Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, was born at the Château de Montaigne in Perigord, near Bordeaux, in 1533. A legend, which appears to have no foundation, asserts that the family was of English origin. It had risen by the salt-fish trade, and its nobility was of recent origin, facts which Montaigne did not recognise so calmly as a philosopher should. His father served under Francis I. in the wars of Italy, and increased the considerable fortune he had inherited, by a rich marriage with Antoinette de Louppes, or Lopes, a Spanish Jewess by descent. Michel was educated at the College of Bordeaux by Buchanan, Muretus, and other famous scholars. By a fad of his father’s, he was surrounded from the beginning by people who only spoke Latin, and so learned the language naturally. His schooling came to an end when he was thirteen. Although he inherited a strong frame from his father, and did possibly serve one or two campaigns, he applied himself to the law, and not to arms, as a profession. He held a judicial post, first at Périgueux, then at Bordeaux, but resigned it early, and retired to his own house. Montaigne was known at Court, which he visited several times, even before he published the first two books of his _Essays_ in 1580. During one visit to Paris in 1588 to superintend the publication of the third book, he was an eye-witness of the “day of the barricades,” and was imprisoned in the Bastille by Leaguers. He travelled abroad, and returned to hold municipal office at Bordeaux, where he showed more caution than courage during a visitation of the plague. He died at his own house of Montaigne in 1592, just as the long anarchy of the wars of Religion, which he had never allowed to ruffle the calm of his life, was coming to an end.[114]