MONTAIGNE’S DANCE: A CUSTOMARY IMPROVISATION

The body is a metaphor for being in the Essais because Montaigne refers to his self analysis quite often in physical terms.^[1] “Je m’estalle entier,” he writes in “de l’Exercitation,” “c’est un skeletos ou, d’une veuë, les veines, les muscles, les tendons paraissent, chaque piece en son siege.”^[2] The thorough description of his “esprit,” “les profondeurs opaques de ses replis internes,”^[3] is, however, also a literary portrait. Montaigne’s presence to himself and to the world—the portrait of his “jugement”—far outweighs limitations suggested by purely physical description. Yet, the metaphor of self portrait as painting—for all its inherent literality as bodily rather than intellectual image—is adroitly maintained. “Je m’estudie plus qu’autre subject. C’est ma metaphisique, c’est ma phisique.”^[4] For Montaigne’s writing to gain the fluidity required for miming, indeed mirroring, the self, that writing is often portrayed metaphorically as an extension of his own voice: “Le ton et mouvement de la voix a quelque expression et signification de mon sens.”^[5] Only his own voice can carry those indigenously self-reflexive qualities that would make the writing indubitably self-portraiture, and insure that words convey ancillary images of self. The aesthetic goal of essay writing—“tel sur le papier qu’à la bouche”^[6]—is to capture a “subjet informe” in another body: “ce corps aërée de la voix.”^[7] Since the voice is also corporal, the reflexivity of “verbal” portraiture, voice over body, nicely encapsulates the reflexivity of Montaigne’s project: a portrait of consciousness by consciousness. By the same token, listening to yourself talk is an apt emblem of self-indulgence in the auto-portraitist. The aesthetic concerns of orality tend to maintain Montaigne’s writing practices in a natural relationship to his physical processes. That is, at any given time, his body can organize his discourse. It is thus interesting to observe Montaigne’s self emerging from his writing by alternately affirming and denying the illustrative value of the body and the ethics of bodily movement, his own and others’.

Montaigne’s period knew intense experimentation with theatrical spectacle often understood as ritual.^[8] Although, unlike Baïf, Montaigne staged no mascarades, unlike Ronsard or Dorat, he wrote no ballet libretti, and unlike Brantôme, he did not chronicle court spectacle, Montaigne did implicitly elaborate a theory of movement which can be understood as a way of rehearsing self-knowledge.^[9]

A fundamental position of Montaigne’s moral philosophy is that human beings are expressive: that is, that there is a truth to be gleaned from observing oneself, and by extension, from observing himself. “Si mon visage ne respondoit pour moy, si on ne lisoit en mes yeux et en ma voix la simplicité de mon intention, je n’eusse pas duré sans querelle et sans offence si long temps.”^[10] Montaigne conceives of expressive gesture as largely unconscious, or unselfconscious, calling it “le naturel pli”: “il n’est pas inconvenient d’avoir des conditions et des propensions si propres et si incorporées en nous, que nous n’ayons pas moyen de les sentir et reconnoistre. Et de telles inclinations naturelles, le corps en retient volontiers quelque pli sans nostre sçeu et consentement.”^[11] Rendering “le naturel pli” is the objective of the self-portrait wherein physical and moral being coincide: “Je me presente debout et couché, le devant et le derriere, à droite et à gauche, et en tous mes naturels plis.”^[12] Yet, the truth inherent in human morphology, physiognomy and its tics, is not equally present in human action. Since the development of “civilité” in Western Europe of the Renaissance, the regulation of gesture constitutes both a bond of human society and a source of duplicity. Particularly sensitive to this development, Montaigne analyzes the authentic and the inauthentic, the essential and the accidental aspects of gesture with scrupulous precision. Indeed, he develops a scathing and sustained critique of the coded physical behavior emanating from the upper class.

Fundamentally opposed to rhetorical forms of culture, Montaigne rejects “la ceremonie” as necessarily duplicitous. “Nous ne sommes que ceremonie; la ceremonie nous emporte, et laissons la substance des choses; nous nous tenons aux branches et abandonnons le tronc et corps.”^[13] “Ceremonie” designates codified formal behavior “aux lieux de respect et de prudence ceremonieuse.”^[14] The realm of “ceremonie” is the public act. “Les vies publiques se doivent à la ceremonie.”^[15] The adjectival epithets of “ceremonie” are “superficiel,” “artificiel,” and “emprunté.” To “ceremonie,” Montaigne opposes “nature:” authentic movement, spontaneous utterance. The adjectival epithets of “nature” are most often “vrai,” “essentiel,” “naïf.”

However, Montaigne does not argue against ceremonial behavior indiscriminately. Rather, he acknowledges gestural spontaneity only when fully and visibly motivated. His most striking example of a desired gestural spontaneity is motivated by pain:

Au demourant, j’ay toujours trouvé ce precepte ceremonieux, qui ordonne si rigoureusement et exactement de tenir bonne contenance et un maintien desdaigneux et posé à la tollerance des maux. Pourquoy la philosophie, qui ne regarde que le vif et les effects, se va elle amusant à ces apparences externes? Qu’elle laisse ce soing aux farceurs et maistres de Rhetorique qui font tant d’estat de nos gestes.^[16]

To the stoical principles of constancy which characterize the early Montaigne, finding their paradoxical complement in the physical containment of “civilité.”^[17] Montaigne ultimately opposes a notion of diversion which is fundamentally a theory of decentered and unpatterned movement. “Si le corps se soulage en se plaignant, qu’il le face; si l’agitation luy plaist, qu’il se tourneboule et tracasse à sa fantasie; s’il luy semble que le mal s’évapore aucunement . . . pour pousser hors la voix avec plus grande violence, ou, s’il en amuse son tourment, qu’il crie tout à faict.”^[18] Yet, he is careful not to endow action with a natural status if, unlike the example which pain provides, the individual is not imbued to overflowing with the feelings and sensations which dictate action as a conscious experience:

Chacun sçait par experience qu’il y a des parties qui se branslent, dressent et couchent souvent sans son congé. Or ces passions [impressions] qui ne nous touchent que par l’escorse, ne se peuvent dire nostres. Pour les faire nostres, il faut que l’homme y soit engagé tout entier; et les douleurs que le pied ou la main sentent pendant que nous dormons, ne sont pas à nous.^[19]

It is particularly interesting to compare movement consciousness and unconsciousness with Montaigne’s views on courtly social dance. For when it comes to dance he also divides action into two categories: the controlled and circumspect as opposed to the vertiginous:

Tout ainsi qu’en nos bals, ces hommes de vile condition, qui en tiennent escole, pour ne pouvoir representer le port et la decence de nostre noblesse, cherchent à se recommander par des sauts perilleux et autres mouvemens estranges et bateleresques. Et les Dames ont meilleur marché de leur contenance aux danses où il y a diverses descoupeures [figures] et agitation de corps, qu’en certains autres danses de parade, où elles n’ont simplement qu’à marcher un pas naturel et representer un port naïf et leur grace ordinaire.^[20]

In dance, containment is an attribute of simplicity and nature whereas abandon is a sign of vainglory.^[21] Yet, Montaigne’s way of theorizing movements of pain and movements of dance are not incompatible. There is nothing inherently wrong, for Montaigne, with excessive and apparently uncontrolled movement. It is simply that this movement should be honestly produced. That is, the feeling or sensation which animates it must be fully adequate to the scale of the movement. If there is a discrepancy between outward movement and its inner source, then that movement is artificial, “borrowed,” based on an unauthentic model which could be termed “ceremonious.”

The value placed on the natural as opposed to the artificial dovetails nicely with the project of self-portraiture, the study of his own nature in writing. In his “Au Lecteur,” Montaigne distinguishes sharply between the public and the private as between ceremony and nature. “Si c’eust [le livre] esté pour rechercher la faveur du monde, je me fusse mieux pare et me presenterois en une marche estudiée.”^[22] The self portrait is not to be that of a public but of a private self. “Je veus qu’on m’y voie en ma façon simple, naturelle et ordinaire, sans contantion et artifice: car c’est moy que je peins.”^[23] Concomitant to the notion of Montaigne’s private being is the constant pain of the kidney stone on which so much description is lavished. At the outset, therefore, Montaigne opposes artifice to nature, limiting nature only by custom: “Que si j’eusse esté entre ces nations qu’on dict vivre encore sous la douce liberté des premieres loix de nature, je t’asseure que je m’y fusse très-volontiers peint tout entier, et tout nud.”^[24]

“Coustume” is a term which, in many instances, mediates between “ceremonie” and “nature.”^[25] While not a synonym of “ceremonie” it does designate that layer of ceremoniousness which, like customary law, precedes “ceremonie” as belief does opinion. We are blinded to the relativity of “coustume” by “accoustumance.”^[26] For Montaigne there is, and there will always be, in each act and feeling an element of conditioning, an “emprunt” or borrowing from convention which stands between nature and its own undivided singularity. A good argument for cultural pluralism but also, in the European context of the Renaissance, for cultural skepticism. A full awareness of the power of “coustume” is disillusioning. Cutting across the dichotomy of the natural and the artificial, “coustume” predetermines what is natural as partially acquired. The truth of custom demystifies the myth of spontaneity. “C’est à la coustume de donner forme à nostre vie, telle qu’il luy plaist; elle peut tout en cela: c’est le breuvage de Circé, qui diversifie notre nature comme bon luy semble.”^[27] In the above citation from “De l’Experience,” the unsettling figure of Circe, representative of threatening diversity in late-Renaissance court entertainments, overrides the sanctity of the individual subject, rendering us similar to others but different from our true selves. Conformity is social monstrosity. To sum up, “coustume” is, at its best, naive ceremony, ceremony at its least arbitrary, its most “natural.” At its worst, “coustume” is exposed as the artifice of nature. “Nous appellons contre nature ce qui advient contre la coustume,” he writes in “D’un Enfant Monstrueux.”^[28] In that essay, Montaigne claims that custom blinds us to a desired cultural relativism. Custom is responsible for our perception of the unusual as monstrous.^[29] Moreover, the monstrous has a secondary definition as “ennemie de communication et de société.”^[30]

It is mostly because of the power of “coustume” that nature is not easily available to consciousness. “Je n’ay rien mien que moy; et si, en est la possession en partie manque et empruntée.”^[31] We are all, Montaigne seems to say, culturally contaminated. Only God enjoys the full presence of his self to himself: “Dieu, qui est en soy toute plenitude et le comble de toute perfection, il ne peut s’augmenter et accroistre au dedans.”^[32] Only He merits praise because only He is so abundantly substantial that an unchanging sign—his name—can stand for him in his absence. The substance of human beings, by contrast, is too unstable and inconsistent to be represented with anything other than a constantly altered or recalibrated name. This human onomastics is frequently referred to in the Essais as “voix.” “Nous sommes tous creux et vuides; ce n’est pas de vent et de voix que nous avons à nous remplir; il nous faut de la substance plus solide à nous reparer.”^[33] Ideally, for Montaigne, proper names should be reinvented at each instant to insure authentic connection to human beings. In the aristocratic system of honor and reputation, proper names were the emblems of glorious actions, long outliving their real performance.^[34] Thus, the glorious proper name for Montaigne is the very emblem of the discrepancy between action and intention. Only severe pain or absolute virtue can establish a consistency between action and its motivating feeling. Paradoxically, in the instance of pain, the gestural language is authentic because it is chaotic and unique to the moment. One might say that it is improvised with utter, though unrepeatable, conviction. This is, in essence, Montaigne’s nominalist position. No word, and a fortiori no proper name, has an essential connection to the identity it marks. With his famous dichotomy between “le nom” and “la chose” in “De la Gloire,” he inaugurates that nominalist position through a linguistic theory of proper names which are, as Mill would say, disembodied.^[35] In that essay, proper names are considered as the equivalents of arbitrary though ceremonious gestures to which public consensus attributes meaning.^[36] Thus the danger of ceremony is to presuppose universals—unchanging contents—falsely guaranteed by all varieties of cultural performance: mourning, eloquence, “civilité,” bad literature, law, medicine, theater, to name only the most frequently cited. Montaigne frequently overdetermines the critique of a particular cultural practice by conflating several endeavors. For example, in the following quote, mourning, oratory and theater are used as descriptive systems for one another: “Est-ce raison que les arts mesmes se servent et facent leur proufit de nostre imbecilité et bestise naturelle? L’Orateur, dict la rethorique, en cette farce de son plaidoier s’esmouvera par le son de sa voix et par ses agitations feintes, et se lairra piper a la passion qu’il représente. Il s’imprimera un vray deuil et essentiel, par le moyen de ce battelage qu’il joüe . . .”^[37]

Thus, the problem of the self-portrait in the Essais becomes increasingly bound up with the changing definition of gesture. For example, in “De l’exercitation,” Montaigne writes “ce ne sont pas mes gestes que j’ecris, c’est moy, c’est mon essence.”^[38] This essentialist view of the self is subsequently overturned in favor of a processual one when Montaigne writes “Je ne peints pas l’estre. Je peints le passage.”^[39] In the first instance, “essence” is distinguished from transient and superficial gesture while, in the second, being is attributed, paradoxically, only to the trajectory between states: interstitial movement. “Nostre vie n’est que movement.”^[40] A semantic instability inhabits Montaigne’s terminology, indicating a split between ontological and epistemological conceptions of the self portrait. “Essence” obtains a positive reading with regard to gesture while its synonym “etre” can only be understood negatively when compared to “le passage.” In a similar manner, “coustume” should be read positively in the context of “ceremonie” but negatively against “nature.” “Coustume” signifies by turns a superior ceremony but an inferior nature. The same relative redemption does not befall the proper name or any equivalent linguistic phenomenon in the Essais.^[41] Gesture, however, does accede to an unexpected theoretical flexibility in the course of the work.

These and similarly shifting thresholds of meaning are frequently referred to by Montaigne as movement: “branle.” “Le monde n’est qu’une branloire perenne” he writes in “Du Repentir,”^[42] thus evoking that social dance most directly connected to Renaissance belief systems. In its circular pattern of joined hands and its constant though uneven shifts from side to side, the “branle” evokes cosmic harmony even as it affirms change. James Miller’s recent study, Measures of Wisdom, sets forth the complex and extraordinarily rich traditions of this performance concept in Western culture.^[43] It is worth noting that the “branle” was unique in late-Renaissance France for being the only social and theatrical dance which transcended all class barriers. Given to much popular elaboration, it also maintained a privileged place in royal court entertainment well into the seventeenth century. In 1635, the librettist of Le Balet du Roy writes of that court ballet:

Le sujet de ce Balet triomphant estoit une representation de la vissicitude des choses humaines, dont le branle continuel n’a point d’hieroglyphe plus significatif que celuy de la danse.^[44]

The “branle” clearly served as an emblem of the general socio-cultural import of dance for late Renaissance and early Baroque France. And that import was not far from Montaigne’s message about change and instability. In other terms, the “branle” was at the nerve of dancing as a practice that had great cultural centrality. Montaigne’s “branloire perenne” suggests both a shifting and unstable universe and a dance floor upon which a shifting dance is performed to acknowledge and compensate for cosmic instability. Dancing the branle in Renaissance France was a manner of rehearsal—in the performative sense—of social, political, and personal harmony as what Montaigne called “la condition mixte:” “Nostre vie est composée, comme l’armonie du monde, de choses contraires.”^[45] The “branloire perenne” suggests both a metaphysical problem and a cultural “performance” designed to address that problem.^[46]

The “branloire perenne” is probably the most well-known of Montaigne’s references to dance. However, in “De l’Institution des Enfants,” Montaigne calls upon dance as a paradigmatic example of intellectual training. As he opposes rote learning to the true formation of judgement, Montaigne draws the seminal distinction between words and their “substance.” Bad learning allows the student to confuse specific texts with the true end of education: “il les transformera et confondera, pour en faire un ouvrage tout sien, à sçavoir son jugement. Son institution, son travail et estude ne vise qu’à le former.”^[47] Surprisingly, at this juncture, the model of true instruction or education is given as the learning of a dance step:

Je voudrais que le Paluël ou Pompée [two famous Milanese dancing masters], ces beaux danseurs de mon temps, apprinsent des caprioles à les voir seulement faire, sans nous bouger de nos places, comme ceux-cy [bad teachers] veulent instruire notre entendement, sans l’esbranler. . .^[48]

Montaigne probably had recourse to a dancing example because he considered it most persuasive at this point in his argument. No one can reasonably well imagine that learning an aerial dance step without moving—exercising one’s faculties—is possible. But the example is interesting for another reason. Despite his own theatrical prejudices, this quote reveals that dancing is not uniquely an emblem of rhetorical patterning resisted throughout the Essais. In fact, here, “patron” is associated with bookish study: “Ce qu’on sçait droittement, on en dispose, sans regarder au patron, sans tourner les yeux vers son livre. Facheuse suffisance qu’une suffisance pure livresque.”^[49] Reading is opposed to doing, study to practice. Or, more exactly, reading is advocated as a form of exercise. Dance is not only a potent metaphor for universal uncertainty and the wisdom of cosmic sympathy, it is also a model for that polar opposite in Montaigne’s mental universe: the formation of individual judgement.

In his recent Les Métamorphoses de Montaigne, François Rigolot claims that Montaigne the moralist rejects dance as a practice (even while retaining it as a model for the essays themselves as play) in the name of judgement, the latter defined as an “inner pattern:” “le devoir de l’homme,” writes Rigolot glossing Montaigne’s thought, “est de se soustraire à la danse générale pour établir ‘un patron en dedans’ de lui-même.”^[50] Rigolot misinterprets the sense of “branle” as popular dance only, and therefore as, vertiginous movement.^[51] Montaigne does favor a simple and noble dance over a popular and inflated one, but the “branle” fits into neither category. In fact, the “branle” provides a model for that most anti-cultural of concepts in Montaigne’s essays: movement and flux. The very process of writing the essays entails judgement confronting personal and universal instability and seeking resolution in movement. While by nature unpredictable and unregulated, that movement is already aesthetically patterned by the cultural practice of Renaissance dance. Only a knowledge of cultural performance transcending the immediate boundaries of the critical literary endeavor can reveal that Montaigne’s concept of movement does have a cultural and rhetorical precedent. One might, then, well ask whether the sharp distinctions drawn by Rigolot between historical and poetic knowledge and inquiry are truly in the deeper interests of literary exegesis.^[52] Should we not rather rehearse the questions of literature within the broader confines of cultural performance? By asking how one can know the dancer from the dance, Montaigne implicitly points to gestural rehearsal as a metaphor for the epistemological process of self knowledge. For Montaigne, gesture is not reified in any pattern though its improvisatory space has culturally determined limits. The different possibilities of movement rehearsed reflect the ontological project of the “moy” in a specular way: as epistemological spectacle.

^[1]I thank Djelal Kadir for his many insightful comments on this paper.

^[2]Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais (Pairs: Garnier, 1962), ii, vi, p. 416.

^[3]Ibid., ii, vi. p. 414.

^[4]Ibid., iii, xiii, p. 525.

^[5]Ibid. iii, xiii, p. 543.

^[6]Ibid., i, xxvi, p. 185.

^[7]Ibid., ii, vi, p. 416.

^[8]See Frances A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute of London, 1947), Margaret M. McGowan, L’Art du Ballet de Cour en France (1581-1643) (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1978) and Mark Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (c. 1416-1589) (Birmingham: Summa Publications, 1986).

^[9]In fact, Montaigne employs gestural metaphor frequently in order to lend conceptual coherence to a wide variety of issues which today would be considered the separate domains of sociology, anthropology, politics, linguistics, history, literature, cultural critique, aesthetics, philosophy, theology and/or autobiography.

^[10]Ibid., iii, xii, p. 515.

^[11]Ibid., ii, xvii, p. 32.

^[12]Ibid., iii, viii, p. 381.

^[13]Ibid., ii, xvii, p. 31.

^[14]Ibid., iii, iii, p. 243.

^[15]Ibid., iii, viii, p. 540.

^[16]Ibid., ii, xxxvii, pp. 171-172. “Montaigne, en effet, c’est frappant,” writes Hugo Friedrich, “ne peut se défendre d’un mouvement d’irritation polémique chaque fois qu’il tombe sur une idée formelle et rhétorique de la culture.” Montaigne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 94

^[17]“Il advient a la plus part de roidir leur contenance et leurs parolles pour en acquerir reputations . . .” Essais, ii, xiii, p. 3.

^[18]Ibid., ii, xxxvii, p. 172.

^[19]Ibid., ii, vi, p. 412.

^[20]Ibid., ii, x, p. 453.

^[21]In “Des Livres,” the inflation of “fantastiques elevations” is an effect of poorly accomplished imitation and even plagiarism: “Ce qui les faict ainsi se charger de matiere, c’est la deffiance qu’ils ont de se pouvoir soustenir de leurs propres graces; il faut qu’ils trouvent un corps où s’appuyer . . .” Ibidem, p. 452. “Il leur faut plus de corps. Ils montent à cheval parce qu’ils ne sont assez forts sur leurs jambes.” (Ibidem., p. 453).

^[22]“Au Lecteur,” p. 1.

^[23]Ibidem.

^[24]Ibidem.

^[25]Jean Starobinski analyzes the relationship of custom to nature in the context of Montaigne’s attitudes toward medicine in “The Body’s Moment,” in Yale French Studies 64 (1983), pp. 273-305.

^[26]The reverence is an example in point. “Il est des peuples où on tourne le doz à celuy qu’on salue, et ne regarde l’on jamais celuy qu’on veut honorer. . . . Où, pour signe de subjection, il faut hausser les espaules et baisser la teste. . . . Où l’on saluë mettant le doigt à terre, et puis le haussant vers le ciel.” Ibid., i, xxiii, pp. 116-119.

^[27]Ibid., iii, xiii, p. 534. See also i, xxiii, p. 116: “J’estime qu’il ne tombe en l’imagination humaine aucune fantaisie si forcenée qui ne rencontre l’exemple de quelque usage public, et par consequent que nostre discours n’estaie et ne fonde.” See also iii, xiii, p. 538: “La coustume a desjà, sans y penser, imprimé si bien en moy son caractere en certaines choses, que j’appelle excez de m’en despartir.”

^[28]See ibid., ii, xxx, p. 118.

^[29]Although there is a tension in the Essais between nominalism and realism, “coustume” may act as an expedient, though surrogate universal. Antoine Compagnon has called custom “la définition de l’universel empirique comme seul critère du naturel, à l’exclusion pleinement nominaliste d’une éventuelle essence.” Antoine Compagnon, Nous, Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 176.

^[30]Essais, i, xxvi, p. 179.

^[31]Ibid., iii, ix, p. 408.

^[32]Ibid., ii, xvi, p. 15.

^[33]Ibidem., p. 16.

^[34]See Arlette Jouanna, Ordre Social. Mythes et Hiérarchies dans la France du XVIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1977).

^[35]See John Stuart Mill, Philosophy of Scientific Method (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1950), pp. 13-64.

^[36]Similarly, a nominalist position in “des noms” and “des pouces” stresses the parallelism between gestures and proper names in Montaigne’s thought.

^[37]Ibid., iii, iv, p. 259.

^[38]Ibid., ii, vi, p. 416.

^[39]Ibid., iii, ii, p. 222.

^[40]Ibid., iii, xiii, p. 553.

^[41]With the possible exception of Montaigne’s own proper name. See Compagnon, op. cit.

^[42]Essais, iii, ii, p. 222.

^[43]James Miller, Measures of Wisdom. The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986).

^[44]Paul Lacroix, Ballets et Mascarades de Cour sous Henri IV et Louis XIII (de 1581 à 1652). (Geneva: chez J. Gay et fils, 1868-1870), vol. V, p. 58. This collection was reprinted by Slatkine in 1968.

^[45]Essais, iii, xiii, p. 545.

^[46]While I prefer the term “rehearsal” in this context, cultural anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of “cultural performance” might also be applicable here. For Turner, cultural performance deals reflexively with anthropological, social and metaphysical categories. Whatever symbolic form such performance might take, it is “liminal” for Turner: cultural performance lies between the subjunctive and the indicative, between what is and what might be. Performance attempts to reconcile and transform while pointing out “the fundamental indeterminacy that lurks in the cracks and crevices of all our sociocultural ‘constructions of reality.’” See his The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), p. 60.

^[47]Ibid., i, xxvi, p. 162.

^[48]Ibidem.

^[49]Ibidem. This passage leads directly into the already quoted one on learning a capriol.

^[50]François Rigolot, Les Métamorphoses de Montaigne (Paris: P.U.F., 1988), p. 203.

^[51]This misapprehension stems from another, more evident in an earlier study for this chapter, “Les Jeux de Montaigne,” in Les Jeux à la Renaissance, ed. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: Vrin, 1982). There, Rigolot writes, “si la chasse est la distraction nobiliaire par excellence, la danse est plutôt un passe-temps populaire et villageois” (p. 329). Rigolot does not take into account that dancing in the Renaissance was a courtly as well as a “rustic” phenomenon.

^[52]Rigolot, op, cit., “Mutation de l’Histoire: ‘l’accointance des Muses,’” pp. 15-34.