CHEVALIER DE B***: It is extraordinary to observe, first of all, how easily history disappears. The dead are wiped away, their monuments have become traffic islands, their books are grassy country tombs. Everyone who lives is the barbarian of what has just lived. If we consider the past, we encounter no more than an obstinate reverberation of images, of rasping voices. And in the middle, vast opaque soundless areas. The invisible presences are grateful if we sense this awesome distance, this mighty silence. They feel no greater disdain than for those who treat the past with cordial familiarity.

“What can thought do now?” asked the Master. “Hide itself,” he replied, and disappeared.

Conversation is an art that its great masters, its great mistresses, considered lost even as they were speaking. Madame de Staël’s lament over a certain tone that could no longer be found comes several decades after that of Madame du Deffand. It would therefore be pointless searching for a time when that fleeting essence had not already in some way vanished. But it is clear what took it away forever. It was husbands—as Stendhal declared, with touching emphasis. If we had to find one feature that typified the immeasurable difference in behavior between the age of Louis XVI and that of Louis XVIII, it would be this: that before the guillotine women appeared alone in society, whereas just a few years later—and this began with Napoleon, who “in 1804 brought pruderie into fashion”—it wasn’t possible to see a young woman in a salon without being “certain of finding her husband playing écarté in some corner.^{654, 655} This eternal and constant presence of the husband, while most laudable and moral, struck the death blow to the art of conversation … The husband stifles that spirited abandonment that produces malice, innuendo, witticisms, which, though innocent in itself, cannot be expressed in the presence of authority established by law. In wit, in satire, in gaiety, in short in social comedy, there is invariably some spirit of opposition. Many people make fun of established authority: by nature, they are rebels. Not to mention how the eternal presence of the same person impedes creative inspiration. How can you tell a story or an anecdote if you’re within earshot of a witness, who is there—and you well know it—listening to the twists that you’ll be adding to give a certain effect or to liven up your account? How can you drop into a conversation, with that necessary air of improvisation, the spicy news you’ve picked up during the day if you’re being watched by someone who was perhaps there with you? It’s impossible. When the husband opens the door, the art of conversation must inevitably leave by the window.” Talleyrand was always surrounded by women who disregarded their husbands in the Stendhalian sense, and often in every other sense. It all began at Reims, on the day of his great entrance into society: “The sacre of Louis XVI marks the beginning of my connections with various women remarkable for their various gifts, women whose friendships have never ceased for a single moment to cast their spell on my life.⁶⁵⁶ I refer here to the Duchesse de Luynes, the Duchesse de Fitz-James, and the Vicomtesse de Laval.” Some were his lovers, others disappeared over the years, others were added, but as though they had always been around him. At the beginning, they were insolent and adventurous; at the end, they were decrepit and frivolous. But they always watched over him like a bodyguard that enclosed the Prince in a magical circle of soft fabric.