1595) in preparation, and also many notes and papers. The widow, not equal to the task, delegated the sorting of these papers to Pierre de Brack, an intimate friend of her husband. He, in turn, sent them to Marie de Gournay to publish. It was a tremendous piece of work which the young woman did quickly if not perfectly.
The manuscript which she used has been lost. Feugère, in his Femmes Poètes du 16(illegible text) Sciècle, quotes Le Grand Dictionnaire Moréri (1706) which mentions the fact that:
There is to be found in the library of M. Spanheim, the manuscript (exemplaire) which Mademoiselle de Gournay used, with the corrections made by the hand of the author, showing his real intentions, as she explains it in a note glued to the inside of the cover of the book.
What became of this manuscript no one knows. This statement in Moréri, if true, disproves the assertion of Bonnefon, who in his Montaigne et ses Amis, says that Montaigne annotated but one text of his Essays, and that the edition of 1595 was published by Marie de Gournay from the published edition of 1588, changed and corrected from the notes and papers sent her by Pierre de Brack after the death of Montaigne.
The one manuscript still in existence is found in the library at Bordeaux. This, Marie de Gournay did not see. Why not? And why did Montaigne annotate two copies? These are questions which we cannot enter into at this time.
III
What interests us especially in this edition of the Essays published by Marie de Gournay is the Preface. It contains a sentence which shows that as early as 1595, when she was about thirty years old, Marie was already chafing at the limitations which hedged in the women of her century.
