THE LANGUOR OF A PARK IN BERRY

The Prince is now in his eighties. He has brought peace once more to Europe by settling the Belgian problem. He is lord of the chateau of Valençay, living under the protection of his beloved niece Dorothée, the Duchess of Dino. He notes down ordinary, liquid words, surfacing behind monotony, the final curtain: “I organize my life so that it is monotonous, I want to close myself up behind domestic concerns. I am not happy, I am not unhappy; my health is not good, but it is not bad; I have no pains nor illnesses; I am fading gently and, if this state of languor doesn’t cease, I don’t know how it might end. But this neither grieves me nor does it frighten me. My business is done. I have planted some trees, built a house, done various other foolish things; isn’t it time to end it?” Yet sometimes, almost unwittingly, he lets slip certain disarming phrases that offer glimpses of his past and his inner thoughts: “Nothing makes me suffer, because I am prepared for everything”; “I do not struggle against destiny.”

The Duke of Orléans, son of Louis Philippe, while staying at Valençay, had occasion to see the plaster casts of the legs of Talleyrand’s women friends. On each was carved the model’s name. Thus, over many decades, the Prince had had woven for them soft stockings. By now they were nearly all dead.

History’s curs threw themselves at Talleyrand, snarling because, it was said, he would never believe in anything, not even in history itself, the ultima dea. Yet the aristocratic Talleyrand once told the creature he most loved, the aristocratic Madame de Dino: “There is nothing less aristocratic than incredulity.”

Talleyrand saw that the difference between the age in which he had been born—an age that was cyclical, ceremonial, though no longer ritualistic—and the experimental age that surrounded him at eighty (and still expected him at least to sort out the Belgian question) lay not just in what was being produced but in what was coming to an end. The Princesse de Vaudémont died on New Year’s Eve 1833. She spent her last years surrounded by animals. She was generous to the poor. Talleyrand had first met her fifty years earlier, with his mistress and patron Comtesse de Brionne. Since then they regarded each other as friends. It was at her house that Talleyrand had made his peace with Fouché and had listened with mild indulgence to the intrigues of Aimée de Coigny. Those teas were held in the “most dangerous place for an unstable government. There, it was safe to plot. The armchairs were so comfortable, the life so pleasant and so inconsequential, that spies used to doze off.” Napoleon, in the meantime, had fallen from power and died; and so, too, once again, had the Bourbons. Casimir, Comte de Montrond—libertine, gambler, crook, ready for any kind of shady enterprise, the man in whom many saw the dark soul of Talleyrand, since they wanted to attribute a dark soul even to the Devil—saw the Prince weep only once, when news of his old friend the Princesse de Vaudémont’s death reached him in London. Talleyrand noted: “It is a feature of these times that certain things in what we call society are coming to a complete end. At one time a famous salon, or a person who was influential in spirit or judgment, was replaced by another. All that we can clearly see today is what is lost. All that will be reborn is still hidden.—And so, despite all the mischief of the young, I find this to be the golden age of the old; and it proves that society itself is coming to an end.” The old man would no longer be the intermediary for experiment, since that experiment ended each time with him. But in this way he became something all the more mysterious and impressive; a stone left abandoned in a field, carved by an unknown hand, in accordance with unknown rules. The physiognomies of these survivors, deprived of all progeny, stand out in solitude: their uselessness is magnificent, the wisdom that perhaps they do not have and they certainly do not wish to transmit looks at us in silence like every memory that accepts self-destruction.

“In the four corners of the room were small triangular Chinese lacquer shelves, on which stood four plaster busts, dressed with black crêpe both to protect them from dust and as a mark of mourning, for these were busts of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Madame Elisabeth, and the Dauphin.” That most terrible of acids, a stale virginity, corrodes the line of the profiles, observed the Catholic roué Barbey d’Aurevilly. The provincial nobility wanders around between mourning and dust, in vast rooms with smoke-stained walls that separate them from the heavy darkness of Normandy. But the Restoration also recalls, evokes, a power that will forever be denied to the revolutionaries who remain always the same: “The Jacobins of France were just as dour, solemn, and pedantic as the Puritans of England.” A Chouan knight, Jacques Des Touches, their ruthless enemy in the Normandy areas of Valognes and Coutances, brought something different to mind: he was dubbed “la Belle Hélène” for his youthful looks, and “the Wasp” for his venomous raids, since he knew how to vanish into thin air and even into the mist and waves of the English Channel with his primitive dugout canoes. There is something erotic about feudal homage, about feudal loyalty, that shuns any democratic devotion: from Chevalier Des Touches to Clark Gable, all of them “gone with the wind.” Guerrilla warfare is an abstract game where, in the end, people even forget for whom they are fighting. The difference is in the eye that stares at a naked body: Aimée de Spens undresses at the window, doubly spied upon: by the Blues of the revolutionary army, who think she is alone, though she is sheltering Des Touches, the Chouan, who is staring at her from within. Years after, the feudal eros still causes Aimée to blush: and when Barbey d’Aurevilly, an indiscreet chronicler, went to visit Des Touches at the hospice at Caen, he found him sitting on a stone, “and those eyes of his, which had scanned the farthest parts of the sea, the mist, the lines of enemies and the smoke of battle, gazed passively, apathetically at the beds of red flowers he had once compared to Aimée and which perhaps, in the abstraction of his dementia, he didn’t even notice.”

In the early days of the Revolution, a cook called Francesco Desnot was often to be seen in the vicinity of any bloodshed. When Marquis de Launey, governor of the Bastille, was repeatedly bayoneted, a voice came from the crowd: “The Nation demands his head to display it to the public.” And the task was given to Desnot, who had just been kicked in the testicles by the governor as he struggled: “Since you have been injured, you can cut off his head.” But Desnot refused the saber that was offered to him: he wanted to cut through Launey’s neck with a small black-handled knife he had in his pocket and used for preparing meat in the kitchen. Eight days later, a similar scene occurred. Berthier’s body was stabbed by many bayonets. But this time it was his heart they wanted to display. Desnot the cook, who wandered around during this time wearing a magnificent dragoon’s helmet he had picked up in the Tuileries, claims he hadn’t acted himself this time. He was simply following the orders of a soldier who, having opened Berthier’s stomach with a saber, cut out the heart and handed it to Desnot with these words: “Justice is done, dragoon. Take them this heart.” Desnot, followed by the small band of accomplices, wanted to show it to Lafayette, who gave a shudder. Then they wandered around the Palais-Royal, still holding the heart. Eventually they sat down to supper in a tavern. They put the heart on the table and started drinking. But meanwhile a crowd had gathered beneath the windows, calling for Berthier’s heart. According to the same account, Desnot threw the heart into the crowd, who then carried it around the garden of the Palais-Royal on a bed of white carnations. He couldn’t say more than that.

Yeshuotl the theologian looked up and said to Monsieur Godeau: “If you really wish to regulate your life and judge history, you should at least know how God spends his days. He has kept a certain place in heaven for himself, four cubits by four, and there he studies the Talmud for the first three hours of the day. From the fourth to the seventh hour, God sits and judges the world. But as he sees that the world is guilty, he gets up from the seat of Justice and goes to sit on the throne of Mercy. During the third part of the day, He sits there and feeds the world, from the rhinoceros to the fleas. During the fourth part of the day, God sits and plays with the Leviathan.”