Abstract: Montaigne’s Essays can be recognised as potential novels. This familiarity can be interpreted in two ways. A point of view: the reader of the 1930s, a “novel reader”, pays attention to the pages where he finds a “novel climate”. A historical situation: though Montaigne considered the novel of his time as a “jumble”, the advent of the “novel of destiny” brings the genre to a point of maturity that makes it the privileged form for the exploration of the human condition.
