Recounting Others, Recounting Self: Montaigne and the Conteurs of his Century

Abstract

In the first chapter, we explored how Montaigne seeks to engage the receptive skills of the reader when he reworks tales he appropriates from Antiquity. It is evident that he seeks to inspire the reader, his “suffisant lecteur,” to find meanings not intended by the author (I, 24, 127A). He tells us that it is not only in medicine, but in other arts as well that fortune plays a part. Those graceful and beautiful touches (“graces et beautez”) that the audience discovers in a work are put there often “non seulement sans l’intention, mais sans la cognoissance mesme de l’ouvrier” ‘not only without the workman’s intention, but even without his knowledge’ (I, 24, 127A/93). This is a part of the process of renewing the source material mentioned previously. Integral to this process is Montaigne’s reshaping of stories he borrows to fit the design of his essays—a design that values self-awareness and self-reflection. He takes hold of tales that mirror his singular efforts at self-portraiture in order to advance his growing interest in human behavior. As mentioned earlier, Gabriel-André Pérouse reminds us that in order to trace the essayist’s connection to the storytellers who preceded him, we should choose examples from his immediate predecessors, Des Périers, Marguerite de Navarre, and the early Du Fail, along with the propos bigarrés, those mixtures of conversation and brief narrative that were so popular at the time at which Montaigne was composing his Essais.