelty" (II, 11), in which Montaigne declares that his own nature makes him hate cruelty, whether to animals in the form of hunting, or to humans in the form of torture. 5 1 More than that, whether from birth, the influence of his father, or his training at home, he cannot say, "but the fact is that of myself I hold most vices in horror ... from an attitude so natural and so much my own that the same instinct and impression that I brought away from my nurse I have still retained. Nothing has been able to make me alter it, not even my own reasonings, which, having in some things broken away from the common road, would easily give me license for actions which this natural inclination makes me hate. " 52 On rereading the words above, Montaigne felt compelled in 1588 to make a further reflection, one tending to transform his virtuous qualities simply into a quirk, since they appear to function independent of his beliefs. "It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in that area, in many things, more restraint and order in my morals than in my judgment [C: opinion], and my lust less depraved than my reason." 53 I find this an accurate self-assessment; Montaigne's mind was so open to any opinion, or any conduct, that he has shocked readers, or at least stimulated them, for four centuries. 54 But the more I read him, the less I find that could be considered shocking in his conduct, or what of it can be guessed from the Essays. Whatever libertinage he had seems to have been largely in his mind, and he was evidently somewhat dismayed when he realized it. Gracious conduct, or admirable feats, can be interpreted in many ways, from the most complimentary (I did that out of greatness of soul) to the least (I did that from purely selfish motives), with a variety of stations between the extremes, such as: I did that without thinking; I did that because it cost me little; I did that to gain the esteem of others; I did that for Oedipal reasons; I did that for mixed motives; I did that from laziness; I did that for no discernible reason at all. Of the multiple motives assignable to any action, Montaigne consistently chooses those that give him the least credit, usually mentioning more than one possibility among them. This is not necessarily an illegitimate or deceptive procedure; after all, from his point of view the truth has many sides which do not contradict each other, especially in this domain. For example, in the matter of veracity he is willing to attribute his inherent honesty to fortune,

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to nature, to temperament, to conviction, to ineptitude, to his self; but he refuses to attribute it to his education, to the authority of inspiring leaders, either religious or philosophical, or to self-mastery. "Thus I cannot give myself any great thanks because I find myself free from many vices: ... I owe it more to my fortune than to my reason. " 55 Third, he credits himself with the absence of vices rather than the presence of virtues, with inaction rather than bad actions, with laziness or indifference rather than zeal or ardor. Scattered over the pages of the Essays, one can find a startling number of vices that he describes as simply incompatible with his nature. (It is interesting to note that not a few of these correspond closely to the indirect self-portrait cited earlier. 56) He has never tasted vengeance, though he recognizes how it may seem sweet to others. 57 Despite the fact he is a Gascon, and therefore from a province reputed for thievery, he can hardly speak of envy, of covetousness. 58 He is acquainted with sexual jealousy only as he sees it in others, not from a deep personal experience. 59 He hates no one. 6° Fear cannot unseat his good sense. 61 No man has ever meddled less in the affairs of others (for example, he has never opened a letter committed to his trust). 62 No one has ever challenged him in matters of social precedence, but what he has yielded immediately. 63 He is so disinclined to excessive drinking that he can hardly persuade himself to sociable drinking. 64 He does not swear, unless he is in company that makes a habit of swearing, where, being impressionable, he may imitate the manners of his companions. 65 "The fact is that of myself I hate most vices. " 66 He cherishes formulas that state his qualities in negative rather than positive ways. Instead of saying he is considerate, he claims not to interfere with others, restricting his acts in consideration of their interests but extending his acts in consideration of his own. 67 As a mayor, he would be glad to let civil strife sleep so that he too may sleep. 68 On assuming the position, he addressed the Jurats of the city: "I deciphered myself to them faithfully and conscientiously, exactly such as I feel myself to be: without memory, without vigilance, without experience, and without vigor; also without avarice, and without violence." 69 It is often true that having disparaged his talents, Montaigne continues his account only to emerge in a highly favorable light, the hero of the tale, admirable in many ways. The passage about giving vent to cries of pain when suffering from stones displayed

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such a movement. The same sort of procedure is clearly spelled out in the continuation of his account of his mayoralty. People also say that my administration passed without a mark or a trace. That's a good one! They accuse me of inactivity in a time when almost everyone was convicted of doing too much .... I was prepared to work myself a bit more roughly if there had been any great need of it. For it is in my power to do something more than I do or than I like to do. I did not leave undone, as far as I know, any action that duty genuinely required ofme. I easily forgot those that ambition mixes up with duty and covers with its name .... Men of our time are so formed for agitation and ostentation that goodness, moderation, equability, constancy, and such quiet and obscure qualities are no longer felt .... Anyone who will not be grateful to me for the order, the gentle and mute tranquillity, that accompanied my administration, at least cannot deprive me of the share of it that belongs to me by right of my good fortune. And I am so made that I like as well to be lucky as wise, and to owe my successes purely to the grace of God as to the effect of my own action. . . . I did not satisfy myself ... in this undertaking, but I accomplished about what I had promised myself, and far surpassed what I had promised those whom I had to deal with. For I am apt to promise a little less than what I can do and what I hope to deliver. I am sure I left no cause for offense or hatred.7°

If we omit the credit he gives to God for his successes, we find in this passage a generous number of perfections; in fact, we end

up with a record that simply cannot be criticized. Montaigne excuses himself from the vices of other administrators; he is exempt from ambition and from ostentation. Without actually saying it was his doing, he claims for his administration goodness, moderation, equability, constancy, order, and tranquillity. Every genuine duty was accomplished without creating any offense or hatred. Though he promised little, he performed more, and was both ready and able to do even more had it been required of him. What else could one ask? His general assessment of his years in office as quiet ones is probably accurate for his first term, but less so for his second two years in service, characterized by various troubles during which it is difficult to believe that he never made an enemy or offended anyone. His ideals, in politics as in ethics, are order and tranquillity, modest ones when compared with those of his contemporaries; but he feels he has lived up to his ideals, indeed surpassed them.

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I find the same situation in his relation of how he conducted his love affairs. His report reveals him to be the ideal lover in a clandestine affair, always putting the interests of his mistress before his own. It is contrary to form, but still it is true that in my time I have handled this business, as far as the nature of it would permit, as conscientiously as any other business and with some air of justice; and that I swore to them [his paramours] only what I felt about my affection, and represented to them candidly its decadence, its vigor and its birth, its fits, and its lapses. One does not always go about it at the same pace. I have been so sparing in promising that I think I have carried out more than I promised or owed. They have found me faithful even to the point of serving their inconstancy-! mean an avowed and sometimes multiplied inconstancy. I have never broken with them as long as I held to them even by a bit of thread; and whatever occasions for it they have given me, I have never broken with them to the point of scorn or hatred. For such intimacies, even when acquired on the most shameful terms, still oblige me to some good will. Anger and somewhat heedless impatience I have sometimes shown them on the occasion of their ruses and evasions and our quarrels; for by my nature I am subject to sudden outbursts which, though slight and brief, often harm my affairs .... If I have left them with any reason to complain of me, it is rather for having found in me a love which, compared with modern usage, was stupidly conscientious. I have kept my word in things in which I might easily have been excused. In those days they sometimes surrendered with honor and on conditions that they readily suffered the conqueror to break. I have more than once, in the interest of their honor, made pleasure yield in its greatest stress; and when reason urged me, I have armed them against myself, so that they conducted themselves more safely and severely by my rules, when they freely relied on them, than they would have done by their own. 71

Fortunate women to have such a lover! The traits of this portrait reiterate what Montaigne says of himself in other domains; he masters his passions in the interests of his women (an allusion to coitus interruptus?); he is subject to bursts of anger; he does not dissimulate his feelings, portraying his mental state bluntly, he promises little, but then observes his word scrupulously, often performing beyond his commitments. His honesty is contrary to the manners of the times, he was willing to give advice according to his reason, not according to his interest.

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Montaigne is presumably referring to affairs (note the plural) of his youth, before marriage. But we have no idea about the station of the women involved, or any other details of the affairs-how long they lasted, whether money changed hands, and the like. What is clear is that the essayist conducted himself faultlessly, unlike the common run of men of the day. It is equally clear that the women conducted themselves much less well; in this short account, we find them guilty of a series of failings: they were unfaithful (more than once) and admitted it; they gave him grounds to break off the relationship, but he did not; the terms on which the intimacies were founded might be shameful (his money?); they imposed terms upon their surrender which they did not really keep to (unlike Montaigne, who always kept his word); their rules were more lax, in fact, than his, and they did well to follow his careful concern for their honor. I cannot persuade myself that Montaigne was so perfectly considerate in his treatment of his women. Human conduct in such relations is too complex to conform to this pattern; his own was perhaps distorted in his memory in part by the lapse of time, in part surely by self-satisfaction. Just how self-satisfied was Montaigne? A distrustful reader, with sufficiently jaundiced eyes, can locate self-satisfaction clearly expressed in essay after essay, usually accompanied or introduced by some self-depreciation, but often far outweighing that depreciation. Not only is it impossible to find Montaigne confessing any serious faults, but it is also not unusual to find compensating factors for the failings he does acknowledge. He deplores his defective memory with gusto, but then also states that a strong memory often accompanies a weak judgment, that his weak memory forgets offenses he has received, and prevents him from practicing deception. When he criticizes his inability to descend to trivial conversations with common people, he exalts at the same time the virtues of a serious conversation. The self-satisfaction is there in the essays for everyone to see, and it is part of Montaigne's honesty that it is there; it is part of his skill that it is partially camouflaged and rarely offensive. To see only it and to dismiss out of hand the self-depreciation seems to me a highly selective reading of the Essays. The multiplicity of perspectives that Montaigne takes upon himself guarantees to a certain extent their accuracy and sincerity. Montaigne had apparently heard the charge that his book presented a devious, misleading portrait of himself, falsified by his

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subtlety. "Those who commonly contradict what I profess, saying that what I call frankness, simplicity, and naturalness in my conduct is art and subtlety, and rather prudence than goodness, artifice than nature, good sense than good luck, do me more honor than they take away from me. But surely they make my subtlety too subtle. And if anyone follows and watches me closely, I will concede him the victory if he does not confess that there is no rule in their school that could reproduce this natural movement and maintain a picture of liberty and license so constant and inflexible on such tortuous and varied paths and that all their attentions and ingenuity could not bring them to it. " 72 Though the essayist is speaking here of his forthrightness in expressing his opinions in company, his comment applies equally well to the sincerity of his published portrait. It is too diverse, too apparently contradictory in detail to be the product of systematic deception or misrepresentation. A good liar says consistently the same thing; a sincere man may contradict himself wildly. The last, best argument Montaigne can produce to demonstrate that he is sincere must be an appeal to his reader to be sensitive to the guileless tone of all he writes. In 1580 Montaigne wrote "I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work. I am less a maker of books than of anything else. " 73 As time passed, however, his book became increasingly a part of his life; and although he continued to regard living as far more important than writing, writing became an integral part of his living, especially because he was writing about himself and about his living. So in later years in the margins of his personal copy he was able to make this striking statement: "I have no more made my book than my book has made me-a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand extraneous purpose, like all other books."74 Consubstantial with its authorclearly that is impossible if taken literally. A book cannot be a man; a man cannot be a book. The essayist uses the word "consubstantial" or its noun on four other occasions, all of which involve the intermingling of two elements (pleasure and pain, good and evil) in some inextricable manner, so that where the one is, the other is, almost to the point of identity. 75 Among other meanings, "consubstantiality" was used in his day to designate the Lutheran explanation of the miracle of the Eucharist, as opposed to the Catholic transubstantiation. I doubt that Montaigne had this recently for-

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mulated usage in mind, but the word, and its cognates, modeled on Latin, carried with it religious overtones of the miracle of the Trinity, in which the Father and the Son are of one being. For me one of the most exciting aspects of the Essays is the presence of a series of clues about how the book and the man interacted, illustrating in what sense it was true that the book did make the man as much as the man made the book. The interpenetration of the two is indicated in small ways, such as word patterns that speak of the book as if it were a person ("This is a book of good faith, reader"} or speak of the author when what is really meant is his words in his book. When he imagines critics blaming his chapter "On Some Verses of Virgil" (III, 5) because it treats licentious subject matter, he says he would counter by condemning his critics, whose minds think more coarsely than anything he has written in his book. "I conform well to their hearts, but I offend their eyes. " 76 The "I" is obviously the Essays. In the statement "People are all the time quoting me to myself without my knowing it," 77 "me" is clearly "my book" while "myself" must be the author of that book. Montaigne promises that if he can find a man to suit his humors, he will bring him "essays in flesh and bone." 78 How many authors refer to themselves as their works in the flesh? No passage illustrates better the difficulty of deciding whether "I" is a man or a book than the following late addition to one of the first chapters: "This also happens to me: that I do not find myself in the place where I look; and I find myself more by chance encounter than by searching my judgment. I will have tossed off some subtle remark as I write .... Later I have lost the point so thoroughly that I do not know what I meant; and sometimes a stranger has discovered it before I do. If I erased every passage where this happens to me, there would be nothing left of myself. At other times, chance will show me the light clearer than noonday and make me astonished at my hesitation. " 79 The first sentence, "I do not find myself in the place I look," makes a generalization about Montaigne that we cannot translate into a specific situation, for we lack the necessary context. More than that, the statement does not give rise in the reader's mind to a familiar experience-when do we look for ourselves and not find ourselves because we have looked in the wrong place? The second half of the sentence hardly improves matters; it states that chance, not judgment, leads to finding oneself. Then comes the first light

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of a possible context: Montaigne had written something subtle, and on rereading it he cannot find what he had had in mind. We start with a very general statement invoking great, abstract forces, such as chance, and then descend to the specific instance, which is insignificant at first sight. The generalization had ascended to heights quite distant from the little event, so distant that its application is far from obvious, sometimes even after we have understood the context. Montaigne specializes in writing at these two extremesthe concrete, appropriate for the portraitist, and the highly abstracted, fitting for the moraliste. It would have been easier to follow his train of thought if Montaigne had given the event of rereading his text first and then the general statement he drew from it. I suspect that that order is the one in which the thoughts came to him. Montaigne's recital continues with a second clarifying circumstance: sometimes a stranger has been able to see the meaning of the Essays better than their author. Then follows a statement typical of his system of self-study, where he makes from the single incident a general assessment of his own weakness, namely, that if he were to mark every passage where the original sense was lost to him, "there would be nothing left of myself." The assertion alienates the reader somewhat because of its exaggeration. We readers must discount this, for we understand most of what he says. But he is following his customary practice in his study of his self. One swallow, one sign of ignorance, makes a whole spring for him. Next, he reverses field and returns to his original generalization as he admits that there are other times when chance, not his native wit, will reveal the meaning that had eluded him; and he will wonder how he could ever have been puzzled. The experience in question illustrates a typical constellation of Montaigne's concerns; he is launched by a tiny occurrence, likely to escape most men's notice precisely because it is tiny, also because it testifies to an unexpected ineptitude on our part. From it he leaps to the very thin atmosphere of his abstraction: I do not find myself where I look for myself and do find myself more through good luck than judgment. Taken unattached to the incident of re-reading his book, this generalization could be deciphered to imply any number of things. Who would guess that the "myself" is in fact "the meaning of a sentence I wrote some years ago"? Only Montaigne's peculiar habit of speaking of his book as if it were himself would justify such a usage. In

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fact, amusingly enough, this passage is a perfect candidate to produce the very phenomenon it describes; it is vague enough that Montaigne might have reread it and not perceived what it was all about. But we must beware of reducing this entire passage, as I have been doing, to the simple experience of rereading oneself; for the larger conclusion that Montaigne is drawing deserves our attention as well: his self is elusive, variable, and a creature of chance as much as of judgment. His project of self-study must, accordingly, be endless, for the harder he looks, the harder it becomes to claim that he has found what he is seeking. Although the book's "principal end and perfection is to be precisely my own," 80 Montaigne realizes that the man and his work must differ in several ways, largely because the work, once printed, does not change, grow old, forget. This is especially true of the learned lore included on every page of the book. "It may know a good many things that I no longer know and hold from me what I have not retained and what, just like a stranger, I should have to borrow from it if I came to need it. If I am wiser than it, it is richer than 1."81 He admits here that his book may not be exactly as he would want it because it somewhat falsified his nature. Other than these two dissimilarities, that the book is more learned and less alive than its author, Montaigne finds no substantial differences between himself and his book. Other books, having as they do subjects foreign to their authors, may deserve praise for their utility without doing credit to their creators, or may be worthless, however estimable their authors. 82 "In this case we go hand in hand and at the same pace, my book and I. " 83 How did the writing of the Essays change their author's life? They brought him a friend, a benefit he admitted to hoping for; and he even made her his literary executrix. 84 They changed the experience of reading for him. When he began writing, he says, he was startled to find how easily he could support his opinions by citing the reasons and examples of ancient philosophers. 85 Having written his book, he cannot read another's without asking himself if it might contribute to his own. "What if I lend a slightly more attentive ear to books, since I have been lying in wait to pilfer something from them to adorn or support my own? I have not studied one bit to make a book; but I have studied a bit because I have made it.... " 86

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Our analysis of his account of the fall from his horse showed that it was the process of writing that made him aware of the full significance of his experience. Somewhat the same is true, he says, of the essay concerning his illness and his relations with the medical profession. In it he sets down all the arguments he can muster against the medicine of his day in order "to support a little and strengthen the natural aversion to drugs and to the practice of medicine which I have derived from my ancestors, so that it should not be merely a stupid and thoughtless inclination and should have a little more form. " 87 Without the writing down, his convictions would remain inclinations, shapeless, thoughtless. Writing essays allows him to know his own opinions better. Expanding his knowledge of his humors may have the effect of modifying them. A significant marginal addition to "Of Giving the Lie" (II, 18) furnishes the most extended and definitive treatment of consubstantiality. "In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones."88 It is the portrait (Montaigne also uses the image of a statue here), not simply self-study, that has allowed him to define himself better than he would have. Bacon says "Reading maketh a full man; conference [discussion] a readye man, and writing an exacte man. " 89 When the task of writing essays forced Montaigne to ask himself how he conducted himself in anger, what his ideals for domestic relations were, how his sexuality contributed to his make-up, he became more able to guage accurately who he was, what was habit and what was nature in him. "For those who go over themselves only in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faith, with all his strength. " 90 The obligation to put himself into writing, then, is a genuine commitment, more complex by far than the mental exercise of introspection, a task that becomes his study, his work of art, and the vocation of his life. "I listen to my reveries because I have to record them. " 91 Since he has "ordered"92 himself to publish himself, he is in effect living in the open, without the privilege of concealing any part of himself. "Whoever would oblige himself to tell all, would oblige himself not to do anything about which we

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are constrained to keep silent.... A man must see his vice and study it to tell about it." 93 Publication, which had seemed a whimsy at first, for which he had felt constrained to apologize, even clumsily, became in Montaigne's mind a duty, conceivably one of his first duties. "I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public. " 94 Finally, the composition of his portrait would have been worth his efforts even if no one read him, for it gave him very real pleasure. ,Ultimately, the portrait needs no defense, for Montaigne has found himself immeasurably enriched by it. It provided him with many enjoyable hours, filled with a pleasure entirely self-sufficient. It aided him to discover and confirm his convictions. It imposed some order upon his mind. It proved to be the most effective technique, perhaps the only genuine technique, for attaining knowledge of himself. It furnished a written model in clear colors that he felt obliged to live up to for fear of belying the qualities he had discovered and made known to the entire world. It reminded him that he should never do anything he would be unwilling to admit in print. It became the most significantly personal activity in his lifein fact, a way of life. His book raises the paean of the self, and suggests that becoming an essayist is the surest way to fulfill the potentiality innate in each self.

NOTES NOTES TO CHAPTER I

1. Facts from Montaigne's life, unless otherwise specified, are taken from Donald M. Frame, Montaigne: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965 (which I will refer to simply as "Frame biography"). Readers seeking details can find them through the extensive index. For a general bibliography on Montaigne with critical commentary, see the revised Sixteenth-century volume of the Cabeen Bibliography, A Critical Bibliography of French Literature, Richard A. Brooks, general editor, Volume II. Revised. The Sixteenth Century, ed. Raymond La Charite. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985, pp. 481-544. 2. See E. Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue franfaise du 16' si?~cle and Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, 1611. Also, Andreas Blinckenberg, "Quel sens Montaigne a-t-il voulu donner au mot Essais dans le titre de son oeuvre?" Bulletin de la Societe des Amis de Montaigne 3e Ser. 29 (1964), 22-32. This important journal will be referred to as BSAM. 3. Clement Marot, in his 1532 preface. See Clement Marot, Les Epitres, ed. C. A. Mayer. London: University of London, Athlone Press, n.d., p. 95. 4. For examples of essai in all the uses mentioned in the text, see: I, 14, F 40; OC 59; VS 59A; I, 25, F 103, 105; OC 139, 142; VS 140, 142A. II, 2, F 246; OC 324; VS 342A; II, 5, F 266; OC 348; VS 368A; II, 12, F 387, 405; OC 501, 523; VS 521, 541A; III, 7, F 701; OC 896; VS 918B; III, 12, F 807; OC 1031; VS 1054C; III, 13, F 826, 827; OC 1056, 1057; VS 1079, 1080B. References to texts of the Essays designate the book and the chapter (e.g., "1, 14" above) and then give page numbers for three editions: (1) The Complete Works of Montaigne. Essays, Travel journal, Letters. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford, Cal.: University of Stanford Press, 1957. (F 187 means page 187 of this edition), (2) Oeuvres completes. Eds. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat. Bibliotheque de la Pleiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1962 (OC 248); (3) Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne. Ed. Pierre Villey, re-edited by V.-L. Saulnier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965 (VS 254); surely the most helpful reader's edition in French of the Essais alone, with extremely rich apparatus and notes (most scholars use this for their page references). The final letter, in this case "A," in citations follows the now

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conventional notation to indicate the date of first publication: A = 1580 (or, rarely, 1582), B = 1588, and C = text of the Bordeaux manuscript as printed in modern editions. These strata of publication will be discussed in the chapter on the essay form. For the 1580 text, I have used the Essais de messire Michel seigneur de Montaigne ... , 2 vols. Bordeaux: Millanges, 1580. Reprint: Geneva: Slakine and Paris: Champion, 1976. With introduction and notes by Daniel Martin {referred to as "Martin"). Occasionally I will refer to the "Muni~ipal edition": Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, publies d'apres l'exemplaire de Bordeaux. Eds. Fortuant Strowski and Fran!rois Gebelin. Bordeaux: Pech, 1906-1919,3 vols. and its fourth volume {notes) by Pierre Villey, 1920. 5. I, 26, F 139; OC 173; VS 174A. 6. I, 56, F 234; OC 308; VS 323C. 7. I, "Au lecteur," F 2; OC 9; VS 3A. I have made several minor adjustments in the Frame translation, producing a literal rendition of the 1580 text, more suitable for purposes of textual explication. Since "Au lecteur" occupies only one page, there will be no need to provide pagination for future references. 8. See Pierre Bonnet, "La Source latine d'une citation de Montaigne," BSAM, 4< Ser., 19 {1969), 44. Bonnet counts all citations, not just those in Latin. In 1580 Montaigne's citations are verse only, with few exceptions. He began citing Latin prose regularly only in the C material on the margins of his copy of the Essays. 9. See Henri Peyre, Literature and Sincerity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963. p. 43. "Montaigne, like Gide, and many other males, soon became an aged coquette posing before multiple mirrors. He played at hide-and-seek with himself, but he never took the game quite seriously enough to be caught in it altogether." 10. I, 3, F 11; OC 22; VS 18-19B. 11. See Stanley Fish, Self-consuming Artifacts. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1973. 12. For a reading of "Au lecteur" that stresses its incongruities, see Lino Pertile, "L'esoridio di Montaigne," Rivista di Letterature moderne et comparate 25 {1972), 50-61. 13. II, 18, F 504; OC 647; VS 664A. The first sentence was dropped after 1580. 14. II, 18, F 503; OC 646-7; VS 664A. I follow the 1580 text. 15. G. Gourbin published his translation of Sebond in 1569. F. Morel published the La Boetie volume in 1571. 16. Two other Montaigne scholars have published books centering on the self-portrait: Richard Regosin, The Matter of My Book: Montaigne's Essays as the Book of the Self, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1977 and Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d'encre, Paris: Seuil,

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267

1980. Although we all three inevitably cite many of the same passages from the Essays, our interpretations do not repeat each other substantially. Both are more inclined to literary theory than I. While Regosin confines himself to Montaigne, Beajour writes a genuine theory of the self-portrait, from St. Augustine to the present. 17. See her delightful appreciation in The Common Reader, Harvest Books, New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, n.d., p. 59. The remark about King Rene is II, 17, F 496; OC 637; VS 653A. 18. I, 26, F 108; OC 147; VS 148A. 19. II, 37, F 596; OC 764-5; VS 784A. 20. II, 8, F 278; OC 364; VS 386A. 21. III, 2, F 610; OC 782; VS 804B. 22. III, 12, F 809; OC 1034; VS 1057B. 23. III, 5, F 677; OC 866; VS 887C. 24. See Rene Descartes, Discours de Ia methode, texte et commentaire par Etienne Gilson, Paris: Vrin, 1947, p. 55-7 and notes. 25. Woolf, op. cit., p. 60.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1. The principal works consulted in the preparation of this chapter are listed below, and will be referred to in future notes by the last name of the author. Benkard, Ernst. Das Selbstbildnis vom 15. bis zum Beginn des 18. ]ahrhunderts. Berlin: Heinrich Keller, 1926. Breckenridge, Hames D. Likeness: A Conceptual History of Ancient Portraiture. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968. (Excellent, both for the theory of portraiture and its history.) Brusseaux, Odile. Le Peintre et son miroir. Preface de Gerard Mourgues. Grenoble: Roissard, 1975. (Fine selection of reproductions.) Friedlander, Max J. Landscape, Portrait, Still Life: Their Origin and Development. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1949. (Many generalizations appear hard to substantiate.) Galleria degli Uffizi. Da pittore a pittore. (Catalog of paintings from the National Academy of Design collection of self-portraits arranged by United Technologies Corporation.) Cambridge, Eng., 1987. Gasser, Manuel. Self-Portraits from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Day. Tr. Angus Malcolm. New York: Appleton-Century, 1963. (Good documentation, some very doubtful interpretations.) Goldscheider, Ludwig. Five Hundred Self-Portraits from Antique Times to the Present Day in Sculpture, Painting, Drawing and Engraving. Tr. J. Byam Shaw. Vienna: Phaidon, 1937. (Dense, careful assessments.)

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Kellar, Harald. The Renaissance in Italy. Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. Tr. Robert E. Wolf. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969. Kinneir, Joan. The Artist by Himself. New York: StMartin's Press, 1980. Masciotta, Michelangelo. Autoritratti del quattrocento et del cinquecento. Sphaera I. Florence: Electa Editrice, 1949. National Academy of Design. Painters by painters. {Catalog of paintings from the Uffizi collection of self-portraits arranged by United Technologies Corporation.) Cambridge, Eng., 1988. Pope-Hennessey, John. The Portrait in the Renaissance. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1963. Bollingen SeriesXXXV, 12. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966. Rothschild, Ruth Deborah. A Study in the Problems of Self-Portraiture. The Self-Portraits of Paul Gauguin. Columbia University Fine Arts Doctoral Dissertation, 1961. · Saisselin, Remy G. Style, Truth and the Portrait. Cleveland Museum of Art, 1963. Smith, Alistair. Renaissance Portraits in the National Gallery. Number 5. London: National Gallery, 1973. Van Devanter, Ann C. and Alfred V. Frankenstein. American Self-Portraits 1670-1973. Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1974. {Rich collection with commentary on each portrait. Illustrates diversity of approaches to the self-portrait.) 2. III, 13, F 782; OC 691; VS 607B. 3. Quoted in Saisselin. 4. See Breckenridge, chap. I. 5. See, for example, Kellar on Mantegna in his discussion of perspective. 6. Montaigne uses this image himself: II, 6, F 846; OC 1028; VS 1102B. 7. See Saisselin, opening pages, and Breckenridge, p. 8. For a nineteenth-century treatment of the same problem in literature, see Maupassant's "Preface" to Pierre et Jean. 8. Quoted as epigraph in Dirk Van Der Cruysse, Le Portrait dans les Memoires du due de Saint-Simon {Paris: Nizet, 1971 ). 9. Rembrandt created almost 100 self-portraits, including nearly seventy paintings and thirty or so etchings or sketches. So significant a role do they play in his output that Jakob Rosenberg devotes his first chapter to them in his Rembrandt, Life and Works, rev. ed., Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. 10. See Scientific American 238 (Nov. 1975), 110-12. 11. See E. Sherman in the Preface to Saisselin. 12. Natural History, Book 35. Smith points out that the anecdote suggests the possibility that the first portraits presented profiles {the easiest form for depicting the human face).

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13. See Pope-Hennessey. 14. In a few remarks (discussed in Chapter VIII, pp. 146-47) Montaigne handles his self-portrait as if it were a private, domestic one created for his family and friends. Later comments tend to be put in the category of public portraits for all mankind. 15. See Breckenridge, passim. 16. See Breckenridge, chap. 2. 17. Breckenridge, p. 123. 18. P. 8, with commentary on pp. 7 and 11. Richard's emblems and clothing tell more of him than his face. 19. See Hartt. 20. See Pope-Hennessey. For a self-portrait, see Benkard. 21. See Goldscheider, Smith. 22. See Smith, p. 22. A mirror in the background contains shadowy sketches of the two figures seen from behind and in the distance (behind the vantage point of the spectator) two figures, presumably witnesses to the wedding. Tradition has identified the smaller of the two figures as a self-portrait. See Goldscheider, p. 19. 23. See Smith, p. 16. 24. Smith, p. 16. 25. See Benkard, Goldscheider, Masciotta, Pope-Hennessey, and Smith. The painting is sometimes considered a self-portrait. 26. See Pope-Hennessey for the development on the motions of the mind. 27. In Goldscheider. 28. See Goldscheider. 29. See Goldscheider. 30. For Andrea Orcagna and Niccolo Pisano: see Goldscheider. For Lorenzo Ghiberti: see Goldscheider, Hartt, Kellar, Masciotta, Pope-Hennessey. 31. For Roger Van de Weyde: see Goldscheider. For Dirk Bouts: see Gasser, Goldscheider. For Jan Gossaert: see Goldscheider. 32. For Giotto, see Pope-Hennessey; for Masaccio, see Gasser, Goldscheider, Hartt, and Masciotta; for Fra Filippo Lippi, see Benkard, Brusseaux, Goldscheider, and Hartt; for Ghirlandaio, see Goldscheider, and Hartt; for Pontormo, see Goldscheider; for Raphael, see Benkard, Brusseaux, Gasser, Masciotta, and Pope-Hennessey; for Signorelli, see Benkard, Goldscheider, Hartt, and Masciotta; for Perugino, see Goldscheider; for Veronese, see Brusseaux and Hartt; for Titian, see Benkard, Brusseaux, Gasser, Goldscheider, Hartt, Masciotta, and Pope-Hennessey. 33. II, 17, F 496; OC 385; VS 378B. 34. See Van Devanter and Frankenstein, pp. 15-17.

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35. See the introductions to Da pittore a pittore by John H. Dobkins, Russel Lynes, and Michael Quick. This catalogue concerns a show of 53 self-portraits taken from this collection. 36. For the convex mirror portrait see Benkard, Gasser, and Masciotta. Benkard and Masciotta also give a second, later self-portrait showing a very different, older bearded artist. 37. See Brusseaux, Gasser, Goldscheider, Masciotta, Pope-Hennessey. One of Michelangelo's final series of unfinished statues is frequently identified as a self-portrait, though not always the same one. 38. Quoted iii Brusseaux. 39. In Brusseaux. 40. The literature is quite skimpy on these questions, perhaps in part because self-portraits, stylistically speaking, do not differ from other works by an artist. Rothschild gives some good details on the use of mirrors and other techniques involved in self-portraiture. 41. See Rothschild for some examples in 19th-century France. 42. See Rothschild. For another fascinating example of mirror images, see Horace Pippin, in Van Devanter and Frankenstein. 43. The drawing is number 1519/2 in Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Engravings, Etchings and Drypoints of Albrecht Durer {New York: Dover Publications, 1972). Durer painted three major self-portraits, much discussed and endlessly reproduced. See Benkard, Brusseaux, Gasser, Goldscheider, K.inneir, Masciotta, Pope-Hennessey, and Rothschild. 44. Gasser, p. 14.

NOTES TO CHAPTER

3

1. Two exceptions: Michel Beaujour in his Miroirs d'encre, Paris: Seuil, 1980 and Anthony Wilden in his "Montaigne on the Paradoxes of Individualism: a Communication about Communication," in System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. London: Tavistock, 1972, p. 88-109. 2. Frederick Rider in The Dialectic of Sel.fhood in Montaigne, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973 follows generally the psychological views of Erik H. Erikson. Robert D. Cottrell discusses sexual language in the Essays {without any particular school of psychology in mind) in his Sexuality/Textuality: a Study of the Fabric ofMontaigne's Essais, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981. Lawrence D. Kritzman, in "My Body, My Text: Montaigne and the Rhetoric of Sexuality," in Michel de Montaigne's Essays, ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 81-95 writes from a basically Freudian point of view. Fausta Garavini, in "Le fantasme de la mort muette (a propos de I, 2 «De la tristesse» ),"

NOTES

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BSAM 7• Ser. 13-14-15-16 {1988-89), 127-138 speaks of the essayist's need to confront his neuroses by writing. 3. James Olney, in his anthology Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 8, draws attention to the crucial role of Georges Gusdorf's "Conditions et limites de l'autobiographie" and presents it in English translation, p. 29-48. The French text appeared originally in Formen der Selbstdarstellung: Analekten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbstportriits, ed. Gunther Reichenkron and E. Haase, Berlin, 1956, p. 105-23. The majority of this article is given in Philippe Lejeune's L'Autobiographie en France, Collection U2, Paris: Armand Colin, 1971, p. 217-36. Olney's anthology ends with a very valuable bibliography, briefly annotated. A much more informative critical bibliography on autobiography is the "Bibliographical Essay" in William C. Spengemann's The Forms of Autobiography, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, p. 170-245. 4. Olney mentions New Literary History, The Sewanee Review, Genre, MLN, and the Revue d'histoire litteraire de France, p. 7, to which can be added L'Esprit createur, 1980. 5. In A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, tr. E. W. Dickes, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951, I, 4. 6. On the adaptations of existing literary conventions, see Wayne Shumaker, English Autobiography. Its Emergence, Materials, and Form, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954, p. 101-213. Also Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, New York: Columbia University Press, 1969, p. 3. 7. Schumaker and Delany in works already cited above, Elizabeth W. Bruss in Autobiographical Acts, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 197 6; Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960; and Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris: Seuil, 1975. The last two have useful bibliographies. 8. Lejeune, Pacte, p. 14, my translation. 9. Geschichte der Autobiographie, Vierte Bande, Zweite Halfte, Frankfurt: Schulte-Blumke, 1969, p. 683, my translation. 10. In his Metaphors of Self. The Meaning of Autobiography, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972, p. vii. 11. In his The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 12. The Autobiography of Montaigne, Boston and New York: Houghton Miffiin Company, 1935. 13. From I, 14: F 43-6; OC 53-7; VS 62-6BC. 14. Op. cit., p. xviii. 15. P. XX. 16. For how Montaigne uses historical matter as exempla, not as history, see Geralde Nakam, Montaigne et son temps, Paris: Nizet, 1982, Conclusion.

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17. I, 21, F 76; OC 104-5; VS 106C. 18. Georges Gusdorf, "De l'autobiographie initiatique a l'autobiographie genre litteraire," Revue de l'Histoire Litteraire de la France 75 (1975), 971. 19. II, 37, F 574; OC 737; VS 758A. 20. III, 9, F 721; OC 922; VS 946B. 21. II, 6, F 274; OC 359; VS 379C. 22. I, 26, F 128-31; OC 172-7; VS 173-7ABC. 23. For superstition, see I, 27, F 133; OC 178; VS 178-9A; for studies, see III, 3, F 629; OC 807; VS 829C; for money, see I, 14, F 43-6; OC 63-6; VS 62-6BC. 24. III, 9, F 736; OC 941; VS 964C. 25. See Book IX of his Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen, Baltimore: Penguin, 1953, p. 379. 26. P. 169, end of Book IV. 27. See "The Rhetoric of Montaigne's Self-portrait: Speaker and Subject," Studies in Philology 73 (1976), 292-93. 28. English Autobiography, p. 34-35. 29. Ibid., p.40. 30. III, 8, F 718; OC 919; VS 940B. 31. III, 13, F 829; OC 1059; VS 1081B. 32. III, 10, F 771; OC 985; VS 1008B. 33. II, 2, F 246; OC 323; VS 341C. 34. See Alan M. Boase, "Montaigne annote par Florimond de Raemon" Revue du seizieme siecle 15 (1938}, 237-78. 35. II, 12, F 448; OC 577; VS 593C. 36. II, 2, F 247; OC 325; VS 343C. 37. II, 35, F 563; OC 723; VS 745B. 38. See Eva Marcu, "Les Dedicaces de Montaigne et 'l'Inconnue' de 'l'Apologie'" BSAM 3• Ser. 27 (1963}, 36-43. 39. III, 13, F 828; OC 1059; VS 1081B. 40. Rendall, op. cit., p. 286-89. 41. III, 2, F 610-1; OC 782; VS 805B. 42. II, 18, F 503; OC 646-47; VS 663-64A. 43. III, 12, F 809; OC 1034; VS 1057B. 44. Rendall, op. cit., p. 290. 45. P. 298. 46. The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1961, p. 228. NOTES TO CHAPTER

4

1. Pierre Villey, Les Sources et l'evolution des Essais de Michel de Montaigne 2 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1908, II, 27-36. (Rpt: New York: Burt Franklin,

NOTES

273

1968.) Andre Tournon analyzes sixteenth-century practice in the "le~;on," the compilation, and the paradox, Montaigne: Ia glose et l'essai, chaps. IIIV. 2. III, 9, F 762; OC 974; VS 995C. 3. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo, ed. with commentary by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books. New York: Random House, 1969, 217-69. 4. I, 9 F 23; OC 36-37; VS 36A. 5. Georges Hoffmann in "Les Additions de 1584-1588: l'ecriture seconde de Montaigne," BSAM 7< Ser. 13-14-15-16 {1988-89), 203-212, notes that Montaigne made use of the prominence of verses on the page in his 1588 additions, where they serve frequently to draw attention to turning points in his thought's development. 6. III, 9, F 761; OC 973; VS 994B. 7. III, 9, F 721; OC 923; VS 946B. 8. III, 2, F 611; OC 782; VS 805B. 9. II, 10, F 297; OC 388; VS 409A. 10. III, 5, F 668; OC 854; VS 875B. 11. II, 27, F 528; OC 677; VS 699B. 12. III, 9, F 761; OC 973; VS 994B. 13. I, 31, F 152; OC 203; VS 205A. 14. A sampling: On III,6: Jean Thomas, "Sur la composition d'un essai de Montaigne," Bibliotheque d'humanisme et Renaissance 5 {1938), 297-306; Robert Griffin, "Title, Structure and Theme ofMontaigne's 'Des coches'," MLN 77 {1967), 285-90; and Etiemble, "Sens et structure dans un essai de Montaigne," Cahiers de !'Association Internationale des etudes Jran,aises 14 (1962), 263-74. On III, 9: Grace Norton, in her Studies in Montaigne, New York: Macmillan, 1904. 15. Numbers 1-4, 7, 8, 10, 11. 16. III, 5, F 657; OC 841; VS 864B. 17. III, 5, F 664; OC 850; VS 873B. 18. III, 5, F 661; OC 846; VS 869B. 19. II, 19, F 509; OC 654; VS 671A. 20. For signs of careful organization in some major essays {1, 14, 20, even II, 17), see Edwin M. Duval, "Rhetorical Composition and 'Open Form' in Montaigne's Early Essays," Bibliotheque d'humanisme et Renaissance 43 {1981), 269-87. 21. III, 9, F 761; OC 973; VS 994B. 22. I, 28, F 135; OC 181; VS 183A. 23. II, 27, F 528-29; OC 678; VS 699A. 24. III, 9, F 721; OC 922-23; VS 946B. 25. Edwin Duval, in Revue d'Histoire litteraire de Ia France 88 {1988), 896-907, demonstrates admirably how careful Montaigne is as he develops

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MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

his theme in I, 1, and then how destructive the 1588 additions are as they disrupt the orderly exposition. He concludes that each edition of the Essais followed its own logic, and that the earlier chapters display tighter organization than is usually admitted. 26. See II, 4, F 262; OC 344; VS 364A. Also probably II, 32, F 546; OC 700; VS 722A. Also II, 22. 27. III, 7, F 701; OC 896; VS 918B. 28. II, 12, F 418; OC 540; VS 557A. 29. I, 26, F 109; OC 147; VS 148A. 30. II, 24 and 35; III, 7 and 9. 31. On whether he used his titles deceptively, see Patrick Henry, "Les titres fa~ades, la censure et l'ecriture defensive chez Montaigne," BSAM 5e Ser. 24 (1977), 11-28. 32. III, 11, F 791; OC 1011; VS 1033B. 33. II, 33, F 555; OC 711; VS 733A. 34. II, 11, F 318; OC 414-15; VS 435A. Marcel Tetel discusses these concluding sentences, finding in them Montaigne's self-deconstruction: "Les fins d'essais: mise en question ou debut du convaincre," BSAM 7e Ser., 1-2 (1985), 191-99. 35. II, 25, F 522; OC 669-70; VS 689-90A. 36. Marianne Meijer argues that in many cases there are subtle connecting links between apparently disjointed chapters. See her" 'Des pastes' et 'Des pouces': plaisanteries ou points de repere?" in Columbia Montaigne Conference Papers, eds. Donald M. Frame and Mary B. McKinley, Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1981, p. 105-18. Adopting his methodology, she goes further than Richard Sayee in "L'ordre des Essais de Montaigne," Bibliotheque d'humanisme et Renaissance 18 (1956), 7-22. 37. Daniel Martin in his introduction to the reprint of the 1580 Essais, p. 17-31, and elsewhere, finds a highly complex numerological structure in the Essays. His conclusions are very difficult for me to accept. 38. Available in Martin reprint. 39. Available in photographic reprint, ed. Marcel Fran~on, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1969. 40. See Etienne Lablenie, Essais sur les Essais, Paris: SEDES, 1967, chap. IV or BSAM 4e Ser. 13 (1968), 15. 41. Georges Hoffman counts exactly the 1580 additions in the margins of the Bordeaux copy, "Les additions de 1584-1588: l'ecriture seconde de Montaigne," BSAM 7e Ser. 13-14-15-16 (1988-89), 210. 42. III, 13, F 842; OC 1076; VS 1097C. 43. It is possible to examine the hand-written glosses in a modern edition: Essais. Reproduction en phototypie avec notes manuscrites marginales. Introd. by Strowski, Paris: Hachette, 1912. 1024 plates. 44. Municipal edition, I, 427-28.

NOTES

275

45. III, 9, F 736; OC 941; VS 963-64BC. 46. Hoffmann, loc. cit., p. 204, shows that 90-95% of Montaigne's additions confirm the positions of his first text. 47. I, 14, F 42-6; OC 61-68; VS 61-67A; II, 12, F 394-400; OC 509-17; VS 528-36A. 48. E.g., II, 20. 49. II, 14, F 462; OC 595; VS 611A. 50. III, 9, F 736; OC 941; VS 963-64BC. 51. The 1580 edition separates the first text from the addition by a line of asterisks, the only time in the Essays that I know of where appended material is distinguished on the page from original material. 52. III, 12, F 796; OC 1017; VS 1041B. 53. Tournon (Montaigne: Ia glose et l'essai, 274-79) argues that the chapter was already completed and that Montaigne inserted his material in its middle. Why not simply start a new chapter, if the first had been finished? 54. Lablenie, BSAM, 4• Ser. 1 (1968), 15-23. 55. In "Of Vanity" (III, 9), out of 110 additions, 23 are verse citations, and 40 recall recent reading. 56. See Andre Tournon, Montaigne, le glose et l'essai, Lyons: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1983, Appendix I 57. Some examples: "Caesar in" I, 20, F 63; OC 89; VS 91C once intended for III, 13, F 846; OC 1081; VS 1102; "Life is neither" I, 20, F 65; OC 91; VS 93C once intended for III, 13, F 853; OC 1092; VS 1111; "Evil is in its turn" II, 12, F 364; OC 473; VS 493 once intended for III, 7, F 702; OC 898; VS 912. 58. II, 17, F 501; OC 644; VS 660. 59. In the phototypie see plates 312 (II, 6); 950 {III, 12); 925 {III, 10) with three short additions. 60. Plate 916 (III, 10, F 769; OC 983: VS 1006) where a,b,c was rewritten as a,c,b. Also plate 361 (II, 11 F 312; OC 407; VS 428). 61. Plate 361 (II, 10 F 296-97; OC 387-88; VS 408) and plate 961 (III, 12 F 808-809; OC 1033-34; VS 1056-57) and plates 109-110 (I, 26 F 108; OC 146-47; VS 147-48). 62. For a nightmarishly difficult page, see plates 73-74 (I, 21, F 703; oc 98-101; vs 101-103). 63. III, 9, F 736; OC 941; VS 964C. 64. For an example of such a juxtaposition, see "Of Solitude" I, 39, F 178; OC 236-37; VS 242A and C. Two paragraphs (beginning "We have lived ... "and "It is time ... ")present rather different perspectives, though the difference may not be noticeable at first. 65. First Strowksi's edition municipale, then several by Villey, especially his 3-volume Paris: Alcan, 1930-31 edition. In the interests of readability, Villey adopted a somewhat unusual policy concerning spelling. L' Angelier,

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MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

the Paris publisher of the posthumous edition in 1595, determined how words would be spelled. His choices, far from consistent (one sentence may contain the same word spelled in two or more different ways), departed widely from Montaigne's rather personal orthography in the marginalia. To avoid an upsetting contrast between the two systems, Villey elected to follow Montaigne's words and L' Anglelier's spelling! Both OC and VS reproduce his text. 66. II, 12, F 391; OC 506; VS 525. 67. By Arthur H. Beattie, In Defense of Raymond Sebond, New York: F. Ungar, 1959 and by Paul Porteau, L'Apologie de Raymond Sebond, Paris: F. Aubier, 1937.

NOTES TO CHAPTER

5

1. "In the year": F ix-x; OC xvi; VS xxi. For the Latin, see Montaigne's Essays and Selected Wrtings, a Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. Donald M. Frame, New York: StMartin's, 1963, p. 469. 2. III, 12, F 802; OC 1025; VS 1048B. 3. II, 17, F 488; OC 627; VS 643-4A. 4. III, 5, F 667; OC 853; VS 875B. 5. II, 37, F 574; OC 736; VS 758A. 6. III, 3, F 629; OC 807; VS 828C. 7. III, 12, F 808; OC 1033; VS 1056B. 8. II, 17, F 493; OC 634; VS 650A. 9. III, 8, F 718; OC 919; VS 940B. 10. III, 3, F 629; OC 806-7; VS 828BC. 11. I, 56, F 229, 232; OC 303, 303; VS 318, 320A; II, 16, F 46; OC 603; VS 620A; F 1051; OC 1354. The Municipal edition glossary considers that the last form means "to compose." 12. Maturin Dreano and Pierre Michel, in BSAM 4< Ser. 27 (1971), 73-74. 13. See Municipal edition, I, 425. 14. II, 9, F 295n; OC 386; VS 405nA. OC omits the 1580 text crossed out by Montaigne. 15. II, 37, F 574; OC 737; VS 758A. 16. I, 40, F 186; OC 247; VS 253B. 17. III, 9, F 737; OC 942; VS 965B. 18. I, 2-21, 2, 27, 32-48; II, 1. 19. II, 2-6. 20. II, 12, 14, 15. 21. I, 1, 29, 31; II, 7-11, 16-36. 22. I, 26 and II, 37.

NOTES

277

23. In his "Montaigne's Early Personal Essays," Romantic Review 62 {1971), 5-15. 24. I, 17, F 49-51; OC 71-73; VS 72-74A. 25. I, 9, F 20; OC 34 and note; VS 34 and note. The English has been modified to fit the 1580 text. 26. III, 5, F 667; OC 853; VS 875B. 27. Here and in future citations I have modified the practice of the Frame translation with respect to the Latin citations in the Essays. Montaigne's text is sprinkled with phrases in Latin (and, rarely, other foreign languages) without identification of their authors. Montaigne's presumably felt that his readers would have no need for translations and that to identify the author would be superfluous. {Sometimes, as with Plautus here, his text names the Latin writer; usually it does not.) I find Frame's choice of English for the texts eminently sensible, for Montaigne would not have wanted his reader to be forced to seek out footnotes in order to understand his prose. I prefer to leave out the author's name, simply because Montaigne himself did. 28. This is implied in a B addition to his physical self-portrait, II, 17, F 486; OC 624; VS 641, analyzed on page 129 in the chapter ''Modest Me." 29. I, 55, F 228-29; OC 300-302; VS 314-16. 30. II, 37, F 574; OC 736; VS 758B. 31. I, 8, F 20-12; OC 33-4;3 VS 32-33A. The first verse citation comes from Horace; the second, from Lucan. A few minor comments: 1580 gives "vanam for "variam" in the Lucan verse. Montaigne corrected this misprint immediately in 1582, and I have made the correction as it surely represents his original intention. Beyond two Latin verse citations, Montaigne saw no reason to add to this text, as in fact it referred in most part to a state of mind long since extinct. I have made minor adjustments in the first clause of the translation to bring it into more literal conformity with the French text. 32. See Municipal edition, IV, 17. 33. II, 10, F 300; OC 392; VS 413A. 34. II, 12, OC 489n; VS 509nA. This 1580 text was modified in the final version. The earlier variant is not given in Frame. 35. II, 32, F 546; OC 700; VS 722A. 36. II, 12, F 417; OC 538; VS 556A. 37. III, 9, F 761; OC 973; VS 994C. 38. See The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, tr. and ed. by Jacob Zeitlin, 3 vols. {1934-36), I, 367-68. The notes and comments on individual essays in this edition are remarkably rich. 39. For accounts, see Frame biography and Maurice Riveline, Montaigne et l'amitie, Paris: Alcan, 1939.

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MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

40. F 1046-56; OC 1347-60. See W. Floyd Gray, "Montaigne's Friends," French Studies 15 {1961), 203-12 and Roger Trinquet, "Laveritable source du premier ecrit de Montaigne," BSAM 4< Ser. 20 {1970), 11-19. 41. I, 28, F 138; OC 185; VS 187A. Since Freud, it has been impossible for many to read "On Friendship" without wondering about possible homosexual elements in this love-friendship. Whatever they may have been, they could have existed only in Montaigne's subconscious, for his conscious thought is robustly heterosexual with a hearty dose of male chauvinism. I personally do not believe there can be much profit in speculations along this line, and therefore bury the topic in a footnote, and ask myself if it was worth raising at all. 42. "common": I, 28, F 140, 141, 143; OC 188, 190, 191; VS 190, 191, 192A; "perfect": I, 28, F 136 {his), 137, 141; OC 182, 183, 184, 190; VS 184, 185, 186, 191A; "mystery": I, 28, F 140; OC 188; VS 189A; "divine": I, 28, F 141; OC 189; VS 190A; "sacred": I, 28 F 138; OC 185; VS 186A; "inconceivable": I, 28; F 142; OC 191; VS 192A. 43. I, 28, F 143; OC 191; VS 192A. 44. Ibid. 45. I, 28, F 143; OC 192; VS 193A. The verses are Virgil's. 46. He refers to himself as "expert" in III, 9, F 746; OC 954; VS 977B. In I, 9, F 22: OC 35; VS 34B, he writes "I who know how to do nothing so well as be a friend .... " 47. I, 28, F 139; OC 186-87; VS 188-89A. Modified to conform to the 1580 text. 48. III, 3, F 623; OC 798; VS 820-lB. 49. I, 28, F 135; OC 181-82; VS 183-84A. 50. Michel Butor, Essais sur les Essais, Paris: Gallimard, 1968. Patrick Henry, Montaigne in Dialogue, Stanford French and Italian Studies LVII, Saratoga, Cal.: AMNA Libri, 1987. "Return to the Tomb of La Boetie," 73-100. 51. I, 40, F 185-86; OC 246; VS 252C. 52. III, 9, F 750; OC 959; VS 981B. 53. III, 9, F 752; OC 961; VS 983B. OC has emporte by error. For an analysis of the motivations leading to the self-portrait, see Donald M. Frame, "Specific Motivation for Montaigne's Self-portrait," in Columbia Montaigne Conference Papers, eds. Donald M. Frame and Mary B. McKinley. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1981, p. 60-69. 54. See Villey in one of the following: Municipal edition IV, 195; Sources I, 359; or VS 370. 55. Much of this material has been published in my article "Montaigne Tries Out Self-study," L'Esprit createur 20 {1980), 23-35. 56. F 1056-57; OC 1353.

NOTES

279

57. I, 20, F 60; OC 85; VS 86A. 58. I, 20, F 58; OC 83; VS 85A. 59. I, 20, F 64; OC 90; VS 91A. 60. II, 16, F 468; OC 602; VS 619A. 61. A marginal note, cited in Zeitlin's edition of the Essays, I, 322. 62. In "De I, 20 («Que philosopher c'est apprendre a mourir») a III:12 («De La phisionomie»): Ecriture et «essai» chez Montaigne," BSAM 7< Ser., 13-14-15-16 (1988-89}, 93-118, Gerard Defaux gives close consideration to I, 29 and the later reversal in Montaigne's attitude. Defaux is not convinced that Montaigne was genuinely committed to Stoicism, and finds much of 1,20 a rhetorical exercise (an essai of foreign ideas). 63. III, 9, F 748; OC 956; VS 978-79B. 64. III, 12, F 804; OC 1028; VS 1051B. 65. II, 6, F 267; OC 350; VS 371A. 66. II, 6, F 268; OC 352; VS 372-73A. 67. II, 6, F 268-69; OC 352-53; VS 373A. 68. II, 6, F 272; OC 357; VS 377A. 69. Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, New York: Viking Press, 1979, p. 105. 70. II, 6, F 271; OC 355; VS 375A. 71. II, 6, F 271; OC 356; VS 376A. 72. II, 6, F 271-72; OC 356; VS 376A. 73. II, 6, F 269; OC 353; VS 373-74A. 74. II, 6, F 272; OC 357; VS 377A. 75. II, 6, F 268; OC 351; VS 371A. 76. II, 6, F 270; OC 354; VS 374A. After 1582 the word "certainly" is omitted. 77. II, 6, F 271; OC 355; VS 375A. 78. II, 6, F 272; OC 357; VS 377A. 79. II, 6, F 272; OC 357; VS 377A. 80. II, 6, F 271-72; OC 356; VS 376A. 81. II, 6, F 269-;-70; OC 354; VS 374A. 1580 text. 82. II, 6, F 271; OC 355; VS 375A. 83. II, 6, F 268; OC 351; VS 372A. This passage is the only one I know of in the Essays which can be cited as possible evidence that Montaigne did not believe in the afterlife inasmuch as he says that sleep represents our eternal state after death. 84. II, 6, F 270; OC 354; VS 374A. 85. II, 6, F 272; OC 357; VS 377A.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER

6

1. "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic" in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher. Riverside Editions A13. Boston: Houghton, Miflin, 1960, pp. 284-301. 2. On classical skepticism, see R. G. Bury's Introduction to Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press and London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1967. I, vii-xlv. Or my Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Skepticism, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966, pp. 4-17. 3. See my Montaigne and Bayle, p. 88. 4. II, 12, F 374; OC 485; VS 505A. 5. On how the "Apology" was composed, see: Jacob Zeitlin's edition of the Essays, II, 494-519; Donald M. Frame, "Did Montaigne Betray Sebond?" Romanic Review 8 (1947), 297-329; and Craig B. Brush, op. cit., pp. 74-76. 6. I, 26, F 117; OC 158; VS 158A. 7. II, 12, F 400; OC 517-18; VS 536C. 8. II, 12, F 371; OC 482; VS 502A. 9. II, 12, F 372; OC 483; VS 503A. 10. II, 12, F 444; OC 572; VS 587-88A. 11. II, 12, F 445-46; OC 574-75; VS 590A. May I add that Diderot assumed the role of the "intelligent man" suggested by Montaigne when he wrote his "Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See." 12. II, 12, F 403-5, 454; OC 522-23, 585; VS 540-41, 600-601A. 13. II, 12, F 403-4; OC 521-22; VS 540A. 14. II, 12, F 430; OC 555; VS 571A. 15. II, 12, F 405-9; OC 524-29; VS 542-46AC. 16. II, 12, F 381-83; OC 495-96; VS 514-16. 17. II, 12, F 395; OC 511; VS 530C. 18. II, 12, F 406-7; OC 525; VS 543A. 19. III, 12, F 704; OC 901; VS 923B. 20. II, 12, F 408; OC 527-28; VS 545-46ABC. 21. I, 23, F 79; OC 10; VS 111B. 22. III, 11, F 785; OC 1004; VS 1027B. 23. II, 12, F 430; OC 555; VS 571A. This passage apparently was written in the final composition of the "Apology," therefore two or three years after reading Sextus Empiricus. 24. II, 12, F 393; OC 509; VS 527A. 25. II, 12, F 393; OC 508; VS 527B. 26. "We must", "we must not," I, 39, F 177; OC 235; VS 241A; "the worst condition," II, 2, F 245; OC 322; VS 340C; "away with," I, 26, F 122; OC 165; VS 165A.

NOTES

281

27. II, 12, F 438; OC 565-66; VS 581AB. 28. III, 11, F 972; OC 1012; VS 1034B. 29. II, 12, F 403; OC 520-21; VS 539A. 30. I, 23, F 80; OC 110; VS 112C. 31. III, 11, F 785; OC 1004; VS 1026B. 32. II, 12, F 389; OC 504; VS 523A. 33. II, 12, F 425; OC 548; VS 565A. 34. II, 12, F 419-20; OC 541; VS 559A. 35. II, 17, F 496; OC 638; VS 654C. 36. III, 37, F 575; OC 738; VS 760B. 37. II, 12, F 358; OC 465; VS 486A. 38. II, 12, F 336; OC 437; VS 460A. 39. III, 9, F 762; OC 974-75; VS 996C. 40. III, 11, F 791; OC 1011; VS 1033B. 41. II, 17, F 494; OC 635; VS 651A. 42. III, 11, F 785; OC 1004; VS 1027B. 43. III, 11, F 786; OC 1005; VS 1028B. 44. II, 12, F 426; OC 549-50; VS 566B. OC by error omits "mon before premier. 45. II, 12, F 423; OC 546; VS 563A. 46. Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres completes, ed. L. Lafuma. Paris: Seuil, 1963, p. 505, fragment 44-82. 47. III, 13, F 817; OC 1045; VS 1068B. 48. II, 12, F 405; OC 523; VS 541-42A. OC misprints est for et. 49. III, 13, F 819; OC 1047; VS 1070B. 50. III, 13, F 834; OC 1067; VS 1088B. 51. On nominalism, see Jean Largeault, Enquete sur le nominalisme. Paris and Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1971. 52. Antoine Compagnon, in Nous Michel de Montaigne, Paris: Seuil, 1980, argues that Montaigne has a technical acquaintance with nominalism. 53. III, 9, F 726; OC 929; VS 951C. 54. Table Talk I, 10. Text given in Municipal edition IV, 242. 55. II, 12, F 378; OC 491; VS 511C. F and OC accept a reading with the word "willfully" [volontiers], which VS and the Municipal Edition omit. The word appears in Montaigne's handwriting, but in a sentence he rewrote several times. 56. II, 12, F 430; OC 554; VS 571A. 57. II, 12, F 387; OC 501; VS 520A. 58. See, for example, II, 12, F 429; OC 553; VS 570A. 59. III, 13, F 817-18; OC 1045; VS 1068C. 60. III, 13, F 819; OC 1047; VS 1070B. 61. Herman Jansen, Montaigne fideiste, Nijmegen, Dekka and van de Wegt, Utrecht: van Leeuwen, 1930. See also index of my Montaigne and

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MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

Bayle and Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, Berkely, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1979. 62. I, 23, F 80-82; OC 110-13; VS 112-14ABC. 63. II, 17, F 498; OC 639; VS 656A. 64. III, 13, F 814-17, 819-20; OC 1042-44, 1047-48; VS 1065-67, 1070-71BC. 65. II, 17, F 497; OC 638-39; VS 655C. 66. II, 8, F 279; OC 366; VS 387 A. 67. I, 26, F 114; OC 154; VS 155AC. 68. III, 8, F 714; OC 913; VS 935B. 69. III, 1, F 603; OC 772; VS 794B.

NOTES TO CHAPTER

7

1. II, 6, F 273; OC 358; VS 377-78C. 2. II, 8, F 291; OC 383; VS 401A. 3. III, 5, F 643; OC 824; VS 846-47B. 4. See Richard Regosin, "Nemo's Descent: The Rhetoric of Presence in Montaigne's Essais," French Forum 13 (1988), 153-66. This article proposes a fairly radical deconstruction of the whole process of self-portraiture. Regosin lists the presuppositions behind the process: (1) an integral consciousness prior to the writing, (2) a transparent medium to write in, and (3) the primacy of the voice over writing. As my text makes clear, I doubt Montaigne is guilty of holding assumptions (1) and (2) in an unthinking way, and that he saw many dimensions in (3). Regosin appears to me to misstate Montaigne's position: "And the truth of the self is that the self has no truth, the substance of the self is that it is nothing; only as a no one, a nothing, can Montaigne attempt to descend into himself, to descend into nothing and to experience himself as nothing" (p. 160). 5. II, 6, F 274; OC 359; VS 379C. 6. II, 16, F 468; OC 601; VS 618A. 7. II, 12, F 386-87, 442; OC 501, 569; VS 520, 585A. 8. III, 13, F 818; OC 1045-46; VS 1069BC. 9. I, 10, F 27; OC 42; VS 40C. 10. See I, 26, F 115; OC 155-56; VS 156-57ABC. 11. III, 13, F 834; OC 1066; VS 1088B. 12. III, 5, F 665; OC 850-51; VS 873BC. 13. I, 26, F 127; OC 171; VS 171A. 14. In an excellent article published after this chapter was written, "Rhetorique de representation dans les Essais: de la peinture de l'autre a la peinture du moi," BSAM 7< Ser., 1-2 (1985), 21-48, Gerard Defaux

NOTES

283

lists the obstacles Montaigne faced, as well as the essayist's jubilant claim to have overcome them. "His practice constantly refutes his theory." Defaux's many-sided vision is summarized as follows: "An instrument for philosophic inquiry, a means to know and to master himself, a portrait, a mirror, a body, a friend, a child, the act of writing is Montaigne's Other and his All" {my translations). Many of his views correspond to those expressed less eloquently throughout this book. 15. II, 17, F 484; OC 622; VS 639AC. Also III, 2, F 615; OC 788; VS 810B. 16. III, 2, ibid. 17. III, 5, F 666; OC 852; VS 874B. 18. III, 2, ibid. 19. III, 9, F 751; OC 961; VS 982B. Also II, 2, F 320; OC 416; VS 440C. 20. III, 9, ibid. 21. II, 17, F 484; OC 622; VS 639A. Sentence later removed. 22. II, 17, F 484; OC 622; VS 639A. 23. Quoted in VS 1207-8. 24. III, 5, F 665; OC 851-52; VS 873-74BC. 25. II, 17, F 484; OC 622; VS 638A. 26. III, 1, F 599; OC 767; VS 790B. 27. In his Mimesis. Doubleday Anchor Books. New York: Doubleday, 1957, p. 254. Cited by Barry Lydgate in his excellent article "Mortgaging One's Work to the World: Publication and Structure of Montaigne's Essays," PMLA 96 {1981), 210-23. 28. Most notably Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's monumental The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 2 vols. Also Lydgate, op. cit. 29. See Defaux, loc. cit., p. 31-32 on the sixteenth-century concept of "presence" in literature. 30. III, 9, F 750; OC 974; VS 995C. 31. III, 5, F 644; OC 825; VS 847B. 32. III, 13, F 828; OC 1059; VS 1081CB. 33. III, 13, F 851; OC 1088; VS 1108B. 34. III, 13, F 858; OC 1091; VS 1110B. 35. II, 2, F 245; OC 322; VS 340C. 36. II, 12, F 350; OC 454; VS 476A. 37. II, 12, F 360; OC 467; VS 488A. 38. III, 10, F 769-70; OC 984; VS 1007CB. 39. II, 17, F 496; OC 637; VS 653A. I have translated the 1580 and 1582 text, not the canonical text in all modern editions. The loss, perhaps accidental, of a single letter changed the opening phrase to "I am not obliged not to .... "

284

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

40. III, 1, F 599; OC 767; VS 790B. 41. II, 1, F 239; OC 315; VS 332A. 42. III, 13, F 825; OC 1054; VS 1077C. 43. III, 13, F 817; OC 1044; VS 1067B. 44. II, 20, F 511; OC 656; VS 675B. 45. II, 20, F 510; OC 656; VS 674B. 46. I, 38, F 172-73; OC 229-30; VS 234-35AB. The verse is from Publius Syrus. 47. II, 1, F 242; OC 319; VS 336A. 48. I, 37, F 170; OC 226; VS 230AC. 49. Ibid., B. 50. II, 20, F 511; OC 656; VS 674B. 51. II, 1, F 240; OC 316-17; VS 333AC. 52. II, 1, F 242; OC 318-19; VS 335A. 53. III, 13, F 846; OC 1082; VS 1102-3B. 54. II, 12, F 425; OC 549; VS 566A. 55. II, 1, F 242; OC 319; VS 335C. (Distinguo: Georges Hoffmann points out that in fact Montaigne's additions seldom perform the function of establishing a distinguo, "Les additions de 1584-1588: l'ecriture seconde de Montaigne," BSAM 7• Ser. 13-14-15-16 (1988-89), 203. Montaigne seems J;o prefer to proceed by example and counter-example.) 56. II, 1, F 244; OC 321; VS 337A.

NOTES TO CHAPTER

8

1. One might wish to add I, 50; II, 11; and parts of I, 28 and II, 12. 2. For a very precise analysis of such notes, see Francis Goyet, "A propos de «Ces pastissages de lieux communs». (Le role des notes de lecture dans la genese des Essais)," BSAM 7• Ser. 5-6 (1986), 7-8 (1987), 9-30, especially the second part. In brief, Montaigne sometimes referred to his notes when writing, but was not dominated by them. 3. II, 18, F 503; OC 647; VS 664C. 4. I, 50, F 219; OC 289; VS 301A. 5. I, 50, F 219; OC 289; VS 301A. 6. I, 50, F 219; OC 289; VS 301-2A. 7. I, 50, F 219 revised. This text was much rewritten. The original French forms are given in notes to OC 289, and VS 302, as well as in Martin I, 460-61. 8. I, 50, F 219; OC 289-90; VS 302AC. 9. I, 26, F 108; OC 147; VS 148A. 10. II, 8, F 278; OC 364; VS 385A. 11. III, 12, F 799; OC 1021; VS 1044C.

NOTES

285

12. See Jules Brody, "Montaigne «se debine»: lecture philologique de l'essai «Du dementir» (II, 18)," BSAM 7< Ser. 13-14-15-16 {198889), 141-59. 13. See J. J. Supple, "Montaigne's De la gloire: Structure and Method," French Studies 27 {1973), 385-94. 14. II, 16, F 475; OC 610; VS 626-27A. 15. I, 46, F 204; OC 270; VS 280A. 16. See Willard V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, New York: Random House, 1966, also in Scientific American 206 {1962). And Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, New York: Random House, 1980, references in index. Also by the same author, Scientific American 244 {1981), 22-32 and 246 {1982), 16-28. The second article includes a hilarious story by David Moser composed of 97 self-referential sentences or sentence fragments. I cannot understand what Anthony Wilden writes in "Montaigne on Paradoxes of Individualism: a Communication about Communication," in his System and Structure, London: Tavistock, 1972, pp. 88109. 17. "Metamagical Themas," Scientific American 244 Oan. 1981), 2232. 18. II, 12, F 392; OC 508; VS 527B. 19. II, 14, F 462-63; OC 595; VS 611A. 20. II, 17, F 479; OC 615; VS 632A. 21. II, 17, F 478; OC 614; VS 631A. 22. II, 6, F 27 4; OC 359; VS 379C. 23. I, 28, passim, and III, 9, F 746; OC 954; VS 977B. 24. Eg., I, 31, F 158; OC 212; VS 213A or II, 17, F 481; OC 618; VS 635A. 25. III, 10, F 784; OC 1002; VS 1024B. 26. II, 8, F 278; OC 364; VS 385C. 27. I, 24, F 95-96; OC 129-30; VS 130-31B. 28. See Georg Misch, "Die Autobiographie der franzosischen Aristokratie des Siebzehnten Jahrhunderts," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte I {1923), 173-213, and Susan Read Baker, "La Rochefoucauld and the Art of the Self-portrait," Romanic Review 65 {1974), 13-30. The text of La Rochefoucauld's self-portrait is frequently published in critical editions of the Maximes, as J. Truchet's (Paris: Garnier, 1967, pp. 253-58). 29. II, 17, F 484-86; OC 622-25; VS 639-41. I have introduced some strata indicators not given in the French or English texts. The poet is Martial. 30. II, 17, F 488; OC 626n; VS 643n. 1580 text not given in Frame. 31. III, 2, F 612; OC 784-85; VS 807B. 32. III, 9, F 747; OC 948; VS 970B.

286

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

33. I, 56, F 230; OC 303; VS 318A. 34. III, 13, F 833; OC 1064; VS 1086B. 35. II, 12, F 345; OC 449; VS 470A. 36. III, 5, F 676; OC 865; VS 886B. 37. III, 5, F 677; OC 866; VS 887B. 38. II, 17, F 481; OC 617; VS 634A. 39. II, 17, F 481; OC 618; VS 635A. 40. II, 6,'F 275; OC 360; VS 380C. 41. II, 17, F 483; OC 620; VS 637AC. 42. II, 17, F 483; OC 620-21; VS 637A. 43. For a skillful analysis of this and other ploys of modesty used by Montaigne when speaking of the Essays, see Marie-Jose Southworth, "Les remarques depreciatives de Montaigne au sujet de son livre," BSAM, 4• Ser., 27 {1971), 19-26. 44. In his first draft of his preamble to the Confessions in Oeuvres completes Pleiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1959, I, 1150. 45. II, 17, F 486; OC 625; VS 641-42A. 46. II, 17, F 487; OC 626; VS 642-43AC, revised at the end to conform to the 1580 text. 47. II, 17, F 490; OC 629; VS 646A. 48. II, 17, F 490-91; OC 629-30; VS 646-47A. I follow the A text, Martin, II, 452. 49. II, 17, F 491; OC 630-31; VS 647-48. 50. In "Rhetorique de representation dans les Essais: de la peinture de l'autre ala peinture du moi," BSAM 7• Ser., 1-2 {1985), 30-33. 51. III, 9, F 741; OC 948; VS 970B. 52. oc 1406. 53. VS 1150, 1213. See II, 5, F 264; OC 346; VS 366B. 54. I, 3, F 11; OC 22 {no note); VS 19 (no note) A. See also III, 9, F 735; OC 940; VS 963B. 55. II, 37, F 596; OC 764; VS 784A. 56. III, 9, F 765; OC 978; VS 999B. 57. F 962; OC 1236. 58. III, 9, F 749; OC 959; VS 980C. 59. III, 10, F 779; OC 995; VS 1017B and III, 13, F 820; OC 1049; VS 1072B. 60. See Frame biography, p. 89f. 61. F 1023; OC 1319. 62. For a long list, though hardly one I find convincing, see Eva Marcu, "Quelques invraisemblances et contradictions dans les Essais," in the Memorial du 1" Congres international des etudes montaignistes, Bordeaux: Taffard, 1964, pp. 238-46. 63. III, 9, F 744; OC 952; VS 974B.

NOTES

287

64. I, 40, F 186; OC 247; VS 253B and II, 17, F 487; OC 625; VS 642A. 65. III, 2, F 611; OC 783; VS 806B. 66. III, 9, F 751; OC 961; VS 983B. 67. I, 40, F 186; OC 247; VS 253B. 68. III, 9, F 762; OC 974; VS 995-96C. 69. III, 9, F 738; OC 944; VS 966B. 70. I, 21, F 71; OC 99; VS 101C. 71. I, 23, F 79; OC 108; VS 111C. 72. Antoine Compagnon examines this question and the classical tradition extensively in "Montaigne ou la parole donnee," BSAM 7• Ser., 12 (1985), 9-19. 73. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Book III, opening. 74. III, 1, F 608; OC 779; VS 801C. 75. III, 5, F 660; OC 844-45; VS 867B. 76. II, 31, F 545; OC 698; VS 720C. 77. F 900; OC 1156. 78. III, 13, F 840; OC 1074; VS 1095B. 79. II, 17, F 492; OC 632; VS 649A. Translation modified. 80. Ibid. 81. II, 17, F 492; OC 632; VS 649A. 82. II, 17, F 493; OC 633; VS 649-SOA. 83. II, 17, f 494; OC 635; VS 651 C. 84. II, 17, F 494; OC 635; VS 651. 85. See his "Paper and Ink: The Structure of Unpredictability," in 0 un amy!: Essays on Montaigne in Honor of Donald M. Frame, Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1977, p. 196. 86. Michael Metschies, Zitat und Zitierkunst in Montaignes Essais, Kolner romanistische Arbeiten, neue Folge, 37, Paris: Minard and Geneva: Droz, 1966, p. 48. 87. Two verses from the Odyssey, translated into Latin by Cicero, taken perhaps by Montaigne from Augustine's City of God, V, 28. II, 1, F 240; OC 317; VS 333A and II, 12, F 424; OC 547; VS 564A. 88. One example, from Cicero's De senectute II, 10 F 303; OC 395; VS 416A (in Latin) and III, 5, F 639; OC 819; VS 842B (in French). Montaigne repeats his own French once: "all that goes beyond plain death seems to me pure cruelty." II, 11, F 314; OC 410; VS 431A and II, 27, F 530; OC 679; VS 700A. 89. I, 14, F 36-37; OC 54; VS SSA and II, 12, F 361; OC 470; VS 490A. 90. II, 12, F 390, 431; OC 505-6, 556; VS 525AC, 573B. 91. III, 9, F 724; OC 939; VS 962B. 92. Municipal edition I, 428.

288

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

93. II, 17, F 496; OC 637; VS 653A. 94. II, 17, F 498; OC 640; VS 656A. 95. II, 17, F 498; OC 640; VS 656AC. 1580 text: Martin II, 465. Montaigne later changed "justify" to "excuse," perhaps a reversal of the French proverb "Qui s'excuse s'accuse." 96. II, 17, F 499; OC 641; VS 657A. 97. III, 9, F 751; OC 960; VS 982B. 98. III, 5, F 640; OC 821; VS 844B. 99. II, 12, F 408-9; OC 528; VS 546B. 100. II, 6, F 273; OC 358; VS 378C. 101. II, 18, F 503; OC 647; VS 664B. 102. II, 17, F 495; OC 636; VS 653A.

NoTEs To CHAPTER

9

1. II, 37, F 595; OC 763; VS 783A. 2. Fragment 675-29. 3. I, 38, F 173; OC 230; VS 235B. 4. II, 15, F 467; OC 600; VS 617C. 5. III, 2, F 612; OC 784; VS 807B. 6. III, 11, F 785; OC 1004; VS 1026-27B. 7. I, 25, F 100; OC 135; VS 136C. 8. II, 37, F 597; OC 765; VS 785A. 9. II, 12, F 373; OC 484; VS 504C. 10. III, 8, F 717; OC 918; VS 939B. English repunctuated. The verse is from Ovid. 11. II, 8, F 287; OC 376; VS 395-96A. 12. See VS 1151-52. 13. Memoires d'outre-tombe, Texte de l'edition originate (1849}, preface, notes et commentaires par Pierre Clarac, Livre de poche, 1973, I, 165. 14. Andre Tournon in "Les prosopopees ironiques dans les Essais," BSAM 7< Ser., 1-2 (1985}, 113-21, counts six prosopoeia, and suggests they may all be ironic to one degree or another. (I find the case for this passage the weakest of the six.) 15. II, 12, F 421; OC 543; VS 560-61A. 16. II, 12, F 389; OC 504; VS 523A. 17. II, 12, F 325; OC 423; VS 446C. 18. III, 9, F 727; OC 930; VS 953B. 19. III, 9, F 721; OC 923; VS 946B. 20. "To the Reader," and III, 9, F 736, 737; OC 941, 942; VS 96, 965BC. 21. I, 14, F 38; OC 57; VS 57AC. II, 3, F 252; OC 331; VS 350A.

NOTES

289

22. II, 12, F 389, 396; OC 504, 513; VS 523, 531AB. III, 5, F 670; OC 857-8; VS 879B. III, 9, F 766; OC 979-80; 1001VS B. III, 10, F 767; OC 981; VS 1004B. Also I, 20, F 58; OC 83; VS 84A. 23. "see how people": II, 12, F 393, 394; OC 508, 510; VS 527, 529A; "listen to Cicero: II, 31, F 541; OC 694; VS 716A and II, 12, F 395; OC 511; VS 530A; "compare the life": II, 12, F 362; OC 470; VS 491A; "find a man who": II, 29, F 536; OC 687; VS 709A. 24. "do you think that": II, 12, F 424; OC 547; VS 564A; "would you like an example": III, 13, F 836; OC 1068; VS 1090B; "what is the use": III, 8, F 706; OC 904; VS 926B. 25. "you would think": II, 12, F 400; OC 517; VS 536A; "you would say": III, 8, F 719; OC 920; VS 941B. 26. I, 40, F 186; OC 246; VS 252B. 27. III, 5, F 678; OC 867; VS 888B. 28. II, 5, F 264; OC 346; VS 366A. 29. III, 8, F 716; OC 917; VS 938B. 30. III, 12, F 804; OC 1028; VS 1051B. 31. A dueler: II, 27, F 526; OC 657; VS 697B; ajealous lover: III, 5, F 661; OC 847; VS 869B; a seducer: III, 5, F 656; OC 840; VS 862B; an angry man: II, 31, F 544; OC 698; VS 720A. 32. II, 5, F 266; OC 349; VS 369C. 33. III, 1, F 602, 606; OC 771, 776-77; VS 794, 798B. 34. III, 5, F 662; OC 848; VS 870C. 35. III, 4, F 630; OC 808; VS 830B. 36. The seminal works in speech act theory are: Austin, John Langshaw, How to do Things With Words, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. Searle, John R., Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, and Expression and Meaning in the Theory of Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

I, 56, F 235; OC 310; VS 324A. II, 12, F 373; OC 484; VS 504A. III, 8, F 715; OC 914; VS 936B. III, 10, F 805; OC 1029; VS 1052B. III, 8, F 707; OC 905; VS 927B. III, 13, F 817; OC 1044; VS 1067B. Translation altered. III, 5, F 683; OC 873; VS 895B. II, 17, F 495; OC 636; VS 653A. I, 28, OC 193n; VS 195nA. Text suppressed after 1588. III, 13, F 833; OC 1065; VS 1087B. III, 5, F 640; OC 821; VS 843-44B.

290

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

48. "within our memory": II, 29, F 537; OC 689; VS 710B; "of whom we are": II, 8, F 290; OC 379; VS 398A; "let us continue": III, 1, F 604; OC 774; VS 796B; "Let us speak": II, 12, F 434; OC 560; VS 577B. 49. Passim. 50. "do we think": I, 25, F 101; OC 137; VS 137A; "shall we believe": I, 42, F 193; OC 255; VS 264A, also II, 12, F 329; OC 428; VS 450C. 51. III, 2, F 615; OC 789; VS 811B. Readers who cannot remember just what it is our experience shows us may check the full text. 52. II, 37, F 593; OC 761; VS 781C. 53. III, 13, F 839; OC 1073; VS 1095B. 54. II, 35, F 563; OC 722; VS 744B (compare with the C passage following). 55. poverty: I, 14, F 38; OC 56; VS 56A; his heirs: II, 8, F 280; OC 366-67; VS 387AC; escape from duels: II, 10, F 780; OC 997; VS 1019B. 56. I, 14, F 39; OC 58; VS 58A. 57. III, 1, F 600; OC 768; VS 791B. 58. III, 10; F 773; OC 989; VS 1011B. 59. II, 3, F 254; OC 334; VS 353A. 60. II, 12, F 322-24; OC 419-21; VS 442-44ABC. 61. III, 11, F 788; OC 1007; VS 1030BC. 62. III, 12, F 844; OC 1079; VS 1100B. 63. I, 42, F 195; OC 257; VS 266A. 64. II, 11, F 313, 316; OC 409, 412; VS 430, 432A. 65. II, 9, F 294; OC 384; VS 404A. 66. II, 15, F 467; OC 600; VS 617C. 67. Among others, II, 31, F 540; OC 692; VS 715A. 68. I, 14, F 38; OC 56; VS 57A and III, 3, F 622; OC 797-98; VS 820B. 69. I, 24, F 90; OC 123; VS 124A; I, 27, F 134; OC 181; VS 182A; I, 32, F 160; OC 214; VS 216A; I, 56, F 234; OC 309; VS 323A; II, 5, F 264; OC 346; VS 366A. 70. II, 8, F 282, 285; OC 369, 373; VS 389, 393A and II, 12, F 362; OC 470; VS 491A. 71. II, 8, F 283; OC 371; VS 392A. 72. III, 13, F 818, 823; OC 1045, 1052; VS 1068, 1075B. 73. III, 8, F 719; OC 920; VS 941B. 74. III, 9, F 751; OC 960; VS 982B. 75. I, 48, F 215; OC 284; VS 294C. 76. See Borje K.nos, "Les citations grecques de Montaigne," Eranos 44 (1946), 460-83. 77. III, 1, F 605; OC 775; VS 797B. 78. III, 9, F 723; OC 925; VS 948B.

NOTES

291

79. III, 5, F 642; OC 822; VS 845C. 80. II, 17, F 498; OC 640-41; VS 657C. 81. In "L'Intelligence et l'echafaud," Problemes du roman, special issue of Confluences. Ed. Jean Prevost. Lyons, 1943, pp. 218-23. 82. II, 10, F 296; OC 387; VS 407A. 83. III, 5, F 641; OC 822; VS 845C. For disagreement with Plato, see III, 13, F 843; OC 1078; VS 1098C. 84. I, 14, F 38; OC 56; VS 56C. 85. III, 3, F 627; OC 804; VS 826BC. 86. III, 9, F 743; OC 950; VS 973B. 87. "I want to tell": I, 14, F 43; OC 63; VS 62B; "it is easy": II, 8, F 290; OC 379; VS 399A; "I know by experience": I, 10, F 26; OC 41; VS 40A and I, 21, F 70; OC 97; VS 99A; "this I know": II, 15, F 466; OC 599; VS 616A. 88. I, 49, F 218; OC 288; VS 299A. 89. I, 49, F 217; OC 287; VS 299. 90. III, 8, F 715-16; OC 915-16; VS 937BC. The Latin text is Cicero's. 91. vs 1322. 92. See my article "The Essayist is Learned," Romanic Review 62 (1971), 16-27. 93. F 951; OC 1223. 94. Figures from Lablenie, BSAM 4• Ser. 13 (1968), p. 15f. 95. F 947-48; OC 1219-20. 96. F 1018; OC 1311. 97. F 960-61; OC 1234-35. 98. F 1018; OC 1306. 99. I, 26, F 127; OC 171; VS 171A. 100. F 1014, 1030: OC 1305, 1328. 101. F 920, 961, 1006; OC 1183, 1235, 1295. 102. F 943, OC 1212-13. 103. III, 5, F 667; OC 853; VS 875B. 104. Jules Brody, "De mesnager sa volonte" (III, 10), lecture philologique d'un essay," in 0 un amyl Essays in Honor of Donald M. Frame, Lexington, Ky: French Forum, 1977, p. 64. 105. II, 37, F 588; OC 755; VS 775A. 106. III, 2, F 611; OC 783; VS 806B. 107. III, 5, F 667; OC 853; VS 875B. 108. III, 8, F 704; OC 900; VS 923B. 109. Ibid. 110. III, 8, F 706; OC 903; VS 925B.

292

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

1. II, 12, F 421; OC 544; VS 561A. 2. Pierre Courcelle has provided an exhaustive history of the varying usages of this adage in Connais-toi toi-meme de Socrate aSaint Bernard, Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1974, 3 vols. Most of the material here is taken from his account. 3. In his essay "Que signifioit ce mot ei," carefully read by Montaigne. 4. E.g., epistles 26, 43, 94. 5. 1, 8. 6. 15, 9. 7. Number 696 in Henri Estienne's 1559 Lyons edition. 8. I, 27, F 133; OC 179; VS 180A. 9. I, 37, F 169; OC 225; VS 229AC. 10. II, 6, F 275; OC 360; VS 380C. 11. III, 5, F 642; OC 822-23; VS 845C. 12. II, 6, F 273; OC 358; VS 378C. 13. III, 13, F 821; OC 1050; VS 1072B. 14. II, 17, F 499; OC 641; VS 657-58A. 15. I, 53, F 224; OC 296; VS 309A; II, 1, F 242; OC 319; VS 335B; II, 12, F 425; OC 548; VS 565A {twice); II, 12, F 426; OC 549; VS 566B; II, 18, F 504; OC 648; VS 665C; III, 4, F 636; OC 815; VS 837B (twice); III, 5, F 643; OC 824; VS 847B; III, 9, F 766; OC 979; VS 1000-1B (three times); III, 13, F 822; OC 1051; VS 1074B. 16. Tasting: II, 17, F 499; OC 641; VS 65 7A; touching: II, 6, F 27 4; OC 360; VS 380C; II, 37, F 577; OC 740; VS 762C; III, 3, F 621; OC 797; VS 819C; listening: II, 12, F 426; OC 548; VS 565A; II, 18, F 504; OC 648; VS 665C; II, 20, F 511; OC 656; VS 674B; III, 2, F 615; OC 789; VS 811B; III, 13, F 822; OC 1052; VS 1073B (twice). 17. Probing: I, 53, F 224; OC 296; VS 309A; II, 6, F 273; OC 358; VS 378C; II, 18, F 504; OC 648; VS 665C; III, 5, F 643; OC 824; VS 847B; III, 6, F 686; OC 878; VS 900C; company: II, 6, F 274; OC 360; VS 379-80C (three times); II, 18, F 504; OC 648; VS 665C; III, 11, F 787; OC 1006; VS 1029B. 18. III, 5, F 642; OC 823; VS 846C. 19. I, 26, F 61; OC 86; VS 88C. 20. II, 18, F 504; OC 648; VS 665C. 21. III, 3, F 621-22; OC 796-97; VS 819B. 22. III, 3, F 621-22; OC 797; VS 819C. 23. III, 13, F 823; OC 1052; VS 1075B. 24. III, 13, F 823; OC 1052; VS 1075B. 25. III, 11, F 787; OC 1006; VS 1029B. 26. II, 6, F 273; OC 358; VS 378C.

NOTES

293

27. Fragments 132-39, 414 {Lafuma numbers). 28. III, 9, F 766; OC 979; VS 1000B. 29. II, 20, F 511; OC 656; VS 674BC. 30. II, 12, F 425; OC 548; VS 565A. 31. I, 20, F 61; OC 87; VS 88A. Translation modified. 32. III, 4, F 636; OC 815; VS 837C. 33. III, 13, F 822-23; OC 1051-52; VS 1073-74BC. 34. "Confounded fool": I, 38, F 173; OC 230; VS 235C. See pp. 11314 in "I Have Nothing to Say." 35. II, 12, F 423; OC 546; VS 563A. 36. II, 12, F 423; OC 546-47; VS 563A. 37. II, 12, F 425; OC 548; VS 565A. 38. III, 3, F 629; OC 806; VS 828C. 39. II, 12, F 425; OC 548; VS 565A. 40. II, 1, F 242; OC 319; VS 335B. See also I, 53, F 224; OC 296; VS 309A. 41. III, 13, F 822; OC 1051; VS 1074B. 42. I, 25, F 101; OC 137; VS 138B. 43. III, 2, F 621; OC 796; VS 817B. 44. III, 13, F 848; OC 1085; VS 1105C. 45. I, 23, F 83; OC 114; VS 116C. 46. III, 8, F 709; OC 907-8; VS 929BC. Verse adapted from Erasmus. 47. III, 8, F 710; OC 908; VS 930C. 48. III, 8, F 717-18; OC 918; VS 939B. 49. III, 9, F 613; OC 785; VS 807C. 50. II, 17, F 480; OC 617; VS 634C. 51. III, 2, F 613; OC 785; VS 807B. 52. III, 2, F 613; OC 785; VS 807B. 53. III, 9, F 74; OC 958; VS 980B. 54. II, 11, F 313; OC 406; VS 427B. 55. III, 2, F 617; OC 791; VS 813B. 56. II, 37, F 582; OC 746-47; VS 767-68C. 57. III, 10, F 769; OC 983-84; VS 1006-7B. Translation altered. 58. III, 13, F 857; OC 1096; VS 1115B. 59. I, 39, F 178; OC 236; VS 242A. 60. I, 26, F 120; OC 162; VS 162C. 61. III, 10, F 774; OC 989; VS 1012B. 62. I, 31, F 156; OC 209; VS 210A. 63. III, 9, F 766; OC 979-80; VS 1000-1B. 64. In his Magna moralia III, 15, 1213a (inspired perhaps by First Alcibiades 132). See Courcelle, p. 21. 65. III, 10, F 773; OC 989; VS 1011B. 66. II, 17, F 478; OC 615; VS 632A.

294

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

67. Act V, sc. ii, l. 11. 68. Quoted in John M. Morris, Versions of the Self, p. 215. 69. I, 42, F 192; OC 254; VS 262A. 70. III, 13, F 853-54; OC 1092; VS 1111-12B. 71. III, 13, F 854; OC 1092; VS 1112B. 72. II, 12, F 364; OC 473; VS 493A. 73. Ibid., OC 472 A. 74. Ibid., OC 473 C. 75. P. Mansell Jones, in his French Introspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937, pp. 22-41. 76. II, 12, F 428; OC 553; VS 569A. 77. II, 11, F, 311; OC, 406; VS, 427A. 78. III,2, F, 616; OC 790; VS, 812B. On this subject see Donald M. Frame, "Montaigne's Refusal of Inner Conflict," 79. III, 9, F 766; OC 979; VS 1000B.

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

1. I, 8, F 52; OC 75; VS 75A. 2. II, 12, F 391; OC 506; VS 525AB. 3. I, 42, F 189; OC 250; VS 258A. 4. I, 21, F 75; OC 104; VS 105C. 5. II, 10, F 303; OC 396; VS 416C. 6. II, 26, F 117; OC 157-58; VS 158A.C 7. III, 5, F 638; OC 818; VS 841B. 8. I, 39, F 179; OC 238; VS 243A. 9. I, 1, F 5; OC 13; VS 9A. 10. I, 30, F 148; OC 198; VS 200A. 11. II, 2, F 249; OC 328; VS 346A. 12. II, 20, F 511; OC 656; VS 675B. 13. II, 12, F 330; OC 429; VS 452A. 14. II, 16, F 468; OC 601; VS 618A. 15. I, 50, F 221; OC 291; VS 303A. 16. Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur Ia signification du comique, Paris: Presses Universitaires Fran~raises, 1967, p. 32. 17. II, 12, F 330-58; OC 429-65; VS 452-86. 18. II, 8, F 279; OC 366; VS 387A. 19. II, 11, F 317-18; OC 414; VS 435A. 20. I, 23, F 83; OC 114; VS 115C. 21. I, 24, F 92; OC 125; VS 127A. Translation modified. 22. F 955, OC 1229.

NOTES

295

23. Also see Zoe Samaras, "Le role de la fortune dans la pensee de Montaigne," BSAM 5< Ser. 10-11 (1974), 71-77. 24. I, 14, F 33; OC 50; VS 50A. 25. III, 8, F 713; OC 912-13; VS 934B. 26. II, 29, F 537; OC 689; VS 711B. 27. I, 21, F 72; OC 100; VS 102C. 28. I, 21, F 73; OC 101; VS 102-3C. 29. I, 21, F 73; OC 101; VS 103C. 30. III, 1, F 599-600; OC 767-68; VS 790-91B. 31. II, 32, F 548; OC 703; VS 725A. 32. I, 26, F 117; OC 158; VS 158A. 33. II, 12, F 427; OC 550; VS 567A. 34. II, 31, F 541; OC 693; VS 716A. 35. See Marcel Conche, "Montaigne et le plaisir," BSAM 5< Ser. 2930 (1979), 5-35. 36. III, 10, F 768; OC 982; VS 1005B. 37. II, 15, F 464; OC 596; VS 613A. 38. II, 20, F 511; OC 656; VS 674C. 39. III, 13, F 856; OC 1095; VS 1114B. 40. III, 13, F 849-50; OC 1087; VS 1107B. 41. II, 3, F 248; OC 326; VS 344A. 42. III, 13, F 841; OC 1076; VS 1097C. 43. II, 8, F 293; OC 383; VS 401. 44. III, 5, F 641; OC 821; VS 844C. 45. OC 821n. 46. III, 13, F 846-47; OC 1083; VS 1103B. Translation modified. 47. III, 7, F 701-2; OC 897-98; VS 919B. 48. III, 9, F 756; OC 967; VS 988B. 49. Matthew 5, 48. 50. III, 9, F 756; OC 967; VS 989B. 51. III, 8, F 710; OC 909; VS 930B. 52. III, 12, F 811; OC 1037; VS 1059C. 53. III, 13, F 856; OC 1095; VS 1115C. See also III, 2, F 615; OC 788; vs 811B. 54. III, 13, F 856; OC 1096; VS 1115B. 55. This idea, and the illustrations, were communicated to me by a former student, Tom Meola. 56. E.g., I, 26, F 124; OC 166-67; VS 167A. 57. II, 8, F 292; OC 382; VS 401A. 58. II, 1, F 239; OC 315; VS 332A. 59. Ibid. 60. II, 13, F 459-60; OC 591; VS 607A. 61. I, 4, F 15; OC 26; VS 23A.

296

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

62. III, 2, F 614; OC 787; VS 809B. See also III, 12, F 808; OC 103233; VS 1055B on Socrates vis-a-vis Aristotle and Caesar. 63. III, 2, F 613-14; OC 786; VS 808B. 64. III, 2, F 614; OC 787; VS 809B. 65. III, 13, F 850-51; OC 1088; VS 1108C. 66. II, 33, F 555-56; OC 712-13; VS 734-35C. 67. III, 10, F 783; OC 1001; VS 1023B. 68. II, 37, F 596; OC 764; VS 784C. 69. III, 2, F 611; OC 782; VS 805B. 70. III, 13, F 822; OC 1051; VS 1073-74B. 71. III, 5, F 639-40; OC 820; VS 842B. 72. I, 23, F 79; OC 108; VS llOC. 73. I, 26, F 124; OC 167; VS 168AC. 74. I, 4, F 15; OC 26; VS 23A. 75. I, 50, F 220; OC 291-92; VS 303C. 76. III, 3, F 629; OC 807; VS 929B. 77. III, 10, F 776; OC 992; VS 1015B. 78. III, 13, F 825; OC 1055; VS 1077B. 79. III, 13, F 824; OC 1053; VS 1076B. 80. Adagiorum Chilades Quatuor et Sesquicenturia, ed. Henri Estienne. Lyons: Gryphius, 1559, p. 266. 81. III, 2, F 620; OC 794; VS 816C. 82. III, 13, F 835; OC 1068; VS 1089-90B. 83. III, 13, F 854-55; OC 1093-94; VS 1113BC. 84. See Frame biography, p. 53. 85. F 956, OC 1230. 86. See various works of Zbigniew Gierczynski, notably "Le fideisme apparent de Montaigne et les artifices des Essais," Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 162 (1969), 137-63. 87. III, 13, F 852; OC 1091; VS 1110C. 88. III, 13, F 845; OC 1092-93; VS 1112BC. 89. III, 5, F 677; OC 866; VS 887C. 90. III, 5, F 677; OC 866; VS 887C. 91. II, 8, F 293; OC 383; VS 402C. 92. Ecclesiasties 1, 2. 93. III, 13, F 850; OC 1087-8; VS 1107B. 94. II, 6, F 271; OC 356; VS 371A; III, 5, F 638-9; OC 818; VS 841B; and III, 10, F 770; OC 984; VS 1007B. (In the last case Montaigne is probably referring to dreams, not pure sleep.) 95. II, 10, F 301; OC 393; VS 414A. 96. II, 12, F 361n; OC 469n; VS 490nA. 97. III, 12, F 793; OC 1014; VS 1037B. 98. II, 12, F 360; OC 468; VS 489A.

NOTES

99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

297

I, 31, F 150; OC 200; VS 203A. II, 1, F 240; OC 316; VS 333A. II, 1, F 243; OC 320; VS 337A. II, 1, F 242; OC 318-9; VS 335A. III, 13, F 849; OC 1087; VS 1106-7C.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 12

1. III, 2, F 618; OC 793; VS 814-15C. 2. I, 39, F 178; OC 236; VS 242A. 3. II, 2, F 245; OC 322; VS 340C. 4. III, 3, F 622; OC 797; VS 819B. 5. II, 6, F 274; OC 359; VS 379C. 6. III, 2, F 611; OC 782; VS 805C. 7. Confessions, IX, 1. 8. The soul: II, 12, F 405-17; OC 523-38; VS 542-56; the body: II, 12, F 417-18; OC 538-39; VS 556-57. 9. II, 12, F 401-2; OC 499-500; VS 537-38A. 10. Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 27-114. 11. II, 17, F 484-85; OC 622-23; VS 639A. 12. II, 12, F 402; OC 520; VS 539A. 13. I, 50, F 220; OC 290; 14. III, 5, F 641; OC 821; VS 844B. 15. II, 12, F 401-2; OC 519; VS 537-38AC. 16. II, 12, F 409; OC 528-29; VS 546A. 17. II, 37, F 592; OC 759-60; VS 780A. 18. III, 4, F 638; OC 817; VS 839B. 19. III, 10, F 773; OC 988; VS 1010C. 20. III, 9, F 736; OC 941-42; VS 964C. 21. I, 57, F 237-38; OC 313; VS 327A. 22. III, 10, F 772; OC 987; VS 1010B. 23. III, 2, F 619; OC 794; VS 815B. 24. III, 2, F 620; OC 795; VS 817C. 25. III, 5, F 638-39; OC 818-19; VS 841-42B. 26. III, 5, F 639; OC 819; VS 842B. 27. III, 13, F 842; OC 1077; VS 1098B. 28. II, 17, F 486; OC 625; VS 642A. 29. III, 13, F 845; OC 1081; VS 1101B. 30. "The Selves" in The Medusa and the Snail, New York: Viking Press, 1979, pp. 41-44.

298

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

31. III, 13, F 846; OC 1082; VS 1102B. None of these portraits has reached us, nor has any other made during the essayist's lifetime. See C. Lafon and J. Saint-Martin, "lconographie de Montaigne," BSAM 3< Ser. 14 (1960), 1-46. On authors' portraits as they appear in published works, see Steven Rendall, "The Portrait of the Author," French Forum 13 (1988), 143-51. 32. Iliad, I, 188-92. 33. III, 5, F 641; OC 821; VS 844B. 34. III, 7, F 699; OC 894; VS 916B. 35. III, 10, F 776; OC 991-92; VS 1014B. 36. III, 9, F 744; OC 951-52; VS 974B. 37. III, 13, 822F; OC 1051; VS 1074B. 38. II, 1, F 242; OC 319; VS 335B. 39. In his The Lives of a Cell, Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam Books, 1975, p. 167. 40. Henry James, The Portrait of A Lady, New York: NAL, 1979, p. 186 (near end of chapter 19). 41. Godel, Escher, Bach, New York: Random House, 1980, p. 360. 42. Ibid., p. 696-97. 43. III, 9, F 740; OC 946; VS 968B. 44. III, 7, F 699; OC 895; VS 916B. 45. III, 1, F 604; OC 774; VS 796B. 46. III, 9, F 727; OC 929-30; VS 952-53B. 47. III, 9, F 756; OC 966; VS 988B. 48. III, 10, F 768; OC 982; VS 1005B. 49. III, 10, F 767; OC 981; VS 1004B. 50. III, 10, F 770; OC 985; VS 1007BC. 51. I, 23, F 86; OC 117; VS 118A. 52. III, 1, F 601; OC 769; VS 792B. 53. III, 9, F 758; OC 970; VS 991B. 54. I, 38, F 172; OC 229; VS 234A. 55. III, 10, F 773; OC 989; VS 1011B. 56. III, 9, F 729; OC 932; VS 955B. 57. I, 39, F 177; OC 235; VS 241A. 58. I, 14, F 42; OC 62; VS 62C. 59. III, 10, F 769-70; OC 984; VS 1007CB. 60. III, 5, F 648; OC 830; VS 852B. 61. III, 13, F 846; OC 1082; VS 1103B. 62. III, 13, F 831; OC 1063; VS 1085B. 63. II, 17, F 499; OC 641-42; VS 657A. Translation modified. 64. I, 26, F 107; OC 145; VS 147C. 65. II, 12, F 409; OC 528; VS 546C. 66. I, 26, F 61; OC 86; VS 88C.

NOTES

299

67. I, 21, F 68; OC 95; VS 98C. 68. II, 31, F 540; OC 692; VS 715A. 69. III, 10, F 766-67; OC 980; VS 1003B. 70. III, 10, F 767; OC 980; VS 1003B. 71. II, 12, F 346; OC 450; VS 471A. 72. VS 1280; the text is given in Municipal edition IV, 226. 73. III, 10, F 773; OC 988-89; VS 1011B. 74. III, 3, F 621; OC 796; VS 818-19B. 75. II, 6, F 274; OC 359; VS 379C. 76. III, 10, F 767-68; OC 981; VS 1004BC. 77. III, 2, F 611; OC 782; VS 805B. 78. III, 2, F 615; OC 789; VS 811B. 79. III, 13, F 819; OC 1047; VS 1070C. 80. II, 17, F 501; OC 643; VS 660A. 81. III, 2, F 615; OC 788; VS 810B. 82. Ibid. 83. I, 26, F 120; OC 162; VS 163C. 84. III, 12, F 805; OC 1029; VS 1052B. 85. Ibid. C. The final words, after "example," were crossed out. Montaigne first wrote the sentence without the words "natural and universal." He revised his marginal gloss several times, always retaining this sentence as its punchline. 86. I, 54, F 227; OC 300; VS 313C. 87. See Raymond B. Waddington, "Socrates in Montaigne's 'Traicte de la physionomie'," Modern Language Quarterly, (1980), 328-45. See also Frederick Kellermann, Symposium 10 (1956), 204-16. 88. III, 9, F 748; OC 957; VS 979B. 89. I, 2, F 8; OC 17-18; VS 14B. 90. III, 10, F 780; OC 997; VS 1020C. 91. See Montaigne's manuscript correction to the 1588 title page, Municipal edition I, xxv. 92. See chapter 1 of his L'Etre et Ia connaissance selon Montaigne. Paris: Jose Corti, 1968. 93. In "L'Integrite de l'homme selon Montaigne," in 0 un amy! Essays in Honor of Donald M. Frame, pp. 20-21. 94. P. 21. 95. III, 13, F 822; OC 1050; VS 1073C. 96. II, 17, F 498; OC 640; VS 657C. 97. II, 16, F 471; OC 605-6; VS 622C. 98. III, 10, F 781; OC 998; VS 1020B. 99. I, 39, F 175; OC 233; VS 238A. 100. III, 9, F 724,728, 727; OC 926, 931, 930; VS 949,954, 953CCB. 101. III, 5, F 640; OC 821; VS 843B.

300

MONTAJGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

102. I, 20, F 56; OC 80; VS 82C. 103. III, 3, F 629; OC 807; VS 829BC. 104. III, 2, F 612; OC 784; VS 806B. 105. II, 2, F 613; OC 785-86; VS 808A. 106. III, 2, F 617; OC 791; VS 813B. 107. III, 2, F 613; OC 785; VS 807B. 108. III, 13, F 832; OC 1064; VS 1086B. 109. III, 12, F 811; OC 1036-37; VS 1059B. 110. See the Entretien avec M. de Saci, op. cit., p. 291-97 and fragment 680-63 (Lafuma). 111. See her "Montaigne: les structures de la prudence destructrice," in Le Mythe d'Etiemble: Hommages, Etudes et Recherches inedites, no. 77, Paris: Didier, 1979, p. 85. 112. III, 5, F 642; OC 828; VS 845BC. 113. III, 5, F 677; OC 866; VS 887-88B.

NoTES TO CHAPTER 13

1. II, 8, F 278; OC 364; VS 385C. 2. III, 2, F 611; OC 782; VS 805C. 3. III, 5, F 678n; OC 867n; VS lacking. A marginal comment later crossed out. Montaigne says he spurred himself to break the ice. 4. III, 9, F 752n; OC 961n; VS 983nB. 5. III, 9, F 751; OC 961; VS 983B. 6. III, 9, F 752; OC 961; VS 983B. 7. II, 12, F 409; OC 528; VS 546C. 8. II, 12, F 408-9; OC 528; VS 546C. 9. III, 9, F 749; OC 958; VS 980B. 10. III, 9, F 721; OC 922; VS 945B. For the same French term, see III, 9, F 750; OC 959; VS 981B and III, 13, F 826; OC 1056; VS 1079B. 11. II, 18, F 504; OC 648; VS 665C. 12. Ibid., my translation. 13. III, 2, F 611; OC 782; VS 805B. 14. III, 9, F 721; OC 923; VS 946B. 15. I, 26, F 108; OC 147; VS 148A. 16. III, 9, F 749; OC 958; VS 980B. 17. III, 9, F 759; OC 971; VS 992C. See also II, 6, F 274; OC 359; VS 379C. 18. II, 6, F 274; OC 359; VS 379C. I have changed the order of Montaigne's sentences. 19. See Gerard Defaux, "Rhetorique de representation dans les Essais: de la peinture de !'autre ala peinture du moi," BSAM 7e Ser., 1-2 (1985),

NOTES

301

44. "Never, if we are to believe him, was so perfectly unachievable project so perfectly achieved" (my translation). 20. III, 2, F 611; OC 783; VS 805BC. 21. III, 5, F 667; OC 853; VS 875B. 22. III, 9, F 750; OC 959; VS 981B. 23. III, 8, F 720; OC 921; VS 942C. 24. II, 37, F 576-77; OC 739-40; VS 760-62A. I follow the 1580 version in some parts. 25. In his first preamble to the Confessions, op. cit., 1150. 26. At the conclusion of Book II, op. cit., 84-87. 27. III, 2, F 612; OC 784; VS 806B. 28. III, 5, F 677; OC 866; VS 887C. 29. III, 8, F 720; OC 921; VS 942C. 30. III, 13, F 823; OC 1052; VS 1074B. 31. III, 5, F 643-44; OC 824; VS 847B. 32. II, 17, F 495; OC 636; VS 653AC. 33. Fragment 780-62 (Lafuma): "Le sot projet qu'il a de se peindre, et cela non pas en passant et contre ses maximes, comme il arrive a tout le monde de faillir, mais parses propres maximes et par un dessein premier et principal." See also fragment 649-25. 34. Lettres philosophiques 25, xl, pp. 179-80 quotes Pascal's entire fragment. The brief answer: "Le charmant projet que Montaigne a eu de se peindre na.lvement comme il a fait! Car il a peint la nature humaine." 35. III, 8, F 705; OC 902; VS 924BC. 36. II, 17, F 495; OC 636; VS 653A and III, 9, F 749; OC 958; VS 980B. 37. III, 9, F 751; OC 961; VS 983B. 38. Ibid. 39. III, 8, F 721; OC 922; VS 943C. 40. III, 2, F 611; OC 783; VS 805B. 41. III, 9, F 721; OC 922; VS 945B. 42. II, 6, F 273; OC 358; VS 378C. 43. III, 13, F 826; OC 1056; VS 1079B. 44. III, 8, F 703; OC 899; VS 921-22B. 45. III, 12, F 799; OC 1021; VS 1044C. 46. III, 2, F 611; OC 782-83; VS 805C. 47. II, 6, F 274; OC 359-60; VS 379-80C. 48. III, 8, F 720; OC 921; VS 942B. 49. I, 37, F 169; OC 225; VS 229A. 50. II, 11, F 311; OC 406; VS 427A. 51. II, 11, F 313; OC 408; VS 429A. 52. II, 11, F 312; OC 407; 53. Ibid.

302

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

54. See Marcel Gutwirth, Michel de Montaigne, ou le pari d'exemplarite, Montreal: Presse Universitaire de Montreal, 1977, p. 22. 55. II, 11, F 311-12; OC 406-7; VS 427-28A. 56. See supra, p. 130, citation to note 31. 57. III, 4, F 634; OC 813; VS 835B. 58. II, 8, F 281; OC 367-68; VS 388B. 59. III, 5, F 657; OC 841; VS 863B. 60. III, 12, F 814; OC 1040; VS 1063B. 61. III, 6, F 685-86; OC 877; VS 899B. 62. II, 4, F 263; OC 345; VS 364B. 63. III, 9, F 749; OC 959; VS 980C. 64. II, 2, F 247-48; OC 324-25; VS 342-43A. 65. III, 5, F 667; OC 853; VS 875B. 66. II, 11, F 311-12; OC 407; VS 428A. 67. III, 2, F 613; OC 785; VS 807B. 68. III, 10, F 782; OC 999; VS 1021B. 69. III, 10, F 768; OC 982; VS 10005B. 70. III, 10, F 781-82, 783-84; OC 999, 1002; VS 1021, 1024B. 71. III, 5, F 678-79; OC 867-68; VS 889B. 72. III, 1, F 660; OC 773; VS 795B. 73. II, 37, F 596; OC 764; VS 784A. 74. II, 18, F 504; OC 648; VS 665C. 75. I, 20, F 57; OC 81; VS 82C; II, 20, F 510; OC 655; VS 673B; III, 2, F 615; OC 788; VS 811B; III, 13, F 835; OC 1068; VS 1090B. 76. III, 5, F 642; OC 822; VS 845C. 77. II, 17, F 494; OC 635; VS 651B. 78. III, 5, F 640; OC 821; VS 844B. 79. I, 10, F 26-27; OC 41-42; VS 40C. 80. III, 5, F 667; OC 853; VS 875B. 81. II, 8, F 293; OC 383; VS 402C. See also III, 8, F 715; OC 915; VS 936C. "That we do not possess all we borrow may perhaps be verified in myself," i.e., me and my book. 82. III, 8, F 718; OC 918; VS 939B. 83. III, 2, F 611-12; OC 783; VS 806B. 84. III, 9, F 749-50; OC 959; VS 981B. III, 12, F 809; OC 1034; VS 1057C alludes anonymously to Mlle de Gournay. 85. II, 12, F 409; OC 528; VS 546C. 86. II, 18, F 505; OC 648; VS 665-66C. 87. II, 37, F 597; OC 766; VS 786A. 88. II, 18, F 504; OC 647-48; VS 665C.

NOTES

303

89. Essayes {1597) 1 "Of Studies" in Francis Bacon, A Selection of his Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft, Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1965, p.33. 90. II, 18, F 504; OC 648; VS 665C. 91. Ibid. 92. III, 5, F 642; OC 822; VS 845B. 93. III, 5, F 642; OC 822-23; VS 845C. 94. III, 5, F 677; OC 866; VS 887C.

BIBLIOGRAPHY MoNTAIGNE SouRcEs

Oeuvres completes. Ed. Arthur Armaingaud. Paris: Conard, 1924-41. Oeuvres completes. Eds. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat. Bibliotheque de la Pleiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. The Complete Works of Montaigne. Essays, Travel journal, Letters. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957. Essais de messire Michel seigneur de Montaigne ... , 2 vols. Bordeaux: Millanges, 1580. Reprint: Geneva: Slakine and Paris: Champion, 1976, with introduction and notes by Daniel Martin. Essais. Reproduction en phototypie avec notes manuscrites marginates. Introd. by Strowski. Paris: Hachette, 1912. 1024 plates. Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, publies d'apres l'exemplaire de Bordeaux. Eds. Fortuant Strowski and Fran~ois Gebelin. Bordeaux: Pech, 190619, 3 vols. and its fourth volume (notes) by Pierre Villey, 1920. (The so-called Edition municipale.) Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne. Ed. Pierre Villey, re-edited by V.-L. Saulnier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Tr. and ed. by Jacob Zeitlin, 3 vols. New York: Knopf, 1934-36. In Defense of Raymond Sebond. Ed. Arthur H. Beattie. New York: F. Ungar, 1959. L'Apologie de Raymond Sebond. Ed. Paul Porteau. Paris: F. Aubier, 1937. journal de voyage. Livre de poche. Paris: Librairie Generale Fran~aise, 1974.

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Barthiou, Louis. "Autour d'un exemplaire des Essais de Montaigne de 1580," Bulletin du bibliophile {Dec. 1929}, 534. Beaujour, Michel. Miroirs d'encre. Paris: Seuil, 1980. Bellenger, Yvonne. Montaigne. Unefete pour ['esprit. Paris: Balland, 1987. Benkard, Ernst. Das Selbstbildnis vom 15. his zum Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Heinrich Keller, 1926. Bergson, Henri. Le Rire: Essai sur Ia signification du comique. Paris: Presses Universitaires Fran~aises, 1967. Blinckenberg, Andreas. "Quel sens Montaigne a-t-il voulu donner au mot Essais dans le titre de son oeuvre?" Bulletin de Ia Societe des Amis de Montaigne 3• Ser. 29 {1964}, 22-32. (The abbreviation BSAM will be used hereafter to refer to this important journal.) Boase, Alan M. "Montaigne annote par Florimond de Raemon" Revue du seizieme siecle 15 {1938), 237-78. - - - . The Fortunes of Montaigne: A History of the Essays in France, 15801699. London: Methuen, 1935. Boileau, Nicolas. Oeuvres completes. Garnier Flammarion. Paris: Garnier, 1969. Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Breckenridge, Hames D. Lineness: A Conceptual History of Ancient Portraiture. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Brody, Jules. "De mesnager sa volonte" {III, 10}, lecture philologique d'un essay," in 0 un amy! Essays in Honor ofDonald M. Frame. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1977. - - - . "Montaigne «se debine»: lecture philologique de l'essai «Du dementir» {11,18}," BSAM 7• Ser. 13-14-15-16 {1988-89}, 141-159. Brush, Craig B. Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Skepticism. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. - - - . "Montaigne Tries Out Self-study," L'Esprit createur 20 {1980}, 23-35. - - . "The Essayist is Learned," Romanic Review 62 {1971}, 16-27. Bruss, Elizabeth W. "Eye for 1: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film," in James Olney, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. Brusseaux, Odile. Le Peintre et son miroir. Preface de Gerard Mourgues. Grenoble: Roissard, 1975. Butor, Michel. Essais sur les Essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. Chateaubriand, Fran~ois-Rene de. Memoires d'outre-tombe. Texte de l'edition originate {1849}, preface, notes et commentaires par Pierre Clarac. Paris: Livre de poche, 1973. Compagnon, Antoine. "Montaigne ou la parole donnee," BSAM 7• Ser., 1-2 {1985}, 9-19.

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Lejeune, Philippe. L'Autobiographie en France. Collection U2, Paris: Armand Colin, 1971. Lowenthal, Marvin. The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne, Comprising the life of the wisest man of his times: his childhood, youth, and prime; his adventures in love and marriage, at court, and in office, war, revolution, and plague; his travels at home and abroad; his habits, tastes, whims, and opinions. Selected, arranged, edited, prefaced, and mostly translated anew from his Essays, etc., withholding no signal or curious detail. Boston and New York: Houghton Miffiin, 1935. Luthy, Herbert. "Montaigne on the Art of Being Truthful," in The Proper Study: Essays on Western Classics. Eds. Quentin Anderson and Joseph A. Mazzeo. New York: St Martin's Press, 1962. Mansell Jones, P. French Introspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937. Marcu, Eva. "Quelques invraisemblances et contradictions dans les Essais," in the Memorial du ter Congres international des etudes montaignistes. Bordeaux: Taffard, 1964, pp. 238-46. Marot, Clement. Les Epltres. Ed. C. A. Mayer. London: University of London, Athlone Press, n.d. Masciotta, Michelangelo. Autoritratti del quattrocento e del cinquecento. Sphaera I. Florence: Electa Editrice, 1949. Maskell, David. "Montaigne correcteur de l'exemple de Bordeaux," BSAM 5e Ser. 25-26 (1978), 57-71. - - - . "Quel est le dernier etat authentique des Essais de Montaigne?" Bibliotheque d'humanisme et Renaissance 40 (1978), 85-103. Mathieu-Castellani, Gisele. Montaigne, l'ecriture de l'essai. Collection «Ecrivains». Paris: PUF, 1988. McKinley, Mary B. Words in a Corner: Studies in Montaigne's Latin Quotations. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1981. Meijer, Marianne. "'Des postes' et 'Des pouces': plaisanteries ou points de repere?" in Columbia Montaigne Conference Papers. Eds. Donald M. Frame and Mary B. McKinley. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1981, pp. 105-18. Metschies, Michael. Zitat und Zitierkunst in Montaignes Essais. Kolner romanistische Arbeiten, neue folge, 37, Paris: Minard and Geneva: Droz, 1966. Misch, Georg. A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Tr. E. W. Dickes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951. - - - . "Die Autobiographie der franzosischen Aristokratie des Siebzehnten Jahrhunderts," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literatur wissenschaft und Geistegeschichte I (1923), 173-213. Morris, John N. Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from john Bunyan to John Stuart Mill. New York: Basic Books, 1966.

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312

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INDEX OF PROPER NAMES Achilles, 220 Alcibiades, 68, 203 Alexander, 169, 204, 207 Arcesilaus, 236 Archeanassa, 162 Aristippus, 236 Aristotle, 14, 128, 129, 140, 157, 180, 185, 215 Auerbach, Erich, 109 Augustine, Saint, 33, 103, 164, 186, 196, 215, 231 Austin, J. L., 155 Bacon, Sir Francis, 104, 262 Balzac, Guez de, 137 Baraz, Michael, 234 Baum, L. Frank, 216 Beauvoir, Simone de, 20 Bellini, Giovanni, 17 Bergson, Henri, 193 Bernard de Clairvaux, 17 4 Beze, Theodore de, 146 Booth, Wayne C., 35 Bordeaux, 7, 127 Bouts, Dirk, 19 Breckenridge, James D., 14 Bruss, Elizabeth, 25 Buchanan, George, 146 Butor, Michel, 71 Caesar, Julius, 15, 105, 127, 149, 206 Caligula, 203 Calvin, Jean, 174 Camus, Albert, 56, 162, 189 Caravaggio, 20 Cardano, 30 Castiglione, Baldassare, 135 Cato, 169, 204, 218, 237, 252 Cellini, Benvenuto, 33 Cervantes, Miguel de, 126 Chateaubriand, Fran~ois-Rene de, 151

Cicero, 90, 174, 199, 218 Cotgrave, Randle, 40 Critchley, Macdonald, 22 Cyrus, 203 Dante, 175 Daurat (poet), 146 Defaux, Gerard, 137 Delany, Paul, 25 Delphi, 174 Democritus, 98, 121 Descartes, Rene, 66, 89, 96, 212, 217 Diderot, Denis, 56 Diogenes Laertius, 168 Dion, 162 Don Quixote, 226 Du Bellay, Joachim, 146 Duras, Mme de, 48, 149 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 110 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 85 Epaminondas, 169 Epicurus, 143 Erasmus, Desiderius, 12, 126, 174, 209 Estienne, Henri, 86 Euripides, 189 Fabricius, 162 Faulkner, William, 40 Frame, Donald M., 40 Francis II, 144 Francis of Assisi, Saint, Freud, Sigmund, 178, 189 Garavini, Fausta, 238 Gasser, Manuel, 22 Genet, Jean, 239 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 18 Ghirlandaio, 16, 19 Gide, Andre, 230, 238 Giotto, 19

316

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 56, 229 Gossaert, Jan, 19 Gournay, Mlle de, 5, 58, 72, 160, 261 Guise, Duke de, 146 Hegesias, 166, 168 Heliogabalus, 203 Henry III, 1 Henry of Navarre, 1, 33 Henry, Patrick, 71 Heraclitus, 121 Hippocrates, 103 Hofstadter, Douglas, 125, 223 Holbein the Younger, Hans, 12 Homer, 143 Horace, 105 James, Henry, 222 Jesus Christ, 13, 38, 74 Johnson, Samuel, 11, 56 Jones, Mansell, 189 Julian the Apostate, 203 Kaiser, Walter, 126 Kant, Immanuel, 212 King Lear, 187 L'Hospital, Chancellor Michel de, 146 La Boetie, Etienne de, 1, 48, 55, 64, 67f, 68, 73, 82, 119, 157, 245 LaCharite, Raymond C., 59 La Fontaine, Jean de, 56 La Rochefoucauld, Fran~ois de, 56 Lablenie, Etienne, 49 Lafayette, Mme de, 162 Lejeune, Philippe, 25 Leonardo da Vinci, 17 Lippi, Fra Filippo, 19 Loreto, 210 Lowenthal, Marvin, 26 Lucretius, 73, 105 Luther, Martin, 104, 202 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 101, 137 Mantegna, 16 Marot, Clement, 1 Martial, 61, 131 Masaccio, 19 Massys, Quentin, 12

Matteo, Master, 18 Menander, 174 Messie, Pierre, 64 Messina, Antonello da, 17 Metrodorus, 113, 236 Michelangelo, 20 Mill, John Stuart, 187 Misch, Georg, 24 Moneins, Monsieur de, 127 Montdore (neo-Latin poet), 146 Montluc, Marshall, 151 More, Sir Thomas, 126 Nero, 203 Newton, Isaac, 162 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 38, 56 Nozick, Robert, 216 Olivier, Chancellor Fran~ois, 136, 146 Olney, James, 25 Orcagna, Andrea, 18 Origen, 103 Ovid, 174 Paris, 7, 62 Parmagianino, 20 Pascal, Blaise, 96, 149, 177, 238, 247 Pascal, Roy, 25 Pasquier, Etienne, 108 Peletier du Mans, Jacques ,89 Perseus, king of Macedonia, 113 Pertile, Lino, 143 Perugino, 19 Phaedo, 162 Pindar, 174 Pisano, Niccolo, 18 Plato, 14, 138, 162, 164, 175, 178, 181, 182, 215 Plautus, 61 Pliny, 12, 79 Plutarch, 32, 61, 64-67, 98, 105, 110, 162, 169, 171, 173, 186, 191, 194, 229 Pontormo, Jacopo da, 19 Pope, Alexander, 56 Proust, Marcel, 81 Pyrrho, 85 Rabelais, Fran~ois, 126 Racine, Jean, 66

317

INDEX

Raemond, Florimond de, 31, 55 Ramses II, 13 Raphael, 19 Rembrandt, 19 Rendall, Steven, 29, 32, 34 Rene of Anjou, 19 Rene, king of Sicily, 144 Romance of the Rose, The, 191 Rome, 169-171, 210 Ronsard, Pierre de, 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 28, 56, 134, 209,239,245 Saint-Simon, Louis, due de, 30 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 56, 189 Searle, John R., 155 Seneca, 66, 73, 83, 150, 153, 173, 215 Sevigne, Mme de, 151 Sextus Empiricus, 86, 87 Shaw, George Bernard, 56 Shumaker, William, 25, 29 Signorelli, 19 Socrates, 86, 169, 173, 175, 187, 204,218,233,237,243,251 Song of Songs, 174 Sophocles, 189 Stella, 162

Stilpo, 226 Suetonius, 105 Swift, Jonathan, 56 Tacitus, 161, 252 Thales, 209 Thomas, Lewis, 76, 220, 222 Tiberius, 165 Titian, 19 Turnebus, Adrianus, 146 Turner, Beatrice, 22 Van der Weyden, Roger, 19 Van Eyck, Jan, 16 Vasari, Giorgio, 16 Venice, 62 Veronese, 19 Vico, Giambattista, 149 Villey, Pierre, 59, 64, 119, 168 Virgil, 166, 167, 234 Vives, Louis, 196 Voltaire, 56 Weintraub, Karl J., 25 Wilde, Oscar, 12 Woolf, Virginia, 8 Wordsworth, William, 25 Xerxes, 203

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Ancients, 68, 133, 136, 197, 227 Anger, 228, 256 Animals, 194 Assertion, 164 Assurance, 239 Astronomy, 87 Ataraxy, 86 Atheism, 153 Autobiography, 23-25 Axiomatic truth, 89 Bible, 104 Body, 113 Buridan's Ass, 126 Catholics, 161 Character, 35, 113, 114 Children, 226 Christianity, 202, 216 Conformism, 225, 238 Conservatism, 100 Consubstantial, 258 Contradictions, 40, 67, 99, 101, 116 Conversation, 104, 105, 111, 149, 161, 165, 171£, 176, 249 Custom, 90, 100, 194 Death, 73f, 179 Desire, 229, 237 Deuteronomy, 174 Diversity, 96, 190, 192, 232 Drunkenness, 215 Eating, 201 Epecho, 86 Ephemerides, 26 Erudition, 161, 163, 170, 248 Essays, 248 a human work, 74 additions to text, 46f Apology for Raymond Sebond (II, 12), Chap. 6 passim, 43, 86, 87, 89,91, 95, 98,101,102,126,

143, 151, 173, 180, 186, 215, 227 art of, 34, 43, 81, 169, 204, 244 autobiography, 25 Book Three, 53 citations, 4 conclusions, 45 consubstantial with the author, 35, 164 dictation, 58 digression, 38 effects on Montaigne, 79, 83, 258f essaying a topic, 80, 82, 92, 168 evolution, 205 exemplaire de Bordeaux, 46, 49 form, Chap. 4 passim le~ron, 37 length, 37 main themes, 162 memoirs, 30 Montaigne's comments on, 71, 104, 120, 143, 183 motions of the mind, 43, 65 not epistles, 72 not history, 27 Of Cripples (III, 11), 44, 94 Of Cruelty (II, 11), 45, 253 Of Democritus and Heraclitus (I, 50), 120, 192 Of Drunkenness (II, 2), 163 Of Experience (III, 13), 102, 165 Of Friendship (I, 28), 48, 67 Of Giving the Lie (II, 18), 124, 146,262 Of Glory (II, 16), 124 Of Husbanding Your Will (III, 10), 228 Of Idleness (I, 8), 63 Of Physiognomy (III, 12), 44, 48 Of Practice (II, 6), 50, 249 Of Practice (II, 6) (f), 73 Of Prayers (I, 56), 131 Of Presumption (II, 17), 124, 132, 162

319

INDEX

Of Repentance (III, 2), 163, 231, 236,249 Of Smells (I, 55), 61, 129 Of the Disadvantage of Greatness (III, 7), 163 Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions (II, 1), 112f, 163, 181, 186, 214 Of the Power of the Imagination (I, 21), 195, 228 Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers (II, 37), 243 Of Vanity (III, 9), 184, 236 On Some Verses of Virgil (III, 5), 259 organization, 42, 45, 48 Papal censors, 194 people in, 30, 32, 165 persona, 34, 59, 169 printed form, 40 publication, 6 strata indicators, 51 teaching, 6, 154, 177, 189, 251 term "essay," 120 titles, 37, 43 To the Reader, 2, 119, 146 topics, 41-43, 52 treatise, 38 two voices, 119, 123, 242 We Taste Nothing Pure (II, 20), 198 Everyday life, 204f Experience, 89, 96, 165, 186 Fertility, 91 Fideism, 100 Fortune, 133, 141, 194 French language, 108 Friendship, 67f, 70, 72, 200 Frivolous, 179 Games, 140, 206f God,89, 90,104,186,210,211

Ignorance, 177, 180 Imagination, 228 Immortality, 90 Indirection, 129f, 238 Judgment, 34, 120f, 142, 164, 170, 178, 180, 232 Know thyself, 173f Language, 92, 104f Latin language, 107f Liar paradox, 125 Liberty, 227, 230 Marginal additions, 110 Mathematics, 87, 89 Medallions, 86 Memory, 33, 60, '142f, 179 Mind, 200, 221 Modesty, 3, 33, 66, 69, 124f, 129, 132,134,177,208,242 Modesty topos, 127 Montaigne: evolution, 28, 59, 209, 212, 233 fall from horse, 75 family, 1 father, 1 his tower, 57 ignorance, 87 kidney stone, 4, 179, 188, 199, 243 Latin inscription, 26, 55, 235 letter on La Boetie's death, 68 Mayor of Bordeaux, 33, 128, 130, 183, 225, 254 mementos, 119 name, 46, 124, 137 nobility, 141, 207 religion, 74, 99, 131, 159, 210f Roman citizenship, 138 Moraliste, 55, 58, 61, 94, 112, 114, 124, 132, 163, 170, 175, 177, 191f, 197, 208, 209, 215, 245 Mysticism, 234

Habit, 226 He~th,200, 201,229,237 History, 181, 194 Human nature, 30, 179, Chap. 11 passim, 197, 199 Humanism, 67, 68, 74, 108,179, 231

Nature, 181, 183, 196, 211, 229, 237 Nominalism, 97, 117 Old age, 181, 218, 219 Opinion, 227

320

MONTAIGNE'S SELF-PORTRAIT

Optimism, 210 Orderliness, 204 Pain, 188, 198, 244 Paradoxes, 107, 124f, 144f, 177, 185, 221, 224, 230 Passions, 228 Philosophy, 86, 87 Pleasure, 198f, 236 Poetry, 105, 133, 169 Portrait, 7, 8, 11-17, 72, 107, 146, 263 Portraitist, 61, 79, 112, 117, 147, 163,170,177,208 Presumption, 121, 124f, 146 Private life, 225f Prudery, 199 Pyrrhonism, 85, 91 Que Sfay-je?, 92

Reader, 104, 111, 168, 152f, 170 Reason, 89-95, 97, 102, 120, 193, 233 Renaissance, 6, 175, 186 Repentance, 237 Romanticism, 229, 239 Self, 78, 177, 235 affection for self, 228 body-soul, 217f character, 231f coherence, 220 definition, 25, 215f diversity, 113f ethics of selfhood, 140, 17 5, 177, 184, 215, 224f, 236 harmony, 190, 209, 211, 218f lack of coherence, 116 mind, 195, 213 self-control, 228 self-cultivation, 175, 185, 215, 230,239 self-improvement, 28, 208, 221, 233f uniqueness, 175 Self-awareness, 77, 144, 150, 168, 187f, 221, 223 Self-knowledge, 92, 127, Chap. 10 passim, 201, 224, 234 Self-observation, 221

Self-portrait, 4, 8, 37, 38, 45, 48, 50,176,220,228,245 a form of self-study, 262 accuracy, 5, 34, 137f, 246, 261 additions to the text, 47f affection for self, 145 ancient Egypt, 18 art of, 134, 248 assurance, 127, 131, 242 audience, 3, 111, 146, 161f autobiography, 26 by inventory, 132 character, 23, 241, 245 confession, 103, 247 decency, 248 defense of, 251 erudition, 4, 138, 143, 261 evolution, 123, 148 fidelity, 22 his faults, 134, 136, 141, 254 his virtues, 130, 136, 137, 228, 232,252f history, 28 honesty, 137f, 257 humanist, 170 in 1580, 119 in Of Smells (I, 55}, 62 indirection, 106£, 136, 147, 176 judgment, 122, 144f, 246 La Boetie's role in, 72 lover, 256 memento, 138 Middle Ages, 18 mirror image, 21 modesty, 141 natural, 249 nobility, 31, 137 nonchalance, 135, 138 obstacles, 20 Of Idleness (I, 8), 66 of the mind, 43 omissions, 244f originality, 103, 107, 241 physical, 128f presumption, 128, 148 print culture, 110f, 263 prudery, 5, 132 reason for, 19 Renaissance, 20 Saint Luke, 19 sculpture, 18 self-satisfaction, 257

321

INDEX

series of moments, 28, 32, 51, 135 skepticism, 94f soldier, 138 tone, 250 Travel Journal, 170 words as medium, 104, 105 writing as medium, 108 Self-possession, 215, 218, 224 Self-reference, 106, 125 Self-study, 79f, 110, 176, 180, 197, 209 Senses, 88f Septuagint, 174 Sin, 183 Sincerity, 7, 225 Skepticism, 85f, 100, 122, 164 Sleep, 81f, 188, 213 Soul, 90, 113 Speech act theory, 155 Stoicism, 68, 73, 74, 79, 202, 215, 224, 233, 252 Style, 260 accumulation, 78 audience, 153 dialogues, 149f digression, 41, 67 essaying, 79 exclamations, 152 images, 171, 176, 185

imperatives, 156 marginal passages, 50 Montaigne on, 105, 134 motions of the mind, 38f natural, 107 Of Idleness (I, 8), 66 personal, Chap. 9 passim pronouns, 153-55, 163, 219, 221, 222 prosopopoeia, 151 questions, 152 speech, 105, 109 speech acts, 157 Travel Journal, 170 Theology, 74 Tranquillity, 235 Travel Journal, 26, 139, 169f Trivial, 30, 179 Truth, 96 Vanity, 181, 184, 186, 190, 193, 209,213 Vice, 197 Virtue, 114, 197, 205 Will, 196 Wind, 213 Wisdom, 112, 184, 195, 209, 211f, 235