The analysis of one of the rare moments of life in the Essais has served as a transition from the analysis of the life narrative to an investigation of Montaigne's invention of the self: writing life leads to inventing the self. The chapter "De l'exercitation" (II, 6) recounts a fall from a horse that was a traumatic experience for Montaigne, touching on both death and the return to life: the personal anecdote leads to a reflection on self-study, carried out in a very long addition of 1588 and which, as the narrative progresses, takes on a scope out of all proportion to the need for argument, until it gains its autonomy.
The chapter opens with a general and impersonal moral lesson on the question of preparing for death; if there is one experience for which one cannot prepare, it is that of death: "one can only try death once". However, there are states close to death, such as sleep, which can bring us closer to it, and in which Montaigne shows a modern interest as intermediate states of consciousness beyond the control of intention. Drawing on examples from the ancient philosophers who analyzed the soul's passage between life and death, he poses the question of the self on the basis of its absence: the case of "heart failure", of loss of consciousness, provides a better approach to death than the state of falling asleep.
The long account of the fall from his horse takes up two-thirds of the chapter, which opens with the mention of a memory lapse: Montaigne is unable to date the accident, even though he provides a highly detailed account of it, served up in the anecdotal, pared-down style characteristic of the life narrative in the Essais. The precision of the description - the horse "knocked down and lying stunned", the sword, the belt, etc. - is that of a testimonial account, well worth the trouble. - is that of a testimonial account, even though he says he lost consciousness at the moment of his fall, to the point of being left as if "dead" and struck with amnesia. It is therefore a second-hand account, reported after the event by witnesses whom he later admits hid the true circumstances of the accident from him.
Montaigne traces all the stages of his return to life in a long "recordation". In the first awakening of consciousness, he senses the proximity of death, which is characterized by a superficial presence of mind combined with physical insensibility; this experience confirmed the idea, upheld by Montaigne against the advice of La Boétie, that the passage from life to death is accompanied by "that sweetness felt by those who let themselves slip into sleep". The rest of the story develops the role of the imagination, of unconscious and involuntary actions, in that sort of intermediate state of subjectivity that characterizes the gradual return to consciousness after fainting, in the "stuttering" of sleep that makes us feel the outside world as if "at the edges of the soul". The thoughts that emerge in him in this state of semi-consciousness, notably the idea of ordering a horse for his wife, come from a soul "as if licked only and watered by the soft impression of the senses". This state of sweetness and languor, provoked by the separation of the soul from the suffering of the body, is contrasted with that of the following hours, when both body and pain are reborn.
