Celebration of a Life: Michel de Montaigne
Died September 13, 1592 (age 59), Guyenne, France
Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates the French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne on the 432nd anniversary of his death. Describing his associative, introspective form of prose, Montaigne used the term essai, which means “trial” or “attempt,” and with it launched a new literary form combining the discursive contemplation of quotidian and philosophical subjects, literature, historical and contemporary events with personal anecdotes and lucid self-regard.
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“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
Excerpt from “Foreword,” by Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays 2018
“The room had three views: ‘at one sweep,’ he wrote, ‘I command a view of my household...and see below me my garden, my farmland, my courtyard, and into most parts of my house.’ The house, the Château de Montaigne, was built in the fourteenth century and purchased in 1477 by the essayist’s great-grandfather, Ramon Eyquem, a prosperous fish and wine merchant who laid the foundations of the family fortune. About thirty miles east of Bordeaux, the chateau has gone through many renovations, but the famous tower remains intact, a monument to the great writer who once resided there and its fortifications a reminder of the violent religious conflicts he endured. The chateau is where Montaigne will be born in 1533, grow up with Latin as his native tongue, be paternally indulged and spared a country life’s ordinary chores. And then in 1571 at the age of thirty-eight, shortly after his father’s death and the inheritance of both the estate and a large fortune, the chateau is where he will retire from public life and devote himself to study and leisurely reflection. The new lord of the manor will eventually abandon the family patronymic and assume the name of his beloved estate: Montaigne. Was ever a room, a study, a house, a piece of property, a person so closely attached to a literary genre?
“Situated on the third floor of one of the chateau’s stone towers, just above his bedroom, and two floors above his Catholic chapel, the library was his favorite place on earth. It had originally served as a wardrobe (une grande garderobe), which he considered the most useless room in the house and so converted it into a library when he established residence. A self-proclaimed klutz, inept at most practical endeavors, Montaigne surely had a talented carpenter construct the five semi-circular shelves that housed his personal collection of some one thousand books. He also probably didn’t paint the inscriptions from Greek and Latin authors on the room’s ceiling beams, some of which can still be seen. But it’s very likely he alone designed the interior space (including the 10’ x 8’ adjoining study with a fireplace for colder days) of his personal ‘kingdom,’ where he would spend so much time alone with his precious books and fluid thoughts. I’ve never visited the tower, and perhaps someday will, but in all of my reading and research I’ve also never come across any information from anyone about the dimensions of this historic library, even though it has been a prominent tourist site for centuries. My only information comes from Montaigne, who writes that the diameter of his library was seize pas—sixteen paces.
“Paces is perhaps the most accurate word, since Montaigne preferred to compose in motion (‘My mind will not budge unless my legs move it’), pacing back and forth, often dictating to someone who sat, one imagines quietly and patiently, at a small writing table facing the bookshelves. And this is how the modern essay takes its shape. A solitary, restless individual, perhaps one experiencing what we might call a ‘midlife crisis,’ circling the floor of his private study, now and then consulting one of his books, now and then peering out of one of his beloved windows to enjoy a momentary interruption of thought, and occasionally looking up at the ceiling for philosophical inspiration. And so, in a tentative fashion, he gradually figures out how to document his innermost thoughts and originate a suitable mode of vernacular expression. He had a later start than most. Although he had recently published a long translation of a theological work from Latin to please his father, he didn’t consider himself a writer or a scholar: he had no craft, no subjects, skills, or style. If, like some literary geniuses, he did have a sense of destiny, he presumably thought that his destiny would be achieved only if he avoided a destination. He didn’t retire with essays in mind. They slowly emerged out of the relentless reflective process, the endless pacing.”
“The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.”
First published work: Essais, 1580
The essays, Montaigne wrote, were “a register of varied and changing occurrences, of ideas which are unresolved and, when needs be, contradictory, either because I myself have become different or because I grasp hold of different attributes or aspects of my subjects. So I may happen to contradict myself but, as Demades said, I never contradict truth.”
English translations of Montaigne’s collected essays:
The essayes, or, Morall, politike and millitarie discourses of Lo. Michaell de Montaigne, Knight of the noble Order of St. Michaell, and one of the gentlemen in ordinary of the French King, Henry the Third his chamber : the first booke, translated by John Florio (Edward Blount, 1603). This is the edition Shakespeare read.
Essays of Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton (in 1685—86); revised by William Carew Hazlett (Edwin C. Hill, 1910).
The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957)
The Complete Essays, translated by M. A. Screech (Penguin Classics, 1991; rpt. 1993).
See also, works by authors whose essays have appeared in The Best American Essays series (R) or have been listed in Notables (N):
Robert Atwan, “Foreword,” The Best American Essays 2018 (Foreword)
Robert Atwan, “Of Essays and Essayists,” The Best American Essays 2015 (Foreword)
Jane Kramer, “Me, Myself, and I,” The New Yorker, 2007 (R)
Judith Hertog, “Running with Montaigne,” Crab Orchard Review, 2019 (N)
Patricia Hampl, “Montaigne's Lute,” Gulf Coast, 2015 (N)
Robert D. Zaretsky, “Montaigne's Foot,” Southwest Review, 2002 (N)
Hilary Masters, “In Montaigne's Tower,” The Ohio Review, 1998 (N)
Carl H. Klaus, “Montaigne on His Essays: Towards a Poetics of the Self,” Iowa Review, 1992 (N)
Robert Martin Adams, “Montaigne and the Ladies,” Hudson Review, 1991 (N)
Monroe K. Spears, “Montaigne Our Contemporary,” Hudson Review, 1989 (N)
Notable books inspired by or about Montaigne:
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Bakewell (Vintage, 2011).
After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays, edited by David Lazar and Patrick Madden (U Georgia Press, 2017).
Recommended by Robert Atwan, founding editor, The Best American Essays series:
Biographies
Donald M. Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). An attractive reprint was published by North Point Press in 1984. Read a review from the New York Review of Books, November 1965.
Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, first published in Germany in 1949. In 1991 University of California Press published a translation by Dawn Eng. An academic and far-ranging biography.
Criticism
A useful critical collection was published by the Modern Language Association in 1994 as part of their "Approaches to Teaching" series: Montaigne's Essays, edited by Patrick Henry.
Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion. First published in French in 1982, it was translated by Arthur Goldhammer for the University of Chicago Press in 1985.
Philip P. Hallie, The Scar of Montaigne: An Essay in Personal Philosophy (Wesleyan University Press, 1966 ).
A monumental essay is the chapter on Montaigne in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (A, Francke, 1946); translation by Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1953); expanded edition with an introduction by Edward W. Said (Princeton University Press, 2013)
(Switzerland: A. Francke, 1946). A translation by Willard Trask was published in 1953 by Princeton University Press. In 2013 they published an expanded edition with an introduction by Edward W. Said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," in Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1850).
See also:
Of recent note:
Michel de Montaigne, “On Pedantry,” translated by Tess Lewis, The Hudson Review, Summer 2024. Includes an afterword by the translator.