Proceed to this link and sign up for the SPEP webinar series newsletter: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Since getting to know this freest and mightiest of souls, I at least have come to feel what he felt about Plutarch: 'as soon as I glance at him I grow a leg or a wing.' If I were set the task, I could endeavour to make myself at home in the world with him.” Nietzsche by Munch:

Nietzsche as well esteemed de Montaigne, writing in Untimely Meditations: “I know of only one writer whom I would compare with Schopenhauer, indeed set above him, in respect of honesty: Montaigne. That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth . . .

In her titular essay Virginia Woolf wrote “After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne & Pepys & Rousseau perhaps [. . .] this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne." Photographed by Gisèle Freund:

Celebrated by the modernists, T.S. Eliot wrote of Pascal’s antagonism toward de Montaigne that “by the time a man knew Montaigne well enough to attack him, he would already be thoroughly infected by him.” Eliot photographed below diagramming his play The Cocktail Party:

. . . a philosopher among fanatics, and who paints under his name our weaknesses and our follies–he is a man who will always be loved.” Voltaire depicted below in a bronze statue by the French rococo sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon.

Voltaire defended de Montaigne from Pascal’s opprobrium: “For he has painted human nature. Had Nicole and Malebranche always spoken of themselves then they would not have succeeded. But a country gentleman from the time of Henry III, a favourite in a century of ignorance . . .

Pascal ridiculed de Montaigne’s for his “foolish plan to paint himself.” What was bad in de Montaigne, claimed Pascal, “could have been corrected in a moment had someone warned him that he was making too much of a fuss talking too much about himself.”

De Montaigne’s great peer in the French moralist tradition, Blaise Pascal, nursed a lifelong ambition to refute the man. In the Pensées, Pascal attacked de Montaigne for his unmethodical style, lack of piety, & literary conceit for self-exposition. See below Pascal's death mask.

Known by his motto, inscripted below, “What do I know?” (que sçay-je? in Middle-French, the language he wrote his Essays in, breaking from the prevailing Latin tradition).

Died aged 59 in 1592. Famous as a statesman, later for popularizing the essay as a literary genre, de Montaigne’s influence extends beyond his towering stature in the Renaissance era, reaching philosophers as varied from Francis Bacon to Friedrich Nietzsche. Château de Montaigne: