On the same hot afternoon, Gouverneur Morris, ever curious, attempted to climb up toward Passy to see the fighting on the Champ de Mars from above. But he didn’t get there in time. Morris had arrived in Paris from Philadelphia at the beginning of the Estates General. In the United States he had put the finishing touches to the Constitution with a solid sense of the facts and for what was possible. He had lost a leg in an accident. His faltering French was that of a distant province, inadequate for the aphoristic flashes of conversation. But his American credentials were still good enough in Paris to stir well-meaning curiosity. In short, he was a trusted guest in many illustrious houses. He assiduously courted Madame de Flahaut, and with some success. At that time she had an apartment at the Louvre and was already Talleyrand’s mistress. Gouverneur referred to Talleyrand as “the bishop.” Once he had got to know him, he found him “sly, cunning, ambitious and malicious.”¹⁸²

Back down from Passy, Morris spent that Sunday evening of July 17 with Madame de Ségur. Returning home, he spent a contemplative moment—rare for him—looking at the Seine: “I think one of the finest views I ever saw was that which presented itself this evening from the Pont Royal.¹⁸³ A fine moonshine, a dead silence, and the river descending gently through the various bridges between lofty houses, all illuminated (for the sake of the police), and on the other side the woods and distant hills. Not a breath of air stirring. The weather has this day been very hot.”

On Taste

“Reasoning is sadly gaining currency”

—Voltaire to Madame du Deffand

Taste makes its appearance in order to inherit. To inherit what? Difficult to say. But certainly in every civilization dreamed of by reactionaries, taste did not exist. Meaning was enough to suppress it. And meaning has to quake on its foundations before taste makes an appearance.

Perhaps some great anthropologist, some Marcel Mauss in a remote wilderness, will one day discover what taste has been—as something that can be studied from the sum of various documents. For there is certainly something improbable about its appearance (and disappearance) in the history of societies. It is an efflorescence that promises no return. It lasts a short time, is easily swallowed up, but the effects of its appearance are irreversible. Its memory will not be erased.

When “correspondences”—the last canon—collapsed, the function of law was preserved for several years by a silent pact of manners, gestures, physiology, which despite its obvious fragility nevertheless feigned to be as equally solid, everlasting, and overtly fair as every barbarous predecessor.

Eighteenth-century France, in cultivating taste, confines and diminishes the meaning of literature. There is something ludicrously petty about their tragedies, which they find gratifying. But Napoleon will ask in vain for a new form of tragedy. Pettiness also in poetry, insipid anacreontics. Judgments on Shakespeare: Voltaire sends Julius Caesar to Cardinal de Bernis so that he can laugh at it. It is thought scandalous that the Regent admires Rabelais. Fontenelle finds Virgil’s sixth Eclogue “bizarre.” Madame du Deffand reads Saint-Simon with immense pleasure, but she guards herself by adding: he has an “abominable style,” he is not an “homme d’esprit.”¹⁸⁴