"Se Peindre de la Plume:" History, Biography, and Self-Portraiture in Montaigne's Rewriting of History

Abstract

“Se Peindre de la plume:” History, Biography, and Self-Portraiture in Montaigne’s Rewriting of History Deborah N. Losse Historians from Antiquity to his own contemporaries figure prominently among the authors whose thoughts, principles, and stories Montaigne weaves into the fabric of his essays. In an effort to show how a new genre—the essay—springs in part from the tradition of the short narrative form of the conte, let us look to one of the richest sources of Montaigne’s many narrative borrowings—the great historians of the past. Gabriel-A. Pérouse traces the bifurcation which took place in the short narrative tradition during the sixteenth century.1 One path leads to some of the longer contes of Marguerite de Navarre and to the extended narration of the novel in the seventeenth century. A second path takes us from the brief tales interspersed with commentary [propos] penned by the likes of Bonaventure Des Périers, Noël du Fail, and Cholières to emerge as the essay, in which narrative anecdotes and discourse share textual space. Although Montaigne does not hesitate to support his views with examples from myth, fiction, and fable, for he tells us that “les [End Page 1054] tesmoignages fabuleux, pourveu qu’ils soient possibles, y servent comme les vrais” [fabulous testimonies, provided they are possible, serve like true ones] (I, xxi, 104c; 75), he has a preference for accounts from history, and particularly, the history of men’s lives: a) Les Historiens sont ma droitte bale: ils sont plaisans et aysez; et quant et quant (c) l’homme en general, de qui je cherche la cognoissance, y paroist plus vif et plus entier qu’en nul autrelieu. . . . (a) Or ceux qui escrivent les vies, d’autant qu’ils s’amusent plus aux conseils qu’aux evenemens, plus à ce qui part du dedans qu’à ce qui arrive au dehors, ceux là me sont les plus propres. 2 The historians come right to my forehand. They are pleasant and easy; and at the same time, man in general, the knowledge of whom I seek, appears in them more alive and entire than in any other place. Now those who write biographies, since they spend more time on plans than on events, more on what comes from within than on what happens without, are most suited to me. In this paper, I shall explore the filiation between Montaigne’s views of history and how these views shape his retelling of the anecdotes of ancient and modern historians. His practice as both a reader and teller of tales contributes to the process of reshaping the models from history. Finally, we shall see how his preference for biography [vita] leads to the pivotal enterprise of his book—self-portraiture. The anecdote lies at the heart of both historical and fictional narrative, and we should be mindful of the fact that sixteenth-century conteurs were careful to claim that their nouvelles sprang from true events. 3 Since the present study focuses on the relationship between the conte, historical narration, and the essay, the anecdote must be the point of departure. The anecdote is understood to be, in the words of Joel Fineman, “the narration of a single event” [End Page 1055] and “a literary form or genre that uniquely refers to the real.” 4 The anecdote, with its “formal” if not “actual” brevity, is the smallest minimal unit of the historiographic fact (Fineman 56). Two aspects of Montaigne’s view of history lead us back to Thucydides. First, Montaigne’s insistence that events in themselves are not the stuff of history, but the event in relationship to the pattern or context. The best historians (“les biens excellens”), he tells us, have the talent and capacity to sift through the events of an historic period to find those which are most significant and which contribute to the overall pattern of behavior which ultimately instruct the reader: Les biens excellens ont la suffisance de choisir ce qui est digne d’estre sçeu, peuvent trier de deux raports celuy qui est plus vraysemblable; de la condition des Princes et de leurs humeurs, ils en concluent les conseils et leur attribuent les paroles...