The nausea produced by excessive sweetness marks the moment when the sacrifice should occur. Nausea arises from the feeling of guilt at having avoided the sacrifice.

The state of sweetness is not stable: an occasional fleeting and insidious perfection, the dulcedo of mystics. When it becomes lasting, sweetness demands to be devoured. Sweetness ends under the knife of sacrifice, sexual pleasure in a spasm.

Douceur is the patina spread over life, making it livable; it is the dust on the wings of the butterfly. To produce it involves long alchemical care: slow cooking, gentle heat. But there is always fire, which seeks in the end to kill.

Douceur eventually shrinks to a murmur, a voice that, in the words of Céline, seeks to “gently gather the kindly spirits of the dead.”¹²⁷ It inadvertently escapes the murderous oppression of the world, “with its constrained, insistent, besmirched characters clinging to their desires, to their passions, to their vices, to their virtues, to their explanations.”¹²⁸ Ellipses mark the empty spaces in a lace of shadows: “… talking, after that, more gently to things …”¹²⁹

When the Duchesse de Saint-Simon was appointed lady-in-waiting to the Duchesse de Berry she was given apartments at Versailles: an antechamber and five rooms, into which the only daylight to enter came through the front door. In the most secluded part of those rooms, the Duc de Saint-Simon established “sa boutique.” He could neither read nor write there without candles, even in the middle of the day. In the great empty idleness that had been forced upon him he heard the crash of falling ranks. Hunched in his stone hovel, he asked himself, throughout the first five years that he labored on his Mémoires, if what he was doing was not impious. And so his first reader was a friend from the Court, though not someone from the far end of another Versailles corridor but Abbot Rancé at the monastery of La Trappe. The Regent, who knew Saint-Simon no less than Saint-Simon knew him, saw him as “unchangeable as God and fiercely tenacious.” The Regent was an excellent reader, and loved Rabelais when everyone else considered him gothic. And so it was his task, without knowing it, to write down those words like a cartouche beneath the most recent delusion of omnipotence: that of the writer who has shut out the world in order to possess its specter with a rapaciousness that no man of power could match. Moving away from Versailles, that dissimulated yearning had only to find protection among Proust’s cork-lined walls.

CHEVALIER DE B***: Don’t imagine that Monsieur de Maistre was a harsh bigot, worried by darkening times. He was a brilliant talker—and most of all he wanted the sound of his words to echo as far as the great city of Paris, where he would set foot too late. He wanted his words to travel far around those salons that had harbored esprit in everything that seemed execrable to him, and which were therefore the only appropriate places to receive them.