The essay as a literary form owes much to the sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne, who gave it its name. The French word essai means an attempt or a trial, and Montaigne chose it deliberately. His pieces did not pretend to settle questions once and for all; instead they wandered, doubled back, and tested ideas the way one might taste a dish before committing to it. Writing on subjects as varied as friendship, fear, and the education of children, he made his own shifting opinions the true subject of inquiry. Later writers borrowed the form but often narrowed it, using the essay to argue a single fixed thesis. Montaigne's originality lay precisely in his refusal to do so: for him the value of an essay lay in the honest record of a mind thinking, not in the tidy conclusion it might reach.