Montaigne would not countenance torture (he couldn’t even stomach hunting) and, unusually for his era, he spoke out against it. It was, he felt, both strategically and morally flawed. Most torture victims, he reasoned, would say anything to put an end to pain; moreover, torturing someone on suspicion of wrongdoing was “putting a very high price on one’s conjectures.” As the terrorism of France’s religious wars intensified in the region of his family home, Montaigne refused to guard the doors of his estate. To do so would have been to capitulate to violence and, in a sense, to escalate it. He chose, instead, to live out the counsel of the Mishnah: “Where there is no human being, be one.”

It is this quality that has made Montaigne a hero to so many opponents of fanaticism. And it constitutes one of his greatest answers to the question of how to live. As Bakewell distills it: “Be convivial.” In that blithe-sounding word, she helps us hear solemn undertones. Be convivial: live with one another, be on the side of life, forbear. Even as the long party rages on, she reminds us, a long war rages just outside the door. Montaigne’s joy in humanity was not a way of ignoring it, but a way of resisting it.