“ ‘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.”⁴⁹

Note for Lucien

Mon cher,

Nearly a hundred and fifty years have passed since your meeting with that good man Gauthier, nearly two hundred since the storming of the Bastille, and I wish to give you some news. Followed by his comrades, now no longer in out-of-the-way provinces, but audacious and assertive in all worlds, which are moreover also on the way to liberation, Gauthier has never for one moment stopped talking. Indeed, he is anxious to talk to everyone he meets. Meanwhile, the Ligue des Compagnons has shown itself unanimously reluctant to be déniaisée. And if, from time to time, one of the female allegorical figures allows herself to be débauchée, she soon returns demurely to her duty. We wish they were all Ninotchkas, but even that physical type is not now one of the most frequent. Those massacres for the common good have been of no use. Not even those between brothers. The tide of good intentions continues to wash about among waves of tedium. The cause of justice and of the people still fixes its gaze on holy pictures, but never achieves their aesthetic tenderness. The adventurousness of the Good is still far from being found, after so many years in which we have been compelled to feed with the Iniquitous, with their extravagant lies and intrigues. Around us there is a stubborn insistence on changing the way we live, but with no clear notions about the facts of life. While you were writing Souvenirs d’égotisme with your automatic writing at Civitavecchia, you were hoping those pages would have been published ten years after your death. Twenty years after was already too late, you feared: once all the “nuances de la vie” had changed, the reader would have perceived only the masses.⁵⁰ Then you wondered: “But where are the masses in these games my pen is playing?” Well, think Gauthier: that nuance of yours has become a mass—or a “multitude,” as one school mistress once said when she wanted to avoid overcompromising herself with the words of the day. I send you my fondest wishes and look forward to seeing you this evening for whist.

Talleyrand

It took forever, as usual, for the Prince of Wales to be dressed. To pass the time that morning, Laclos, aloof by nature, whose words had something dark and cold about them, fell into the trap that Tilly, an able man of the world, had prepared for him. “Monsieur de Laclos, who had no great tact at Court, but had all the gloomy impatience of a philosopher or a conspirator, preferred idle chatter instead of continually pulling out his watch and kicking his heels.”⁵¹