Faded by légende, funerary ornament of every glory, unnamable because too often named, his victims are still seated on the “finest systematic laws” proclaimed at the Luxembourg, imperatoria brevitas, evocation of a larval nature. “Fatigue, the camps, the night watches have made me fat,” he wrote to Joséphine with his atrocious spelling, in his “badly formed” handwriting. “Horrible and impressive” were a good pair of adjectives: he used them in recalling the spectacle of that “miserable city”—Mantua—in flames.⁹⁰

“A very shrewd observer, very calm, despite his fits of anger, which are mere subterfuges; a man of wit, if by wit we mean he understands the ignoble side of the heart; indifferent to good and bad, so that, in his impartiality, he would perhaps have preferred the first to the second, insomuch as more safe; he had moreover studied all the principles of tyranny, and it would have flattered his amour propre to have shown some sort of moderation as proof of his ability.”⁹¹

Napoleon’s legacy: the cult of will and the urge for control: a self-generated tension, a wind-up toy with a long spring. Control is illusory from the very start, but the machine it operates has nevertheless a majesty that encourages veneration.

Talleyrand’s legacy: in the final touch given to things, in the comma that decides meaning (a precept of the Duc of Choiseul), in the almost imperceptible mark that style leaves behind, in the conviction that, generally speaking, little can be done, and this littleness might be due, if anything, to transient gifts such as the ear, the sense of kairòs, lightness, agility in breasting the waters of metamorphosis.

“His repugnance and scorn for those who call themselves philosophers are apparent on every occasion.⁹² When he came to hear that events in Naples were going badly, that people were dying of hunger, that the new Court had no money, he said coldly: ‘That’s their business; see what happens to countries governed by philosophers.’—There’s nothing more amusing than the way he treats Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, his ex-colleague at the Consulate. ‘So, Monsieur Sieyès, how’s the metaphysics going?’—‘What do philosophers have to say about all this, Monsieur Sieyès?’—that’s the tone he uses with him. Sieyès, for his part, withdraws into an impenetrable silence.” These quips about metaphysics, reported by Gentz, were among the more subtle pleasures that power gave to Napoleon. And there was one man who escaped such mockery: Talleyrand, a metaphysician disguised to everyone, including himself.

We are always somebody’s metaphysicians. The ideologist Sieyès was ridiculous in the eyes of Napoleon, but Napoleon appeared awkwardly archaic in the eyes of the financier Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard, since he had failed to recognize the power that would soon overshadow every empire—credit.

“Napoleon knew no sources of revenue other than taxation and conquest.⁹³ Credit for him was an abstraction; he saw in it only the dreams of ideology and the empty ideas of economists,” wrote Ouvrard. And once he even had the impudence to suggest to Napoleon what it was that would one day take his place: “He rose from his chair and, drawing me across to the window recess, he said: ‘Monsieur Ouvrard, you have lowered royalty to the level of commerce.’⁹⁴—‘Sire, commerce is the accomplishment of states; it can do very well without royalty, whereas royalty cannot do without it.’ ”