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29. Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de La Boëtie

[This chapter was designed to introduce sonnets by Montaigne’s especial friend La Boëtie, the subject of the previous chapter, and did indeed do so in all editions published during Montaigne’s lifetime. All the previous allusions which lead us to expect them here are kept, not least the promise to print them in compensation for his decision to omit the text of De la Servitude volontaire. In the Bordeaux copy Montaigne simply struck them all out – leaving his own text as ‘grotesques’ surrounding an absent masterpiece. No attempt is made to conceal the omission: the gaps are like blank columns in a censored newspaper. Montaigne had just defended his friend, and himself, from suspicion of seditious republicanism. His respect for the magistrature would have led him to consent to the excision (if pressure was in fact put on him) but not to change his loyalty or his judgement. His action can be compared to his refusing (III, 10) to concede ‘to the magistrature itself the right to condemn a book (his own Essais) for having classed a heretic (Beza) among the best poets of this century’.

Montaigne had published some Sonnets of La Boëtie in 1572 (Fédéric Morel, Paris) and dedicated them to the Count de Foix. The sonnets which were printed here do not figure in them. This chapter is dedicated to Diane, wife of the Count of Grammont and Guiche (a good friend of his) and subsequently mistress of the protestant Henry of Navarre (the future King Henry IV). She was surnamed Corisande d’Andoins from a character in Amadis de Gaule, a vast many-volumed novel in which she delighted.]

[A] To Madame de Grammont, Countess of Guiche

Madame, I am offering you nothing of mine, either because it is yours already or else because I deem none of it worthy of you. But I have wanted these verses, wherever they may be read, to be headed by your name because it would honour them to have the great Corisande d’Andoins to guide them on their way. This gift seemed appropriate to you, inasmuch as there are few ladies in France who are better judges of poetry or who can more rightly take advantage of it. And since not one of them can sing poetry more vividly or more animatedly than you can with that tuneful voice so full and fair with which Nature has endowed you among a million other graces, these verses deserve that you, madame, should encourage them: for you will share my opinion that none have come out of Gascony which are better contrived or more refined, or which bear witness of deriving from a richer hand. You must not feel jealous because you have merely received the remainder of what I have already had printed, dedicated to your good kinsman, Monsieur de Foix, for these have something more indescribably lively and overflowing, having been written in his verdant youth in the heat of a fair and noble passion which I will one day, Madame, whisper in your ear. The others were written later for his wife when he was courting her; somehow they already have the cooler savour of marriage. Personally I am one who holds that poetry is never more gay than when treating a subject unruly and wanton.

[C] These verses can be found elsewhere.1