Michel de Montaigne

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born on 28 February 1533 at the Château de Montaigne in Périgord, into a family whose nobility his father had bought a generation earlier. That father ran an experiment on him: a German tutor who spoke no French, a household ordered to address the boy only in Latin, so that Latin would arrive before his mother tongue. He was six before he was sent to board at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux.

He became a magistrate — first at Périgueux, then in the Bordeaux parlement — and there met Étienne de La Boétie. The friendship lasted six years and ended with La Boétie's death in 1563. Montaigne spent much of the rest of his life circling it.

In 1570 he sold his office. In 1571, at thirty-eight, he built a study into the tower at the corner of his estate, lined it with books, and had sentences from his reading painted across the beams. He began writing the following year. What he produced had no precedent and no name, so he took one from the verb essayer — to attempt, to test, to try something and see. He was not reporting conclusions. He was watching himself think.

The first two books appeared in 1580. That same year he left for Italy, ostensibly to treat kidney stones at the thermal baths, and while at Pisa learned he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He served two terms from 1581, through the worst of the Wars of Religion, as a Catholic trusted enough by both sides to carry messages between them — while members of his own family converted to Protestantism.

He kept revising until he died. The 1588 edition added a third book; his personal copy of it, annotated in his own hand until his death on 13 September 1592, still survives in Bordeaux. The finished work runs to 107 chapters. He had invented the essay, and he never stopped calling it an attempt.