The fires of Beltane, described by Frazer: “After the custard is eaten up, they divide the cake into so many portions, as similar as possible to one another in size and shape, as there are persons in the company. They daub one of these portions all over with charcoal, until it be perfectly black. They put all the bits of the cake into a bonnet. Every one, blindfold, draws out a portion. He who holds the bonnet, is entitled to the last bit. Whoever draws the black bit, is the Devoted person who is to be sacrificed to Baal…”
Wittgenstein notes: “The fact that for drawing lots they use a cake, has something especially terrible (almost like betrayal through a kiss).”
—When finally we began asking ourselves what was the taste of the slice of cake daubed with charcoal …
—The philosopher spoke about qualities, but not about what the single qualities are … What is sweetness?
The slice of cake in the Beltane rite is the méros, which is the moīra, the part that is fate. But it is important for the lots drawn here to remain linked to a thing, not just to a calculation, as in a counting-out game, which is fate without substance. By eating his own piece of cake, the Beltane carline eats himself, his own fate. What happens in his mouth will be repeated in the fire.
“Where you presently are, you can at least enjoy the douceur of not hearing discussion about [public] affairs”: Marie Antoinette in a letter of April 1787.
In a language that tended to become dry and insipid, some words were charged with radiance, becoming more variegated in meaning than ever before. Douceur: from sweetness to delight to pleasure to slowness to softness to mildness to languor to kindness to smoothness. It is useless trying to define what became concentrated in that word during certain years, for certain people.
If fate is the indivisible part, sacrifice can only be performed by pretending to be a whole. The Beltane “company” pretends to be one single being, and pretends that this being is a whole: the cake divided into so many equal portions. It can then give up one portion of it, which is not its own portion of it. To respond to the divine sacrifice, which takes place within a whole, the human sacrificers pretend they have a totality and all-powerfulness. The only mark that betrays them: the black on the slice of the person Consecrated and Damned (Devoted).
“Thanks to such a long-lasting peace and such perfect leisure, civilization had reached an extreme douceur.” The story of progress is divided into two stages, separated by an interval of sacrifice. In the first stage, for the more enlightened minds the idea of progress never departed from that of a gradual mellowing. From a raw and rough material, by polishing and filling, delicately grinding, a perfection would be reached without harm or detriment. But what is the next moment? If perfection is the perfect baking of the Beltane cake, the next moment is the drawing of lots for the sacrifice. The cake of the indolent, which had itself emitted all douceur, is cut with blind equity by the guillotine. Acting in the heart of progress was the demon of the unlimited; meanwhile in the heart of douceur was nausea. Once having reached the equilibrium of bon ton, all that is left is a headlong degeneration. The smoothest language also becomes the most inert; the sharpest arrow—the bon mot—becomes a professional tool in the tainted air of the press room. After the Revolution, history becomes one of a development that has lost the patina of douceur.
After the Revolution, progress forgets douceur. Its heart, inhabited by the demon of endless advance, has no wish for it. Its reason, which now claims to be based on the Revolution, and therefore on the moment when douceur was killed off, has no wish for it. And the immense misunderstanding of reason wanted the sacrificial victim to be seen as the Enemy. Even its legacy could have brought contagion. When the very memory of douceur is eradicated, when all of history becomes son et lumière and no longer a coexistence with dark protective shadows, then certain affable and dreary expressions such as “leisure time” and “quality of life” will appear, in the same way that people had begun talking of “landscape” when nature had already been defaced.
The nausea produced by excessive sweetness marks the moment when the sacrifice should occur. Nausea arises from the feeling of guilt at having avoided the sacrifice.
The state of sweetness is not stable: an occasional fleeting and insidious perfection, the dulcedo of mystics. When it becomes lasting, sweetness demands to be devoured. Sweetness ends under the knife of sacrifice, sexual pleasure in a spasm.
Douceur is the patina spread over life, making it livable; it is the dust on the wings of the butterfly. To produce it involves long alchemical care: slow cooking, gentle heat. But there is always fire, which seeks in the end to kill.
Douceur eventually shrinks to a murmur, a voice that, in the words of Céline, seeks to “gently gather the kindly spirits of the dead.” It inadvertently escapes the murderous oppression of the world, “with its constrained, insistent, besmirched characters clinging to their desires, to their passions, to their vices, to their virtues, to their explanations.” Ellipses mark the empty spaces in a lace of shadows: “… talking, after that, more gently to things…”
When the Duchesse de Saint-Simon was appointed lady-in-waiting to the Duchesse de Berry she was given apartments at Versailles: an antechamber and five rooms, into which the only daylight to enter came through the front door. In the most secluded part of those rooms, the Duc de Saint-Simon established “sa boutique.” He could neither read nor write there without candles, even in the middle of the day. In the great empty idleness that had been forced upon him he heard the crash of falling ranks. Hunched in his stone hovel, he asked himself, throughout the first five years that he labored on his Mémoires, if what he was doing was not impious. And so his first reader was a friend from the Court, though not someone from the far end of another Versailles corridor but Abbot Rancé at the monastery of La Trappe. The Regent, who knew Saint-Simon no less than Saint-Simon knew him, saw him as “unchangeable as God and fiercely tenacious.” The Regent was an excellent reader, and loved Rabelais when everyone else considered him gothic. And so it was his task, without knowing it, to write down those words like a cartouche beneath the most recent delusion of omnipotence: that of the writer who has shut out the world in order to possess its specter with a rapaciousness that no man of power could match. Moving away from Versailles, that dissimulated yearning had only to find protection among Proust’s cork-lined walls.
CHEVALIER DE B***: Don’t imagine that Monsieur de Maistre was a harsh bigot, worried by darkening times. He was a brilliant talker—and most of all he wanted the sound of his words to echo as far as the great city of Paris, where he would set foot too late. He wanted his words to travel far around those salons that had harbored esprit in everything that seemed execrable to him, and which were therefore the only appropriate places to receive them.
His pole star was an opinion that did not belong to the rabble of spirits. He saw the people around him as being alien to all that is most noble, most tender, most sublime. At best, they could at times be right. He often awoke with a thirst for revenge, with his sword drawn. He would immediately stir himself into a state of fury, wanting to destroy everything. From the first time he appeared to me, behind a moonlit balustrade, at St. Petersburg, where I had finally been cast by the storm of the revolution in my country and a multitude of strange events, I regarded him as the most exemplary gentleman of intelligence that life had offered me.
I had spent the years of my adolescence under the leather strap of the fathers of Vendôme: but all I can hear now is the hum of the refectory, like an army of cicadas, and the solitary voice of a preacher, who still mimicked the mild unction of Massillon. I was still not ready to meet someone in whom religious spirit and military spirit came together with equal fervor. As soon as I met Monsieur de Maistre he invited me to take occasion from my recollections of France to consider the multitude of great culprits who sacrificed themselves at each other’s hands with supernatural precision. In his view, one fact alone remained unchanged in the history of the universe: the spilling of human blood. Once I even found myself thinking he was mad, when he asked, fixing me in the eye: “If we had records of massacres in the same way that we have meteorological records, do you think we might perhaps discover their inner law, after a few centuries of observations?” But he saw immediately that I was confused, and he tried almost to apologize with that immense kindness that tempered certain terrifying words: “I only find myself thinking about these things because, as long as I have been thinking, I think of war.”
Nothing makes Joseph de Maistre more furious than the pretension that something of significance can be decreed by human arrangement, convention, stratagem. For him, factice, artificial, is the worst of insults. When the Americans decide to build their capital on the basis of a resolution, Maistre shudders as if in the face of some iniquity. And he immediately adds: “You could bet, one thousand to one, that the city will not be built, or that it will not be called Washington, or that the Congress will not reside there.” History has then taken care to ensure he would lose his sweeping bet: but this is not an indication of Maistre’s blindness but confirmation of what terrified him. What most disturbed him was improbability, the apparent frailness of the evil that he saw spreading: whereas the truly satanic element lay in the fact that it was precisely that improbability that threatened to become fixed as a permanent situation—which is what then happened. Although he didn’t wish to admit it for fear of compromising his anathemizing fury, Maistre foresaw that man—that aberration for whom republican legislators labored, that empty word: “Man now simply doesn’t exist in the world”—could survive, and for a long time, with no land, with no roots, with no notion of an unwritten law, with no longing for “that indefinable quality that is called dignity.” Indeed, he could easily cancel out those memories, like a vague dream. And this would be the most alarming moment, since “if Providence erases something, it certainly does so in order to write.”
Such new writing would be recorded on flesh that had no memory and would demand a far greater amount of bloodshed, marking the beginning of a world that was no longer largely uninhabited, no longer with vast expanses of wilderness, but overrun and overexploited by the excesses of civilization.
Aldebert von Chamisso, poet and botanist, journeyed the world with Count Nikolai Rumyantsev. Their ship, the Rurik, arrived one day at an island that was not marked on the maps. On landing, they soon imagined they were the first foreign crew to have set foot in those parts. The natives proved docile. They worshipped an idol. Chamisso was allowed to see it. A woman smiled out from a framed etching. Chamisso recognized her wonderful face as that of Juliette Récamier, in a painting by Jean-Baptiste Isabey. He asked how that etching had been washed up on the island, but to no avail. The natives wouldn’t say: they considered it blasphemy to talk about the origin of the gods.