Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles de Montesquieu

The line lands like a salon-era mic drop: the “author” isn’t a romantic genius but a socially incontinent nuisance who refuses to stop talking even after everyone in the room has begged him, politely, to. Montesquieu weaponizes the word “torment,” upgrading bad writing from a private annoyance to a public harm. The joke is proportionate to the crime: boredom is already a mild form of suffering; print turns it into inheritance.

The intent is less anti-literature than anti-vanity. He’s skewering the kind of writer who mistakes persistence for importance, who confuses the mere fact of having thoughts with having something to say. “Not content” is the tell. The author’s sin isn’t that he bores; it’s that he can’t accept the natural limit of his audience. He must outlive his social penalties by embalming himself in text, conscripting “generations to come” as captives. That’s a particularly Enlightenment fear: the permanence of print, the idea that culture can be clogged by inferior work long after the original social circles have moved on.

Subtextually, it’s also a defense of taste and civic hygiene. Montesquieu belonged to a world where writing was power: pamphlets, treatises, letters, reputations. Bad authorship isn’t harmless self-expression; it’s noise in the system, attention stolen from better arguments, a kind of intellectual pollution. The insult flatters the reader, too: if you can recognize this “fool,” you’re not him. And if you’re an aspiring writer, it’s a warning delivered with a smile sharp enough to draw blood.