Simultaneously with the language there was being created a public intelligent, inquiring, and eager.

Scarcely had the translation of Plutarch by Amyot appeared, when it at once became, as Montaigne says, "the breviary of women and of ignoramuses." "God's life, my love," wrote Henry IV.

to Mary de' Medici, "you could not have sent me any more agreeable news than of the pleasure you have taken in reading.
Plutarch has a smile for me of never-failing freshness; to love him is to love me, for he was during a long while the instructor of my tender age; my good mother, to whom I owe everything, and who set so great store on my good deportment, and did not want me to be (that is what she used to say) an illustrious ignoramus, put that book into my hands, though I was then little more than a child at the breast.

It has been like my conscience to me, and has whispered into my ear many good hints and excellent maxims for my behavior and for the government of my affairs." Thanks to Amyot, Plutarch "had become a Frenchman:" Montaigne would not have been able to read him easily in Greek.

Indifferent to the Reformation, which was too severe and too affirmative for him, Montaigne, "to whom Latin had been presented as his mother-tongue, rejoiced in the Renaissance without becoming a slave to it, or intoxicated with it like Rabelais or Ronsard.