Now that I’ve begun to make up for my error in never writing about Marie de Gournay, I’m fascinated by her and have dug into Phillipe Desan’s book for more information. This might be a good time to point out that I’ve had to put down Desan’s book a couple times because it is so poorly edited and the mediocre translation doesn’t help either. It’s a difficult book to plow through, but it also contains some essential information and insights.
One thing I picked from Desan—which I need to use in my On Experience essay about Montaigne’s memory — is that he made heavy use of secretaries to compile his writing. So to the question of how Montaigne could really have as poor a memory as he claimed but also know so many learned quotations, the answer is likely that his secretaries either knew or looked up the citations for him. So a heavy revision of one essay is in order.
I raise this point because it’s only when Gournay comes on the scene where Montaigne decides to stop using secretaries and rely on her for assistance. Desan concludes that Gournay’s role in shaping and promoting the latter essays (and revisions of earlier ones) was immense:
Marie de Gournay occupies a crucial place in the publishing history of the Essais. During the first half of the seventeenth century she worked tirelessly to have the work of her “adopted father” (père d’alliance) reprinted and accompanied throughout her life this “orphan entrusted to her,” as she called the text of the Essais in the preface she addressed to Cardinal Richelieu in 1635.
In the autumn of 1588, he no longer had any hope of playing a political role. Nevertheless, he had met a young woman determined to devote the rest of her life to spreading the fame of her “adoptive father.” Although he had not yet realized the consequences of this meeting, Montaigne had just found the ideal literary agent who was to allow him soon to be recognized as a major author of the French Renaissance.
There’s a curious direct reference to Marie de Gournay that appears in some posthumous versions of the essays that Montaigne scholars have long considered something that she put into the text herself. But Desan isn’t convinced that Montaigne didn’t believe the sentiments expressed:
In another passage in the Exemplar that was used to compose the posthumous edition of 1595—but which, suspiciously, does not appear in the Bordeaux Copy—we find the following reference to Marie de Gournay: “She is now the only one I see in the world.” Montaigne describes an affection for the young woman that is “more than superabundant.” He then lauds this young prodigy’s intellectual feats and gives her, in book II, chapter 17, the title of “adoptive daughter” (fille d’alliance). The compliments go far beyond simple marks of friendship and suggest a more romantic adventure: “Her judgment of the first Essays, as a woman, and in this century, and so young, and alone in her region, and the extraordinary vehemence with which she loved and long desired me on the sole basis of the esteem she had for me, before she had seen me, is a circumstance very worthy of consideration.”Critics have often maintained that this passage could not have been written by Montaigne, and accused Gournay of having invented and imagined a relationship that she never had with the author of the Essais. Even if these words might have been added by Marie de Gournay, nothing allows us to assert that they are the result of fantasizing.
Desan believes that there was a some sort of romantic relationship between them, but whether that was also a sexual relationship is impossible to determine.
We can rightly speak of Marie’s fascination with Montaigne. At that time, she had not yet written anything, and it is not impossible that Montaigne found in her something other than an opportunity for erudite conversations about Plutarch and other philosophers. It has also been suggested that Marie de Gournay made use of him to advance her own career. That may not be entirely false, but Montaigne had done the same with La Boétie twenty years earlier. Hadn’t he given Marie to understand that he could help her in this domain? During his stay at Gournay, he even gave her a diamond: “the diamond bodkin he gave me bears the symbol of a double ‘m m’ in a circle.”157 This gift was very costly for a simple friendship, and may have had a more sentimental value.
It’s a fascinating angle to add to the Montaigne story, and one that opens up so many possibilities for my project.
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