A prisoner at the Conciergerie, she asks only to read fiction: she wants “the scariest adventures.”

Her own story belongs entirely to the dark century, to that meta-historical realm of revenge and expiation, of blasphemy and omen, which is apparent here even in the gossip. The guardian spirits, blazing at the door of the sepulcher, are Léon Bloy and Louis Massignon. Both are chroniclers of the mysterium iniquitatis: one of them the execrator of grocers, provoker of the Paraclete, the other the grand vizier of Fatima and of the Deuxième Bureau, of Lobachevsky and the Seven Sleepers.

Inside the oval, drawn with a single stroke, a forehead too rounded and childlike, counterbalanced by a protruding, pensive Habsburg lower lip, similar to that of Charles V bent over his clocks.

From the moment she crossed the table at Strasbourg, “l’Autrichienne,” as she was immediately called by Mesdames, the three daughters of Louis XV, was confronted by implacable hostility sine intermissione. But memory has been clouded by the bloodshed and the passage of time, faces superimpose and merge: ladies insulted at court, ministers, tricoteuses, sansculottes, favorites, royal provisioners—all come together in that hatred. We must return then to the Prince de Ligne, Marie Antoinette’s playmate who conspired with her to hide in another niche, behind the bust of Louis XIV that looked out over the groves of Versailles, the same bust that the young Comte d’Artois would sometimes salute: “Bonjour, grand-père.” Ligne had second thoughts that evening: he feared they wouldn’t give him a ladder to climb down from that awkward position, and that he might be left perched up there all night behind the marble bust.

The only crime that Ligne felt he could lay on Marie Antoinette was one of immense, charming “recklessness.” A crime above all of repeated “disregard toward bores of both sexes, who are always implacable.”¹⁵⁶ And in order to punish her, a pact was reached among those Implacable beings, who would from then on produce tedium like exemplary English factory women produced pins, with appropriate division of labor among the dining rooms of the Third Estate, the tribunals of the people, and arrogant nobility, forever united by intolerance to any sign of frivolity and indulgence to any aspiration to mediocrity. Stendhal would be aware of this when he was struck by the incredible “vapidity of good company,” which had sought, moreover, between 1804 and 1830, to reestablish the salons of 1780.¹⁵⁷ But this time, of course, without the “recklessness.”

A wicked thought lingered: might the capacity to generate boredom perhaps allow bon ton to be revived? The pact continued to work: nor was there any shortage of blood to bathe it. The trial of Marie Antoinette is the first, victorious insurrection of Bores, the only moment in which the people and the nobility were fused into one single mass.