me to be (that is what she used to
say) an illustrious ignoramus, put that book into my hands, though I was
then little more than a child at the breast. It has been like my
conscience to me, and has whispered into my ear many good hints and
excellent maxims for my behavior and for the government of my affairs."

Thanks to Amyot, Plutarch "had become a Frenchman:" Montaigne would not
have been able to read him easily in Greek. Indifferent to the
Reformation, which was too severe and too affirmative for him, Montaigne,
"to whom Latin had been presented as his mother-tongue, rejoiced in the
Renaissance without becoming a slave to it, or intoxicated with it like
Rabelais or Ronsard. "The ideas I had naturally formed for myself about
man," he says, "I confirmed and fortified by the authority of others and
by the sound examples of the ancients, with whom I found my judgment in
conformity." Born in 1533, at the castle of Montaigne in Perigord, and
carefully brought up by "the good father God had given him," Michael de
Montaigne was, in his childhood, "so heavy, lazy, and sleepy, that he
could not be roused from sloth, even for the sake of play." He passed
several years in the Parliament of Bordeaux, but "he had never taken a
liking to jurisprudence, though his father had steeped him in it, when
quite a child, to his very lips, and he was always asking himself why
common language, so easy for every other purpose, becomes obscure and
unintelligible in a contract or will, which made him fancy that the men
of law had muddled everything in order to render themselves necessary."
He had lost the only man he had ever really loved, Stephen de la Boetie,
an amiable and noble philosopher, counsellor in the Parliament of
Bordeaux. "If I am pressed to declare why I loved him," Montaigne used
to say, "I feel that it can only be expressed by answering, because he
was he, and I was I." Montaigne gave up the Parliament, and travelled in
Switzerland and Italy, often stopping at Paris, and gladly returning to
his castle of Montaigne, where he wrote down what he had seen; "hungering
for self-knowledge," inquiring, indolent, without ardor for work, an
enemy of all constraint, he was at the same time frank and subtle,
gentle, humane, and moderate. As an inquiring spectator, without
personal ambition, he had taken for his life's motto, "Who knows? (Que
sais-je?)" Amidst the wars of religion he remained without political or
religious passion