How to Live (48 page)

The battle followed the rules of classical warfare, focusing on sieges of key strongholds and access to supplies. Armies of rival transcribers and editors attacked the Bordeaux Copy, working at roughly the same time, looking over each other’s shoulders, and doing all they could to block each other’s path to the precious object. Each contrived his own technique for reading the faded ink, and for representing the various levels of addition and augmentation, as well as different hands. Some got so bogged down in methodology that they made no further progress. One early transcriber, Albert Caignieul, wrote to his employers at the Bordeaux Library explaining why it was taking him so long to produce anything:

When, a few years later, he was challenged again—there being still no sign of any completed transcription—he tried a different tack:

Nothing ever came of Caignieul’s project, but others achieved better results. By the early 1900s, three different versions were in production, one an “Edition Phototypique,” which merely reproduced the volumes in facsimile. The other two were the Edition Municipale, directed by bumptious scholar Fortunat Strowski, and the Edition Typographique, directed by the equally opinionated and difficult Arthur-Antoine Armaingaud. They took it in turns to overtake each other, like two very slow racehorses on a long
course. Strowski won the first lap, bringing out his first two volumes in 1906 and 1909. He then boasted that no other edition would ever be necessary, and persuaded the Bordeaux repository to impose tough new working conditions on Armaingaud, including finger-numbingly low ambient temperatures and the requirement that all pages be read through thick panes of green or red glass to protect them from light. Armaingaud struggled on; his first volume appeared in 1912—though he gave it the false date 1906 to make it look to posterity as though it had appeared at the same time as Strowski’s.

The game continued. For a while, Armaingaud edged ahead, but his subsequent volumes got stuck in the pipeline. He also isolated himself with his tendency to promote unusual opinions about Montaigne, notably the idea that he was the true author of
On Voluntary Servitude
. Not unlike Marie de Gournay before him, and many literary theorists after, Armaingaud liked to think of Montaigne as having secret levels of meaning which only he could decipher. As one of his enemies sarcastically put it: “He alone knows him in depth, he alone knows his secrets, he alone can speak of him, in his name, interpret his thought.” At least Armaingaud kept up a trickle of output, but Strowski now became distracted by other projects and failed to finish the last volume of his edition. The Bordeaux authorities funding him eventually passed the work to someone else, François Gébelin, who produced the final volume in 1919—fifty years after the idea had first been proposed. Volumes of commentary and concordance followed in 1921 and 1933, produced by the astute Montaignist who now took over the project, Pierre Villey, a man whose achievement was the more noteworthy because he had been blind since the age of three. He finished his work in time for Bordeaux’s celebrations of Montaigne’s four hundredth birthday in 1933—only to have the organizers of the festivities forget to invite him. Meanwhile, Armaingaud also finished his version, so the world was, at last, presented with two fine transcriptions of the
Essays
. Both books had a key feature in common: having worked so hard to get access to the physical Bordeaux Copy, their editors were determined to stick to it, and to ignore Marie de Gournay’s readily available published version almost entirely. They also shared a highly un-Montaignesque tendency to consider themselves the source of the final, unchallengeable word on all matters of
Essays
textual scholarship.

These two editions set the tone for the rest of the century.
From now on, the 1595 version would be used only as a source of occasional variant wordings, to be flagged in footnotes. Even this was done only where the difference seemed significant. Otherwise, small variations were taken as a sign of Marie de Gournay’s poor editing, and of the 1595 text’s corrupt state. Gournay was assumed to have done just what they did—transcribe the Bordeaux Copy—but to have made a hash of it.

As long ago as 1866, however, an alternative explanation had already been put forward, by Reinhold Dezeimeris.
Gournay could have done an excellent editing job, he suggested, but on a different copy. It took a while before this idea sank in. Once it did, it won increasing numbers of followers, some of whom worked out in detail how the switching of copies could have happened.

If this theory is true, the story probably began with Montaigne working on the Bordeaux Copy for several years, as its supporters always thought. At a certain point, however, it became so overloaded with notes that it was barely usable. Frustrated with its messiness, Montaigne had a clean copy made—no longer extant, but now dubbed the “Exemplar” for convenience. He carried on making additions to this, mostly minor, for he was almost at the end of his working life by now. When he died, the Exemplar
—not
the Bordeaux Copy—was sent to Marie de Gournay for her to edit and publish. This would explain why it does not survive: authors’ manuscripts or marked-up earlier editions were normally destroyed as part of the printing process. Meanwhile, the unused Bordeaux Copy remained intact, like the skin-shell left hooked on a tree when a cicada outgrows it and moves on.

The hypothesis is neat; it accounts for both the survival of the Bordeaux Copy and its textual divergences. It accords with what is known of Marie de Gournay’s editorial practice; it would have been odd for her to pay minute attention to last-minute corrections, as she did, if she was so careless with her work in the first place. If accepted, the consequences are dramatic. It means that her 1595 publication, rather than the Bordeaux Copy, is the closest approximation to a final version of the
Essays
as Montaigne would have wanted it to be, and thus that most twentieth-century editing is a misguided blip in history.

Naturally, this debate has thrown the Montaigne world into turmoil, and
has sparked a conflict every bit as heated as those of a hundred years ago. Some editors have now dramatically reversed the hierarchy by consigning Bordeaux Copy variants to the humble spot in the footnotes which Gournay occupied for so long, notably the Pléiade edition of 2007 edited by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-Simonin.
Other scholars still support the Bordeaux Copy. It thrives particularly in a 1998 edition by André Tournon, which surpasses earlier editions in its devotion to the microscopic detail of that text. It incorporates Montaigne’s own punctuation choices and marks, previously glossed over or modernized—as if to emphasize its physical proximity to Montaigne’s hand and to his intentions. It is as if he is still holding the pen, dripping ink.

When the dust settles—assuming it does—a standard will be established for the coming century. There will be several consequences for all Montaigne readers. New editions are likely to foreground one text or the other rather than amalgamating them, since the importance of the variations is now so well appreciated. If Gournay wins, a page of Montaigne may also come to look simpler, for it could reduce the desire for the visually disruptive sprinkling of “A,” “B,” and “C” letters signifying different layers of composition. They would still be of interest, but they were first put in by editors working from the Bordeaux Copy whose motivation was partly to make their hard work fully visible. Gournay herself never thought of doing such a thing; nor did Montaigne. There would also be consequences for Montaigne readers in languages other than French. A new English translation would be urgently needed, since the two otherwise excellent ones that dominate the market now, by Donald Frame and M. A. Screech, are firmly of the Bordeaux Copy era. We would go back predominantly to the source text used by John Florio, Charles Cotton, and the Hazlitt dynasty.

Whatever happens, this is unlikely to be the end of the story. Disputes will continue, perhaps only about the placement of commas. It would be hard, now, to maintain the hubristic Strowskian belief that a perfect final edition can ever be created. In fact, the
Essays
can never truly be said to be finished. Montaigne the man may have hung up his boots and abandoned his quill, but, so long as readers and editors disagree about the results, Montaigne the author has never quite put that final ink mark on the page.

Montaigne knew very well that, the minute you publish a book, you lose control of it. Other people can do what they like: they can edit it into strange forms, or impose interpretations upon it that you would never have dreamed of. Even an unpublished manuscript can get out of hand, as happened with La Boétie’s
On Voluntary Servitude
.

In Montaigne’s and La Boétie’s time, the absence of copyright law and the admiration of copying as a literary technique allowed even more freedom than would be expected today. Anyone who took a fancy to certain bits of the
Essays
could publish them separately; they could abridge or enlarge the whole, strip out sections they didn’t like, rearrange the order, or publish it under a different name. A dozen or so chapters could be extracted and turned into a slim, manageable volume, providing a valuable service to readers whose biceps would not support the full tome. A decluttering service could be offered: confronted with a twenty-page Montaigne ramble, a bold redactor such as “Honoria” could cut it down to two pages which—un-Montaignean notion!
—seemed to address the point announced in the title.

Some editors have been even more interventionist than this. Instead of slicing off choice cuts here and there, they have rolled up their sleeves and plunged their hands right into the
Essays
to dismember it like a chicken and make an entirely new creature of it. The outstanding representative of these is also the earliest and most famous: Montaigne’s friend and near-contemporary Pierre Charron, who produced a seventeenth-century best seller called
La Sagesse
(Wisdom).
Montaigne would barely have recognized himself in it, but it is essentially the
Essays
by another name and in a different format. It has been called a “remake”; one could also call it a “remix,” but neither term captures quite how far it departs in spirit from the original. Charron created a Montaigne devoid of idiosyncratic details, of quotations or digressions, of rough edges, and of personal revelations of any kind. He gave readers something they could argue with, or agree with if they wished: a set of statements that no longer slithered away from interpretation or evaporated like a fog. From Montaigne’s rambling thoughts on a topic such as the relation of humans to animals, he put together the following neat structure:

(illustration credit i18.4)

1. Features common to animals and humans
   
2. Features not common to humans and animals
   
   1. Features advantageous to human beings
      
   2. Features advantageous to animals
      
      1. General
         
      2. Particular
         
   3. Features of disputable advantage
      

It is impressive, and dull—so dull that
La Sagesse
met with immense success. Encouraged by this, Charron compressed it even further to produce an abridged
Petit traité de la sagesse
. This sold well too: both went into numerous editions. As the seventeenth century went on, more and more readers encountered their Montaigne in a Charronized form, which was partly why they were able to understand and tackle his Pyrrhonian Skepticism so analytically. (If Pascal still found him infuriatingly elusive, it was because he actually read the original.) Marie de Gournay, however, did not approve of Charron. In the preface to her 1635 edition of the
Essays
she dismissed him as a “bad copyist,” and remarked that the only good thing to be said for reading him was that he reminded you of the genius of the real Montaigne.

Charron’s successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remixed Montaigne even further, and sometimes they remixed Charron too. While the
Essays
remained on the
Index
, remixes and remakes were the only form in
which the book could be published in France. The market was therefore flooded with slim, uncredited Montaignes, or with works whose titles evoked purified essences:
L’Esprit des Essais de Montaigne
(The Spirit of the Essays of Montaigne), or
Pensées de Montaigne
(Thoughts of Montaigne).
This last purged him so thoroughly that the book runs only to 214 small pages, introduced by the remark, “There are few books so bad that nothing good can be found in them, and few so good that they contain nothing bad.”