A Refuge for the Soul: How to Build a Library, According to Montaigne

1. Think about Yourself
Modern French intellectual culture has two founding myths. In 1571 the thirty-eight-year-old Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne, decided to take early retirement in the tower of his Bordeaux country estate. Some half-century later, in 1619, the twenty-five-year-old René Descartes, soldier of fortune, on his way back to France from Germany, found himself alone: “The onset of winter detained me in quarters where, finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no cares or passions to trouble me,” he writes in Discourse on the Method (1637), “I stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room [un poêle], where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts.” Thus these two men, some fifty years apart, launched an inquiry into the nature of the self that begins in interior spaces. In other words, modern philosophy begins in social distancing; only in self-imposed quarantine can you rethink the foundations of the self.

For Descartes, that stove-heated moment instigated his investigations into the metaphysics of nature, the operations of thinking, the deduction of truths from first principles. For Montaigne, it had to do with a probing into the inner recesses of the self: “It is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my thoughts, that I have been examining and studying only myself; and if I study anything else, it is in order promptly to apply it to myself, or rather within myself” (II: 6, 273). What and who is this self? One that is “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal” (II: 1, 242).

2. Live in a Tower
The tower of books and the stove-heated room. No matter how much some philosophers want to disembody it, thinking always occurs in a particular time and a particular place. Socrates loved to spend time with the youth of Athens at the Agora; Plato established his Academy; Aristotle set up his Lyceum. For Epicurus it was a small garden. The Stoics got their name from the Stoa, a colonnade on the north side of the Agora. Elite Romans like Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny took great care to set up their villas with nice views, fresh air, and well-stocked libraries, which they believed to be requisites for a good life.

For Montaigne, the good life occurred inside the edifice of a short round tower in the same estate where he was born and died. His great-grandfather Ramon had purchased it in 1477 and spent much time on improving its holdings, expanding its land, building its chateau. Located some thirty miles from the historic center of Bordeaux, you can still visit it today. The wine business survives in the name of Château d’Yquem, which produces a sweet and delicate premier cru supérieur, its slight acidity due to its “noble rot,” which some have suggested mirrors the prose style of its illustrious forefather.

Innumerable are the passages in the Essays where the author reveals his complexity, sweetness, and ripeness. This writerly fermentation came from his decades-long seclusion. If Descartes abandoned his Jesuit humanist education to roam the “book of the world,” Montaigne brought the capacious book of the world into the miniature world of his tower. Within it, he sought to compose the book of the self in a way that made the world, the self, and the book coextensive and consubstantial.

His library offers him a refuge for the soul, away from the demands of his offices, the ministration of his city, the cares of domestic life, the engulfing turbulence of the world.

An inscription found on the ground floor of his tower announces that “at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, Witin the walls of his study, he will devote himself to ‘freedom, tranquility, and leisure.” But anyone who’s ever pursued these values know that they are always aspirations rather than attainments.

Before his retirement, Montaigne led a busy life as member of the Bordeaux parliament and a magistrate in the law courts. He went to Paris frequently for sensitive diplomatic missions. He had his own share of misfortunes: his best friend, Etienne de La Boétie, fell victim to the plague. Montaigne’s younger brother was killed in a freak accident when a tennis ball smashed into his head. Montaigne himself almost died in a freak accident on horseback. His father, whom he adored, died from an excruciating case of kidney stone—an affliction to which the son too would ultimately succumb. Montaigne’s firstborn daughter lived for only two months.

In sum, in Montaigne’s lifetime six kings rose and fell; famine ravaged cities and the countryside; the plague came and went; economic turbulence made Bordeaux at times fabulously rich and at times cripplingly poor; the vintage was always at the mercy of the weather; civil wars between the Catholics and Protestants erupted no less than nine times (one notorious incident, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, had more than five thousand casualties); witch trials were at a fever pitch; tortures and atrocities were commonplace. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—pestilence, famine, war, death—sixteenth-century France had them all.

No wonder why Montaigne wanted to retreat into a tower: “We have lived enough for others; let us live at least this remaining bit of life for ourselves” (“Of Solitude,” I: 39, 178). His library offers him a refuge for the soul, away from the demands of his offices, the ministration of his city, the cares of domestic life, the engulfing turbulence of the world. Writing, reading, living for Montaigne became a continuum: “I have no more made my book than my book has made me; a book consubstantial [consubstantiel] with its author” (II. 18, 579). Thus Montaigne is his imaginary library and the imaginary library is Montaigne.

3. Buy as Many Books as You Can
The Bordeaux region where Montaigne was born was a thriving commercial hub. Connected to the Atlantic through the gentle river Garonne, it traded its famed wine, cultivated since Roman times, with its northern European neighbors. Montaigne’s ancestors dealt in the import and export of wine, salted fish, and blue woad-dye. Through shrewd management and investment, they made a fortune. In time his great-grandfather had the means to buy the noble title Montaigne (Montanus in Latin), which came with an estate. Michel’s father, inspired by humanist pedagogy, hired a German tutor, ignorant of French, to speak only Latin to his son. Everyone in the household was also instructed to do the same: “Altogether, we Latinized ourselves so much that it overflowed all the way to our villages on every side” (I: 26, 128). Thereafter, Montaigne was sent to the Collège de Guyenne, a school that delivered a sound humanist education.

Besides the collège, Bordeaux had a university and law courts. Its readers were well served by a healthy number of booksellers. Surviving records show that more than three hundred figures were involved in the book trade. Montaigne was a precocious book buyer. Through the course of his lifetime, he would accumulate a thousand more volumes. Scholars have identified some one hundred volumes extant: some of them survive in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque municipale of Bordeaux, and the University of Cambridge.

4. Write Your Favorite Sayings on Ceiling Beams
How does the architecture of Montaigne’s personal library reflect the infrastructure of his thinking? At a certain point, Montaigne had forty-seven maxims painted on the ceiling beams of the library on the third floor of his tower. Some of them are:

ΑΚΑΤΑΛΗΠΤΩ—Undecided.

ΟΥ ΚΑΤΑΛΑΜΒΑΝΩ—I do not understand.

ΕΠΕΧΩ—I stop.

ΣΚΕΠΤΟΜΑΙ—I examine.

ΚΑΙ ΤΟ ΜΕΝ ΟΥΝ ΣΑΦΕΣ ΟΥΤΙΣ ΑΝΗΡ ΙΔΕΝ ΟΥΔΕΤΙΣ ΕΖΤΑΙ ΕΙΔΩΣ—No one has ever known the truth and no one will know it.

ΟΥΔΕΝ ΟPΙΖΩ—I determine nothing.

In some ways, they resemble the modern platitudes we see plastered on the walls of homes today: “Follow your heart,” “Believe in yourself,” “Love is love.” But while these contemporary commonplaces offer simple, digestible truths that risk reducing the complexity of human existence to a set of manageable, easily quoted phrases.  Montaigne’s phrases, however are much denser, enigmatic. They invite deeper reflection. These ceiling inscriptions function as a sort of architectural commonplace book, a thesaurus or databank from which Montaigne can withdraw his accumulated knowledge at will. The inscriptions create a matrix, a latticework into which he can mold the architectonics of its own thinking. The textual multiplicity of the beams generates the compositional multiplicity of the Essays.

5. Look out Your Window
Here is how Montaigne describes his library:

When at home, I turn aside a little more often to my library, from which at one sweep I command a view of my household. I am over the entrance, and see below me my garden, my farmyard, my courtyard, and into most of the parts of my house. There I leaf through now one book, now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments. One moment I muse, another moment I sit down or dictate, walking back and forth, these fancies of mine that you see here. (“Three Kinds of Associations,” III. 3, 629)

Notice how the author’s visual and physical movement of consciousness is conveyed in his syntax: “In one sweep [tout d’une main] I command a view of my household.” He waves his hand and all that he beholds—belongs to him alone. He takes inventory of his holdings: my garden, my farmyard, my courtyard, my house. This can only be the gaze of the seigneur. Detached, he sees all; all that he possesses is his by virtue of his birthright. Sure, he is a reluctant man of affairs, much preferring to while away his days in contemplation, but he knows full well that it is precisely his aristocracy which enables him to have such leisure at all. Yet this birthright does not give him a sense of baronial composure; rather, the syntax of the next sentence mimics the phenomenology of his mind: he zooms in and out; he zigs and zags: “I leaf through now one book, now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments” (sans ordre et sans dessein, à pieces descousues).

Next he describes the layout of his fortress of solitude:

The shape of my library is round [la figure en est ronde], the only flat side being the part needed for my table and chair; and curving round me it presents at a glance all my books, arranged in five rows of shelves on all sides. It offers rich and free views in three directions, and sixteen paces of free space in diameter.

In winter I am not there so continually; for my house is perched on a little hill, as its name indicates, and contains no room more exposed to the winds than this one, which I like for being a little hard to reach and out of the way, for the benefit of the exercise as much as to keep the crowd away. There is my throne. I try to make my authority over it absolute.

Behold how the seigneur delights in his “man cave.” So much of what is essential about Montaigne is distilled here: his love of solitude, his affable boast about his microsovereignty (“There is my throne”), his need for creaturely comforts (a fire in winter), his need for space to pace around (“sixteen paces of free space in diameter”). In one glance he beholds all his books; his library is the proscenium in which he is both the actor (as writer) and spectator (as reader). The height of the tower opens a new phenomenology of perception. High above, he sees all and yet remain hidden.

6. Read in Bed
French literary history will have many men who spend a lot of time inside their studies in earnest bendings of the mind. Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage around My Room (1794) is a parodic grand travel narrative of the young nobleman’s six-week imprisonment when he was under house arrest in Turin. “When I travel through my room,” he writes, “I rarely follow a straight line: I go from the table towards a picture hanging in a corner; from there, I set out obliquely towards the door; but even though, when I begin, it really is my intention to go there, if I happen to meet my armchair en route, I don’t think twice about it, and settle down in it without further ado.” Sounds a lot like Montaigne.

His library is the proscenium in which he is both the actor (as writer) and spectator (as reader).

In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s fin de siècle novel A Rebours (Against Nature, 1884), a decadent, ailing aristocrat, Des Esseintes, withdraws to a luxurious villa that is equipped with a rather decent library, which I think is a dark homage to Montaigne. There, he indulges in “silver age” Latin literature. He scorns the “tiresome” Virgil, with “his well-washed, beribboned shepherds taking it in turns to empty over each other’s heads jugs of icy-cold sententious verse, his Orpheus whom he compares to a weeping nightingale,” and delights instead in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, which for him embodies the zenith of the Latin language, captured in Huysmans’s purple prose: “sweeping along in a dense flood fed by tributary waters from every province, and combining them all in a bizarre, exotic, almost incredible torrent of words; new mannerisms and new details of Latin society found expression in neologisms called into being to meet conversational requirements in an obscure corner of Roman Africa.”

Altogether different from Montaigne, who loves the well-worn golden age authors: “It has always seemed to me that in poetry Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace hold the first rank by very far, and especially Virgil in his Georgics, which I consider the most accomplished work in poetry.” Though he does throw some shade at the epic: “There are passages in the Aeneid which the author would have brushed up still a little more if he had had the chance” (“Of Books,” II: 10, 298).

And of course the greatest librocubicularist (one who reads in bed) of them all: Proust. He outs himself as an aficionado of the age of Montaigne in the second sentence of In Search of Lost Time (1913): “It seems to me that I was the thing the book was about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francis the First and Charles the Fifth.” The narrator—Marcel—is in his childhood bedroom; the author—Proust—writes, in bed, in a cork-lined room. While Montaigne devotes twenty-one years in his tower to produce a book about himself, Proust devotes thirteen years in his apartment on Boulevard Haussmann to the single-minded production of a book about the relationship between time and the self. The bed as study is the locus where dreams and reading mix, collide and merge together—the librocubicularist becomes an avatar of the sixteenth century. Theodor Adorno thus comments: “The chaos of cultural goods fades into the bliss of the child whose body feels itself at once with the nimbus of distance.”

7. Never Finish
The Montaigne that we read today is not the definitive Montaigne, because there is no definitive Montaigne. From the day the first edition came out in 1580 to September 13, 1592, the day he died, he labored every day to make additions, revisions, and deletions. “Who does not see that I have taken a road, in which, incessantly and without labour, I shall proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world?” (III. 9). The Montaigne I read—the Villey-Saulnier edition and the translation by Donald Frame—is but a mediation of two standard versions that is agreed upon by convention, by a particular editor, revised by another editor, translated by one scholar, an accumulation of particular times and places.

The work of Pierre Villey gains a poignancy when one considers that he was blind from a young age—he did all his monumental philological labors on transcribed Braille index cards. His edition is for the most part a composite of what is known as the Bordeaux Copy, the fifth edition published by Abel L’Angelier in 1588. Preserved in the Municipal Library of Bordeaux, it is a singular artifact—copiously annotated in Montaigne’s hand—with thousands upon thousands of corrections, scribbled in the margins as well as in the body of the text (fig). Montaigne called these allongeails (extensions).

For us, Montaigne’s devoted followers, our imaginary library is a secret kinship, a shudder of recognition, a mirror-image not only of him but of all those whom he has read and all those who read him. In the middle of a discussion on the smallness of our knowledge in “Of Coaches,” Montaigne inserts a loose citation from Cicero’s dialogue On the Nature of the Gods: so great is the power of the soul that “if we could view that expanse of countries and ages, boundless in every direction, into which the mind, plunging and spreading itself, travels so far and wide that it can find no limit where it can stop, there would appear in that immensity an infinite capacity to produce innumerable forms” (III. 6, 692). We who admire him discover that the center and circumference of his library extends to the center and circumference of the world. His lesson to us is that in every studiolo lies an autobiography of the soul.

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From The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries by Andrew Hui. Copyright © 2024. Available from Princeton University Press.