The deadly “torrent” described by Talleyrand becomes a “blizzard” in Metternich’s “confession of faith” in his letter to Alexander I from the Silesian capital, Troppau, dated December 15, 1820, a key text for every Reactionary. The last two sentences read as follows: “Every great State that is determined to survive the blizzard of the moment still conserves great prospects of salvation.⁶⁸ A strong union between States on the principles set out here will defeat the same blizzard.” Sonorous whirlpools were now replaced by a blinding tempest. Reality threatened to freeze its most ardent observer. A few days later, while traveling to the Congress of Laibach, Metternich saw as a strange blessing the “first gust from the South,” which “in less than a quarter of an hour [melted] the ice that covered the windows of the carriage and had been half an inch thick at certain points.” For a moment he went back in time: no longer as a prince, but as a servant, and yet happy: “I breathed in a new life, like servants who often inhale aromas when they open the doors of a drawing room.”⁶⁹ That moment of suspended intoxication was short-lived. The ice loomed once again: “Tomorrow we shall see the avalanche arrive, the sad avalanche of statesmen.”

Chateaubriand is constantly playing, with cunning, malice, sleight of hand, with the exoteric and esoteric versions of his writing. This creates a meditative and visionary Chateaubriand that is, at one and the same time, his most ludicrous and his most sublime aspect, his most popular and his most covert aspect. We then have, on the one side, the Chateaubriand who has been the bane of so many French lycée students: the man who always finds a proper context, carefully arranges the objects onstage, adjusts the lighting, and then “launches” into one of his meditations, with the same ease with which an office clerk, during the coffee break, starts telling his colleagues about his car’s engine performance. Thus he succeeds in keeping a proper distance from the battlefield of Waterloo in order to meditate calmly on the historical occasion, while cannons rumble in the background. And thus it is most rare, as he himself admits, for him to pass through “the silent and uninhabited halls of the Tuileries without offering some serious reflection.”⁷⁰ But the two levels of prose sometimes become juxtaposed: all of a sudden, during a piece of somber, lofty, and vague blather, a few sharp, disturbing lines appear, which then abruptly end—and immediately we hear the polite murmur resume. In one of his many meditations on graveyards, which are often interchangeable, like the discourses on moonlight that he used to repeat to guests at the home of Madame de Villeparisis’s father, we find these phrases: “Is it certain everything is emptiness and absence in the realm of tombs?⁷¹ Will there not be existences of nothingness, thoughts of dust? Could those bones not perhaps have ways of life that we ignore? Who is acquainted with the passions, the pleasures, the embraces of these dead?”