Montaigne’s Wake

Mademoiselle de Gournay was expected to weep, for reasons of form. All the others talked away, a little more quietly than usual, recapitulating and digressing: oh, the Roman matrons, the murderous doctors, the post horses, the positions of the thumbs, the futility of the human condition, the cannibals, the back room of solitude … And those present behaved as though Montaigne were absent—nor had they bothered to pay superstitious homage to his face, nobly laid out on a collar of Flemish lace, his book beside him, in the casket of fragrant cherry wood—until suddenly he began to speak, demanding that they answer him, as conversational custom requires in honest society.

“And now—doesn’t everything become immense?” said Sainte-Beuve at last, revealing in his gaze a ray of fanaticism that was indeed alien to him and alarmed some of the ladies gathered around. “This conversation that we are now conducting between moments of silence will never stop. The speaking presence of this dead man before us who we were about to bury with honor indicates that we will be long obliged to consider and heed our every mood-swing. And the perpetual chatter of detail dismays me.”

“You, of all people,” came the voice behind him of the delirious man from the Soirées of St. Petersburg. “You, my dear friend, who grieved so much in this vale of tears, who celebrated Good Friday with a double dinner Chez Magny, who have listened magnanimously to all that was singular and tangible, linked to the moment and to discretion … You of all people are now the first to feel a damned veil being laid over these tiny pleasures, over these wandering distractions of the intellect, much sooner and earlier than over the vast storms of passion.” Sainte-Beuve turned and answered: “Nothing is innocent, I well know—and least of all that feeling and enjoyment of nuance, which has always moved us, within which we have always moved … But deep down, even when you were with the cavalier and the senator on your terrace overlooking the Neva, your words were a continuation of our whisperings, as in a cabinet de lecture—and only the surroundings changed, which you wanted dark and barbaric, in anticipation of a thunderbolt from heaven … Whereas we, out of delicacy, out of uncertainty, had ruled that out from the start. And I venture to suggest, now, that the thunderbolt and the whispering will long be intertwined … Nothing clean-cut awaits us.” As he replied, Sainte-Beuve slowly modulated his voice to that tone more familiar to his female company, and his expression of a soft, old cat emerged once more. Only a flush around the ears betrayed him. But conversation soon resumed in various parts of the room, and became muffled.