Angry at society: they are words that no one would expect from the mouth of Talleyrand. And yet they are confirmed, with subtle variations, by what Talleyrand himself wrote in his Mémoires: “At the seminary I felt a sadness which, in a sixteen-year-old, has few comparisons. I established relations with no one. I did nothing except in bad humor. I felt resentful toward my superiors, toward my parents, toward the institutions, and above all toward the power that was given to social conventions to which I found myself obliged to submit.

“I spent three years at Saint-Sulpice, hardly speaking to anyone; people thought I was supercilious, they often reproached me … I was no more than a quiet young man, extremely miserable and inwardly vexed … The library at Saint-Sulpice, endowed by Cardinal de Fleury, was vast and well organized.⁷³¹ I spent my days there reading the great historians, the personal lives of statesmen, moralists, a few poets. I devoured accounts of journeys. A new land, the dangers of a storm, the portrayal of a disaster, the description of countries where evidence could be seen of great transformations, sometimes conflicts, all of this strongly attracted me. At times it seemed that something about my situation was less hopeless when I observed these great voyages, these great disasters, descriptions of which filled the writings of modern navigators.” By a clever sleight of hand, Talleyrand had transformed what he had called revolt and sedition in private conversation into travels and storms in his public memoirs. Weren’t they, after all, the same thing? Weren’t they perhaps equivalent forms of that “torrent” that prevents us from ever resting on secure ground? About Max Stirner, during his years of adolescence, we have only a few notes from teachers in the records of schools that were certainly not as distinguished as the seminary at Saint-Sulpice. But the whole of The Ego and Its Own is impregnated with the memory of long, bitter imaginings of revolt. Stirner and Talleyrand, when they came out into the open, both found themselves moving forward into a whirling nothingness. Stirner belonged to nothing from the very beginning, and had to represent it in its purity and in its absoluteness; Talleyrand was nothing inasmuch as he had been ousted from his “natural place” which continued to exist for him in the midst of every conflict: a legitimate place, representing an order that could disrupt neither tempest nor revolt. He never fell, however, into the crude ingenuousness of thinking that such order could be identified with any kind of social system. And yet any system was bound to relate to such order. This was a reflection of the mysterious words of Saint Paul: “Non est enim potestas nisi a Deo—There is no power that does not come from God.”⁷³² Throughout his life, he was accompanied by a premonition. He sensed, like a faint perfume, that behind the world, behind the fury of its waves, there was the inaccessible “hidden ocean,” celestial and terrestrial, perceivable through the distant vibrations of the waves: it was there that the prop of ṛta was born, it was there that it continued to rise, day after day, with the appearance of the Dawn.