Building on an essential passage from the chapter “On vanity” (III, 9) of Montaigne’s Essays and on a quote from Propertius, in this article we will once again strive to shed new light on the question of the management of public and private links in Montaigne’s works, by relating it to the ethics of moderation, to the Pyrrhonian balance, to the “role” and its logic, and above all, in the last instance, to certain aspects of the tradition of (...) “care of the self” as Michel Foucault had envisaged it in some of his courses at the Collège de France. (shrink)