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.³⁷ 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.”³⁸ 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,”³⁹ a reference to how doxa had been transformed from its ancient splendor of appearance to the mental dross of contemporary times.⁴⁰

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.”