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 warni ...