THE SENATOR FROM ST. PETERSBURG: As we watch this evening that sinks away, these dying rays, remnants of a day that will never return, as we wait for the dense night to cheer us and return us to the void, I want to tell you—here, among we Aberrants, how gladdened I am by the thought of being born in this hybrid place, in these shrill times, which I pray each day will receive their punishment. Save, then, to find myself once again on this terrace, built on its four Chinese columns, indulging in my most cherished of pursuits: free conversation. Behind me I feel the peace of my library. I have never written but have often spoken about what majesty I find in the godless doctrines I have always abhorred. There I see malice at work accompanied by formal excellence, in a composition such as to stir respect. The earth has been bridled by a few ideas … but let us not use this inappropriate word … by a few utterances entirely devoid of insight into what in truth we undoubtedly are, by a few rules of behavior devoid of any resonance, without us even knowing who has proposed them; nor even if they have ever been put into writing.

The volatile and promiscuous nature of these phrases makes them akin to what were once proverbs. They are the element we breathe without knowing it. And their emptiness is linked to their immense power: to a capacity to multiply power, to stir and devastate the earth without anyone being able to say how its incessant hum could originate from those scraps of words. And deep down, I am the one who most faithfully relishes these iniquities. Far more than those who practice them as though they were rural nature. And so, when I first met Fouché, we looked upon each other as two rakes from the same club. Perhaps it was then that I told him I wasn’t on his side, since Goodness was more adventurous.

Empire: a moment of intermission, of hidden terror. Power is frightened of itself, and fear corrodes each day. The will to hold in zoomorphic stasis (Egypt on furniture) the great dégringolade of the bourgeois age. The Empire tries once more to invent an aristocracy (as a realm of will, it has to be able to invent everything); the Restoration, with its aristocrats back in their rightful places, cannot for a moment hide the fact that it is installing the Shopkeeper in power. Egypt: to stamp the seal of greatest fixity onto the greatest precariousness. In Napoleonic Egypt the image of terror appears in the face of history for the last time. Then history will sweep everything away toward its nearby estuary. The mingling of fresh and salt water, the Liffey in the Irish Sea, piercing swoon: history abandons its wreckage to post-history. A perpetual farewell, that continues to repeat itself.

Past the Barrière Saint-Martin, accompanied by a single Cossack, Count Nesselrode made his way along “boulevards crowded with people in Sunday dress.²⁵ They looked as if they were there for some celebration, not for the arrival of an enemy army.” In that city where all power had been absent for several hours, he sought out the only place that guaranteed safety, the house where power had always kept a room—there, where Monsieur de Talleyrand waited, behind the terse pilasters of the Hôtel de l’Infantado. The Tsar, the white angel of the north, whose uniforms were too tight-fitting, his courtesy excessive, eager to please everyone, though the Steppes howled behind him, had been tipped off—no one knows by whom, perhaps (it was suggested) by one of Talleyrand’s messengers, as usual. The Elysée Palace, where he intended to reside, was mined, was a trap. Yet Talleyrand, this high dignitary of the defeated state, this official of a political power that was now to be blotted out, presented himself as unassailable.