How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

by Sarah Bakewell

Because he liked to know what people really did, rather than what someone imagined they might do, Montaigne’s preference soon shifted from poets to historians and biographers. It was in real-life stories, he said, that you encountered human nature in all its complexity. You learned the ‘diversity and truth’5 of man, as well as ‘the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him’. Among historians, he liked Tacitus best, once remarking that he had just read through his History from beginning to end without interruption. He loved how Tacitus treated public events from the point of view of ‘private behaviour and inclinations’, and was struck by the historian’s fortune in living through a ‘strange and extreme’ period, just as Montaigne himself did. Indeed, he wrote of Tacitus, ‘you would often say that it is us he is describing’.