Ploughshares

When you visit the statue of Montaigne in Paris, you find him amidst overgrown greenery, almost sequestered in the bushes across from the Sorbonne, as if preferring, in bronze, the margin he chose in life. The first thing you notice is his shoe. Even at night, when I came upon him, the shoe emerges first, golden against the dusky bronze of his casually seated self, cross-legged, bending forward as if to catch what you might be saying there on the sidewalk.

People rub the shoe for luck or maybe out of affection. A shoe-rub is said to ensure a good exam result. It glows from all this human touch, an elegant sixteenth-century Mary Jane dancing slipper, blushing from generations of twentieth-century fondling. The sculptor, Paul Landowski, is better known for his gigantic 1931 Flash Gordon statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro. Montaigne's statue was done two years later, in 1933, perhaps to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1533.

Something of the dandy about that shoe. Then you notice the face, surprisingly intent, looking back at you. The face of a man who appreciates the finer things, but is wryly amused by this weakness for pleasure, not haunted by his appetites. Landowski has given Montaigne a twentieth-century face, nonchalant, worldly, warm—almost an American face. A humanist face. This Montaigne, like the one I've been reading in recent years, sees it all and accepts it all in advance—the "all" of human perversity and contradiction played out on the field of avidity and longing.

It was raining that night, and though I'm urging a visit to the statue as if to a shrine, I didn't visit it. I just happened upon it, running late, trying to locate a fish restaurant recommended by a friend who knows Paris. Dripping in his leafy bower by the university, gleaming from the wet—or maybe because I'd been reading him, living with his sinuous sentences in my head, and had no idea such a statue existed—this bronze Montaigne had something of the apparition about him. [End Page 7] Like Whitman, another eccentric of the first person voice, he was loafing by the side of the road.

Out with the iPhone. Snap snap. Got the shoe. Didn't, couldn't quite, get the face. I had made an earlier pilgrimage to the famous tower on the chateau property near Bordeaux, had stood alone in the rounded room, imagined it once ringed with books, the stony enclosure where he devised his pieces, some shorter than a page, some long enough to make a chapbook, the writing he called his essais. He had refused to outfit this study with a fireplace (imagine the cold in winter) in order to safeguard his precious library.

I had checked out as well the adjacent alcove where he did allow a little fireplace, a cramped space to warm himself. On the walls I made out what was left of the painted frescoes (naked nymphs and godlets mostly, bundles of chipped floral decor) and the graffiti of earlier visitors—boldly scrawled Emma 1882 and Pierre 1920, and someone whose name or message I couldn't decipher, the date 1989, the most recent I found.

I looked out the window of the alcove to experience (or think I was experiencing) his view. May, a great blossoming marronnier, part of an allée of chestnut trees marshaled along a gravel roadway leading to the tower. Nearer, just below, a triangular untended parterre garden where I imagined herbs (surely he ate well—he tells us he loved rich sauces, delicately flavored). I turned back toward the main room, his writing room, intending to take some descriptive notes, hoping for an insight for the book I was—I am—writing (an earnest essayist acting the part). With this in mind, turning quickly, gaze angled down to my notebook, I misjudged the space (an earlier century, a smaller scale) and smacked my head into the stone wall.

You do see stars. Or bits of white, spinning, that you could think of as stars.

Then, in my bell...