How to Live (47 page)

By now, she was going through difficult times in other ways too. Her mother died in 1591 and Marie inherited major family debts as well as responsibility for her younger siblings. Determined not to enter a loveless
marriage for money, she set out to live purely by writing—a tough path, almost unprecedented for a woman. For the rest of her life, she wrote about any subject she thought might sell—analyses of poetry and style, feminism, religious controversy, the story of her own life—and used all the literary connections she could find. Justus Lipsius was one of the writers she sought out to help her promote her work. But none was more important than the mentor with whom her name would always remain linked: Montaigne.

Skillful use of his reputation brought about her first big breakthrough when, in 1594, she published a novel entitled
Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne
(The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne). The contents had nothing to do with him at all, apart from the fact that—as she wrote in the dedicatory epistle—it had been inspired by a story she had told him one day as they strolled in her family’s garden. In fact the
Proumenoir
’s exotic romp of a narrative was stolen almost entirely from a book by another author.
It did extremely well, and paved the way for the book which really began Gournay’s career: her great definitive edition of the
Essays
, published in 1595.

The idea of her becoming Montaigne’s editor and literary executor apparently arose only after his death, when his widow and daughter found one of his annotated copies of the 1588 edition among his papers. They sent it to Gournay in Paris, so that she might publish it. Perhaps they only wanted her to deliver it to a suitable printer, but she interpreted it as a major editorial commission and set to work. It proved a huge task, one so difficult that it still overwhelms editors more experienced and well equipped than she. To this day, no one can agree about it, so many are the variants, so complex the text, and so great the work of identifying all Montaigne’s references and allusions. Yet Gournay did the job brilliantly. Perhaps she yielded to temptation in adding those suspicious lines about herself, or perhaps they were genuine, but on the whole she was more meticulous about accuracy than most editors of her time. Surviving copies of the book’s first printing show that she continued to make last-minute ink corrections even while sheets were coming off the press, as well as after publication—a sign of how much she cared about getting everything right.

From now on, she would be less a daughter to Montaigne than an adoptive mother to his
Essays
. “Having lost their father,” she wrote, “the
Essais
are in need of a protector.” She put the book together, but she also
championed it, defended it, promoted it, and—in this first edition—equipped it with a long, combative preface which set out to defeat any hint of criticism in advance. Most of her arguments were rational and tightly constructed, but she seasoned them with plenty of emotion. Against those who considered his style vulgar or impure, she wrote, “When I defend him against such charges, I am full of scorn.” And, concerning the allegation that he wrote in a disorganized manner: “One cannot deal with great affairs according to small intelligences … Here is not the elementary knowledge of an apprentice but the Koran of the masters, the quintessence of philosophy.”

Nor was she satisfied if people praised the
Essays
faintly. “Whoever says of Scipio that he is a noble captain and of Socrates that he is a wise man does them more wrong than one who does not speak of them at all.” You cannot write in measured tones about Montaigne: “Excellence exceeds all limits.” (So much for Montaigne’s idea of moderation.) You must be “ravished,” as she had been. On the other hand, you should be able to say
why
you have been ravished: to compare him point by point to the ancients and show exactly where he is their equal, and where their superior. The
Essays
always seemed to Gournay the perfect intelligence test. Having asked people what they thought of the book, she deduced what she should think of them. Diderot would make almost the same observation of Montaigne in a later century: “His book is the touchstone of a sound mind. If a man dislikes it, you may be sure that he has some defect of the heart or understanding.”

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.

Gournay was happy to acknowledge that she remained in Montaigne’s shadow: “I cannot take a step, whether in writing or speaking, without finding myself in his footsteps.”
In reality her own personality comes through loud and clear, often in ways that are at odds with his. When she extols Montaignean virtues such as moderation, she does it in her crashingly immoderate way. Advocating the arts of Stoic detachment and of slipping quietly through life, she does it emotionally and abrasively. This makes her edition a fascinating wrestling match between two writers, just as happens with Montaigne and Florio, or even Montaigne and La Boétie, in the first stirrings of the conversation that became the
Essays
.

In many ways, this was a literary partnership of the same sort, but very much complicated by the fact of Marie de Gournay’s being a woman. It annoyed her that it was never taken as seriously as other such relationships—and neither was she. Ridicule followed her through life; she never found a way of shrugging it off. Instead, she raged. Some of this rage finds its way into the
Essays’
preface: the writer sometimes seems to reach right through the page to grab male readers by the lapels and berate them. “Blessed indeed are you, Reader, if you are not of a sex that has been forbidden all possessions, is forbidden liberty, has even been forbidden all the virtues.”
The most fatuous men are listened to with respect, by virtue of their beards, yet when she ventures a contribution everyone smiles condescendingly, as if to say, “It’s a woman speaking.” Had Montaigne been subjected to such treatment, he might have responded with a smile too, but Gournay did not have this gift. The more she let her anger show, the more people laughed. Yet this sense of strain and anguish makes her a compelling writer. The preface is not just the earliest published introduction to Montaigne’s canonical work; it is also one of the world’s first and most eloquent feminist tracts.

This may seem odd for a text introducing Montaigne, who was not obviously a great feminist himself. But Gournay’s feminism remained closely tied to her “Montaignism.” Her belief that men and women were equal—neither being superior to the other, though different in experience and situation—was in tune with his relativism. She took inspiration from his insistence on questioning received social assumptions, and his willingness to leap between different people’s points of view. For Gournay,
if men could exert their imagination to see the world as a woman sees it, even for a few minutes, they would learn enough to change their behavior forever.
Yet this leap of perspective was just what they never seemed to manage.

Shortly after publication, alas, Gournay had second thoughts about her blistering preface. By this time she was staying on the Montaigne estate, as a guest of Montaigne’s widow, mother, and daughter, who had apparently taken her in out of friendship, loyalty, or sympathy. From their home, she wrote to Justus Lipsius on May 2, 1596, saying that she had written the preface only because she was overwhelmed by grief at Montaigne’s death, and that she wished to withdraw it. Its excessive tone, she now said, was the result of “a violent fever of the soul.” Shortly after this, sending copies to publishers in Basel, Strasbourg, and Antwerp, she axed the preface and replaced it with a brief, dull note just ten lines long. The original stayed in Gournay’s bottom drawer, and parts of it resurfaced in a different form in a 1599 edition of the
Proumenoir
. Later still, she repented of her repentance altogether, perhaps coming to a late Montaignean sense of defiance. The last editions of the
Essays
in her lifetime restored the preface in all its excess and glory.

All these successive
Essays
editions, together with a sequence of lesser and often more contentious works, kept Gournay going through her advancing years. Somehow, she did what she had set out to do: she lived by her pen. By now she had returned to Paris, and there occupied a garret with a single faithful servant, Nicole Jamyn. She ran an occasional salon, and threw herself into friendships with some of the most interesting men of her day, including
libertins
such as François le Poulchre de la Motte-Messemé and François de La Mothe le Vayer. Many people suspected her of being a
libertine
and religious freethinker herself. She did write, in her autobiographical
Peincture de moeurs
, that she lacked the deep piety she would have liked to have, perhaps a hint that she was an out-and-out unbeliever.

Gournay’s books sold, but the publicity that made it happen often took the form of scandal or public mockery. This never focused on the
Essays
, at least not in her lifetime, nor even on her various feminist writings. Mostly, she was ridiculed for her own unorthodox lifestyle or her lesser polemical works. At times, she gained a grudging respect. In 1634 she became one of
the founders of the influential Académie française, but two great ironies hover over this achievement.
One is that, as a woman, she was never admitted to any of that organization’s meetings. The other is that the Académie associated itself for centuries with exactly the arid, perfectionist style of writing that Gournay herself detested.
It lent no support either to her own views on literary language or to her beloved Montaigne.

Gournay died on July 13, 1645, just before her eightieth birthday. Her graven epitaph described her just as she would have liked: as an independent writer, and as Montaigne’s daughter. Like his, her posthumous reputation was destined to be twisted into bizarre shapes by changing fashions.
The exuberant writing style she preferred remained out of favor for a long time. One eighteenth-century commentator wrote: “Nothing can equal the praise she received in her lifetime: but we can no longer give her such eulogy, and whatever merit she may have had as a person, her works are no longer read by anyone and have slipped into an oblivion from which they will never emerge.”

The one thing that continued to sell was her edition of Montaigne. But this in turn attracted jealousy, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries started to see her as a leech on Montaigne’s back. This interpretation had some truth in it, since she did use Montaigne to survive, but it ignored the extent to which she promoted and defended him as well. The sheer intensity of this devotion could attract suspicion. In the twentieth century, she was still being described by one Montaigne editor, Maurice Rat, as “a white-haired old maid … who made the mistake of living too long” and whose “aggressive or grumpy attitude” did more harm than good.
Even the judicious scholar Pierre Villey, who generally took her side, could not resist poking fun sometimes, and he resented her attempt to set her friendship with Montaigne alongside La Boétie’s. In general, the Gournay/Montaigne friendship continued to be judged by different criteria from the Montaigne/La Boétie one. The latter is lauded, deconstructed, theorized, analyzed, eroticized, and psychoanalyzed to within an inch of its life. Gournay’s “adoption” has long passed with little more than one of those patronizing smiles that used to annoy her so.

In recent years much has changed, mainly because of the rise of feminism, which recognizes her as a pioneer. Her first great modern champion was a
man, Mario Schiff, who wrote a full biographical study in 1910 and published new editions of her feminist works. Since then the journey has been ever upwards. Marjorie Henry Ilsley ended her 1963 biography,
A Daughter of the Renaissance
, with a chapter entitled “Marie de Gournay’s Ascending Fortune”; since then, she has climbed even higher, with fresh biographies and scholarly editions of her works coming out regularly, as well as novelizations of her life.

More recently still, there has been a shift in attitudes to her 1595 edition of the
Essays
—which fell into disuse for a hundred years or so, following its first three centuries of unquestioned dominance. Having sunk to the deepest sea bed in the twentieth century, remembered only in a few footnotes, it is now bobbing up again. It seems to have all the formidable resilience of Marie de Gournay herself.

The rejection of Gournay’s edition became most severe at the very moment that her general reputation began to revive. This strange fact has a simple explanation. Before that, her text had no rival; it was immaterial what readers thought of her personality. But in the late eighteenth century a different text did turn up in the archives of Bordeaux: a copy of the 1588 edition, closely annotated in Montaigne’s own hand as well as those of secretaries and assistants, including Marie de Gournay herself.

This “Bordeaux Copy,” as it became known, still did not attract much attention until the late nineteenth century, when scholars developed a taste for poring over the minutiae of such texts. It now emerged that the Bordeaux Copy and Gournay’s 1595 edition were similar in soft focus, but not in detail. Several thousand differences existed, scattered like grit through the book. Of these about a hundred were significant enough to change the meaning, while a few were very major, including the section praising Marie de Gournay herself. Actually all the differences were equally important, for they implied that Gournay had not been a careful editor after all. She had been incompetent at best, and fraudulent at worst. This conclusion sparked an anti-Gournay backlash, followed by a series of
editing wars which ran through the early twentieth century, and which (after a lull) are raging again today.