His pole star was an opinion that did not belong to the rabble of spirits. He saw the people around him as being alien to all that is most noble, most tender, most sublime. At best, they could at times be right. He often awoke with a thirst for revenge, with his sword drawn. He would immediately stir himself into a state of fury, wanting to destroy everything. From the first time he appeared to me, behind a moonlit balustrade, at St. Petersburg, where I had finally been cast by the storm of the revolution in my country and a multitude of strange events, I regarded him as the most exemplary gentleman of intelligence that life had offered me.

I had spent the years of my adolescence under the leather strap of the fathers of Vendôme: but all I can hear now is the hum of the refectory, like an army of cicadas, and the solitary voice of a preacher, who still mimicked the mild unction of Massillon. I was still not ready to meet someone in whom religious spirit and military spirit came together with equal fervor. As soon as I met Monsieur de Maistre he invited me to take occasion from my recollections of France to consider the multitude of great culprits who sacrificed themselves at each other’s hands with supernatural precision. In his view, one fact alone remained unchanged in the history of the universe: the spilling of human blood. Once I even found myself thinking he was mad, when he asked, fixing me in the eye: “If we had records of massacres in the same way that we have meteorological records, do you think we might perhaps discover their inner law, after a few centuries of observations?” But he saw immediately that I was confused, and he tried almost to apologize with that immense kindness that tempered certain terrifying words: “I only find myself thinking about these things because, as long as I have been thinking, I think of war.”

Nothing makes Joseph de Maistre more furious than the pretension that something of significance can be decreed by human arrangement, convention, stratagem. For him, factice, artificial, is the worst of insults. When the Americans decide to build their capital on the basis of a resolution, Maistre shudders as if in the face of some iniquity. And he immediately adds: “You could bet, one thousand to one, that the city will not be built, or that it will not be called Washington, or that the Congress will not reside there.”¹³⁰ History has then taken care to ensure he would lose his sweeping bet: but this is not an indication of Maistre’s blindness but confirmation of what terrified him. What most disturbed him was improbability, the apparent frailness of the evil that he saw spreading: whereas the truly satanic element lay in the fact that it was precisely that improbability that threatened to become fixed as a permanent situation—which is what then happened. Although he didn’t wish to admit it for fear of compromising his anathemizing fury, Maistre foresaw that man—that aberration for whom republican legislators labored, that empty word: “Man now simply doesn’t exist in the world”—could survive, and for a long time, with no land, with no roots, with no notion of an unwritten law, with no longing for “that indefinable quality that is called dignity.”^{131, 132} Indeed, he could easily cancel out those memories, like a vague dream. And this would be the most alarming moment, since “if Providence erases something, it certainly does so in order to write.”¹³³