After the fall of Napoleon an insidious and imprudent feeling begins to circulate: that passions, grand gestures, and the perpetual drama of the soul now belong to the stage or to the past, but not to the events of the day. Any display of it is now overlaid, like a levy, by a deep sense of inadequacy, a general tinge of mediocrity. So every feverish Julien Sorel dreams about Napoleon’s victories as the final picture of the past; and every Joseph Delorme will nurture his hypochondria with a rejection of the present. A new breed concerns itself above all with eliminating all personal semblance of contact with the world. To cut links, to distance the heart, and finally to sabotage. From the dandy to the nihilist conspirator, young Barrès, black or white esotericism, Ludwig II, the flight to the Orient, spleen and rancor, silent exaltation, heightened perception—all appear as solitary points, dim lights that form the constellation of contempt: they are Gobineau’s Pléiades, calendars, wandering dervishes who tell interconnected stories, children of kings often born in small apartments, sometimes crippled by fortune. They meet at the table of an inn, on their restless Grand Tour, and the few words they exchange are enough to alert them: perhaps the acquaintance they have only just met, this artist who does not let his hair fall on his shoulders, who dresses like everyone else, who is naturally well mannered, who gives nothing away in his appearance—perhaps he, too, is the son of a king. And so it happened, recounts Gobineau, that Conrad Lanze met Wilfrid Ore on the boat for Arona, after having crossed the St. Gotthard Pass, among the dust and rhododendrons, together with Louis de Laudon, whom he had met two weeks before in Zurich, where they had been “taken by a fine love for each other.”⁵⁹⁵

If we must indeed find a distinction between what can be said about modernity and all we find in every previous age—isn’t it perhaps a certain capacity that it has to be swept along by form or gesture, to disregard limits even when it expressly defends them, to invade every off-limits area, perhaps with the excuse of guarding it from all abuse? Why do we regard Joseph de Maistre as so akin to his hated Voltaire? Why does Pascal converse as a brother with the most unbelieving moralists? It is a certain disregard for the consequences, moving impulsively and with the pleasure of roving, rapacious, reckless movement: eris palpans in meridie—you shall grope about at noonday.

Sainte-Beuve’s balanced and equanimous tone cost him a continual congestion of the black humors in his circulation: his capillaries became poisonous coral. We find them pasted into the Cahier vert that Sainte-Beuve wanted to fall “only into friendly hands,” and which has so far fallen mainly into indifferent hands.⁵⁹⁶ Few people have noticed the “very dark and very thick base of the palette,” which served to fix those pieces of gossip that couldn’t be published for reasons of decency, par bienséance, just as much as to thicken clots of confession that could never be dissolved verbally, par bienséance.⁵⁹⁷ On the other hand, those isolated, laconic words conceal a pathos that suspends them in the void, or against the background of his “arsenal of vendettas,” like the spare chapters of the only novel written by Sainte-Beuve: the Cautious Journey of a Delicate Soul toward Desolation:⁵⁹⁸