I’ve finished An Apology for Raymond Sebond, the longest and noodliest—some critics believe the best—of Montaigne’s essays. In my translation by Donald M. Frame it runs a stout 170 pages, whereas few of the other essays measure much longer than 10 or 20. It’s as though Montaigne prefers the to run the quarter mile, but mid-way through track season, decides to take up the marathon.

It’s a peculiar riffing essay and has little to do with the medieval Christian apologist of its the title, whose book Montaigne had translated at his dying father’s request. “It was a very strange and a new occupation for me,” Montaigne writes, “but being by chance at leisure at the time, and being unable to disobey any command of the best father there ever was, I got through it the best I could; at which he was singularly pleased, and ordered it to be printed; this was done after his death.”

In an introductory essay, Frame notes: “Less than one tenth of the chapter deals with Sebond at all. Primarily it is a sustained argument of the impotence of unaided human reason…”

It is addressed to a princess whom Frame believes to be Margaret of Valois, who—the theory goes— asked Montaigne to publish a defense of the thinking of the man he had translated. What a response she got instead!