Montaigne - Essays

The September 7, 2009 issue of the New Yorker magazine has a fine article about Michel E. Montaigne.  It is well-worth reading as an introduction to the man who invented the "essai."

Literary Lives

Me, Myself, and I

What made Michel de Montaigne the first modern man?

by Jane Kramer, September 7, 2009

ABSTRACT: LITERARY LIVES about Michel de Montaigne. Every French schoolchild learns the date: February 28, 1571, the day that the educated nobleman Michel de Montaigne retired from court and public duties, retreated into the tower of his family castle, near Bordeaux, shut the door, and began to write. It was his thirty-eighth birthday. His plan was to spend the second half of his life looking at himself. Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called “essais.” His first two books of essays appeared in 1580. By the time he published a third book, in 1588, everyone in France with a philosophic bent and a classical education had read the first two. His books were utterly original. They were not confessional nor were they autobiographical. They made no claim to composing the narrative of a life, only of the shifting preoccupations of their protagonist in an ongoing conversation with the Greek and Roman writers on his library shelves—and, of course, with himself. His belief that the self, far from settling the question “Who am I?,” kept leaping ahead of its last convictions was so radical that some describe Montaigne as “the first modern man.” He left his tower in 1580 for a year of traveling. He left it again in 1581 to become the mayor of Bordeaux. He was also a close friend and confidant of Henri de Navarre, as well as his emissary to the court of Henri III. Mentions Montaigne’s wife, Françoise de la Chassaigne. Describes the sour relationship he had with his mother, Antoinette Louppes de Villeneuve. “On Vanity,” perhaps Montaigne’s greatest essay, is a meditation on dying and, at the same time, on writing. It draws pretty much the whole cast of characters from his library into the conversation. The penultimate pages are an homage to Rome. But he ends the essay in the oracular heart of Greece, with the Delphic admonition to “know thyself,” and in a few pages turns the idea of vanity on its head, defending his pursuit of himself as the only knowledge he, or anyone, can hope to gain. It is the one argument for a “truth” he makes in a hundred and seven essays. Mentions Étienne de la Boétie. Montaigne was seven years into the essays when he suffered his first serious attack of kidney stones. When Navarre succeeded to the throne, in 1589, becoming Henry IV, Montaigne wrote to volunteer his services again. In July of 1590, Henry summoned Montaigne to court, but by September Montaigne was too sick to travel. He died at the age of fifty-nine.