DUCHESSE D’ABRANTèS: When did we all start wearing masks? Let me think … yes, it was before I’d been let out into society, and my sharp-toothed cousins paid me a visit and told me everything … those were the reckless years of the Directory, when purple togas packaged in England were seized at customs … when Bonaparte was received at the Palais Luxembourg by five Directors with plumed hats, dressed in cloaks covered with arabesques and cut in medieval style—yes, they were not yet resolved on Roman Virtue … pale with anxiety before the General whom the sublime Ossian held suspended two inches above the ground … said our dear friend, ours, and everyone’s perennial traitor—Talleyrand, the only one to have succeeded in betraying everything, apart from style … and certainly not out of delicacy but because style is the golden scepter that is ultimately revered by a vast part of this world, and some other … Like a camp of dazed nomads, among pieces of cloth robbed from innocent travelers, this was Paris at that time … Everyone dreamed of the Court, but memories of the correct gestures were already starting to fade … the Directors represented the people, but that was not enough … though still representing someone, they were rather like salesmen setting off to invade the provinces by stagecoach … with their new price lists …

An irrepressible tropism turns the spirit toward Talleyrand: “Once, during my youth, and even later, when I used to love adventure stories and melodramas, I realized that what fascinated me was uncertainty about people’s identity.”³ How can we not experience it over that mask that many called deathly or impenetrable or impassive, while just as many have attributed to it all kinds of infamy and the most unexpected virtues? A mask that had watched over the whole murky course of the Canonical Phases, which themselves had doubtful identities: they did not know, they would never know, whether to consider themselves lucky or unlucky, all marked niveis atrisque lapillis. In the end the only thing that could be said was what Léon Bloy noted in his usual blunt manner: “Evidently God no longer knew what to do about that old world.⁴ He wanted new things, and someone like Napoleon was needed to set them going.” Apart from such harsh certainty, the whole was unstable, and then the outlines of a physiognomy offered themselves as a last mainstay. But there again, all knowledge is physiognomic.

Johann Kasper Lavater, the last savant of physiognomy, asked young Goethe to help him on his Physiognomische Fragmente. Wasn’t he perhaps already convinced about the “general homogeneity of every formation of nature”?⁵ Of course, replied Goethe—and his contribution to Lavater’s work would indeed be pressed further. For him, even objects, clothing, environments were part of physiognomic science: “Nature forms mankind, and mankind is transformed, and such transformation, in turn, is natural; he who finds himself standing in the midst of the vast world creates another world within him, a small world enclosed and protected by walls, and furbished in his image.”⁶