What do women gossip about?

Let them dispense with ceremony a bit, let them speak freely; we are but children compared with them in this knowledge. Hear them describe our wooings and our conversations, and you will realize full well that we bring them nothing that they have not known and digested without us. Could it be as Plato says, that they were once dissipated boys? My ear one day happened to be in a place where without suspicion it could snatch some of the talk they were having among themselves. If only I might repeat it! By Our Lady, I said, we make fine use of our time by going off to study the phrases of Amadis and the stories of Boccaccio and Aretino so as to seem worldly-wise!

—Translated by Donald M. Frame

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance.