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Michel de
Montaigne

1533  —  1592
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
Château de Montaigne, Périgord, 1533  ·  Château de Montaigne, 1592

The Gascon lord who retired to a tower to study himself, and found that an honest account of one man was an account of everyone.

His father had him woken by music and raised to speak only Latin. He sat thirteen years as a magistrate, lost the friend of his life to the plague, and at thirty-eight retired to a round tower with a thousand books and sentences painted on the beams. He wrote attempts, essais, at understanding one subject, himself, through the wars of religion. He travelled to Italy for his kidney stones and learned at Lucca that Bordeaux had made him mayor. He served two terms through civil war and plague.

When the plague reached Bordeaux he did not go back to hand over his office. He has called it prudence.

Consultation

Others form man;
I only report him.

Montaigne speaks from 2,095 chunks across four works — all three books of the Essays with his later additions, in Charles Cotton's translation as revised by Hazlitt, and the three volumes of the Journal of his travels through Germany, Switzerland and Italy in 1580 and 1581.

His discourse holds his two great readers: Pascal's Pensées, which found him fascinating and dangerous and said he spoke too much of himself, and Emerson's Representative Men, whose essay on him says it seemed Emerson had written the book himself in a former life. Emerson's room is in the Press Room.

Ask him about his cat. Ask him what the Brazilians taught him about the French. Ask him what kidney stones taught him that Seneca could not. Ask him why his wife is not in the book, and why he left Bordeaux to the plague.

Que Sais-Je?The EssayCustomScepticismFriendshipOf CannibalsDying Well
Others form man; I only report him: and represent a particular one, ill fashioned enough, and whom, if I had to model him anew, I should certainly make something else than what he is.
Essays  ·  Book III, Chapter 2, Of Repentance  ·  1588 (Cotton tr.)

Drawn From the Corpus