I grew up in Charente and moved to Paris when I was twenty, with the feeling that it would take time for me to feel truly at home. In September 1993, the French Ministry of Education appointed me to the Lycée Montaigne, an old school in the Latin Quarter, close to the Luxembourg Gardens, named after a writer I had long admired. Little did I know how much that name would stay with me.
Stefan Zweig, who dedicated one of his last texts to the Montaigne family, recounts with almost novelistic precision how the family came to be what it is today. Before they were “de Montaigne”, their name was Eyquem, and for centuries they had operated a trading post in the port district of Bordeaux, shipping smoked fish, wine and other goods. It was great-grandfather Ramon who made the first decisive move when, in 1477, he bought Château de Montaigne from the Archbishop of Bordeaux for a modest sum, thus crossing the threshold between the bourgeois and aristocratic worlds. His grandson Pierre, Michel’s father, completed the ascent by going off to the Italian war with François I, returning with a title of nobility, turning the old château into a humanist house open to scholars, and becoming mayor of Bordeaux.
Michel was born of all this in 1533. He was the first to permanently erase “Eyquem” from all documents, keeping only the name of the land. Three generations of patient trade made this writer possible, and Montaigne knows full well what he owes to this history, even if he doesn’t dwell on it.
Pierre Eyquem was a singular father, two centuries before Rousseau. He meditates at length on the education he will give his son, and makes a decision that resembles a thought experiment: he hires a German tutor who doesn’t speak a word of French, with formal instructions to address the child only in Latin, and imposes the same constraint on all members of the household, parents and servants included, who must learn a few snatches of this language in order to be able to speak to little Michel. As a result, by the age of six, Montaigne had mastered perfect Latin learned without a book, without grammar and without constraint, while he could not pronounce a single sentence in French. Zweig notes that throughout his life, Montaigne read this language with “almost more pleasure than French”, and that in moments of amazement, it was the Latin word that spontaneously came to his mouth.
This childhood between two languages, one foreign and the other acquired later, is familiar to anyone who has grown up in one world and lived in another.
At the age of thirty-eight, after fifteen years of public life as an assessor at the Bordeaux Parliament, Montaigne made a decision that Zweig describes as a “refusal of the outside world”. He resigned, sold his office and had a solemn yet relieved inscription carved into the stone of his library, declaring that he had come to rest “in calm and security”, having been “long disgusted with the slavery of the Court and public office”.
He then moved into the round tower of his château, on the third floor, inaccessible to the noise of the house, with a view over the garden and fields. He had the library inherited from his friend La Boétie, who had died a few years earlier, moved here, and had fifty-four Latin maxims painted on the ceiling beams, so that his gaze would always find something to hold on to. It was here that he began jotting down his thoughts, first so as not to lose them, then because writing imposed itself on him as a way of getting to know himself. “This is my seat,” he wrote. “I try to give myself pure dominion over it.”
Yet Montaigne was not a man of absolute retreat. He travels a lot, on horseback, and enjoys the diversity of customs and habits he encounters. In 1581, he accepted the position of mayor of Bordeaux, at the direct request of Henri III, and played a discreet but real role in attempts to bring Catholics and Protestants together in a France that had been devastated by the Wars of Religion for decades. And he declares his love for Paris with a warmth that is surprising, coming from a man so attached to his Gascony tower:
“I love it dearly, down to its warts and spots. I am French only through this great city.”
Essays, III, IX
This double anchorage, this way of belonging to several places without allowing himself to be trapped in any one, is perhaps what makes Montaigne so difficult to classify and so easy to love. Zweig, who wrote his essay from exile and knew he was being hounded, saw something essential in it: Montaigne had lived through an era of fanaticism and violence by refusing to be assigned to a camp, keeping his inner space intact. What Zweig admires is his ability to remain himself in the midst of chaos, to “keep the human being pure and timeless” in an age that sought to dissolve him into collective allegiances.
When I moved from the Charente to Paris, it took me a long time to stop feeling the slight inadequacy of someone from elsewhere who doesn’t yet know exactly how to behave in this new world. I missed the slow, dense, concrete aspects of the province. Paris attracted me because of its movement, its intellectual density and the way ideas circulate. It took me a long time to understand that this feeling of in-between was not a lack to be filled, but a position to be inhabited, and that this position had its advantages.
Montaigne helped me to think about this, not as a consolation, but as a way of looking at things. He who belongs to two worlds sees what each of them ignores of itself, and it seems to me that it is from this look that the Essays were born: a man from Gascony who loves Paris, a Latin who writes in French, a mayor who prefers his tower, a public man who jealously guards his private life.
In 2008, my daughter Marianne was accepted into a literary preparatory class at the Lycée Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux. Born and bred in Paris, she was on her way to the city that Montaigne had ruled, in an establishment that bore his name. I don’t believe in coincidences, but I do believe in the threads that weave themselves between people, places and texts, and it seemed to me, that day, that something was closing with a discretion and exactitude that resembled Montaigne himself.
