SOURCE: Horowitz, Maryanne Cline. “Marie de Gournay, Editor of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne: A Case-Study in Mentor-Protégée Friendship.” The Sixteenth-Century Journal 17, no. 3 (fall 1986): 271-84.

In the following essay, Horowitz demonstrates how the mentor/protégé relationship between Montaigne and de Gournay influenced de Gournay's artistic maturation and her evolving concept of the nature of friendship.

In Paris in the spring of 1588, a mutual friendship developed between the fifty-five-year-old, married essayist and former mayor of Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne, and a twenty-two-year-old, self-taught, unmarried admirer of the Essais, Marie de Gournay. Later that year Montaigne visited his “fille d'alliance,” covenant daughter, Marie at her family estate at Gournay-sur-Aronde on several visits between working on a new edition of the Essais and negotiating for a political peace between Henry of Navarre and King Henry III. Her walks with Michel de Montaigne are immortalized in the curious...