Novel Rivalries

A new take on a celebrated author reveals unexpected passions

The 16th-century French writer Michel Montaigne inspired intense passions.

Just how intense?

“The ruination of private lives” is not too strong a phrase, suggests Ken Keffer, Stodghill Professor of Modern Languages, who has taught French and German at Centre since joining the faculty in 1979.

Keffer’s discovery of such an unexpected depth of feeling began almost a decade ago when he saw an edition of Montaigne’s famous Essays with more than 1,000 corrections and additions written in the margins by Montaigne himself. The edition was a photographic copy published in 1912 of the 16th-century original, which was kept proudly in Bordeaux, where Montaigne had once been mayor.

“I was mesmerized by the handwriting,” says Keffer. “The handwriting made it so human.” But the handwriting, he found, was not the real story. “It’s not about the text,” Keffer says. “It’s about the people.”

In reading the preface of the photographic copy, he found not the expected explanation of how the 1912 edition came to be, but “a diatribe” with “allusions to infighting and struggles” over two other versions of the Essays. Those transcriptions—or recopying—of Montaigne’s marginalia had been done during the late 19th century by secretaries, librarians, and paleographers working at the city library in Bordeaux and also in Paris. Later, while researching at the Bordeaux library, Keffer discovered material in the archives that documented much of the acrimony.

The title of his resulting book, A Publication History of the Rival Transcriptions of Montaigne’s Essays (Mellen, 2001), hints at the complex plot twists behind the anything-but-routine re-copying.

“The purpose of these transcriptions was the publishing of a monumental edition of the Essays,” Keffer explains. “It turned out that a quarrel broke out between scholars and administrators in Bordeaux and Paris, and so my book becomes a chronicle of politeness, academic culture in France, and the ruination of private lives.”

One reviewer observed that Keffer’s book might even be read “as a novel on university life.”

The cast of characters includes the blind scholar Pierre Villey, who struggled to get paid for his work before being killed in a train wreck; Albert Cagnieul, who, in his meticulous transcribing of each of Montaigne’s additions, came to identify with Montaigne himself; and Ernest-Daniel Grand, a paleographer from Paris, whom the Bordeaux library authorities intentionally put in an unheated room to work during a winter of record cold.

“In France, the book has caught the attention of serious scholars because I am the first person ever to have drawn attention to this transcription process and to the lies and tensions it created,” says Keffer, who acknowledges the excitement of finding a new take on a writer who has been “scrutinized” for 400 years. “Nobody had thought there might be a record of that rivalry.”

His book received the Adele Mellen Prize for distinguished contribution to scholarship. A French edition came out last year under the title Montaigne for ever (Champion, 2005), from a phrase used to describe one of Montaigne’s more impassioned 19th-century fans.

Working with a translator was a “revealing” experience, Keffer says, especially since he often writes and publishes in French. “French is less concrete [than English], it’s more abstract,” he says. “French is a language of about 40,000 to 50,000 words (whereas our own is well over 100,000), and so words frequently have to play several roles.”

Unlike the rivalries of his research, the translation project also enabled some of Keffer’s students to see the collaborative side of academic life, which he appreciates—and so do they. Sherri Rose Burke ’04 happily recalls the summer she spent comparing the translation to the English text and says the experience helped convince her to head for graduate school.

“Dr. Keffer has an energy and enthusiasm for French that inspires students to explore culture and language in innovative ways,” she says. “During my French classes with Dr. Keffer I remember acting out scenes from plays of Molière, taking a hike en français, and painting part of an Impressionist mural of Le déjeuner des canotiers (The Luncheon of the Boating Party) by Renoir. His encouragement and passion for language are a large part of the reason I’m at the University of Virginia working on my master’s in French literature, aspiring to continue for a Ph.D. and eventually to teach.”

—D.F.J.

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