The story of Michel de Montaigne is that rare case, a political life that ends in success. Not, admittedly, the success that Montaigne sought. Nothing succeeded so well for Montaigne as failure. “My world is done for, my form is emptied,” he wrote shortly before his death in 1592. “I belong entirely to the past.”
Montaigne wrote this in the margins of what scholars call the Bordeaux Copy, a print copy of the fifth edition of his Essais. Published in Paris in 1588, the fifth edition was the last to appear in Montaigne’s lifetime. The 1588 edition added a third book of 13 chapters and 600 revisions to the two books and 94 chapters of the first edition of 1580. This expanded the text by about a third, and the Essais from one volume to two.
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