“His manner, constantly light when dealing with the greatest matters …” Talleyrand’s lightness, and especially when dealing with “the greatest matters,” is the characteristic that reveals the hidden role he has chosen for himself.⁶⁰ There is no longer anything in the world that cannot be treated with lightness—this is his premise. Everyone is afraid to acknowledge it. Talleyrand accepts it and puts it into practice in his every action.

This is enough to create that immeasurable distance that many regard as monstrous between him and everyone else. Talleyrand is capable of using lightness because things no longer have a preestablished weight. They fluctuate, they are huge, poisonous bodies that do not rest in themselves. Nothing stands firm. There is nothing more incorporeal and empty than will. Nor can an immediately apparent bond be found between that silent emptiness, pure compressed energy, and the inordinate transformations that it provokes, often without allowing any lull before the devastation.

Living in the Torrent

Talleyrand soon realized that disputes over power would no longer be fought out on a chessboard, where each move was made with slow ceremony, but in a current far stronger than all that it dragged along with it. This is the “torrent” he spoke of when describing the years of the Revolution—the same that we find in the pages of many of his contemporaries. Saint-Simon, when writing about the Regent, once said that “he could live only in the action and in the torrent of affairs”: but that choice,⁶¹ tantamount to a drug for the man who had been “bored since birth,” now dragged all and everything toward Amazonian cataracts.⁶² Torrentiality was not a prodigious accident that came to rock history before being reabsorbed by it: on the contrary, it was the expression of a new dominant character—the fever for experiment—that was grafted onto history, transforming it forever. Talleyrand would find it everywhere: under Napoleon but also under the Restoration, and finally under the bourgeoisie of Louis Philippe. And he would live just long enough to taste the first fruits of the petite bourgeoisie protecting the rise of Adolphe Thiers, an eager journalist who had come to Paris from the provinces. Seen with an unsympathetic eye, like that of Talleyrand, the Reaction and the White Terror followed hotfoot after the Jacobins: “I also wish to recall a decree of Count Wurmser, the Intendant General of the Austrian Army, to show just how great was the urge of the revolutionary spirit (I cannot describe it otherwise) of governments who declared they were waging war solely against the Revolution, in the person of Bonaparte.”⁶³ As Talleyrand would state in his note to the allies, dated July 31, 1815, the transition from the Revolution to Napoleon had been a transition from “l’esprit d’égalité” to “l’esprit de conquête.” And it could be said that it was through the very bigotry of the Restoration that “l’esprit de conquête” had achieved its goal of infiltrating the whole of Europe.