Did he wear out fewer quill pens / Than Suard? Did Docteur Guy Patin have more than ten thousand volumes?” But one day Sainte-Beuve felt he was approaching something that seemed to be his own point of equilibrium. A vision that he didn’t welcome and to which he yielded through exhaustion. For him, as for the monks who compiled herbaria and for whom, after all, he had no interest, everything was a book. But liturgical devotion manifested itself in him as “basic indifference,” a willingness to read those countless and now grubby characters anywhere, without distinction, without purpose, regardless, with no hope of encountering at any point the beginning or the end of the book, which indeed no longer existed: “Perhaps as a feigned excuse for my indolence, perhaps because now I have a deeper perception of the principle that everything in the end is the same, I have reached the point of considering that, whatever I do or don’t do, whether I labor in my study on a specific work or fritter my energies on many articles or waste my time in company, letting my hours be taken up by the importunate, the needy, by appointments, in the street, by anyone and anything, nevertheless I never stop doing just one single thing, reading just one single book, an infinite, perpetual book of the world and of life, which no one reads to the end, of which the wisest people decipher many pages; I therefore read all the pages of it that are presented to me, at full tilt, backwards, what does it matter!⁶⁸⁵ I never stop. The richer the blend of colors, the more frequent the interruptions, the more I am drawn into this book where you always find yourself in the middle; but the advantage is to have read it by opening it in all sorts of places.”

What are the dead for us, if not—before all else—books? Of all forms of prehistoric religion, that which seems most remote and most difficult to understand today is the cult of the dead, their perpetual presence in every occurrence of life. But for ancient man, the most remote and most difficult aspect in our cult would have been the use of books. And yet both forms converge. Solidified into portable objects that accompany us, prey on us, haunt us, assuage us, the dead have established themselves on the written page: their power has never diminished, though it has undergone a wondrous change.

Voices from the Palais-Royal

Restif de la Bretonne: “… this center of chaos of a great city.”⁶⁸⁶

Richelieu chose the place thanks to his usual capacity to touch a body’s center of gravity: that great quadrangle which, at that time, was called Palais-Cardinal, then Palais-Royal, then Palais-Marchand, then Palais-Égalité, then Jardin de la Révolution, before once again becoming Palais-Royal, the center of the center of the center of the vast body of civilisation, created in the midst of eighteen years of hatred and intrigue. Mighty figureheads and stone anchors jutted from the old façade as a reminder that the Cardinal presided over the seas and over commerce.