Twenty-Nine Sonnets of Étienne de La Boétie
Translated by HyperEssays.net (2020–25)
Book 1 Chapter 28
To Madame de Grammont, Countess of Guissen1
Madam, I offer you nothing of mine, either because it is already yours or because I find none of it worthy of you. But I wanted these verses, wherever they may be seen, to come after your name to grant them the honor of having the great Corisande of Andoins as their conductor. You are, I believe, the right person for this gift for there are few women in France who understand and appreciate poetry better than you do. And not one can breathe life into it as you do with the beautiful voice nature gave you when it found a million ways to make you beautiful.
Madam, these verses deserve your affection. I know you will agree with me that there are none that have come out of Gascony that are as creative and sweet, and none to claim to have come from a more impressive hand.
Now, do not be jealous because you have only the remains of what I have already published and dedicated to Monsieur de Foix,2 a fine relative of yours. There is something in them that is warmer and more alive because he wrote them when he was young and burning of a beautiful and noble desire of which, Madam, I will whisper in your ear one day. The other ones were written later, for his wife, when he was looking to marry her. You can already feel in them a certain marital chill. But I am of those who believe that poetry is never as pleasant as when it finds a joyful and free subject.
These verses are seen elsewhere.3
Notes
- 1This chapter is dedicated to Diane d’Andoins, countess of Guiche (here spelled Guissen). Montaigne had originally planned on including with his essays La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. However, with the conflict between Protestants and Catholics heating up, he decided that publishing his friend’s political writings was unwise and chose, at the last minute, not to include the Discourse. Montaigne replaced it with 29 of La Boétie’s unpublished poems. ↩︎
- 2In 1571, before he began working on the Essays, Montaigne had published a book of La Boétie’s poetry, Vers françois de feu Estienne de La Boetie, which he had dedicated to Paul de Foix. ↩︎
- 3Montaigne crossed the sonnets off of his 1588 printed copy of the Essays and added this single sentence instead. He did not intend to have them reprinted in the updated edition he was working on in the early 1590s. They had been published elsewhere by then. No copy of that book remains today. ↩︎
Related documents
Metadata
- Updated
- June 18, 2026
- Translation
- HyperEssays.net
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
- Source
- Montaigne, Michel de. (1595) 1877. Essays of Montaigne. Edited by William Carew Hazlitt. Translated by Charles Cotton. London: Reeves and Turner.
- Numbering
- HyperEssays follows the chapter sequence used by Marie de Gournay, Montaigne’s first posthumous editor, from 1595 onward. Some editions and translations use the older, 1580–1588 sequence and may refer to this chapter as chapter 29 instead of 28.
- Word Count
Eds Words 1580 3,594 1588 3,580 1595 313 Word count in French editions. - Comp. Date
- Probably 1576 · Composition dates are estimates based on Pierre Villey’s Les sources & l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne: Les sources & la chronologie des Essais. (Paris: Hachette, 1908).
- Alt. Titles
- Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de La Boëtie
How to cite this page
Montaigne, Michel de. (1595) 2026. “Twenty-Nine Sonnets of Étienne de La Boétie.” Translated by HyperEssays.net. Hyper