Volume 34, Number 18 · November 19, 1987
A New Montaigne
By Natalie Zemon Davis
Montaigne in Motion
by Jean Starobinski, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
University of Chicago Press, 348 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Michel de Montaigne—who does not know that charmed name? Once it was Eyquem, but Michel dropped his father's surname in favor of Montaigne, the noble property that he inherited as Pierre Eyquem's oldest son. (But what glory did a name bring, Michel asked later in his Essays.) Once a law student, then a judge in the high court of Bordeaux, he resigned that post even before he knew he would have no son to whom to pass it on. ('I speak not as judge…but simply to converse,' he wrote later in his Essays.) During the religious wars of the last decades of the sixteenth century, he did not turn his back on the world: his health and curiosity took him as far as Rome; he served twice as mayor of Bordeaux and several times as mediator between Catholic prince and Protestant prince. But much of the time he stayed on his estate with his family, reflecting as he went about his daily affairs (he said his freest thoughts came when he was on horseback), reading in his tower library, and composing and recomposing his Essays.
Review, 4667 words
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