The rest of his life was one long struggle with ill-health, poverty and neglect; and he is alluded to with sorrowful regret by Montaigne in one of his Essais (i.34), as having, like Sebastian Castalio, ended his days in utter destitution.
He is mainly known to the public because of his biographies, including the lives of Ho Chi Minh, Nasser, Léon Blum, De Gaulle, François Mauriac, Pierre Mendès-France, Mitterrand, Montesquieu, Montaigne, Malraux, Germaine Tillion, Champollion, Rivière, Stendhal and Kennedy.
In Paris, where he resided with his family, he was enrolled in the Montaigne and Louis-le-Grand secondary schools.
He has published on medieval theology, Petrarch, humanism, Erasmus, Luther, Erasmus, Montaigne, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, American political thought, the relation between religion and politics, and the role of sports in human life.
The white-marble statues of Montaigne and Montesquieu (by sculptor Dominique Fortuné Maggesi) were added in 1858.
It was in the village, dominating from its a limestone outcrop the Madon Valley, and also positioned across the old road from Nancy, that the great essayist Montaigne stayed around 1580 before he proceeded to Plombières en route for Italy.
Pierre Charron (1541–1603) was a French philosopher, author of Traité de la Sagesse (Treatise on Wisdom), and a friend of fellow philosopher Montaigne after whom the nearby avenue Montaigne is named.
In Europe, it has a total of 58 shops it directly controls, including a flagship in Paris's Avenue Montaigne and one in London's Old Bond Street.
:Since modern readers are unused to such ardor in masculine friendship and are likely to leap at the notion of homosexuality (a notion sufficiently refuted by the sonnets themselves), we may remember that such an ideal, often exalted above the love of women, could exist in real life, from Montaigne to Sir Thomas Browne, and was conspicuous in Renaissance literature.
In March 2003 a French school, the College Descartes-Montaigne from Liévin near Lens, was due to send an exchange visit to the school, but this was cancelled due to all schools in the Pas-de-Calais department being told Britain was too dangerous to visit.