Montaigne's pursuit of the character he called Myself -"bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; knowing, ignorant"-lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision. When he died, he was still revising and, apparently, not at all surprised, since Myself was a protean creature, impossible to anticipate but also, being always at hand, impossible to ignore.

I like to think of the essays as a kind of thriller; with Myself, the elusive prey, and Montaigne, the sleuth, locked in a battle of equals who were too close for dissimulation and too smart for satisfaction. And it may be that Montaigne did, too, because he often warned his readers that nothing he wrote about Myself was likely to apply for much longer than it took the ink he used, writing it, to dry.

Montaigne's relationship to "Myself" is most similar to that of

A. a detective who is finally able to apprehend a criminal
B. a person who inspires a writer to create well-known works
C. an athlete plagued by a nemesis who can always anticipate the next move
D. a serial killer who deliberately leaves clues so that the police will find him
E. an artist attempting a self-portrait that ends up looking different from the artist



As used in the passage, the word "dissimulation" connotes a sense of

A. deliberate malice
B. outright audacity
C. hidden deception
D. unfeigned delight
E. implied criticism