Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in fifteen thirty-three into a noble family in the Périgord region near Bordeaux in southwestern France.

His father, Pierre Eyquem, was a man of progressive ideas about education, and he arranged for the young Michel to be raised in an unusual way.

Latin was his first language.

He was spoken to in nothing else for the first years of his life, and his education was conducted with a humanist gentleness that was rare for the period, designed to cultivate curiosity and pleasure in learning rather than rote discipline and fear.

The Epicureans taught him about the dignity of ordinary pleasure.

And all of them, together, taught him that the questions that matter most are the ones that have no final answers.

His father died in fifteen sixty-eight, leaving Montaigne the estate and its responsibilities: the management of lands, tenants, crops, and the endless petty disputes that came with being a rural nobleman in a turbulent age.

The practical demands of running an estate were never Montaigne’s strength, and he knew it.