The king soon grew tired. His archers came to take away the child so that he would be brought up far from his mother. There were many letters of complaint and recrimination from the mistress who had fallen into disgrace. But Busby Berkeley’s remark was true at Versailles long before Hollywood: “There is no comeback for a has-been.” There was nothing to do but await her son’s future: when Louis XV died, she let the new king have the boy’s certificate of baptism—and the fourteen-year-old Abbé de Bourbon was received at Court. Many saw in him the slim and graceful figure of Louis XV. While he waited for a position in some prosperous abbey, the bastard was sent to Rome, to Cardinal de Bernis, the last of the four great cardinals who had governed France and now, at his palace on the Corso, entertained passing French nobility. He welcomed the Abbé de Bourbon with kindness, with affection, with “that blend of affability and refinement, of nobility and of simplicity” for which Madame de Genlis declared him to be “the most amiable man I have ever known.”⁶²³ But in Paris they were already forgetting the young abbé of royal stock. There was no more talk of abbeys—and they stopped sending him money. He wandered around Italy. Bernis, his last protector, felt grieved: “He is the Wandering Jew.⁶²⁴ It pains me to see a man who bears such a name drifting idly around all the inns of Italy; he must either be forbidden to hold such an illustrious name or be more respected in his person. I confess that on this point, and on several others, my thoughts are somewhat old-fashioned, indeed I am myself old-fashioned.” During his aimless wanderings, the Abbé de Bourbon died of chicken pox in Naples.

Sometime later, Madame Louise, a Carmelite nun and half-sister of the Abbé de Bourbon, described how she had met Abbé Turlot, who had been with him when he died: “The other day we talked about the poor Abbé de Bourbon … Such is the world: he’s been dead six months and he’s no longer remembered.⁶²⁵ I would so like to have a short epitaph written for him, just for it to be known who he was, but I’ll have to discuss it …” Less than a year later, Madame Louise would herself be dead and her plan came to nothing.

Images, for a long time, belonged to a cosmic liturgy that followed the course of the sun in the Zodiac. And for a short time they inhabited the ceremonies that escorted the sun of sovereignty. Having descended from the heavens, they settled in a mezzanine at Versailles. They were often left abandoned there, like a tedious provincial relative who talks about people entirely unknown. From that humiliating confinement they were dislodged as soon as the revolutionary crowd began to stir. Some ended up on the ends of pikes, others worshipped in Egyptian rites. No one understood whether all was tending toward triumph or persecution. It was tending toward both: but there was no longer a templum. Once the zodiacal belt was undone, each image now wandered in ever vaster cities, its tribe forgotten, ready to be attracted, to be plundered everywhere: in living rooms, abbeys, newspaper offices, satanic mills, ruins, American forests, suburbs. A new, uncontrolled, clandestine, contagious life began for them: for years they met at the crossroads of the mind, and at times they recognized a certain familiar air, the impression of a shared past. But they barely had time to stop before a violent gust urged them onward, along other paths, in a perpetual migration.