Michel Montaigne is considered to be one of the writers having made the most significant contribution to the French language development in the XVI century. M.Montaigne's vocabulary is very rich containing a lot of everyday expressions.
The article deals with the problems related to the delimitation of the phenomena of good and evil, the use of antonymic pairs in antonymic contexts. The paper presents the classification of the basic intellectual and moral virtues and vices laid down in Montaigne's "Essays". It is concluded that the semantic fields of virtues and vices make up two symmetrical systems in the "Essay", consisting of words that are antonyms of each other.
