I was born where the earth of Odessa
is blacker.
French governess, Austrian tutor.
I traveled throughout Europe with my doctor
and an assistant for card-playing.
Years later I found myself off limits
with my easel in no-man’s-land.
Allied command, Russian command.
All wanted to arrest me.
Want to see Europe? Then go to Spa: “There’s no better vantage point than those places where the waters flow.” The Prince of Ligne had a saber wound and wanted to take a look, always curious, footloose, with little interest in his own affairs, impulsive, since he knew his chances were good. What he saw was the changing allegory of Europe, depicted by a continental Hogarth, the improbable and precarious world that history had raised and abandoned to the flow: “I arrive in a large hall where I see amputees with their arms on display, cripples with their legs on display; ridiculous names, titles, and faces; amphibian animals of the Church and of society who leap and run behind a column of Englishmen; hypochondriac lords who stroll around sadly; flirtatious girls from Paris who arrive with great giggles of laughter, trying to appear friendly and casual, and hoping this is the way to do it; young men from all countries, who pretend to be Englishmen and imagine they are, talking through clenched teeth, dressed in riding outfits, their hair curled up, black and greasy, and Jewish-looking side-whiskers as far up as their filthy ears; French bishops with their nieces; an obstetrician with the Order of Saint Michael; a dentist with the Order of the Golden Spur; dance and song masters dressed as Russian majors, Italians with the rank of colonel in the Polish army, carrying behind them young bears from that country; Dutchmen scanning the gazettes for the currency rates; thirty self-proclaimed knights of Malta; sashes of every color, left and right, and in their buttonholes; badges of every shape and size, arrayed on both sides; fifty knights of Saint Louis; elderly duchesses returning from their walk, with thick walking sticks à la Vendôme and three inches of powder and rouge; several marquises returning from playing cards in the country; ghastly and suspicious faces, in the middle of a mountain of ducats, they were devouring everything that was put down tremulously on the green baize; one or two electors in hunting dress, with gold braid and knife; a few princes incognito, who would have produced no greater effect under their true names; several old generals and officers on leave for wounds they’d never received; several Russian princesses with their doctors; and Palatine or Castilian princesses with their almoners; a few Americans; some local burgomasters; fugitives from all the prisons of Europe; charlatans of every kind; opportunists of every sort; abbés from every country; several poor priests, tutors to young boys of Liège; several English archbishops with their wives; twenty sick people who dance like mad things to restore their health; forty lovers, or presumably so, who sweat and fret; and sixty women who dance the waltz, of varying degrees of beauty or innocence, skill and coquetry, modesty and voluptuousness.”
CHEVALIER DE B***: It is extraordinary to observe, first of all, how easily history disappears. The dead are wiped away, their monuments have become traffic islands, their books are grassy country tombs. Everyone who lives is the barbarian of what has just lived. If we consider the past, we encounter no more than an obstinate reverberation of images, of rasping voices. And in the middle, vast opaque soundless areas. The invisible presences are grateful if we sense this awesome distance, this mighty silence. They feel no greater disdain than for those who treat the past with cordial familiarity.
“What can thought do now?” asked the Master. “Hide itself,” he replied, and disappeared.
Conversation is an art that its great masters, its great mistresses, considered lost even as they were speaking. Madame de Staël’s lament over a certain tone that could no longer be found comes several decades after that of Madame du Deffand. It would therefore be pointless searching for a time when that fleeting essence had not already in some way vanished. But it is clear what took it away forever. It was husbands—as Stendhal declared, with touching emphasis. If we had to find one feature that typified the immeasurable difference in behavior between the age of Louis XVI and that of Louis XVIII, it would be this: that before the guillotine women appeared alone in society, whereas just a few years later—and this began with Napoleon, who “in 1804 brought pruderie into fashion”—it wasn’t possible to see a young woman in a salon without being “certain of finding her husband playing écarté in some corner. This eternal and constant presence of the husband, while most laudable and moral, struck the death blow to the art of conversation … The husband stifles that spirited abandonment that produces malice, innuendo, witticisms, which, though innocent in itself, cannot be expressed in the presence of authority established by law. In wit, in satire, in gaiety, in short in social comedy, there is invariably some spirit of opposition. Many people make fun of established authority: by nature, they are rebels. Not to mention how the eternal presence of the same person impedes creative inspiration. How can you tell a story or an anecdote if you’re within earshot of a witness, who is there—and you well know it—listening to the twists that you’ll be adding to give a certain effect or to liven up your account? How can you drop into a conversation, with that necessary air of improvisation, the spicy news you’ve picked up during the day if you’re being watched by someone who was perhaps there with you? It’s impossible. When the husband opens the door, the art of conversation must inevitably leave by the window.” Talleyrand was always surrounded by women who disregarded their husbands in the Stendhalian sense, and often in every other sense. It all began at Reims, on the day of his great entrance into society: “The sacre of Louis XVI marks the beginning of my connections with various women remarkable for their various gifts, women whose friendships have never ceased for a single moment to cast their spell on my life. I refer here to the Duchesse de Luynes, the Duchesse de Fitz-James, and the Vicomtesse de Laval.” Some were his lovers, others disappeared over the years, others were added, but as though they had always been around him. At the beginning, they were insolent and adventurous; at the end, they were decrepit and frivolous. But they always watched over him like a bodyguard that enclosed the Prince in a magical circle of soft fabric.
François Fénelon soon realized how hard it was to be a Taoist at the Court of France. Esprit had now forsaken that uncontrollable power that ubi vult spirat and now became a blend of relentless study and rampant free thought. Whether it was etymology or gossip, everything had to be subjected to its furious scrutiny. It was the invisible observatory, but from which everything could supposedly be seen. A great psychologist, who scorned psychology, Fénelon immediately recognized what was the endless process to which new disciples of the “I, which is the god of secular people,” submitted themselves: it was a machine that would roll them as far as Nietzsche and Freud, as far as those tireless genealogists lying in wait at the threshold of every beginning, every story, to reveal everything (but Nietzsche eventually saw that everything was veiled). And, at that point, only a few scraps of the I would be left. No one who followed that path would ever find peace, for “the Lord exists not in agitation.” The whole of the Enlightenment is anticipated by Fénelon in a few lines. “He who seeks to reassure himself all the time that he is acting according to reason, and not through passion or mood, would be wasting time for action, he would spend his life dissecting his own heart and would never achieve what he is searching for: since he would never be sure that the mood or the passion, disguised beneath specious reasons, are not making him do what he would seem to be doing purely out of reason.”
Fénelon explained to his correspondents that it was less important to mortify and punish themselves (and, in particular, to give in to “scruples”) than it was to carry out a more difficult task—to lose all respect for esprit.
Where there is esprit there is the I—and “the I, which has to be renounced, is not a nothingness or phantom in the air; it is our intellect which thinks, it is our will which does as it wishes out of self-love.” Esprit is split into two breaths and two rival lights: one immediately blows out the candle of the other. “Reasoners, scholars without faith, extinguish their inner spirit as the wind blows out the candle.” “I have always observed that your respect for the spirit is rooted in your heart and you do not let it go. Yet this is precisely what the spirit of grace most often extinguishes when allowed to act freely.” One single image dominated Fénelon’s conduct: water, a feminine water, which has no form itself but takes every form, always transparent, with no flavor. As archbishop, he was the water that flowed through the crevices of Versailles. Saint-Simon, who could study physiognomies in the same way that Fénelon discerned spirits, saw his face as a mobile and liquid surface: “This prelate was a tall, thin man, a fine figure, pale, with a large nose, and eyes from which fire and spirit flowed like a torrent, and of such a physiognomy that I have never seen the like, and which couldn’t be forgotten, even when seen only once. It gathered everything within it, and its contrasts did not clash. It had gravity and gallantry, seriousness and gaiety; in it one perceived the doctor, the bishop, the great lord; uppermost, as in his whole person, was refinement, spirit, grace, decorum and above all nobility.” It is no surprise that this exterminator of esprit had such an abundance of it, even if he was “a man who never wished to have more spirit than those to whom he spoke.” This indeed was his art of dissimulation: enemy of “all the extremes, even in goodness,” since they “bring with them refined affectation,” he displayed so much esprit in order to appear more mediocre, more akin to the ordinary courtier, who was ever desperate for esprit. His worldly perfection, before which Saint-Simon bowed, had become for Fénelon a vehicle that made it possible to transmit, intact and unrecognized, that nameless and formless “foundation” for everything, which intelligence and delicacy were constantly dissipating. “Nothing can match the courtesy, wisdom, pleasantness with which he received everyone.” But this immaculate hospitality was the context for a work of vast destruction: “Be a true nothing in everything and everywhere; but nothing need be added to this nothing. On nothing there is no hold. And nothing to lose. The true nothing never resists, because it doesn’t have an I that looks after it.” Saint-Simon observes that it is “incredible to what extent [Fénelon] became the idol of military men.”
The Lumpen, evoked so stridently by Stirner, lurked in every crevice of society. They were the shadow of history, numberless downtrodden and silent existence, “the immense renegade of Yesterday,” glimpsed behind the weight of the “past that will not go away,” that snatches away scraps of the present “with its black claws” and “spews up its old night.” But this was just the beginning. Stirner was not particularly familiar with nature, beyond Charlottenburg. When the Lumpen crept in, passing from underground to impregnate the soft earth, he could no longer follow them. He fell silent. Victor Hugo, the poet of matter, who had become so through the practice of spiritualism, took his place. The epos of paupers flowed from his “mouth of shadow.” Tipping tables had given Hugo a metaphysical narrow-mindedness, but one full of images that pervaded everything and jumbled his good intentions with the bad intentions of Maldoror, until it reached a point of coruscating neutrality. In the whirl of transformation every object, every plant, every dish turned out to be a place of expiation, every landscape a place of reclusion, a reliquary. Replying to Marquis Coriolis d’Espinouse, who was shocked to see that he had fallen “into total Jacobinism,” Hugo mocked “that old rheumatism called royalty.” But his was a dark, tormented humor, and presupposed some apparition: “The whole dread jail of outcasts rises up.” While strolling in Jersey, among rocks and heather, he would see this jail of outcasts as the cosmos itself. “Oui, ton fauve univers est le forçat de Dieu. / Les constellations, sombres lettres de feu, / Sont les marques du bagne à l’épaule du monde—Yes, your wild universe is God’s prisoner / The constellations, grim letters of fire, / They are the brand of prison at the shoulder of the world.” The cosmos drained by crude mechanists came back to life, to bathe itself with souls. They inhabited every blade of grass, like a boundless jail of ghosts. “L’archipel ténébreux des bagnes s’illumine—The dark archipelago of prisons is lit.” Those beings cast out of communal life, Lumpen, gueux, paupers, welcomed the grandees and kings of the earth as guests in a vaster dwelling place. Caiaphas is a bramble, Pilate a reed, Alaric a “scarlet-throated” volcano. “Grains of sand are kings, blades of grass emperors,” all fixed into a tangible form that groans—and could just as well be a chair or a window frame. Hugo proclaims “the outcast universe.” Out of the poet’s hundred and fifty thousand lines and more, Hofmannsthal, with his perfect ear, marked out certain words: fauve, hagard. Fauve is the universe as “God’s prisoner.” And, after a brief cataract of words, Hugo writes: “L’univers est hagard.” A word from falconry, hagard comes from Hagerfalk, the wild falcon that is too ferocious to be tamed. Time has led the word to new meanings: “bewildered,” “afflicted by a sinister presence,” like Lumpen, these wild falcons that circle the streets of the city. But those streets are now drawn across the celestial vault.
The Liber Mundi that the monk was contemplating had clear, luminous letters. Each creature was a copy transcribed from the great Koran: the cosmos. Every herb in the cloister found its place on a written page, for “nature has only one script” and all was easily ascribable to that script. Every book opened on the lectern was in a way the same book, each letter filled Saint Jerome’s cell with a hum of correspondences, while the meek lion lay at his feet, guarding a rugged savanna of parchments. Reading absorbed every other occupation, even those of the liturgy: recognizable in the syllables of the hymns were extracts from a reading of the seasons, records of the celestial cycles. Sainte-Beuve was a young man from the provinces, often gloomy, who had abandoned his medical studies to embark on a literary career. From the outset he had listened to every voice, but couldn’t fully understand the meaning of the verb believe. And yet he realized that dwelling within him, like a duplicitous alien, was a “parasitic religiosity.” Incapable of any faith, he observed in himself, with a naturalist’s wonder, the vibrations of “Christian sensibility.” He, too, belonged to that species of men of whom he wrote: “A sober life, an overcast sky, a certain mortification of desire, a pensive and solitary manner, all this penetrates them, softens them, and inclines them imperceptibly toward belief.” But something that inclines toward belief is far removed from something that demands belief. In his case, in fact, it ruled it out. The elegiac Sainte-Beuve, who stared out at the bare courtyard behind his study, soon became the rôdeur who prowled the streets of the great city, racked by the urge for some feminine tenderness; the railleur who cunningly navigated the corridors of newspaper offices; the causeur who was well practiced in dropping a small dose of flattery or poison. And something in him said that this complex of vices formed the core of literary civilization, and would allow nothing to be worshipped but them. With the spontaneous cynicism of the inventor of forms, Sainte-Beuve long made use of his “Christian sensibility” to attune himself to Port-Royal. But it was a question of ear and certainly not of doctrine. He found that he admired Bayle for a certain “basic indifference,” for his ability to move over whatever kind of terrain, provided that it was typographical. “He’s not afraid of mésalliances; he goes everywhere, through the streets, gathering information, talking to people; curiosity attracts him and he doesn’t say no to the pleasures that offer themselves.” A curiosity all the more eager since it was based ultimately on indifference, a case of faith in an irrepressible faithlessness. Was he a skeptic? Or a mystic? Something in those descriptions, however, was relevant to Sainte-Beuve himself. In the end, in both cases, everything depended on one single experience: reading, that subtle mania that no longer sought to find, in the transparency of the page, even the characters of the Liber Mundi but expected a few futile answers from futile and anonymous books: “Can you tell me, please, / In what corner and among what clutter / I might possibly find some trace / Of Monsieur Malherbe’s long stay / At Carpentras, or of Ménage’s expression / when he performed his role Chez Sévigné? / Did Monsieur Conrart know Latin / Better than Jouy? Did he wear out fewer quill pens / Than Suard? Did Docteur Guy Patin have more than ten thousand volumes?” But one day Sainte-Beuve felt he was approaching something that seemed to be his own point of equilibrium. A vision that he didn’t welcome and to which he yielded through exhaustion. For him, as for the monks who compiled herbaria and for whom, after all, he had no interest, everything was a book. But liturgical devotion manifested itself in him as “basic indifference,” a willingness to read those countless and now grubby characters anywhere, without distinction, without purpose, regardless, with no hope of encountering at any point the beginning or the end of the book, which indeed no longer existed: “Perhaps as a feigned excuse for my indolence, perhaps because now I have a deeper perception of the principle that everything in the end is the same, I have reached the point of considering that, whatever I do or don’t do, whether I labor in my study on a specific work or fritter my energies on many articles or waste my time in company, letting my hours be taken up by the importunate, the needy, by appointments, in the street, by anyone and anything, nevertheless I never stop doing just one single thing, reading just one single book, an infinite, perpetual book of the world and of life, which no one reads to the end, of which the wisest people decipher many pages; I therefore read all the pages of it that are presented to me, at full tilt, backwards, what does it matter! I never stop. The richer the blend of colors, the more frequent the interruptions, the more I am drawn into this book where you always find yourself in the middle; but the advantage is to have read it by opening it in all sorts of places.”
What are the dead for us, if not—before all else—books? Of all forms of prehistoric religion, that which seems most remote and most difficult to understand today is the cult of the dead, their perpetual presence in every occurrence of life. But for ancient man, the most remote and most difficult aspect in our cult would have been the use of books. And yet both forms converge. Solidified into portable objects that accompany us, prey on us, haunt us, assuage us, the dead have established themselves on the written page: their power has never diminished, though it has undergone a wondrous change.