His century and ours
It is a book of which he wanted to be the subject himself. A confined book, written day by day for twenty years by Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne in the tower of his castle at the gates of Bergerac and Saint-Émilion, in his library where he engraved Latin phrases on the large blackened beams . Reading these cheerful and swarming pages, wonderfully contemporary despite their 400 years, one is sometimes taken with a burst of medieval laughter, sometimes seized by the depth of a universal meditation. It deals with themes as eternal and familiar as friendship, identity, loneliness, the education of children.
But if The Essays speak to us particularly today, it is because our sensitivity corresponds to that of the Montaigne century, this violent 16th century crossed by religious wars, a period of intense doubt, upset by the discovery of the New World. Time of crisis that echoes ours, marked by the return of history and skepticism
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