Pot-Boilers

A city has photographed Montaigne’s crossings-out, deletions and every wavering mark on the page. But Clive Bell warns that anyone hunting for dramatic revelations in them is in for a surprise.

In this essay from Pot-Boilers, Bell turns from a twentieth-century facsimile to a sixteenth-century French gentleman who travelled through Europe and came home, he says, more mellow than transformed. Montaigne’s great adventure, Bell suggests, was not a conversion but a way of thinking: plain-spoken, sceptical and humane, wary of certainty and hostile to cruelty. How did this seemingly ordinary man arrive at a tolerance that Bell finds remarkable even by modern standards?

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