On the last day of February

 Andrew Hui has written a book called The Study, about the development of private libraries during the Renaissance. The reviews say Montaigne plays a role in this tale.

I like the idea of a study as a place of one’s own. For centuries before Montaigne, interesting people had locked themselves in cells and hermitages to worship and meditate. Montaigne had a private chapel for those purposes. But he also wanted to think — to commune with “the learned virgins,” as he called the Muses. So he withdrew to his library, which was hidden away in a tower on his property. You had to climb steep stairs to disturb him. He inscribed this, in Latin, on the wall of his study:

 

At the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out.

 

Montaigne said this about thinking:

 

The greatest of souls make it their vocation. … It is the work of the gods, says Aristotle, from which springs their beatitude and our own.

 

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 923.