Talleyrand saw the prospects for Napoleon’s political future from the time of the Battle of Marengo. He told the financier Ouvrard at that time: “Two paths open up for him: the federal system, which, after the conquest, leaves every prince as master of his own house, on terms favorable to the victor: so that today the First Consul could reinstate the King of Sardinia, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and so forth.⁹⁶ But what if, on the other hand, he wants to bring together, to incorporate? Then he takes a path that has no end to it.” Talleyrand, through his innate wisdom, possesses a talent, the perception of limit, but he knows that the new political world is compelled toward the limitless. He knows also that by now “all the mechanisms controlling the old political system are broken or about to break.”⁹⁷ And yet Talleyrand’s destiny is to move among les affaires, the metaphysical name for politics. He will have no hesitation therefore in choosing the path with no limit, that error spiced with novelty. The small courts of emigrants hold no attraction for him: they are a mistake that has already gone stale. Whereas it will be thrilling, and splendidly ephemeral, to create a coexistence between limit and the government of that person whose mission it was to cancel it. The relationship between Napoleon and Talleyrand is a fetish bristling with mirrors and nails. But in the obscurity of their relationship, one single point is obvious: the immense curiosity that attracted each to the other. For years they were seen trying not to make it apparent, like two stately beasts, brought from remote and incompatible climates and locked together in the same cage.

Who did Napoleon have to fear after the Battle of Austerlitz? On the evening of his victory he was staying, by fortunate coincidence, at the house of Prince Kaunitz, who had so humiliated the French ambassador during the Seven Years War and used to clean his teeth at table (Metternich would never have done such a thing). He had chosen to establish himself in Kaunitz’s own room, into which there was a constant flow of “Austrian flags, Russian flags, messages from archdukes, messages from the Emperor of Austria, prisoners who bore the names of all the great families of the Empire.”⁹⁸ The courier arrived with the post, “an event that, in war, is most pleasurable.”⁹⁹ Napoleon asked Talleyrand to glance through it in his presence. Coded letters from foreign ambassadors in Paris, deciphered; police reports, banking matters. But there was also a long report from Madame de Genlis (“no one has been such a determined écriveuse”),¹⁰⁰ who reported various pointed comments heard “in the houses that were then called the faubourg Saint-Germain.”¹⁰¹ Various indomitable old ladies had once again been looking down on him. The letter and those remarks threw Napoleon “into a state of unimaginable rage.¹⁰² He cursed, he railed against the faubourg Saint-Germain. ‘Oh! They think they’re stronger than me,’ he said, ‘Messieurs du faubourg Saint-Germain. We shall see! We shall see!’ ” To remain steadfast to that challenge, years of military campaigning had to follow; and around a century later, for Proust, years of reclusion in a cork-lined cell.