2—
Montaigne's Dutiful Daughter

J'étais sa fille, je suis son sépulcre, j'étais son second être, je suis ses cendres.
Marie de Gournay

I was his daughter, I am his sepulchre. I was his second being, I am his ashes.

In the preceding analysis of the complex status of the child of the mind we encountered the gap between the father's intention and the way the child carries it out, and I concluded with the image of a textual offspring who is at the same time faithful and rebellious, who simultaneously represents its author and betrays him as well, both in spite of itself and because it is in its nature to do so. In this context we witnessed Montaigne's concern for what he himself identified as the intended meaning of La Boétie's writing and the role he took on to protect the integrity of his friend and his text. And we witnessed as well the essayist's misgivings about the future reading of his own text as he positioned himself, once again, beyond the grave. Who, I asked, would second Montaigne's offspring, the Essais , after the death of their father, who would speak to ensure his (their) intention as Montaigne had spoken to safeguard La Boétie's? Deprived of the guardianship of the father's friend, the textual progeny would be left entirely on its own to fend for itself, endlessly, insistently, and perhaps desperately to repeat the father's words to those who would challenge it or threaten to tear it, as they threatened to tear La Boétie, into a thousand different faces. Or we might also picture it uninhibited by guardianship, gleefully opening itself up to misreading, complicitous in the production of perverse meaning. Even the friend, of course, as surrogate father or guarantor, would not ultimately have the last word (any more than the text itself does), but at least he could speak from the shared experience of the relationship to assuage Montaigne's immediate concern, perhaps even his anxiety, at leaving the entire responsibility for protecting him to his child of the mind and at being misread and misrepresented in his absence.

The Essais thus appear not only to originate in the loss of the friend but in a sense to project that loss and its consequences into the future, beyond the writing, into the reading.^[1] The plaintive cry, "O un amy!" which echoes in "De la vanité" (III, 9, 981b), sounds Montaigne's regret and his longing for companionship, and it anticipates as well the loneliness that will accompany his progeny: "Si à si bonnes enseignes je sçavois quelqu'un qui me fut propre, certes je l'irois trouver bien loing; car la douceur d'une sortable et agreable compaignie ne se peut assez acheter à mon gré. O un amy! Combien est vraye cette ancienne sentence, que l'usage en est plus necessaire et plus doux que des elemens de l'eau et du feu" ("If by such good signs I knew of a man who was suited to me, truly I would go very far to find him; for the sweetness of harmonious and agreeable company cannot be bought too dearly, in my opinion. Oh, a friend!" [750]). These are mediocre times, as the essayist informs us in "De la praesumption" (II, 17), when few have measured up to the standards of the past or to Montaigne's highest aspirations. La Boétie, of course, was the exception, "un' ame à la vieille marque" (659a), and he remains the model to which all other contemporaries are compared and found wanting. There have been some others worthy of note—military leaders, men of uncommon virtue, poets, and noble souls—but "de grand homme en general, et ayant tant de belles pieces ensemble, ou une en tel degré d'excellence, qu'on s'en doive estonner, ou le comparer à ceux que nous honorons du temps passé, ma fortune ne m'en a fait voir nul" (659a) ("as for an all-around great man having all these fine parts together, or one part in such excellent degree as to cause amazement or comparison with the men of the past whom we honor, I have not had the good fortune to find any" [500]). Ordinary friendship is a common thing and should not be confounded with its perfect form, Montaigne claims in "De l'amitié," where the paradoxical words of Aristotle serve to describe the essayist's condition, friendless in the midst of friends: "O mes amis, il n'y a nul amy" (190c) ("O my friends, there is no friend" [140]). If this is the legacy that the essayist will leave to his child of the mind, then the answer to my opening question is that no one will second that offspring, no one will protect it (and its author) from being misread and misrepresented.

Here history and literature converge, and the literal and the figurative confound, to produce an extraordinary sequel to the story of the orphaned text. In the space in the Essais that Montaigne clears of

family and natural offspring so that the child of the mind can grow and prosper unencumbered, undisturbed by sibling rivalry that would vie for the attention of the father, another child surges forth unexpectedly as a figure of the writing at the end of "De la praesumption" (II, 17, 661–62c). This second child, after Montaigne's death, will materialize in history to play out literally the role of guarantor that the text had assigned to the friend; but not as the son on whom patriarchal tradition bestowed this right and this responsibility, not as the male offspring destined to carry on the father's name and to speak in his place. Instead, Montaigne names a daughter, Marie de Gournay le Jars, whom he calls "ma fille d'alliance"; he elevates her to a level equal to that of the greatest men of his time; and with unrestrained praise he confers a mantle of nobility that establishes her as a legitimate and worthy heir(ess). This startling substitution, which also bypasses Montaigne's natural daughter, designates a young woman whom contemporary readers will recognize primarily, if not exclusively, as the editor of the posthumous 1595 publication of the Essais they have in their hands. Let us begin to explore the implications of this designation for the father, for his text, and for the "daughter" herself by analyzing what Montaigne has to say about her as he presents her to the world.^[2]

From the outset we encounter a major difficulty: we literally do not know if Montaigne says anything at all about Marie de Gournay in the Essais . The authenticity of the single passage in which she is named and praised has been questioned by numerous scholars, some even suggesting that its author might be Marie de Gournay herself. The Villey-Saulnier edition expresses the sentiments of Frame and others: "Cet éloge de Marie de Gournay ne figure pas dans l'exemplaire de Bordeaux, où pourtant la place n'aurait pas manqué pour l'inscrire. C'est ce qui a fait soupçonner parfois qu'il est de Mariede Gournay même" (661 n) ("This praise of Marie de Gournay is not to be found in the 'exemplaire de Bordeaux,' where there was room to include it. This has occasionally led some to suspect that she wrote it herself"). Others have disagreed, however. Taking into account Montaigne's habit of writing on separate pieces of paper and the notational system for his textual additions, Maurice Rat, the editor of the Pléiade edition, remarks that, although the paragraph is not in the Bordeaux edition, "il y a des signes de renvoi sur la page, et le feuillet a dû se perdre" (1,595 n. 10) ("there are

reference marks on the page, but the loose-leaf sheet must have been lost"). My own analysis of the rhetoric and thematics of children and friendship also suggests that Montaigne might have marked a place for Marie de Gournay in his text in anticipation of her future role. But rather than attempt to address the problem of attribution, I prefer to exploit the uncertainty of authorship and read the passage twice, as if it had been written by both Montaigne and Marie de Gournay. These readings, I am going to say, are mutually inclusive, and from their double perspective they cross generational lines and gender difference, they challenge the dominant father-son model of transmission and representation, and in the process they open up critical perspectives on issues of authority, of friendship and filial responsibility, and of textual integrity and meaning.

During the years up to 1588 the Essais expressed Montaigne's belief that his text would be left on its own after his death. In the passage in "De la vanité" where he threatens to return from beyond the grave to set his readers straight about himself, and where he speaks of his own defense of La Boétie, the essayist acknowledged his solitude and looked ahead to his own absence: "Je sçay bien que je ne lairray apres moy aucun respondant si affectionné bien loing et entendu en mon faict comme j'ay esté au sien. Il n'y a personne à qui je vousisse pleinement compromettre de ma peinture: luy seul jouyssoit de ma vraye image, et l'emporta. C'est pourquoy je me deschiffre moymesme, si curieusement" (983 n. 4) ("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 no one to whom I would be willing to entrust myself fully for a portrait; he alone enjoyed my true image, and carried it away" [752]). Because there is no one pledged to him, ("aucun respondant," from the Latin respondere , to promise in return, to make a pledge), no one who has returned his promise of friendship and to whom he could entrust his portrait ("compromettre de ma peinture"), there will be no sponsor, no one who will respond on his behalf to those who would misinterpret and misunderstand him after he is gone. The text will be asked to carry a burden it will not be able to manage, to assume a responsibility it cannot fulfill by itself, whatever support Montaigne gives it—that is, however painstakingly and fully he succeeds in writing (and reading)

himself and his intention into it. The child of the mind will, as we said, faithfully (and stupidly) repeat what it says to those who would interrogate it, but that will not be enough to forestall the fragmenting effects of commentary and the distortions of misreading. If not willfully, then inadvertently, the child betrays the father.

The 1595 edition contains two revisions that dramatically alter this picture of the friendless essayist and his soon-to-be-orphaned text. Montaigne had thought first to sharpen that picture. In the "exemplaire de Bordeaux"—the 1588 edition that he amended and revised in his own hand—after "peinture" in the passage we quoted above, he added, "Et si en y a que je recuse, pour les cognoistre trop excessivement proclives en ma faveur" ("And if there should be any, I repudiate them, for I know them to be excessively prejudiced in my favor"). He had already said with a certain bravado that he would return from the other world to give the lie to any man who portrayed him other than he was, even if it were to honor him, as if the writing did not need anyone else to defend it. Here Montaigne again affirms that there is no one to whom he would entrust himself fully, but even if there were, he continues, I repudiate this potential friend in advance. But this marginal addition that confirms the solitary status of the text never made it into print. Montaigne crossed it out, and, more significant, he did what he says he never does ("j'adjouste, mais je ne corrige pas"), he deleted its immediate context entirely from the body of his text—from "je sçay bien" to "si curieusement." What remains, then, is the expression of his desire not to be represented even by someone acting on his behalf, the statement of his own defense of La Boétie as the expression of his friendship, and the opening—which he had previously foreclosed—that indeed allows the sponsor, the "respondant," to emerge.

The second revision occurs several hundred pages earlier, at the end of "De la praesumption," where Marie de Gournay le Jars becomes a textual persona in the addition to the 1595 edition to which we have referred and that bears quoting in full:

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 en-

tre autres de la perfection de cette tres-saincte amitié où nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait peu monter encores: la sincerité et la solidité de ses moeurs y sont desjà bastantes, son affection vers moy plus que sur-abondante, et telle en somme qu'il n'y a rien à 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. Le 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 tres-digne consideration. (II, 17, 661–62)

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 being. She is the only person I still think about in the 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. (502)

I will begin by reading the passage as if it were Montaigne's own. Although nothing in these lines explicitly appoints Marie de Gournay as Montaigne's future guardian, she does assume a privileged position that bears upon the future. As the only person in the world the essayist claims still to think about, she displaces Montaigne's family and becomes a "fille d'alliance" who takes the place of wife and natural daughter, linked to the father through a personal alliance that has both the legal weight of a pact and the sacredness of a covenant. But Marie de Gournay is even more than a covenantal daughter. She is naturalized by Montaigne's language, made a part of him like the other parts of his being, physical or spiritual, including the part that is called the child. And as one of the best parts, we might imagine that she is rather like the metaphorical child of his

mind, a product of his noble soul, an offspring of whom he is both father and mother and one who will represent him and bring him honor. This Marie de Gournay, the daughter of "De la praesumption," is literally a product of Montaigne's noble soul, in every sense a child of his creative imagination who is embodied in the writing. When Montaigne proclaims proudly that he has published her praises numerous times before, he confirms that the promising and perceptive young woman portrayed here as his daughter is in a real sense his textual progeny. Thus naturalized, sacralized, ennobled, this Marie de Gournay is more than "just" a daughter, and that is perhaps why Montaigne loves her "plus que paternellement."

The figure of this exceptional young woman, loving Montaigne through his writing, beloved of Montaigne as a part of his being, appears to be modeled on that of La Boétie and destined for the part that he can no longer play. The description of the privileged relationship in "De l'amitié" in which the two friends shared all, including being itself, reads as the subtext of Marie de Gournay's entrance into the Essais , and the youthful promise, both personal and intellectual, that was realized in the all-too-short life of the first friend bodes well for the future of the second and for the role she alone can now fulfill. Cast in the future tense, as an adolescent worthy of great expectations, as a soul that one day will be capable of the finest things, and among them the perfection of sacred friendship, Marie de Gournay represents the fulfillment of the bond broken by the death of La Boétie. In the passage in "De la praesumption" the essayist expresses his fatherly concern over the daughter's anxiety at his impending end, but this reference to the "end" also expresses the writer's own preoccupation with his death and with what will happen in his absence. By his projection of the model of the ideal daughter and his evocation of the perfect friend, Montaigne both anticipates and prepares the coming into being, or the return, of the one who will represent him and loyally defend his interests. Earlier the essayist had entrusted his portrait to La Boétie, to the friend who alone had enjoyed his true image, and the friend had carried it off in his death. Now after Montaigne himself has been "carried off" Marie de Gournay is meant to become the guardian of this textual self-portrait that he will leave behind, this other true image through which she has enjoyed him. Marie de Gournay enters the Essais for Montaigne's ultimate benefit, he inscribes her as the textual figures of both daugh-

ter and friend in the hope that life will imitate art. In this way he can be less troubled by his mortality and less concerned by what he cannot do in any real sense—that is, return from the other world to protect himself.

But what does it mean to place his fate in this way in the hands of a daughter? A son, our reading has indicated, would have spoken for the father, responded in his name, but could not have done so without also betraying the father, substituting for him and speaking in his own name. That is what it means to be a son. The daughter, at least in Freudian terms, does not rival the father and seek to take his place, and thus she would appear capable of expressing the father's will in the world without betraying herself. She can be dutiful without reservation and without compromising either the father or herself. One could argue, of course, that the issue of whether a son or daughter defends Montaigne is moot since it was already resolved by the historical role played by Marie de Gournay. But it is also true, as I have suggested, that Marie de Gournay is in a real sense Montaigne's textual creation and that, without what is written about her in "De la praesumption" and in Montaigne's public praise, this "Marie de Gournay" could not have been. Life does imitate art, and in the dynamics of what I have called sponsorship, gender does matter. The dutiful daughter is meant to compensate for the unavoidable perversity of the son.

At least this would be the ideal, and it would explain why Montaigne designates the daughter (as gendered child) to be his spokesperson. But the status of the dutiful daughter and the role she is meant to play are fraught with paradox. Can she be child, woman, friend, and respondant? In "De l'amitié" Montaigne had ruled out the possibility of a perfect friendship with one's children, and, moreover, the slippage in that section of the essay from talk of "enfans" to "riis" to his relation to his own father confirmed the exclusion of the daughter. Women too were banned from the sacred bond, although they are acknowledged before being set aside: "D'y comparer l'affection envers les femmes, quoy qu'elle naisse de nostre choix, on ne peut, ny la loger en ce rolle" (185a) ("To compare this brotherly affection with affection for women, even though it is the result of our choice—it cannot be done; nor can we put the love of women in the same category" [137]). But Marie de Gournay escapes the bland indifference with which daughters—and Montaigne's natural daugh-

ter, in particular—were traditionally treated, and she escapes the restrictions put on friendship as well. But at a price, I would claim. Montaigne reminds the reader twice in "De la praesumption" that Marie de Gournay is a young woman, but in each case his comments suggest that his "fille d'alliance" is more (or less) than a woman. When Montaigne insists that it is remarkable that a woman has understood the Essais so well, the implication is that Marie de Gournay has indeed read like a man: "Le jugement qu'elle fit des premiers Essays, et femme, et en ce siecle, et si jeune, et seule en son quartier. . . ." And when he praises her nobility, her virtue, and the quality of her judgment, he honors her with traditional masculine traits that entitle her to the privilege of male friendship that obviously no woman could have enjoyed before: "la perfection de cette tres-saincte amitié où nous ne lisons point que son sexe ait peu monter encores." In the oxymoronic conjunction of daughter / woman and friend, in this "foolish" figure that implies that a woman can also be a man, Marie de Gournay acquires the "masculine" credentials that qualify her to speak in Montaigne's absence.

Is there a place for the feminine that does not disappear in masculine appropriation? Can the woman be a friend without also being a man? Can the daughter fulfill her duty to the father without also becoming a son, without becoming an active voice who also speaks for herself, promotes herself in her own name, and thus in some way betrays the father? The story of Marie de Gournay provides an occasion for examining these complex questions of gender. Here, as I begin that story in my reading of Montaigne's presentation of his "fille d'alliance," we meet Marie de Gournay in her adolescence at a time when she is not yet the person she is destined by the writing to become. At this point Marie de Gournay remains silent. Montaigne speaks for her and about her ("J'ay pris plaisir à publier en plusieurs lieux l'esperance que j'ay de Marie de Gournay le Jars"), inscribing her in his text as his "fille d'alliance," bound to him by their covenant and a part of his being. But my reading reveals that the covenant is formed in anticipation of the voice she will assume when the promise of her youth is realized. Or perhaps I might say that the covenant is formed in order to allow Marie de Gournay to speak, and to speak in a certain way, when that promise is realized, after Montaigne is dead. When Montaigne deletes the passage cited earlier from the 1588 version of "De la vanité" he stifles his own voice on the subject of his

"respondant" and provides the silent space within which Marie de Gournay will be able to speak in her own voice.

I should continue to emphasize, however, that "speaking in her own voice" in the context of the Essais means that Marie de Gournay will speak for Montaigne. In the absence of the son and the (male) friend, where the writer and his text stand alone together, and where the text as child of the mind will soon stand all alone, Marie de Gournay comes from the outside, and as Montaigne narrates it she is drawn to him in a way that the writing makes necessary and natural: virtue recognizes itself in virtue, judgment in judgment, the aspiring intellectual finds the famous author, the promise of youth responds to the fulfillment of maturity. This is an affirmation of Montaigne, of who and what he is, and what he is here, among the other things I mentioned, is the father (figure) sought by the adolescent girl, the friend of she who one day will be capable of that sacred friendship. Thus, a solemn alliance is formed and inscribed, doubly bonded in family and friendship, a covenant that is also an exchange. Montaigne gives Marie de Gournay his name as father and his protection; he gives voice to her promise and accords her status by his praise; and he admits her—in the future—to the sacred bonds of friendship, allowing her to achieve what no woman has yet achieved. In return, as the gesture of deletion allows—and as subsequent history has revealed—Marie de Gournay will become more than a figure in Montaigne's text; she will become the literal "respondant," the friend who in her turn gives voice to protect the father, the writer, and his text, who returns the pledge of friendship and fulfills the promise of the covenant. In the complex and paradoxical rhetoric of Montaigne's praise of Marie de Gournay, the most faithful friend is a woman, the most dutiful son a daughter.

One could argue, persuasively at this point, I believe, that in spite of this elevation or "liberation" of Marie de Gournay, Montaigne has dominated his "daughter" and forced her to do his bidding, and that even the voice she will attain, and that I have called her own historical voice, derives exclusively from him and is in a certain sense an extension of him. As if the essayist were going to practice a kind of ventriloquy from beyond the grave, where Marie de Gournay would merely mouth the words the father intended, like a kind of alter ego

well ensconced within a traditional patriarchal order. Or one might say, with more or less the same result but from the perspective of the textual dimension of the problem, that Marie de Gournay derives from the dominant rhetorical and thematic dynamic of the text, that she is a figure who serves the norms and values expressed in and as Montaigne's text, an element in the discursive network of children and friends meant to carry on in the absence of the father / friend. Marie de Gournay thus fulfills her role in the Essais as "fille d'alliance," one might add, just as all the other historical and literary personages (or offspring) play theirs, even Socrates and La Boétie himself. In either case the autonomy and integrity of the feminine voice is compromised, subordinated as it has been historically to (and within) the dominant masculine discourse.

But only if the discussion ends here. This picture changes radically when I assume that the passage at the end of "De la praesumption" was written by Marie de Gournay herself and inserted in the 1595 edition after Montaigne's death. In this reading she is no longer Montaigne's creation, or his creature, but her own, no longer a daughter to whom the father (alone) has given birth but a writer who has engendered herself as daughter, who has projected her own image and inscribed her own being in the text of the father. The essayist does not speak for and about the passive, silent daughter; rather, the active feminine voice usurps that of the father to speak in his name and writes herself into the family, the father's being, the book.

One might claim that only the father's death allows this bold, unauthorized action, that Marie de Gournay would not have dared to threaten the father and to displace him in his presence. But paternal authority extends beyond the grave; one always runs the risk of being an insurgent, of contravening the father's will, even when one is only confronting his memory. Moreover, in this case authority maintains a concrete presence, embodied in the (male) child / text of the mind that transmits the paternal indefinitely into the future. Marie's intrusion into the Essais challenges the place of the father and of the son as well; she breaches the order of masculine succession by inserting herself as the legitimate heir and friend and by anticipating her future role as defender of paternal intention and meaning.

I have expressly chosen the active metaphors of breaching and intruding to characterize the force and willfulness of Marie de Gournay's gesture and to represent her seizure of a traditional male pre-

rogative. Here again, one might say, the daughter also seems to be a son. She herself will articulate this same strength of purpose and design in the intensity of her accounts of her first contact with the Essais and of her desire to meet and to know Montaigne. At the same time we recognize that the challenge takes place indirectly, that she writes herself into the role of dutiful daughter and speaks in the guise of the father's own voice and consistent with his style, both textual and personal. We might want to say that at this stage Marie de Gournay is a ghost writer, one who writes for and in the name of another and that she is not yet what can be called an autonomous speaking or writing subject. She enacts here the appropriation of masculine discourse that Hélène Cixous has expressed by the verb voler (to steal the discourse, to fly beyond it) and that represents for her the first stage of feminine writing.^[3] The passage in "De la praesumption' is a presumptuous theft of Montaigne's voice and counterfeit of his writing, but it is also a subterfuge. Reacting to the muffling and marginalizing of the feminine voice in the sixteenth century, and in the Essais , the voice of indirection attains a covert, muted, and masked presence. This then is a "ghostly" presence, transparent yet palpable, seen yet absent. And Marie de Gournay's gesture is presumptuous in yet another way, for to presume is to take in advance, to speak or to act in anticipation of the future. Although not yet willing (or able) because of personal, social, or political reasons to write in her own name, Marie de Gournay opens the way for herself to become a writer by positioning herself to fulfill (usurp) the traditional roles of the son and of the friend.

In this second reading, "Montaigne's" textual praise of Marie de Gournay in "De la praesumption" and the privileged status it accords her as "fille d'alliance" becomes an aegis, a historical shield, under which she can begin her long career as writer and as editor, novelist, poet, translator, literary critic, autobiographer, and feminist. The fact that these words inscribed in the essay authorize her to speak in her own name and lend authority to her writing might be reason enough to suppose that Marie de Gournay added the passage to Montaigne's essay, precisely at a time when she was about to publish, or had just published, her first work, "Le proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne par sa fille d'alliance" (1594), and while she was preparing the edition of the Essais that would appear in 1595 and the preface that introduced it. A young, unknown writer and a woman would benefit

immeasurably from the association, as she reveals by repeating Montaigne's name in her titles and by identifying herself as his covenant daughter. The question of intention, though, is essentially a moot one. What interests me is rather the way in which Marie de Gournay attempts to protect the father's word and image, the Essais , and how that effort signals the emergence of her own word and her own emergence through her words. The "Preface sur les Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne, par sa Fille d'Alliance" gives voice to Marie de Gournay and to the "respondant" that Montaigne feared he had lost.^[4]

At the time that Madame de Montaigne sent a copy of the annotated text of the Essais to Marie de Gournay in 1594, contemporaries both great and small were debating the merits of the work. Scaliger scoffed at the treatment of Sebond, Lipsius lauded the essayist's practical judgment, Badius his psychological insight, and Pasquier praised Montaigne as "un autre Seneque en notre langue" while pointing to shortcomings of language and of clarity. Various lesser luminaries were shocked by Montaigne's Gasconisms, annoyed by what they considered the triviality of his self-portrait, scandalized by his sexual license and by what was read as his religious indifference.^[5] The essayist had responded to the charges of obscurantism and linguistic abuse in "Sur des vers de Virgile" in his 1588 edition (III, 5, 875b), alleging that his faults were what made him himself, and he had expressed there his confidence in the integrity of his portrait, "tout le monde me reconnoit en mon livre, et mon livre en moy" ("everyone recognizes me in my book, and my book in me" [667]). But controversy about his "vraye image" persisted. Marie writes her "Preface" to respond to what she calls the "censeurs" and "mépriseurs," the misreaders and the misrepresenters, and she responds as well to the call for a friend, "O un amy," the call to s / he who will respond.^[6]

Filial duty and friendship (can the two be separated out in this case?) motivate the daughter's desire to defend the father, but what right does she have to speak, either to speak for the father or to speak on her own? Marie de Gournay is a daughter who is not even a daughter, a daughter whose honorific status as "daughter" is as much a Renaissance commonplace as it is a sacred covenant; she is a

woman friend who cannot be a friend, a woman who aspires to a friendship that Montaigne himself admits cannot admit of women. And now she desires to be a writer and a reader in a world in which men alone count as writers and readers. To write a preface to the Essais , to introduce the edition and its author to their readership, to justify and explain what Montaigne has said, this demands that Marie de Gournay introduce herself, that she justify not only what she writes but that she writes. A son, a male friend, would have taken on the mantle of authorship as a legitimate, natural right of inheritance in the transmission of authority from male to male. Montaigne did not have to justify writing about his natural or intellectual fathers or about La Boétie. Marie de Gournay must claim authorship, she must appropriate it, guard and defend it.

In the preface to the posthumous edition of the Essais , the complex relation between daughter / friend and father that I have been describing and the tensions that inhere in it both structure the writing and constitute its content. Because Marie de Gournay cannot defend Montaigne without defending herself, her discourse must constantly reflect upon itself, it must double back to speak up for the right to speak.^[7] In this sometimes dizzying play of mirrors, discourse and metadiscourse generate and reflect each other just as the father engenders the covenant daughter and the daughter as writer and the daughter in her turn originates the father's true image and meaning and her own as well. The form is unorthodox, unclassical. The nascent voice of the feminine, and, I should say, the insurgent voice proclaiming its right to be heard, articulates itself as the complex subject matters and multiple discursive voices, the abrupt shifts in perspective and sharp transitions, the unapologetic tone. All these elements constitute what has long been regarded as a perverse, or false, rhetoric, as if this illegitimate and unsanctioned mode of expression posed a threat to order—social and political as well as aesthetic and rhetorical—that needed to be stifled. We should not be surprised that contemporary writers mocked Marie de Gournay and that even Montaigne's elevating praise could not place her above ridicule. Where gender alone could determine what she would call "le crédit d'en estre creu, ou pour le moins escouté" ("the credit one has to be believed, or at least heard"), a determined woman writer directly confronted the reproach, and the sarcasm, of the dismissive "c'est une femme qui parle" (27).^[8]

Marie de Gournay's design is, in part, to set Montaigne beyond reproach, to situate him outside the critical grasp of a public unequal to his genius, or to his virtue, and to authorize her own voice through strategies of association and resemblance. Whether the vulgar readers criticize or praise the Essais is moot: "qu'est-ce donc que le dire de la commune?" ("Of what value is the opinion of the common herd?"). Montaigne's text is inherently worthy, and its value is underscored by the positive judgment of a man of learning like Justus Lipsius. And the appraisal of this great scholar corroborates Marie de Gournay's own reaction, it authenticates her natural, spontaneous response to her first reading of the Essais —"ils me transsissoient d'admiration" (24) ("I was transfixed with admiration")—and it provides the cover for her defense of the text on intellectual grounds. By the complex logic of mutually reflecting worth (Justus Lipsius is a worthy man who recognizes the intrinsic worth of the essays; he is also worthy because he recognizes their worth; Marie de Gournay recognizes their worth as well; she is thus doubly a woman of worth), Marie de Gournay attempts to situate herself in the charmed circle of authentic readers and to participate in their privileged insight and authority. "C'est de telles ames," she says, "qu'il fault souhaitter la ressemblance et la bonne opinion" (25) ("We must seek to resemble such minds and desire their good opinion").

Genealogy also bestows privilege in the "Preface." The title of the introduction identifies its author not by name but as Montaigne's "fille d'alliance," and on at least nine occasions she refers to the essayist not by his name but as "mon père." These honorific titles may be Renaissance commonplaces, but they acquire uncommon significance in this case where Marie de Gournay derives her identity, her being, her self from them: "Je ne suis moy-mesme que par où je suis sa fille" (25) ("I am only myself insofar as I am his daughter"). I will have to come back to this extraordinary self-subordination on the part of a woman insisting on the right to speak in her own voice. For the moment I want to emphasize the rhetorical advantage of this filiation that assures both intimacy and empathy. Marie de Gournay's ecstatic reaction to her discovery of the Essais and her intense desire to meet Montaigne ("apres qu'ils [les Essais ] m'eurent fait souhaitter deux ans cette sienne rencontre, avec la vehemente solicitude que plusieurs ont cognue" [24]; ["after having made me want to meet him for two years, with the intense desire many knew of"])

compose a story told in Montaigne's pages and retold numerous times. Here in the "Preface" they are inscribed as the history that foretells the forging of the family link and the ultimate fulfillment of filial obligation in the defense of the father.

From within the family, in the name of the father, the daughter presumes to speak, to interpret his intention ("je te dirois qu'il a pensé" [23]), and to express his meaning ("Je te diray que la faveur dont il parle n'est pas celle" [24]), even and especially about his most personal religious attitude, which the writing may not entirely clarify: "C'est à moy d'en parler; car moy seulle avois la parfaicte cognoissance de cette grande ame, et c'est à moy d'en estre creue de bonne foy, quand ce livre ne l'esclairciroit pas. . . . Je dis donc avec verité certaine que . . ."(34) ("It is my place to speak of it: I alone had perfect knowledge of that great mind and I alone can be believed in good faith, when this book does not clarify it . . . I say then in absolute truth that . . ."). In the juxtaposition of the "I" that speaks and the "he" that is spoken for, the daughter's voice repeats and supplements that of the absent father, because their thoughts and their souls were one. Reading Montaigne, and rereading him as she prepares her edition, Marie de Gournay finds herself in him and finds him in herself:

Et parce que mon ame n'a de sa part autre maniement que celuy de juger et raisonner de ceste sorte [like Montaigne], la nature m'ayant faict tant d'honneur que, sauf le plus et le moings, j'estois toute semblable à mon Pere, je ne puis faire un pas, soit escrivant ou parlant, que je ne me trouve sur ses traces; et croy qu'on cuide souvent que je l'usurpe. Et le seule contentement que j'euz oncques de moy-mesme, c'est d'avoir rencontré plusieurs choses parmy les dernieres additions que tu verras en ce volume, lesquelles j'avois imaginées toute pareilles, avant que les avoir veues. (45–46)

"And because my mind, for its part, has no other way of working than to judge and to reason in that way (i.e., like Montaigne), nature having bestowed such honor on me that, except in the smallest and greatest things, I completely resemble my Father, I cannot take a step, either in writing or speaking, where I do not find myself following in his footsteps; and I think that people often believe that I am usurping his place. And the only satisfaction that I have ever had has been to find among these last additions that you will see in the present volume several things that I had thought myself, before having seen them there."

Marie de Gournay naturalizes the resemblance ("nature m'ayant faict tant d'honneur") as if to lend to her covenantal relation with her "father" the profound and mysterious identity that nature passes to future generations in the seed that the essayist evokes in "De la ressemblance des enfans aux peres." There Montaigne's legacy of resemblance was bequeathed to the son, although not unequivocally so, as my discussion revealed; here the daughter appropriates it and inscribes it as her own.

The echoes of that other "he" and "I," Montaigne and La Boétie, and of the perfect knowledge each had of the other, reverberate through this presentation of unity and resemblance, sounding another aspect of Marie de Gournay's genealogy. My discussion of that passage of disputed authorship in "De la praesumption" indicated that in a real sense Marie de Gournay is as much the descendant of La Boétie as she is Montaigne's offspring. Here in the "Preface," with barely a mention of the name of the revered friend (and perhaps in this way making him all the more present), she takes the place of this other "father." La Boétie survives in the person of the daughter as the perfect friend; this time he could be said to survive Montaigne and to keep him, in his turn, from being torn into a thousand faces: "Il ne m'a duré que quatre ans," she writes, "non plus qu'à luy la Boetie" (51).

In a sense Marie de Gournay rewrites Montaigne's essay "De l'amité" as her "Preface," she writes herself into that long tradition of essays on friendship that reaches back to Aristotle and to Cicero, appropriating the father's voice, and his role, and making them her own. Drawing from Montaigne's paean to male friendship, she turns its conceptual framework to her own ends so that it serves the writer of genius maligned by his public, and the daughter who would speak on his behalf. The force of resemblance that bound Montaigne and La Boétie—expressed in "De l'amitié" by such terms as correspondance, communication, concorde, convenance, conference, couture —here becomes the agency that draws the "grand esprit" toward "un pareil," "un semblable." Marie de Gournay is, of course, talking about the ideal relationship between writer and reader, between Montaigne and his public, and, most central, between the essayist and herself as reader, and her goals are to protect the "grand esprit" from the judgment of those unequal to him and, by extension, to authenticate the judgment of those like herself who recognize greatness. We

saw this strategy operating earlier in what I referred to as the logic of mutual worth. But even more is at stake here. When Marie de Gournay defines friendship as movement toward a kindred soul, and movement as the source of being (recalling Montaigne's words in "De l'affection des peres aux enfans": "estre consiste en mouvement et action" [II, 8, 386c]), she locates the sense of self in the impulse toward union with the other. "Les grands esprits," she claims, "sont desireux, amoureux, et affolez des grands esprits: comme tenans leur estre du mouvement, et leur prime mouvement de la rencontre d'un pareil" (47) ("Great minds desire, are in love with, are mad about other great minds; as if their being derives from movement, and their primary movement from meeting an equal"). This is, of course, the paradoxical other of friendship, the other who is not other but another oneself, in whom the self both loses and finds itself.

The fulfillment of the writing act, like the realization of friendship, is a merging of understanding, a life-giving union that is predisposed, predetermined, waiting to happen. The "grands esprits . . . desireux, amoureux, et affolez des grands esprits" move toward the object of desire, open themselves up in order to make themselves known, seek to couple in that fusion of self and other from which the sense of being derives. In the self-reflecting grammar of the "grands esprits" as both subject and object, where the disparity of self and other is already overcome, writer and reader, friend and friend (the two pairs are purposely interchangeable in the "Preface") meet in this markedly narcissistic act whose sexual undertones are unmistakable, as if the spiritual union must be concretized, materialized, eroticized (as it so often is in religious and especially mystical discourse) in order to be expressed, communicated. On its own the self clearly cannot know itself in any absolute way, nor can it be the sole source of its being; if it could, it would not have to write or yearn after a friend. But the self can desire and seek that which is most like itself; it must, if it is to be a "self," look to meet another itself, in order to complete itself and to experience the ecstasy of being.

Paradoxically, friendship and reading—as they are constituted both by Montaigne and Marie de Gournay—are not the present participation in this union or in the fullness of being but are their aftermath, the experience of separation and of absence, of rupture and of deprivation. In effect, to be a friend or a reader in the context of the Essais and of the "Preface" is to function in the void of loss and of

nonpresence, to confront traces inscribed in memory or the signs marked as textuality (is there a fundamental difference?), in a word, to be forced to remember, to reconstitute, to resurrect what has been lost. And what has been lost is not only the missing other for whom one has become the "respondant," the dead friend / author who can no longer speak for himself, but one's own self that is now also missing. Like the isolation and anonymity that precedes "la rencontre d'un pareil," the desolation that follows the death of the kindred soul is provoked by being only half of what one is. Montaigne had written in "De l'amitié," "J'estois desjà si fait et accoustumé à estre deuxiesme par tout, qu'il me semble n'estre plus qu'à demy" (I, 28, 193a) ("I was already so formed and accustomed to being a second self everywhere that only half of me seems to be alive now" [143]). Marie de Gournay rewrites this experience of cleavage in the "Preface": "Estre seul, c'est n'estre que demy. Mais combien est encore plus miserable celuy qui demeure demy soy-mesme, pour avoir perdu l'autre part, qu'à faute de l'avoir rencontré!" (47) ("To be alone is to be only half alive. But how more miserable is s / he who remains only half alive for having lost the other half than for never having met it").

And yet the writing that articulates the experience of rupture and of fragmentation is also meant to overcome it, to be the means by which the self recovers itself, by which it comes to know itself (as in the case of Montaigne) or to assert and be itself (as in the case of Marie de Gournay). The desire to recuperate the self in this way derives from the convictions that writing incorporates the self into the text ("tout mouvement nous descouvre," Montaigne says [I, 50, 302]) and that reading can derive it there. In Marie de Gournay's (feminine) version of "De l'amitié" she inscribes friendship as the origin, the mother of being, that friendship that she experiences as ideal reading and that is also the mother of both writer and reader. The sense of her own selfhood that she earlier ascribed to her privileged status as Montaigne's daughter can now be named an effect of her friendship with the essayist, the paradoxical consequence of its loss, and, most profound, the effect and consequence of Marie de Gournay's own textual formulation and expression.

In her account of the movement that propels writer and reader toward each other, in the communication, concorde, convenance , and correspondance (to repeat Montaigne's lexicon of friendship) that re-

suits from their conjunction, Marie de Gournay discovers herself as un semblable, un pareil , and she discovers as well her role, and the role of all serious readers, in the regeneration of the writer. Writing must be a public act through which the writer makes him / herself known, through which s / he bears witness to what s / he is to a worthy reader, a reader who is him / herself "capable de le gouster," "un homme de bien" (48), "un grand tesmoing" (49). For Marie de Gournay, as for Montaigne before her, to be wholly private, or to be unknown, or to be known by those incapable of truly knowing is not to be at all. In a sense, it is to be dead: "Estre incogneu c'est aucunement n'estre pas; car estre se refere à l'agir; et n'est point, ce semble, d'agir parfaict, vers qui n'est pas capable de le gouster" (48) ("To be unknown is essentially not to exist; for being refers to acting, and it seems as if action cannot be perfect if it inclines toward one who is incapable of savoring it"). After the death of the writer / friend, Marie de Gournay, again like Montaigne, having been a reader comes to her own vocation as writer. Or perhaps we should say that it is through the writing that she both seeks and enacts her vocation, that writing in her own voice is both the call (Latin vocare ) to selfhood and its response. Having been a witness to the other, having allowed that other "to be," Marie now bears witness to herself, she acknowledges and realizes herself.

Marie de Gournay thus writes to perform her coming into being as a reader / writer, her "coming out" of anonymity by making herself known. This is the story that she narrates as the subject matter of her text, the story that tells of her active role in the desiring, loving, infatuated pursuit of Montaigne (where she embodies the "grand esprit" pursuing what in the equation of resemblance is her "pareil"), the story that recounts and announces the emergence on the public stage of Marie de Gournay the editor of the Essais , the writer of this "Preface," the daughter, the friend, the "semblable" of Montaigne. A story to be read, a persona, a self, to be witnessed, acknowledged, known, and brought to life in its turn by a kindred spirit. But there is a disconcerting aporia within this narrative of the self-assured public presentation of self. Speaking of the "sage" who languishes (dies?) if a worthy man does not witness the purity of his conscience, Marie de Gournay adds, "La cognoissance de cette chetifve condition hu-

maine, ne luy permettant pas aussi de s'asseurer ny qu'il face ny qu'il juge bien sans l'approbation d'un grand tesmoing, l'oblige à desirer un surveillant" (49) ("The knowledge of this pitiful human condition, which does not allow him the assurance that he does well or judges well without the approval of an illustrious witness, obliges him to desire that someone observe him"). The disturbing element is the need for the "approbation" of the other, the praise or approval that reassures the self that it is what it takes itself to be or what it has made itself out to be. Going public may initiate the experience of being, as we saw above; it must also confirm one's own self-image. But can it be that virtue does not recognize itself, does not or cannot authenticate itself? Or that moral action or judgment is not sufficient in itself, or does not announce itself for what it is? Marie de Gournay blames the weak and pitiful state of the human condition for what appears to be the impossibility of self-knowledge, even the knowledge that one is virtuous or engaged in moral action. All knowledge, it would appear, must be mediated by the other, all sense of oneself, moral as well as psychological (and, I should add, ontological), is determined by the sanction of the other and must be read in his words, his gaze.

But can one be confident of the meaning of those words or the significance of the gaze? Why should "reading" the other be any less problematical than knowing one's own action or judgment? Can "cette chetifve condition humaine" avoid contaminating the relation between self and other? And what does it mean to make approval (for "approbation" is approval as well as confirmation, sanction) from the other the basis of one's sense of self? Marie de Gournay does not explore the disquieting implications of her own discourse. For rhetorical and individual ends she treats friendship and the community of worthy souls as if they were immune from any undermining uncertainty or instability.

Montaigne too had privileged true friendship as the source of being and of self-knowledge, but while Marie de Gournay's formulation draws from a common lexicon it appears to engage a different personal, social, and historical dynamic. Where Montaigne the father depicted a unique and irreplaceable relationship, "si entiere et si parfaite que certainement il ne s'en lit guiere de pareilles, et, entre nos hommes, il ne s'en voit aucune trace en usage" (I, 28, 184a) ("so entire and so perfect that certainly you will hardly read of the like,

and among men of today you see no trace of it in practice" [136]), the daughter extends the possibility and the hope to every meeting of great and worthy minds. Under the right conditions every reading encounter might perform the functions of friendship. While the plaintive cry for a friend, "O un amy," reverberates in the Essais , the writing becomes Montaigne's response to the absence of both other and self. The text enacts both an opening out and a turning back upon itself, both the desire for friendship and the statement of its impossibility (we recall the paradoxical "O mes amis, il n'y a nul amy"), and it provides the compensatory means by which the self becomes its own friend ("son plus proche et plus amy, sçavoir est soy mesme" [II, 3, 353c]). In Marie de Gournay's preface, by contrast, the writing both expresses and performs the insistent and unending desire for the other in friendship, and it is meant to be its active mediator. The intensity of need that originally impelled her toward the essayist now expresses itself after his death in the broad, thinly veiled appeal to her own readers. The irreparable loss of the friend left Montaigne in epistemological and ontological uncertainty, with needs that might be called broadly psychic, intellectual, and spiritual. The daughter experiences similar needs, but her references to reassurance and to approbation betray above all an uncertainty and an insecurity that are both deeply personal and social.

Marie de Gournay's program in the "Preface" and her posture appear to respond to her own experience as a woman. What we read there is the dynamic interaction of textuality and history, the complex expression of an active feminine self emerging to assert itself and its right to speak at the same time as it expresses its desire for the reassurance of male authority. The daughter who has boldly transgressed traditional patterns of female behavior, who has educated herself, ventured out into public as a professional writer, and dared to challenge male intellectuals on equal footing, this daughter who gives voice to her own aspirations also looks to others, to her "father" and even to other father figures for confirmation. Marie de Gournay performs the tenuous, and double-edged, sociointellectual status of women in late Renaissance France. There was much in her personal and public experience that could have undermined her confidence; throughout her life attacks in satires and caricatures of her person and her writings that could have made her long for the support and reassurance of the "grands esprits." In her private relationship with

Montaigne (or in the relationship she inscribed with Montaigne), she sought and discovered the generous father figure who sanctioned the activity she claimed for her own. In her public expression she in turn posited a generous, open, and accessible friendship based on equality and resemblance, a friendship that invited her readers into a mutually supporting union. But we recognize as well, in the need for this friendship and the approval it confers, the residue of dependence and subordination and the traces (or scars) of the paternal hierarchy it seeks to escape.

The "Preface" thus reaches out to the worthy reader in the intense desire and uncertain anticipation of friendship while boldly asserting its defense of Montaigne and the vigorous fulfillment of that originary friendship. The dutiful daughter who needs reassurance from others now that the legitimizing father is dead speaks forcefully in her own name to protect him. Even the preparation of manuscript copy, Montaigne's literal word, requires the guardian's watchful eye. In the closing pages of her "Preface" Marie de Gournay addresses the editorial work that must be carried out if the text is to represent its author faithfully. The task is not an easy one, especially in the case of posthumous editions, and particularly in the case of the Essais: "outre la naturelle difficulté de correction qui se void aux Essays , ceste copie en avoit tant d'autres que ce n'estoit pas legere entreprise que la bien lire, et garder que telle difficulté n'apportast ou quelque entente fauce, ou transposition, ou des obmissions" (53) ("besides the natural difficulty of correction in the Essays , this edition had so many others that it was not a simple task to read it properly, and to be sure that any given difficulty not bring about misunderstanding, or cause transpositions, or omissions"). Whether she is referring to the vagaries of sixteenth-century French grammatical practice evident in Montaigne's text—varied spelling, the inconsistent use of subject pronouns, unevenness of verb forms, syntactical variety—or alluding to the essayist's corrections, emendations, and additions in the margins and on separate slips of paper, or to his sometimes dense and complex style, the issue is the same: textual integrity and the author's meaning are always open to misreading and misrepresentation. Before the book ever makes its way out in public, and exposes itself brazenly and knowingly to a readership anonymous and re-

moved, it runs the risk of distortion at the hand of its editors, even when they are diligent and sympathetic: "non pas seulement la vigilance des Imprimeurs,... mais encore le plus esveillé soing que les amys ayent accoustumé d'y rendre, n'y pouvoit suffire" (52) ("Not only the vigilance of the printers . . . but also the most careful attention that friends were accustomed to pay to it, could not suffice").

No common professional concern of the printer / publisher, and no concern of the common friend, will suffice. To explain the unusual soundness of Montaigne's text, and its public success in the past, Marie de Gournay evokes the presence of a guardian angel: "quelque bon Ange a monstré qu'il l'estimoit digne de particuliere faveur" (52) ("a friendly angel has shown that it deems him worthy of special favor"). The reference is not entirely playful, or metaphorical, for the dangers of what she calls "la miserable incorrection," the risk that the printing will betray the text of the manuscript, are real. This time she herself will be the uncommon guarantor, the "tuteur" (from tutus , past participle of tueri , to watch, protect, guard): "Somme, apres que j'ay dict qu'il luy falloit un bon tuteur, j'ose me vanter qu'il ne luy en falloit, pour son bien, nul autre que moy, mon affection suppleant à mon incapacité" (53) ("In all, after having said that he needed a good tutor, I dare boast that, for his welfare he needed only me; my affection makes up for my shortcomings"). "Nul autre que moy": no one else is needed to protect Montaigne, but Marie de Gournay's preface also implies that she alone can protect him. In the mysterious bond of perfect friendship that transcends rupture and absence, and in the affection that this "enfant" expresses for her "père," (a love that responds to and requites the paternal affection of Montaigne's "De l'affection des peres aux enfans" [II, 8]), the will of the father and his word survive intact. Even where Montaigne's writing might have left itself open to editorial revision, even where it was in Marie de Gournay's words, "corrigeable," she has bowed to both will and word, to the weight of paternal authority, as it was accessible to the privileged friend and daughter: "soubs ceste seulle consideration que celuy qui le voulut ainsin estoit Pere, et qu'il estoit Montaigne" (53) ("only because the one who wished it so was the Father, and he was Montaigne").

"Il ne luy en falloit, pour son bien, nul autre que moy" ("For his welfare he needed only me"); yet Marie de Gournay is not entirely alone, either in her defense of the Essais or in the preparation of the

1595 edition. From the pages of the "Preface" emerges a small band of supporters who admire and sustain Montaigne and Marie de Gournay herself and whom she generously acknowledges: Lipsins, equal to the task, who has opened "les portes de louange aux Essais " ("the gates of praise"); Pierre de Brach, whose editorial concern earns him the name of "bon amy"; and, most significant, Mme de Montaigne. The Essais , as we know, relegate Mme de Montaigne to the outermost margins of the writing, a "woman's" place, but also the place created by Montaigne's introspective turn toward the self, as he explains in "De la solitude": "Il se faut reserver une arriere-boutique toute nostre,... en cette-cy faut-il prendre nostre ordinaire entretien de nous à nous mesmes, et si privé que nulle acointance ou communication estrangiere y trouve place; discourir et y rire comme sans femme, sans enfans et sans biens" (I, 38, 241a) ("We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, children, without possessions, without retinue and servants" [177]). Only four times in his text does the essayist mention "ma femme," each a passing reference, and once to comment that he might have preferred to produce a perfectly formed child by intercourse with the muses rather than by intercourse with his wife (II, 8, 401b). For her part, Marie de Gournay recuperates Mme de Montaigne from the oblivion to which the Essais (and traditional, male-dominated history) had consigned her: she inscribes her in the "Preface" and restores to her a central place as Montaigne's wife and as a figure in Marie de Gournay's own genealogy and in that of the edition itself.

In a very real sense, Michel de Montaigne and his wife, Françoise de la Chassaigne, are more than the spiritual parents of Marie de Gournay. Her natural father died when she was nine or ten years old, and her mother, as she recounts the story in her various autobiographical writings, opposed her efforts to acquire an education and intended either that she marry or enter a convent. Montaigne replaces the absent father, and, in terms that are perhaps more than metaphorical, one might say that the essayist fathers Marie de Gournay as a writer. She repeatedly indicates that the experience of first reading the Essais and her early meetings with Montaigne signal her

coming of age and the discovery of her vocation. And after the death of the covenant father, Mme de Montaigne in her turn becomes a substitute parent and "mothers" Marie de Gournay, conceiving her as editor of the annotated manuscript of the Essais and inaugurating her lifework as "tuteur" for Montaigne. While the choices offered by her natural mother (as Marie de Gournay tells the story) are bound by the traditionally female world of the body and physical reproduction—its exclusion in the convent and its exclusivity in marriage—her substitute mother opens the way to the traditionally male world of the mind and to cultural production.

Marie de Gournay, for her part, restores Montaigne to life as father (both as her father and as the father of his text), and she can be said to generate Mme de Montaigne as well, or, perhaps more correctly, to regenerate her, to bring her back through her story out of silence into history. In the narrative of the publication that the "Preface" recounts, Montaigne's wife fulfills what is called "les offices d'une tres ardente amour conjugale" (25), she ensures the integrity of her husband's text and his reputation by dutifully collecting and noting the corrections and additions to the "exemplaire de Bordeaux" and by ushering the text toward its appearance in print. As Marie de Gournay tells it, Mme de Montaigne cannot be simply forgotten or dismissed, for the whole region has witnessed her devotion: "Elle a tout son pays pour tesmoing." And the daughter herself testifies as witness, here in print and in public, to Mme de Montaigne's presence as dutiful wife: "Je puis tesmoigner en verité, pour le particulier de ce livre, que son maistre mesme n'en eust jamais eu tant de soing, et plus considerable, de ce qu'il r'encontroit en saison, en laquelle la langueur, où les pleurs et les douleurs de sa perte l'avoient precipitée, l'en eust peu justement et decemment dispenser" (25) ("I can truthfully testify, in the particular case of this book, that even her master could not have brought to it as much care, and the most considerable care, as it received at a time when her languor, into which her tears and the pain of her loss had precipitated her, could justly and decently have exempted her"). In a sense, the dutiful wife reclaims her rightful place as her husband's guarantor and thus allows the daughter (her right) to be dutiful. Mme de Montaigne's presence also guarantees that the daughter remains a daughter, that her charged expressions of passion and desire, her talk of being one with Montaigne, are not misconstrued, that Marie de Gournay herself is not mistaken for the wife.

The return to history of Mme de Montaigne is thus not without paradox, for it could be said that she returns not in her own right and not to her own history. Mme de Montaigne returns as wife to Montaigne's history (and thus does not escape the domination of the husband), and she returns as well to Marie de Gournay's history (and thus does not escape the domination of the daughter). In fact, in Marie de Goumay's paean to her benefactress, in the text through which "this" Mme de Montaigne comes into the world, she praises the essayist's wife not for being what she is but for becoming what her husband was:

Chaqu'un luy doibt, sinon autant de graces, au moins autant de louanges que je faiz: d'avoir voulu r'embrasser et r'échauffer en moy les cendres de son mary, et non pas l'espouser mais se rendre une autre luy-mesme, ressuscitant en elle à son trespas une affection où jamais elle n'avoit participé que par les oreilles, voire luy restituer un nouvel image de vie par la continuation de l'amitié qu'il me portait. (26)

Everyone owes her, if not as much gratitude, at least as much praise as I: to have wanted to embrace again and to rekindle in [through] me the ashes of her husband, and not to espouse him but to make herself into another him, reviving in herself at his death an affection in which she had only participated through hearsay, in truth, to restore to him a new image of life by continuing the friendship he had borne for me.

In this long and complex sentence, Mme de Montaigne takes Montaigne's place for her own but does not displace him. She is there as a forceful subject (expressed in the active verbs r'embrasser, r'échauffer, se rendre, ressusciter, restituer ), the agent of transitive actions that affect both her late husband and Marie de Gournay as objects, but it could also be said that she loses herself in transit. Mme de Montaigne revives Montaigne's presence for (in) Marie de Gournay so that it burns brightly once again. The essayist's ashes and the daughter who herself had become his ashes are both revived and glow anew. Mme de Montaigne reawakens in herself the friendship that had existed between father and daughter and from which she herself had been excluded; she restores to it ("luy restituer") and to each of its constituents a new vitality. But we might also want to exploit the dense prose of the sentence and "misread" Montaigne himself, "son mary," as the antecedent of "luy," for it is he who comes most prominently back to life in a new image. Montaigne comes back, we could say, in the image of Mme de Montaigne herself, who has made herself, or been trans-

formed, into "une autre luy-mesme." The friendship is renewed but not for its own sake, just as Mme de Montaigne does not return for her own sake. Both serve to mediate Montaigne's unhoped-for resurrection.

In my discussion of textual progeny, I spoke of the author / father's desire to write himself down, to represent and thereby perpetuate himself, and of the dangers to which he exposed himself, dangers of disfigurement and misrepresentation by others, and, paradoxically, of displacement by the very offspring meant to embody him. My reading disclosed that the child (the son) has its own life, and when it begins to speak, even in support or in defense of the father, paternal authority and prominence are challenged and the father's voice displaced, muffled, even muted. This is the natural order of things, Montaigne implied in "De l'affection des peres aux enfans," in which he recognizes that the very existence of the child both demands and effects the withdrawal and the absence of the father. But the death of the father and his irresistible displacement do not alone guarantee either the autonomy of the child or the authenticity of its voice. One of the questions I have raised in this chapter is whether the situation of the child is different when she is a daughter. Does the "affiliative" status that exempts her in Freudian terms, for example, from competing with the father, or in social and legal terms from inheriting his name or his property, also exempt her from displacing him or being displaced by him? What happens to the daughter when she begins to speak for the father? When Marie de Gournay attempts to speak for Montaigne, her task is fraught with perils that are social, intellectual, personal, and textual, but none is so great as the risk to her own selfhood posed by the very act of speaking for the other.

The genealogy by which Marie de Gournay claims her identity is paradoxically the genealogy by which she risks losing it. Earlier I evoked the image of the father as ventriloquist, providing the language spoken by the offspring, even from beyond the grave, and I recalled the figure of Socrates in the Phaedrus condemning the textual offspring for stupidly, if faithfully, repeating the father's words in his absence. But how could the child speak otherwise and still remain a loyal surrogate for the father? At the same time, if the child is to become someone in itself, the father's wishes must be exceeded and

his intentions surpassed; in a word, the child must betray the father to speak in its own name, even if the child is a daughter. This is precisely the double bind within which Marie de Gournay's 1595 "Preface" speaks for the father Montaigne and that solicits the revised prefaces that accompany her later editions of the Essais .

Dutifully, the daughter proceeds to defend the father, but there is something so troubling in this defense that she seeks almost immediately to disavow it. Scarcely a year after the publication of the 1595 edition, Marie de Gournay confesses her regret at having written the preface in a letter to Justus Lipsius at Louvain:

J'ai fait une preface sur ce là dont je me repens, tant à cause de ma foiblesse, mon enfantillage et l'incuriosité d'un esprit malade, que par ce aussi que ces tenebres de douleur qui m'enveloppent l'âme, on semble prendre plaisir à rendre à l'envi cette sienne conception si ténébreuse et obscure qu'on n'y peut rien entendre.^[9]

I wrote a preface for that book, of which I repent, as much because of my weakness, my childishness, and the incuriousness of a sick mind as of the darkness of that pain that enveloped my soul; people seem to take pleasure in making, to their heart's content, his own ideas so shadowy and obscure as to be totally incomprehensible.

Moreover, she entreats Lipsius to make certain that the "Preface" is not included in any publication of the Essais in Louvain, at least before it is "corrected."

Six months later, Marie informs Justus Lipsius that he will find eight or ten pages cut from the beginning of each of the three copies of the Essais that she has sent him: she has removed the preface "que je lui laissois couler en saison où ma douleur ne me permettoit ni de bien faire ni de sentir que je faisois mal" (that I allowed to slip at a time when my pain did not permit me either to do well or to sense that I was doing poorly").^[10] In its place, she adds, he will find a tenline introduction:

LECTEUR , si je ne suis assez forte pour escrire sur les Essais , aumoins suis-je bien genereuse pour advouër ma foiblesse, et te confesse que je me retracte de cette Preface que l'aveuglement de mon aage et d'une violente fievre d'ame me laissa n'aguere eschaper des mains: lors qu'après le deceds de l'Autheur, Madame de Montaigne, sa femme, me les feit apporter, pour estre mis au jour enrichis des traicts de sa derniere main. Si je me renforce à l'advenir, je t'en dirai, sinon ce qu'il faudroit, aumoins ce que je pense et ce que je sçay: ou si je ne sçay rien, encore prendray-je la plume pour te prier de m'apprendre ce que

tu sçauras. Pour cette heure, dis-je, ne te donneray rien que mes oreilles afin d'ouyr quel sera ton advis sur ce livre. Que t'en semble donc Lecteur?

READER , if I am not strong enough to write on the Essays , at least I am generous enough to admit my weakness, and I confess that I disavow that Preface that the blindness of youth and a violent mental fever caused me to let slip out of my hands; when, after the death of the Author, Madame de Montaigne, his wife, had them (Montaigne's MSS) brought to me so that they could be published, enriched by the latest additions in his hand. If I gain strength in the future, I will speak of it (the MS), if not all that need be said, at least what I think and what I know of it: or if I do not know anything, I will still take up the pen to entreat you to teach me what you know. For the moment, I will only lend you my ears so that I can hear your opinion of this book. What do you think of this, Reader?

Just to complete the story, this preface first appeared in print in the 1598 edition and remained in successive editions until 1617 when it was replaced with a reworked version of the original 1595 text. Forms of that first preface accompanied the editions of 1625 and 1635; Marie de Gournay also republished it in its original state in the third edition of her Proumenoir de M. de Montaigne in 1599.^[11]

What explains the curious genealogy of the 1595 "Preface," its public disavowal and removal, and its diverse reappearances? François Rigolot has suggested several possibilities: that Marie de Gournay might have realized that its naïve enthusiasm was offensive; or she may have felt that its response to Montaigne's critics was too strong; perhaps she sensed that her occasional "feminist" remarks were out of place here and would be more persuasive in another form; or finally, that by withdrawing the text and taking up its arguments elsewhere she was creating the occasion to speak in her own name and her own voice. Marie de Gournay's own words provide a somewhat different perspective on her vagabond preface. Without alluding to any specific failings of her text, they condemn it in her letter to Lipsius as the product of her weakness, her childishness, and her grief. And, most profound, her words condemn her , for having been weak and childish and for having allowed her sorrow to obscure her thoughts and make her careless. Marie de Gournay publicly confesses her fault and her guilt; she repents of her action and attempts to redeem herself by taking back her words. This extraordinary gesture may be occasioned by the shame she feels at the effusiveness of her prose or the boldness of her criticism, but much more

appears to be at stake here. We might insist on asking, "Of what is Marie de Gournay guilty"?

I would argue that Marie de Gournay is guilty of having misspoken and, more serious, that she is guilty of having spoken at all. Traditionally, as the daughter she has no right to speak, even if, as in this case, the father seems to have authorized her voice in his text and again from his deathbed when he bequeaths the editorship of the Essais to her. The fact that as the offspring she has the obligation to speak in the name of the father, that she is destined to speak in this way, underscores the problematical situation of the child per se, but it sets in particularly bold relief the impossible position of the child as daughter . Marie de Gournay cannot speak, but since she must speak she can only do so as the daughter; she must draw attention to her voice and to the voice that is always identified as a woman's—because she is forced to defend it—and demand her right to speak as herself, as Montaigne's (intellectual) heiress. Thus, as we have seen, her discourse is always excessive, always in excess of a direct defense of the father and always "overstated" in order to make her voice heard and to give it authority. Unlike the son who does not have to justify himself, the daughter must always speak of herself as daughter when she speaks of the father, she must always center herself in her discourse merely to speak, she must make herself the subject of her discourse, even as she seeks, and speaks, only to protect the father. But like all children who speak, and even or especially those who speak to remain faithful to the father, Marie de Gournay, the woman, the daughter, irresistibly displaces the father, competes for textual space (and social and psychological space as well), rivals and betrays him.

Unless she speaks in another way, in a way that uses discourse paradoxically to deny her own right to speak. In her new preface, Marie de Gournay's confessional mea culpa and her public retraction relinquish her claim to represent the father and herself; they enact a withdrawal to the traditional role of dutiful daughter. Her language of self-condemnation, which reflects the historic condemnation of the feminine as weak, childlike, and emotional, accepts that feminine as her own and puts her back in her "place," the place contemporary critics reserved for her and for all women when they said that her proper role was spinning ("la quenouille").^[12] A domestic rather than a public life, handiwork rather than intellectual activity, silence in-

stead of discourse. Marie disavows the presumptuous speech of the past and attributes it to that vulnerability that is taken for woman: "I was weak, I was blinded by youth and feverish emotion, I was passive, and the preface escaped from me." She confesses in the contrite speech of the present that she spoke when she should not have spoken, or what she should not have spoken, but speaking this way now makes her a woman who still has no right to speak. If I grow stronger in the future, she now says to her reader, I will (have the right to) speak of what I know, or I will admit what I do not know and solicit your teaching. For now, Marie de Gournay is all ears ("ne te donneray rien que mes oreilles"), the silent and submissive (feminine) listener, passively deferring to the reader's will and to his words. Montaigne will have to speak for himself, his textual offspring, his book, will be obliged to speak for itself in the name of the father, and the reader will have the last word, speaking undeterred, unchallenged, unopposed, in the empty space of Marie de Gournay's suppressed voice and of her silence. "Que t'en semble donc Lecteur"?

This extraordinary act of self-abnegation thus redeems the dutiful daughter who would remain silent and condemns the dutiful daughter who would speak for the father. But if filial deference ensures faithfulness to the father, the reluctance to speak in his name betrays him. How can the daughter be dutiful? Only by speaking and not speaking at the same time, only by denying herself and simultaneously asserting herself as herself. Perhaps Marie de Gournay escaped some of the impossible burden of this schizophrenic bind by finding another self already split off from her in the person of Montaigne's natural daughter, Léonor, who, she says, "la chérissait plus que fraternellement."^[13] Here was the daughter who remained dutifully silent, who did not challenge the father by her presence during his lifetime but was not present either to defend him after his death. In a sense then, Marie de Gournay did not have to be that dutiful daughter; she could be the daughter who spoke up for the father and for herself, who protected him by displacing him, and who found her proper place herself. If in the preface of 1598 she temporarily abdicates that role to become (like) Léonor, the return of the original text of the "Preface" and the history of its successive versions enact her desire, and her courageous resolve, to speak the complex discourse of the dutiful, and wilful, daughter.