'Cultivation As a Proficient Amateur'

Perhaps the most interesting and even important person in Montaigne’s life – especially for his readers -- was not his wife nor his friend Étienne de La Boétie, whose death in 1563 left him bereft, but Marie de Gournay (1565-1645), the model of an autodidact, who taught herself Latin and translated Sallust, Ovid, Virgil and Tacitus. She wrote poetry and befriended Montaigne in 1588, four years before his death. Her first book, published in 1594, was Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne. After the essayist died, his widow, Françoise de la Chassaigne, gave Gournay a copy of the Essays and asked her to see them into print. In 1595 she published the first posthumous edition of the book, followed three years later by a revised edition. 

In 1588, Gournay became Montaigne’s fille d’alliance, a phrase for which there is no precise equivalent in English. In his 1965 biography of Montaigne, Donald Frame writes: “Usually rendered ‘adoptive daughter’ or ‘covenant daughter,’ this title was one of many by which often, in Montaigne’s times, persons unrelated by blood laid mutual claim to spiritual kinship.”

 

Frame describes Gournay at the time of their first meeting as “an intense young woman of twenty-two, highly emotional and intellectual, not ugly but not by any means beautiful, with a broad forehead, wide-set eyes, straight nose, small mouth, and an expression both wistful and imperious.”

 

It’s not excessive to say Gournay “fell” for Montaigne, though the relationship was never romantic and occasionally resembles a rock star/groupie pairing minus the sex. “Her devotion to him is unquestionable. A romantic, idealistic young bluestocking and apparently a born old maid . . . [s]he was to spend much of her life,” Frame writes, “as his executrix, editor, and archdefender against all critics.” Frame suggests Gournay may have altered and “embellished” several passages in her edited versions of the Essays to flatter herself.

 

“In short, I cannot believe that Montaigne had anything like the feeling for Marie de Gournay that she had for him. An amiable man not accustomed to adulation, he was probably not immune to it. . . . Ailing and close to death, he basked in the warmth of the worshipful love.”

 

In other words, both teacher and disciple were eminently human. I find Gournay interesting because of her autodidactic drive, her love of learning outside of a formal education. In From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000), Jaques Barzun describes Gournay as “the adopted daughter of Montaigne (she adopted him), [who] did go in for philosophy. She was a woman of prodigious erudition, hobnobbing in Paris with all the leading celebrities. She edited two enlarged editions of Montaigne’s Essays, wrote a Defense of Poetry, a discourse On the French Language, a tract On the Small Value of Noble Rank. Most important, she wrote The Equality of Men and Women.” In a related passage Barzun writes:                                                                                                                   

“Actually, the true Renaissance man should not be defined by genius, which is rare, or even by the numerous performing talents of an [Leon Battista] Alberti. It is best defined by variety of interests and their cultivation as a proficient amateur.”