A shadow line separates us from every ancien régime: the moment when the single Palais-Royal was dispersed into a myriad of arcades. The galleries of royalty, the “superbes dehors du Palais Cardinal” celebrated by Corneille, were taken over by shops, gambling dens, coffeehouses, brothels: the city’s gossip whirled around the gardens, the Rumors intensified. Everything took place in a quadrangular epiphany, like a final fling before the curtain of character drama came down. There, in that indiscreet swarm, everyone—from the noble libertine to the ignorant rustic—found their allotted place among the numerous folds of the hierarchic fan of courtesans. By the time that Napoleon installed the Council of State at the Palais-Royal, the place was already inhabited by invisible carcasses—and their remains were soon abandoned to an enemy power: the Administration. A few years later, the arcades began, furtively, then frantically, to be opened up to the streets of Paris. Here, the essences of the Palais-Royal, which had now withdrawn into the shade, spread once again into a suffocating and artificial space, multiplied into the city. Benjamin’s divining eye would have recognized the entrance to the Hell of the new world, facilis descensus Averni: “In ancient Greece, there were places from which it was said you could go down to the underworld. Our waking existence is also a land that, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld, full of places barely visible, from which dreams flow. In the daytime we pass in front of them without suspecting anything, but as soon as we go to sleep we return swiftly toward them, groping in the darkness, and lose ourselves in those dim corridors. By the light of day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades (which are galleries that lead into the city’s past existence) emerge unnoticed onto the streets. But at night, under the obscure masses of houses, their denser darkness becomes distinct and frightening; and the late-evening pedestrian hurries past—unless, that is, we have encouraged him to wander along that narrow alley.” Paris, after the impudent exhibition of the Palais-Royal, experienced its industrial prehistory by rediscovering traces of the mundus in the obscurity. As at the foundation of Rome, even before the city had been given a name, in the “round pit” called mundus there were placed—says Plutarch—“the first fruits of all that is good according to tradition and necessary according to nature,” and in that pit was seen a door to the underworld (deorum tristium et inferum quasi ianua); thus the arcades were crowded with the first fruits of trade of varying kinds, under glazed vaults, between the marble tables and wrought iron columns. If the “soil of Rome was scattered with openings to the underworld,” Paris opened onto mercenary cavities, where “the Sirens of the gaslights would sing […] on one side, while oil-lamp odalisques offered enticements from the other.” But the adventures that occur here are above all the adventures of objects: mild dominators, immersed in the stagnant air of shop windows, they soon abandon themselves to arbitrary alliances: they discover “secret affinities: palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo, prostheses and letter-writing manuals find themselves here together, after a long separation.” In an extract from Cato quoted by Festus, we read: “The mundus takes its name from the mundus [vault of heaven] that is above us; indeed, as I have managed to learn from those who have entered there, it has a form similar to that of the other mundus.” For the arcade, the celestial and subterranean vaults do not exist, apart from the milky light that reflects onto the shop displays and onto their alluring windows. The Romans prudently considered that it was not propitious to start a war on one of the three days of the year when the pit of the first-fruits was open. It was said then: mundus patet (the world is open). The Parisians of the Restoration and of Louis Philippe regarded the arcades above all to be a practical and lucrative invention for those who wished to flâner safe from bad weather, as well as a way of facilitating seduction. For Benjamin they seemed like a collection of oneiric fragments that we could visit at last in a state of wakefulness. Writing about the arcades, he repeated a ritual gesture of the foundation of Rome: having dug the mundus, says Plutarch, “each person brought a piece of earth from his own country and threw it in among the first-fruits, mixing everything together.” The land of romanticism finally encountered that which it had never known: the Big City.
The great book inspired by the arcades is not, as Benjamin suggests, Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris (however captivating it might be), but Céline’s Mort à crédit, with its stories about passage des Bérésinas (which was passage Choiseul), where Cèline’s mother had her shop. She mended lace, often for customers who were vaporous and opulent, quick to pilfer some article of lace by sleight of hand; she cooked only pasta with butter, so that no smell would impregnate her delicate merchandise; she moved anxiously, on a lame leg, in a suffocating space of scraps and oddments. But Benjamin didn’t include Mort à crédit among his disparate sources for the Arcades Project, and perhaps he didn’t read it. Benjamin was immediately defensive and suspicious in relation to Céline: he grouped him, improbably, with Benn and Jung as a representative of “clinical nihilism in literature,” to which he intended to devote a lecture. But for Benjamin those names are held together not so much by “nihilism,” about which everyone talks, as by alarm bells that sound in their writing: shimmering behind Jung’s ponderous and pseudo-scientific prose were erratic, nondialectical, intrusive images. Recognizable in Benn was a sneer at culture that was diametrically opposed to that of Brecht. Benjamin had decided by then to submit to Brecht’s malicious cane—and had no choice but to refuse all others. Finally, in Céline everything was dragged along, from the outset, by a dark current that swept away every momentary island of refuge, every possibility of another story that was not the “petite musique” of gradual disintegration. And yet, if there is a poetics of the arcades, almost a secretion from those highly artificial places, it is that which young Destouches, the child scowling at the back of the shop, had silently absorbed from his mother: “My mother is still working. I remember, in the arcade, when she was younger, the enormous pile of lace to be mended, the fantastic mound that always cluttered up the table—a mountain of stuff to do for just a few francs. It never ended. It was for something to eat. It gave me nightmares, and her as well. It has always remained in my head. Like her, I always have on my table an enormous pile of pending Horror that I’d like to piece together before putting an end to it.”
Historians are unanimous in condemning the ease with which Talleyrand appropriated money in his dealings, obtaining it from the most varied sources. Those large sums were called douceurs. His contemporaries were already extremely curious to know the details about his blatant levies. Barras occupies seven pages of his Mémoires with a list of “Pourboires diplomatiques et affaires de Talleyrand, prince de Bénévent”—a list he claims to have received from Madame de Staël. Adding together the various figures produces the stately sum of 117,690,000 francs (up to 1815, and excluding the transactions carried out through his wife and his emissaries).
But no historian has managed to show that Talleyrand actually conducted any important negotiation because of the douceurs he was about to receive. He obtained money, a lot of money, for things he would have done anyway. In this respect he was following the practice of his friend-and-foe Mirabeau. He knew better than anyone else that history had moved from the world of the douceur to that of douceurs. As a result, he felt it appropriate to introduce a change to the well-established diplomatic practice of douceurs: he no longer accepted “snuff boxes or gems, as was customary, but only cash.” A snuff box, for him, would have been an insult, as well as superfluous. Money, on the other hand, was the instrument that could be most safely concealed, a device that kept the world at a certain distance and blinded it with gold dust, making it temporarily helpless. The age of the douceur and that of douceurs shared one single rule of crucial importance: Talleyrand spelled it out one day to Vitrolles in order to explain to him why Bourrienne hadn’t been appointed as prefect of police: “What do you expect? Bourrienne wasn’t there. He was on his way back from Hamburg in a dilapidated carriage; a wheel broke on the outskirts of Paris, and he lost twenty-four hours having it repaired. That’s what it means to be a poor devil. So Bourrienne, even if he had a revenue of two hundred thousand livres, would still be a poor devil. You see, first and foremost, you mustn’t be a poor devil.” This was his clear and down-to-earth comment on the words of the Gospel “Unto everyone who hath shall be given.”
The douceurs then had to vanish, promptly, on the gaming table, in speculative losses, in the perfection of savoir vivre. Carême was still his cook. Talleyrand had to auction off his beloved library three times. On the last occasion, the sale of his Bibliotheca splendidissima in 3,465 lots brought him 210,000 francs. By then he was sixty-two. On the day of Talleyrand’s death the newspapers were full of solemn and vapid comments. Stendhal read them in Marseilles, with irritation. That same evening he hurried off a piece of his own on the death of Talleyrand, “out of impatience … out of indignation at the high-flown phrases.” He was “tired to death,” and whirling in his mind was the picture of the Spanish dancer Dolores Seral, whom he had just been admiring. But the first sentence of this incomplete and private epitaph scotches all mental sloth, and goes straight to the amiably indecorous truth: “M. de Talleyrand was a man of immense spirit who always found himself short of money.”
While Johann Caspar Schmidt was growing up in the provincial obscurity of Germany—and had yet to become Max Stirner, the author of the only book in the West to express the idea of revolt in its chemically pure state—the old Talleyrand talked at length with Dorothée, prior to sleepless nights in which “one thinks of terribly many things.” Once he paused to remember his days at the seminary: “I was so unhappy that I went through the first two years at the seminary without hardly speaking to anyone. I lived alone, in silence, withdrew during periods of recreation to a library where I searched out and devoured the most revolutionary books I could find, feeding on the history of revolt, sedition and devastation in all countries. I was angry at society, and couldn’t understand why, due to the fact of being afflicted by a childhood infirmity, I was condemned not to occupy the natural place that belonged to me.”
Angry at society: they are words that no one would expect from the mouth of Talleyrand. And yet they are confirmed, with subtle variations, by what Talleyrand himself wrote in his Mémoires: “At the seminary I felt a sadness which, in a sixteen-year-old, has few comparisons. I established relations with no one. I did nothing except in bad humor. I felt resentful toward my superiors, toward my parents, toward the institutions, and above all toward the power that was given to social conventions to which I found myself obliged to submit.
“I spent three years at Saint-Sulpice, hardly speaking to anyone; people thought I was supercilious, they often reproached me … I was no more than a quiet young man, extremely miserable and inwardly vexed … The library at Saint-Sulpice, endowed by Cardinal de Fleury, was vast and well organized. I spent my days there reading the great historians, the personal lives of statesmen, moralists, a few poets. I devoured accounts of journeys. A new land, the dangers of a storm, the portrayal of a disaster, the description of countries where evidence could be seen of great transformations, sometimes conflicts, all of this strongly attracted me. At times it seemed that something about my situation was less hopeless when I observed these great voyages, these great disasters, descriptions of which filled the writings of modern navigators.” By a clever sleight of hand, Talleyrand had transformed what he had called revolt and sedition in private conversation into travels and storms in his public memoirs. Weren’t they, after all, the same thing? Weren’t they perhaps equivalent forms of that “torrent” that prevents us from ever resting on secure ground? About Max Stirner, during his years of adolescence, we have only a few notes from teachers in the records of schools that were certainly not as distinguished as the seminary at Saint-Sulpice. But the whole of The Ego and Its Own is impregnated with the memory of long, bitter imaginings of revolt. Stirner and Talleyrand, when they came out into the open, both found themselves moving forward into a whirling nothingness. Stirner belonged to nothing from the very beginning, and had to represent it in its purity and in its absoluteness; Talleyrand was nothing inasmuch as he had been ousted from his “natural place” which continued to exist for him in the midst of every conflict: a legitimate place, representing an order that could disrupt neither tempest nor revolt. He never fell, however, into the crude ingenuousness of thinking that such order could be identified with any kind of social system. And yet any system was bound to relate to such order. This was a reflection of the mysterious words of Saint Paul: “Non est enim potestas nisi a Deo—There is no power that does not come from God.” Throughout his life, he was accompanied by a premonition. He sensed, like a faint perfume, that behind the world, behind the fury of its waves, there was the inaccessible “hidden ocean,” celestial and terrestrial, perceivable through the distant vibrations of the waves: it was there that the prop of ṛta was born, it was there that it continued to rise, day after day, with the appearance of the Dawn.
For Talleyrand, the last negotiating table was his deathbed. He had prepared that deal well in advance, as always; and yet without anyone knowing anything about it. On the death of his wife, now heavily overweight, who had been an alluring adventuress in India, Talleyrand had few words to say: “This much simplifies my position.” It was the signal that marked the beginning of his final moves. Cold and impenetrable, as legend dictated, he planned out his slow game over more than three years. One day he remarked casually to Dorothée: “‘I wouldn’t mind seeing Abbé Dupanloup … he’s our confessor,’ he added with a half-serious smile.” The abbé was invited a few weeks later to Hôtel Saint-Florentin, and heard the Prince recall what the dying Fénelon had said about Saint-Sulpice (“I know nothing more apostolic, nothing more venerable…”). Talleyrand, too, had been educated there, in the years of his dark and dreamy adolescence, when he played “the little Bonaparte”: years that he now claimed were the happiest period of his life. With the Church, through Abbé Dupanloup, and Dorothée, who acted here as his minister, the sovereign Talleyrand, in the last four months of his life, negotiated a “formula of reparation.” There were two impending obstacles: first, as bishop, he had voted in favor of the impious civil constitution of the clergy and had ordained several constitutional bishops; and second, having been reduced to the lay communion by a papal brief of Pius VII, he had married, contrary to his unrescinded vow of priestly chastity. Sheets of corrected and recorrected paper passed several times from Hôtel Saint-Florentin to the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur de Quélen, an uncompromising Breton who, for years, had been asking the Prince to carry out such a gesture. One moment that acquires a meaning of its own in regard to that negotiation was the Prince’s last public appearance. “Carried in the arms of two liveried manservants,” wearing a tight black frock coat and billowing cravat that made him look like a Merveilleuse from the time of the Directory, the eighty-four-year-old Talleyrand climbed the steps of the Institut to deliver the funeral oration for a second-rank diplomat, Count Reinhard. Once again, he had a clear and definite reason for performing what might have seemed a whimsical act of homage. It would be his “public farewell,” carried out in his inimitable style (“C’est du Voltaire! C’est du meilleur Voltaire!” exclaimed Victor Cousin after the oration, gesticulating with an abstracted scholarly excitement). But above all, it would contain a message. With superb clarity, Talleyrand identified the importance in Reinhard’s life of theological study, the same that had guided him in his own youth. Launching into a detailed list of the great diplomatic theologians who had glorified the history of France, the Prince let it be understood that the art of diplomacy, when seen from a certain angle, appeared as a branch of that wisdom held by those who know the affairs of God. “I once heard him say that he regarded himself as one of the leading theologians of his time,” a faithful observer, Baron von Gagern, had written years before. A paradoxical claim, which now underlined his arguments. A copy of his oration on Reinhard was delivered the following morning to Monseigneur de Quélen and to Abbé Dupanloup.
It is as pointless asking whether Talleyrand’s wish to recant was “sincere” as it would be to ask whether the final documents of the Congress of Vienna were “sincere.” It is clear that Talleyrand’s prime motive behind the negotiation was not religious but ceremonial. In his last years, Talleyrand was aware of the risk he was facing. On his death, he could be refused a religious burial, he could be exposed to the ignominy of a civil funeral. That was the only fear he had. He told his doctor: “Je n’ai qu’une peur, celle des inconvenances—I have only one fear, that of impropriety.” Throughout his life, Talleyrand had been scandal itself, but that scandal had always had the power to confer order, to escape from every “inconvenance.” And now, on his death, that precarious image was in danger of falling to pieces in the face of the solemn refusal of the Church. In his final act, he would have appeared like someone cast out of the most ancient order. Reading Fénelon, Talleyrand dwelt on one passage: “Let us cast our eye on the Church, namely on that visible society of children of God that has been preserved throughout time: it is the kingdom that has no end. All other powers rise and fall: after having amazed the world, they vanish.” Talleyrand wrote in the margin: “Magnificent!” His place was in the kingdom that has no end. “I have to do something with regard to Rome, I know,” he commented to Dorothée.
But, there again, recantation could also undermine the whole of his life, repudiating it. And here Talleyrand’s genius is revealed for the last time. In politics, the timing of acts is more crucial than the acts themselves. The politician is one who has time on his side. And Talleyrand had always held a relationship of brazen faith with the power of time. In his politics, delay was the esoteric weapon. This time, Talleyrand decided to push it to the limit, he decided to make it almost coincide with the limit, which is death itself. “La plupart des choses se font en ne les faisant pas—Most things are done by not being done”: this purest Western translation of the wu wei of Lao-tzu, Talleyrand’s governing maxim, was another secret that he one day confided to von Gagern. This maxim was now given its most rigid application: let matters be done at the final moment before death, and indeed decide that it shall be done this way. Already on the point of death, on the penultimate day of his life, Talleyrand refused four times, with worldly civility, to sign his recantation. And he eventually announced that he would sign it the following day, between five and six in the morning. He signed just as six o’clock was striking, after which Dorothée slowly read the two pages of the document, emphasizing every word, in front of eminent witnesses who had been summoned on that May dawn. More than a recantation, it was a document of submission to the authority of the Church, verba generalia that wrapped the offending memories in a mantle.
His ordeal was to postpone a gesture, in the throes of death, to the right moment when there was no turning back. Tortured by the “enormous sore” of the anthrax that made it impossible for him to lie on his back, supported under his arms by two people who were alternated every two hours, with his shoulders on a pillow “that was held suspended with ropes from the ceiling,” Talleyrand continued to play the gambler: he wagered on the hour of his own death, laying a stake on his last moment of lucidity. Once again, his final gesture would be a signature. A tiny gesture, but the only one that represents everything. And beside it, as close as possible to his signature (“CHARLES-MAURICE, PRINCE DE TALLEYRAND,” the same that had been read at the end of the great treaties of the period), there had to be the seal of an unbroken authority: the signature of death. And so it was: nine hours after he had signed, Talleyrand died. The close proximity of his signature to his death guaranteed him from every attack. When the document reached Rome, the Holy See judged it insufficient. If Talleyrand had survived a few more days, he would have had to face the humiliation of signing again. And to sign a document far more onerous. But now it was too late. Talleyrand could no longer make any correction, he could no longer condemn himself with the words imposed by the Church, which would have compromised the sovereignty of his style. By that time, the Prince had received the sacraments, and had died “in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church,” as he was eager to specify in the opening words of his last will and testament. As for the Church itself, it was never made public that the Pope had considered Talleyrand’s recantation insufficient. Those papers remained on Gregory XVI’s desk, along with his most valued documents. Then they vanished. The maternal Vatican archives have no trace of them.
The theological confrontation, the true agōnía, ended with a phrase, with a gesture of staggering insolence and wisdom, which has been reported by a single witness, Prosper de Barante. When Abbé Dupanloup approached the Prince to administer extreme unction, Talleyrand held out the backs of his hands, saying: “Monsieur l’abbé, remember that I am a bishop.” As bishop, Talleyrand had already been anointed on his palms many years earlier. Now it was the turn of the other side, so that they were wholly covered by the unction. With that gesture, Talleyrand acknowledged that the blind whim of his parents to enforce a spiritual investiture upon him had, in reality, been more clear-sighted than any desire of his own. Thus he had been compelled to guard the sacred, clothing it in scandal, through “a revolution that has lasted fifty years,” as was written in the document he had just signed. But now he offered the backs of his hands for anointing. He who, for many years, had been most likened to the image of the Devil was acknowledging that his soul, at the beginning, had been sold to God.
In raging against Talleyrand, Chateaubriand thought he had outdone every rival when, commenting on his death, he wrote: “M. de Talleyrand, summoned long ago to the supreme tribunal, was contumacious; death sought him at God’s behest, and finally it has found him. To analyze in detail a life that was as rotten as that of M. de La Fayette was wholesome, it would be necessary to face up to certain aversions that I cannot overcome. Scourge-ridden men resemble the carcasses of prostitutes: ulcers have corroded them to such an extent that they cannot be used for dissection.” But somebody else would go even further: Sainte-Beuve. And, true to style, certainly not yielding to the dark clang of invective, but containing himself in the venomous whisper of a postscript: “May God protect us from the douceur of corrupt men if they have an important interest at stake.”
Having signed his recantation, “it can be said that Talleyrand died, like the kings of France, in public.” At precisely eight o’clock, Louis Philippe appeared, accompanied by Madame Adélaide. He wore a snuff-colored coat and polished boots, and was holding his hat nervously in his hand. Displaying a somewhat bourgeois (“tant soit peu bourgeois”) outward bearing, he found himself before the Prince, who was dressed in a faded old dressing gown, his forehead broad and expansive. Talleyrand broke the embarrassment by presenting those in the room to the king, in the order required by etiquette, ending with his first valet, Hélie. During the following hours, a small crowd gathered in the salon next to the dying man’s bedroom. There were a number of politicians, “some with powdered heads, others with bald heads, assembled around the blazing fire; their animated conversation, though conducted quietly, through the good taste and sensibility of the person who led it, filled the apartment with its incessant murmur.” Colmache, the Prince’s secretary, noticed Montrond, Talleyrand’s old companion in vice and financial double dealing, seated to one side, sad and alone: “he was sitting in a painful silence, distant from the others, and seemed to be lost in his thoughts, paying no attention to the various details of the scene that was happening around and which, if it were elsewhere, would no doubt have caused him to make one of those bitter and scathing remarks for which he was so feared.” The pretty Duchesse de V. was stretched out on a sofa by the window, “surrounded by a bevy of young beaux—all robber-like and ‘jeune France’—who were kneeling on the carpet beside her or sitting on the cushions of the divan.” As soon as the murmurs were heard that the Prince had passed away, the rooms became empty: “One would have thought that a flock of crows had taken flight, so great was the precipitation with which each hurried from the hôtel, each in the hope of being first to spread the news in the circle or in the coterie in which he or she happened to be the oracle.” Only those who were truly faithful were left—those who perhaps grieved most for the Prince: the servants. Each kept the order to which he had been accustomed. All at once, Colmache saw “the cook appear punctually at the hour at which for so many years he had been summoned to receive his orders for the day, but this time he was followed by a group of marmitons in spotless dress and long knives at their belt. With solemn footsteps each of them approached the foot of the bed and, kneeling with his white cook’s hat in his hand, murmured a short prayer: each sprinkled the corpse with holy water, after which the whole procession withdrew in the same silence with which they had arrived.”