“Where you presently are, you can at least enjoy the douceur of not hearing discussion about [public] affairs”: Marie Antoinette in a letter of April 1787.

In a language that tended to become dry and insipid, some words were charged with radiance, becoming more variegated in meaning than ever before. Douceur: from sweetness to delight to pleasure to slowness to softness to mildness to languor to kindness to smoothness. It is useless trying to define what became concentrated in that word during certain years, for certain people.

If fate is the indivisible part, sacrifice can only be performed by pretending to be a whole. The Beltane “company” pretends to be one single being, and pretends that this being is a whole: the cake divided into so many equal portions. It can then give up one portion of it, which is not its own portion of it. To respond to the divine sacrifice, which takes place within a whole, the human sacrificers pretend they have a totality and all-powerfulness. The only mark that betrays them: the black on the slice of the person Consecrated and Damned (Devoted).

“Thanks to such a long-lasting peace and such perfect leisure, civilization had reached an extreme douceur.”¹²⁶ The story of progress is divided into two stages, separated by an interval of sacrifice. In the first stage, for the more enlightened minds the idea of progress never departed from that of a gradual mellowing. From a raw and rough material, by polishing and filling, delicately grinding, a perfection would be reached without harm or detriment. But what is the next moment? If perfection is the perfect baking of the Beltane cake, the next moment is the drawing of lots for the sacrifice. The cake of the indolent, which had itself emitted all douceur, is cut with blind equity by the guillotine. Acting in the heart of progress was the demon of the unlimited; meanwhile in the heart of douceur was nausea. Once having reached the equilibrium of bon ton, all that is left is a headlong degeneration. The smoothest language also becomes the most inert; the sharpest arrow—the bon mot—becomes a professional tool in the tainted air of the press room. After the Revolution, history becomes one of a development that has lost the patina of douceur.

After the Revolution, progress forgets douceur. Its heart, inhabited by the demon of endless advance, has no wish for it. Its reason, which now claims to be based on the Revolution, and therefore on the moment when douceur was killed off, has no wish for it. And the immense misunderstanding of reason wanted the sacrificial victim to be seen as the Enemy. Even its legacy could have brought contagion. When the very memory of douceur is eradicated, when all of history becomes son et lumière and no longer a coexistence with dark protective shadows, then certain affable and dreary expressions such as “leisure time” and “quality of life” will appear, in the same way that people had begun talking of “landscape” when nature had already been defaced.