Montaigne, Pascal, and Renard are on my mind quite often the last few years. The French thinkers are close to my heart, no less. But it has occurred to me today that there is hole of sorts in my pantheon of French intellectuals. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) represents the Sixteenth Century, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) the Seventeenth, and Jules Renard (1864-1910) the Nineteenth, but how about the Eighteenth? For some reason, the likes of François-Marie Arouet or Voltaire (1694-1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Denis Diderot (1713-1784), and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert (1717-1783) do not attract me very much. For better or worse, I cannot imagine returning to their works time and again in search of precious jewels. It did not take me long to realize that the unappealing bit about all of them was that they were not thinkers but philosophers. Of course, this is the main trouble with Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), and many others of their ilk in the Twentieth Century. It is the French philosophers I find difficult to stomach, I guess. Not surprisingly, it is Roland Barthes (1915-1980) who is closest to my heart among French intellectuals from the last century. Ha dabbled into many a field, but a philosopher he definitely was not. Satisfied with my conclusions, I abandoned the search. Thinkers I am drawn to, and how, but philosophers tend to annoy me. End of story.