Affektive Transmission. Das textuelle Kind bei Marie de Gournay und bei Montaigne

Abstract

French moral philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and his ‘covenant daughter’, Marie de Gournay (1565-1645), shared a special bond. When the 30 years younger, until then unknown woman and her idol met in Paris in 1588, they forged an alliance beyond blood ties, calling each other ‘spiritual father (père d’alliance) and ‘spiritual daughter’ (fille d’alliance). When Montaigne visited Marie de Gournay in her family’s home in Picardie, the father-daughter couple worked together on the so called “Bordeaux copy” (1588) of Montaigne’s main work, Les Essais. After her ‘father’ died, Marie de Gournay became a writer in her own right as well as the editor, preserver and defender of Montaigne’s oeuvre. Surprisingly enough, although she had never been officially adopted by Montaigne, his fille d’alliance was accepted as Montaigne’s spiritual ‘heir’ by his family (his widow and his natural daughter) as well as by the members of the Republic of Letters. However, scholarly attempts to define this unique relationship between the elderly writer and the young erudite had to cope with the nonexistence of historical and juridical sources. On a textual level, this unique bond is echoed through the metaphor of the text as a textual, spiritually born child, both in Montaigne’s as well as in Marie de Gournay’s texts. A comparative study of Les Essais and of certain paratexts written by Marie de Gournays shows that the ‘spiritual child’ is a an intra- and transtextual phenomenon that links the texts of ‘father’ and ‘daughter’. In this paper, I argue that Montaigne’s Essais-born metaphor of the textual and spiritual child has been 'inherited' by Marie de Gournay as a social practice, fostering the affective and posthumous transmission of their main works, les Essais and les Advis, as spiritual legacies.