One of the most perfect opening passages in literature conveys to us the irresistible attraction of the Palais-Royal: “It is my practice, no matter what the weather, to go for a stroll at around five in the evening to the Palais-Royal.⁶⁹⁸ I am the one who can always be seen alone, dreaming, on the banc d’Argenson. I amuse myself with politics, love, questions of taste and philosophy. I let my spirit run completely free. I give it free rein to follow the first wise or foolish idea that presents itself, in the same way that we see our dissolute young men in allée de Foy following the footsteps of some flighty courtesan with smiling face, keen eye, nose in the air, and then leaving her to follow another, tagging on to all of them and on to none. My thoughts are my whores.” Here Diderot formulates a poetics of thought quite opposite to that advocated in the Encyclopédie—and which, above all, is far more radical in rejecting the past. Here the most obstinate of sins, the delectatio morosa, is not only vindicated but raised to the level of a technique. That which a long succession of witnesses had believed it was necessary to extirpate before thought could even be countenanced, becomes the primordial water of thought itself. Palais-Royal is the mnemotechnical setting for this thought. A nameless being, comfortably settled in the midst of the chaos, follows strands of words, roaming images, constructs minuscule paper edifices, watches ribbons, buckles, and shawls ruffled by the wind under the arches, catches frissons of excitement, immerses inner words into the external hum of voices, lets himself be carried away by lights and sudden imperious shadows, succumbs, has no idea where he’s going—nor even whether that maelstrom will soon guide him back, without recollections, to the banc d’Argenson.

A place for gossip and “deep idleness,” a universal storehouse promising limitless availability, a no-man’s-land where the police never set foot (for such is the family prerogative of Orléans), the park of the Son of Heaven, paradisus inversus, “a great flesh market,” heralding the industrial phantasmagoria that will entice Benjamin into the arcades, the Palais-Royal is the image of an unpurified, childish, crude bonheur that increasingly exasperates its own pleasure and seeks to draw it to destruction.^{699, 700} It is here that the first liturgical act of the Revolution takes place, on July 12, 1789, when two wax busts of Necker and the Duc d’Orléans, taken from Curtius’s already Hoffmannesque wax museum, were carried in procession. According to one witness: “The people, at the sight of those two species of phantoms, abandoned themselves to extravagant conjectures.”⁷⁰¹ Those conjectures would be followed, two days later, by the taking of the Bastille. Events throughout the Revolution would be nurtured by the teeming ghosts of the Palais-Royal.