Concealed in that review that was so superfluous, so marginal for the eighty-year-old Goethe, who still had to complete his Great Work, which remained suspended among the archetypes (and it was essential for him, the systematic and complete being, not to leave it in a fragmentary state), the lines on Talleyrand pointed to a cautious revelation by the Dichter about himself. Goethe, too, knew the art of concealing everything on the surface. An album of engravings of famous people—where the clamor of history is frozen, where looks already tend to dull, as in later illustrations in the Magasin pittoresque—provided an appropriate occasion for someone who purported to be an “occasional poet.” And it was precisely there, rather than in some conversation with Eckermann or other devoted ear, that Goethe had chosen to refer to that long parallel life that had accompanied him in the land of turmoil. After all, he and Talleyrand were the only two beings of absolute significance who had survived it all, from the earliest years of skating and boudoirs up to that dignified, ceremonious, and misunderstood old age. The old age of one who knows too much. Goethe had already taken on the guise of the Grosser Dichter while Talleyrand, at Valençay, received Honoré de Balzac, a writer consumed with curiosity who looked upon him as an ancient, impressive, and delicate kind of lizard; or, worse still, he received the rambunctious George Sand and her band (and Madame de Dino, at the Prince’s side as always, noted: “All in all, very little charm; and the rest of the company totally ordinary”).⁹

In that passage Goethe was sending out a stern warning: don’t fool yourselves—you scholars—into thinking you understand Talleyrand’s gaze, don’t fool yourselves into thinking you understand the polished serenity of the old councillor Goethe. And the game went as far as provocation. Goethe, the “Olympian,” as Germanic kitsch would repeatedly describe him, even resorted to the “gods of Epicurus” to get closer to Talleyrand’s gaze. And yet he must have known that, according to general rumor, that gaze had witnessed almost every possible villainy—and some even of his own making.

The suggested superimposition of the two impassive faces, implied by Goethe, would soon be recognized and declared. Sainte-Beuve—who understood almost everything and tried not to make it too conspicuous—wrote a few lines in this respect in the note introducing the works of Molière, in one of the most attractive illustrés romantiques with the vignettes of Tony Johannot, published by Paulin in Rue de Seine, Paris, in 1835 (Talleyrand still alive, Goethe recently dead): “And nonetheless his [Molière’s] lucidity, his customary coolness of character, at the center of such a lively work, did not lead in the slightest to cold and calculated impartiality, as has been seen in Goethe, the Talleyrand of art: such critical refinements had not yet been invented in poetry at that time.”¹⁰ These, once again, are lines tucked away along the margin so that they are barely apparent. But they were noticed by the sour and irrepressible Barbey d’Aurevilly, who didn’t miss the opportunity of voicing his lordly disdain for Sainte-Beuve’s babouches (“Sainte-Beuve disliked argument, it made his ears turn purple, and his sharp tongue would blabber in anger and spite …”)—and he made it seem like a gratuitous intuition: “Sainte-Beuve once had a flash of inspiration, and called Goethe a literary Talleyrand, today he regrets that correct idea.”^{11, 12} But at that point he, Barbey, weighed in with his sword: “The poseur that Goethe may not have been by nature, but which his admirers had made of him through their excessive admiration, carefully concealed the emptiness of his being beneath his Olympian air, just as Talleyrand, who was no less vacuous, concealed his own beneath the indolent, mocking pose of the supercilious lord who had seen a great deal more …