Such new writing would be recorded on flesh that had no memory and would demand a far greater amount of bloodshed, marking the beginning of a world that was no longer largely uninhabited, no longer with vast expanses of wilderness, but overrun and overexploited by the excesses of civilization.

Aldebert von Chamisso, poet and botanist, journeyed the world with Count Nikolai Rumyantsev. Their ship, the Rurik, arrived one day at an island that was not marked on the maps. On landing, they soon imagined they were the first foreign crew to have set foot in those parts. The natives proved docile. They worshipped an idol. Chamisso was allowed to see it. A woman smiled out from a framed etching. Chamisso recognized her wonderful face as that of Juliette Récamier, in a painting by Jean-Baptiste Isabey. He asked how that etching had been washed up on the island, but to no avail. The natives wouldn’t say: they considered it blasphemy to talk about the origin of the gods.

Eulogius

A gnostic history, which we lack, is largely made up of what Louis Massignon termed intersignes, portents, coincidences (as historians describe them, in order to ignore them), erratic forms, buried relics, physiognomic marks, latent constellations in the sky of thought.¹³⁴ Metternich and Charles Nodier were educated at Strasbourg within a few years of each other, under the shadow of Eulogius Schneider, the erudite and sanguinary Capuchin monk. And, once again in Strasbourg, Metternich took fencing lessons from the same master who had instructed Bonaparte. Nodier tells how his father, “who had a passion for classical studies, had decided to make a scholar of me”—and using his own personal method.¹³⁵ By the age of ten, his son could read the Latin authors with an ease he would never later regain. But now he had to move on to Greek. And so he was entrusted to Schneider, with whom his father had been in correspondence as “the learned publisher of a German Anacreon.”¹³⁶ The young Nodier, a bookish dreamer, discovered that his tutor was a tyrant “driven to the ultimate consequences by the logic of extermination.”¹³⁷ His revolutionary society, La Propagande, practiced appalling hatred, at the tail end of that “long pink-footed idyll that had been the eighteenth century.”¹³⁸ Dragged before the spectacle of the guillotine, Nodier listened to one of Schneider’s followers from La Propagande speaking “with a choice of expressions so charmingly frightening, with an anacreonism so desperate that I could feel a cold sweat trickling down my forehead and bathing my eyelids.”¹³⁹ Metternich had had a tutor “whose name is consecrated to the malediction of Alsace”: he would become a member of Eulogius Schneider’s revolutionary tribunal.¹⁴⁰ And his professor of canon law, on becoming constitutional bishop of Strasbourg, would appoint the same Eulogius Schneider as vicar general. Schneider then “recanted religion and his episcopacy and, in a revolutionary orgy, publicly burned the emblems of his office.”¹⁴¹ Metternich, in recalling those two godless masters more than fifty years later, while writing a fragment of his memoirs for his family archive, was eager to point out, however, that they had “never forced me to change my opinions.”¹⁴²