Goethe in Venice

April 1790

Gypsy girls like lizards

lost in the tiniest porch way.

Sarcophagi, urns, dankness of gondolas,

verselets brush past him

like the elbow of a child

as she runs. Damp, dirty, idle movement,

troubled hours in the nest of stone and water.

Foreigners cheated any way.

The gazette reports the National Assembly.

O Boredom, mother of the Muses!

One single talent remains:

to write in German language

following a tribe of jugglers.

But the servant unearths among the dunes

a skull at the Jewish cemetery.

And in the decayed muzzle of a ram,

sphenoid, ethmoid, ear socket,

shines the Primal Bone.

From one vertebra

descends the All.

“So ends the best day of our life,” wrote the fédérés of a French village, closing their account of the celebration of July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, day of the General Federation. “France’s wedding with France,” wrote Michelet, and this was just one of dozens of images he used to describe the occasion.¹⁶¹ He would not allow himself to break the flow of the story with a single comment: “even the smallest remark could have created an interruption, a discord, perhaps, in that sacred moment.”¹⁶² It was an age to which there could be no return, when the Revolution was “innocence and credulity.”¹⁶³ Moments “prior to fulfillment” (as was written on the tortoise shell of the I Ching), to the promise of a Final Deed, moments which then—on recollection, as with love sickness—become the Deed itself. Once it is over, “the little fox wets its tail” and the Final Deed becomes oppressive: never push as far as complete happiness, with its persecutory element. Stay with the promesse de bonheur.

That day—of double significance, recalling both a bureaucratic innovation (the creation of départements put forward by Sieyès) and the storming of a prison (the Bastille, swept by erotic flames and cruel familiar vengeance)—mobilized the primordial images that came before Temples and Priests, images that inhabited Holy Places, Altars of the Soil, the Sacred spread over the countryside, split between sun and shade.

The fact that it really was a return to the beginning is assured by the seal of kitsch that authenticates all the images here: from the anonymous accounts of the provincial fédérés up to Michelet, to Jaurès, to the perennial quaver in the democratic voice, brought together in the oath of that day. At noon on July 14, the villages seemed empty, the occasional dog crossed the road. “No temple would have been enough.”¹⁶⁴ No witnesses, everyone taking part. The Altar of the Soil is reconstructed at the center of the Holy Place, between north- and south-facing slopes, lines of young people facing each other, but the record does not suggest the verses of the Shih Ching, which respond like the belling of deer. It is the sad lot of Liberty to have to improvise. And if the mind, gliding and sleepwalking in the past, moves once more toward human sacrifice, the euphemism of the Enlightenment will produce this scene: “The newborn child was taken and carried, a living bloom, among the harvest flowers.¹⁶⁵ His mother offered him, placed him on the altar. But he didn’t have just the passive role of an offering, the newborn child was also active, he counted as a person, he swore a civic oath through his mother’s mouth, he claimed his dignity as a man and as a Frenchman, he took possession of the fatherland, he entered hope.”