The conqueror’s footsteps echoed through the Tuileries on the day he took possession of the palace, in the company of Pierre Louis Roederer, a counselor of state at the time. “Come, my little Creole,” he had said to Joséphine, “lie down on the bed of your masters.” Roederer looked at the “old and somber tapestries and the darkness of the apartments.” “General,” he said, “this is dismal.” And Bonaparte, knowing it would be immediately recorded among the counselor’s papers, replied: “Yes, like glory.”¹⁰³

Education has this paradox: that it consists above all of things that cannot be learned—or of things that represent what cannot be learned. Napoleon wanted to be surrounded by it, since he knew that nothing existed without it: but he wanted it to be present in one single person, on whom, at the right moment, he could easily direct all his hatred. For Napoleon, Talleyrand was education insofar as he represented the past: the Rosetta Stone under the eyes of the conqueror. Everyone else in the imperial cortege was a desperate masquerader—but stiff, righteous, pompous, since they all feared ridicule. Napoleon’s hidden wound was legitimacy, and so—with the false reasoning of sovereigns—he wanted to surround himself only with legitimate couples. He even forced Talleyrand, a bishop and a libertine, to marry. This brought an end to the carefree and bittersweet years in which “spouses in good society used to rarely see each other and never quarreled.¹⁰⁴ Since the time of Napoleon, husbands give themselves airs of self-importance, their pride has been reawakened by the whim of a despot who ‘took the decision to adopt good manners’ and ordered women never to appear in public without their husbands.” Stendhal explained the reasons for all this to the incredulous English: “In establishing a new Court, this despot feared more than anything else the effects of ridicule, which in France is fatal for all it touches and would have arisen without doubt if its fledgling nobility had aped the follies and vices of the ancient nobility.¹⁰⁵ Desirous of avoiding the inconveniences that the frivolities and scandals of a licentious Court would have caused him in the midst of his important occupations, he therefore commanded, with his iron will, that orderliness and decency should be the order of the day.”