Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance

CCXCV

Edward Benson

Money & Magic
in Montaigne :
The Historicity of the

Essais

LIBRAIRIE DROZ S.A.

11, rue Massot

GENÈVE

1995

Mentions légales

Résumé

Cinq essais qui sont autant de microlectures de Montaigne, reliées moins par le thème que par une attention aiguë aux réactions de Montaigne face aux phénomènes contemporains que sont la magie et les débuts de l'économie monétaire. On y découvre un Montaigne qui recommande à un ami une méthode pour dénouer l'aiguillette qu'il a éprouvée lui-même, mais qu'il hésite à publier, pris d'une grande peur d'être accusé de sorcellerie. Puis un Montaigne qui s'essaie aux nouvelles métaphores monétaires que le siècle lui apporte, notamment celle du commerce (narratif, sexuel et économique), et les éclaire d'une lumière ambiguë.

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Abstract

Des prognostications presents our reading of the past as no more persuasive than of the future, and De la force de l’imagination reveals Montaigne calling attention to his own impotence in order to mask a “cure” for witchcraft he performed himself. Later still, in Des boyteux, he suffered a violent break with his readers. Edward Benson finds unwitting confirmation in late-twentieth-century studies of witchhunting of its importance in creating modern identity politics, and suggests that Montaigne’s temperamental conservatism allowed him to see the same thing. The scripteur also used monetary metaphors in Sur des vers de Virgile, devoted to a defense of sexual fantasizing, to challenge the supremacy not only of male readers but of “heterosexual” and, perhaps, even “white” ones. Montaigne brought these challenges together in Des coches, in which his historical judgement of his own culture was laid out before the subject of America was broached at all.

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ISBN-10 : 2-600-00102-6

EAN : 9782600001021

ISSN : 0082-6081

Copyright (1995) by Librairie Droz S.A., 11, rue Massot, Genève.

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Dedication

for Sue

… I wish it had not, yet I am delighted it did

Acknowledgements

This project was conceived at a lecture on Montaigne’s Monetary Metaphors at the University of Warwick (UK) in 1984 : my thanks to Christopher Thompson and Grahame Castor for their perceptive criticisms. It was born during a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute on “Montaigne and his Time” at Duke University in 1986, where I learned a great deal from the other participants, but I owe a particularly heavy debt of gratitude to Marcel Tetel for his encouragement and occasional prodding over the years since. It took its first hesitant steps at an NEH seminar on the “New Historicism” at Berkeley in 1989, where I learned even more about critical practice from the other participants than I did about Shakespeare : Stephen Greenblatt remains a model as well as a mentor.

I should also like to thank the Research Foundation at Central Missouri State University for a grant-in-aid. The librarians at the

Bibliothèques Nationale

and

Mazarine

, Brown University, and the Universities of Warwick, Connecticut, and North Carolina at Chapel Hill were welcoming and courteous to a visiting scholar : working at a research library was a pleasure as well as a privilege. The Interlibrary Loan Librarians at Western Illinois Central Missouri Universities were indefatigable and, usually, successful.

Finally, how to thank Susan Porter Benson ? I have spent thirty years with her developing a common understanding of life and our attempts to account for it in history ; she read every page of this study more times than I can bear to count, and has never tired of editing with generosity and (all too much)

élan.

I could not have written it without her ; I would probably not even have tried.

August, 1995

Warrensburg, Missouri

Introduction

“

Ce n’est plus dès lors dans le contenu que s’inscrit l’Histoire, mais au contraire dans l’interaction entre l’objet historique primaire (exemple rapporté) et le

travail

de ce matériau historique par le lecteur-auteur à l’intérieur d’une forme qui nie l’autorité de ces histoires pour les tranformer en un nouvel objet artistique.

”

1

I set to work on this project because I was struck by Montaigne’s monetary metaphors, and was led shortly thereafter by the Martin Guerre episode to Montaigne’s chapters on witchcraft. It soon occurred to me that work on two such historically charged topics should combine well into a book on history in the

Essais

, but money and magic turn out to be far more directly linked than I guessed at the outset (think of the anxieties encoded in the phrase “Gnomes of Zurich”).

2

Perhaps a recent summary of Adam Smith best captures the desire for transparency in modern economic thought : “

la monnaie est définie

analytiquement

comme un simple auxiliaire des échanges qui, au moins en première analyse, peut être considéré comme n’affectant pas les mécanismes fondamentaux de l’économie (neutralité) ; les formes

historiques

prises par cette monnaie traduisent sa dématérialisation progressive, qui lui permet de remplir cette fonction instrumentale.

”

3

The most important part of BDG’s formulation is money’s progressive disappearance as exchange becomes more ubiquitous. Even as economists recognize money’s role as a measure of price and value or, later, its “functions” as units of account and payment, they seek always

to deny mediation,

4

but we shall focus here on Montaigne’s embrace of it, first on a kind of mediation profoundly shocking to us, witchcraft, then on money.

Montaigne’s revulsion at the course of sixteenth-century history has long been recognized ; what is new among students of the

Essais

like Philippe Desan and Timothy Hampton is the recognition of the degree of the

scripteur

’s preoccupation with the subject

5

. Witchcraft is a taboo subject that is again becoming more topical as it resurfaces in the context of “recovered memories” :

6

Montaigne’s first treatment of this subject was in the early chapter « Des prognostications », and it called into question the reliability of the Du Bellay

Mémoires

, the narrative point of departure for the first

Essais.

« De la force de l’imagination » dealt more directly with magic, and concluded with a judgement of history that has attracted more attention than the rest of the chapter.

7

Montaigne’s doubt of the truth value of historical narrative was more explicit than in « Des prognostications » in part because of his inability, until his own manuscript copy of the

Essais

, to recount the cure for witchcraft he performed himself. Montaigne returned to the topic in « Des boyteux » near the end of the third book, where his deconstruction of the explanatory power of narrative became more radical and referred more explicitly to economic change and exchange.

Monetary metaphors in the long

encomium

of the circulation of sexual fantasy, « Sur des vers de Virgile », constructed a

scripteur

less concerned with solitary pleasure than the blunt language led us to expect. In addition, he alluded twice at the end of the 1588 version of this chapter to the lust of mature aristocratic Greek men for youths in their early teens, then laced his manuscript (“C”) copy with several more references to

pæderasty.

I wrote nothing about this topic when I published an article on monetary metaphors in « Sur des vers de Virgile » a few years ago,

8

although I was aware of a couple of citations that seemed to suggest a “homosexual” element in this most heterosexual of chapters.

9

Many of the references depend on knowledge of the context of citations and the content of stories to which the

scripteur

merely referred in passing, so

pæderasty

has been ignored until now : rediscovering ignored evidence that Montaigne performed a cure against a witch’s spell and larded a chapter about sexual desire with references

to pæderasty

should help us place our reading in historical context.

10

I am writing in response to Dominick LaCapra’s call to go beyond a “documentary” sense of the texts critics and historians alike study,

11

but I have found that careful study of the

Essais

as documents is the prerequisite to success in this effort, as the authors of three otherwise excellent articles were led astray by errors in the presentation of the text of the

Essais

by the current scholarly editions.

12

Catherine Henry wrote on the subject of Montaigne’s use of literary dialogue in the « Au lecteur », for instance : “

Malgré le nouveau statut du lecteur dans l’édition de 1580 et dans les derniers

« 

allongeails

 »,

Montaigne ne touche pas à l’avis.

”

13

Neither the Villey/Saulnier text of the « Au lecteur », which Henry used for her article, nor the Thibaudet/Rat edition show any of the markings which we have come to associate with “A,” the first edition (of the first two books) of the

Essais

which Millanges published in Bordeaux in 1580, “B,” the first edition (of all three)

which L’Angelier published in Paris in 1588, or “C,” the copy of the L’Angelier edition heavily annotated in Montaigne’s hand and preserved in the municipal library in Bordeaux and (primarily) used in the first posthumous edition, in 1595. It is therefore understandable that Henry thought Montaigne had not revised his liminal text, but he had : L’Angelier changed a word and some punctuation and, most important, printed the « Au Lecteur » with a new date of 12 June, 1588.

14

The facsimile of the Bordeaux copy published by Fortunat Strowski shows Montaigne at work, not adding but revising :

15

he deleted “

mes imperfections

” from just before “

ma forme naïfve

,” substituted “

contantion

” for “

estude

” and “

entre

” for “

parmy

,” and completely revised the first conditional sentence. Henry would be right to claim that none of these revisions changed the sense of the

scripteur

’s formulation of his reasons for publishing the

Essais

just before he first did so, but the surface of the facsimile of Montaigne’s copy of the L’Angelier edition shows, at the very least, a

scripteur

still engaged by and solicitous of this text of almost ten years earlier. Finally, he restored the original date on the Bordeaux copy, then corrected 1580 to “

mille cinq cens quattre uins

,” which I see as a more emphatic recognition of the dated nature of his response to the problem of the reader.

Fausta Garavini, another of the most perspicacious and original critics of Montaigne, wrote that the L’Angelier edition added “

accident qui ne m’est pas incogneu

” at the end of the following sentence, “

Et de là se peut engendrer parfois la défaillance fortuite, qui surprent les amoureux si hors de saison, et cette glace qui les saisit par la force d’une ardeur extrême, au giron même de la ioüissance

,” but that the Bordeaux copy struck it again.

16

The Millanges edition stopped with “

extrême

,” though, while the L’Angelier edition added “

au giron même de la iouissance, accident qui ne m’est pas incogneu.

”

17

This is another illustration of the perils of relying on even the best modern editions, which show the phrase “

au giron même de la iouissance

” in the text from the beginning. Part of Garavini’s article turned on this passage, which could be read quite differently : surely any reader of the

first edition would have suspected that the

scripteur

was not himself completely innocent of the sensation he was describing ; Montaigne first made the allusion more explicit as well as more personal before making it less, perhaps because he found it less powerful for his readers as it focused more on him ?

18

The most egregious misreading based on modern editions cited “

Ayez un maistre és arts, conferez avec luy

 :

que ne nous faict-il sentir cette excellence artificielle, et ne ravit les femmes et les ignorans, comme nous sommes, par l’admiration et la fermeté de ses raisons, de la beauté de son ordre

? (IIΙ, viii, 927 B)” to show that Montaigne posited his readers as women. The L’Angelier text actually reads, however, “

Ayez un maistre és arts, conferez avec luy, que ne nous faict-il sentir cette excelence artificielle, & ne ravit les femmes, & les ignorans comme nous sommes, par l’admiration & la fermeté de ses raisons, de la beauté de son ordre

?” The placement of comma after “

femmes

” makes all the difference in the world : there are no interpolations around the passage, nothing to cause editors to correct Montaigne’s punctuation, yet they did so and so modified the very sense of his prose. I was the author of the article, having dismissed Tournon’s caution against taking Villey/Saulnier at face value for the successive texts of the

Essais.

19

I shall therefore hew to Daniel Martin’s facsimile of the Millanges (1580 [“A”]) texts of « Au lecteur », « Des prognostications » (I, xi) and « De la force de l’imagination » (I, xxi) ; his L’Angelier texts of « Des boyteux » (ΙII, xi), « Sur des vers de Virgile » (ΙII, v), and « Des coches » (IIΙ, vi) ; and Fortunat Strowski’s facsimile of the L’Angelier texts of the first three and the Bordeaux copy of all six.

20

I seek also to historicize my own writing by situating it in the context of critical discourse on the

Essais

: many critics have recognized the historicism of the conclusion of « De la force de l’imagination » but, again, none has ever mentioned the historical referent of the longest tale in the chapter, the cure Montaigne performed for a bewitched friend. The

scripteur

of « De la force de l’imagination » probably felt too imperiled by the witchhunt to tell the story of the cure he effected

until he did so on his own copy : such self-censorship must have been so galling that it might account for the threat in « Des boyteux » of physical violence between him and his readers, but his anger at these threats was of a different character from the partisan criticism in « Des coches » of the

ligueurs

’ Spanish allies. I shall seek to follow Montaigne’s thought as he figured it in an effort both to show the utility of historical criticism and to open up our readings.

21

Convinced by Gérard Defaux’s argument that the most useful criticism of the

Essais

is an attempt to show the multiple processes of signification and dissuasion within single chapters,

22

I have concentrated on five of Montaigne’s chapters on the historically charged topics of magic and money.

It rapidly became clear when I started this project that several late-twentieth-century students of Montaigne had recognized his interest in history, but they still seem to me to be missing an essential quality of his discourse, which I call the “

poësie du quotidien.

”

23

I am arguing that the

Essais

are a record of the

scripteur

’s perceptions of the most banal events of everyday life but, because his culture was more different from ours than most of us recognize, it is difficult for us to perceive the immensity of the task Montaigne set himself, and us. He meant nothing less than for us to recapture the diversity and intensity of his perceptions without losing sight of our own – indeed, the full measure of success was our ability to share his perceptions by comparing them to ours. Mediation was anything but an illusion, in other words : indeed, the generic requirement the

scripteur

set for his

essais

was that mediation had to remain perceptible even (especially) as it was most successful.

Money has been recognized at least since Aristotle as a unit of value the more useful the more slowly it changes over time, but it was also seen with increasing insistence during the Renaissance as a unit of exchange the more useful the wider and easier its acceptance. Stability and facility are not mutually exclusive, but they are certainly divergent needs : money was already seen as the very embodiment of the mediation of which magic came to be taken as a denial with Freud while, for medieval and early modern practitioners, magic was a means of imperfect access to realms and reservoirs of immanent power. Money and magic are qualitatively different for us but they were related for Montaigne and his contemporaries, as I shall show in “Making & Telling Fortunes & Tales in « Des boyteux ».”

Montaigne wrote the

Essais

at and against the birth of the early modern world order, in great part out of a temperamental and deeply held conservatism. With a few notable exceptions, such as « Des coches », though, he was more interested in the cognitive and linguistic structures that undergirded modernism than in the political expression of those structures. I argue finally that he created the

Essais

out of suspicion of the silences and elisions covered by narrative,

24

so I focus on the disturbing elements in the hope of escaping the thrall of modernist coherence which the witchhunt was instrumental in creating.

25

The ideological stance underlying this book is that culture depends on a series of commonly unexamined metaphors and, in particular, silences to hold it together. It is difficult to perceive these metaphors and silences from within, so I shall focus on surprising or disturbing phrases or images in the belief that surprise is a partial recognition of things ordinarily kept from our notice.

p.9

1

Philippe Desan,

Les Commerces de Montaigne : le discours économique des

Essais

(Paris : Nizet, 1992), p. 250 (emphasis in the original) ;

cf.

Timothy Hampton,

Writing from History : the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature

(Ithaca & London : CornellUP, 1990), p. 154.

2

The first use cited by the

Oxford English Dictionary

(Oxford : OxfordUP, 1971) was from the

New Statesman

(for 24 Nov. 1964) : “The gnomes of Zurich and their related goblins in the more politically involved capitals.”

3

Wealth of Nations

I, iv, quoted by Marie-Thérèse Boyer-Xambeu, Ghislain Deleplace, & Lucien Gillard, (known as “BDG”)

Monnaie métallique et monnaie bancaire

(Paris : L’Harmattan, 1990

[Cahiers d’Économie Politique

18]), p. 1 [emphasis in the original].

p.10

4

The post-modern economists’ “account” and “payment” are even older and more charged terms than Marx’s “price” and “value,” (

cf.

pp. 91-2 & 131-2 below &

Capital

I,

i

, iii, 1) in other words, and more evocative of money’s replacing other mechanisms for circulating and keeping account of goods and services.

5

See Marian Rothstein’s conclusion to her “Etymology, Genealogy and the Immutability of Origins”

Renaissance Quarterly

xliii

# 2 (1990), 332-347, p. 347 : “The Renaissance is a period of strong ambivalence about the past, at once revering it, despairing of equalling it, and confident of excelling it.”

6

Of childhood sexual abuse ; see the review by Walter Reich of Lawrence Wright’s “Remembering Satan” in

The New Yorker

, for 17 & 24 May, 1993, Michael Yapko,

Suggestions of Abuse : True and False Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma

(NY: Basic, 1994), and Lenore Terr,

Unchained Memories : True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found

(NY: Simon & Schuster, 1994),

New York Times Book Review

15 May, 1994.

7

Three of the contributions to

Montaigne et l’histoire : Actes du colloque international de Bordeaux (29 septembre-Ier octobre 1988)

, éd. Claude-Gilbert Dubois (Paris : Klincksieck, 1991) took their titles from it.

p.11

8

“

Guerrier

or

Glossateur

? Montaigne’s Monetary Metaphors”

Renaissance & Reformation/Renaissance & Réforme

XXVIII (Spring, 1992) # 2, 55-72.

9

Neither “homosexual” nor its antonym existed before the nineteenth century : Manfred Herzer dates the coining of the two to a draft letter of 6 May, 1868 (“Kertbeny and the Nameless Love,”

Journal of Homosexuality

XII [1985], 1-25 [cited by Joseph Cady, “‘Masculine Love,’ Renaissance Writing, and the ‘New Invention of Homosexuality’”

Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England : Literary Representation in Historical Context

, ed. Claude Summers {NY, London, & Norwood : Haworth, 1992}]).

10

See Catherine Magnien-Simonin,

Une vie de Montaigne ou Le sommaire discours sur la vie de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne

(Paris : Honoré Champion, 1992 [Etudes Montaignistes VIII]).

11

Cf.

LaCapra,

Rethinking Intellectual History : Texts, Contexts, Language

(Ithaca & London : CornellUP, 1983), p. 340 & Hampton,

Writing from History

, p. 153.

12

Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne

, éd. Pierre Villey, réédité sous la direction et avec une préface de V.-L. Saulnier (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1965 [or 1978, a reissue in two volumes with the same pagination], & Montaigne

Œuvres complètes

, éd. Albert Thibaudet et Maurice Rat (Paris : Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1962).

13

“Il est remarquable qu’il n’en ait pas revu un seul mot, ce qui semble établir qu’à ses yeux l’avis est non seulement une affirmation rétrospective du dessein réalisé dans le livre qu’il introduit en 1580, mais aussi un point de repère qui a permis à l’auteur de le relancer en 1586.” “’En ma fin est mon commencement’ : le ‘Au lecteur’ des

Essais

” in

Montaigne et les

« 

Essais

 » :

1588-1988

, éd. Claude Blum (Paris : Honoré Champion, 1990), 221-229, p. 227.

p.12

14

The major changes are indicated in the Villey/Saulnier and Thibaudet/Rat notes.

15

His famous “

J’adjouste, mais je ne corrige pas

(III, ix, 963 B).” was largely true, as Villey pointed out, until his copy of the L’Angelier edition.

16

I, ii, 13; Garavini, “Le fantasme de la mort muette (à propos de I, 2, « De la tristesse »)”

Montaigne et les Essais

, 127-139, p. 135. “suppression qui n’est sûrement pas innocente, mais qu’on hésite à attribuer à un sursaut de pudeur (c’est au niveau c que le scripteur se montre plus libre en parlant du sexe et de son sexe).”

17

Though she is correct in saying that the

scripteur

struck it on his own copy. Both the Villey/Saulnier and Thibaudet/Rat editions show “au giron même de la jouissance” as part of the original text and mention “accident qui ne m’est pas incogneu” as a 1588 addition, while neither specifically says it was struck on the Bordeaux copy. See Patricia Parker, “Gender Ideology, Gender Change : The Case of Marie Germain”

Critical Inquiry

xix

[1993], 337-364, p. 344.

p.13

18

Cf.

a similar discussion of “De la force de l’imagination,” pp. 47-8, and another reading of this revision on p. 151, below.

19

Cf.

my “« Comme nous sommes » : The

Essais’

Everyman,”

Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance

LI (1989), 579-588; André Tournon,

Montaigne : La glose et l’essai

(Lyons : PUL, 1983), p. 17. Enea Balmas made the same point at the “Montaigne 1588-1988” conference in North Carolina which gave rise to

Le parcours des

Essais

 : Montaigne 1588-1988

, éd. Tetel & Masters (Paris : Aux Amateurs de Livre, 1989).

20

Although I shall cite the Martin and Strowski texts for the texts of the five chapters on which we focus here (changing them only to respect the modern “

u

”), I give the page numbers from the Villey/Saulnier edition, the most informative modern one and the basis for Leake’s

Concordance des Essais de Montaigne

(Genève : Droz [

THR

], 1981).

p.14

21

“L’histoire d’un esprit à travers ses propres exercices de pensée : voilà ce que sont, de chapitre en chapitre, les

Essais

(Géralde Nakam,

Montaigne, la manière et la matière

Paris : Klincksieck, 1991], p. 48).”

22

“Readings of Montaigne”

Montaigne : Essays in Reading Yale French Studies #

64 (1983), 73-92, pp. 81-84.

23

Modifying Desan’s “

philosophie du quotidien

(

Les Commerces de Montaigne

, 68).”

p.15

24

See Stephen Greenblatt,

Marvelous Possessions : The Wonder of the New World

(Chicago : UChicagoP, 1991), p. 61.

25

Dominick LaCapra called it the modernist search for the master narrative (in a lecture at the U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on 26 February, 1993) ;

cf.

Timothy Reiss,

The Meaning of Literature

(Ithaca & London : CornellUP, 1992).

I
Word Magic & Witchcraft in « Des Prognostications » (I, xi)

“

Le problème n’est pas de savoir si l’historien doit ou non faire de la littérature mais laquelle il fait.

”

1

Almost a hundred years ago, Pierre Villey established modern Montaigne studies, showing that Montaigne evolved over the twenty years he spent writing the

Essais

from classical stoicism through a skeptical crisis to humanist epicureanism.

2

At the same time, the

Essais

themselves developed from chapters two through eighteen of book I, which “

puent un peu l’étranger

” and were laboriously built of historical examples, through « L’Apologie de Raimond Sebond » to the mastery of the last chapters to be composed for the 1580 edition and the third book.

3

Given the nature of academic discourse and the prominence Villey’s evolutionary views have assumed at the head of each chapter in what has become the standard edition, it was doubtless inevitable that post-modern critics should call Villey’s thesis into doubt, for instance by citing Montaigne’s oft-repeated denials of linear development in his character.

There is nonetheless no denying that the earliest chapters look different from the later ones, as Montaigne also recognized in one of his later masterpieces.

4

An early chapter constructed from a historical example reads as follows, in its entirety :

Quand aux oracles, il est certain, que bonne piece avant la venue de Iesus-Christ, ils avoyent commancé a perdre leur credit : car nous voyons que Cicero se met en peine de trouver la cause de leur defaillance : mais quant aux autres prognostiques, qui se tiroyent de l’anatomie des bestes aux sacrifices, du trepillement des poulets, du vol des oyseaux & autres, sur lesquels l’antieneté appuioit la plus part des entreprises, tant publicques que privée : nostre religion les a abolies. Et encores qu’il reste entre nous, quelques moyens de divination es astres, es esprits, es figures du corps, es songes, & ailleurs, notable exemple de la forcenée curiosité de nostre nature s’amusant a preoccuper les choses futures, comme si elle n’avoit pas assez affaire a digerer les presantes : si est ce qu’elle est de beaucoup moindre auctorité. Voila pourquoy l’example de François Marquis de Sallusse m’a semblé remarcable : car lieutenant du Roy François en son armee de la les monts, infiniment favorisé de nostre court, et oblige au Roy du Marquisat mesmes qui avoit este confisqué de son frere, au reste ne se presentant occasion de le faire, son affection mesme y contredisant, se laissa si fort espouvanter (comme il a esté adveré) aux belles prognostications qu’on faisoit lors courir de tous costez a l’advantage de Charles cinquiesme et a nostre des-advantage, mesmes en Italie, ou ces folles propheties avoient trouvé tant de place, qu’a Rome fut baillé grande sommes d’argent au change pour ceste opinion de nostre ruine, que apres s’estre souvant condoleu à ses privez des maux qu’il voyoit inevitablement preparez à la couronne de France, et aux amis qu’il y avoit, se revolta, et changea de party a son grand dommage pourtant, quelque constellation qu’il y eut. Mais il s’y conduisit en homme combattu de diverses passions. Car ayant et villes et forces en sa main, l’armée ennemye soubz Antoine de Leve à trois pas de luy, & nous sans soubson de son faict, il estoit en luy de faire pis qu’il ne fist. Car pour sa trahison nous ne perdisme ny homme, ny ville que Fossan : encore apres l’avoir long temps contestee.

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Sweeping condemnations of our curiosity, of our apparently insatiable appetite for ratiocination were of course dear to Montaigne, and central to the project of the

Essais ;

they took up much of « L’Apologie de Raimond Sebond », and showed up in the famous “

plaisants causeurs

” interpolated near the beginning of « Des boyteux ». The moralistic tone of the condemnation here seems on first reading to be justified by the inferential structure of the discourse, flowing from the

scripteur

’s reflection on our inopportune curiosity to the example of a well-known figure whose curiosity led him to grief. History actually served as a sort of alibi, since efforts to read the future were characteristic of classical culture, but our innate curiosity ended up diminishing this comforting distance.

In the first sentence, the use of the first person plural “sewed” the reader into complicity with Montaigne’s observations on the development of religious practice in classical Rome, and the

scripteur

continued to use it in the second sentence although, this time, it referred to the practices which he shared with his contemporaries.

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By the end of this short chapter, however, it referred to an entirely different community : Frenchmen and their Italian allies – at a time...