« Ma préface montre que je n’espérais pas tant oser », avait écrit Montaigne

It is pointless to look for this quotation by Montaigne in an edition of the Essais. Written right at the bottom of a page of the Bordeaux copy, and beneath another more ample, already integrated, handwritten addition, this sentence was crossed out along with the following ones. The entirety forms a jumble of words which is practically impossible for the untrained eye to untangle. However, we can try to decipher the underlying text, thus reconstituting the chronology of pen interventions and the logic of the discourse.