And meanwhile, “it hasn’t yet been established what illness Flaubert died from.”⁵⁸⁹ Laforgue in Berlin was pondering this point, while his voice was flowing over the pages that Empress Augusta was asking him to read, skipping here and there over the impertinent passages. He graciously accepted his role as a rather chlorotic lady-in-waiting, custodian of boredom like “the clock of a deserted railway station.”⁵⁹⁰ But in his physiology, the great philosophical terms, always high-sounding (Will! Renunciation! Schopenhauer! Hartmann!), underwent a rich change, degenerating into illustrations from a biological atlas. The concepts were quietly crouching behind a sheet of glass, no longer directed toward Hyperuranion, but suspended in the Berlin aquarium. “Before the atonic, sated, sober, buddhist gaze of the crocodiles, of the pythons (the ophidians), etc.⁵⁹¹ How I understand those old races of the Orient that had exhausted all meanings, all temperaments, all metaphysics.” And there was something that went even further: “the ideal is these sponges, these starfish, these plasmas in the cool, dull, all dreamlike silence of the water.”⁵⁹² It was Debussy’s piano that covered a now empty thought, corroding it beneath its band of sound.

In that “critical age in which some people tend toward the ironic and sour, others toward the insipid and sugary, and yet others toward the vulgar,” in the first official age of the bourgeoisie, the years of Louis Philippe and of disappointment—here a curtain descends, edged in black, though still transparent, separating the present from the past.⁵⁹³ The present certainly gives cause for concern, if only because it is gross, massive, but it no longer has the aesthetic decorum of history. A new dimension of dreariness is born. Sensitive beings were struck for the first time by a sense of foreboding that the world around might even be ugly forever. Someone suggests, on the other hand, that history means scenery, costumes, and ruinous passions. And every history, now, tends inadvertently to be transformed into a Ludwig II of Bavaria in disguise, talking aloud to the Names in the archives. Spiritualism, after 1848, becomes the basis for even the most rigorous studies—until a recent historian, Robert Darnton, would recognize there, almost as if it were something obvious, the special vocation of his profession: “The reconstruction of worlds is one of the historian’s most important tasks.⁵⁹⁴ He undertakes it, not for some strange urge to dig up archives and sift through old paper, but because he wants to talk with the dead.”