The Montaigne Trilogy
Manuscript complete.
Three volumes, one man. The first follows Michel de Montaigne from the Bordeaux merchant family that bought its name with salt fish and woad, through thirteen years as a magistrate, into the tower where he retired at thirty-eight to write the Essays, and back out as go-between, negotiator, and mayor of a plague city. The second goes with him day by day on the journey of 1580–81 to Italy and back, drawn from the travel diary he kept for seventeen months and never published. The third seats him with the company he asked for: twenty philosophical conversations with the minds he read and those who read him — Seneca and Descartes, Plato and Pascal, Aristotle and Nietzsche among them — each argued with real objections and no verdicts, closing with Montaigne alone.