Château de Montaigne

A castle has stood on the border of Périgord and Bordelais, near Bergerac and Saint-Émilion, since the 14th century, when it was raised as a fortified house in what is now the commune of Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne. In 1477 it was bought by Ramon Eyquem, a Bordeaux merchant, who took with it the hereditary title of seigneur de Montaigne and passed that title on to his children and grandchildren.

Ramon’s grandson Pierre Eyquem brought his family to live there, and there his son Michel spent a studious childhood — he is said to have been raised speaking Latin — before going on to study in French at the collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux. In 1554 Pierre put it to his overlord, the archbishop of Bordeaux, that he had had a château built on the site and had already begun to make the place strong and secure, and that he intended to fortify it and put it in a state of defence with every engine needed for the purpose.

An inscription in the house records that on the eve of the calends of March 1571, his thirty-eighth birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long since wearied by the servitude of the court, the parlement and public office, withdrew while still in health to the bosom of the learned virgins, in calm and safety, and consecrated these paternal retreats to his liberty, his tranquillity and his leisure.

From that year until his death he wrote the Essais there, the major work of Renaissance humanism, its arguments propped throughout on the Greek and Roman classics — there was no use, he explained, in saying worse what another had managed to say better before him. He worked on the third storey of the round tower he called his librairie: a chapel at the bottom, above it a chamber where he often slept in order to be alone, and above that a room sixteen paces across, his books ranged round him on shelves of five tiers, with three open prospects. The park in which the house sits was laid out to his own design. He passed most days and most hours of the day up there, and never a night. Into the ceiling beams he had the fruit of his reading and reflection carved as sentences.

In 1584 he received at Montaigne the king of Navarre, Henri de Bourbon, the future Henry IV, together with Condé, Rohan and Turenne; Henry had already named him a gentleman of his chamber by letters patent in 1577. Montaigne — councillor to several kings, magistrate and mayor of Bordeaux — died in a room of the house on 13 September 1592.

Montaigne’s widow, Françoise de La Chassaigne, went on living at the château after his death. There she received Marie de Gournay, whom Montaigne had befriended in 1588 during a journey to Paris, and to whom an annotated copy of the Essais had been sent with the request that she take charge of getting them published.

In 1860 the castle was bought by Pierre Magne (1806–1879), a minister of Napoleon III. He withdrew to it after the crisis of 16 May 1877, was kept from the sittings of the Senate largely by illness, and died there on 17 February 1879.

A fire in January 1885 destroyed the house, and the château rebuilt in its place carries the neo-Renaissance flavour it has now. The flames spared the librairie: the great round tower, a smaller round tower and the square lodging with them were classified as historical monuments on 28 March 1952, and the protection was extended to the rest of the château in 2009. Privately owned and open to visitors, the estate also carries the Maisons des Illustres label. A study toward a digital reconstruction of the castle began in 2002, and in 2015 the Archéovision laboratory of the université Bordeaux-Montaigne published the tower library in digital form as part of the project Montaigne à l’œuvre.