Montaigne et le travail de l'amitie: Du lit de mort d'Etienne de la Boetie aux Essais de 1595. (Reviews).

Gerard Defaux, Montaigne et le travail de l'amitie: Du lit de mort d'Etienne de la Boetie aux Essais de 1595

(L'Atelier de la Renaissance, 11.) Orleans: Paradigme, 2001. 372 pp. 35.06 EUR. ISBN: 2-86878-219-1

This new book is vintage Defaux: flowing in his diction, precise in his scholarship, polemical in his refutations of competing interpretations, eloquent and personal in his approach to his subject. Defaux's scholarly gifts are here in the service of an attempt to find, in the depth of Montaigne's feeling for his beloved friend, the human truth of the origins of the Essais. As a "believer," a critic on the side of the author's presence in his work, Defaux takes on such scholarly sacred cows as Pierre Villey, as well as those among his own contemporaries, whom he dubs the "doubters," who are more attentive to the gaps and the inconsistencies of the text," than to the continuities of the human presence within it. According to Defaux, when Montaigne tells us about his rare, unequalled friendship that had something of the miraculous in it, there really is no reason not to take him at his word.

Defaux's book centers about "le drame de Germignan," the circumstances surrounding the death of La Boetie as told by Montaigne in a surviving fragment of a letter to Montaigne's father, and in particular the dying La Boetie's astonishing question: "Mon frere! Mon frere! Me refusez vous donques une place?" In the attempt to understand the reasons why this question was formulated in these precise terms and in so urgent a manner, Defaux meditates, in the course of the book, on the various senses of the word "place" and brings to bear other documents, both classical and Christian: the marginal notations in Montaigne's copy of Lucretius' De rerum natura recently published by M. A. Screech; the Gospel of John, in which Christ tells his disciples he is going somewhere to prepare a place for them -- vado parare vobis locum; the relationships between the textual architecture of the Essais and the physical disposition of Montaigne's tower library and study (chapters which owe much to the recent work of Alain Legros). T he library is a "theater of memory," in which the Greek and Latin sentences are disposed as a skeletal outline of the Essais' structure. If the library is the temple of friendship, the cabinet is that of Montaigne's solitude, of the new life he has constructed for himself after the tempest of La Boetie's death and its lifelong aftermath.

Read in the light of Montaigne's lived experience of the death, grief and loss of La Boetie, what Villey called the early "impersonal" essays, may then -- and in this respect one recalls Raymond C. La Charite's prescient 1971 article, "Montaigne's Early Personal Essays" -- be seen as among the most intensely personal of the Essais. The early essay "De la tristesse," for example, becomes less an impersonal string of literary commonplaces than a very personal account of a traumatization that literally condemned Montaigne to seven years' silence.

Defaux speculates that Montaigne waited seven long years to publish his friend's works because of his grief and also because he had become aware of a possible contradiction between La Boetie's study of philosophy and his concern for his reputation after his death. "Qu'est-ce donc que la 'pratique' des 'estudes' et de la philosophie, si elle mene elle aussi la recherche de la vana gloria, de 'l'honneur et applausement des hommes?"' (182). The displacements in the monument to La Boetie that Montaigne had intended to place at the center of Book 1 of the Essais -- the suppression of the Servitude volontaire and the 29 sonnets -- bear witness to the essayist's struggle to work through the doubts he had about his friend's intentions.

According to Defaux's account, the rare and exquisite friendship ending suddenly in death is the point of origin, the organizing principle of Montaigne's life and of his book, the human truth that caused Montaigne to become the essayist. In fact, this may or may not be the case; but Defaux brings to bear his formidable rhetorical skills and draws upon the recent work of numerous Montaigne scholars (Michel Simonin, Alain Legros, M.A. Screech, Francois Rigolot, Michel Magnien are the most frequently cited) to lend scholarly plausibility to the human story he is principally engaged in telling. A detailed bibliographic essay on Montaigne, La Boetie and friendship closes this very stimulating and rewarding volume.