Talleyrand has never inspired respect. From when he was a young “abbé mauvais sujet” until his dying hours, he is the butt of insult, condemnation, sarcasm, and curses.²¹ For decades he is laughed at for being lame. Chateaubriand wrote of Talleyrand: “Since much scorn was heaped upon him, he had imbibed it and had placed it at the two drooping corners of his mouth.”²² His mother implores Louis XVI not to appoint him bishop since he is unworthy of the cloth. As a bishop he has to defend himself from more secular accusations (gambling, speculation, women). As foreign minister under the Directory, the same Directors who had chosen him flatly despise him, and Jean-François Rewbell continually repeated, “Talleyrand was the assembly of all scourges, the prototype of betrayal as of corruption.²³ He is a powdered lackey of the ancien régime: at most he might be useful as a servant, to be put on display, if he had more leg; but his legs are defective, like his heart.” The newspapers want to flay him, and they find plenty of material for doing so. And one day, at last, even the Emperor’s fury will be brought down on him. At that moment Napoleon actually wants to strike Talleyrand, for once at least he would like to shatter his impassivity, and he resorts to the most ridiculous and offensive gesture; he takes Talleyrand by the chin, pushing him against the wall. Thus he, too, finds the occasion for a famous mot: “You are shit in a silk stocking.” But right-minded loathing of Talleyrand culminates with the romantics: Chateaubriand, George Sand, Hugo. Devoted to the Ideal, each of them wants to give Talleyrand an eloquent kick, as if to a stray dog, in an age that no longer belongs to him, but to them. Here the moral bugles sound, indignation is projected on vast wings into the future; it includes all future fathers, speaks in the name of all young people of noble aspiration. And then, for anyone of eminence in the world of literature, Talleyrand is such a rich pretext for a piece of scurrilous virtuosity. It is like a contest between Alexandrian orators: who could best fashion their disdain for Talleyrand, who could write it in the sky as a new constellation of words? Opinion meanwhile conformed, pleased, and satisfied. And it would finally produce the purest crystal of the Received Idea, recorded by Flaubert: “Talleyrand, Prince: Rage against him.”²⁴ It was an inevitable step—one of many—in negotiations for the alliance between romanticism and kitsch, a first stage in that dulling of sensibility that leads from the fever of 1830 to the desolation of 1850.

Compared with Talleyrand, Chateaubriand is the other blood-line, the other way of making lineage productive (and useful). Talleyrand discreetly guided those many successive men of power who did not know how to walk on parquet; Chateaubriand instead sought to saturate the psyche in a new liquid. Nameless sunsets, misty cataracts, hollow echoes. A burnish of aesthetic retreat, a lining of death, a claustral cobweb, heather invincible among ancient slabs of stone. Talleyrand was his enemy, above all, because he was his chief rival in cultivating and nurturing the past in the new age.