François Fénelon soon realized how hard it was to be a Taoist at the Court of France. Esprit had now forsaken that uncontrollable power that ubi vult spirat and now became a blend of relentless study and rampant free thought. Whether it was etymology or gossip, everything had to be subjected to its furious scrutiny. It was the invisible observatory, but from which everything could supposedly be seen. A great psychologist, who scorned psychology, Fénelon immediately recognized what was the endless process to which new disciples of the “I, which is the god of secular people,” submitted themselves: it was a machine that would roll them as far as Nietzsche and Freud, as far as those tireless genealogists lying in wait at the threshold of every beginning, every story, to reveal everything (but Nietzsche eventually saw that everything was veiled).⁶⁵⁷ And, at that point, only a few scraps of the I would be left. No one who followed that path would ever find peace, for “the Lord exists not in agitation.”⁶⁵⁸ The whole of the Enlightenment is anticipated by Fénelon in a few lines. “He who seeks to reassure himself all the time that he is acting according to reason, and not through passion or mood, would be wasting time for action, he would spend his life dissecting his own heart and would never achieve what he is searching for: since he would never be sure that the mood or the passion, disguised beneath specious reasons, are not making him do what he would seem to be doing purely out of reason.”⁶⁵⁹

Fénelon explained to his correspondents that it was less important to mortify and punish themselves (and, in particular, to give in to “scruples”) than it was to carry out a more difficult task—to lose all respect for esprit.