Bordeaux

A wealthy wine port in southwest France. Montaigne retired to a tower on his nearby estate to write the Essays, and Montesquieu was born and served as a magistrate here.

Bordeaux was a wine port on the Garonne with a parlement, and Montaigne served in that court for thirteen years before retiring at thirty-eight to the tower on his family estate outside the city. He was elected mayor twice, reluctantly both times, and was away when plague struck during his second term. He wrote the Essays in that tower and kept revising them for the rest of his life, inventing a form in which a man examines himself in public without ever pretending to have reached a conclusion.