The Essais are a work in which Montaigne developed a new form of writing doubtfully and doubly. But to be ‘double’ in how one speaks or writes, to have ‘une langue double’, is to be a liar, a spreader of rumour, a ‘susurrateur’ whispering one thing to this person and another to that, and, in doing so, undermining not only houses but ‘villes fortes’ and ‘nations puissantes’. As Augustine explained in his two treatises on lying, it is not only the intentio fallendi, the intention to deceive, that makes the liar; it is their duplex cor, their double heart, and their duplex cogitatio, their double thought. To be ‘double’ is, for Montaigne’s contemporaries at least, tantamount to hypocrisy. Take, for instance, Antoine du Val’s pleonastic pairing in his argument that Calvin’s theory of predestination makes God ‘double & hypocrite: car commander le contraire de ce qu’on veult, c’est l’hypocrisie, & faulx semblant’ [double and hypocritical, because commanding the opposite of what one wishes is hypocrisy and dissemblance].