The Essays remind us that literary studies, the "humanities", to use the expression of the time, had for ambition the moral training of man and not the acquisition of knowledge: "The gain of our study, it is has become better and wiser ". This humanism inspired the honest man of the XVII th century and the Enlightenment philosopher. At a time when novelty is established as a dogma and excess as a criterion of quality, it is more than ever necessary to read and reread Montaigne.
