Apology For The Woman Writing

by Jenny Diski

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Marie de Gournay was eighteen when she read, and was overwhelmed by, the essays of the French philosopher Montaigne. She had to be revived with hellebore. When she finally met Montaigne, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. He made her his adopted daughter for the two months they knew each other. He died four years later, after which, though scorned by intellectuals, she became his editor. Jenny Diski engages with this passionate and confused relationship between 'father and daughter', old writer/young acolyte, possible lovers, using both their voices. Much of their story is about absence of the people they love. In Jenny Diski's hands it becomes a fascinating tale.

Release date: February 6, 2014

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 288

Sample

1645

There her mistress lies in the bed, gasping like a fish. Sucking at the air of the world with those dried-up lips, dragging
it in, trying to fill her rusty lungs. It never gets down deep enough to satisfy before she has to release it, the air escaping
through her open mouth in a crackled wheeze, so that she can try again. She sounds like a pair of ancient bellows making a
final desperate effort to be serviceable. Nothing to be done to help her. Only she can breathe or not breathe.


Nicole Jamyn sits, hands in her lap, on a stool beside the bed, not looking, because she doesn’t have to, but also because
it hurts to twist her neck. Her head is heavy. It pains her to let it drop. It pains her to hold it up. For the most part
she sits looking straight ahead towards the small window opposite, above the desk, trying to keep her head painlessly balanced
on her neck, waiting, and listening because she can’t help but listen. Nevertheless from time to time, Jamyn turns – she feels
and hears the bones in her neck crunch unwillingly at the disturbance – and sees the loose skin around her mistress’s closed
eyes tense up with discomfort when she breathes in. The cold air scours her desiccated lips as though she were inhaling sand.
It must be an automatic response from the unconscious old woman, but even so Jamyn leans over painfully, takes up the cloth
in the bowl of water, squeezes it out a little, and dabs at her mistress’s parched mouth in the hope it will bring some relief.
She has no idea whether it helps or not.


It is not as hard sitting at this deathbed as she had imagined. The few who come to pay their respects call her loyal. A paid
servant is not required to hold a death-watch over the final earthly struggles of her mistress.


‘She is fortunate to have you, Jamyn,’ they whisper as they leave.

They call her loyal, but she can see they pity her, supposing her here because she has nowhere else she could be. A sad creature
sitting with a sad creature. It seems they think that if she had a choice, another place to go, a family, she would certainly
do no more than what is necessary for her mistress. Only the pathetically lonely would sit day and night, waiting, keeping
vigil with the depleting soul and skeletal body expiring on the old woollen mattress beside her stool. They are wrong. Not
about her having nowhere else to be. It is true she has nowhere else, no one else, but she is here, sleepless and useless,
for the same reason that Piaillon lies curled at the foot of the bed. They both belong with her. She is their home. They will
wait until the end, and after that they will wait some more. Then Jamyn and Piaillon will remain together until one or other
dies, and at last the last of them will be alone as neither of them has ever been. The chances are it will be Jamyn. Piaillon
is already blind and her teeth no longer serve. All she does now is sleep, hardly more quietly than her mistress. She licks
at her food when Jamyn puts a platter with a few soft scraps beside her on the coverlet. When she needs to relieve herself
she yowls, and Jamyn raises herself slowly from the stool and takes the cat from the bed and carries her all the way down
the four precipitous flights of stairs to the street. After she has finished, Piaillon comes back into the house and Jamyn
closes the door behind her, letting the cat follow her back up the stairs while she hauls herself up to the topmost floor, hand over hand
on the rope that does for a banister. Piaillon climbs as stiff and painfully after her.


‘Come on, come on, you,’ Jamyn calls in an uninflected trailing voice to the trailing cat. ‘We’ll get there. Or we won’t.’

She hears occasional creaks behind her. Either a stair suffering from age as they all are, or the cat feebly complaining at
not being carried. But Jamyn tires on the upward climb, and they arrive at the door of their dying mistress together. It’s
a little exercise for both of them.


Jamyn also does a bit of shopping. They have to have food, she and the cat. Although she could now afford to pay a sou to
the lad downstairs to get it for her, she risks the journey away from her mistress’s side every other morning, perhaps to
feel a sour gratification that the world really is going about its business without any concern for the predicament of her
mistress and herself. Otherwise she sits next to her failing mistress, her lady, with her stiff hands in her lap, slowly and
slightly raising or lowering her head occasionally as if it might relieve the pain.


The attic room, with its sloping roof, is sparsely furnished. Her mistress’s small iron bed with the slight hump of her tiny,
diminishing body under a rough blanket and a grubby but pretty embroidered coverlet; across the room her work table, once
quite a good piece of furniture but now untouched by polish for years and scratched and stained with ink. Jamyn is not allowed
to disturb the chaotic jumble of papers and books to keep it looking nice; plain floorboards, the planks knotted and uneven,
what could be seen of them under the labyrinthine piles of books and papers that seem to have spilled over and spread from the over-burdened table. It is only possible to cross the room by walking
sideways and around the unorganised stacks of printed and inked words. The walls are bare except for a crucifix over the bed.
In any case, they don’t offer enough space to get half the stuff off the floor, even if they had been shelved. Jamyn’s stool
is next to the bed, and in one corner there is a small chest. Opposite the bed and stool, above the table, set into the sloping
roof, there is the small window through which, when it is open and the uneven glass does not distort the world, Jamyn can
watch clouds move across a rectangle of sky, or the rain slant across the driving winter wind. She lets the light come and
go as it will unless, rarely, she has some task to do at night for her mistress that requires her to light a candle. Her eyes
are no good now for sewing or reading – not that she ever reads in the presence of her lady. But she does not find the waiting
tedious. There is, after all, a life to consider, the life coming to its end beside her. A difficult life. Difficult enough
to live, but just as difficult for Jamyn to grasp properly the reason for so much going so wrong. What was it that made her
lady’s impossible necessity so necessary? What made it impossible? Jamyn was not trained to think by scholars and professors
as he was, but she knows the dying woman’s life through and through, better even than her mistress, better even than her own. At
least she sees it more clearly than her lady ever did, and Jamyn, the faithful servant, works very hard to understand how
it was for her mistress. It is the only way she can hope to understand her own disappointments. So boredom is not a problem,
she has enough to do with the time while she waits.


1592

Michel de Montaigne lies in bed, dying. This time there is no doubt. Nothing is left to do but comfort those who weep, and
make his formal peace with God. Soon enough. In the meantime, he considers whether God will wish to make peace with him.


In 1588, when the letter from the young woman arrived, he was fifty-five years old. The excellent classical education with
which his father had provided him ensured that he was aware of Pliny’s opinion that ‘there are three kinds of diseases people
have been accustomed to escape from by killing themselves: the fiercest of all is the stone in the kidney when the urine is
held back by it.’ He had the misfortune not to need Pliny to point this fact out to him, though the confirmation was oddly
comforting. For ten years a stone in the kidney had been bestowing on his body an intermittent but regular ordeal of excruciating
pain, and filling his mind with the inevitability of more and probably worse to come, to say nothing of the inescapable prospect
of the same agonising death his father suffered.


Added to which, it had been a long time since a woman looked at him with hungry eyes, and a few years since he’d dared rely
on his once-virile member to rise to the occasion if by some marvel it should happen. There were, alongside the exquisite
pain from the colic paroxysms and a faltering penis, rotting teeth, fading eyesight, unseemly stomach disturbances and occasional
bouts of the quinsy which vied gaily with the stone for the honour of carrying him off.


None of this was surprising. All of it was to be expected. He was fifty-five years old; an age that many would be grateful
to attain, an age when the end of life is so close that every morning he woke slightly surprised to be doing so. Everything
that ailed him would only get worse until the day came when all pain and discomfort ceased.


He was fifty-five years old with a mother who still regarded him as a wastrel for failing to maintain the family estate, let
alone increase its fortune. She and he argued constantly over how the household ought to be run. It was undignified for both
of them. The worst of it was that he had not the slightest desire to run a household; he did his duty by it, but could give
it no more of his attention. It would have been far more to his taste to have his mother run the estate (if only it didn’t
mean that she would believe she had the right to run him too), but duty required that he, the oldest son and heir, take responsibility
for it. It had been his father’s wish, which he could not set aside, and therefore duty also required that his mother complain
to him at every turn. She nursed a grievance against him for his father’s will that cut her out of any decisions that needed
making and made her virtually a ward of the son she was so unimpressed by. He would meet her on the staircases muttering and
crossing herself. When she saw her son, she’d shriek her contempt at his hurriedly bowed head.


‘Here is the son in charge of his mother. Such a son! Spoiled by that foolish father of his. A child woken in the morning
by paid musicians playing outside his window, if you please. Such a special boy. Only Latin, the finest Latin, was allowed
to be spoken to him because Latin, if you please, must be his first language. So even the servants, even his mother had to learn it. With what
result? With the result that I have an ingrate for a son. A lazy ne’er-do-well who lets the place go to rack and ruin. A son
with no respect and no love for his mother.’


He was fifty-five with a wife, Françoise, to whom he was also well mannered, who complained almost as much as his mother,
in her case of neglect and at being left with the burden of running the estate (and coping with her testy mother-in-law) whenever
he had to conduct his political duties in Bordeaux, or decided he wanted to travel through Europe for a few months, visit
friends, or spend most of his days (and sometimes nights) in his tower, scribbling. He listened to her complaints, as he did
to those of his mother, with a lowered head and in silence. He never argued, or said anything at all in reply. He waited patiently
and politely until they had finished and then he continued on his way. His mother was a burden. But he did not blame his wife
for her nagging dissatisfaction with him. Who could, all her children having died except one? Five of them. They lived minutes
or days, sometimes a month or more, but they all died. Apart from the one girl. It affected his wife badly; she did not grow
so inured as he had to their loss, being naturally not so distant from those particular losses as he must be. He grieved for
the children, but he didn’t brood excessively over their deaths. They were, after all, infants. He and they had no chance
to make each other’s acquaintance.


He made a bad mistake, however, after the death of the first child, Thoinette, when, in an attempt at comfort, he dedicated
his translation of Plutarch’s ‘Letter of Consolation to His Wife’ to Françoise and expressed his regret to her that she had to lose her babe in only the second year of its life. In fact, Thoinette
had died in her second month of life. A slip of the pen, but slipshod. (Later, he carefully recorded all five of the deaths with complete accuracy for
the official family records.) Relations between Françoise and himself became cooler. He attended the marriage bed at appropriate,
regular intervals after the death of Thoinette and respectfully made more children to die before they were weaned. Except
when Françoise lost her patience with his distant ways, they were remote but always polite to each other in bed as well as
out. Which is just as a marriage should be, he believed. How else could it survive? It was, compared to many he’d known, a
good, orderly marriage. And, once, when he had been quite certain he was about to die after a terrible fall from a horse,
when death gently whispered in his ear and he didn’t mind at all, his first words to the servants carrying him back to the
house, when he briefly regained consciousness, were to express concern that his wife be given a horse as she came stumbling
down the road to reach the scene of the accident. Was not her comfort the main thing on his mind even at the hour of his death?
Or so they said; he had no recollection of it.


In the year 1588, he was fifty-five. He had been Mayor of Bordeaux, and done the job well enough, though of course he always
kept something back, retained that back room behind the public shop where no one was permitted to enter. Duty must be fulfilled,
but not at the cost of your soul.


He had gained a literary reputation after retirement. His book of essays – a form he invented himself, he knew with modest
vanity – was selling all over France and receiving praise from the most serious thinkers of the times. They wrote to him to say so. But his wife and only daughter were not much impressed and
neither had read his work. His neighbours were amused and contemptuous. They were, for the most part, men of his own noble
rank but they conformed better to the requirements, being men of action who found the idea of sitting in a room writing laughable
to say the very least. He had shown by public and military service that he too could be a man of action (up to a point – everything
up to a point), but they were baffled by the fact that he chose to retire from a public life to become a book writer. They suspected that the mere three generations of nobility on his father’s side, and the fact that his mother was said to
have come from a family of Spanish converso Jews might account for it.


And so too, initially, was he baffled by his choice of occupation at retirement. It did not, at any rate, go as he had expected
when he readied the tower in the west corner of the château for his new meditative writing plans. Far from fine thoughts clothed
in grand rhetoric coming at elegant intervals to him when he settled to his study in the tower, his mind, presented with the
endless possibilities of everything and anything, with limitless words, limitless but disorderly thoughts, with the rest of
its time alone with itself, was attacked by a blank, black nightmare, a shapeless nothing that was in itself a monstrous form
and threatened him with madness. He wrote doggedly through this fearful agony, hanging on as best he could to the mane of
the ferocious unbroken stallion thrashing in his mind: the hopelessness of his life, the total lack of a point to his existence,
the cavernous loneliness. He wrote neat little arguments about grand subjects, pro and con, well scattered with classical
references, while his head pounded with the dreadful emptiness, the deadly vacuity that was no longer being kept at bay by a busy life.


Gradually, through the nothing, he edged towards something. Small, seemingly ridiculous forays beyond the proper rhetoric
led him there. He allowed himself to follow thoughts that he should have excluded but didn’t from his impeccably balanced
debates. Personal thoughts, reflections about himself. And niggling questions that arose from the conventionally uncontroversial
subjects he took up demanded a reply not from books read or quotations learned, but from furthest inward, deep inside his
troubled mind. A soul-search, call it. Thinking, is how he came to think of it. He made a decision, borne of desperation,
to be led by those thoughts, to demand answers to the questions his mind put to him about himself and write them down, to
make, if they might, the shape of a human being. And what he made, some say, and he knew, was something entirely new in the
world. A unique form, like his own self, somewhat and not at all like everyone’s own self, that might stand for its particular
singularity and yet also address the questions all men ask about their being in the world. Others, of course, did not think
so highly of him for this innovation. And a part of him, the part that wished only to be what he was supposed to be, and to
simply get on without any trouble, agreed with those who termed him vulgar and self-regarding.


He was fifty-five years old in 1588, and all these things were his present existence. Only once had he known complete companionship,
a camaraderie of the spirit, the love of and the experience of fully loving another human being, and it was long ago, brief
as a single sunrise and sunset in the eternity of the world. Often he moaned his agony in the silence of his library. Oh, my friend.


Since then he’d lived in loneliness – the special kind of loneliness that came from having once known what it was to have
another you with you on the earth. With the passage of time, it had become a treasured solitude, painful, certainly, always, but special,
because it recalled constantly the unique communion that had been lost. He would not have given it up, now that his beloved
friend was beyond reach. It was all he had left of him, that loneliness. Perhaps it was more even than having him alive and
with him. But to have no one with whom you can sit in comfortable silence, to whom you can talk and be certain of their understanding,
whom you can trust with your deepest thoughts and fears without hesitation, whose advice is as wise as any good father and
who forgives, like any good father, your hesitation in taking it – to have had and lost such a friend, that is hard. No father,
no friend. Not even a son, though a son could hardly play the part of a lost friend, but a son would have been something.
His daughter, Léonor, was no son. She was her mother’s child. A nice enough girl. Perhaps he once had unfeasible hopes in
spite of her sex, but at sixteen her intellect was no more than ordinary and her soul was already moulded and content with
itself. He smiled to see her frowning over her lessons and sitting like a lady at the dinner table, but there was nothing
more than a distant affection in his heart for her. She would, of course, be his heir, but in spite of the careful instructions
in his will, he feared for the fate of his library and his work after his fast-approaching end. He had friends, of course.
But they were elsewhere, and though he enjoyed their occasional visits and the chance to get away and see them, they never
came close to filling the empty place in him that Estienne de La Boétie left behind.


He was fifty-five in the early months of 1588 and he had just spent weeks travelling from Bordeaux to Paris on an urgent and
secret mission, getting robbed and almost murdered on the way. He was a Catholic who had been entrusted by the Protestant
Prince Henri of Navarre with the task of making an alliance with the Catholic King Henri III against the Catholic League of
the Duc de Guise, who was even then marching on Paris, with the unsurprising result that both Catholics and Huguenots distrusted
him. Perhaps rightly so, because, without denying his Catholic faith in any way, he was more concerned with bringing peace
to France than supporting one side or the other. He arrived for his mission in Paris two weeks late, exhausted to the point
of death by the journey, and its vicissitudes, and in shocking pain. His life could easily have ended in the forest of Villebois,
a victim of the robbers or members of the Catholic League or whoever they were. His life did not end then. He charmed and
reasoned his way out of death that time. He had a job to do, a duty to fulfil. He recalled, however, a very slight twinge
of disappointment when the gentlemen in the forest sheathed their knives and left him to get on with his journey and what
remained of his life.


He was fifty-five and coming to the conclusion that what was most important in life was to take what pleasure it offers you.
To notice it and enjoy it, even momentarily, for what it is. No pleasure was to be disregarded. Only fools despise the pleasures
of the God-given body more than less tangible joys. Once the worst fear you have – in his case the terror of the stone – has
fallen on you, you discover that pleasure still lives in and around your body, beside, beneath and beyond the pain. Once the
end of life is clearly visible, you find that pleasure in its moment is all the sweeter. He knew this, but it was no easy thought to hold in his mind all the time while he lay in bed in his fine Parisian
accommodations, depleted with travel, tormented by pain, trying to rest and gather his strength. Other thoughts kept coming,
his past life laid itself out before him, his future trickled away barely ahead of him, and he was not sure how he would manage
to rise the following morning looking like a man with a purpose. It was 1588. He was fifty-five. There was a knock at his
bedroom door and a servant entered with a letter for him.


1595

Marie de Gournay is alone. She . . .