The jumble of styles and images of 1790 would soon be reduced to a unity fearful of contamination. Every hybrid is vice. In the streets, the frivolous variety of dresses disappeared, “the uniform coat of the new world was worn,” a first sign of the civilian who doesn’t wish to be noticed.⁵⁶ And on the stage, as well, there was the unity of the most tedious Golden Age ever imagined by humanity. Chateaubriand, who during his recent American wanderings had experienced the rustle of virgin forests, Creole eroticism, and the “sublime disarray” of Niagara Falls, also heard the piping of the liberators: “While tragedy turned the streets red, pastoral poetry flourished in the theaters; every plot involved innocent shepherds and virginal shepherdesses: fields, streams, meadows, rams, doves, a golden age beneath the straw roof, brought back to life to the sighing of the flageolet before the cooing thyrses and the credulous tricoteuses leaving the spectacle of the guillotine.⁵⁷ If Sanson had had enough time, he would have played the role of Colin, and Théroigne de Méricourt would have played that of Babet. The members of the Convention prided themselves on being the kindest of men: good fathers, good sons, good husbands, they went out walking with their children; nursed them; wept a tender tear as they watched their simple games; took those little lambs gently in their arms to show them the pretty horse that carted the victims to their execution. They spoke of nature, peace, piety, good works, innocence, domestic virtues; these espousers of philanthropy had their neighbors’ heads cut off with extreme sensitivity, to make the happiness of the human race ever greater.”

Paris air. Hegel wandered around Paris in amazement, and at the Palais-Royal, that “Paris within Paris,” he dutifully followed the instructions in the Manuel des étrangers, though Victor Cousin laughed at him. To Marie Helena, who awaited him in Berlin, he was careful to mention the most notable things: “Today, for example, we went to an abattoir, a slaughterhouse.⁵⁸ In what city of the world would I have gone to a slaughterhouse? But this is one of the remarkable things for which Paris is indebted to Napoleon, like a hundred other great things … And earlier we visited the Stock Exchange, this also founded by Napoleon; what a temple!”

Let us try to remove Talleyrand from the picture of his age, let us wipe away all evidence of his footprints. What is now missing? Fluidity. What is left is the crudeness of revolutionaries and legitimists, of the Directory, of the Napoleonic period, and of the bourgeoisie. They beat, like rams, against the same wall. While every municipal partisan spirit was at last finding his metaphysics in the vision of the Party, Talleyrand maintained the indifference of the sky and the water: mutable, elusive, unscathed among many faiths.

Talleyrand was no lover of bons mots. The only behavior, he felt, that reached perfection to some extent was that of a person he barely knew: his mother. And Talleyrand’s mother rejected bons mots as the bane of conversation. “Going to visit my mother, I chose the times when she was alone: in that way I could better appreciate her fineness of spirit.⁵⁹ It seemed to me that no one ever had more charm in conversation than she. She had no pretension. She spoke just in undertones; she never used a bon mot: it was something too explicit. Bons mots get remembered, and she just wanted her words to bring pleasure and be lost.”