In the foreground, in the background Montaigne’s singularity “in so corrupt an age”

Montaigne appears both in the foreground and in the background of sixteenth-century French discourses on nobility and its debasement, in “an age utterly ruined” (Essais, II, 18). This study follows his reflections on avarice, his musings about his name Montaigne, and his worries about lying : all these show that the Essais – this book whose very substance is its author – embodies a singularity that apparently dissipates at the point of its expression through ambiguous forms.