Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac once boasted that he had “found something many were looking for, namely a certain little art of arranging words and putting them in the right place.” Apart from that “little art,” there is nothing else than “the secret force by which the words are elicited from Heaven, from which, along with it, comes greatness and majesty.”
This is how Sainte-Beuve introduces Guez de Balzac: “No one represents more ingenuously than he the man of letters seen as a type, in his primitive solemnity, in his state of pure preservation and of provincial gentlemanliness, in his absolute respect for all that is the costume and pomp of language, in his perfect ineptitude in everything else.”
“… like Guez de Balzac, who, when the Abbé de Saint-Cyran spoke to him about salvation and grace, could only say: ‘How wonderful!’ To which Saint-Cyran, in exasperation, one day replied: ‘You give me the impression, Monsieur de Balzac, of a man who, on seeing a mark on his face in the mirror, finds nothing else to say except that the mirror is good and fine.’ And Balzac then, struck by the fairness of the comparison and the appropriateness of the imagery, couldn’t resist exclaiming: ‘Oh, how very finely put!’ At which point, Saint-Cyran despaired of him and of all those minds who are all for expression and imagery.”
Guez de Balzac, fancy cocotte of the written word, enjoyed admiring the austerity of Port-Royal from a distance. And Saint-Cyran, the most severe and ferocious of the pères, made him shiver with delight when he showed him contempt and scorn. It once took Balzac three months to compose and hone a letter to Saint-Cyran. From the outset he wove hyperbole and metaphor into it, but along with solid vanity he also displayed the worry of a timid lover: “I know you will not like this language and will frown at this letter of mine.” But he immediately flew off again: “You have to admit, monsieur, that you’re the greatest tyrant in the world today; that your authority will raise fear in every soul and, when you speak, there is no way that people can hold their own opinion if it does not correspond to yours … But one certainly finds pleasure at letting oneself be forced to happiness and falling into the hands of a man who exercises no violence other than one that profits those who suffer it.”
Saint-Cyran propped that long letter on the mantelpiece, unopened. When he himself wrote to Monsieur d’Andilly, he mentioned a “letter from Monsieur de Balzac that I intend to read in three days’ time.” One month later, greatly agitated at having had no reply, Balzac begged a friend to approach Saint-Cyran to ask whether he had ever received the letter. Saint-Cyran replied that he had certainly received it, indeed he apologized for the delay and would put matters right immediately: in front of Balzac’s friend, he wrote a short answer that was much admired.
“The famous writer therefore spent thirty uninterrupted years on his estate, entirely absorbed in the contemplation of himself and his literary work, which had been precocious and brilliant, yet had never matured. His enemies called him Narcissus; indeed he spent all day gazing at himself in the Charente canal, or in that Mirror of rhetoric that seemed so beautiful to him. He never renewed his spirit in the world and through contact with men. He ended up swelling in emptiness. Solitude ruined his spirit, just as the world ruins it for others.”
“Three days before his death, he was still putting the finishing touches to his manuscripts; he had fair copies made for the printers, since he was more concerned about every detail and every minor cul de lampe than about anything else. He died in this way on February 18, 1654, thinking chaotically about his flowery games and his conscience, sincere no doubt, having converted out of compunction, but having converted while holding firm to his defect and his weakness which always reemerged.”
“Nature, history, geography, the universe, existed only to provide him with his single and favorite plunder: metaphor. Let us examine ourselves, let us peer into our own literary conscience. I suspect that more than one eminent modern writer is not as distant to Guez de Balzac as he imagines.” Examining himself closely, Sainte-Beuve suspected he himself belonged to “that sort of spirit that is all for expression and imagery.”
Like a malevolent genealogist who introduces venom into the family history, Sainte-Beuve identified Guez de Balzac as the forefather of style-obsessed writers of French prose. That cult, of such fatuous and ridiculous origin, whose beginnings will always remain uncertain, despite all conjecture, was destined to have a long and eventful life. It no longer gazed at itself in the waters of the Charente, but sailed in all parts, as far as the old Ocean, until it was lost from sight on Rimbaud’s Bateau ivre. In the sentences of Rousseau, leaving aside “his thought and his basic genius,” Sainte-Beuve’s ear recognized “the movement, cadence, caesuras, articulations, and in a way the framework” of Guez de Balzac’s prose. But other undertakings remained: with Chateaubriand, style becomes a magnificent plunder and he subjugates everything to his empire. His “spirit of conquest” did not belong just to politics. “Chateaubriand is a great writer, a great conqueror and invader in matters of style. (This is basically his only unity of passion and feeling, the unity of the stylist); he is neither realist, nor Christian, nor republican, nor socialist, nor … etc., but all this at the same time or in succession, according to what imagery, what more or less beautiful and tempting metaphors there are to be reaped in all fields of ideas: he cannot hold back and throws himself on them: he is a full-blown plunderer, a hoarder of bright and flowery tithes: royal lilies, red carnations, even violets hidden in the grass or knapweed in the cornfields of Beauce, he wanders the countryside searching out everything that seems lovely to pick and, where he has never sown, he gathers his plunder, the variegated flora of all harvests.”
Proust spoke of style as the “sign of the transformation that the writer’s thought imposes on reality.” Once the professorial distinction between “form” and “content” so admired by Sainte-Beuve has been abolished, thought displays itself in what had long passed for mere ornament. After Chateaubriand’s sonorous plundering, in Flaubert the scattered and splintered materials are brought together: “All parts of reality are converted into one and the same substance, with vast surfaces, in glittering monotone. No impurity is left. The surfaces have become reflective. All things are depicted there, but in reflection, without altering the uniformity of substance. Everything that was different has been converted and absorbed.”
“Style,” observed Daumal, “is the mark of what one is on what one does.”
Proust falls upon Sainte-Beuve with a flaming sword: it is the absolute literature of Baudelaire, of Flaubert, of Proust himself that reaps its vengeance on the man who had preferred to kowtow to some representative of the Noailles family or some other ministerial power rather than devoting a further word to Baudelaire. As an avenging angel, Proust has no doubts, but justice suddenly blinds him. Just as Sainte-Beuve had looked with sour suspicion on any claim by literature to be absolute, almost as though it were breaking the rules of the game, so Proust ended up accusing Sainte-Beuve of a conception that, by tortuous ways, brought him close to that of the Recherche. “At no moment in his life does Sainte-Beuve seem to have conceived literature in a truly profound way. He places it on the same level as conversation.” And indeed “his books … have the atmosphere of a series of rooms where the author has invited various interlocutors who are questioned about the people they have known, who bring their own accounts aimed at either contradicting others and, with it, to show how there is also much to criticize in the man one tends to praise, or otherwise at putting anyone who contradicts into another category of spirits.” Here, at the very point where he seeks to demolish Sainte-Beuve’s “method,” Proust was revealing its secret, which was much akin to his own. Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries, accumulated Monday after Monday, but also his Chateaubriand and even his austere Port-Royal, if seen from a distance and in their sequence, turn out, thanks above all to the use of conversation, to be an immense hallucinatory serial novel, packed with voices, allusions, fragments of recollections, gossip, fleeting images, recurring sounds and echoes. And everything flows into one single, slow, relentless current that becomes lost in Sainte-Beuve himself, in his way of living, always fearful, as the last delicate soul. His “method,” which “consists of not separating the man and the work,” certainly didn’t claim to have any theoretical substance. But it was an excellent pretext for enabling him with impunity—while keeping up appearances, sometimes exaggeratedly—to describe hundreds of lives, rooms, landscapes, encounters, elegiac pleasures, flashes of mischief that Sainte-Beuve continued silently dreaming about in his studio. That insidious kind of literary criticism “is almost incompatible with Christian practice,” Sainte-Beuve admitted to himself in his Cahiers, which were for him “the bottom drawer of the desk, a piece of furniture for inner rooms, not to be put on show.” But not so much because it obliged him constantly, against the biblical precept, to “judge, always to judge others!” (Here the slight hypocrisy that he often practiced even followed him to his secret rooms.) It was, instead, a constant temptation, an irresistible temptation, to “reproduce the other, to transform myself into him, as I often do: a basically pagan operation, an Ovidian metamorphosis.” But at least once we come across a frank admission: “There are certain people who take my articles on authors as literary criticism and are upset that these absorb me so much; they do not realize that the criticism in such articles is a very secondary aspect, that I regard them as a portrait, a depiction, the expression of a sentiment; they do not realize that, compelled as I am to write for journals, I have found, and in a certain way invented, the manner for pursuing there, under a somewhat disguised form, the novel and the elegy. But three-quarters of readers, all those of a vulgar mind, don’t even notice it.”
There is a test for all of this. A person is not likely to be a good reader of the Iliad if he doesn’t enjoy lingering over the catalogue of ships: likewise, in approaching Sainte-Beuve, try opening the “table générale et analytique,” which, in more than four hundred pages, provides the list of names referred to in the fifteen volumes of the Causeries. There we find unknown and classical figures, kings and men of letters, women of influence, politicians, socialites, and monks. It is an immense tapestry of voices, opinions, events, relationships, of words lost and recaptured here. Squandering his talent—as Proust put it—week by week, on books that happened to end up on his desk, Sainte-Beuve had spent years, with sticks and moss, building that grand, unwieldy, obsessive construction that resembled a novel, but which he would never have dared present as such. The “table générale et analytique” of the Causeries stands—not just for its size but also for its deep affinity of concept—alongside three other indexes of names: those of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, Balzac’s Comédie humaine, and Proust’s Recherche.
Long before the time of Goethe or Napoleon (who for many reasons are immediately fit for the Reader’s Digest, and it was hardly by chance that they met to exchange unforgettable trivia), the Anthropos of new times, the universal man, who rested his feet in the realm of the heavens and put the planetary variants together in his mind, seeking for the first time not to forget a single one of them, was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. For him, infinitesimal calculus was a prelude to the expansion of the realm of the enlightened and despotic Tsar Peter from Kamchatka to America, the provincial dissent of the churches converged in a prima materia of revelation, and the Jesuits in China had only to persuade Emperor K’ang-hsi to make diligent use of optical instruments so that Confucian wisdom could divest itself of its overly Asiatic dregs. This all-encompassing man was buried in Hannover “like a highwayman,” as his friend Ker of Kersland recorded. The only mourner to follow the coffin of that first cosmic secretary and secret counselor of the divinity was his unremarkable private secretary Eckhart.
The physiocratic François Quesnay, an abrupt man with a certain “monkey-like manner,” was Madame de Pompadour’s physician. He lived in a cramped mezzanine over the apartments of the king’s favorite, where the politics of France was discussed each day. Often he invited Diderot, d’Alembert, Duclos, Helvétius, Turgot, and Buffon to dine with him. Madame de Pompadour, who could not receive the same guests for reasons of etiquette and decency, would sometimes go up to her physician’s rooms to greet them, and remained there in conversation.
Louis XV ennobled Quesnay in Madame de Pompadour’s apartment. He took three pansies from a vase manufactured by Sèvres (founded with the support of Madame de Pompadour since, until then, France had no expertise in the new art of porcelain production and had been importing 500,000 livres’ worth each year from Saxony and Japan) and said: “Here, Quesnay, I ennoble you and give you a coat of arms that speaks.” It marked the birth of political economy.
One of the events of world importance in the years shortly before the Revolution was the final sanctioning of the alliance between snobbery and the left. At the time there was no talk of either snobbery or the left, but suddenly the most influential and often the most elegant ladies began discussing custom duties and Virginia tobacco, spinning mills and credit, and made even some stabbing reference to net output. General interest (alas, though interest nonetheless) became the center of conversation, obscuring that unfettered dissipation of esprit, as had happened up to then. From that moment, high snobbery, which always needs some discreet way of concealing itself, knew what cloak to hide beneath: the Good Cause, whether social, musical, humanitarian, avant-garde, erotic, or Asiatic. But the star of the Righteous shone from the brows of ladies as they welcomed guests to their dinners, to their parties, to their leisurely picnics.
The idea of equality comes from initiation: only through a highly artificial process—as initiation is—can “equality,” a condition nonexistent in nature, be achieved. After 1789, from the moment when Masonic emblems become a basis and assumption of civic life, their nature as emblems or their initiatory origins is no longer recognized, the world of inversion has established its ground. There is a double movement: all are initiates, but initiation itself disappears once and for all as a point of reference. It remains only in the perpetual shadow of the conspiracy and will reemerge from the libraries, with the great academic ethnographers.
Already at the beginning of the Revolution, and then during each of its canonical phases—apart from the Terror, not surprisingly, since from then on, history will have to choose one of two ways: either Talleyrand or the Terror—each of the events that occurs needs an ultimate protection, a malevolent guardian who holds its hand and helps it to write new pacts: Talleyrand. On each occasion he helps the chaos to assume an acceptable form. When an act has an excessive and almost paralyzing symbolic power, we discover that pale hand of his in the shadows, supporting the hand of others, of many others, of a succession of friends or enemies. He is the person responsible for the final version of Article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: “The law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to contribute personally, or through their representatives, in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, positions, and employments, according to their capacity…”