“In the four corners of the room were small triangular Chinese lacquer shelves, on which stood four plaster busts, dressed with black crêpe both to protect them from dust and as a mark of mourning, for these were busts of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Madame Elisabeth, and the Dauphin.”²³² That most terrible of acids, a stale virginity, corrodes the line of the profiles, observed the Catholic roué Barbey d’Aurevilly. The provincial nobility wanders around between mourning and dust, in vast rooms with smoke-stained walls that separate them from the heavy darkness of Normandy. But the Restoration also recalls, evokes, a power that will forever be denied to the revolutionaries who remain always the same: “The Jacobins of France were just as dour, solemn, and pedantic as the Puritans of England.”²³³ A Chouan knight, Jacques Des Touches, their ruthless enemy in the Normandy areas of Valognes and Coutances, brought something different to mind: he was dubbed “la Belle Hélène” for his youthful looks, and “the Wasp” for his venomous raids, since he knew how to vanish into thin air and even into the mist and waves of the English Channel with his primitive dugout canoes. There is something erotic about feudal homage, about feudal loyalty, that shuns any democratic devotion: from Chevalier Des Touches to Clark Gable, all of them “gone with the wind.” Guerrilla warfare is an abstract game where, in the end, people even forget for whom they are fighting. The difference is in the eye that stares at a naked body: Aimée de Spens undresses at the window, doubly spied upon: by the Blues of the revolutionary army, who think she is alone, though she is sheltering Des Touches, the Chouan, who is staring at her from within. Years after, the feudal eros still causes Aimée to blush: and when Barbey d’Aurevilly, an indiscreet chronicler, went to visit Des Touches at the hospice at Caen, he found him sitting on a stone, “and those eyes of his, which had scanned the farthest parts of the sea, the mist, the lines of enemies and the smoke of battle, gazed passively, apathetically at the beds of red flowers he had once compared to Aimée and which perhaps, in the abstraction of his dementia, he didn’t even notice.”²³⁴

In the early days of the Revolution, a cook called Francesco Desnot was often to be seen in the vicinity of any bloodshed. When Marquis de Launey, governor of the Bastille, was repeatedly bayoneted, a voice came from the crowd: “The Nation demands his head to display it to the public.” And the task was given to Desnot, who had just been kicked in the testicles by the governor as he struggled: “Since you have been injured, you can cut off his head.”²³⁵ But Desnot refused the saber that was offered to him: he wanted to cut through Launey’s neck with a small black-handled knife he had in his pocket and used for preparing meat in the kitchen. Eight days later, a similar scene occurred. Berthier’s body was stabbed by many bayonets. But this time it was his heart they wanted to display. Desnot the cook, who wandered around during this time wearing a magnificent dragoon’s helmet he had picked up in the Tuileries, claims he hadn’t acted himself this time. He was simply following the orders of a soldier who, having opened Berthier’s stomach with a saber, cut out the heart and handed it to Desnot with these words: “Justice is done, dragoon. Take them this heart.” Desnot, followed by the small band of accomplices, wanted to show it to Lafayette, who gave a shudder. Then they wandered around the Palais-Royal, still holding the heart. Eventually they sat down to supper in a tavern. They put the heart on the table and started drinking. But meanwhile a crowd had gathered beneath the windows, calling for Berthier’s heart. According to the same account, Desnot threw the heart into the crowd, who then carried it around the garden of the Palais-Royal on a bed of white carnations. He couldn’t say more than that.