What follows are a few paragraphs taken from here and there in the excellent "A Summer with Montaigne: On the Art of Living Well" by Antoine Compagnon, due to be published 2019-05-19:

Montaigne assures us that he respects the truth, even when it is spoken by someone unlikeable. He is not arrogant, and does not see contradiction as a humiliation. If wrong, he prefers to be corrected. What he does not like in his conversational partners is conceit; people who are overly sure of themselves or intolerant.

Machiavellianism asserts that it is permissible to lie, to break one’s word, even to kill when it is in the best interests of the State, in order to ensure governmental stability, which is seen as the supreme good. Montaigne never became comfortable with this, denouncing dishonesty and hypocrisy wherever he found them. He invariably presents himself just as he is and says precisely what he thinks, disregarding etiquette. He prefers openness, directness, and loyalty to what he calls “the covered path”. For him, the end does not justify the means, and he is never prepared to sacrifice private morality for reasons of State.

[...] if Montaigne gives in easily to others, it is not only out of courtesy and to encourage his conversational partners to speak freely to him; it is also because he is not always sure of himself. His opinions are changeable, and he sometimes disagrees with himself. Montaigne loves argument, but he does not need anyone else to provide it. What he detests above all are people who are so arrogant that they take offense when someone else contradicts them. If there is one thing Montaigne loathes, it is smugness, conceit.

“Had my intention been to seek the world’s favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties: I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint.” If decorum had permitted it, Montaigne, like the Indians of Brazil, “would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked.” The book is presented as a self-portrait, even though that was not Montaigne’s initial intention when he withdrew to his estate. He does not feature in the earliest chapters himself, but realizes, little by little, that the observation of oneself is a condition for wisdom, and the depiction of oneself is a condition of self-knowledge. The necessity of the self-portrait has been made clear to him by Socrates’s instruction: “Know thyself.”

First of all, so-far-excellent enables us to experience the world’s diversity, and Montaigne insists that there is no better education. Travelling shows us the richness of nature, proves the relativity of customs and beliefs, and shakes up our certainties; in short, it teaches us scepticism, which was Montaigne’s fundamental doctrine.

So great is Montaigne’s love of riding that if he were able to choose the manner of his death, “I think I should rather choose to die on horseback than in bed.” Montaigne dreamt of dying in the saddle, off on some voyage, far from his home and family. Life and death on horseback represent his philosophy perfectly.

The Essays grew significantly longer from one edition to the next. Until his death, Montaigne never stopped rereading his work, adding citations and developing ideas in the margins of his book.

“[M]y understanding does not always go forward, it goes backward too. I do not much less suspect my fancies for being the second or the third, than for being the first, or present, or past; we often correct ourselves as foolishly as we do others. I am grown older by a great many years since my first publications, which were in the year 1580; but I very much doubt whether I am grown an inch the wiser. I now, and I anon, are two several persons; but whether better, I cannot determine.” (III, 9)

Montaigne’s skepticism is extreme. The first version of the Essays was not inferior; age does not increase wisdom, and the new themes in the book are no more certain than the earlier ones. The paradox is clear: “I now, and I anon, are two several [separate] persons,” he insists, but “my book is always the same.” This is a contradiction, to which Montaigne freely admits: I am always changing, but I remain myself in any and all of my actions and my thoughts. He is coming, little by little, to identify himself completely with his book: “I have no more made my book than my book has made me: ‘tis a book consubstantial with the author” (II, 18), and “who touches the one, touches the other” (III, 2). Man and book have become one.

As for misogyny, Montaigne happily renounces it at the chapter’s close, strongly affirming his belief in the equality of men and women: “I say that males and females are cast in the same mould, and that, education and usage excepted, the difference is not great. Plato indifferently invites both the one and the other to the society of all studies, exercises, and vocations, both military and civil, in his Commonwealth; and the philosopher Antisthenes rejected all distinction betwixt their virtue and ours.

It is much more easy to accuse one sex than to excuse the other; ‘tis according to the saying, “Le fourgon se moque de la paele.” (“The Pot and the Kettle”).” (III, 5) Montaigne is well aware that he is falling back on cliché when he caricaturizes feminine sexuality; the fireplace poker and the dustpan, obvious sexual symbols, are employed side by side, one just as ridiculous—and shameful—as the other.