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Gaillardes escapades: Montaigne's Experience of Beauty

As he reflects on his own book's composition in his essay "On vanity," Montaigne recalls passages from several of the Ancients and exclaims that their gaillardes escapades make them beautiful.   Those two words point to aesthetic values that motivate the Essays and that, Montaigne insists, engage the reader.   The rich lexical scope of gaillardes escapades, both in the Essays and in some works of Montaigne's contemporaries, helps us to appreciate one experience of beauty in sixteenth-century France.

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