The dispersed notes left by Joseph Joubert in his Notebooks until 1824 have never been considered from the point of view of the genre of the essay. This article purports to read Joubert’s work as a vast fragmentary essay. In a counter-revolutionary context, the Christian foundation of Joubert’s thought supposes, a contrario Montaigne’s practice, an essentialist vision of the practice of writing essays. The fragments thus put to paper sketch out a provisional space, a weigh station for a more accomplished reflection, to such a degree that the fragment could be seen as an essay in waiting. Its discontinuous annotations, truncated assertions which call for an absent text, also enable the rehearsal of a number of the issues at stake in the relationship between essay and fiction. Vacant spaces, indeed, give rise to the play of the imagination and to the ring of the echo to the images and sounds of the unfinished note.