innuence

Updated: July 29, 2026

"He was an amazing writer," says M. Faguet, "and disconcerted criticism by the impossibility of explaining his methods of procedure; he was luminous, supple, naturally pliant and yielding; beneath his apparently effeminate grace an extraordinary strength of character would suddenly make itself felt; he had, more than any nineteenth-century writer, the quality of charm; he exercised a caressing innuence which enveloped, and finally conquered, the reader."

Michel de Montaigne - Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian