Montaigne compares his essays to a painter's grotesques around a central masterpiece, then places La Boétie's discourse against tyranny at the centre. He calls La Boétie peerless in natural parts and mourns the treatise as almost the only work chance preserved.
That treatise first brought them together, and their friendship became, Montaigne says, so perfect that story scarcely records its like in three ages.
He sorts false friendships from true: respect between parents and children, passionate love, marriage contracts, and convenient acquaintance all mix other motives with affection. Brothers share names and estates, which often relax the tie; women and wives belong to another order of affection entirely.
Real friendship is chosen, temperate, and whole-souled, unlike love's chase or marriage's legal tangles. Love burns sharp and intermittent; friendship is a constant, equal heat that grows by enjoyment rather than ending at possession.
When asked why he loved La Boétie, Montaigne can only answer because it was he, because it was I: one soul in two bodies with nothing held back. They sought each other before they met; at their first encounter they felt already acquainted, as if fortune had appointed the bond.
Such friendship is indivisible, excludes rivals, and makes gifts and thanks sound foreign. Under it, wills, thoughts, goods, wives, children, and lives are in effect common; lawgivers even forbid gifts between spouses to imitate that union.
Eudamidas' will, Blosius before the consuls, Diogenes asking friends for money, and ordinary social friendships all sharpen the contrast. In lesser ties you walk with bridle in hand; Chilo's counsel to love as if you might one day hate applies there, not here.
Since La Boétie's death, Montaigne says the rest of life is smoke; pleasures double his affliction, and by outliving him he feels he defrauds his friend of his part.
