INTELLECTUAL WORK OF THE BLIND—VILLEY. 697 
stoical, others that they were epicurean. Some regarded them as 
skeptical, while others attributed them to dogmatism. Those who 
were religious affirmed that they were atheistical. In his style one 
ran against equally great contrasts. By the side of jejune chapters, 
devoid of originality, one found admirable essays, rich and full of 
personal feeling, as everybody knows. It seemed to me that all these 
apparent contradictions and these differences could be explained, that 
they corresponded to differences of date in the composition of the 
essays, and that the thought of Montaigne varied from time to time in 
the same way that the style of an artist changes. Retracing, as far 
as possible, the successive stages which his thought had traversed, the 
layers deposited one on another in his mind by the transformations 
of his work; in a word, to retrace the evolution of Montaigne as a 
philosopher and as an artist—such was my plan. 
In order to realize it, the first thing to do was to determine the 
chronology of the essays. It was necessary to investigate the allu- 
sions to contemporary events which they contained, to identify these 
often obscure events, and to fix the date, often at the expense of ex- 
tended research. Without a firmly established chronology there can 
be no historical studies. But to fix this chronology and to make 
clear the evolution which it should reveal to us, it was important to 
recover Montaigne’s reading. Indeed, various chapters inspired by 
the same book were likely to be contemporaneous. His series of read- 
ings might reveal much concerning his series of compositions. I was 
obliged, therefore, to commence by reconstructing what could be found 
of Montaigne’s library, his “ libraire,” as he called it, and, as fast as I 
replaced the books on the shelves, to examine each for the material 
which it had furnished. 
This detailed and very extended inquiry was, then, the necessary 
point of departure of my task, and it constituted the most difficult 
part. In order to comprehend how it was possible, and how it fur- 
nished a solid foundation for the edifice which I wished to construct, 
it is important to recall that Montaigne usually quoted with much 
accuracy the authors who inspired him. One finds in the essays 
phrases copied almost verbatim from the books which he admired; 
in other places there are only allusions, but allusions so precise that 
one can sometimes trace the source with certainty. As besides, Mon- 
taigne spoke with pleasure of his reading, and has given us his im- 
pressions regarding much of it, such an enterprise has a good chance 
of success. It was begun by annotators of the essays, such as Coste 
and Victor Leclere. It was only necessary to continue with more pre- 
cision and more patience. 
My first care, then, was to transcribe in braille Montaigne’s entire 
work. My collection of the essays comprised twenty volumes. I 
was able, then, very easily and without any extraneous aid to study 
