The skeptical sweetness of imposture, from Montaigne to La Mothe Le Vayer

Imposture in the seventeenth century is associated with the libertine fight against religion. However, in the tradition of Montaigne’s skeptical anthropology, it can be the ally of a fabulist imagination that protects man from what he is not able to know. While Fontenelle and Pascal emphasize its social function, La Mothe Le Vayer rehabilitates it psychologically, making it a part of a rhetorical device that turns the Stoic rhetoric of consolation on its head.