ABSTRACT
When Montaigne explicitly addresses the subject of vanity, in De la vanit, he wholeheartedly affirms the Solomonic adage that all is vanity. De la vanit has long been a focal point in discussions of Montaigne's essayistic procedure. More recent commentaries have taken issue with this judgment, finding a close intertwining of the themes of travel and vanity or digressive writing. Furthermore, owing to the multiple grammatical functions of the word de, the title itself suggests, as do most of Montaigne's titles, a slippery relationship of words to their meanings. Montaigne is not only writing on or about vanity; he is also presenting writing as motion and en could hence mean that his writing proceeds literally, figurally, or both from vanity. The word vainement at the end of the sentence demonstrates the emptiness of the pronoun by following it, in time and space, rather than preceding it.
