The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Michel de Montaigne · three books in 107 chapters, with the address to the reader · Books I and II, Bordeaux, Simon Millanges, 1580; the edition of 1588, Paris, Abel L’Angelier, with Book III; the author’s own annotated copy, the Bordeaux Copy, worked on until his death in 1592 · scored as one work on the text of 1588 with the Bordeaux additions, in the Villey-Saulnier edition, on Montaigne’s French, read from knowledge with no text in hand; French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath, and no translation quoted
Mode
Essays: trials of the judgment on any matter, abandoned when the trial is made; self-portrait, moral reflection, anecdote, exemplum and argument in one book
Mythos
The examined self made a type, the Delphic precept turned from an oracle into a method; the cannibals as the natural man against the city; Socrates facing death
Phase
From exempla gathered under headings, through the friendship with La Boétie and the long Apology, to the late chapters on repentance, vanity, the plague and experience
Presentation
Prose; three books of 57, 37 and 13 chapters with the address “Au lecteur”; three strata, of 1580, 1588 and the later manuscript additions, read as one text; Latin verse set into the French untranslated
Register
The table talk of a gentleman: concrete, abrupt, governed by image rather than period, moving by leaps and landing on the body
Scale
One consciousness, its body and household, the estate and the city of Bordeaux, France in the Wars of Religion, the ancient world, the Americas and the Ottoman
Governing Proposition
A gentleman retired to his tower takes himself as the matter of a book, in the vernacular, and calls each chapter a trial of his judgment, not a doctrine. For twenty years he adds and does not correct, so that the later self argues with the earlier on the same page. The wager of the book is that a human being is not a fixed nature but a passage, inconstant in every act, that what we call nature and reason is mostly custom, and that one ordinary life, watched closely enough, holds the whole of the human condition.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“je suis moy-mesmes la matiere de mon livre”
“I am myself the matter of my book” (Au lecteur). The address to the reader says what the book is before a chapter has begun: a book of good faith, in which “c’est moy que je peins”
“it is myself I paint” (Au lecteur). It also says what the book will be charged with. He calls the subject frivolous and vain, and so writes the charge of vanity into the threshold, where a reader will meet it first. A gentleman, writing in French and not in Latin, takes himself as the matter of a book, and names each chapter an essai: a trial of his judgment, not a doctrine.
The book was made over twenty years. Montaigne retired to his tower in 1571 and was writing from about 1572, through his travels of 1580 and 1581 and his two terms as mayor of Bordeaux, from 1581 to 1585, in the years of the Wars of Religion. Books I and II were printed at Bordeaux by Simon Millanges in 1580, and reprinted in 1582 and 1587. The edition of 1588, printed in Paris by Abel L’Angelier, added Book III and some six hundred additions to the first two. He went on writing in the margins of a copy of 1588 until his death in 1592. That copy, the Bordeaux Copy, is kept in the municipal library of Bordeaux, its margins cropped in places by a later binder. Marie de Gournay and Pierre de Brach published the edition of 1595.
“J’adjouste, mais je ne corrige pas”
“I add, but I do not correct” (III.9). The unit scored here is the text of 1588 with the Bordeaux additions, in the Villey-Saulnier edition, with its three strata, of 1580, of 1588 and of the later additions, taken as one work: three books of 57, 37 and 13 chapters, 107 in all. The early chapters of Book I are short, some a page or two, exempla gathered under a heading, from the first, “Par divers moyens on arrive à pareille fin”, to the pieces on ceremonies, names and smells. The essay breaks out of that commonplace book as the work goes on. Book II holds the Apology, by far the longest chapter; Book III has the fewest and the longest. In the late strata a sentence of about 1590 stands beside one of 1572 and argues with it, and neither is erased.
Movement II
The chapter on friendship sets out to say why he loved Étienne de La Boétie, and finds at last that it cannot give a reason beyond the two men themselves: “Parce que c’estoit luy, par ce que c’estoit moy”
“Because it was he, because it was I” (I.28). The second clause was added at a later date. The sentence that the chapter is remembered by was completed by the later self, and in it the method of the whole book can be seen at the scale of a line: the first judgment left standing, and the second set beside it.
The book comes out of a humanist’s reading. His father had him taught Latin before French, and the Latin is everywhere: verse from Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Seneca and Ovid set into the French without translation, and Plutarch, in Amyot’s French of 1572, and Seneca the prose sources most used. The inheritance is the commonplace book and the moral treatise: Erasmus’s Adagia, the collections of sayings and exempla, the Stoic consolation. Against it the chapter on the education of children asks for a speech of another kind: “un parler simple et naif, tel sur le papier qu’à la bouche”
“a simple, natural speech, the same on paper as in the mouth” (I.26).
Book I keeps the Stoic exercises it inherited, and they are of the books. In II.6 he tells of a fall from his horse, and of a near death that he watches from within, as it came close. The exercises and the fall do not cancel each other. They meet as stages of one inquiry, and the end of that inquiry, the trust in nature of the last chapter, is already prepared here, in a thrown rider attending to what he feels.
Movement III
“chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage”
“each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice” (I.31). The chapter on cannibals turns on the Tupinamba brought to Rouen, and on what a European calls savage. It is an argument, conducted on the evidence of customs, that the barbarian is the neighbour seen without his own habits, and that the city which judges him is not the less corrupt. It ends on a turn of the body, ironic and exact: “Mais quoy, ils ne portent point de haut de chausses”
“But what of it? They wear no breeches” (I.31).
The book comes back to custom again and again. What we call nature and reason is mostly custom, the second nature that a habit becomes (I.23). Cruelty is the extreme vice (II.11). In III.6, “Des coches”, a chapter that begins with coaches wanders to the kings of Mexico and Peru, and finds its real subject: the Conquest of the Americas, a butchery done in the name of trade. The title misleads, and the misleading is the method; the subject is found by wandering toward it, not announced.
The cannibals went further than the chapter. In John Florio’s English of 1603 the chapter reached Shakespeare, and Gonzalo’s commonwealth in The Tempest is taken from it nearly word for word. The natural man set against the corrupt city became one of the founding figures of the West. In the chapter itself he is not a myth enacted but a case weighed, and the reader is left to judge.
Movement IV
The “Apologie de Raimond Sebond” (II.12) is by far the longest chapter in the book, and its argument is the humbling of man. Reason is shown its limits; the animals are set beside him; man is “la plus calamiteuse et fraile de toutes les creatures”
“the most calamitous and frail of all creatures” (II.12). The cat comes into the argument as its gentlest proof: “qui sçait si elle passe son temps de moy plus que je ne fay d’elle?”
“who knows if she is not passing her time with me more than I with her?” (II.12).
The skeptic’s question is the chapter’s motto: “Que sçay-je?”
“What do I know?” (II.12). The skepticism ends in faith beyond reason, a fideism the chapter does not examine, and the question it leaves open has stayed open: whether the skeptic is a believer, and what the Apology defends. Pascal argued with the book throughout his Pensées, and Descartes’s Discours answers its doubt. The chapter sprawls; it is also where the book risked the theologians.
The Roman censors examined the book in 1581 and asked for changes, which he did not make; it was placed on the Index in 1676. A page on thumbs, “Des pouces” (II.26), stands in the same book as the Apology, and the same judgment tries itself on both. Of the book he says that it is “livre consubstantiel à son autheur”
“a book consubstantial with its author” (II.18): not a book about him, made of the same stuff as he is, and changing as he does.
Movement V
“Je ne peints pas l’estre. Je peints le passage”
“I do not paint being; I paint passing” (III.2). The chapter on repentance says what the whole book has been doing: “Les autres forment l’homme; je le recite”
“Others form man; I tell of him” (III.2). The world is “une branloire perenne”
“a perpetual see-saw”, and the self moves with it. And it makes the claim on which the book rests: “Chaque homme porte la forme entiere de l’humaine condition”
“Each man bears the entire form of the human condition” (III.2). If he contradicts himself, he says, the truth he does not contradict.
The third book is the book of the late essays, long, digressive and in full command. III.5 speaks of sex. III.9 moves, by his own account, “à sauts et à gambades”
“by leaps and gambols” (III.9), and the leaps are placed. In III.12 the plague of 1585 comes to his country, and the peasants meet it, some of them digging their own graves; beside them stands Socrates facing death, and the book sets the unlettered and the philosopher in one measure.
The last chapter, on experience, is the stone, the body, sleep, food and age, and the life it asks for is lived “avec ordre, mais sans miracle et sans extravagance”
“with order, but without miracle and without extravagance” (III.13). The highest throne in the world is brought down to the body: “si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul”
“yet we are seated only on our own backside” (III.13). The close is made with full control. Bacon took the name of the form in 1597; Emerson made Montaigne the Skeptic in 1850; Woolf wrote on him in 1925. The form and its subject, the essay and the ordinary private self, have kept the shape this book gave them.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites, and the book says where. It was built by accretion, not by design: “I add, but I do not correct” (III.9). The late essays resist removal; III.2, III.9 and III.13 move by digression, and the digression is the matter, since the subject is a mind in motion. But much of Book I could go without loss to what the work knows: its first chapters are exempla gathered under a heading, the commonplace book from which the essay later broke, and the Latin quotations heaped in the later strata often say again what the French has said. The record of a changing self needs its earlier selves, which justifies the strata, not every page. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve, a tenth above the cap.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a human being is not a fixed nature but a passage, inconstant in every act, and each ordinary life contains the whole condition, “la forme entiere de l’humaine condition” (III.2). Around this the book brings into the open what custom hides: that what we call nature and reason is mostly custom (I.23); that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice (I.31); that the Conquest of the Americas was a butchery done in the name of trade (III.6); that cruelty is the extreme vice (II.11). The refusal to conclude is part of what is disclosed. Held off the top because the skepticism of II.12 rests on a fideism the book does not examine, and several truths are stated rather than shown in action.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The book refuses the high style on principle. Its ideal is the ordinary life, “with order, but without miracle and without extravagance” (III.13), and its register is a gentleman’s table talk. Height comes, in a low key: the friendship of I.28, compressed at last to “Because it was he, because it was I”; the fall from the horse in II.6, a near death watched from within; the Apology’s humbling of man as the most calamitous and frail of creatures; the peasants of III.12 meeting the plague of 1585, some digging their own graves; the long close of III.13. These are among the great passages of European prose, but they are spaced across a book of level talk, and frequency counts.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Myth is mostly evoked here, and the book is half against it. What is built is one figure: the self examined, the Delphic “know thyself” turned from an oracle into a method, so that a man with the stone, a cat and a bad memory becomes the type of the examining mind. That figure is load-bearing, and the claim of III.2 that one particular life holds the whole condition is the archetypal claim made into a structure. The rest evokes. The cannibals of I.31 became a founding myth of the West, the natural man against the corrupt city, but in the essay they are an argument, not a myth enacted. Socrates in III.12 is an exemplar, cited and weighed. A book of judgment does not build archetypal structure, and the score records what it does build.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the humanist commonplace book and the moral treatise: Erasmus’s Adagia, the collections of exempla and sayings, Plutarch’s Moralia in Amyot’s French (1572), Seneca’s letters, the Stoic consolation. The early chapters of Book I belong to it. The swerve is from compilation to self-portrait: a gentleman, in the vernacular, takes himself as the matter of a book and calls the result an essai, a trial of judgment. The stake was real. He wrote the charge of vanity into the address to the reader, calling his subject frivolous and vain, and Pascal later made the charge in earnest; the Apology risked the theologians, and the book went on the Index in 1676. Held below the top because the turn was gradual, grown from Plutarch’s and Seneca’s own personal voice.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The essay is the instrument: a trial of the judgment on any matter, left when the trial is made, so that the book knows the self as an activity rather than a thing. Cast as a treatise, the material would have to settle what the book leaves moving; cast as a memoir, it would have to narrate a life the book refuses to arrange. The strata are part of the form, the late additions arguing with the first text in the same paragraph, a mind of about 1590 correcting one of 1572 without erasing it. The book says so of itself: “livre consubstantiel à son autheur” (II.18). Titles that mislead, as “Des coches” (III.6) turns to the Conquest, are form too. Held off the top by the Book I chapters in which the form is still a container.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: four centuries of return without exhaustion. Pascal’s Pensées argue with the book throughout; Descartes’s Discours answers its doubt; Emerson made Montaigne the Skeptic of Representative Men (1850); Sainte-Beuve wrote at length on him in Port-Royal; Nietzsche named him among the few he lived with; Auerbach gave him a chapter of Mimesis. The twentieth century added Villey’s study of the sources and the growth of the book, Hugo Friedrich (1949), Jean Starobinski’s Montaigne en mouvement (1982), and the textual argument over 1595 and the Bordeaux Copy, which is still open. The questions it holds open are central: whether the skeptic is a believer, whether the self is discovered or made by the painting, what the Apology defends. The strata reward a reader who reads them as a dialogue.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The field is French prose of the sixteenth century and, as the book went out, European letters. The intrinsic force: it made a form and a subject. The essay as a genre, and the ordinary private self as a fit matter for literature, both begin here in the form they kept. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bacon took the name for his Essayes (1597); Florio’s English (1603) supplied Gonzalo’s commonwealth in The Tempest, taken nearly word for word from I.31; Burton, Browne, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Descartes and Rousseau worked in its wake or against it; the English essay of Addison, Lamb and Hazlitt, Emerson’s essays, and the confessional and autobiographical traditions descend from it; Woolf wrote on him in The Common Reader (1925). Held a step below the very top only because the confession of the self had an ancient precedent in Augustine.
Score: 9.5 / 10
More than four centuries, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole in two authoritative witnesses, the edition of 1595 and the Bordeaux Copy in the author’s hand. Their disagreements, and a later binder’s cropping of a few marginal additions, are matters of editing, not of loss; nothing that made the work is missing. Presence: continuous since 1580, reprinted in every century, translated early into English (Florio, 1603; Cotton, 1685 to 1686) and into the European languages, read through the years of the Index, a school and university text in France and widely read elsewhere, by the general reader as well as the academy. Fabric: the Wars of Religion, the Latin and the Stoic exercises of Book I fix the surface to its moment in places, and the book has outlived them. High in the band for centuries, short of the millennial texts.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on Montaigne’s French. The command is of the sentence: concrete, abrupt, governed by image rather than period, in his own words “un parler simple et naif, tel sur le papier qu’à la bouche” (I.26). It moves “à sauts et à gambades” (III.9) and lands its turns on the body: “si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul” (III.13), said of the highest throne in the world. The metaphors are physical and exact; the transitions, apparently careless, are placed; the closes of III.2 and III.13 are made with full control. The charges: the arrangement of the whole is loose by design but sometimes merely loose; the early chapters are thin; the heaps of quotation in the later strata clot the line; the Apology sprawls.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: “Des pouces” (II.26), a page on thumbs, and the Apology (II.12), the longest argument in the book on the limits of reason; or the cat of II.12 and Socrates facing death in III.12. One law governs them: a single judgment trying itself on whatever comes, against presumption, by the measure of nature and experience. The range is very wide and held. The book admits its contradictions and claims them for the law: “je me contredits bien à l’advanture, mais la verité ... je ne la contredy point” (III.2). The charge: the Stoic exercises of the early Book I and the naturalism of III.13 meet as development, but the fideism of II.12 and the trust in nature elsewhere sit in a tension the book leaves unresolved.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Many orders, held in one mind and its book. Consciousness at the centre: memory, inconstancy, the body’s moods. The body: the stone, the fall, sex in III.5, sleep, food, age. Friendship, with La Boétie. The household and estate, and the father who had him taught Latin before French. The state: the mayoralty, the Wars of Religion, the use of torture and of law. History and the world: the Conquest of the Americas, the Tupinamba brought to Rouen, the Ottoman and the ancient. The sacred: prayer (I.56), Sebond, faith beyond reason. The natural order: animals in the Apology, death throughout. Education (I.26). Held a step down because the family is thinly held, wife and daughter at the edge, labour appears only as the peasants of III.12 seen at a distance, and one consciousness joins the orders by passing through them, not by setting them against one another in action.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, then The Imperishable at 9.4 and The Swerve at 9.3. Four centuries of return, from Pascal and Descartes to Auerbach and Starobinski, with the textual argument still open; a book that made a form and a subject, the essay and the ordinary private self, and handed both to Bacon, Shakespeare, the English essayists and Emerson; a text whole in two authoritative witnesses, one in the author’s hand, and read without break since 1580; and the turn from the commonplace book to the self-portrait, at a stake the Index confirmed.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6: the book was built by accretion, and much of the early Book I, exempla gathered under headings, and many of the Latin quotations of the later strata could go without loss to what it knows. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8, where one figure, the examined self made a type, is built and the rest is evoked or argued; then The Sublime at 7.9, a low key chosen on principle, its great passages spaced across a book of level talk.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.4, The Swerve at 9.3 and The Unconcealment at 9.2 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 7.6, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.1. The aggregate, at 8.9, stands below the summit’s 9.0 in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, scored as one work: the text of 1588 (Paris, Abel L’Angelier) with the manuscript additions of the Bordeaux Copy, Montaigne’s own annotated copy of that edition, as read in the Villey-Saulnier edition, the three strata of 1580, 1588 and the later additions taken together; three books of 57, 37 and 13 chapters with the address “Au lecteur”, chapters numbered as in Villey. The edition of 1595, by Marie de Gournay and Pierre de Brach, is named as the other witness and is not scored separately; the differences between the two do not bear on the judgment. The chapters weighed most are I.20, I.26, I.28, I.31, II.6, II.12, II.17, III.2, III.5, III.6, III.9, III.12 and III.13; the short early chapters of Book I are known less closely, one by one, and are judged as a group. Every axis is judged on Montaigne’s French. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, no length is given in pages or words, and no quotation was checked against a file. French is quoted only where its words are certain, in the old spelling of the Villey text as remembered, which may differ from the edition in a letter, with the desk’s own English beneath; citations are by book and chapter. Translations · Donald Frame’s The Complete Essays (1957 to 1958), read for sense; M. A. Screech’s Penguin translation (1991), a close version that marks the strata, as a second; John Florio’s (1603), known in part, as the version through which the book entered English letters. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the book. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the share of the final text that the last additions make, the share of the whole that the Apology takes, and the length of the whole in pages or in words.