The great book inspired by the arcades is not, as Benjamin suggests, Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris (however captivating it might be), but Céline’s Mort à crédit, with its stories about passage des Bérésinas (which was passage Choiseul), where Cèline’s mother had her shop. She mended lace, often for customers who were vaporous and opulent, quick to pilfer some article of lace by sleight of hand; she cooked only pasta with butter, so that no smell would impregnate her delicate merchandise; she moved anxiously, on a lame leg, in a suffocating space of scraps and oddments. But Benjamin didn’t include Mort à crédit among his disparate sources for the Arcades Project, and perhaps he didn’t read it. Benjamin was immediately defensive and suspicious in relation to Céline: he grouped him, improbably, with Benn and Jung as a representative of “clinical nihilism in literature,” to which he intended to devote a lecture.⁷²² But for Benjamin those names are held together not so much by “nihilism,” about which everyone talks, as by alarm bells that sound in their writing: shimmering behind Jung’s ponderous and pseudo-scientific prose were erratic, nondialectical, intrusive images. Recognizable in Benn was a sneer at culture that was diametrically opposed to that of Brecht. Benjamin had decided by then to submit to Brecht’s malicious cane—and had no choice but to refuse all others. Finally, in Céline everything was dragged along, from the outset, by a dark current that swept away every momentary island of refuge, every possibility of another story that was not the “petite musique” of gradual disintegration. And yet, if there is a poetics of the arcades, almost a secretion from those highly artificial places, it is that which young Destouches, the child scowling at the back of the shop, had silently absorbed from his mother: “My mother is still working.⁷²³ I remember, in the arcade, when she was younger, the enormous pile of lace to be mended, the fantastic mound that always cluttered up the table—a mountain of stuff to do for just a few francs. It never ended. It was for something to eat. It gave me nightmares, and her as well. It has always remained in my head. Like her, I always have on my table an enormous pile of pending Horror that I’d like to piece together before putting an end to it.”

Historians are unanimous in condemning the ease with which Talleyrand appropriated money in his dealings, obtaining it from the most varied sources. Those large sums were called douceurs. His contemporaries were already extremely curious to know the details about his blatant levies. Barras occupies seven pages of his Mémoires with a list of “Pourboires diplomatiques et affaires de Talleyrand, prince de Bénévent”—a list he claims to have received from Madame de Staël.⁷²⁴ Adding together the various figures produces the stately sum of 117,690,000 francs (up to 1815, and excluding the transactions carried out through his wife and his emissaries).