TALLEYRAND: I speak at the opening of this book because I was the last person familiar with ceremonies. I also speak, as always, to deceive. This book is not dedicated to me, nor to anyone else. This book is dedicated to dedication.

“Monsieur de Talleyrand is a difficult man to follow around the meanderings of his political life,” said the Duchesse d’Abrantès as she opened the doors of the Salon de M. de Talleyrand. At the entrance, the delicious stuccoes of the ancien régime. By the exit, the bourgeois dining room. At the center, the hypnotic beasts of the Empire stare at us from armchairs. And in rooms to the side we greet the guillotine and the American forests. Toward the far end, a Congress stumbles in the trails of its dances. From every corner Prince Talleyrand’s mots echo among the guests. A delicate tom-tom, an instrument heard for the first time at Mirabeau’s funeral, sounds them out through the meanderings, billets-doux along the way. Mots retold many times over, almost never by the Prince himself, who was so lazy about writing. He entrusted certain terrible truths to the instant of a reply, threw them into the bustle of conversation, risking each time that they might not be picked up. But Talleyrand, who had seen it all, even before he had set off on his journey, always kept a magnanimous faith in at least one thing: in society as a resonant salon, where each time there would be at least one hidden ear to catch what he said. And so those mots, bound up in balsamic bandages, would be passed down over the years as if they were a set of folio volumes. Certain aristocrats, in old age, tend to resemble their servants. Here the Great Chamberlain will gradually become a simple master of ceremonies, keeper of a house of ghosts, tour guide. The meanderings of his life and of his salon will become the context for a cruel performance repeated over and again, though in changeable sequences, in place of the myth that society had forgotten to repeat.

In the salons that softly, tenderly surrounded the Congress of Vienna for one last time, the conversations heard in window recesses and immediately noted down by the secret police didn’t just concern amorous intrigues and what the history books would call the new balance of Europe. One question arose before every other and behind every other: that of transforming once and for all the ṛta, the articulation between heaven and earth that makes life possible and gives it order. It had all begun one day, when the gods, tired perhaps of the solid, opaque primordial turmoil, “wished: ‘What can we do to separate these worlds of ours a little further? How can we have more space?’ And then they breathed into those worlds, uttering the three syllables ‘vī-ta-ye,’ and the worlds distanced themselves from each other and there was more space for the gods.” And, later, for human beings. It was certainly no longer appropriate to talk about it now. Indeed no one had any clear memory of it. And yet there was still a pressing need to resolve one family matter that harked back to ṛta: legitimizing Legitimacy as its heir. There was a certain embarrassment when talking about Law. But the true word of the moment was the other one: Legitimacy—and the person to grasp this could only be Talleyrand, the man who had always kept a discreet distance from the law. The step was enormous, and therefore needed to be sensed as little as possible, it had to be submerged beneath the surface of society balls and tiresome dynastic (sometimes domestic) quarrels. Legitimacy was the least reassuring word, a picnic among grassy ruins. But hidden behind legitimacy was another word, another realm: the realm of Convention, which was finally leading to absolute power. Until then, Convention had been the eternal cadet branch of the psyche, its power had constantly grown in an unnamable shadow, precisely because it had no legitimacy. In order to become legitimate, it would have to drain legitimacy and dress in its clothes. Now it needed to be recognized effectively, while command was given to facts. This had clearly been reached through political necessity. With the Russian campaign, Napoleon had stirred the ghost of unlimited war, attracted by the land that in itself evokes limitlessness, uncontrollability, hopeless turmoil, Europe’s exit from itself, far from civilization and its douceur. That same limitlessness was already about to show itself in Europe: a diplomatic euphemism would call it “the social question.” The moment had therefore come to give authority to the only power that promised to negotiate on equal terms with the limitless, perhaps even to grasp hold of it (though few at that time were sure about that): Convention as Legitimacy. Time would tell, it would bleach the bones of meaning. Pol Pot and his men roamed the jungle between Thailand and Cambodia. For most of the surrounding world, he was still his country’s sole legitimate authority. The temples turned upside down by his sovereign rule stretched into large numbers of mass graves, dug deep into the ground. The layers of those dead bodies epitomize our own Canonical Phases: the corpses at the lowest level reveal scraps of colored clothing and are the followers of Lon Nol (the ancien régime); they are followed, higher up, by the Buddhist monks (refractory priests); then various civilians (the Public Safety police turn against anyone); and finally the dark rags of the Khmer Rouge themselves (the true Jacobins, the true Bolsheviks, conspirators and renegades). Grave diggers heaped piles of skulls into the forms that Cambodian peasants had used from times immemorial to stack their annual pineapple harvest. In the face of mass graves, history returns to being natural history.

DUCHESSE D’ABRANTÈS: When did we all start wearing masks? Let me think … yes, it was before I’d been let out into society, and my sharp-toothed cousins paid me a visit and told me everything … those were the reckless years of the Directory, when purple togas packaged in England were seized at customs … when Bonaparte was received at the Palais Luxembourg by five Directors with plumed hats, dressed in cloaks covered with arabesques and cut in medieval style—yes, they were not yet resolved on Roman Virtue … pale with anxiety before the General whom the sublime Ossian held suspended two inches above the ground … said our dear friend, ours, and everyone’s perennial traitor—Talleyrand, the only one to have succeeded in betraying everything, apart from style … and certainly not out of delicacy but because style is the golden scepter that is ultimately revered by a vast part of this world, and some other … Like a camp of dazed nomads, among pieces of cloth robbed from innocent travelers, this was Paris at that time … Everyone dreamed of the Court, but memories of the correct gestures were already starting to fade … the Directors represented the people, but that was not enough … though still representing someone, they were rather like salesmen setting off to invade the provinces by stagecoach … with their new price lists …

An irrepressible tropism turns the spirit toward Talleyrand: “Once, during my youth, and even later, when I used to love adventure stories and melodramas, I realized that what fascinated me was uncertainty about people’s identity.” How can we not experience it over that mask that many called deathly or impenetrable or impassive, while just as many have attributed to it all kinds of infamy and the most unexpected virtues? A mask that had watched over the whole murky course of the Canonical Phases, which themselves had doubtful identities: they did not know, they would never know, whether to consider themselves lucky or unlucky, all marked niveis atrisque lapillis. In the end the only thing that could be said was what Léon Bloy noted in his usual blunt manner: “Evidently God no longer knew what to do about that old world. He wanted new things, and someone like Napoleon was needed to set them going.” Apart from such harsh certainty, the whole was unstable, and then the outlines of a physiognomy offered themselves as a last mainstay. But there again, all knowledge is physiognomic.

Johann Kasper Lavater, the last savant of physiognomy, asked young Goethe to help him on his Physiognomische Fragmente. Wasn’t he perhaps already convinced about the “general homogeneity of every formation of nature”? Of course, replied Goethe—and his contribution to Lavater’s work would indeed be pressed further. For him, even objects, clothing, environments were part of physiognomic science: “Nature forms mankind, and mankind is transformed, and such transformation, in turn, is natural; he who finds himself standing in the midst of the vast world creates another world within him, a small world enclosed and protected by walls, and furbished in his image.”

Over fifty years later, the old Goethe found himself leafing through the Collection des portraits historiques de M. le baron Gérard, published by Urbain Canel in Paris, 1826. They were etchings of somewhat doubtful quality that Monsieur Pierre Adam had made from those sumptuous portraits scattered around Europe. Goethe’s friend Boisserée complained, during one visit, about the crudeness of the execution. “My dear boy,” replied Goethe, “we, in our Weimar modesty, are content with such things. You are too refined and difficult to please.” Goethe spent much time studying those etchings alone. Art was not the point, he was following a physiognomic dream of his own. Leafing through the album, his eye fell on a man he had known on that now famous day at Erfurt, sitting to the right of Napoleon (who had made that embarrassing remark: “Voilà un homme!”). Studying the portrait of Talleyrand, he wrote: “The more we proceed to contemplate this collection, the more important it seems to us.” And yet, in commenting on the portraits of Alexander I, Charles X, and Louis Philippe d’Orléans, his words of appreciation were amiably generic. Only in front of Talleyrand do we feel him sinking into that obscure contemplative stillness from which his finest pages emerge: “Here before us we have the prime diplomat of the century. He sits in perfect stillness and calmly awaits all the circumstances of the moment. Sitting in a room that is most dignified, though not ostentatious, we find him wearing simple and appropriate court dress, his plumed hat on the couch just behind him, as if this homme d’affaires is awaiting the call that his carriage is ready to take him to a meeting; his left arm resting on the corner of the table, beside it papers and quills, his right arm in his lap, his right leg crossed over his left, and he appears to us perfectly impassive. We cannot but recall the gods of Epicurus, who live ‘where it does not rain and does not snow nor does the tempest ever blow’; such is the calmness of this man, untouched by the storms that hiss around him. One can understand how he manages to assume such an appearance, but not how he can maintain it. His gaze is quite impenetrable; he looks ahead, but it is doubtful whether he sees those who are looking at him. His gaze is not looking inward, like that of someone who is thinking, nor is it looking outward, like someone who is watching; his gaze rests in and on himself, like his whole figure, which suggests not exactly self-satisfaction, but certainly some lack of connection with the outside.

“But that’s enough, here we can play physiognomists and interpreters as much as we wish, in any case our understanding will prove too short, our experience too poor, our imagination too limited to give us an adequate idea of such a being. It is likely that the same will happen for future historians, who can see to what extent this picture of ours will be of assistance to them.”

Concealed in that review that was so superfluous, so marginal for the eighty-year-old Goethe, who still had to complete his Great Work, which remained suspended among the archetypes (and it was essential for him, the systematic and complete being, not to leave it in a fragmentary state), the lines on Talleyrand pointed to a cautious revelation by the Dichter about himself. Goethe, too, knew the art of concealing everything on the surface. An album of engravings of famous people—where the clamor of history is frozen, where looks already tend to dull, as in later illustrations in the Magasin pittoresque—provided an appropriate occasion for someone who purported to be an “occasional poet.” And it was precisely there, rather than in some conversation with Eckermann or other devoted ear, that Goethe had chosen to refer to that long parallel life that had accompanied him in the land of turmoil. After all, he and Talleyrand were the only two beings of absolute significance who had survived it all, from the earliest years of skating and boudoirs up to that dignified, ceremonious, and misunderstood old age. The old age of one who knows too much. Goethe had already taken on the guise of the Grosser Dichter while Talleyrand, at Valençay, received Honoré de Balzac, a writer consumed with curiosity who looked upon him as an ancient, impressive, and delicate kind of lizard; or, worse still, he received the rambunctious George Sand and her band (and Madame de Dino, at the Prince’s side as always, noted: “All in all, very little charm; and the rest of the company totally ordinary”).

In that passage Goethe was sending out a stern warning: don’t fool yourselves—you scholars—into thinking you understand Talleyrand’s gaze, don’t fool yourselves into thinking you understand the polished serenity of the old councillor Goethe. And the game went as far as provocation. Goethe, the “Olympian,” as Germanic kitsch would repeatedly describe him, even resorted to the “gods of Epicurus” to get closer to Talleyrand’s gaze. And yet he must have known that, according to general rumor, that gaze had witnessed almost every possible villainy—and some even of his own making.

The suggested superimposition of the two impassive faces, implied by Goethe, would soon be recognized and declared. Sainte-Beuve—who understood almost everything and tried not to make it too conspicuous—wrote a few lines in this respect in the note introducing the works of Molière, in one of the most attractive illustrés romantiques with the vignettes of Tony Johannot, published by Paulin in Rue de Seine, Paris, in 1835 (Talleyrand still alive, Goethe recently dead): “And nonetheless his [Molière’s] lucidity, his customary coolness of character, at the center of such a lively work, did not lead in the slightest to cold and calculated impartiality, as has been seen in Goethe, the Talleyrand of art: such critical refinements had not yet been invented in poetry at that time.” These, once again, are lines tucked away along the margin so that they are barely apparent. But they were noticed by the sour and irrepressible Barbey d’Aurevilly, who didn’t miss the opportunity of voicing his lordly disdain for Sainte-Beuve’s babouches (“Sainte-Beuve disliked argument, it made his ears turn purple, and his sharp tongue would blabber in anger and spite…”)—and he made it seem like a gratuitous intuition: “Sainte-Beuve once had a flash of inspiration, and called Goethe a literary Talleyrand, today he regrets that correct idea.” But at that point he, Barbey, weighed in with his sword: “The poseur that Goethe may not have been by nature, but which his admirers had made of him through their excessive admiration, carefully concealed the emptiness of his being beneath his Olympian air, just as Talleyrand, who was no less vacuous, concealed his own beneath the indolent, mocking pose of the supercilious lord who had seen a great deal more …

“Indeed, there is a great similarity between Goethe and Talleyrand, these two princely souls! Goethe is a literary Talleyrand, dressed up in his cravat like Talleyrand. Except that, even though he wore the famous cravat that had to be knotted eighteen times, Goethe did not have the impertinence with which Talleyrand held his head, with the semi-closed eye of a charmer, the eye of the languishing viper, since these are spontaneous and natural things that Talleyrand had—gifts of God or of the devil!—whereas nothing is spontaneous and natural in Goethe, this operatic actor, always in front of a mirror…”

How did the Revolution find Talleyrand? “He loved the worldly life of the old days, as a man of his situation and quality could live it: he had a passion for women, gambling and everything that made a man fashionable at that time, and it was thus that 1789 found Monsieur de Talleyrand.” It also found him with an abnormal gift for discerning how times were moving. And in it lay his entire political intelligence. “The benefits he enjoyed would have been taken from him by the force of events; and, in his opinion, it was better to abandon them beforehand (I always say ‘perhaps’).” In the irony of her “perhaps,” the Duchesse d’Abrantès refers to one of the rare characteristics that can certainly be attributed to Talleyrand. To sniff out the times, a beast in the boudoir. The aristocratic choice of giving what a moment later would be snatched away (“only one course remained: to yield before being forced into doing so, and while credit could still be gained for it”). A Talleyrand cannot accept that something is to be snatched from him: but he’ll accept that he can give everything away. Especially if what he is giving is a Gift-gift, a poisoned gift, something that he privately hates: ecclesiastical privileges, for example, which were the mark of an occupation (the occupation of bishop) into which he had been forced by his parents’ innate tyranny. By giving those revenues and privileges to the nation he was reaping revenge on the demonic aspect of the nobility—its unassailable whim—to which he had been compelled to submit from birth.

Behind the welter of facts, behind the conspiracies and betrayals, we also find the stubborn loyalty of Talleyrand. Certain perceptions of him seem to have been permanently fixed, and nothing of what later happened would undermine them. First, the early awareness that the age of bouleversements and upheavals, in short the “age of revolutions,” had begun; that every movement from then on would be a ripple in the current—and that this demanded an adequate and lasting change in all methods of action. Certain symbols of power would be ludicrously impotent from then on; whereas certain other gestures (such as the ball that Talleyrand gave for Madame Bonaparte at Hôtel Galliffet on January 3, 1798) were more decisive than battles. Second: that the summum bonum, the supersensible sun of political action, would no longer be to hinder or exacerbate that turmoil (brute childishness in both cases), but to soften the blow, coating the rough edges with lenitive, residual douceurs, wrapping them in noble gauzes abandoned in the attics. And above all removing faith from the turmoil, not attributing that plus that it always claims to represent: in short, not to believe that slaughter could be easily transformed into sacrifice. Without a liturgy, people were moving about in a vast slaughterhouse.

“Tat tvam asi—this you are”: those words that open the doors of the cosmos and of the mind, the assumption of all vedantic assumptions, are not, after all, so eccentric in regard to ordinary life. Certainly no more eccentric than Descartes’s ego cogito. But the civilized West, the eighteenth century that held the stage, seems to be separated by a sheet of lead from all that might turn attention to ātman-brahman. Hermetism continues to proliferate, but is now resigned to its role in secret sects, preparing the way for spiritualism. And, if anything, it loves getting involved in dark political intrigues that end up as a distraction from contemplation. Clarté teaches first of all not to see certain things. The important point—as Descartes insisted—is to draw the boundaries, to vanquish the limitless psyche, let the mind run loose in its own glittering golden cage. But there are also geological events that accompany history. In this case the emergence of a new wild continent within Europe: Germany. Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer is a posthumous tribute to that emergence, which had taken place under the banner of the Romantik. “India ended up becoming Germany,” observed Victor Hugo in front of the shadow plays that marbled the “wall of the centuries.” Every civilization needs to nurture its own Orient within itself. When the first notes of the romantic piano sounded, Europe found its own Orient in this penetrating sound—an Orient that it had long tried to lose.

Talleyrand’s role above all was that of master of ceremonies—but this was an age where ceremonies had lost their meaning, an age that claimed it could do without them, while it stumbled at every step. At that point Talleyrand offered his arm, impassively—and helped find a way out of the embarrassment. But what ought to have caused alarm was his distant gaze when proffering help. For decades, apart from the searing interlude of the Terror, Talleyrand had constantly sought to ensure that History—grievous, bloody, and awkward in its successive guises—would be passable in society. He had made the government of parvenus passable in society, the demimonde in power for the first time, with the Directory. And almost forty years later, at the age of eighty, in London, he ensured that the government of the bourgeoisie, in power for the first time under their declared names—lawyers and merchants, no longer citizens—was passable in society. From his point of view, History seemed marked by a progressive decline. But it was still necessary to help it glide smoothly along its tracks. Talleyrand felt a justified horror at the sudden flounderings of History, at its paroxysms. And so he sought to put a few drops of oil into the workings, waiting for others to throw in sand. Talleyrand foresaw it, he knew it, he had already seen it: and it would happen repeatedly. But he continued all the same: glissez, glissez, in the end something will remain. A gesture, at least.

M***: The Napoleonic Court is established in the equatorial forest, theocracy is found among merchants at the bazaar, Lenin has put on a parachute uniform, smokes Davidoff cigars, the Holy Experiments are circling the rice fields with corpses. It is increasingly apparent that the future political scene is the Africa of Raymond Roussel. And now we will also be obliged to rediscover many things that zeal had sought to eradicate: ideas were once thought important—now they are lined up before us like dented Coca-Cola cans. We used to think that the prime requisite was a general knowledge (“The Evil of the World is Ignorance” was the last banner, gnostic as always, of conquering commonplaces)—and we realize that all education is magnetized by something silent and implied, whereas explicit education alone sounds shrill and hideous, like Racine recited in a penitentiary for the director’s birthday. Expressa nocent. What is said can damage.

Talleyrand has never inspired respect. From when he was a young “abbé mauvais sujet” until his dying hours, he is the butt of insult, condemnation, sarcasm, and curses. For decades he is laughed at for being lame. Chateaubriand wrote of Talleyrand: “Since much scorn was heaped upon him, he had imbibed it and had placed it at the two drooping corners of his mouth.” His mother implores Louis XVI not to appoint him bishop since he is unworthy of the cloth. As a bishop he has to defend himself from more secular accusations (gambling, speculation, women). As foreign minister under the Directory, the same Directors who had chosen him flatly despise him, and Jean-François Rewbell continually repeated, “Talleyrand was the assembly of all scourges, the prototype of betrayal as of corruption. He is a powdered lackey of the ancien régime: at most he might be useful as a servant, to be put on display, if he had more leg; but his legs are defective, like his heart.” The newspapers want to flay him, and they find plenty of material for doing so. And one day, at last, even the Emperor’s fury will be brought down on him. At that moment Napoleon actually wants to strike Talleyrand, for once at least he would like to shatter his impassivity, and he resorts to the most ridiculous and offensive gesture; he takes Talleyrand by the chin, pushing him against the wall. Thus he, too, finds the occasion for a famous mot: “You are shit in a silk stocking.” But right-minded loathing of Talleyrand culminates with the romantics: Chateaubriand, George Sand, Hugo. Devoted to the Ideal, each of them wants to give Talleyrand an eloquent kick, as if to a stray dog, in an age that no longer belongs to him, but to them. Here the moral bugles sound, indignation is projected on vast wings into the future; it includes all future fathers, speaks in the name of all young people of noble aspiration. And then, for anyone of eminence in the world of literature, Talleyrand is such a rich pretext for a piece of scurrilous virtuosity. It is like a contest between Alexandrian orators: who could best fashion their disdain for Talleyrand, who could write it in the sky as a new constellation of words? Opinion meanwhile conformed, pleased, and satisfied. And it would finally produce the purest crystal of the Received Idea, recorded by Flaubert: “Talleyrand, Prince: Rage against him.” It was an inevitable step—one of many—in negotiations for the alliance between romanticism and kitsch, a first stage in that dulling of sensibility that leads from the fever of 1830 to the desolation of 1850.

Compared with Talleyrand, Chateaubriand is the other blood-line, the other way of making lineage productive (and useful). Talleyrand discreetly guided those many successive men of power who did not know how to walk on parquet; Chateaubriand instead sought to saturate the psyche in a new liquid. Nameless sunsets, misty cataracts, hollow echoes. A burnish of aesthetic retreat, a lining of death, a claustral cobweb, heather invincible among ancient slabs of stone. Talleyrand was his enemy, above all, because he was his chief rival in cultivating and nurturing the past in the new age.

THE SENATOR FROM ST. PETERSBURG: As we watch this evening that sinks away, these dying rays, remnants of a day that will never return, as we wait for the dense night to cheer us and return us to the void, I want to tell you—here, among we Aberrants, how gladdened I am by the thought of being born in this hybrid place, in these shrill times, which I pray each day will receive their punishment. Save, then, to find myself once again on this terrace, built on its four Chinese columns, indulging in my most cherished of pursuits: free conversation. Behind me I feel the peace of my library. I have never written but have often spoken about what majesty I find in the godless doctrines I have always abhorred. There I see malice at work accompanied by formal excellence, in a composition such as to stir respect. The earth has been bridled by a few ideas … but let us not use this inappropriate word … by a few utterances entirely devoid of insight into what in truth we undoubtedly are, by a few rules of behavior devoid of any resonance, without us even knowing who has proposed them; nor even if they have ever been put into writing.

The volatile and promiscuous nature of these phrases makes them akin to what were once proverbs. They are the element we breathe without knowing it. And their emptiness is linked to their immense power: to a capacity to multiply power, to stir and devastate the earth without anyone being able to say how its incessant hum could originate from those scraps of words. And deep down, I am the one who most faithfully relishes these iniquities. Far more than those who practice them as though they were rural nature. And so, when I first met Fouché, we looked upon each other as two rakes from the same club. Perhaps it was then that I told him I wasn’t on his side, since Goodness was more adventurous.

Empire: a moment of intermission, of hidden terror. Power is frightened of itself, and fear corrodes each day. The will to hold in zoomorphic stasis (Egypt on furniture) the great dégringolade of the bourgeois age. The Empire tries once more to invent an aristocracy (as a realm of will, it has to be able to invent everything); the Restoration, with its aristocrats back in their rightful places, cannot for a moment hide the fact that it is installing the Shopkeeper in power. Egypt: to stamp the seal of greatest fixity onto the greatest precariousness. In Napoleonic Egypt the image of terror appears in the face of history for the last time. Then history will sweep everything away toward its nearby estuary. The mingling of fresh and salt water, the Liffey in the Irish Sea, piercing swoon: history abandons its wreckage to post-history. A perpetual farewell, that continues to repeat itself.

Past the Barrière Saint-Martin, accompanied by a single Cossack, Count Nesselrode made his way along “boulevards crowded with people in Sunday dress. They looked as if they were there for some celebration, not for the arrival of an enemy army.” In that city where all power had been absent for several hours, he sought out the only place that guaranteed safety, the house where power had always kept a room—there, where Monsieur de Talleyrand waited, behind the terse pilasters of the Hôtel de l’Infantado. The Tsar, the white angel of the north, whose uniforms were too tight-fitting, his courtesy excessive, eager to please everyone, though the Steppes howled behind him, had been tipped off—no one knows by whom, perhaps (it was suggested) by one of Talleyrand’s messengers, as usual. The Elysée Palace, where he intended to reside, was mined, was a trap. Yet Talleyrand, this high dignitary of the defeated state, this official of a political power that was now to be blotted out, presented himself as unassailable.

Nesselrode entered the room just as the Prince’s hair was being coiffed, and was enveloped in a cloud of powder. A protective nimbus, the extreme aura, down from the throne and vaporized. But the purpose was to give a patina of ancient tradition to a scandalous gesture: the victor who comes as guest to visit the defeated power like an old friend, so as to feel he is safe. A few days later the staircase hummed with voices at all hours. Talleyrand took the mezzanine, Nesselrode had the second floor, the Tsar the first, along with his aides-de-camp. In the courtyard, Cossacks dozed on bales of straw.

Talleyrand was the first to understand that the new world, as it emerged from the Napoleonic Age in the hope of finding some kind of equilibrium, was no longer expecting, was not demanding a law but the semblance of a law. Any other solution would have been too hard, and would have quickly brought ruin. An inviolable law could no longer be upheld by anyone—or even conceived, except by a true eccentric like Joseph de Maistre on the terrace at St. Petersburg; an absence of law, a total submission to power and to short-lasting agreements between powers was exactly what the world couldn’t bring itself to admit, though it practiced it daily. Indeed: it could not admit it for the very reason that it practiced it. The voice of law therefore still seemed necessary, but the law itself would prove to be more or less empty, incapable of withstanding any scrutiny. The law was therefore close to becoming purely ornamental, a flourish of pompous rhetoric, a useful artifice when unveiling monuments, a pretext for a pharmacist’s discourse in the coffeehouse. The whole century would abound, like no previous age, in appeals to principles, while keeping secretly in mind one single principle about principles, that of Napoleon: “Principes est bien, cela n’engage point—Principles are fine, they don’t commit you to anything.” From the moment Talleyrand throws the card of legitimacy onto the table, accompanying his gesture with a few impelling words, the grand proliferation of the bêtise begins. It will find its dazzled chroniclers in Baudelaire, then in Flaubert, then in Bloy, then in Karl Kraus, and will fix its centenary celebrations for August 1914, replacing the fireworks at Versailles with the rockets and mortar blasts on the Belgian Front. There was no further talk, by then, of legitimacy—but there is always some abstraction, each feebler than the last, that takes the vacant place of the law. Now it was the turn of “neutrality.” The sacred, in its migrations, no longer infused the arms of a dynasty, but the paper of a treaty. The only thing left at this point was for the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, to remark: “All this for a word—‘neutrality’—for a scrap of paper.” The equivalence was now established between “a scrap of paper” and a new, vaster, all-pervading kind of slaughter, open to everyone, which would have allowed the ancient divinity of war to laugh once and for all at the worthless law that had sought to subjugate it.

“The legend about the origins of the Wahungwe people refers to a king called ‘Madsivoa.’ His name is said to derive from dsivoa (lake, ford, pool).” Any Western theory about legitimacy is lacking in one respect: it knows nothing about the waters of origin. “Who made you king?” Aldebert, count of Périgord and ancestor of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, asks Hugh Capet, king of the Île-de-France and first king of France. But Capet is unable to say “I come from Dsivoa, from the pool of origins, I came out of one of those water bubbles that form spontaneously on its surface.” Without those waters, all are usurpers. And the first usurpers can then appeal to one single ally—time. When a sovereign power exists for a certain time it is supposed that the ruthlessness with which it has exerted its authority is already encased and covered by the douceur of custom, by prolonged acceptance, and finally: by tradition. And so tradition will no longer serve to establish the origins, but to conceal them. The great Aufklärer, the terrible Enlighteners, up to Nietzsche, to Freud, have always been fanatical searchers for origins and genealogies—that was the peculiar nefas of the West that attracted and dazzled them. By filling the missing gap of origin, they thought it would be possible at last to move down without delusion to the present. They then discovered origin as a delusion, choosing in this way the delusion into which they wanted to fall—and it would hound them to the last.

Legitimacy brings together two fundamental operations that take place in the mind: analogy and convention, branches that grow out of one single trunk: substitution. By analogy, the only legitimacy is that of sacred investiture, which descends by resonances and attractions through all levels of being. Where that resonance dies out, there can be no legitimacy. By convention, legitimacy is the prime example of that arbitrary pact that allows all kinds of mechanisms to operate, from language to society. As always, convention is not concerned in this case either with essences or with substances, but with functionality—and, being the very soul of substitution, it is ready to swap one form for the other.

In 1956, John Von Neumann used the Silliman Lectures to give a short outline of what had happened recently, what was now happening between machines that calculated by themselves. When he began setting out the distinction between digital computers and analog computers, he gave a new name to the two poles that secretly sustain us. The digital pole would seem biologically secondary and dependent, in the same way that exchange would seem secondary to the object being exchanged. But then the digital pole takes command, revealing a capacity to envelop the other pole, to absorb it—and naturally to utilize it. The digital pole confers great power, but it does not contain, within the machine, that physicality of changing values that is a last palpable record of the outside world. Digitality is pure sequence of signs: when its control is extended to everything, we no longer know what earth supports us—if there still is an earth. We continue experiencing the analog pole, we no longer know what to call it: it is mute emotion that overwhelms and no longer flows into its ancient estuary. Digitality has made it a new bed, indestructible silicon. Above, a silent current flows, waiting for the Bateau Ivre.

“Monsieur de Talleyrand, scion of one of the oldest families in France (royal counts, indeed), was the eldest of three children; but he had been lame since childhood, his family considered him unfit to appear in society and had therefore destined him for the Church, even though he was a man who lacked those qualities that might have made him acceptable to the Roman communion. Many times I have heard him say that, despised by his parents as a wretch who would never be good for anything, he had adopted a reserved and gloomy manner from childhood: he had never slept under the same roof as his father and mother; they had forced him to renounce his right of primogeniture in favor of his younger brother.” Étienne Dumont, Mirabeau’s biographer, gives a short, blunt description of Talleyrand, immediately exposing a wound. Talleyrand’s infirmity was caused by an accident, one of the chance events of history and fate: at the age of four, entrusted to the care of a country woman, he dislocates a leg falling from a cabinet. For that accident, for that chance occurrence, his lineage spurns him, disowning him. Talleyrand is legitimacy denied. Talleyrand is destined to become a foundling. From then on he will know a double lineage, from the lowest and from the highest rung on the ladder of life. He will be of the oldest stock, condemned by fate; but he will also be the wild plant that grows in solitude. Someone from a most illustrious estate and someone who has never shared the same roof as his father. The age-old root and the uprooted. He who has the power to give protection and he who is constantly compelled to seek it.

The nobility of the Talleyrand-Périgord family is not a nobility of spirit—or drawn by spirit. It is a biological nobility that does not deign to explain or justify itself. The family motto Re que Diou means they will answer only to God—with answers, if there are any, that are invisible and unascertainable. Besides, nobility is “a name and a coat of arms.” It is a heredity, so that the individual is just the temporary vehicle. And the individual, as such, deserves no particular attention, except when the “family” is considered as embodying him (“For in the great houses it was the family that people loved, much more than the individuals, and especially the young individuals who are as yet unknown”). This is the ultimate form of sacrifice, now empty, reduced to its husk, as perpetuated in the aristocracy, that cannot renounce sacrifice unless it renounces itself. Talleyrand will thus suffer atrociously for the cruelty, indifference, and capriciousness that affect him as an individual, and bind him in his young role as sacrificial victim (the lame firstborn who is to be rejected and abandoned to the Church because he cannot achieve the only single glory, which is military glory), but he will never speak a word against the mechanism of sacrifice. Indeed, after all, his politics are based on a respect for sacrificial heredity: the only truth, however intolerable. But nothing is more intolerable than the sacrifice that continues to operate in the age that rejects it, the age in which Talleyrand happens to be living. The evasive fluidity of his politics goes to mitigate that horror, to cover it for a little longer with the veil of its noble and bloody past.

The Primal Scene, from which Talleyrand’s view of politics derives, is played out where his grandmother Mortemart lives, “in a vast room of the chateau, which they called ‘the pharmacy.’” There, seated beside his grandmother’s velvet armchair (where he was placed—he emphasized—at the age of five “as of right,” in exactly the same way as he would later sit beside Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis Philippe), the young Talleyrand observed the primordial mystery of power: the power of healing, which the thaumaturgic kings used to display on those afflicted with scrofula (Louis XVI would still do it at Reims, and the young chaplain Talleyrand would see him repeat it on 2,400 sufferers who came from the farthest provinces: “May God heal you; the King touches you”). Grandmother Mortemart applied it to the sick of the village. Young Talleyrand took part in the ceremony with devotion. On those occasions his grandmother “had a silk dress trimmed with lace. She wore a cascade of ribbons, with bows on the sleeves matching the color of the seasons. Her large cuffs had three layers. Her Sunday dress, which was more elaborate than that of the other days of the week, had a fur collar, a cap with a bow, and a black bonnet that tied beneath the chin.” Around her, a small court of Périgord nobles kept order according to rank, flanking her as she sat in a velvet armchair, before an old black lacquer table, distributing ointments, syrups, and other medicaments to the peasants with a ceremonial gesture.

His grandmother indicated the ointment to be applied, and “one of the gentlemen who had accompanied her to mass went to fetch it. Another produced a small chest containing linen.” Young Talleyrand then took out a piece of cloth and held it out while his grandmother cut it. This was the duty of the minister, from the days of Shang China: to make sure the cloth to be applied as a bandage is cut carefully. In the majesty of this scene, Talleyrand has described (without stating it) his highest conception of politics—a conception that would operate behind designs that no one can yet claim to have reconstructed. And in that very scene he sensed a reality, as yet unexplained, that would always guide him: the “heredity of feelings,” the essentially nourishing, as well as destructive, relationship between time and quality of whatever kind. Time alone ensures that every reality secretes its douceur. Otherwise, everything is naturally bitter, insipid, arid. The old Périgord nobles who paid court to Madame de Mortemart and were ready to leave no trace of their existence prepared with their silent step the arrival of something unprecedented, indicating to the young Talleyrand how he might bear it: “The ways of the Périgord nobility resembled their old castles: there was something grand and solid about them; the light filtered in faintly but gently. They were moving slowly but surely toward a more enlightened civilization.”

Beneath Talleyrand’s every gesture is a hint of the sacramental origin of power, though he never says this, nor perhaps does he think much about it. The paradox of his art is in making origin still active in an age—in the first age—in which the transmission of noble titles had ended for good. Sacrality therefore had to become a fiction, and the challenge would be to make it into a powerful fiction: to invent, with Napoleon, a dynasty; to claim, with the Congress of Vienna, that it is still possible to appeal to a “principle”—and to appeal to that very “legitimacy” that had just been buried; to persuade society even to accept an insurrection, with Louis Philippe. Talleyrand believed less than anyone else in the fictions he was suggesting. “Legitimacy” now becomes something similar to what the “self” would be in the age of Ernst Mach—insubstantial, but a useful point of reference. He knew that the aim each time was to hold out for a few years. After a few years, simulation approaches its death, which is its collision with the bedrock of simulated reality. But the transmission of power (and also the transmission of thought) would now be—had to be—a chain of these slippery and precarious fictions, which nevertheless succeed once again, for a brief period, in capturing the essence of power—or at least getting close to it for a few moments. On the hidden difference between New and Old power, on the secret weakness of the New, along with its showy trappings of power, Talleyrand left us the parable of his grandmother Mortemart’s pharmacy, together with an abrupt but telling comment: “Pharmacies better stocked and more scientific, perhaps also operated free of charge by doctors of great reputation, would never have brought so many poor people together and, above all, would not have done them so much good. Those pharmacies would have lacked certain great resources for healing people: good disposition, respect, faith and gratitude.” With the greatest precision and least ostentation, Talleyrand sought here, and only here, to describe the charisma of power.

The Marquis de Lafayette is the Hero of Democracies. Always on horseback, his empty gaze sizes up the crowd, eagerly seeks the “delicious sensation of the smile of the multitude.” He knows it is important to think little, but with determination. And above all, that it is important to seize the opportunity for certain gestures that might become vignettes: an embrace at a window while the crowd cheers outside, a white charger, a plume in the breeze. With his usual perfidy, but this time stifled by dutiful praise, Sainte-Beuve observed that Lafayette had transformed “the idol of honor into another idol: that of popularity”; a further sarcasm: “Lafayette’s prime motive is opinion in the honorable sense, glory in the ancient sense,” a reference to how doxa had been transformed from its ancient splendor of appearance to the mental dross of contemporary times.

The new rituals, which made Talleyrand laugh, with their jarring awkwardness, as any new and secular ritual was bound to be, are seen by Lafayette as freshest water that continuously streaks his uniform, in the absence still—though for just a few years—of the photographic plate. This hero will be the model for much vulgarity, but he cannot be described as vulgar—if anything, ridiculous. He is still protected by a faint aura of the ancien régime, the memory of many beautiful women seduced, including the difficult Madame de Simiane. His patriotic old age will be a revered and somewhat faded brocade. He, too, proclaims the capital letters that will reverberate around the halls of parliaments, then over town squares, before reemerging, somewhat surprised and reluctantly, in the steely storms of August 1914. They, too, “hadn’t wanted it.”

With Lafayette the pact of alliance between Good Causes and Stupidity is sealed. From then on, those seeking out the good of Man will have a grossly inaccurate, good-natured, obtuse, pompous image of man. Lafayette lets himself be escorted by the Unknown Soldier. For Good to return to being a fascinating conquest, it is necessary to await Simone Weil. And this will only be because Weil paid careful attention to platonic Good.

Lafayette is the true opposite of Talleyrand. They are born and die within a few years of each other, both have illustrious ancestries, both are involved in everything. Lafayette, convinced from the very start that he is moving with the times, is especially eager every now and then to strike historic poses, and in the meantime to survive. He has an unshakable capacity not to notice. Talleyrand also moves with the times, follows the trends, changes his shirts and his allegiances. But this is not why he is not forgiven. On the contrary: it is felt that his amorality is consistent and faithful, that his ever-moving and restless waters conceal some solid, ancient rock that resists the ravages of time much better than the papier-mâché of Lafayette.

After the many insults hurled against Talleyrand in Lafayette’s name, Talleyrand’s revenge on Lafayette comes from a judge who is equal to his task: Vautrin. In Le Père Goriot, during the course of Rastignac’s initiation, the convict offers him these words: “I have a friend whom I have attached closely to myself, a colonel in the Army of the Loire who has just been transferred into the Garde Royale. He has taken my advice and turned ultra-royalist: he is not one of those fools who never change their opinions. Of all pieces of advice, my cherub, I would give you this—don’t stick to your opinions any more than your words. If anyone asks you for them, let him have them—at a price. A man who prides himself on never changing opinions is a man who ends up always going in a straight line, an idiot who believes in infallibility. There are no such things as principles, there are only events; there are no laws, there are only circumstances: the man of talent accepts events and circumstances and turns them to his own ends. If principles and laws were fixed, nations would not change them as readily as we change our shirts. The individual is not obliged to be more particular than a whole nation. The man who has served France less than anyone is venerated as a fetish because he has always seen red; at most he should be placed in the Conservatoire, among the automatons, with the label ‘Lafayette,’ while the prince against whom everyone casts his stone, and who despises humanity enough to spit in its face all the oaths it demands, prevented the division of France at the Congress of Vienna: they owe him laurels, and they throw mud at him. Oh! I know something of affairs, I can tell you! I hold the secrets of many men! But enough.”

(It is difficult to rage against Lafayette. Behind it all, he is likably vacuous, someone who has decided to become the Plutarchan hero in the same way that others become bankers. And he has also chosen it because it is an occasional occupation that allows him plenty of spare time. When he enters the salon of the idéologue Antoine Destutt de Tracy, the lady of the house greets Mon cher Monsieur “with an enchanting tone of voice” and everyone admires his tall figure, on which is “a face that is imperturbable, cool, colorless as an old family portrait, a head covered by a short, badly made wig.” But Stendhal has no doubt: “I felt, without anyone needing to tell me, that Monsieur de Lafayette was simply a hero from Plutarch. He lived from day to day, with no excessive spirit, simply carrying out like Epaminondas the great action that came his way. Meanwhile, his sole occupation, despite his age, was to take hold of the skirts of pretty girls (vulgo fondle their asses), and he did so quite frequently, with no qualms.” He was a simpleton, but in the vague generalities of his conversation there was a “basic elegance.” And a basic indifference for the lofty ideas he fervently professed, rather like a libertine ready to make any fatuous declaration that might further his purpose of seduction. “Monsieur de Lafayette is extremely courteous and indeed affectionate to everyone, but courteous as a king.” He had an “admirable” way of knowing that “the essential thing is not to displease anyone and to remember everybody’s name.” While they speak to him about the political developments of the day—and there he has no doubts: encourage “all schemers, all fools, all those full of their own pomposity”—his eye is following one single new, young Portuguese girl, glimpsed among “Monsieur de Lafayette’s fifteen or twenty young nieces, almost all blond with splendid complexions and ordinary faces,” who are “lined up in battle order on the blue sofa.”)

“Lucien had to endure from good Gauthier what the young men of Paris call a tartine, a diatribe on America, democracy, the prefects that have to be chosen from among the members of the general councils, etc.

“While he was listening to these arguments that can be found in print everywhere, Lucien thought: ‘What a difference of spirit between Du Poirier and Gauthier! And yet Gauthier is probably as honest as the other is a scoundrel. In spite of my profound respect for him, I can hardly keep awake. How can I call myself a republican after all this? This proves that I am not cut out to live under a republic; for me it would be the tyranny of all mediocrities; and I can barely tolerate even those who are more worthy of respect. For me, what we need is a crooked and amusing prime minister, such as Walpole or Monsieur de Talleyrand.’

“Meanwhile, Gauthier was ending his discourse with these words … But Americans in France … there aren’t any.

“‘Take a small shopkeeper in Rouen and Lyon, stingy and lacking in imagination, and you have an American!’

“‘Oh, how you grieve me,’ exclaimed Gauthier, getting up sadly to leave, as the clock struck one.”