Montaigne

"e;The others form the human being, I depict him; and here I present an individual who is quite poorly formed and whom I would certainly make largely differently if I had to reshape him. But now that's the way he is."e; This phrase from the famous essays of Michel de Montaigne outlines the character of the author and his work. Montaigne wrote his essays not from a position of certainty but from an awareness of his own inadequacy. He thus reveals a level of critical self-reflection that, before his time, was rarely put on paper. Stefan Zweig dedicated a character study to this Michel de Montaigne, the French nobleman and freethinker among the religious dogmatists and political quarrels of the 16th century.