The first, dangerous figures of modernity were not atheists and freethinkers, timorous germs of Freigeisterei, brought up under the protection of learned commentaries. “Generally speaking,” Joseph de Maistre would one day proclaim, “the atheist is quiet.²³⁶ Having lost the moral life, he rots in silence and wages no attack on authority.” To threaten the world order, to look up from perpetual submission, would require “a theological club, a place of assembly, four walls and nothing more.”²³⁷ Those “four walls” were Port-Royal—and in that desolate place, never far enough away from the snares of passion, in that Thebaid just a few leagues from Versailles, lay the infected gauze that would swathe the world. That solitude did not deceive Maistre. It was a tiny vortex that called up the dead and those not yet born, since “every sect … needs the crowd, especially of women.”²³⁸ Feverish chatter formed the halo to that false calm. Maistre recognized in the mad virgins of Port-Royal, in those implacable spiritual snobs, the long line of eager tricoteuses at the guillotine; he saw pale women nihilists with suitcases of explosives; he saw the wretched of the earth, the women who would embody the eros of destruction. It is pointless dwelling on the usual foolish Jacobins, always bound by the facts, suffocated by words still incognito. Let us go further back in time, to those women wedded to solitude, to mortification, to self-abasement before an absent Grace: there “the eternal crime of our wretched nature” really did emerge: the realization, in the silence and amid the marshland, that “the human heart is naturally in revolt.”²³⁹ For those who go back to that point, it seems obvious indeed that the revolution of 1789 has to be attributed to those few obstinate individuals: “nothing is more vivacious than that sect, and it has certainly shown such fine evidence of life during the revolution that it does not seem possible to consider it dead.”²⁴⁰ An invisible Jansenism is scourging the world. Those learned clerics, austere and ponderous, alien to every royal court, became firebrands, far “more guilty than the vile laborers who completed the task [of the revolution]; for it was Jansenism that struck the first blows at the cornerstone of the edifice.”²⁴¹ Reading these exasperated words, we see Joseph de Maistre, that “toy soldier of the Holy Spirit,” his arms waving in the void.²⁴² And now it could be thought, as so many tepid souls have done, that his visionary sarcasm detaches him irremediably from reality. But a celestial relationship comes to our aid. For Napoleon, the word Jansenist was the worst insult (he was once heard raging against someone, using an ascending scale of invectives: “He’s an idéologue, a member of the assembly, a JANSENIST …”). With the same reaction as the legitimate King Louis XIV, the usurper himself had recognized that those people were the Enemy. And so both of them “denounced [the Enemy], through an instinctive dislike, to all the authorities of the universe.”²⁴³ Napoleon read Maistre’s Considérations sur la France in 1797, in Milan. Cioran has observed, impassively, that those passages “revealed Bonaparte to himself.”²⁴⁴ Indeed, if there is an ultimate truth in the paradox that “the main dogma of Jansenism is entirely that of Hobbes,” then likewise Joseph de Maistre can corroborate the usurper whom he had always abhorred while at the same time relying on him as a supporting witness.²⁴⁵ Celestial affinities tend to invert relationships. In heaven, atheists are often accused of credulity. Meanwhile, Joseph de Maistre and Bonaparte talk amiably in front of a still sunset, on the terrace at St. Petersburg.