Near the opening of Of Repentance, the second chapter of Book III, Montaigne says something few people readily say about themselves. If he had this person to make again, he would make him very differently. But it is done now.

The chapter has a difficult job. A man has spent years writing a book about himself. During those years, the man has changed. Who, then, is the person in the book?

The Bordeaux Copy lets us see him continuing to work on the question. This is the printed volume he used in the last years of his life, with his later writing still upon it.

A sentence in the margin

In the left margin of Of Repentance, Montaigne wrote a sentence whose thought is this: if all else fails, among so many changing forms, choose the one that changes least.

There is a small word, a, inserted above its line. The whole marginal sentence is crossed out.

The sentence was not part of the printed text of 1588. It was added by hand and then struck out. We can still read it, but we cannot treat it as the wording he finally left in place here.

It sounds like a reasonable escape. Everything may change, but surely something changes more slowly than the rest. Let that be you.

Read it that way, and the cancellation acquires weight. But the weight belongs to an interpretation. The paper can show that he withdrew a sentence. A line through the words cannot, on its own, show why he withdrew them, or which philosophy of the self he had decided to reject.

The passage around it

The chapter opens with some of Montaigne's best-known lines.

Nothing in the world stays still, he says. Even constancy is a slower kind of movement. He cannot fix his subject in place: it staggers and sways as though drunk by nature. He can take it only as it is at the instant he looks.

He does not portray being. He portrays passing.

Not the passage from one age of life to the next, nor some change counted in seven-year intervals. Day by day. Minute by minute.

He comes back to the sentences

These words were already in the printing of 1588. The Bordeaux Copy shows Montaigne returning to their punctuation and capitals.

A letter becomes a capital; a punctuation mark is altered. He goes back into the words already printed and rearranges the places where a reader pauses.

A man who has just said that he cannot hold his subject still goes back to reconsider where his sentences end. That is an impression the marks invite, not a self-explanation they require us to put into his mouth. The subject keeps moving. The sentences can still be made more exact.

Something we have all done

Find something you wrote a few years ago, and the wish to revise it can catch you in the same place. Change it, and it no longer preserves exactly how you wrote then. Leave it alone, and it continues to say things you no longer quite believe.

A compromise is possible. Soften the word that now offends you. Leave the rest. The softened place belongs to the new layer; the older writing remains underneath.

Montaigne's copy gives this difficulty a visible form. Revision happened, but the earlier layer was not entirely concealed. Open the book today, and both are still there.

What remains

At the beginning of the chapter, Montaigne says that if he could make this man again, he would make him differently. But it is done now.

In the margin of the same chapter, the proposal to choose what changes least was written down and crossed out.

We may read it as a way out that appeared and was not retained. But we should not cross the line ourselves and announce, on his behalf, a final answer. What remains is a person who cannot be fixed in place, and a book still being changed.