There is a test for all of this. A person is not likely to be a good reader of the Iliad if he doesn’t enjoy lingering over the catalogue of ships: likewise, in approaching Sainte-Beuve, try opening the “table générale et analytique,” which, in more than four hundred pages, provides the list of names referred to in the fifteen volumes of the Causeries. There we find unknown and classical figures, kings and men of letters, women of influence, politicians, socialites, and monks. It is an immense tapestry of voices, opinions, events, relationships, of words lost and recaptured here. Squandering his talent—as Proust put it—week by week, on books that happened to end up on his desk, Sainte-Beuve had spent years, with sticks and moss, building that grand, unwieldy, obsessive construction that resembled a novel, but which he would never have dared present as such. The “table générale et analytique” of the Causeries stands—not just for its size but also for its deep affinity of concept—alongside three other indexes of names: those of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, Balzac’s Comédie humaine, and Proust’s Recherche.

Long before the time of Goethe or Napoleon (who for many reasons are immediately fit for the Reader’s Digest, and it was hardly by chance that they met to exchange unforgettable trivia), the Anthropos of new times, the universal man, who rested his feet in the realm of the heavens and put the planetary variants together in his mind, seeking for the first time not to forget a single one of them, was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. For him, infinitesimal calculus was a prelude to the expansion of the realm of the enlightened and despotic Tsar Peter from Kamchatka to America, the provincial dissent of the churches converged in a prima materia of revelation, and the Jesuits in China had only to persuade Emperor K’ang-hsi to make diligent use of optical instruments so that Confucian wisdom could divest itself of its overly Asiatic dregs. This all-encompassing man was buried in Hannover “like a highwayman,” as his friend Ker of Kersland recorded.²¹⁶ The only mourner to follow the coffin of that first cosmic secretary and secret counselor of the divinity was his unremarkable private secretary Eckhart.

The physiocratic François Quesnay, an abrupt man with a certain “monkey-like manner,” was Madame de Pompadour’s physician.²¹⁷ He lived in a cramped mezzanine over the apartments of the king’s favorite, where the politics of France was discussed each day. Often he invited Diderot, d’Alembert, Duclos, Helvétius, Turgot, and Buffon to dine with him. Madame de Pompadour, who could not receive the same guests for reasons of etiquette and decency, would sometimes go up to her physician’s rooms to greet them, and remained there in conversation.

Louis XV ennobled Quesnay in Madame de Pompadour’s apartment. He took three pansies from a vase manufactured by Sèvres (founded with the support of Madame de Pompadour since, until then, France had no expertise in the new art of porcelain production and had been importing 500,000 livres’ worth each year from Saxony and Japan) and said: “Here, Quesnay, I ennoble you and give you a coat of arms that speaks.” It marked the birth of political economy.