Abstract EN:

The list of greek and latin sentences from Montaigne’s librairie was made up in 1861. Since then, they have just been reprinted with a few changes. There has never been any critical edition of those. In order to set up this edition, it had been necessary to make a historical review of the way the sentences were discovered: the process of the corpus from 1770 (Prunis) to 1861 (Galy and Lapeyre), the publishing of the list from 1900, the recent query about the function of location. It was especially necessary to reconsider the observance of palimpsest beams. Thus, we have been able to find out and identify 11 sentences, unmentioned so far, all of whom are added to the 55 ones already known. An addendum shows photographs of those writings, and a few paintings of the "cabinet" nearby, with plans. Our research work takes into account the librairie and the cabinet, including texts and pictures altogether. Whenever we reach for potential patterns, we deal with traditional ecclesiastic libraries, testimonies from humanists' dwellings, and stocks of drawings and engravings. The roman letters of the inscriptions can come from ancient epigraphy, the greek letters owe much probably to typographic usages. Prior to the 1580 version of the Essais, the sentences allow us a better understanding as for the time when and the way how Montaigne proceeded from inscriptions to writings. They bring up prime information about the biography and the readings of Montaigne’s (Stobaeus, Diogenes, Sextus Empiricus, Gellius, Erasmus; perhaps Campensis, a hebraist paraphrasing the book of ecclesiast?), but also about the relationship between the librairie and the book. When quoted, translated and paraphrased, they make up a lasting intertext of the Essais, a “gardoire” of ancient sentences and a source alive for further ones.