With the intent gaze of the naturalist, Hippolyte Taine stoops to look at the Palais-Royal and recognizes there the peculiar vegetation of new times, the venomous flora of the down-and-outs who clog and corrode the elementary mechanisms of every class struggle: “Center of prostitution, gaming, idleness and pamphleteering, the Palais-Royal attracts all that rootless population that drifts around a large city and which, having neither employment nor home, lives only for curiosity and pleasure, which haunts coffee shops, gambling houses—opportunists and down-and-outs, lost or redundant sons of literature, art and law, attorney’s clerks, schoolboys, fools, flâneurs, foreigners and lodgers in hôtels garnis; it is said there are forty thousand of them in Paris.”⁷⁰⁵ Michelet denounced the Palais-Royal of the Orléans as “this house where everything is fake.”⁷⁰⁶ That arid and intoxicating fever could develop only in a place dedicated to a karman of sensual enjoyment, of cold exasperation and deception: powers that belong to the retinue of exchange. But when the liturgy of the Revolution begins, the roles are reversed: the down-and-outs of the Palais-Royal, these gossipmongers, become the voice of the people, they fill the public galleries of the assemblies and intimidate the provincial representatives. The Council of State would eventually arrive—Napoleon installs it at the Orléans palace to exert administrative control over that center of ghosts. There, one evening in 1787, the young Bonaparte, a military officer, had approached a pallid “nymph,” despite being “affected more than anybody else by the loathsomeness of their condition.” “You’ll catch cold, how do you manage to wander about here outside?” he said. “Oh, sir, it’s hope that keeps me going, I have to get through the evening.” There were still fire attacks, restorations, and barricades: but no compromise was allowed between the Modern State and the Palais-Royal.⁷⁰⁷ When Bonaparte came to power, the first rumor to emerge from the Palais-Royal was that the general was preparing to deport the girls from that place to Egypt. “But that’s outrageous! Hell, deportations aren’t done like that!” said Bonaparte with feigned indignation, as soon as he was told about the rumor. And he began stroking the head of Rustan, his favorite mamluk. Today its silence is pervaded by the echo of occasional footsteps. A public garden, with solitary benches, children. Returning home, Colette, who was sensitive to the cold, felt between the colonnade and the wall “a perennial, zigzag movement of air that comes from the square of the Palais-Royal and splits into two currents: one fills rue de Montpensier, the other penetrates into the galerie de Chartres.⁷⁰⁸ In summer, this is where the dust swirls; in fall, a maelstrom of early-falling leaves dances in the same spot.”