One of the events of world importance in the years shortly before the Revolution was the final sanctioning of the alliance between snobbery and the left. At the time there was no talk of either snobbery or the left, but suddenly the most influential and often the most elegant ladies began discussing custom duties and Virginia tobacco, spinning mills and credit, and made even some stabbing reference to net output. General interest (alas, though interest nonetheless) became the center of conversation, obscuring that unfettered dissipation of esprit, as had happened up to then. From that moment, high snobbery, which always needs some discreet way of concealing itself, knew what cloak to hide beneath: the Good Cause, whether social, musical, humanitarian, avant-garde, erotic, or Asiatic. But the star of the Righteous shone from the brows of ladies as they welcomed guests to their dinners, to their parties, to their leisurely picnics.

The idea of equality comes from initiation: only through a highly artificial process—as initiation is—can “equality,” a condition nonexistent in nature, be achieved. After 1789, from the moment when Masonic emblems become a basis and assumption of civic life, their nature as emblems or their initiatory origins is no longer recognized, the world of inversion has established its ground. There is a double movement: all are initiates, but initiation itself disappears once and for all as a point of reference. It remains only in the perpetual shadow of the conspiracy and will reemerge from the libraries, with the great academic ethnographers.

Already at the beginning of the Revolution, and then during each of its canonical phases—apart from the Terror, not surprisingly, since from then on, history will have to choose one of two ways: either Talleyrand or the Terror—each of the events that occurs needs an ultimate protection, a malevolent guardian who holds its hand and helps it to write new pacts: Talleyrand. On each occasion he helps the chaos to assume an acceptable form. When an act has an excessive and almost paralyzing symbolic power, we discover that pale hand of his in the shadows, supporting the hand of others, of many others, of a succession of friends or enemies. He is the person responsible for the final version of Article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: “The law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to contribute personally, or through their representatives, in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, positions, and employments, according to their capacity …”

A Belated Nostalgia for Sorrow

Talleyrand and Madame de Staël had been lovers at the time when she was explaining to Monsieur de Surgères, between one contredanse and another, the meaning of “Western dominion.”²¹⁸ Talleyrand couldn’t forget the ungainliness of her body, but had written to her from America asking for help, and she had offered enough assistance to allow him to return. She would then make six visits to Paul Barras on Talleyrand’s behalf. On one occasion she bursts into the Luxembourg Palace, disheveled and distraught, and tells Barras that Talleyrand is about to throw himself into the Seine unless he is made minister of foreign affairs. He has just ten golden louis. If politics, in its metaphysical sense, demands a knowledge of how “to make women march,” as Talleyrand so brazenly put it, Madame de Staël marched with proud passion, and generally reached her destination.