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I have naturally a [comique] and [privé ] style . . . (p. 225)2
I hate men base in deeds but wise in words. (p. 119)
Pacuvius
Although we have many examples of men, contemporary to Montaigne, who claim to write about their private lives, few of them satisfy our curiosity about the state of intimate life in the French Renaissance. For example, in Blaise de Monluc's Commentaires (1571), his vision of recounting his inner self means, as he writes, detailing the "honor and reputation . . . [he] acquired . . . by force of arms."3 Similarly, each subject in Théodore de Bèze's Les Vrais portraits des hommes illustres (1581) is painted in a more public light. Kings and military leaders reach the "summit of knowledge" and "glory," "surpassing all others" in their vocation. Moreover, pastors, ministers, and martyrs comprise the majority of his pages, which promise from the outset to be filled with men who have loved and maintained the "mother of all virtues . . . the true Religion." Even sixteenth-century letters tended toward the public, official letter, the letter of recommendation or de faveur, as Montaigne reminds us (p. 226), once again reinforcing a less intimate setting and function.
Readers of Montaigne's day must have craved a sense of the heroic, since some of the best sellers of the time cast men who "made history," like the hommes illustres found in the Lives by Plutarch and other such collections of important figures, both ancient and contemporary. If these works aim, like Montaigne, to reveal intimate aspects of their protagonists (Bèze refers to a "private communication" with the illustrious figures, while Monluc refers to his faict particulier and states "I want to talk about myself"4), they nevertheless reflect a highly dignified world of nobility, military service, piety, and of what Philippe Ariès has synthesized as the good opinion of one's community thanks to appearances, a kind of defense of one's honor.5 As Roger Chartier, Jacques Revel, and Norbert Elias have all made clear, the evolution in the Renaissance from chivalric writing to civil writing of how to live well led to a more individualistic and tailored notion of the subject.6 But this evolution was slower to reach France than other countries, such...