SOURCE: Horowitz, Maryanne Cline. “Marie de Gournay, Editor of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne: A Case-Study in Mentor-Protégée Friendship.” The Sixteenth-Century Journal 17, no. 3 (fall 1986): 271-84.

[In the following essay, Horowitz demonstrates how the mentor/protégé relationship between Montaigne and de Gournay influenced de Gournay's artistic maturation and her evolving concept of the nature of friendship.]

In Paris in the spring of 1588, a mutual friendship developed between the fifty-five-year-old, married essayist and former mayor of Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne, and a twenty-two-year-old, self-taught, unmarried admirer of the Essais, Marie de Gournay. Later that year Montaigne visited his “fille d'alliance,” covenant daughter, Marie at her family estate at Gournay-sur-Aronde on several visits between working on a new edition of the Essais and negotiating for a political peace between Henry of Navarre and King Henry III. Her walks with Michel de Montaigne are immortalized in the curious title of her first novella, which she sent to him shortly afterwards, Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne par sa fille d'alliance. They corresponded for the next four years. In May or June 1593, when a letter arrived from Justus Lipsius, Marie learned of Montaigne's death in September 1592. Grief-stricken over this event, as well as over the recent death of her mother, Marie de Gournay continued her friendship with Montaigne, one that had begun for her not in 1588 but in 1584 when she had first read the Essais and had found in his thoughts a kindred mind. A year and a half after Montaigne's death, his widow Françoise de La Chassaigne sent to Marie de Gournay in Paris one of the final drafts of the Essais to have them printed. Françoise also included Marie de Gournay's novella, which had been found in his papers, and invited Marie to visit with her and her daughter Léonor. Marie published her novella that year, and in the following year produced the 1595 posthumous edition of the Essais with a long preface by herself as editor. Her literary career begun, she spent about sixteen months from 1595 through early 1597 at the chateau of Montaigne. Here she continued her friendship with Montaigne through friendship with his widow and daughter and through long hours of work in the tower lined with the thousands of volumes which had inspired Montaigne's essays. Eight more editions of the Essais were to appear through her editorship, most notably the 1598 edition, containing Montaigne's additions found in the chateau, the 1617 edition, which was the first to include translations of the Latin quotes and to designate the sources cited, and the 1635 edition, dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu. An aging woman of letters who conversed and corresponded with major scholars of her day, Marie de Gournay produced a great variety of poetic and philosophical literary works which she collected together in a volume of over one thousand pages in 1626, 1634, and again in 1641. Until her death on 14 July 1645 she defended Michel de Montaigne against the literary critics who had little praise for the French style he represented.¹

While Marie de Gournay's literary works are gaining in scholarly attention, my historical interest focuses on the formative years in which she initiated unique female paths to gaining an education and establishing herself in literary circles. Particularly noteworthy was her creative building of a mentor-protégée relationship with a male mentor. What Marie did was to extrapolate from the title Michel de Montaigne had given her, “fille d'alliance,” to refer to Montaigne as her “père,” her literary father, one might say.

To write on Marie de Gournay without entering the realm of ridicule or polemics typical of the previous scholarship is still a challenge. On the one hand, from the initial response to her preface of 1595, where she proclaimed her friendship with Montaigne and where her argumentative self-educated style stood out in marked contrast with the subtlety and nuances of Montaigne, Marie de Gournay was an object of ridicule and humor. One might well imagine the laughter at her claim that her recognition of Montaigne's greatness indicated the greatness of her own mind, that his friendship with her replaced his much missed friendship with La Boétie, and that she was altogether similar to her “father.”² On a superficial level what could be more obvious than the contrast between her finding her own self-portrait in Montaigne's analysis of his self and of the human condition and the current classically based clichés concerning female inferiority.³ In 1610, following Marie de Gournay's political and theological treatise in the aftermath of the assassination of King Henry IV, the first published satire the Anti-Gournay by Courbouzon-Montgomery appeared, which encouraged caricatures and a pile of practical jokes to be practiced on her. A fraudulent request from an emissary of “King James I of England” for her biography and portrait caused her to write the “Vie de la Demoiselle de Gournay,” and later to sue the three French male pranksters. Her involvement in creating the Académie française in 1634 brought forth a pile of satires wherein Marie, who as a woman was debarred from official meetings of the Academy, is very present as a caricatured bluestocking defending the retention of old words in the satires written about it.⁴

A review article in the 1971 Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne may have helped to revive seventeenth-century ridicule of Marie de Gournay; Jean Morand claimed that tradition has viewed Marie de Gournay as devoid of all feminine charm and of all intelligence and has seen her as an ugly, self-serving, proud, and vindictive old maiden. “Finally, the accumulation of reproaches has made Marie de Gournay a personality which no person would want to study seriously, in France at least, as if a certain fear of ridicule a priori discouraged researchers.”⁵ While recognizing that the first full-length biography of Marie de Gournay by Wellesley Professor Marjorie Ilsley finally put research on Marie de Gournay on a sound, documentary footing, Morand highlights the gaps in our records, like the missing correspondence between Montaigne and Marie de Gournay, and concludes that on Montaigne's side the friendship with the young Marie was based on “une passion aussi violente que secrète.”⁶

On the other hand, Ilsley's A Daughter of the Renaissance: Marie le Jars de Gournay, Her Life and Works culminated quite self-consciously a long tradition of defenders of Gournay, documented in her last chapter “Marie de Gournay's Ascending Fortune.” From the high regard of her contemporaries Justus Lipsius and Guillaume de la Vair, through the positive commentary in Léon Feugère's Les Femmes Poètes au XVI^e Siècle and Paul Bonnefon's Montaigne et ses Amis, and through Mario Schiff's republication of Gournay's two feminist treatises of the 1620s in his short monograph of 1910, Ilsley gave evidence of Gournay's contribution in her own right as a literary critic, moralist, poetess, feminist, apart from her accomplishments as an editor of the Essais.⁷ Ilsley recognized the practical errors that caused Marie de Gournay the scorn of some contemporaries, yet her own dedication to women's history and literature in the decade of the 1960s added a polemical tone in her discussion of the literary qualities and originality of Gournay's poetry and prose. Likewise, articles and books on Marie de Gournay's feminism isolate this one aspect of her thought and highlight the anti-feminism present in the standard references to her, in even the best intentioned works, as a “bluestocking” or “a born old maid.”⁸

Several problems have pervaded the scholarship on Marie de Gournay. For one, her social standing in seventeenth-century Paris has been projected backwards on to the year 1588 when Montaigne met with her. Ageism and sexism, as well as the mature Marie de Gournay's outspoken and assertive personality, have effected the caricatured image and have predisposed scholars to be incredulous that Montaigne would have taken a liking to her. Lipsius's viewpoint is a case in point. In 1590 his 1589 Latin letter to her appeared in print: “Who can you be who write me thus? A maiden? Scarcely can I believe it from what you write. Is it possible that so keen an understanding and so solid a judgment, not to speak of such wisdom and knowledge, can be found in one of your sex and in such times as these?” Contrary to Ilsley's claim that Lipsius and Marie de Gournay had cordial relations until his death in 1606, Günter Abel has inferred much from the fact that the last surviving letter is dated May 1597 and suggests that the following statement in Lipsius's 1601 French letter to Jean Moretus refers to Lipsius's embarrassment on the celebrity his compliment gave to Marie: “I once praised this French maiden, and I am not too happy nor can others be with the judgment that I made of her. This is a deceiving sex, and one which has more of lustre than substance.”⁹ While we cannot be sure, however, that Lipsius's reference was to Marie de Gournay, we can see in the juxtaposition of the two letters practical echoes of the “querelle des femmes,” an exaggerated overestimation of a talented woman in contrast with a disparaging view of womankind and an easy disillusionment with a talented woman who does not come up to one's imagined estimation or who surpasses one's wildest expectations in taking the compliments seriously.

Secondly, Marie opened herself up for the barbs of the literary critics and the quarrelers on womankind by her outspoken intent to model herself on Michel de Montaigne. The root is the title “fille d'alliance,” covenant daughter, which she conspicuously utilized to aid her debut into the literary world. The title was one Montaigne gave her during their first meeting in Paris. On a literal level, it was appropriate for Montaigne, who had lost five daughters in their infancy and had only one surviving daughter, Léonor, and it was appropriate as well for Marie, an eldest child of six, whose father had died in 1577. It helped legitimize and clarify a relationship between a fifty-five-year-old man and a twenty-two-year-old female admirer, a relationship which in the modern world might be described as that of a “mentor” with an apprentice or student. On a figurative level, the relation of “alliance” in the sixteenth century involved giving a family title to a relationship of intellect and erudition. Montaigne viewed himself as La Boétie's “brother”; and in the letter telling Marie of Montaigne's death, Lipsius asked Marie to accept him as her “brother.” Marie opened herself for negative comparisons with her “father” when in the preface of 1595 she immodestly announced that it is great minds that recognize other great minds, that “I am altogether similar to my father,” and that the relationship between her and Montaigne was comparable to the relationship between Montaigne and La Boétie.¹⁰ A common retort of scholars has been to lament that Marie de Gournay failed to be the feminine Montaigne; for example, Ian Winter wrote not long ago “… her insight into Montaigne's self-portrait should have enabled her further to develop the essay-genre by painting the feminine equivalent of Montaigne's masterpiece. In this she tried but was unsuccessful. Excessive hero-worship and a dogmatic interpretation of Montaigne hindered her from achieving the broadness of mind and flexibility of spirit that would have been the mark of the literary products of the perfect follower.”¹¹

The only reasonable response is that many authors have taken up the essay genre without approaching Montaigne's inimitable psychological depth and philosophical subtlety. A comparison of Marie de Gournay's “Vie de l'Autheur” with her “Vie de la Demoiselle de Gournay,” reveals her full recognition that a girl, who amid household tasks stole away private hours to teach herself Latin by comparing Latin texts with their French translations, would not produce French literary works of the calibre of one of the very best creative French writers, who had the benefit of a paternally supervised home tutorial in Latin and of a French university education in liberal arts and law.¹² The role of historians seeking to comprehend Marie de Gournay is to understand her life and works within the social perimeters open to her, perimeters she greatly extended by her creativity and literary “alliances.”

Beside the unfairness of projecting her later slandered reputation on the young woman whom Michel de Montaigne knew and the unfairness of judging Marie de Gournay as a mediocre writer compared to her mentor, scholarship has focused too exclusively on the attitudes of Montaigne towards their friendship. It is understandable that this has been the case since Montaigne's essay “L'Amitié” (I. 28) has been of enduring interest, and many readers have felt a “friendship” with Montaigne which transcends the centuries. The title of the major French organization devoted to studying Montaigne “Société des Amis de Montaigne” is proof of the affection reading of Montaigne elicits. Female readers particularly seek to know whether Montaigne's relationship with Marie caused him to revise his notion that “the ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship which is the nurse of this sacred bond. … But this sex in no instance has yet succeeded in attaining it.”¹³ The general consensus of scholarship is that summed up by Donald Frame that Montaigne “drew a sharp distinction between La Boétie and any other friend—including Marie” and “I cannot believe that Montaigne had anything like the feeling for Marie de Gournay that she had for him.”¹⁴ The question cannot be fully resolved because the literary evidence concerning their relationship and their conversations on friendship have been passed down to us through Marie's writings and through passages which are among those first occurring in the 1595 edition, for which no hand-written addenda by Montaigne have survived the centuries.¹⁵ From actions we can observe that Montaigne was more comfortable phrasing their relationship in paternal terms, that he did dictate additions to her which were recorded in her hand in the 1588 edition, and that the familial relationship they established continued among Madame de Montaigne, Léonor (six years younger than Marie), and Marie de Gournay, literary executrix.¹⁶

What we can know with a high degree of accuracy is Marie de Gournay's perceptions of her friendship with Michel de Montaigne. The “mentalité” of an early reader who took seriously his request “if my humours happen to please and suit some worthy man before I die, he will try to meet me”¹⁷ should interest current “amis” of Montaigne, if we can restrain the jealousy and unfulfillable curiosity we experience concerning the conversations Marie de Gournay succeeded in having with Michel de Montaigne. Likewise, the very functional role Marie's relationship with Montaigne played in the formative years of her choices to remain single and to attain a literary career make a valuable case-study in mentor-protégée friendship.

Marie's adoration of Michel de Montaigne matured through several stages. Her first reading of the 1582 Essais at age eighteen or nineteen thrilled her so much that her mother wanted to give her a sedative. The book was her constant companion, as Marie, like so many readers of later generations, found that Montaigne revealed the reader to herself or himself. “She began to desire knowledge, conversation and fellowship with their author more than all things in the world.”¹⁸ When Marie was twenty-two, rumors reached Gournay-sur-Aronde that Montaigne had been killed during a dangerous peace mission, and Marie experienced severe grief that her family could not console. Marie's reporting of this grief reveals the nature of the relationship she had hoped for: “all the glory, happiness and hope of enriching her soul was destroyed in the bud by the loss of the conversation and society that would be promised her by such a mind.”¹⁹

On arriving in Paris in the winter of 1588, Marie de Gournay learned that Montaigne was not dead as rumored but was in fact in Paris. She sent him a letter declaring her esteem for him and his book, and he visited her the next day to thank her for her letter and to meet her. Montaigne, whose mind dwelt on issues of death, must have been moved by Marie's concern. It is on that first day that Marie de Gournay claimed he called her his “fille d'alliance.” The meaning she gave to that designation included her resemblance to Montaigne, a resemblance she very much wanted to acquire through the relationship: “Nature has so honored me that, except for the more or less, I resemble my father. I cannot take a step, whether in writing or speaking, that I do not find myself following in his footsteps.” She elaborated, “If I do not possess the virtues of my second Father, I do have some of the vices that he confesses to, especially this one, that I become impatient in an ill-conducted discussion.”²⁰ The much sought after conversation with Montaigne was the second stage of her relationship. One must see the educational value of that stage in her life in the context of her own very severely suffered insight that deprivation from formal education was a blight on women's development.²¹

The camaraderie and conversation with Montaigne was Marie de Gournay's apprenticeship into the literary world. When at her country home later that year he spent about three months on several visits walking and talking with her, like a peripatetic philosopher of antiquity, this woman who had translated Diogenes Laertius's “Life of Socrates” from the Greek to French had the deeply motivating experience of intelligent discourse with Michel de Montaigne. She entered into involvement in the production of the 1588 Essais when in his presence she added in her hand his additions to Book I, chapters 22 and 23.²² This was a new stage of the relationship, that of editorial assistant, one which gave her experience that she was to build on after his death.

The influence of Gournay on Montaigne's additions during his last four years has been the focus of much speculation;²³ but herein my concern is the effect the interchange had on Gournay's estimation of herself and her decision-making concerning her future activities. Three days after his last departure from Gournay-sur-Aronde, Marie de Gournay sent him a story which was stimulated by their shared reading of Plutarch's Accidents of Love and by her earlier reading of Claude de Taillemont's Second discours des Champs Faez. In it she elaborates upon a strong female character Alinda, who defies her father in refusing a marriage of convenience to follow the man of her choice. The tragic heroine has both constancy of love, an attribute Montaigne questioned was possible in women, and psychological depth. The long disgressions and quotations of a philosophical and moral nature mark Gournay's work as they do Montaigne's, yet her advice to a woman “to remain mistress of her own soul” has a feminist thrust.²⁴ With a great writer interested in her, one to whom she might send her manuscript, Marie de Gournay had composed an impressive piece, a precursor of the novel. The genre, ideas, and character development depart from their models and are distinctively Gournay's. The “daughter's” relationship with her “literary father” is reflected in full ambiguity in humble literary apologies for her first work and strident character development of a fictional “daughter.”²⁵

The scorn she expresses in the work for a marriage of convenience comes at a significant stage of life, when it would be customary for her to marry as had her sister Madelaine. Might the literary road she felt opening up to her in dialogue with Montaigne, combined with her satisfaction in her friendship with him, have helped her to maintain her status as single woman? It would seem likely that in a discussion of Plutarch, love, and marriage, she might have discussed with her “father” her reluctance to be given away in a marriage. And he who so clearly described the pitfalls of custom on this subject in “On Some Verses of Virgil,” admitting his own reluctance to marry and recognizing that women are formed by their cultures and circumstances, might well have viewed Marie de Gournay as one of these “unusual minds and minds of the highest stature”²⁶ that he attested are found among French women. Altogether, her relationship with him set her on a stage of literary productivity (the many poems and short novella published in Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne) and may also have encouraged her to remain unsubordinated to a husband.²⁷

Marie de Gournay's productive response to the death of Michel de Montaigne was rapid and remarkable given that the news reached her six months late. Between May and June 1593, the time that she received Lipsius's informative letter, and early spring 1594, when the manuscript parcel arrived from Madame de Montaigne, we have little information on what transpired and also surprisingly little speculation. Why did Montaigne's widow send the manuscript to Marie de Gournay when she was already receiving editorial assistance from a family friend and poet on hand, Pierre de Brach? Possibly Montaigne or Lipsius had recommended that action, but Gournay never made that claim. Her location in Paris is one consideration. What also must be considered is the unlikelihood that Marie de Gournay would have remained silent in her grief, and the great likelihood that she wrote her “mother” in griefstricken prose, and offered to aid in the editing, printing, and dissemination of their loved one's Essais. Madame de Montaigne found within Montaigne's papers Le Proumenoir, and it is highly likely she was moved by the dedicatory letter and title honoring her deceased husband. When Le Proumenoir appeared in print shortly afterwards, it brought celebrity to the entire Montaigne family through Marie de Gournay's “Quatrains pour la maison de Montaigne,” which contained poems to her “mother” Françoise, “sister” Léonor, thirteen other “relatives,” and to the illustrious name of Montaigne. The shortened preface states “Madame de Montaigne, his wife, sent them [the Essais] to me to publish them, enriched with his additions.”²⁸

A serious consequence of the slandered reputation of Marie de Gournay concerns scholarly reading of the texts of Michel de Montaigne. Until 1802 most editions of Montaigne, including both Florio's and Cotton's English translations, were based on her 1595 edition. All major editions since 1802, including the indices and concordance, have utilized the 1588 edition with hand-marked additions by Michel de Montaigne, which is known as the “Exemplaire de Bordeaux.” We know for a fact that the Bordeaux edition lost many attached notes by Montaigne when it was rebound in the eighteenth-century. There are between two thousand and three thousand differences, one hundred of which are important, between the 1595 edition and the prized Bordeaux 1588 edition. In the last two centuries, scholarly suspicion of Marie de Gournay's editorial procedures has run high. There is, however, strong evidence defended in the 1970s by Günter Abel, Richard Sayce, and most convincingly David Maskell, that Marie de Gournay utilized one exemplary sent to her in Paris and another in the chateau of Montaigne, exemplaries which contained Montaigne's last hand-written changes. This recent reaffirmation of the quality of her editing procedures significantly raises questions which Montaigne scholars have been reluctant to face on the merit of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reliance on the Bordeaux edition.²⁹

In 1594, on Marie de Gournay's publication of Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne, she was simultaneously making her literary debut and increasing the public's curiosity about Montaigne. Her interest and Montaigne's interest were coalescing, and she had something she could do for him and for the Montaigne family that would prove the quality of her friendship with him. Her psychological state at the time of printing the first posthumous edition is revealed by the preface which extols their friendship and defends the Essais against early detractors. In her letter to Lipsius of 21 May 1596 she apologized for the seventeen and a half page preface and did replace it by short prefaces in subsequent editions until her volumes of 1619, 1625, and 1635. It is at the home of Madame de Montaigne that she wrote her apology to Lipsius, and it is likely, I think, that it had offended Lipsius and Madame de Montaigne. It is after their deaths that the long preface was restored.³⁰ Her statement of 1595 in its impulsiveness reflects her desire to have her views of Montaigne as a person and as a writer serve as an essay in front of the Essais themselves.

Marie de Gournay initiated the personal friendship with Montaigne and remained loyal to him and his memory with a productive devotion that gave her a lifetime of editorial and literary work. Likewise, young Michel de Montaigne had first learned of Etienne de la Boétie through his Servitude volontaire; the brief living friendship between 1559 to 1563 (four years as in Marie's friendship, 1588-1592) was superseded by almost thirty years of Montaigne's productive devotion to him through publishing La Boetié's sonnets and translations, extolling their friendship in his essay “L'Amitié,” and filling the void through writing essay-images of himself. The relationship Michel de Montaigne maintained with Etienne de la Boétie after his death was the genre Marie de Gournay maintained with Michel de Montaigne.³¹

Within the text itself of the Essais appears a statement by Montaigne on Marie de Gournay which those who trust her as a faithful editor think he wrote in entirety, which those who distrust her think she wrote in entirety, and those who take a middle position think he wrote all but parts of the middle section (phrases italicized) which Marie de Gournay dropped from the 1635 edition. Both seventeenth-century English translators Florio and Cotton respected Mademoiselle Gournay's editing and relied mainly on the 1595 edition and gave this passage in full. Contextually, the statement very appropriately fulfills Montaigne's double purpose in his essay “De la Presumption,” to examine his own presumption in writing on himself and to examine greatness in contemporaries. Let us look at the passage to learn of their friendship:

I have taken pleasure in making public in several places the hopes I have for Marie de Gournay le Jars, my covenant daughter, whom I love indeed more than a daughter of my own, and cherish in my retirement and solitude as one of the best parts of my own being. She is the only person I still think about in this world. If youthful promise means anything, her soul will some day be capable of the finest things, among others of perfection in that most sacred kind of friendship which, so we read, her sex has not yet been able to attain. The sincerity and firmness of her character are already sufficient, her affection for me more than superabundant, and such, in short, that it leaves nothing to be desired, unless that her apprehension about my end, in view of my fifty-five years when I met her, would not torment her so cruelly. The judgment she made of the first Essays, she a woman, and in this age, and so young, and alone in her district, and the remarkable eagerness with which she loved me and wanted my friendship for a long time, simply through the esteem she formed for me before she had seen me, is a phenomenon very worthy of consideration.³²

The statement attests to her long-lived admiration for his Essais and her desire for his friendship, to the paternal relationship which Montaigne established, to her desire to achieve the highest kind of friendship he had discussed in his essay on “Friendship” (which the ancients denied to women), and her constancy of character which Montaigne found so rare in women. Whether his intent was to recognize his friendship for her, or to spare her disappointment given her friendship for him, Montaigne did omit after 1588 his comment on La Boétie: “I know well that I will leave behind no sponsor anywhere near as affectionate and understanding about me as I was about him. There is not one to whom I would be willing to entrust myself fully for a portrait, he alone enjoyed my true image, and carried it away.”³³ That act of omission may well indicate his recognition that he would be entrusting his book to Marie.

Our openness to exploring Marie de Gournay's “mentalité” in her long sought after friendship with Michel de Montaigne has as a side product indicated ways in which she challenged him and his readers. Readers of editions of the Essais containing Marie de Gournay's long preface were challenged to recognize that a female literary critic had been one of the first to recognize that the frank exploration of self, for which Montaigne was criticized by some early readers, was an original contribution of the Essais. Likewise she challenged Michel de Montaigne during his lifetime and challenged observers after his lifetime to recognize that a woman had tried to be Montaigne's true, constant friend, an equal to Montaigne in his relationship to La Boétie. Might he who wrote at the close of one of Marie de Gournay's favorite essays, “I say that males and females are cast in the same mold; except for education and custom, the difference is not great,” have learned from Marie de Gournay's enthusiasm for the Essais that he had succeeded in his exploration of himself to explore “la condition humaine?”³⁴

Notes

1. Marjorie Henry Ilsley, A Daughter of the Renaissance: Marie le Jars de Gournay Her Life and Works (The Hague: Mouton, 1963). Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 82, 273-84, 305-6, 310-12. Pierre Villey, Montaigne devant la Posterité (Paris: Boivin, 1935), 36-55.

2. Marie de Gournay, “Preface” in Michel de Montaigne, Essais, edition nouvelle trouvée après le décès de l'auteur, reveuë et augmentée par luy d'un tiers plus qu'aux précédentes impressions (Paris: Abel L'Angelier, 1595).

3. Villey, Montaigne devant la Posterité, 46: “L'amusant dans l'affaire est que le livre de Montaigne n'est rien moins que féministe.” Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Cecile Insdorf, Montaigne and Feminism (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1977).

4. Requête des Dictionnaires, Rôle des Présentations, La Furieuse Monomarchie, and La Comédie des Académistes, selections in Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 106-21, 232-42. The earliest portrait recently found of Marie de Gournay dates from 1610 and is likely the one she sent along with her “La Vie”: Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, 6th series, 3-4 (1980): 103.

5. Jean Morand, “Marie le Jars de Gournay La ‘Fille d'Alliance’ de Montaigne,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, 4th series, 27 (October-December 1971): 45: “Finalement, l'accumulation des reproches a fait de Marie de Gournay un personnage auquel, en France tout au moins, personne n'a voulu s'intéresser sérieusement, comme si une certaine crainte de ridicule avait a priori découragé les chercheurs.” The pressure to perpetuate sexist stereotypes of Marie still influences female scholars as well: e.g., Dorothy Anne Liot Backer, Precious Women (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 116-9.

6. Morand, “La ‘Fille d'Alliance’,” 54.

7. Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 266-77. Morand's commentary to the contrary, the significant works on Marie de Gournay have been by French authors. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Paris, 1697); Léon Feugère, Les Femmes poètes du XVI^e Siècle (Paris, 1860); Paul Stapfer, La Famille et les Amies de Montaigne (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1896), 156-236 who viewed her relationship with Montaigne as significant but her works as “mort”; Paul Bonnefon, Montaigne et ses amis (Paris: Colin, 1898), 2: 187-210, 315-408; Mario Schiff, La Fille d'Alliance de Montaigne, Marie de Gournay (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1910), and see note 29 below.

8. Schiff has made her feminist treatises readily available: “L'Egalité des hommes et des femmes” and “Grief des dames,” 57-97. Lula McDowell Richardson, The Forerunners of Feminism in French Literature of the Renaissance from Christine de Pisa to Marie de Gournay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929), 153-9, suggests that Montaigne might have made his severe statements about women as a result of his friendship with the “much satirized ‘savante’.” (154, n. 3) Insdorf, Feminism, 59-71 in contrast, asserts that Gournay's feminist ideas and sterling character strengthened Montaigne's view of women. Pierre Michel, “Une apôtre du Feminisme au XVII^e siècle: Mademoiselle de Gournay,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, 4th series, 27 (October-December, 1971): 55-8, finds in Marie's feminism evidence of the original thoughts Marie de Gournay advanced quite separately from Montaigne.

9. Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 37. Günter Abel, “Juste Lipse et Marie de Gournay: autour de L'Examplaire d'Anvers des Essais de Montaigne,” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et de la Renaissance, 35 (1973): 128-9. “Jaij une foi loue ceste damoijselle francoise, et ne m'en contente pas trop nij les aultres (peult estre) du iugement que l'en aij faict. C'est un sexe trompeur, et qui at du lustre plus que de substance.”

10. Francois Payen's research cited in Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 31, n. 19. “Preface sur les Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne par sa Fille d'Alliance,” Essais (Paris: Abel l'Angelier, 1595), Houghton Library edition, “j'etois toute semblable a mon Pere.”

11. For example, in Ian J. Winter, Montaigne's Self Portrait and its Influence in France, 1580-1630 (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1976), 92.

12. “La Vie de l'Autheur estraite des ses propres ecrits” in Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Rouen: Jean Osmont, 1619), Clark Library of U.C.L.A. Marie de Gournay, “Vie de la Demoiselle de Gournay,” in Les Advis ou Les Presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay (Paris: Jean Du-Bray, 1641), Bibliothèque nationale.

13. Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1962), 185 (referred to as OC subsequently). The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1865), 138 (referred to as S subsequently). “… la suffisance ordinaire des femmes n'est pas pour respondre à cette conference et communication, nourrise de cette saincte couture. … Mais ce sexe par nul exemple n'y est encore arriver. …” Unless otherwise indicated my text cites the S edition and my notes give the OC edition. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Reproduction photographique de la deuxième édition Bordeaux, 1582 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 156 gives the passage in the edition likely read by Marie in 1584.

14. Donald M. Frame, Montaigne: A biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 279.

15. Frame, Montaigne, 277-81 interprets Montaigne as sceptical of her praise; Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 26-35 gives credence to passages as authentic to Montaigne, and fills in the facts with novelistic portrayal of Montaigne's sentiments. Villey, Montaigne devant la Posterité, 51-2 respects Marie's thorough and vigilant job as editor. See notes 32 and 33 below.

16. Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 76-84. Bonnefon, Montaigne et ses amis, 2:322.

17. Book II, ch. 9 (S 749-780) (OC 959) discussed in Frame, Montaigne, 82 (page reference mistaken in Frame's notes). “S'il advient que mes humours plaisent et accordent à quelque honneste homme avant que je meure, il recherchera de nous joindre. …”

18. Marie de Gournay, Preface of 1595, “Mais elle commenca de desirer la connaisance, communication et bienveillance de leur Auteur plus que toutes les choses au monde.”

19. Marie de Gournay, “Vie de la Demoiselle de Gournay,” in Les Advis ou Les Presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay (Paris: Jean Du-Bray, 1641), 992 “… luy semblant que toute la gloire, la felicite et l'esperance d'enrichissement de son ame estoient fauchez en herbe pour la perte de la conversation et de la societe qu'elle s'etait promise d'un tel esprit.” For a recent reprint of this rare “Vie,” see Elyane Dezon-Jones, “Marie de Gournay: Le je/u/ palimpseste,” L'Esprit Créateur 23 (Summer 1983): 33-4.

20. Marie de Gournay, Preface of 1595, “la nature m'ayai fait tant d'honneur que, sauf le plus ou le moins, j'etois semblable a mon Pere: je ne puis faire un pas, soit ecrivant ou parlant, que je ne me troive sur ses traces.” “Si je n'ai les vertus de mon second Pere, j'ai quelques uns des vices qu'il avoue, surtout celui-ci de m'impatienter vivement d'une conference confuse,” cited from Preface, 1595, by Villey, Montaigne devant la Postorité, 42-5, not in Houghton Library edition.

21. Marie de Gournay, Preface of 1595, a, iii; “Grief des dames” (1626), in Schiff, La Fille L'Alliance de Montaigne, 90-2. This later feminist tract starts off with the feminist plea Marie had made previously in the Preface of 1595: “Bien heureux es tu, Lecteur, si tu n'ez pas d'un sexe, qu'on ait interdit de tous les biens, l'interdisant de la liberté … affin de luy constituer pour vertu seulle et beatitude, ignorer et souffrir. Bien heureux, qui peuz estre sage sans crime, le sexe te consedant toute action, et parolle juste, et le credit d'en estre creu, ou pour le moins escouté.”

22. R. Dezeimeris, Recherches sur la recension de texte posthume des Essais de Montaigne (Bordeaux, 1866), 23, n. 3.

23. She claims in the Preface of 1595, right after asserting her resemblance to her father, that there are several additions to this book that she had imagined quite similarly before seeing them. While to Ilsley, her statement appears to be indicative of parallel thought-patterns, this may be a document of influence, Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 73.

24. “… de maintenir l'âme chez elle …” Marie de Gournay, L'Ombre de la Demoiselle de Gournay (Paris: Jean Libert, 1626), UCLA edition. Bonnefon, Montaigne et ses amis, 2:321; Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, 57.

25. For a suggestive recent analysis of Le Proumenoir, see Domna C. Stanton, “Woman as Object and Subject of Exchange: Marie de Gournay's Le Proumenoir (1594),” L'Esprit créateur 23 (Summer 1983): 9-25.

26. Montaigne, Essais III, 5 (OC, 861; S, 673) “d'ames singulieres et du plus haut estage” Marie commented on his reluctance to marry in her “La Vie de l'Auteur de Montaigne.”

27. Montaigne, Essais I, 39 (OC, 234-5) “Or, puis que nous entreprenons de vivre seuls et de nous passer de compagnie, faisons que nostre contentement despende de nous; despronons nous de toutes les liaisions qui nous attachent à autruy, gaignons sur nous de pouvoir à bon escient vivre seuls et y vivre à nostr'aise.”

28. Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, Appendix 1, 283. Michel Seigneur de Montaigne, Les Essais (Rouen: Jean Osmont, 1619), “Advis sur les Essais … par sa fille d'Alliance.” “Madame de Montaigne sa femme me les fist apporter pour estre mis au jour, enrichis des traicts de sa derniere main.”

29. Günter Abel, B.H.R. (1973), note 9 above; Richard Sayce, “L'Edition des Essais de Montaigne de 1595, B.H.R. (1974): 115-41; David Maskell, “Quel est le dernier etat authentique des Essais de Montaigne?” B.H.R. (1978): 85-103; Les Essais de Montaigne, Catalogue des éditions et des exemplaires présentés par la Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux (Bordeaux: Bibliothèque municipale, 1980-81), 18-24.

30. Marie de Gournay, “Letter to Lipsius,” in Bonnefon, Montaigne et ses amis, 2:346. Günter Abel found a 1595 draft of the revised preface in a handwriting not Marie's (see note 9). For analysis of the prefaces, see Anne Uildriks, Les Idées litéraires de Mlle de Gournay (Groningen, 1962).

31. Preface of 1595, “Il ne m'a duré que quatre ans, non plus qu'à lui la Boétie.” On the literary use to which Montaigne put his friendship with La Boétie, see Richard L. Regosin, The Matter of My Book (Berkeley: University of California, 1977), 7-29.

32. Montaigne, Essais, II, 17 (S 502, OC 645-6). Ilsley accepts the full quote; Frame accepts the beginning and end. The full passage was in all editions until that of 1635. I have examined the Bordeaux copy, which does not contain this passage, but does have glue spots on that page.

    J'ay pris plaisir à publier en plusieurs lieux l'esperance que j'ay de Marie de Gournay le Jars, ma fille d'alliance, et certes aymée de moy beaucoup plus que paternellement, et enveloppée en ma retraitte et solitude, comme l'une des meilleures parties de mon propre estre. Je ne regarde plus qu'elle au monde. Si l'adolescence peut donner presage, cette ame sera quelque jour capable des plus belles choses, et entre autres de la perfection de cette trèssaincte amitié ou nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait peu monter encores. La sincerité et la solidité de ses meurs y sont desjà bastantes, son affection vers moy plus que sur-abondante, et telle en somme qu'il n'y a rien a souhaiter, sinon que l'apprehension qu'elle a de ma fin, par les cinquante et cinq ans ausquels elle m'a rencontré, la travaillast moins cruellement. La jugement qu'elle fit des premiers Essays, et femme, et en ce siecle, et si jeune, et seule en son quartier, et la vehemence fameuse dont elle m'ayma et me desira long temps sur la seule estime qu'elle en print de moy, avant m'avoir veu, c'est un accident de très-digne consideration.

33. Montaigne, Essais, II, 9 (S 752, note 14, OC 961, note 3). “Je scay bein que je ne lairrai après moi aucun respondant si affectionné de bien loing et entendu en mon faict comme j'ay esté au sien. Il n'y a personne a qui je vousisse pleinement compromettre de ma peinture: luy seul jouyssait de ma vraye image et l'emporte.” See Frame, Montaigne, 279.

34. Montaigne, Essais, III, 5 (S 685, OC 875). “Je dis que les masles et femelles sont jettez en mesme meule; saut l'institution et l'usage, la difference n'y est pas grande.” This first appears in the 1588 edition and is thought by Cecile Insdorf to reflect the influence of Marie de Gournay. Insdorf, Feminism, 81. The passage, however, seems authentically Montaigne's in that it reflects his sentiments on the impact of custom in creating differences among human beings.