The procession was passing beneath his balcony when Saint-Just appeared. “In his manner there was a sort of stern brusqueness: he didn’t look for popular acclaim; indeed, he discouraged it, with a dry peremptory gesture.¹⁴⁸ And yet his thick and heavily powdered hair over his straight black eyebrows, his head erect above his high and full cravat, the dignity of his tiny build, the elegance of his simple dress, never failed to have their effect upon the multitude. He signaled for the procession to stop, and everyone halted.”

His anger was already visible through his “shining and intense” gaze. But, before he could speak, Schneider’s betrothed fell to her knees on the ground: “Justice, justice, citizen! I appeal to Saint-Just and to the Convention!” In a few words, she told her story. The executioner confirmed it, declaring that he had been ordered to be ready in case the aristocrat had refused to grant his daughter’s hand. Finally, Schneider’s bride even asked for clemency. Saint-Just then became furious: “Clemency! Clemency for the Capuchin of Cologne! Off to the guillotine!” he continued with an outrage barely credible in a character so methodical and so composed. “Let him be taken to the guillotine!” “Do I have to cut off his head?” the gaunt man in the small carriage respectfully asked. “I have no right to order it,” said Saint-Just, quivering with irritation. “May he go to the death that that monster has invented! Tie him to the guillotine till further orders!”¹⁴⁹

Shortly after, Nodier saw Schneider, with “small eyes as if molten in their orbits,” being led to the guillotine, goaded by the swords of his hussars of death. Around him were waves of shouting. Nodier was jostled more and more by the crowd and couldn’t see over their heads. But he heard the words of a volunteer from the south who towered over everyone else and felt it his duty to describe to his neighbors what he could see.

Metternich knows he has to find the most effective and economical way of running a drafty old house with rusty window frames and blocked pipes: Talleyrand has never identified himself with any house: even when he is wearing his finest uniforms, a part of him is always on the highway, playing in the fields dressed in rags, as his uncle had once seen him as a child. He has never set foot in his father’s house. Something deep within makes him feel close to the downtrodden, the rootless, enables him to understand the new, the barbarous new, and to devise mutable strategies to ensure that it might end up, in its turbulent course, following one particular direction and not others.

Metternich was the great curator of the museum of Europe: like every clear-thinking curator, he knew his work could last only a certain time. Talleyrand, on the other hand, is aiming at survival, he moves between temporary residences, regularly auctions off his books and objects of value. He retains only his style, since he knows this is his single unfailing weapon for survival. Those who yield and adopt the style of the moment are killed the moment after. Like a Tao master, Talleyrand doesn’t exclude the possibility that survival might be infinite. But, if he does have to die, he knows it has to be accepted naturally. And, then too, he seeks to keep his style one last time. “He died as one who knows how to live,” one lady commented. Talleyrand always held the view that the passage of time was murderous in itself—and the whole art of politics was now one of surviving the grip of events. And so his work lasts longer than that of Metternich: the legacy of the past is not guaranteed by its ability to be restored, but by its capacity to escape a sentence that has already been passed, deferring death moment by moment.