At the age of 38, Michel de Montaigne retired from a distinguished public career and withdrew to the Tower at the Chateau de Montaigne, where he set out to record “some traits of my character and of my humours” with the utmost candor and honesty. He did not expect much. With a characteristic disdain for the pursuit of fame, he warned in the preface to his essais —“testsor “attempts” — that “I am myself the matter of the book; you would be unreasonable to suspend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject”. It may be the most self-deprecating statement ever made, for in the following nine years he developed a new form of writing that took the reader on a journey of exploration of various and sundry ideas and topics, not to educate or prove a point, but to examine the matter at hand from all sides with a keen and skeptical eye. Relating personal anecdotes, stream of conscious, rhetoric, and frequently citing Plutarch and Lucretius, we see a lucid, practical, ironic mind at work, grateful for a handle on what can be known and often finding that reality is often greater than our ability to comprehend it. In all the collection consists of 107 essays assembled into three books. The first collection was published in 1580.Montaigne kept adding and revising for the rest of his life, sometimes adding material that contradicted his earlier thinking, which he let stand. The second book appeared in 1588. Book 3 was published posthumously in 1595.