Writing nearly fifty years ago, Terence Cave saw in Montaigne’s invocationof the Danaïdes an image illustrating the ‘problems of writing’: ‘remplissant et versant sans cesse’, the essayist’s ‘gesture of transference’ is no more than an ‘empty mime’, a disquieting ‘counter-example of cornucopian productivity’. The ‘papier’ to which fragments of ‘alien discourse’ are attached is ‘a place of difference’, Cave argued, permitting ‘the search for the identity of a moi’ while ensuring that the search remains incomplete, ‘since the self is expressly an entity dissociated from the activity of writing’.

This book has argued that Montaigne thinks with ‘ce papier’ and, crucially, with Seneca, Plutarch and the ‘forme d’escrire’ that they facilitate, not as part of an infernal labour of textual and discursive production, but to reveal himself fully and authentically, communicating and recognising his character (ethos), his soul, his doubtful, double pattern of thinking. In making this case, I am indebted to Cave’s more recent studies of the relationship between literature and cognition. Montaigne’s form is, as Cave says of literature more broadly, ‘an instrument of thought’; his literary and compositional techniques ‘perform thought’ and do not merely ‘exemplify it’: ‘If you removed those features, the thought would be different.’