The book

Montaigne was a sixteenth-century Frenchman. He left public office in 1570. The following year, at thirty-eight, he announced his retirement to his estate. A room in its tower became his study. This was no permanent disappearance from the world: he travelled, and public duties would find him again. But a book began to grow there.

It was not a system. It consisted of pieces of very different lengths, with titles that could sound almost casual: Of Repentance, Of Vanity, Of Experience, Of Drunkenness, Of Post-horses. One thought led to another, with the voices of ancient writers joining him along the way.

He called the book Essais: attempts, trials, acts of weighing something up. The word would become the name of a literary form. Before that, it was the name of his book.

What he was trying out was himself.

He worked on it for years, and it kept growing. The first edition appeared in 1580, in two books. The title page of the 1588 edition called it the fifth, advertised six hundred additions, and announced a third book. There were now 107 chapters.

Publication did not bring the writing to an end.

The copy

One copy of that 1588 edition—the copy Montaigne continued to work in—has survived. It is held in the library in Bordeaux and is known as the Bordeaux Copy.

He kept annotating it during the remaining years of his life, until his death in 1592. There is writing in the margins, between the lines, and over the printed letters themselves.

At first glance, there are two layers. One is print: the book as it stood in 1588. The other is handwriting: what he subsequently added, deleted, or altered. That second layer has its own earlier and later moments; it was not put down all at once. Open the volume now, and print and pen are both before you.

Usually we meet a revised passage after the old wording has gone. Here, Montaigne carried on inside the book already printed. What he had published and what he went on to think remain on the same sheet of paper.

One qualification belongs at the beginning. Another edition appeared in 1595, three years after his death, and its text differs from this copy. The relationship between the two is a complex editorial question. These essays will not settle it. They begin with the printed words and handwritten interventions that can be made out on these pages.

The five essays that follow

The following pieces look at what this particular copy allows us to see: what Montaigne wrote, what he returned to, what he left standing, and what he crossed out. Sometimes the paper tells us more than we expect. Sometimes it tells us considerably less.

Each essay also has a separate aside, placing a contemporary framework called SAE alongside the passage. An aside is not a proof, and this comparison makes no claim of intellectual descent. You can leave the asides unread.