Mon cher,
Nearly a hundred and fifty years have passed since your meeting with that good man Gauthier, nearly two hundred since the storming of the Bastille, and I wish to give you some news. Followed by his comrades, now no longer in out-of-the-way provinces, but audacious and assertive in all worlds, which are moreover also on the way to liberation, Gauthier has never for one moment stopped talking. Indeed, he is anxious to talk to everyone he meets. Meanwhile, the Ligue des Compagnons has shown itself unanimously reluctant to be déniaisée. And if, from time to time, one of the female allegorical figures allows herself to be débauchée, she soon returns demurely to her duty. We wish they were all Ninotchkas, but even that physical type is not now one of the most frequent. Those massacres for the common good have been of no use. Not even those between brothers. The tide of good intentions continues to wash about among waves of tedium. The cause of justice and of the people still fixes its gaze on holy pictures, but never achieves their aesthetic tenderness. The adventurousness of the Good is still far from being found, after so many years in which we have been compelled to feed with the Iniquitous, with their extravagant lies and intrigues. Around us there is a stubborn insistence on changing the way we live, but with no clear notions about the facts of life. While you were writing Souvenirs d’égotisme with your automatic writing at Civitavecchia, you were hoping those pages would have been published ten years after your death. Twenty years after was already too late, you feared: once all the “nuances de la vie” had changed, the reader would have perceived only the masses. Then you wondered: “But where are the masses in these games my pen is playing?” Well, think Gauthier: that nuance of yours has become a mass—or a “multitude,” as one school mistress once said when she wanted to avoid overcompromising herself with the words of the day. I send you my fondest wishes and look forward to seeing you this evening for whist.
Talleyrand
It took forever, as usual, for the Prince of Wales to be dressed. To pass the time that morning, Laclos, aloof by nature, whose words had something dark and cold about them, fell into the trap that Tilly, an able man of the world, had prepared for him. “Monsieur de Laclos, who had no great tact at Court, but had all the gloomy impatience of a philosopher or a conspirator, preferred idle chatter instead of continually pulling out his watch and kicking his heels.”
“How did Les Liaisons dangereuses come about?” ventured Tilly as soon as he saw him yield. And finally Laclos told him: a provincial daydream, the result of the long, tedious period spent on garrison duty at Grenoble. There was a fellow soldier, now a famous scientist, who had many stories about women: he was a born womanizer. Among these, a woman from Grenoble who vaguely resembles the character of the Marquise de Merteuil. They used to talk, and Laclos sometimes gave him advice on what moves he should make. He had also collected many other stories over the years, his poison chest: all he had to do was transpose them into the right setting, Paris. That’s how it happened, more or less. Laclos broke off—and came to an abrupt end: “I improved the style as best as I could, and after a final few months’ work I let my book loose on the public. Since then I’ve heard almost nothing about how it’s doing, though they tell me it’s still alive.”
At that time, in the same way that Valmont had “worked” Cécile Volanges, Laclos was still “working” the Duc d’Orléans, in whom many people saw a terrifying Valmont of politics. From London, the Duke sent letters on strategy that he diligently copied from the drafts of his counselor Laclos. What crystalline intoxication it is to be the man who moves the man who is thought to move the conspiracy of the Revolution! From the military solitude of the Île de Ré, where Les Liaisons had been created, he had reached the delirium of the spider who thinks it can cover the world with its web! A few months later, Laclos claimed he was secretly moving not only the Duc d’Orléans but also the Jacobin Club. And it was partly true. Then the spider’s web was swept away by the torrent of events. In a box at La Scala, the artillery general Laclos looked about him, disconsolate: nothing for him was “more tedious than an Italian opera buffa, except perhaps an opera seria.” There, in the box of the military general staff, he was introduced to a red-cheeked dragoon, still a boy, timid and curious. Laclos’s gaze finally “softened” when he learned that this Second Lieutenant Henri Beyle was also from Grenoble. From one province to another, he reflected, thinking of Milan, a city for him devoid of any charm, made of roads and houses. And perhaps it was the moment to go back to writing. One plan he kept close to his heart, for his old age: to write a work dedicated to “popularizing this idea: that the sole happiness lies in the family.” It would have been no small thing: “It will be difficult to arrange events in the right way, and the almost insurmountable difficulty will be that of stirring interest without resorting to anything novelistic.”
The jumble of styles and images of 1790 would soon be reduced to a unity fearful of contamination. Every hybrid is vice. In the streets, the frivolous variety of dresses disappeared, “the uniform coat of the new world was worn,” a first sign of the civilian who doesn’t wish to be noticed. And on the stage, as well, there was the unity of the most tedious Golden Age ever imagined by humanity. Chateaubriand, who during his recent American wanderings had experienced the rustle of virgin forests, Creole eroticism, and the “sublime disarray” of Niagara Falls, also heard the piping of the liberators: “While tragedy turned the streets red, pastoral poetry flourished in the theaters; every plot involved innocent shepherds and virginal shepherdesses: fields, streams, meadows, rams, doves, a golden age beneath the straw roof, brought back to life to the sighing of the flageolet before the cooing thyrses and the credulous tricoteuses leaving the spectacle of the guillotine. If Sanson had had enough time, he would have played the role of Colin, and Théroigne de Méricourt would have played that of Babet. The members of the Convention prided themselves on being the kindest of men: good fathers, good sons, good husbands, they went out walking with their children; nursed them; wept a tender tear as they watched their simple games; took those little lambs gently in their arms to show them the pretty horse that carted the victims to their execution. They spoke of nature, peace, piety, good works, innocence, domestic virtues; these espousers of philanthropy had their neighbors’ heads cut off with extreme sensitivity, to make the happiness of the human race ever greater.”
Paris air. Hegel wandered around Paris in amazement, and at the Palais-Royal, that “Paris within Paris,” he dutifully followed the instructions in the Manuel des étrangers, though Victor Cousin laughed at him. To Marie Helena, who awaited him in Berlin, he was careful to mention the most notable things: “Today, for example, we went to an abattoir, a slaughterhouse. In what city of the world would I have gone to a slaughterhouse? But this is one of the remarkable things for which Paris is indebted to Napoleon, like a hundred other great things … And earlier we visited the Stock Exchange, this also founded by Napoleon; what a temple!”
Let us try to remove Talleyrand from the picture of his age, let us wipe away all evidence of his footprints. What is now missing? Fluidity. What is left is the crudeness of revolutionaries and legitimists, of the Directory, of the Napoleonic period, and of the bourgeoisie. They beat, like rams, against the same wall. While every municipal partisan spirit was at last finding his metaphysics in the vision of the Party, Talleyrand maintained the indifference of the sky and the water: mutable, elusive, unscathed among many faiths.
Talleyrand was no lover of bons mots. The only behavior, he felt, that reached perfection to some extent was that of a person he barely knew: his mother. And Talleyrand’s mother rejected bons mots as the bane of conversation. “Going to visit my mother, I chose the times when she was alone: in that way I could better appreciate her fineness of spirit. It seemed to me that no one ever had more charm in conversation than she. She had no pretension. She spoke just in undertones; she never used a bon mot: it was something too explicit. Bons mots get remembered, and she just wanted her words to bring pleasure and be lost.”
“His manner, constantly light when dealing with the greatest matters…” Talleyrand’s lightness, and especially when dealing with “the greatest matters,” is the characteristic that reveals the hidden role he has chosen for himself. There is no longer anything in the world that cannot be treated with lightness—this is his premise. Everyone is afraid to acknowledge it. Talleyrand accepts it and puts it into practice in his every action.
This is enough to create that immeasurable distance that many regard as monstrous between him and everyone else. Talleyrand is capable of using lightness because things no longer have a preestablished weight. They fluctuate, they are huge, poisonous bodies that do not rest in themselves. Nothing stands firm. There is nothing more incorporeal and empty than will. Nor can an immediately apparent bond be found between that silent emptiness, pure compressed energy, and the inordinate transformations that it provokes, often without allowing any lull before the devastation.