Muses themselves."  This friendship never
failed or diminished; it was the best thing
Marie ever achieved in this life, and is her
chief claim on the sympathy and interest of
posterity. But Marie de Jars became
possessed by the dæmon of wishing to become a
distinguished woman on her own account.
To accomplish this, she set to work to learn
Greek and Latin, and though she brought
more zeal than method to her studies, she
worked with so much perseverance as to
obtain a good insight into both languages.

Montaigne, in the next edition of his Essays,
added the following passage to the seventeenth
chapter of the second book:—" I have taken
a delight to publish in many places the hopes
I have of Marie de Gournay de Jars, my
adopted daughter, beloved by me with more
than a paternal love, and treasured up in
my solitude and retirement as one of the best
parts of my own being. I have no regard to
any thing in this world but to her. If a man
may presage from her youth, her soul will
one day be capable of very great things; and
amongst others, of that perfection of friendship
of which we do not read that any of her sex
could yet arrive at; the sincerity and solidity
of her manners are already sufficient for it;
her affection towards me more than
superabundant, and such as that there is nothing
more to be wished, if not that the apprehension
she has of my end from the five and fifty
years I had reached when she knew me, might
not so much afflict her.

"The judgment she made of my first Essays,
being a woman so young, and in this age, and
alone in her order, place, and the notable
vehemence with which she loved and desired
me, upon the sole esteem she had of me
before ever she saw my face, are things very
worthy of consideration."

Any woman might justly have been proud
of such a tribute, and one feels to like
Montaigne himself all the better for it. In 1588
Montaigne went with Mademoiselle de Gournay
and her mother to their château at
Gournay-sur-Aroude and spent some time
with them.

In the year following she published her
first book, calling it " Proumenoir de M. de
Montaigne." She dedicated it to him, and
sent a copy to him at Bourdeaux, where he
was then residing. That must have been a
very proud day for Marie! This " Proumenoir"
was not, as its title might suggest, any
account of Montaigne, or relics of his
conversation, but only a rambling Arabian story,
which if gracefully told by Marie herself,
might perhaps have been interesting during
the course of a walk, but which, set down
upon paper, is insipid to a degree, and of an
interminable length. Montaigne is answerable
for the sin of having encouraged her to
write it, thus adding to the weary array of
books that nobody is able to read.

At her mother's death, Mademoiselle de
Gourney did something much better: she
took charge of her younger brother and sister,
and administered the affairs of the family
(which, as we have said, Madame de Gournay
had left in great embarrassment) with so
much discretion and judgment, that she
redeemed all the mortgages, paid off all the
debts, and was in possession of about two
thousand pounds in money.

Montaigne died in 1592, at Bourdeaux.
Enthusiastic and devoted, Mademoiselle de
Gournay set off as soon as she was informed
of it, and, providing herself with passes,
crossed almost the whole kingdom of France
alone, to visit his widow and daughter, to
console them as best she might—and to
weep with them the loss they had sustained.

Madame de Montaigne gave her the Essays,
enriched with notes in her husband's
handwriting, in order that she might prepare a
new and complete edition of them. This was
a labour of love to Marie: she revised all the
proofs, which were executed with so much
correctness, that she is well entitled to call
it, as she does, " le bon et vieux exemplaire."
It remains to this day the principal edition
as regards authenticity of text, and one of
the handsomest as regards typography. It
appeared in 1595 (Paris, Abel Langlier).
Mademoiselle de Gournay wrote a preface,
which is not without eloquence. She
vigorously repels all the objections that had been
raised against the work, and alludes to her
adoption by Montaigne with genuine feeling.
We translate the passage:—" Reader, having
the desire to make the best of myself to thee,
I adorn myself with the noble title of this
adoption. I have no other ornament, and I
have a good right to call him my true father,
from whom all that is good or noble in my
soul proceeds. The parent to whom I owe
my being, and whom my evil fortune snatched
from me in my infancy, was an excellent
father, and a most virtuous and clever man—
and he would have felt less jealousy in seeing
the second to whom I gave this title of father,
than he would have felt pride in seeing the
manner of man he was." The good lady's
style is of the most intractable to render into
common language.

With Montaigne's death, the whole course
of Mademoiselle de Gournay's life seemed to
be arrested. Henceforth all her strength and
enthusiasm were expended in keeping herself
exactly where he had left her. She resolutely
set her face against all the improvements and
innovations which were every day being
brought into the French language, which was
making rapid progress; but Mademoiselle de
Gournay believed that she had seen the end
of all perfection when Montaigne died.
Not only in her style of writing, but also in
her mode of living, she remained obstinately
stereotyped after the fashion of the sixteenth
century, during the first half of the
seventeenth. Whilst still young, she became a
whimsical relic of a by-gone mode, a caricature
out of date. She resided in Paris, where