Michel de Montaigne

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 at the Château de Montaigne in Périgord, in southwestern France, into a recently ennobled merchant family whose money came from salted fish and wine. His father, who had ideas about pedagogy picked up in the Italian wars, arranged for the boy to be woken every morning by music, raised by a peasant family in his first years so he would understand the lives of his future tenants, and tutored in Latin so exclusively that he spoke it before French. He was sent to law school at Toulouse and Bordeaux and entered the Bordeaux parlement — a regional high court — in 1557, where for thirteen years he wore the black robe of a magistrate in a country sliding into religious civil war.

In 1571, at thirty-eight, he sold his office, withdrew to a circular tower on his estate, had Greek and Latin sentences painted on the ceiling beams of its top-floor library, and announced his intention to spend the rest of his life reading and writing. The result, over twenty-one years, was the Essais — three books, published in expanding editions in 1580, 1588, and (posthumously) 1595, totaling more than a hundred pieces ranging from a single page on thumbs to the hundred-page "Apology for Raymond Sebond." The word essais meant "attempts"; Montaigne invented both the term and the form, the prose piece of personal reflection that proceeds by association rather than argument, doubles back, contradicts itself, and never quite settles. The motto on a medal he had struck for himself was Que sais-je? — "What do I know?"

The modern Pléiade edition prints the Essais with markers showing the three layers of revision, so the reader can watch Montaigne's mind change over two decades: the 1580 text in one typeface, the 1588 additions in another, the marginal notes from his last years (the "exemplaire de Bordeaux") in a third. He almost never deleted; he accreted. The effect is of a man arguing with his earlier selves on the same page.

The retirement to the tower was not absolute. Montaigne traveled in 1580–1581 through Germany and Italy in search of relief from his kidney stones — he kept a travel journal, found only in the eighteenth century — and was elected, in his absence, Mayor of Bordeaux. He served two terms, from 1581 to 1585, during the most violent phase of the Wars of Religion, negotiating between the Catholic League, the Protestant Henry of Navarre (a personal friend and a guest at the château), and a wavering crown. His own position — Catholic by practice, sceptical by temperament, royalist on the grounds that civil order was worth more than confessional purity — pleased no faction and probably saved his region from the worst of the fighting. He left office as plague broke out and did not, his critics have noted, return to the city to oversee the evacuation.

He died at the château in 1592, probably of complications from quinsy, hearing Mass in his bedroom. The Essais passed into every modern European language and became, by way of Shakespeare (who read them in Florio's English translation) and later Emerson and Nietzsche, one of the founding texts of the introspective tradition we still mostly use to think about what a self is.