Les Chapitres oubliés des 'Essais' de Montaigne: actes des journées d'étude à la mémoire de Michel Simonin, University of Chicago (Paris), 9 avril et 5 novembre 2010 (review)

The 'forgotten chapters' of Montaigne's Essais are mainly the short ones in Books I and II that received little or no modification after the first edition of the work in 1580. In the past they have often been disparagingly classified as 'impersonal' and have attracted much less critical attention than those chapters where Montaigne is seen at work augmenting and modifying his text in the 1588 edition and the Bordeaux Copy. Scholars have generally shown a preference for the more complex chapters, which often contain Montaigne's most captivating personal revelations, as they enable his process of literary composition to be traced from edition to edition. Montaigne is partly responsible for engendering this preference: he characterized his early chapters as somewhat foreign to the rest — 'de mes premiers essays, aucuns puent un peu à l'estranger' (III. 5). Pierre Villey, the early twentieth-century Montaigne scholar and editor of the Essais, was entirely dismissive of the early chapters of Book I: 'Tout ce qu'il y a à dire de ces chapitres, c'est qu'il n'y a rien à en dire' (quoted on p. 33). The results of the University of Chicago study days published in the present volume, however, prove that Villey was mistaken. Some contributions expand on the themes to be found in the 'chapitres oubliés': rhetoric in I. 9 and 10, hierarchy and precedence in I. 13, nudity and clothing in I. 36. But a 'forgotten chapter' may also be a microcosm of the whole. Catherine Magnien-Simonin argues that 'Des senteurs' (I. 55) is 'un chapitre, certes court, mais qui [. . .] représente bien l'ensemble des Essais et annonce déjà "De l'Expérience"' (pp. 178-79). Standing apart is 'De l'incommodité de la grandeur' (III. 7), which is the shortest and least modified chapter of Book III and the only one from that book that can be described as 'oublié'. Richard Scholar highlights the importance of this chapter, which concludes abruptly and laconically with the implication that unbridled political power represents a great danger for the freedom of all. Montaigne probably had Henri III and his subjects in mind when he wrote it, although he prudently avoids any explicit reference. Paul J. Smith gives an account of a copy of the 1602 edition of the Essais, now in the British Library, which contains numerous annotations and illustrations by Pieter van Veen (c. 1562-1629), whose 191 small drawings offer a remarkable visual response to Montaigne's text. Smith shows that the Dutchman's agile pen was just as assiduous in the margins of the 'forgotten chapters' as in the rest. So one reader at least, whose life overlapped with Montaigne's, embraced the totality of the Essais, an approach encouraged by the seventeen contributors to this volume.