While France tore itself apart in religious civil war, one of its most powerful diplomats retreated to a tower to write about his moods, his memory failures, and his kidney stones. This episode traces Michel de Montaigne from a family fortune built on herring, through a father who sent him to live with peasants for three years and then raised him in a Latin-only household woken each morning by a zither, to his legal career in Bordeaux and the legendary friendship whose sudden loss left him with half a conversation for the rest of his life.

The hosts cover the riding accident that nearly killed him, his 1571 retirement to a tower with 1,500 books where he invented a genre he called attempts or trials, his European road trip in search of thermal baths and the travel diary found 200 years later, the Vatican censors who let him off with a warning, his election as mayor of Bordeaux without campaigning, his role as a trusted mediator between Catholic and Protestant kings, his strikingly modern theories of education, and the cruel irony of a death that paralyzed his tongue.

• Why his father’s peasant-village experiment and punishment-free schooling were radical for a sixteenth-century nobleman
• How grief for a lost friend turned the future reader into a stand-in for the dialogue he had lost
• Why acknowledging the limits of human certainty made him an effective negotiator in a war zone
• Why he argued that rote memorization engineers passive adults who blindly obey authority
• How Shakespeare, Bacon, Pascal, Emerson, and Nietzsche drew on the man dubbed the first modern human being