I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.

The same rule applied to his mother father and servants who were obliged to use only Latin words he himself employed and thus acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. That is what Montaigne did and that is why he is the hero of this book. His maternal grandfather Pedro Lopez from Zaragoza was from a wealthy Marrano (Sephardic Jewish) family who had converted to Catholicism.

He is most famously known for his skeptical remark 'Que sçay-je?' ('What do I know?' in Middle French; modern French Que sais-je?). Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (French: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]; February 28 1533 – September 13 1592) was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and commonly thought of as the father of modern skepticism. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers the world over including René DescartesBlaise Pascal Jean-Jacques Rousseau William HazlittRalph Waldo Emerson Friedrich Nietzsche Stefan Zweig Eric HofferIsaac Asimov and possibly on the later works of William Shakespeare.