Search Results

Chapter 2.5 begins with Pierre Huet’s early eighteenth-century description of the school of Montaigne, which he says has been flourishing for more than a century. He denounces the Essais as ‘the breviary of urbane loafers and ignorant pseudointellectuals’, of undisciplined, over-free literates who do not want to pursue proper scholarship and knowledge. The chapter goes on to offer two further case-studies of the life-writing of such free literates in early modern France (Jean Maillefer and Pierre de L’Estoile), as well as a coda on Pierre Coste and John Locke. Both read Montaigne’s work while writing manuscript journals to domestic and private ends; both combined reading and writing in books with the keeping and reviewing of personal records. L’Estoile reveals the significance of Montaigne’s references to the Essais as a registre––both institutional and personal registers were ubiquitous in this period.

2.1 and 1.7 comprise the core of the two-volume study. Having followed Montaigne and the Essais to Rome in 1580–1 in 1.7, we now follow them to Paris in 1588. It emerges that Montaigne, in his persona as the author of the Essais, did not properly ‘arrive’ in Paris, as far as the French parliamentary elite were concerned, until after the posthumous publication of Paris 1595. Even then, he was not accorded the position of a patron-author, which was held only by great lawmen and scholars such as L’Hospital. He was in the shadow of the friend whose works he had edited and addressed to parlementaires in the early 1570s: La Boétie. He was welcomed in terms that retrospectively inserted the author and his book into a politique context. The major figures discussed include de Thou (whose brush with Roman censorship is contrasted with Montaigne’s), Sainte-Marthe, Pasquier, L’Estoile.

The ‘Epilogue’ (2.7) picks up the discussion from the ‘Prologue’ (1.1) and extends it across a broader canvas in the history of the book and of reading. It asks how the case studies in previous chapters (including Pierre de L’Estoile), and new ones in this chapter of Bishop Camus, Pierre Charron, and Pierre Bayle, might revise the sketch of the Essais offered in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. I argue that the fundamental issue at stake in the early modern making and transmission of the Essais is the issue that is explicitly raised by Marie de Gournay in her preface of 1595, and, in a different style and context, by Charron’s use of Montaigne in De la sagesse (1601, 1604): how best to preserve and regulate the well-born individual’s natural liberté of judgement, their franchise or frankness, through reading and writing, in an age of moral corruption and confessional conflict.

This chapter dispels the myth of Pierre de L’Estoile as a passive observer of his times and introduces his role as an engaged collector who negotiated and commemorated the conflicts that divided France in the Wars of Religion. It outlines an approach to L’Estoile and his world that emphasizes individual agency over cultural determinism and the possibilities of religious pluralism in the post-Reformation period over the binaries of confessional conflict. A Gallican Catholic resistant to papal authority, L’Estoile prudently avoided confessional conflict in his own life and showed great respect for individual Protestants among his friends and relations. From his perspective, the Wars of Religion appear more confessionally ambiguous in the responses they provoked, more socially specific in their impact on individuals at different levels of the hierarchy, and more culturally diverse in the memories they left behind.