SOURCE: Cholakian, Patricia Francis. “The Economics of Friendship: Gournay's Apologie pour celle qui escrit.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25, no. 3 (fall 1995): 407-17.

[In the following essay, Cholakian contrasts de Gournay's practical view of friendship, tempered by the necessities and stresses of everyday life, with the more idealized perspectives in Montaigne's “De l'amitié” and Cicero's “De amicitia.”]

The title of Gournay's Apologie pour celle qui escrit would seem to indicate that it is a first-person narrative intended to justify the writer's life to her readers.¹ This impression is confirmed early in the text, when she begs an unnamed prelate to use the true facts in it to defend her reputation after her death.² She does not proceed with her revelations in an orderly, chronological fashion, however. Instead of telling her story in the form of mémoires, she speaks about only the financial aspects of her life, and these she embeds in a long essay on the subject of false friendship. The hybrid form, mingling self-representation with expository prose, Latin citations, and classical anecdotes, is, of course, familiar to readers of Montaigne's Essais. Gournay uses this fragmented and digressive way of writing not only to affirm her filiation to her “père d'alliance,” but to prove that her œuvre belongs to the humanist tradition, which she also inherited from him.³

Gournay's anxious and determined efforts to adhere to this tradition are everywhere apparent in her work. Framing her Apologie with an essay on a topic frequently treated by both humanists and ancients allows her to become celle qui escrit, an authority who, like Montaigne, can stand above events and expound on universals. Renaissance imitation, as Terence Cave has remarked, is “a kind of intertextual dialogue or conflict.”⁴ I propose to read Gournay's denunciation of false friendship as such a conflicted imitation—a text that contests the view of friendship set forth in Montaigne's “De l'amitié,” and Cicero's “De amicitia.”⁵

Both Cicero and Montaigne extol an idealized form of friendship, which, they are careful to point out, must be distinguished from the more ordinary variety. True friendship, they argue, is transcendental and inspires unlimited trust and devotion. Cicero's meditation takes the form of a conversation between three Roman patricians following the death of Scipio Africanus, a friend, one of them says, such as he cannot hope to meet again.⁶ Acclaiming the pleasures and benefits of true friendship, Cicero argues that its most important quality is virtue, without which it cannot exist. Like Cicero, Montaigne's point of departure is the death of a friend, La Boétie. He develops more fully Cicero's distinctions between friendship and other close relationships, stating that in addition to being based on virtue, a true friendship must be entered into freely and must not involve sexual passion. For these reasons, he rules out family members—children, fathers, brothers, and spouses, as well as lovers, be they women or men (although he admits that when the Greeks practiced “cet'autre licence,” two men who had been lovers might sometimes have become true friends once their ardor had cooled).

Montaigne makes explicit what Cicero implies but never states: although not all relationships between men are perfect friendships, all perfect friendships are necessarily formed between men. Women, he says, are simply incapable of participating in the kind of association he is talking about, for they lack the firmness to sustain it: “La suffisance ordinaire des femmes n'est pas pour respondre à cette conference et communication, nourrisse de cette saincte couture; ny leur ame ne semble assez ferme pour soustenir l'estreinte d'un neud si pressé et si durable. … Ce sexe par nul exemple n'y est encore peu arriver, et par le commun consentement des escholes anciennes en est rejetté.”⁷

Gournay's account in the Apologie of her failed attempts at friendship would seem to confirm Montaigne's opinion. As one who had experienced just the opposite of the “unique et principale amitié” that he and Cicero describe, she looks at the topic from the other end of the telescope. She speaks of ideal friendship in terms of what it is not, rather than of what it should be. Instead of representing the perfect friend as a lost other, she represents herself as the perfect friend, a practitioner of Ciceronian virtue, who has been despised and rejected for two reasons: first, she is poor, and second, she is a woman. Written from this perspective, the Apologie comments indirectly on “De amicitia” and “De l'amitié” by making visible their unstated assumptions about social background, economic status, and gender.

Gournay's essay deals with what Montaigne calls “les amitiez communes.” It is a vehement tirade against those who reserve their sympathies for the rich, especially those she calls “mignons de table,” sycophants who give friendship in exchange for a “bowl of soup” (500), only to desert their hosts if they turn out (like her) to be poor, or to have fallen on hard times: “si leurs affaires ont esté meilleures ou semblé l'estre, comme de moy; (qui ne sçay que trop combien ces discours sembleront extravagans aux esprits vulgaires) ceux qui pendant ceste illusion les practiquoient, ne manquent jamais de s'évader alors qu'elle est esvanouie” (496-97; emphasis mine). Worse still, to justify their disloyalty they spread false rumors about those they have abandoned.

Such bitter generalizations are obviously rooted in personal experience, as the parenthetical interjection shows. Nevertheless, for the first fifteen pages of her Apologie, Gournay alludes only briefly to the specific circumstances that have inspired her to write in this vein. The authorial voice remains largely impersonal, generalizing about “les propres vertus et merites de l'homme” (494), deploring the ingratitude and perfidy of “les trois quarts du genre humain, ou pour le moins des François d'aujourd'hui” (498), and backing up these assertions with classical references, from Socrates to Seneca.

It is clear to the reader, however, that the impoverished individual who has been abandoned and betrayed by “amys de fortune” (497) is not a straw man, but celle qui escrit. Personal experience serves as exemplum and proof of the decline in honor and virtue that allows such hypocritical alliances to pass for friendship. Occasionally she does slip in a first-person pronoun, as in the passage cited above. At other times, she fleetingly mentions her own feelings: “J'advoue mon deffaut … j'ayme le silence sur mes actions, si je ne puis obtenir la louange, et supporte aigrement la calomnie” (495); or she reveals that she reacts with fury to those who form social relationships for selfish reasons: “Ce qui me fasche encore à plain fond, c'est, que la pluspart de ceux qui trenchent des sçavants aujourd'hui … respectent si hautement par dessus les autres, non seulement ceux qui peuvent je ne sçay quoy pour leur fortune, mais encore les donneurs de bons disners” (501).

Only twice in these early pages does she depart from the discursive mode to engage openly in self-representation. The first instance is a self-portrait that projects her as the practitioner of Ciceronian virtue, a “tres bonne amy,” who has done nothing to deserve the betrayal of those who pretended to be her friends: “Mais homme ne femme de sain jugement et practic en ma cognoissance, se sçauroient alleguer, quand ils me voudroient mal; que je sois fauce en coeur, ny passagere en mes bonnes volontez, ne de tiede office” (499). Domna Stanton writes of this passage, “This symptomatic self-portrait begins with a self-definition by extended negation, but it culminates in a triumphant self-affirmation. In that process, the acknowledged faults of sensitivity, rigidity and vehemence are transmuted into precious qualities that have helped the speaking subject attain the ego ideal, ‘une âme illuminée de raison.’”⁸

The second occasion is even more interesting because it shifts not only from the discursive to the personal, but from the masculine to the feminine, in a sense conflating the two, as Gournay recounts the mockery she has endured as a learned woman: “Rien n'est sot ny ridicule, apres la pauvreté, comme d'estre clair-voyant et sçavant: combien plus d'estre clair-voyante et sçavante, ou d'avoir simplement, ainsi que moy, desiré de se rendre telle? Parmy nostre vulgaire, on fagotte à fantaisie l'image des femmes lettrées” (506; emphasis mine).

The words celle qui escrit in the title have signalled her intention of playing off gender against her identity as a writer. In this passage, where she replaces masculine, “gender-neutral” adjectives with their feminine forms, she further dramatizes her conviction that being a woman has intensified her social problems, adding to the ridicule already heaped on those who, like her (“ainsi que moy”) are poor and, worse still, dare to have intellectual pretensions.

Montaigne foregrounds the question of gender by dismissing the friendship of women, because by nature they are incapable of meeting his criteria. Gournay's Apologie shows that it is not women's nature but their situation that is responsible for their exclusion. She describes how her gender has worked against her to marginalize her both socially and professionally. She is especially sensitive to the fact that, unlike the men of the literary establishment, she did not receive a formal education. As a result, she laments, she is mocked both for being learned and for not being learned enough: “Mais, mon Dieu! que ne me laisse-t-on jouir du Passe-port de l'ignorance? puis qu'il est veritable … que tous les jours mon ignorance en sert de risée aux esprits joyeux d'entre les sçavans, comme ma science en sert à ceux des Cours et de leur faux-bourg? Pourquoy ne riroient ceux-là, trouvans une sçavante pretendue, sans Grammaire, pour s'estre instruicte soy-mesme au Latin par routine confrontant des versions au originaux?” (508).

Despite these passionate shifts to the apologetic mode, however, Gournay does not engage in sustained self-narrative until she confronts the ugly rumors that were spread about her when the true state of her finances became public knowledge. One of these is the charge that she caused her own ruin by wasting huge sums on the practice of alchemy: “A ce descry general des femmes studieuses, on adjouste en mon fait un poinct particulier, c'est de pratiquer l'Alchimie, qu'ils croyent en soy folie parfaicte” (509).

She claims that she has engaged in these experiments primarily out of natural curiosity: “Outre que si mesmes je n'esperois nul succès en l'Œuvre, comme je ne puis desormais faire apres ce long-temps écoulé sans fruict, je ne lairrois pas de travailler: pour voir soubs les degrez d'une tres-belle decoction, ce que deviendra la matiere que je tiens sur le feu” (511). This passage suggests, nonetheless, that at least in the beginning she hoped alchemy would help her to achieve the financial independence that would enable her to pursue her literary career. Alchemy functions at the center of this text as the sign of her endeavors to transform herself—from poor to rich, from uneducated to sçavante, from outsider to insider, from la demoiselle de Gournay to celle qui escrit, from moral philosopher to autobiographer. It is at this point that she abandons the omniscient voice of the absent author in order to launch into an exact accounting of the sums spent on this hobby. Her manner here bears a curious resemblance to that of a nervous taxpayer justifying her return to the IRS. She insists that after her initial outlay her expenditures were minimal, and that none of them was drawn from the capital of her inheritance.

But in defending herself from this charge, she also calls attention to the fact that she has departed radically from the way women of her class were expected to live. She says that most of the costs of her experiments were paid for by her “inventions et labeurs,” presumably the money she earned as a writer and editor. And the rest was covered by economizing on wearing apparel, the expenses that were usual “et comme naturelle aux femmes de ma robe, en l'entretien de leur personne” (510-11). This defense of her expenditures refutes the accusations of profligacy; but it also reveals the extent to which she was an iconoclast: earning money by writing, and neglecting what a woman should never neglect—her personal appearance.

The passage on alchemy not only reorients the text, away from impersonal discourse and toward first-person narrative, it also situates it in the financial domain, foregrounding the significance of money in the social and professional disasters that have befallen celle qui escrit. As Philippe Desan has remarked, at the end of the Renaissance, “social discourse is conveyed through economic discourse.”⁹ The story Gournay wants her prelate-addressee to disseminate is “l'histoire de mon maniement de bien” (511).

The itemized account of her alchemical expenditures constitutes the first installment of the self-narrative whose purpose is to refute the charge that she has mismanaged her inheritance. She goes on to address another false allegation—that she frittered away her money on “vain apparat”: “Les uns ont dit que j'avais un page, les autres, de riches meubles, les autres, que je tenois table, les autres m'ont attribué deux demoiselles: choses autant et publiquement fausses l'une que l'autre” (512). The true facts are that once, for a period of eight months, she hired a girl to teach her to play the lute. Any other young women seen in her house, she explains, were taken in out of charity and received no wages. She confesses that in her vainglorious youth, she did briefly employ two lackeys, but adds that she soon discharged one of them. As for the accusation that she invited too many people to dinner, does that refer, she asks, to her habit of having in one or two close friends “rarement et sobrement” (512)? The truth is that she has always been extremely frugal in her manner of living. She has never even allowed herself anything but “un lict de laine en toute saison” (512)!

The interest of these revelations lies not only in the details they provide about Gournay's life, but in what they imply about the way she resisted ideologies of gender while still trying to maintain a foothold in the aristocracy. She argues that she economized on the finery “naturelle aux femmes de ma robe”; but at the same time, she defends certain expenditures that were not luxuries but necessities for noblewomen. Thus, although she admits that she did own a carriage at one time, she claims that it was because the filthiness of Paris streets made it impossible for ladies to go out on foot, a problem George Sand would solve in a more unconventional manner two hundred years later.

Pour le regard du carrosse que j'entretenois, cela est né avec les femmes de ma qualité, toute simple que je l'aye recogneue: ouy mesmes totalement necessaire par la longueur et saleté du pavé de Paris: notamment si elles ont sur les bras, comme moy, les affaires communes d'une succession paternelle. Puis l'exemple general et tyrannique du siecle, rend la honte du manquement d'un carosse si grande, qu'il n'est pas permis à celles qui veulent vivre avec quelque bien-seance du monde, de consulter s'il couste trop ou non

(512-13).

She is poor, she maintains with some asperity, because she has been too proud to accept charity, notably from Montaigne's wife and daughter, and because she has refused to trade financial security for sexual favors, as have some of her female critics, “qui n'ont pas craint d'accepter des hommes, vilainement requis, le bien que j'ay par fois refusé des femmes, dignement offert, pour faire chose encore plus digne en le reservant à leur propre besoin: et dix mille testes le sçavent en Guyenne” (513).

She sees that the problem is not just that she is a woman, however. Had she been rich, or had powerful connections, her fate would have been quite different. It is the combination of femininity and poverty that has worked against her: “En fin toute forme saine et forte est repudiée en notre saison, et l'est aux femmes jusques à l'outrage, si elles ne sont redoutées par consideration de la puissance de leur parentage et parentage proche, ou de leurs moyens: d'autant que le modelle general de leur sexe, sur lequel on les veut attacher, se trouve par mauvaise nourriture quelque degré plus bas que celui du masculin” (514).

Her analysis contextualizes her marginalization as a woman and a writer, showing how it was exacerbated by the socioeconomic decline of her class. The situation she describes was typical of the provincial aristocracy, which was inexorably slipping into poverty. In preceding generations, as she states in the Copie de la Vie de la Damoiselle de Gournay, her father's family had already been forced to abandon the sword, the only career deemed suitable for the feudal aristocracy, and migrate to the city, where they could earn their living as civil servants.¹⁰ In the Apologie she relates how the Wars of Religion accelerated their decline. Her mother was forced to borrow money to maintain a son in the army, while at the same time she was not paid the sums owed by the crown. Debts, high interest rates, legal suits, payments on a sister's dowry, all reduced the estate, and Marie's income was further diminished because she agreed to take the unpaid royal revenue as part of her legacy, and because she insisted on living independently in Paris, and refused to accept hospitality from family friends. Of course, it was unheard-of for a single woman to live alone, let alone support herself by writing.

The story of celle qui escrit is not just about her money troubles, therefore; it is also about how she rejected the roles assigned to women of her class and tried to become self-sufficient in order to support herself as a writer. Since she refused to assure her material welfare in the traditional way, by becoming a wife or a kept woman, and since she was barred from practicing a profession, she had far greater need than a man to advance herself through social connections. “Ceste mienne procedure estoit recevable par sa necessité: puis qu'il est vray, que la despense est le seul mal-heureux et sot moyen de se faire practiquer, congnoistre et priser en France: et plus precisément l'est-il aux femmes, qui ne se peuvent faire voir ne recognoistre par les affaires” (525).

If she was to succeed, friendship of the kind Cicero and Montaigne eulogized was a luxury she could not afford. It was impossible for a woman writer to maintain her tenuous ties to the upper classes without money, and it was equally impossible for her to generate (by alchemy, writing, or self-deprivation) enough money to live on. Her only hope, she explains, lay in obtaining a royal pension, a goal all the more justified by the fact that she had never been paid the delinquent revenues. To do so, she needed influential friends at court; and to win those, she had no alternative but to spend some of her dwindling resources on hospitality. She had to use friendship as a means, rather than an end in itself.

When these erstwhile friends deserted her, they precipitated a double disaster: not only does she now have no one to plead her case, but the lies they spread about her have made her seem unworthy of royal aid: “Mais l'impieté de ceux qui m'accusent de la ruine de mes affaires … m'arrache encores la vie en consequence … n'ayant espoire de secours en mes besoins, que par les Roys, et le perdans presque du tout, lors que ces parleurs démentent quelque particuliere estime” (513).

Gournay's peripatetic monologue has now come full circle, linking the seemingly impersonal diatribes of the early pages to the economic predicament in which she found herself as a single woman, determined to live as celle qui escrit. Despite the moralistic generalizations that frame the Apologie, it is an intensely personal document. Its seemingly digressive shifts of voice and tone all come together in a persuasive defense of the woman who writes. Her close-to-the-bone account of how she tried and failed to attract loyal friends makes visible the barriers that exclude both women and men from the social institutions that foster “true friendship.” It also makes visible another aspect of friendship that is skimmed over by Cicero and Montaigne. It is fairly obvious that women are excluded from their construct of ideal friendship. What is less obvious is the extent to which economic and social factors also function as boundaries in their texts.

In reality, Cicero and Montaigne speak of friendships that blossom within a very restricted circle whose members have received similar educations, share similar interests, and serve in the same political establishments—for Cicero, the Roman Senate and for Montaigne, the Parliament of Bordeaux. Madeleine Lazard emphasizes the cultural and ideological affinities that brought La Boétie and Montaigne together: “Leur tempérament ardent, la similitude de leur milieu et de leur culture, la convergence de leurs pensées, les rapprochaient.”¹¹ Although their meeting was fortuitous, they probably knew each other by name and reputation before they met.

Cicero and Montaigne often close the gap between speaker and reader by employing the first-person plural pronoun we in a way that includes both those they speak about and those to whom they speak. Their texts circulated within a community of shared privileges—a community that was closed to the majority of those who lived in their times. As a woman, Gournay could not join the world of lawmakers and magistrates in which Cicero and Montaigne found friends made-to-order by training and background. All she knew she had taught herself, in defiance of a mother who thought women's learning should not go beyond housewifery. Celle qui escrit speaks as an isolated outsider, cut off from the ties and networks that bound her predecessors to their friends and readers.

“De Amicitia” and “De l'Amitié” present friendship as a decontextualized, rarefied, pure essence that defies explanation—“Puisque c'était luy, puisque c'était moi.” Kritzman calls it “the edenic illusion of unity associated with symbiotic bliss.”¹² Regosin also stresses the atemporal nature of Montaigne's vision of the union of two souls that takes place “on a level above what we commonly consider the realm of human activity, closer to what might be than what is.”¹³ Not only does it take no notice of socioeconomic differences between friends, it assumes that they can share equally in everything—that whatever belongs to one, belongs automatically to the other—an assumption that obscures the fact that such friendships also confer social and professional advantages on those who enjoy them. As Desan comments, “L'amitié doit rester un idéal, tout commerce mettrait l'amitié sur le même plan que les autres biens matériels.”¹⁴ Montaigne's ideal of friendship is utopian. It may be realized, as he says, only once every three hundred years.

Gournay's story of how friendship actually operates within a given social framework is far more down-to-earth. She reveals it to be a complex network whose purpose is to create associations that are mutually beneficial to the parties involved.¹⁵ Because she was a woman, she had no way to make money, and because she was poor, the friends she needed to help her improve her situation had no use for her. Only so long as she was able to conceal the sorry state of her finances, and confer favors on those who enjoyed her hospitality—“ma maison ayant tousjours esté pendant ce temps-là fort frequentée, et mon accez libre à chacun” (498)—did her guests reciprocate by singing her praises. When she could no longer afford to continue her lavish dinners, her friends suddenly dropped her and spread lies about her to justify their defection. This is not, of course, the kind of friendship Cicero and Montaigne extol, but unfortunately it is an accurate representation of how what is called friendship is used to further personal ambitions and private goals.

Montaigne believed that women lacked souls firm enough to sustain perfect friendship. Yet, I would argue, Gournay's text encodes a refutation of his point of view. As Domna Stanton has pointed out, celle qui escrit has a double meaning: it can refer to “the female writer of this particular text,” but it can also refer to “everywoman who writes.”¹⁶ Read in this way, Gournay's Apologie is not just the story of one poor woman, who was abandoned by those who overlooked her virtue for “a bowl of soup.” It is a defense composed on behalf of all women who write. Such a move suggests a solidarity among women that may yet prove Montaigne wrong.

Notes

1. The Apologie appeared in L'Ombre de la demoiselle de Gournay (Paris: Jean Libert, 1626), and, with minor revisions, in Les Advis et presens de la demoiselle de Gournay (Paris: T. du Bray, 1634; reprint 1641). Page numbers in parentheses after my quotations are from the 1634 edition. I have slightly modernized the spelling. An aside on p. 531 of the 1634 edition indicates that the Apologie was written during the minority of Louis XIII. Ilsley believes that the misfortunes Gournay describes occurred after the assassination of Henri IV, when she not only lost his patronage, but was under attack for her Defence des Jésuites; Marjorie H. Ilsley, Daughter of the Renaissance, Marie le Jars de Gournay, Her Life and Works (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), 119.

2. In “A Sophrosine,” the preface to Les Advis, Gournay writes, “La principale louange qu'elle [l'Apologie] cherche c'est de dire verité: laquelle j'esclaircis et appuye de telle sorte, … que j'en espere obtenir une creance favorable de toutes les ames en qui la malice ne surpasse point la prudence.” Ilsley (Daughter of the Renaissance, 127) conjectures that the addressee may have been Gournay's cousin, Charles de Hacqueville, Evêque de Soissons.

3. Cathleen M. Bauschatz shows how Gournay continued to defend humanist practices throughout her life; “Marie de Gournay and the Crisis of Humanism,” in Philippe Desan, ed., Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 279-94.

4. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 36.

5. Regosin sees in Gournay's Preface to the 1595 edition of the Essais another instance in which she “writes herself into that long tradition of essays on friendship that reaches back to Aristotle and to Cicero.” Richard L. Regosin, “Montaigne's Dutiful Daughter,” Montaigne Studies 3 (1991): 120.

6. The “De Amicitia” was written in 44 b.c.e., when Cicero was sixty-four, but the conversation supposedly takes place in the previous century. Scipio died in 129 b.c.e.

7. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965; reprint 1988), 1:186-87. An insertion at the end of 2.17 in Gournay's 1595 edition of the Essais singles her out for praise and expresses the conviction that she will someday be capable of “la perfection de cette tres-saincte amitié, où nous ne lisons point que son sexe ayt peu monter encores.” This is obviously a reference to the passage from “De l'Amitié” just quoted. It is not certain, however, whether Montaigne made this insertion before his death, or whether Gournay did so later. It does not appear in the Bordeaux copy. In her 1635 edition, it has been shortened and the passage on friendship omitted. For a summary of scholarly opinions on this question, and a discussion of its implications, see Regosin, “Montaigne's Dutiful Daughter.”

8. Domna C. Stanton, “Autogynography: The Case of Marie de Gournay,” French Literature Series (Columbia SC, Univ. of South Carolina, Dept. of Foreign Languages) 12 (1985): 24.

9. Philippe Desan, “For a Sociology of the Essays,” in Patrick Henry, ed., Approaches to Teaching Montaigne's Essays (New York: PMLA, 1994), 92. He argues that the barriers separating the idealistic values of the nobility and the economic materialism of the bourgeoisie were breaking down, with the result that there was a linguistic and literary shift away from the old feudal concepts of virtue, glory, and honor, and an increasing use of commercial and mercantile vocabulary.

10. She writes of her father's family, “La branche de cette race dont il procedoit venant par succession de Temps à s'affoiblir de biens, ses derniers ayeulx furent forcez de quitter la campagne et l'espée, pour se retirer aux Villes et aux Estats et vaccations qui s'y practiquent; et fust quand à luy Thresorier de la maison du Roy.” Cited by Elyane Dezon-Jones in “Marie de Gournay: le je/u/ palimpseste,” L'Esprit créateur 23.2 (Summer 1983): 33.

11. Madeleine Lazard, Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 128. See also pp. 119-33.

12. Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Montaigne and Psychoanalysis,” in Patrick Henry, ed., Approaches to Teaching Montaigne's Essays, 110.

13. Richard L. Regosin, The Matter of My Book: Montaigne's Essais as the Book of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 13. Regosin believes that Montaigne's moving eulogy of his relationship with La Boétie may derive more from books than from experience (9).

14. Philippe Desan, Les Commerces de Montaigne: le discours économique des Essais (Paris: Nizet, 1992), 156.

15. The type of friendship envisioned by Gournay would seem to belong to the “archaic” system based on reciprocal exchange described by Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 145-279. Lorna Hutson argues that during the Renaissance, the feudal model of friendship, based on the exchange of gifts and services, was being slowly displaced by the Ciceronian model of “true friendship.” Hutson insists on the gendered nature of the latter and locates it in the humanist reading program, “which, in the course of the sixteenth century, transformed the education of Englishmen.” The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), 3. Her generalization would apply equally to Frenchmen, and certainly to Montaigne.

16. Stanton, “Autogynography,” 22.