Essais sur poutres: Peintures et inscriptions chez Montaigne.

Alain Legros. Essais sur poutres: Peintures et inscriptions chez Montaigne.

Paris: Klincksieck, 2000. 548 pp. index. illus. bibl. 420 FF. ISBN: 2-252-03317-7.

Andre Tournon. Montaigne: la glose et l'essai.

Paris: Honore Champion Editeur, 2001. 424 pp. append. bibl. 380 FF. ISBN: 2-7453-0400-3.

The year 2000 marks the publication of the monumental work by Alain Legros on the layered inscriptions painted on the beams of Montaigne's library. Modern techniques of research and of studying material artifacts have provided Professor Legros with an opportunity to do the first extensive assessment of the levels of writing on the wooden beams and crossbeams. Legros introduces his readership to the history of the painted sentences, from those who first observed them, to other visitors who catalogued what they had seen, and finally his own findings. His aim is not to set the painted inscriptions apart from the printed text of the Essais but to discover what the sentences can tell us about Montaigne's thought and writing.

In revising his well-known study published in 1983, Montaigne, la glose et l'essai, Andre Tournon views the writings on the beams as just one more instance of the enunciation of Montaigne's thought, to be viewed in the global context of the Essais and considered in their various iterations: "Les sentences gravees sur les poutres de la 'librairie' de Montaigne sont isolees ... Mais dans les Essais, maximes et anecdotes ne prennent un sens que par les rapports d'opposition ou de similitude qui s'y decelent ... De ce fait, un enonce ne peut pas y figurer seul: il doit etre associe a d'autres pour que s'ebauche une argumentation ou un expose. Autrement dit, il doit s'inscrire dans un contexte" (73). Material fixation and subsequent deterioration or writing overconcern Legros, while the interplay and evolving context of the Essais absorb Tournon. Both critics, however, are engaged in following the evolving and growing fabric of the essayist's thought as it plays out in his writing.

Through the accounts of visitors to Montaigne's tower in the eighteenth century to the present, Legros provides a detailed register of the locus that drew lawyers, poets, researchers, and curators to Montaigne's library. Subsequently Legros considers the physical state of the library--placement of beams and cross-beams, as well as the physical presentation of Latin and Greek characters in the inscriptions, compared with characters painted in public places of the time or illustrated in studies of Roman and Greek characters. Consideration is given to the paintings of the adjoining smaller cabinet and the possible significance of the contrast between the high level of written inscriptions and the more earthly topics illustrated in the small room with the fireplace.

The presence of palimpsests--inscriptions on top of inscriptions--was first discovered and studied by Edmond Galy and Leon Lapeyre in 1861, both professionals in library and museum conservation. Legros notes that taking into account the palimpsests, the inscriptions are fairly evenly split between those in Greek and those in Latin (32 Greek and 39 Latin). However, and this is where Legros's study offers incredible insight into the evolution of Montaigne's thought, when Montaigne wrote over inscriptions, he was most apt to replace the words of Greek poets by Latin prose. The two most frequent sources on the outer and visible layer are the skeptic philosophers, especially Sextus Empiricus and Ecclesiastes.

This valuable and erudite study is at its best when Legros uses the inscriptions on the beams to elucidate passages from the Essais in order to shed light on the authors preferred by Montaigne. Legros's detective work on the inscriptions and overlays serves as yet one other gloss for Tournon's study of Montaigne's variants, including marginalia in the exemplaire de Bordeaux.

There is another link between Legros's work and that of Tournon. Tournon concludes and reiterates in his reexamen that too much attention has been placed on the evolution of Montaigne's method to the detriment of a certain continuity of thought and method. Pyrrhonism dominated the Essais from the start. The texts on the beams, as well as the palimpsests, were set there prior to the first edition of the Essais. There is no trace of the second edition on the beams. Legros goes on to posit the sentences could not have been put in place as late as 1575-76, as thought by Villey, but rather in 1571-72, a date when he had already translated Sebon and long after Estienne's translation of Sextus Empiricus. Legros views the ceiling as a kind of laboratory for the composition of "L'Apologie de Raimond Sebond," where the texts of Sextus Empiricus and those of Ecclesiastes run through the man writing at his table as he cast the occasional eye to the inscriptions above him.

Tournon, like Legros, gives precedence to the skeptic principle of the zetetique--the spirit of seeking and researching without the certainty of finding a definite answer. Tournon critiques his own efforts in the earlier edition of Montaigne, la glose et l'essai, to impose a too-rigid system as he tried to show how the additions function: providing a common moral lesson, redirecting the course of the argument, accentuating a criticism, or providing a more explicit reading. While remaining firm in his belief that the variants added were not provided to fill in gaps or lapses in continuity, Tournon acknowledges that he may have overlooked incongruities or neglected to point out gray areas or shades of meaning in the interest of reinforcing his systematic approach to the additions.

For those familiar with Tournon's ambitious work, he notes areas in which he has revised the text to acknowledge the recent contributions of scholars: the work of Katherine Almquist, Frank Lestringant, Terence Cave, and others. Fully conversant with developments subsequent to the original publication of his work, Tournon generously praises advances made in the area of Montaigne's additions to the Essais and reinscribes his revised edition firmly within current contemporary criticism on Montaigne. Legros joins Tournon in insisting on the elastic fabric of the essai as it expands to incorporate successive additions by Montaigne.

DEBORAH N. LOSSE

Arizona State University