Yesterday, I almost copied the first of the following passages, from David King’s Vienna, 1814, into the day’s entry. I’m glad that I waited. I did mention that I was going to continue re-reading Adam Zamoyski’s Rites of Peace as soon as I was finished with King, but later decided to return to Zamoyski at once. The frame of Zamoyski’s narrative is larger than King’s; whereas King begins in Vienna, with preparations for the Congress, Zamoyski starts in December, 1812, with Napoleon’s lightning return to Paris from the debâcle in Russia. Fully a third of the book covers the campaigns, military and diplomatic, of 1813. We get to know most of the principal players very well. But Talleyrand is not introduced until page 173.

Talleyrand was the undoubted genius of the Congress. He would have been a brilliant aristocrat at any time, but the upheavals in France that coincided with his maturity allowed him to exploit a strategic boldness (not to mention a grasp of public relations) that would have gone unused in times of peace. King repeats Napoleon’s two most pungent quips about Talleyrand: “shit in silk stockings” is one. “I have made two mistakes with Talleyrand — first, I did not take his good advice, and second, I did not have him hanged when I did not follow his advice.” Zamoyski can put off mentioning Talleyrand for so long because, during 1813, Talleyrand was no longer serving Napoleon as Foreign Minister; he was simply the Chamberlain, a ceremonial role that freed him to connive with the Bourbons.

Instead of writing at greater length about the importance of Talleyrand &c, I want to compare the way in which a particular nugget of gossip about the man is handled by my two authors. I call it “gossip” not because it’s untrue but because it’s personal information of a vaguely scurrilous nature that we can be sure Talleyrand himself wanted to be generally known: one of his most successful tactics was to dazzle interlocutors with his courtly eccentricities. The very idea of entertaining guests while getting dressed reeks of royal diffidence, and Talleyrand had a magical capacity to swell to royal dimensions in the absence of the genuine article. So he and his valets choreographed a routine that was duly captured by eyewitnesses.

Getting ready for the day ahead, Talleyrand entered his dressing room and took his seat by a porcelain stove. Three valets waited on him, one supervisor and two assistants dressed in gray livery, covered with long aprons. The team began removing his flannel and stockings from the night before, and placed them in a bucket of eau de cologne. One handed him a cup of camomile tea, and the others set about taking away the rest of the night garments, the “drawers, vests, dressing gowns, with all sorts of odds and ends flopping about.”

After the nightcap, a cambric bonnet tied with lace ribbon around his neck, was removed, two valets attacked his hair, “combing, curling, pomading and powdering him.” In the meantime, Talleyrand refreshed himself with a glass or two of warm water, which he then emptied into a silver basin, as one eyewitness described the maneuver, “sucked in through the nose and spit out, much the way the elephant uses his trunk.”

A warm cloth was applied to his face, and his feet were washed in unpleasant, medicinal eau de barèges, dried, and then perfumed. His valets put on his white silk stockings, his breeches, and his shoes. As he stood up, the valets skillfully removed the last dressing gowns and maneuvered the shirt over his head — everything was done modestly, as he often entertained guests at the same time. By the end of the lengthy ritual, usually just under two hours, Talleyrand was immaculately dressed in velvet, silk, and satin. He was ready for his first showdown.

King notes his sources for this picture; they include the memoirs of the Comte de Rémusat, which mention the elephant snort. Zamoyski relies only on Rémusat. But observe the way the same material is structured.

Talleyrand was at his toilette. This was a remarkable daily performance, often enacted before a series of callers who, in the words of one who witnessed it, could at first “see only an enormous assemblage of flannel, felt, fustian, percale, a mass of white” being attended by two valets in white aprons under the direction of a third in silk stockings and powdered wig. From the upper reaches of this ragged mass, out of a coil of cravats, jutted a firm chin, a permanently curled lip and a small upturned nose. The valets would begin by removing the woollen stockings and strips of flannel from his legs, which were plunged into a small basin of mineral water. This was the only part of Talleyrand that was ever exposed. “The remaining parts of his person were covered by drawers, waistcoats, dressing gowns, with various pieces of cloth hanging off every bit of him, and his head wrapped in a kind of tiara of percale, held in place by a pale colured ribbon,” continues the diarist. “The two valets would then begin to comb, curl, pomade, powder, while he dabbed at his face with swabs which he dipped in a silver dish held before him for the purpose. Among the more remarkable elements in his toilette was one, curious enough to overcome the disgust one might have experienced witnessing it, which involved the consumption of one or two large glasses of tepid water which he sucked in through the nostrils and then ejected, more or less like an elephant, through his nose.’

Interestingly, Zamoyski sets the scene in Paris, while King has it in Vienna. The difference is inconsequential in itself — the ritual was enacted every day wherever Talleyrand happened to be — but King does something else that shows up the difference between writing history and writing for Vanity Fair. He embeds the toilette in his account of a particular day, the one on which the Great Four Powers finally condescended to receive the French plenipotentiary. That’s the “showdown” to which King refers. Zamoyski is writing of a particular day, too, just before the arrival of Allied forces in Paris several months earlier. But Zamoyski begins by detaching anecdote from history. Talleyrand’s toilette is an entertaining sidebar, and Zamoyski quotes the block of Rémusat as a way of indicating that he, Zamoyski, does not consider this material worthy of historical re-evaluation.

King, in contrast, works hard to convey the illusion of you-are-there. Instead of Zamoyski’s single, streamlined paragraph, we have three short paragraphs of one-damned-thing-after-another. The climax of the anecdote — the elephant business — is not saved for the end, where it serves to nail the fact that this is an anecdote, but presented in chronological order, as a kind of pseudo-history. Or, as it might be, a shooting script. Throughout his book, King strives to put the reader in the picture, and he is very good at it. But genuine history is concerned with keeping the reader out of the picture. Historians struggle to present the past as comprehensible (up to a point) but not familiar. This is not because “no one really knows what happened.” It’s precisely because we do know what happened. At least, we know most of what happened that matters, and more and more and more of it as the period in view approaches our own. But to know how things are going to work out is lose a fundamental quality of life as it is lived, which is in ignorance. This is the price of learning history, and many, perhaps most, readers consider it too steep, because they have not been taught history’s rich uses.

I’m not going to make nice and say that I think that these books are equally excellent in their respective ways, because in the end the Vanity Fair way is so decidedly inferior. It is designed to skirt perplexity, and it does not encourage thinking about structural problems such as the nature of power — something we understand very poorly, I believe.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2012 at 10:38 am.