1. On Montaigne and La Boétie see, among others, Wilden, "Par divers moyens on arrive à pareille fin"; Butor, Essais sur les Essais ; Thibaudet, Montaigne , 143ff; Starobinski, Montaigne en mouvement , 52-86; Rigolot, Les métamorphoses de Montaigne , 61-78; and Regosin, The Matter of My Book , 7-29. S. Rendall ( Distinguo , 73-94) examines the implications of what he calls "expropriation" for Montaigne, using the model of La Boétie's text, but he does not center Marie de Gournay in the story as I do.

2. Marie de Gournay is beginning to receive the attention she deserves both as a writer in her own right and in her complex relationship to Montaigne. See especially M. H. Ilsley, A Daughter of the Renaissance: Marie le Jars de Gournay, Her life and Works (The Hague, 1963); Elyane Dezon-Jones, Fragments d'un discours féminin (Paris, 1988) and "Marie de Gournay: le je / u / palimpseste," L'esprit créateur 23, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 26-36; Domna Stanton, "Woman as Object and Subject of Exchange: Marie de Gournay's Le proumenoir (1594), L'esprit créateur 23, no. 2 (Summer 1983), 9-25, and "Autogynography: The Case of Marie de Gournay's 'Apologie pour celle qui escrit,'" in Autobiography in French Literature , French Literature Series 12 (Columbia, S.C., 1985); Tilde A. Sankovitch, French Women Writers and the Book: Myths of Access and Desire (Syracuse, 1988), 73-99; and Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, 1990), 280-86.

3. Hélène Cixous, "Le rire de la Méduse," L'arc 61 (1975): 49.

4. Using the 1595 edition of the Essais in the Firestone Library at Princeton University, François Rigolot has republished the "Preface," with introduction, notes, and glossary in Montaigne Studies 1 (1989): 7-60. Page references in my text refer to this edition.

5. On the reactions to the Essais see Alan Boase, The Fortunes of Montaigne: A History of the Essays in France, 1580-1669 (London, 1935; rep. New York, 1970).

6. On the 1595 "Preface" see Cathleen M. Bauschatz, "Marie de Gournay's Préface de 1595': A Critical Evaluation," Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne , nos. 3-4 (1986): 73-82.

7. Rigolot, "Préface de Marie de Gournay," points out the structural importance of what he calls "un double discours" that both defends Montaigne and legitimates Marie de Gournay. See his "Introduction," 17.

8. I have provided my own translations for the words of Marie de Gournay in this chapter. Her prose is often dense, and her syntax frequently complex, but I have not attempted to simplify in order to give some sense of her style.

9. Letter of May 2, 1596, written at Montaigne's château and quoted in full in Dezon-Jones, Fragments , 191.

10. Letter of Nov. 15, 1596, in Dezon-Jones, Fragments , 193. The text that follows, and that was sent to Justus Lipsius in manuscript form, prefaces the 1598 edition of the Essais (in the Firestone Library at Princeton) and is quoted in full by Rigolot, "Préface de Marie de Gournay," 12.

11. Boase, The Fortunes of Montaigne , 52.

12. Marie de Gournay recognizes and refuses this feminine "place" in "Egalité des hommes et des femmes" (1622). Cf. Dezon-Jones, Fragments , 113.

13. Marie de Goumay, Copie de la vie de la Demoiselle de Gournay (1616) in Dezon-Jones, Fragments , 139.