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.”²⁶ 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.