I’ve written about Montaigne for 13 years without ever mentioning Marie Le Jars de Gournay. This is an oversight on my part, because Sarah Bakewell, whose book “How to Live” introduced me to Montaigne, devoted a full chapter to de Gournay.
Where to even begin with Montaigne’s most devoted reader, friend, “adopted daughter,” editor and eventual executor of his work? She was only 23 years old when she met Montaigne, and by then she was already obsessed with the essays. But I’ll let Terrence Cave more fully describe her:
Montaigne’s implication that the very best readers, the ones who will really get the point, are few and far between is given substance by the arrival on the scene, in the later part of his life, of just such a reader. This was a young woman called Marie de Gournay, whose fascination with the Essais led her to contact their author and embark on a close friendship with him, one that no doubt compensated in some sense for the loss of his ideal friend Estienne de La Boétie; in due course, she became what he called his ‘adoptive daughter’. After his death, she was responsible for seeing further editions of the Essais through the press, the last appearing as late as 1635. She also acted as an ardent advocate of his work against a whole range of early critical reactions, and may be regarded as an essential vehicle of transference between the reception of the work in Montaigne’s lifetime and its future horizons of reception. In the long apologetic preface she wrote for the posthumous 1595 edition, she picks up Montaigne’s own remark that the Essais are ‘not for beginners’ (III.8: ‘On the art of conversing’). People complain that they are obscure, she says, but ‘This book is not an elementary manual for apprentices: it is the masters’ Koran, the quintessence of philosophy: a work not for tasting but for digesting and chylifying, the last book one should take up and the last one should put down.’
While no one knows for sure what happened at the first meeting, Bakewell speculates that Montaigne might have tried to seduce her—but she turned the tables on him and somehow got him to agree to refer to her as his “adopted daughter” from then on.
She was unquestionably brilliant and her own essays are studied now as one of the earliest examples of feminist writing. She gained Montaigne’s trust in little time and was an important influence on the third (and in my judgment, best) volume of essays.Bakewell wrote this about her:
But Marie de Gournay had the right to expect a great deal from her readers, for she was an excellent reader of Montaigne herself. For all her excesses, she had an astute grasp of why the Essays were fit to place among the classics. At a time when many persisted in seeing the book mainly as a collection of Stoic sayings—a valid interpretation so far as it went—she admired it for less usual things: its style, its rambling structure, its willingness to reveal all. It was partly Gournay’s feeling that everyone around her was missing the point that created the long-lasting myth of a Montaigne somehow born out of his time, a writer who had to wait to find readers able to recognize his value. Out of an author who had made himself very popular while barely seeming to exert himself, she made Montaigne into a misunderstood genius.
So, to the question of whether my inclusion (and sometimes obsession) with my “reader” is appropriate to an examination of Montaigne, I answer emphatically in the affirmative. I am fortunate to have my own version of Marie Le Jars de Gournay, whoever she may be. Long may she speak through the work.
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