78

‘Besides, whom do you write for?’ That is one question Montaigne asks himself about his Essais. The same question could be put to him about his reading notes, especially the ones he wrote in the margins of his copy of Nicole Gilles ( Annales et croniques de France, Paris, G. Le Noir, 1562). Although for private use, those notes address the reader more than once: the second person imperative to refer to another page, calling the reader as a witness to support some criticism, warnings against misreadings, confessed weariness or some mood change, conjuring up a potential interlocutor; or, to the contrary, some cautious use of modal verbs in the first person. Often hostile to both Nicole Gilles and Sauvage, his publisher, those notes are, more than others, an invitation to dialogue. Splitting of the self? Craving for public speech? One senses Montaigne ready to step out of those margins where someone else’s book still restrains his pen’s ‘leaps and capers’.