“Reasoning is sadly gaining currency”
—Voltaire to Madame du Deffand
Taste makes its appearance in order to inherit. To inherit what? Difficult to say. But certainly in every civilization dreamed of by reactionaries, taste did not exist. Meaning was enough to suppress it. And meaning has to quake on its foundations before taste makes an appearance.
Perhaps some great anthropologist, some Marcel Mauss in a remote wilderness, will one day discover what taste has been—as something that can be studied from the sum of various documents. For there is certainly something improbable about its appearance (and disappearance) in the history of societies. It is an efflorescence that promises no return. It lasts a short time, is easily swallowed up, but the effects of its appearance are irreversible. Its memory will not be erased.
When “correspondences”—the last canon—collapsed, the function of law was preserved for several years by a silent pact of manners, gestures, physiology, which despite its obvious fragility nevertheless feigned to be as equally solid, everlasting, and overtly fair as every barbarous predecessor.
Eighteenth-century France, in cultivating taste, confines and diminishes the meaning of literature. There is something ludicrously petty about their tragedies, which they find gratifying. But Napoleon will ask in vain for a new form of tragedy. Pettiness also in poetry, insipid anacreontics. Judgments on Shakespeare: Voltaire sends Julius Caesar to Cardinal de Bernis so that he can laugh at it. It is thought scandalous that the Regent admires Rabelais. Fontenelle finds Virgil’s sixth Eclogue “bizarre.” Madame du Deffand reads Saint-Simon with immense pleasure, but she guards herself by adding: he has an “abominable style,” he is not an “homme d’esprit.”
What then is taste, if it actually impedes a certain understanding of literature? But isn’t that certain understanding of literature perhaps, in turn, a subtle and late-formed Western essence, distilled from history, an essence that had not yet been formally analyzed, and would only be analyzed much later, during the time of Baudelaire and Mallarmé? Taste, on the other hand, crystallizes earlier, and its origin lies far away from the arts. Painting or literature or furniture: they are just some of the many areas of its application. But the source of taste is another: taste is now the mark of initiation, it is applied to everything, and to nothing in particular. It is a seal of existence, the final substitution of a wisdom that it is good taste not even to mention.
Sainte-Beuve, in referring to Antoine Hamilton, fixed the discovery of “netteté,” clarity, between “the end of La Bruyère or Fénelon and the beginning of Jean-Jacques,” a few decades in which something irreversible is crystallized, a form, a hint of Western sobriety that will soon be corrupted, yet retaining its indelible character, in the background of everything. Anyone who is quick to complain how the language of “netteté” has opened the way to the most pretentious insipidness, which still rages, must however remember that the French language “became the language of the perfect honnête homme with Pascal.” Shortly before being condensed, and almost strangled, in the short phrases promoted by Voltaire, the honnête homme had strolled around the empty space between two chairs—and something reminded him still of a meandering flicker, the reflection of clear water only slightly muddied.
Shame, the gesture of referring to that which is not to be named, that which is called taste in the final stage of its life, is what has preserved, beyond its death, the language ordered on the axis of the world. And so it is the greatest act of blasphemy when the axis of the world has become the stratification of society. Everything responds in it, but like mirror with mirror. What once held opposites without coming into sight becomes the only thing that can be sighted. The opposites are momentarily illuminated to give more solidity to the uniform foundation from which they rise. The disappearance of linear culture leaves the word and the other sacrificial objects—sound and image—suspended in air, with no right and no restriction, whereas the new tribe perpetually sacrifices to itself the empty and magnificent spoils of the vanished tribe. Final liberation takes place in a state of total blindness. If nothing can be fixed to an axis, words become constellations of the thing itself. They are the slenderest fibers, easy to crush, but they are the only things to be born without being assisted at any time by the urge of arbitrary will. Such fragility restores the difference that has been canceled out. Now, only that which can be canceled out is to be trusted.
A visitor at the Salon of 1828 happened to come across Talleyrand: “Approaching, or rather dragging himself along between two valets who were dressed in black, we saw a kind of motionless figure who slid with the same step in front of daubs and masterpieces; in front of paintings from Couder to Picot’s Tsarina. I mistook him for a character by Curtius, in which the wax has come out rather too yellow, or for an automaton that was crossing the Louvre to take up its place at the exposition of French industry.” During those final years, Talleyrand’s personal appearance seemed to be suggesting that the whole of history, guided by him, was about to enter the Grévin Wax Museum. The bourgeois age was sick of history—and this sometimes gave it a conceited glee. But it dared not recognize that that sickness was the consequence of an impalpable fact: the cutting of the family knot that tied the present to past history. In Saint-Simon the generations of peers and bastards are entangled in that knot, the dead are still living at Versailles a few apartments away. But with Michelet everything is hallucination—and the present is just an annoyingly faithful hallucination. History as family history is swallowed up forever. Gripped by the bombast of the emancipated, the bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe had “always prided themselves on understanding the whole of history,” as Sainte-Beuve sarcastically observed. But they were ready only to set it out in the illustrations of the Magasin pittoresque. The automaton and the waxwork are the new Watchmen at the Gate. Now they must both receive an offering in order to gain access to the future and to the past.
Throughout his life, from his first appearances in public, Talleyrand was the butt of accusations and insults of every kind. Everyone took pleasure in attacking him, from anonymous gazetteers to rulers, to the new emperor and democratic shopkeepers. The motives, varying each time, were corruption, betrayal, treachery, lying, criminal conduct. At the height of the age of Good Feelings, he had the privilege of being the shining image of Evil. After his death, the historians joined in, right until today. His criminal file is a hefty one: allegations mount, they sometimes corroborate each other. At the age of seventy-three, Talleyrand was publicly struck in the face and kicked by his attacker. When Charles X asked him to explain what had happened, he replied: “Sire, it was a punch.” In the life of a politician, insults don’t matter, but humiliations do. For Talleyrand, through all the reversals of fortune and allegiance, there are few actual moments of embarrassment and even fewer moments of humiliation. The worst of these were not the famous scenes in front of Napoleon, with his threats and insults, but two encounters with the king whom Talleyrand had most certainly reinstalled on the throne—Louis XVIII, King Ubu, the old gamekeeper who used to go around shooting at poachers. And, in his eyes, Talleyrand would always remain a poacher, even though his return to France was thanks to him. As Chateaubriand observed, Louis XVIII, “while not being cruel, was not human.” At their meeting at Mons, in the middle of the night, Talleyrand runs limping after the carriage of the king he hadn’t wanted to pay his respects to during the day. “I’m in no hurry,” he had said, in accordance with his principle that “few political dealings are of such a nature that they cannot be delayed.” And yet that night he was woken with a start, had to forgo his long toilette, ran down into the street, supported on the arm of Monsieur de Ricé, only to hear the king’s brief words of derision: “Prince of Benevento, are you leaving us? The waters will do you good: do let us have your news.” The other encounter was during the second Restoration, when Talleyrand was head of government and asked his king to pledge him greater trust. Vitrolles recounts: “Monsieur de Talleyrand, generally so skilled at soft insinuation, had no doubt reckoned that he needed to use a more peremptory language this time; the king, who was not accustomed to such tones, was shocked and, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, paused in silence for a moment. ‘Well,’ he eventually answered with a quiet air, ‘I shall choose a new government.’” Writing to the Duchess of Courland the following day, Talleyrand would acknowledge the insult he had borne, so far as his style permitted: “His ingratitude is insufficiently concealed.” None of the many new men with whom Talleyrand had dealings, starting with Napoleon, would have been capable of wounding him so coldly: it required that fat, insensitive man whose only real concern was for his own peace of mind; it required a Bourbon to knock down the Prince, almost without realizing it, an act of revenge that came from deep down in his blood.
As literature sets off on its tortuous route to becoming absolute, it joins up with Satanism in a shared passion, in what only the greatest theologians have come to recognize as one of the gravest sins: curiosity. The image of the writer then becomes Milton’s Satan when, “having reached the earthly paradise, he flew straight down onto the tree of life, the tallest tree in the garden, and rested there, looking like a cormorant, without any attempt to re-conquer life, indeed using the tree only to enable him to see farther, for prospect.” This could be the motto for the experimental frenzy that has been throwing forms into continual disarray since the times of Sainte-Beuve: For prospect. And wasn’t it, after all, in that same empty curiosity that the theologians had found the radical sin of the new science?
“The disease of literature and of art, as they call it, is very common these days … Never perhaps in any age, I would suggest, have phrase and color, the falsehood of the literary word, predominated to such an extent over the foundation and over the truth as in these years. The realm of the pen has replaced, literally, the realm of the sword.” Marx would relentlessly follow the emancipation of the exchange value in its every tiny detail; likewise Sainte-Beuve looked long at the emancipation of the word. It was a process in which he felt himself an accomplice, but at the same time it revolted him. The sinuous verbosity of the new writers, who sailed in the editorial waters of the press and unwittingly discovered the industrial use of the word, their elation at realizing that the word was capable of everything and managed to cover everything, seemed, in his view, to secretly descend from the same origins as Chateaubriand’s majestic prose. And they were also the origins of Hugo, who continued to produce page after page with his “rough soul of the strong and cunning Barbarian.” But the ultimate rancor lay elsewhere: from that same odious proliferation came the newness that Sainte-Beuve, in the fearful corner of his mind, was not inclined to follow, even if his farsightedness prevented him from ignoring it: the newness of Baudelaire, then of Flaubert, both entranced by absolute literature. The basest word and the perfect word were soon to mix together in their waters, like in certain gnostic rituals. Sainte-Beuve, who always refused to stray beyond good and evil, was now distressed to realize that around him there was no “foundation” or “truth” on which to rely. And he spoke to himself in his confidential tone, that of the tender cynic: “I was a petty thief in my youth, I’ll be a pirate in old age. Oh, how I would have preferred to be a good literary gentleman, who lives on his lands in a state of poetry!”