A gnostic history, which we lack, is largely made up of what Louis Massignon termed intersignes, portents, coincidences (as historians describe them, in order to ignore them), erratic forms, buried relics, physiognomic marks, latent constellations in the sky of thought. Metternich and Charles Nodier were educated at Strasbourg within a few years of each other, under the shadow of Eulogius Schneider, the erudite and sanguinary Capuchin monk. And, once again in Strasbourg, Metternich took fencing lessons from the same master who had instructed Bonaparte. Nodier tells how his father, “who had a passion for classical studies, had decided to make a scholar of me”—and using his own personal method. By the age of ten, his son could read the Latin authors with an ease he would never later regain. But now he had to move on to Greek. And so he was entrusted to Schneider, with whom his father had been in correspondence as “the learned publisher of a German Anacreon.” The young Nodier, a bookish dreamer, discovered that his tutor was a tyrant “driven to the ultimate consequences by the logic of extermination.” His revolutionary society, La Propagande, practiced appalling hatred, at the tail end of that “long pink-footed idyll that had been the eighteenth century.” Dragged before the spectacle of the guillotine, Nodier listened to one of Schneider’s followers from La Propagande speaking “with a choice of expressions so charmingly frightening, with an anacreonism so desperate that I could feel a cold sweat trickling down my forehead and bathing my eyelids.” Metternich had had a tutor “whose name is consecrated to the malediction of Alsace”: he would become a member of Eulogius Schneider’s revolutionary tribunal. And his professor of canon law, on becoming constitutional bishop of Strasbourg, would appoint the same Eulogius Schneider as vicar general. Schneider then “recanted religion and his episcopacy and, in a revolutionary orgy, publicly burned the emblems of his office.” Metternich, in recalling those two godless masters more than fifty years later, while writing a fragment of his memoirs for his family archive, was eager to point out, however, that they had “never forced me to change my opinions.”
The young Nodier, down from the Jura Mountains, reached Strasbourg at night and took accommodation at the Hôtel de la Lanterne, run by Madame Tesch, who gazed at him tenderly: to her, the young boy looked like a girl in disguise. He slept little: “By daybreak I was wandering the empty streets, amazed by everything, and gripped by a kind of ecstasy in front of that magnificent cathedral, which the ancient world would have included among its marvels. Never in my life had I seen anything like that choir of angels and saints which was surrounded by myriad figures that seemed to rise up to the heights of celestial Jerusalem, rising among the rich transparent embroideries and lace of its miraculous architecture. A hammer blow tore me from my meditation, and I saw the head of a saint roll to my feet. There was another resounding blow and this time the bust of the Virgin fell with child in arms. I tried to fathom where all this was coming from, and could see a man perched in the portal, on the shoulders of an enormous apostle, hammering left and right, uttering frightening curses against those gothic portrayals of the Lord’s elect. People gradually gathered in excited groups, from which there were bursts of laughter, dark utterances and dull murmurs. It took me quite some time to make sense of that frenzy, which hadn’t yet reached the foothills of the Jura.”
Madame Tesch immediately explained to her guest that Abbé Schneider was now called Citizen Schneider, and it was now imperative that his young pupil address him in familiar terms. These opening words were already enough to disturb Nodier. The pupil was received by a surly servant girl. “Breakfast was served. It was a plate of oysters, rara concha in terris, a plate of anchovies, a bowl of olives, and a tankard of beer. Citizen Schneider came in, laid his two pistols on the table, and, after a curt greeting to me, sat down.
“I approached and handed him my father’s letter. After the first two lines he took my hand, addressing me with I don’t know what phrase in Greek, to which I replied that I didn’t yet have the fortune to know a word of Greek; he then invited me for lunch and, upon my refusal, to dinner. I had no reason to decline. Nevertheless, I would have preferred to dine at Madame Tesch’s.”
Citizen Schneider makes his appearance: “He was a man of thirty-five, ugly, fat, short and ordinary, with rounded limbs, round head. What made him most unusual was his livid gray face, with red blotches here and there, and the contrast between his black, short-cropped hair and his dark bushy eyebrows, under which flashed two wild eyes, shaded by light brown lashes. Endowed with an immense aptitude for learning, and a spirit full of irony, along with which I invariably found cruelty, there was nothing about him that stirred any feeling, any emotion, nothing that touched the heart.” The first rule that Nodier’s Greek teacher laid down was that he should in no circumstances mix with “popular society,” as Saint-Just called it, since it was “infected by the Convention’s evil principles of moderatism.”
As for Saint-Just, in his icy dandyism, he did not approve of the learned, predatory Capuchin. “The leading figure in Strasbourg,” wrote Michelet, “was the ex-Capuchin Schneider, well-versed in ancient literature, formidable in his German tongue and a zealous preacher, a spiritual advisor adored by women. Even today, in this city where a story of loathing has built up around him, certain women (now elderly) are not yet consoled.
“Schneider was a rabid democrat in the mould of the old Anabaptists, of John, the tailor king of Leyden, who sought to compete with Solomon for the number of women. This monk was insatiable: not satisfied with the women who ran after him of their own accord, we are assured that he took women wherever he went.
“Nevertheless, he wanted a wife, and had just married one by force and by terror. He returned to Strasbourg in the evening, in great pomp, in a four-horse carriage. It was late for a city at war; the gates were shut, he had them opened. Saint-Just takes advantage of this situation, namely Schneider’s aristocratic behavior with his carriage and retinue, and has him captured that same night in his marriage bed. Strasbourg can hardly believe its eyes the following morning at the sight of its tyrant tied to the guillotine. He remained there for three hours, in that wretched position, and left it only to be sent to Paris, to his death.
“While he was displayed like that, Saint-Just was seen to appear on the balcony overlooking the square, and to watch his suffering with haughty indifference. The Catholic population, witnessing the humiliation of that renegade, recognized the hand of God and heaped blessings on God’s and Robespierre’s envoy.”
Young Nodier was there that day, at the square in Strasbourg, in front of Saint-Just’s balcony. He describes what really happened. Schneider had decided to marry in the hope that his religious past, about which he was still reminded, might be completely forgotten. He had chosen the pretty daughter of an Alsatian aristocrat whom he had put into prison. He had noticed her among the crowd of supplicants. He released the father and forced him to invite him for lunch. The daughter had remained in her rooms. Schneider ordered that she take part in the banquet and, in her presence, asked for her hand. Before any answer had been given, he rose from the table and went across to the open window. Outside they were building the guillotine. The girl begged her father to accept the marriage proposal and, turning to her future husband, she, too, made a proposal: she wanted to be married straightaway, but in Strasbourg, not in that small town of theirs, so that the marriage would be a glorious occasion and everyone could forget the mistresses that Schneider had till then dragged behind him. The suitor agreed. Schneider made his entry into Strasbourg the next day, preceded by his hussars of death, in a carriage drawn by six horses, sitting beside his radiant bride-to-be, followed by a low red cart on which his mobile guillotine was mounted, and finally a small carriage where the executioner sat—a pale, gaunt, serious man on whom all eyes were fixed. It was three thirty in the afternoon, a few minutes after the gates were due to close.
The procession was passing beneath his balcony when Saint-Just appeared. “In his manner there was a sort of stern brusqueness: he didn’t look for popular acclaim; indeed, he discouraged it, with a dry peremptory gesture. And yet his thick and heavily powdered hair over his straight black eyebrows, his head erect above his high and full cravat, the dignity of his tiny build, the elegance of his simple dress, never failed to have their effect upon the multitude. He signaled for the procession to stop, and everyone halted.”
His anger was already visible through his “shining and intense” gaze. But, before he could speak, Schneider’s betrothed fell to her knees on the ground: “Justice, justice, citizen! I appeal to Saint-Just and to the Convention!” In a few words, she told her story. The executioner confirmed it, declaring that he had been ordered to be ready in case the aristocrat had refused to grant his daughter’s hand. Finally, Schneider’s bride even asked for clemency. Saint-Just then became furious: “Clemency! Clemency for the Capuchin of Cologne! Off to the guillotine!” he continued with an outrage barely credible in a character so methodical and so composed. “Let him be taken to the guillotine!” “Do I have to cut off his head?” the gaunt man in the small carriage respectfully asked. “I have no right to order it,” said Saint-Just, quivering with irritation. “May he go to the death that that monster has invented! Tie him to the guillotine till further orders!”
Shortly after, Nodier saw Schneider, with “small eyes as if molten in their orbits,” being led to the guillotine, goaded by the swords of his hussars of death. Around him were waves of shouting. Nodier was jostled more and more by the crowd and couldn’t see over their heads. But he heard the words of a volunteer from the south who towered over everyone else and felt it his duty to describe to his neighbors what he could see.
Metternich knows he has to find the most effective and economical way of running a drafty old house with rusty window frames and blocked pipes: Talleyrand has never identified himself with any house: even when he is wearing his finest uniforms, a part of him is always on the highway, playing in the fields dressed in rags, as his uncle had once seen him as a child. He has never set foot in his father’s house. Something deep within makes him feel close to the downtrodden, the rootless, enables him to understand the new, the barbarous new, and to devise mutable strategies to ensure that it might end up, in its turbulent course, following one particular direction and not others.
Metternich was the great curator of the museum of Europe: like every clear-thinking curator, he knew his work could last only a certain time. Talleyrand, on the other hand, is aiming at survival, he moves between temporary residences, regularly auctions off his books and objects of value. He retains only his style, since he knows this is his single unfailing weapon for survival. Those who yield and adopt the style of the moment are killed the moment after. Like a Tao master, Talleyrand doesn’t exclude the possibility that survival might be infinite. But, if he does have to die, he knows it has to be accepted naturally. And, then too, he seeks to keep his style one last time. “He died as one who knows how to live,” one lady commented. Talleyrand always held the view that the passage of time was murderous in itself—and the whole art of politics was now one of surviving the grip of events. And so his work lasts longer than that of Metternich: the legacy of the past is not guaranteed by its ability to be restored, but by its capacity to escape a sentence that has already been passed, deferring death moment by moment.
“What is history? Specification. The more that history specifies, clarifies, characterizes, the more it is history, the more it is itself.” His Histoire de la Révolution française accompanied Michelet day and night for nearly ten years. He wrote the last two volumes in total solitude, near Nantes: “For my voluntary exile, I chose the capital of our civil wars; I wanted to end my book between Brittany and the Vendée.” The crucial step was that of locking up his library in Paris, taking away “only the sources strictly necessary.” And so Michelet withdrew to a place that was immune from the chronic contagion of other books, those “silent witnesses” that, due to their mere presence, remain in a state of complicity with diverging worlds and obstruct the exact hallucination. One Sunday in May, toward ten in the morning, before his departure, Michelet wanted to visit the principal museum of the Terror.
“By this I don’t mean Clamart, where Mirabeau is, with Madame Roland—I don’t mean the Madeleine, where, along with the king, were the Girondins, Charlotte Corday; I don’t mean Picpus, where André Chénier sleeps, along with the French nobility; nor Bourg-la-Reine, where Condorcet lies. I’m referring to Mousseaux.
“It is the cemetery of Danton and Robespierre, of Camille Desmoulins, of Saint-Just, of Anacharsis Clootz, of Lavoisier.
“The weather, in contrast to these lugubrious recollections, was sunny, mild, already bringing blossom, it was the weather of a warm spring day caressed by breezes.
“Nature is forgetful! But France is all the more so! This place of death where the earth drank the blood of the nation, the very life of the Republic, what has become of it? ‘A hostelry outside the gate, a drinking house?’ No, a meeting place of disrepute, where there is dancing! France dances cheerfully on its dead!
“This ground, planted with young trees, is a remote corner of the old orchard that once formed part of the Mousseaux estate. A park, once owned by the Duc d’Orléans, laid out in English style at the end of the eighteenth century, shabbily decorated with rococo architecture, with fake ruins that have now become real, is charming but extremely sad. It was where Marie Antoinette last strolled (on June 20), and Robespierre, in his darkest days in Prairial and Messidor, often carried his frenzied agitation about with him. Later it was a place of celebration. In June 1848, Mousseaux was the center of the national ateliers: their sudden dissolution would drown Paris in blood.
“The corner of the orchard described here, purchased in 1784 by the Ferme générale as land needed for the new city walls of Paris, then acquired by the municipality in February 1793, was an ordinary cemetery for some time, divided into four sections.
“Suppressed as such, and cleared, it was sold, conveyed to the Marquis d’Aligre, one of the richest men in France, who, most probably unaware of all of this, rented out half of it so that they could build this meeting place; the remainder, closer to the city wall, is divided into small stony gardens where the Parisians fancy themselves cultivating flowers.”