“A black girl of thirteen or fourteen, almost naked and of singular beauty, opened the barrier to the enclosure like a young Night.⁷⁴ We bought corn cakes, chickens, eggs, milk, and returned to the house with our pitchers and our baskets. I gave the young African my silk handkerchief: I had been welcomed to the land of freedom by a slave girl.”

“On those same pavements where ragged folk and men in frock coats are now seen strolling, young girls used to pass wearing white capes, straw hats tied under their chins with ribbons, baskets on their arms, with fruit or a book; all of them used to keep their eyes lowered, all of them would blush when someone looked at them.⁷⁵ ‘England,’ says Shakespeare, ‘is a nest of swans among the waters.’ ”

UNE FEMME CURIEUSE: Voluptuousness is a state of the imagination that precedes, accompanies, and follows pleasure. It can be compared with that appearance assumed by trees in a park, the steps of a stairway, the outline of a manor house, when lit by the moon. A luminous glow then reveals the glory of their nature; and they are wrapped in a wonderfully sweet halo.

Madame Tallien, Juliette Récamier, and Joséphine de Beauharnais appear at the Bal des Victimes in Abel Gance’s film Napoléon, looking like three déesses of the Folies Bergère and faithful to the légende even in their Voluptuousness. Here, they are not parading on a brightly lit catwalk: all they have to do is descend a few gray steps on which they radiate “a sweet luminescence” (as one newspaper put it), while in the background, through the prison bars, the distant light of the outside world casts a halo around their shoulders and their hair. The film has a mauve tint: the camera lingers on the open tunics of these flappers of the Directory. Bonaparte, a sullen voyeur, draws back into a corner. The camera starts moving again as the dancing begins: among the bodies, which mingle, ever more softly, we no longer distinguish the curve behind a knee from that of a neck or arms. In this celluloid carnality, Glory bursts out of its revolutionary sackcloth.

The Grand Ball

With the Congress of Vienna a new kind of spectacle appeared in politics. No one in that prolonged social gathering could believe that the purpose of the negotiations was what everybody claimed—the restoration of monarchist sovereignty. Instead, there was an urgent need to test out for the first time in lavish orchestration the language of concealment, which would make such a contribution to the political process over the next decades. “The grand remarks about ‘reconstructing social order,’ about ‘regenerating political order in Europe,’ about ‘a lasting peace based on a division of power,’ etc., etc.,⁷⁶ were made to reassure the people, and to give an air of dignity and importance to that solemn meeting, but the real purpose of the Congress was to share out among the winners the spoils taken from the losers.” This is what Friedrich von Gentz noted in his memorandum of February 12 for Prince John Caradja, hospodar of Wallachia. But the division of spoils among the victors is what happens in any war: if a perceptive observer like Gentz felt the need to point it out, it was precisely because he had a bleak awareness that the real significance of the Congress lay in its paraphernalia, much more than in its ultimate decisions. A new aesthetic of politics was unfolding there. And Gentz felt it to such an extent that he wanted to record, at the very outset, how, beneath the masquerade of grand phrases and grand balls, the old unshakeable purpose of politics—“the dividing out of spoils”—persisted.