Montaigne only had one real friend and knew it before he lost him
Asked why he loved him, a 16th-century essayist gave the least useful, most honest answer possible.
Michel de Montaigne met Étienne de La Boétie in Bordeaux in 1558, and by his own account it took no time at all — the two magistrates recognized something in each other that Montaigne would spend the rest of his life failing to find twice. He called it a friendship that happens "once every three centuries," not out of vanity but arithmetic: he meant it that rarely, full stop.
Four years later, La Boétie was dead, probably of plague, at thirty-two. Montaigne watched him die over three agonizing days and never fully recovered the capacity to describe why the man had mattered so much. Pressed, decades on, to explain what he'd loved in him, he wrote the most quoted non-answer in the history of friendship: because it was he, because it was I. No shared interests, no list of virtues — just the fact of the two of them, which turned out to be reason enough and the only reason that held up.
Montaigne remarried, had a family, kept writing for thirty more years, and by every account was a warm, social, well-liked man. He also said, without self-pity, that he considered the friendship-shaped part of his life essentially finished the day La Boétie died. Not tragic — just true. Some rooms in a person only get furnished once.
Most of us assume we'll get several real friendships in a life. Montaigne's ledger says the honest number might be one, and that one might still be worth the whole account.