[back]
***
2. An at-the-time disproportionate-seeming number of Montaigne’s earliest readers were female, and he was made fun of for it. He dedicated several of his pieces to women and boasted that he would come to know more about that sex than any man before, because his book would become a tiny Trojan horse that would carry him even into their bedrooms, even into their toilettes. Among his most passionate early defenders, and his first posthumous editor, was the great Marie le Jars de Gournay, whom he called his fille d’alliance (something between a goddaughter and a female apprentice). Good on this topic is Grace Norton’s Montaigne: His Personal Relations to Some of His Contemporaries, and His Literary Relations to Some Later Writers, which mentions the “peculiar interest Montaigne has inspired through all generations in women.”
[back]
***
3. Read Pierre Villey’s Montaigne en Angleterre for both a tour de force treatment of this subject and an amusing instance of the French attitude to it, which is (or was for a long time) that we English are a little bit weird about Montaigne. Every country treasures him, but England has loved him. In the nineteenth century we tried to claim him, Villey points out, by seizing on a claim he makes, at one point in the Essais, that his father’s family was descended from one situated in England and that he could recall seeing, as a boy, English relics in Eyquem family homes. Genealogies were drawn, more wishfully than carefully, tracing Eyquem back to Ockham. That would explain the English fixation on Montaigne, our drive to emulate him. He was really ours.
[back]
***
4. Notice the self-canceling doubleness of even his syntax there. Those other pieces can’t be “essays” (looser meaning) because they’re strong, and able to endure the sharpest “trial” (stricter meaning). Cornwallis seems to be winking at us there, letting us know that he knows that the whole problem of the word is a linguistic ouroboros. Takeaway being, 1601 and you already have the ironic essay about essays.
[back]
The Best American Essays 2014 Page 31