Table Of ContentA Devil in Diversion Number and Line in the Essais
Tom Conley
Configurations, Volume 17, Number 1, Winter 2009, pp. 87-103 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0068
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A Devil in Diversion: Number and
Line in the Essais
Tom Conley
Harvard University
“J’usay de diversion.”
—Essais (III.4)
Abstract:
A close reading of chapters 3 and 4 of the third volume of Montaigne’s
Essais reveals that within the lexical matter, there is a strategic deploy-
ment of mathematical and geometrical signs. Words and their spac-
ings are literally riddled with numerical forms that reorient—and even
multiply—the vectors of meanings of the essays themselves. Gematria
becomes a working principle of the chapters that draw attention to
the force of their form. In the Essais, arithmetic and geometry are not
used metaphorically, but instead inform the verbal texture and belong
to the strategies at work in the printed writing. Study of the paired
essays “De trois commerces” and “De la diversion” argues that what
Montaigne calls his “poetical allure” belongs in strong part to a style
built upon the sight and sound of mathematical ciphers. In chapter
3, Montaigne’s tower is seen twisting and moving by way of numbers
inhering in the signifiers; and in chapter 4, the art of diversion uses
distraction and detour to serve as a means to cope with melancholy.
In a richly informative study of the stage in the English Renais-
sance, Henry Turner shows how the practical arts figure in the plot-
ting and performing of Elizabethan drama. In search of ways of
doing their craft, poets and playwrights consulted books of prac-
tical science and geometry that featured diagrams and maps. The
Configurations, 2009, 17:87–103 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press and the Society for Literature and Science.
87
88 Configurations
geometer of the world at large—whether a topographer, a navigator,
a carpenter, or an engraver—engaged the Aristotelian category of
“productive knowledge,” “a practical intellect” for means to reach
specific ends. The users of these manuals, adds Turner, were not
confined to “mechanicals”: the textual, visual, and spatial design
of these manuals brought forward “the epistemological similari-
ties between prudence, rhetoric, dialectic, and practical geometry.”1
Practical science flowed into the worlds of commerce and diplomacy
and soon “had more to do with personal conduct, property manage-
ment, civic duty, and codes of male friendship than with productive
manual labor” (73). It gave birth to a new type of reader, “the hu-
manist gentleman and statesman” (73), no doubt because in reading
and extending them to their own crafts, he or she saw how their
“ceaseless iteration of figures, lines, and units” (76) could apply to
the rhetoric of civil conduct and conversation. The performative na-
ture of what they professed included plotting, or “platting”—the art
of setting forward complex physical and mental operations on two-
dimensional surfaces.
Performance was not the exclusive agency of identity or self-fash-
ioning. It was mediated through what Michel de Certeau called arts
de faire, practices whose cultivation and repetition made themselves
felt in various arenas of life, not the least of which was writing, taken
both as a manual activity and as a collective creation in the produc-
tion of manuscripts and printed books.2 In this essay, I would like to
have Turner’s observations serve as an epigraph to a reading of the
Essais of Montaigne in the places where the reader discovers a con-
vergence of geometry and topography. It happens where numbers,
ciphers, and spatially determined signs inflect—variously confirm-
ing, diverging from, and contradicting— the ostensible meaning of
the discourse. These places are especially pertinent not just to export
Turner’s arguments to French shores, but in the main to discern how
typography, topography, and geometry are drawn into printed mat-
ter; how the writing is ciphered in its own form; and, as a result, how
these arts inform a unique style and signature. The aim is to show
how the practical arts inform the inner workings of the essay that
by its own definition is a product and process of weighing, measur-
ing, balancing, and surveying. To be sure, the practical art engages
a theoretical counterpart, gematria, in which study of ciphers and
1. Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical
Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 44, 77.
2. Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien 1: Arts de faire, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Gal-
limard/Folio, 1990), esp. chap. 6.
Conley / Number and Line in the Essais 89
signs in and between words and their spacings is taken to decrypt
or exhume meaning, and in doing so also locates articulations and
points of reference in the language and space that convey it.
Montaigne’s essays demand a reading that can be called at once
discursive—that moves ahead, from left to right and from the top
to the bottom of the page to gather what it means—and indexical—
insofar as words are seen as compass points that allow the page to
be navigated visually or even in a haptic fashion, and where they
can be understood to be polyvalent signs that “signify” elements
other than what they are said to mean. Hence a practical gematria:
when he writes of his style, Montaigne suggests that the poetry of
his prose owes in part to ciphers inhering in the words, to networks
or chains of figures that confer upon the writing paradoxical density
and slightness as if they thus acquired greater value where numbers
and geometrical figures were invested in the words. When he assures
the reader who purchases the book that he or she will not be swin-
dled (“ne s’en aille les mains toutes vuides”), he accords himself the
privilege of attaching to his “ill-joined marquetry” an embleme su-
pernumeraire, a supernumerary emblem that adds a particular value
by virtue of being a “petite subtilité ambitieuse”—in other words, an
implied visual form that subtly duplicates the pattern of the whole
in the manner of a mise en abyme.3 He puts monetary signs into the
words in order to inflate their worth and to call attention to what-
ever use- and exchange-value their readers might find in them.
It almost goes without saying that figural surplus is invested in
the language in the form of numerical shapes incised into words and
their spacing. Later, in the same essay, when he returns to reflect on
his style, he remarks that “the names of my chapters do not always
embrace the matter. They often denote it by some kind of mark”
(973). Montaigne implied as much when he undertook the third
volume of the Essais, seven years after their initial publication in
two books at Simon de Millanges in Bordeaux in 1580. He decided
to write with increasing obliquity and ask his reader to pay greater
attention to composition by devoting extended leisure to longer,
uninterrupted pieces whose inner order—in other words, what is ci-
phered in the language in accord with geometry and creative use of
perspective, such as anamorphosis—would be reflected in the verbal
matter. Or as Montaignistes know by heart:
3. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. M. Rat and A. Thibaudet (Paris:
Gallimard/Pléiade, 1962), p. 941. All quotations from the Essais will be taken from this
volume and cited between parentheses in the text. Translations from the French are
mine.
90 Configurations
J’entends que la matiere se distingue soy-mesmes. Elle montre assez où elle se
change, où elle conclud, où elle commence, où elle se reprend, sans l’entrelasser
de paroles de liaison et de cousture introduictes pour le service des oreilles
foibles ou nonchallantes, et sans me gloser moy-mesme. Qui est celuy qui
n’ayme mieux n’estre pas leu que de l’estre en dormant ou en fuyant? (974)
(I want the matter to be distinguished by itself. It shows well enough where
it changes, where it concludes, where it begins, where it recommences, with-
out knotting it up with words of linkage and of pattern, inserted to serve weak
or nonchalant ears, and without my glossing myself. Who would prefer not to
be read than to be in sleeping or fleeing?)
In the margins of the Bordeaux copy he soon adds that the fre-
quent ruptures caused by the divisions of the shorter chapters in
the earlier material divided the reader’s attention before it was even
born, and for that reason, “je me suis mis à les faire plus longs, qui
requierent de la proposition et du loisir assigné” (974) (I began to
make them longer, that now require commitment and appointed
leisure). The more ample and rambling thoughts and their style,
“qui vont vagabondant de mesmes” (973) (that [in themselves] go
errantly), carry the author’s obligation “à ne dire qu’à demy, à dire
confusément” (974) (to speak only half-way, to speak confusedly); to
write enigmatically, discordantly and with willed opacity in order, he
implies, is to have the reader produce meaning latent, unintended,
or reaching beyond the bounds of grammar. In order to follow the
essay, the reader must decipher it—that is, determine how numbers
and emblems or iconic figures embedded in the words make them
“signify” as they do. They thus require the book to be seen and read
at once, like a moving diagram, map, or plotted creation.
It can be added that what might be a sign of flippant play with
language, where words and figures are put in the two pans of a bal-
ance in order to weigh reflections for their worth, becomes a latent
mathesis that turns the essays into what Arielle Saiber, describing
Giordano Bruno’s language, calls something of an urgent and timely
design: “a network of words, spaces, forms and numbers” that holds
thought “together as a tightly woven web” of the kind known in
mathematical notation. Adding how the author’s vision of geometry
bears on language, she shows how the complex meaning of Bruno’s
discourse is not “truly true,” but of such virtual force that it plots the
very space of its imagination. Montaigne, like Bruno, uses “alphabets,
numbers, geometrical figures, poetic structures, and groups of im-
ages working together” to make manifest “the interconnectedness
beneath the surfaces of all linguistic and symbolic systems.”4 For the
4. Arielle Saiber, Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate
Publishers, 2005), pp. 53, 55.
Conley / Number and Line in the Essais 91
reader of today, the presence of modes and signs of numerical and
spatial calculation in the essays has an effect of felicitous disorienta-
tion. Carla Mazzio has noted also that an inner affinity existed be-
tween geometry and melancholy, and that mathematics served as a
pharmakon when the writer addressed—as did Montaigne, in the sec-
ond essay that will be taken up below—the malady of melancholy.5
The question remains as to where and how the ciphered style
takes place in the Essais as they become longer and of an abundantly
difficult beauty. The Essais are swollen by the “Apologie de Raimond
Sebond”—what one reader calls an “anti-essay,” a monstrous piece
that makes the longer chapters of the third volume seem more than
manageable.6 And “De l’amitié,” numbered to rhyme with the inclu-
sion of twenty-nine sonnets by the author’s late friend Etienne de
la Boétie, in the twenty-ninth and central chapter (indeed an en-
crypting tomb and a vanishing point in the first volume of fifty-
seven essays), would be evidence that from the outset, the Essais
were mapped and plotted according to Euclidean geometry or even
a topographer’s mode of measuring and of delimited local spaces.7
Some areas of the work seem coded and other less so. The “diligent”
reader often wonders if the calculus of the prose comes and goes, if
it inheres everywhere in the diction, or if in certain areas it brings
exceptional intensity to the writing.
For the goal of this essay, the ciphering is occasional and, as a result,
makes for a topographic reading, especially where attention is drawn
to local places in which numbers and figures apply to the matter and
style of the implied author. In the third volume, geometry and math-
ematics are especially present in two of the shorter essays, “De trois
commerces” (Of three kinds of association) (chapter 3) and “De la
diversion” (Of diversion) (chapter 4). They are set at a site where they
seem to anticipate and rehearse the modes required for the care-
ful reading required of the longer and resonant chapters—5, 9, and
13—that follow. In these two pieces, tactically disposed numbers
and figures of measure are incised in the language. They become evi-
dence and proof of what the essayist calls the occasional subtilité am-
bitieuse he inserts in the text for the sake of a webbing of figures in
a moving spatial design. “De trois commerces” seems titled as if to
reflect the number of the volume (3) and the chapter (3), such that,
5. David Glimp and Michelle Warren, eds., “The Three-Dimensional Self,” Arts of Cal-
culation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), pp. 42–43.
6. Alfred Glauser, Montaigne paradoxal (Paris: Nizet, 1972), p. 148.
7. Michel Butor, Essais sur les “Essais” (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), and François Rigolot, Les
Métamorphoses de Montaigne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).
92 Configurations
like the motto of an emblem, the numerical sign becomes a signal
device, which the first sentence both emphasizes and contradicts by
calling attention to other numbers residing in the words:
Il ne faut pas se clouër si fort à ses humeurs & complexions. Nostre principalle
suffisance, c’est sçavoir s’appliquer à divers usages. C’est estre, mais ce n’est
pas vivre, que se tenir attaché & obligé par necessité à un seul train. Les plus
belles ames sont celles qui ont plus de varieté & de soupplesse. Si c’estoit à
moy à me dresser à ma mode, il n’est aucune si bonne façon où je voulusse
estre fiché pour m’en sçavoir desprendre. La vie est un mouvement inegal, ir-
regulier et multiforme. Ce n’est pas estre amy de soy et moins encore maistre,
c’est en estre esclave, de se suivre incessamment et estre si pris à ses inclina-
tions qu’on n’en puisse fourvoyer, qu’on ne les puisse tordre. (796)
(We must not be nailed so strongly to our humors and complexions. Our
principal sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to diverse uses. It is to
be, but it is not to live, to hold and be obligated to follow a single way. The
most beautiful souls are those that have greater variety and suppleness. Were
I to present myself in my own manner, there is no good fashion where I would
wish to be fixed in order to know how to be free. Life is an uneven, irregular
and multiform movement. It’s less about being our own friend and even less
our master of ourselves, than it is be our slave, to follow ourselves endlessly
and to be so taken in our inclinations that we cannot turn astray, or that we
can’t twist and turn them around.)
The unstated number of humors and complexions mentioned in the
first sentence count four. They bifurcate from si fort, whence they
implicitly challenge the symbolic authority of the number of the
chapter above. They also engage triage, what could be a sifting or
balancing, but also an inherited art of evaluating proportion known
in architectural manuals, where threes are seen in the midst of things
two and four. Such is what is given in the process of diversion and
“diversification,” in which torsion can be seen belonging as much to
poetry as to commerce. When Montaigne declares, with uncharac-
teristic platitude, “life is an unequal, irregular and multiform move-
ment,” the simplicity of the sentence betrays the art of triage in the
number and quality of complements attached to the three attributes
of “life.” The style of the essay is shown endowing categorical reason
with movement through numbers and mathematical signs melding
into printed words.
Infrequently scrutinized substantives suddenly call attention to
themselves: life (vie) and being (estre), two innocuous words that our
eyes too often slip over too quickly when we search of the truth they
are supposed to bear are suddenly turned around and about. The vie
that Montaigne describes becomes an object of practice in “divers
Conley / Number and Line in the Essais 93
usages”; and estre is shown not proceeding, but following an art of
living in which calculus and measure play vital roles. Something
arcane is seen in the locution about our need to apply ourselves
to divers usages: “[D]ivers” inflects estre such that in order to be en-
dowed with life, “being” must be a function of number, arguably
three (in estre) that inheres in the word just as four (iv), five (v), and
six (vi) are visible in vivre, the infinitive that can be scanned as “v-
iv-re,” “vi-v-re,” and “v-vi-re.” When Montaigne wishes, as it were,
to “twist being by its neck” (as Paul Verlaine would later do with
“eloquence” in his “Art poétique”), he can send or lead astray his
best and worst inclinations by virtue of numbers and numerals he
invests in his words.
Although the essay concerns three objects that the text commixes
in its art of comparison and juxtaposition, and although the author
spells them out with descriptive clarity in the penultimate sentence
of the chapter, “[v]oilà mes trois occupations favories et particu-
lieres” (808) (there are my three favorite and particular occupations),
the essay makes much ado about the ciphered nature of writing as it
does friends, women, and books. More than anywhere in the Essais,
the numerical and geometrical form of the sentences both confirms
and is at odds (and certainly not at evens) with the meaning. Tri-
adic or triangulating formulas are ubiquitous. And elsewhere, when
he makes conclusive remarks directly and distinctly, not confusedly,
numbers are the coefficient of clarity. After discussing friends and
women with aplomb and generosity (and, in fact, also touching sex-
ual difference), numbers are tendered, as they might in a geometri-
cal proof, to straighten the curved lines of his reason: “Ces deux
commerces sont fortuites et dependans d’autruy. L’un est ennuyeux
par sa rareté; l’autre se flestrit avec l’age. . . . Celuy des livres, qui est
le troisiesme, est bien plus seur et plus à nous. Il cede aux premiers
les autres avantages, mais il a pour sa part la constance et facilité de
son service” (805) (These two associations are fortuitous and depend
on others. The one is bothersome in its rarity; the other withers with
age. . . . That of books, which is the third, is more sure and closer to
us. It concedes the other advantages to the first ones, but on its side
it has the constancy and facility of its service). Since the essay treats
of division and bifurcation, the fortuity of commerce and congress
with men and women would belong to the network of the signifiers
for- and four-.
The simplicity he advocates is riddled with internal complexity.
When, before a simple-minded public, he would prefer not to “par-
ler tousjours bandé, favellar in punta di forchetta” (799)—that is, to
speak muffled, with too much care and affectation—he is literally
94 Configurations
writing on the two, three, or four points of a fork: meaning splits
and multiplies, diverts, and diversifies itself through its own form.
In fact, when he praises la forme ordinaire of speech for its practi-
cal effects, its ostensible unity of sense and meaning is split though
the numerical latency of for. Where forme would otherwise be the
static counterpart of force, and where the “punctum” of style would
turn form into force, the essay shows that numbers invest force into
form.8
Hence the writing splinters where it advocates a style that twists
and exposes its subject to multiple points of view:
Je le dy à cette heure, pour ne me pouvoir facilement despestrer de l’impor-
tunité de mon ame, en ce qu’elle ne sçait communement s’amuser sinon où
elle s’empesche, ny s’employer que bandée et entiere. Pour leger subject qu’on
luy donne, elle le grossit volontiers et l’estire jusques au poinct où elle ait à s’y
embesongner de toute sa force. (796)
(I say it right now, in order not to be so easily freed from the importunity
of my soul, in that it takes pleasure only where it is hindered, or is at work
only if erect and entire. However slight the subject that is given to it, it will-
fully inflates and stretches it to the point where it has to be belabored in it
with all of its force.)
The drive of his soul generates his style, and style is productive where
it goes beyond its compass and measure. The restless and unbridled
soul takes pleasure in difficulty, but no less in the erotic character
of its mathematical drive. When it puts itself to use only bandée et
entiere, in its masked mode it is as if under the spell of blind Cupid,
erect and ready to capture its prey. And when it is “entire,” it is of
a single and firm form that arches back to integer, a standing cipher
that brings a “nervous and solid” torque to the writing where what
is integral submits to division, entiere being shown as a function of
the triadic disposition of the essay. What is one extends to three,
and in extending, filling, and multiplying itself it labors—indeed, it
for-nicates (s’y embesongne) with all of its force.
The essay acquires spatial virtue where numbers and letters in-
form meaning. Montaigne notes that the idleness of many minds
needs foreign matter to be primed or set in motion. His mind, to the
contrary, needs to gather itself and stay in place, in its own study.
In a remarkable sentence that changes from one edition (1588) to
8. Historians of structuralism assert that Jacques Derrida’s “Force et signification,” a
review-essay of Jean Rousset’s Forme et signification (a collection of studies on literary
form from Corneille to Balzac), which inaugurates L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil,
1967), invests force in forme. Montaigne, who had always been one of Derrida’s mentors
in the art of writing, shows how it is done.
Conley / Number and Line in the Essais 95
the next (1595), he notes of his mind as if it were outside of his
own body: “[a]ux premieres pensées qui lui viennent” (to the first
thoughts that come to it), “il s’agite et fait preuve de sa vigueur à
tout sens, exerce son maniement tantost vers la force, tantost vers
l’ordre et la grace (1595), se range, modere et fortifie” (797) (it acts
up and proves its vigor in every way, it exercises its manner now
toward force, and then toward order and grace, arranging, temper-
ing, and fortifying itself). Things one and integral that first come
to mind make it aware of its vigor in all senses and nudge it now
toward force and again toward two components of the triad, order
and grace. The sentence displays a force of style when in under-
lining its own effect with three additional verbs, the last of which
turns back upon the beginning where fortifie caps and consolidates
its own force. As it had been seen below the title and incipit to the
chapter, the flicker of letters and numbers in this passage indicates
that the play of number and meaning generates force in the figural
design of the language—a force that submits to control, but that also
diversifies both the meaning and the nature of the implied voice of
the writer. The “I” who appears for the first time in “[j]e le dy à cette
heure” finds that in the course of the writing, his soul risks spinning
out of control before it recollects itself according to the triangular
configuration drawn through the verbal texture. The space in which
the soul re-gathers itself is the spatially defined estude, the third floor
of the circular tower in which the reflections are generated.
The entire essay swings on a double entendre in estude, a word
that can be taken in topographical and metaphysical senses, the
study-as-room and the study as self-examination or self-reflection.
In an addition of 1595, inserted between this remark and another
that deals with the tempering of the soul by the order of number,
Montaigne seems to be looking at himself as other in the name of
the moy, but in the third person, luy, who is reading the 1588 mate-
rial: “Les livres sont pour luy [moy] du genre des occupations qui
le [me] desbauchent de son [mon] estude” (797) (Books are for me/
him of the genre of occupations that debauch him/me in his/my
study). In the gap where we see him looking at himself, the space of
self-study turns into that of the room in which he meditates. But the
reflection does more than make space a function of meditation: the
practical geometry that resides within the words begins, it seems,
almost independently of the author to chart at once an inner and
outer architecture, one mental and the other domestic, that owe
their resemblance to numbers. In a long addition scribbled at a right
angle to the printed text of the Bordeaux copy, Montaigne adds,
as if to turn the essay away from its treble order, “le mediter est un
