The Eleven

I

The painting was commissioned in Nivôse — and not in Ventôse, as was said, as continues to be said, because History arranges dates in its own way; because the afterwards is a great lord and has all the rights, His Lordship the Afterwards; because Ventôse was the darkest month in that winter of year II when the factions fell, when the barren Decrees of Ventôse were drawn up and proclaimed, terrible to the suspects, full of compassionate zeal for the unfortunate, making the first despair, giving the second the phantom hope of food and shelter, setting the tone for the Great Terror; because it was also the coldest month, because lurking in the great cold and feeling it at heart Robespierre brought out the knife to shear off right and left, the moderates and the extremists, the beautiful knife named Saint-Just; because the wind in Ventôse resounds more theatrically than the snow lying softly in Nivôse; because there is no snow in the painting, but something like the effect of great wind, although there is no wind either; above all because, as you know, since the Empire, in a bold, romantic confusion, this definitive painting has sometimes been called Le Décret de Ventôse. No, it was earlier. It was commissioned two months before Ventôse, in Nivôse in year II, on the fifteenth or sixteenth of Nivôse, which is about January 5, 1794, erstwhile the Epiphany, Three Kings Day.

It was the night of the fifteenth. It may have been eleven o’clock. Corentin was sleeping. Someone knocked loudly on the door, on Rue des Haudriettes — he was still living in that small mansion, the main building of which opened to the street and which he had bought with the large commission from the Marquis de Marigny for the Louveciennes château, twenty-five thousand pounds from the king, almost twenty years earlier. The little girl (he no longer had servants living in), the little girl heard them before he did and ran frightened to his bedside. He went over to the window alone, opened it, and saw the three Sans Culottes below, peaceable, respectful in so far as was possible for Sans Culottes, who told him that he was wanted à la section at that very moment. From his extended arm, one of them raised a large square guardroom lantern. Their voices and the raised faces aglow in its full light were familiar to him. He signaled for the little girl to climb very quietly to the safety of the garret. He got dressed and went down.

There was a biting frost, the bright stars glistened in the dark night. Surely it was not the great off-white cloak that he wore, but the one that appears in legend, the greatcoat the color of the smoke of hell, impossible to tell if it is black, red, charcoal gray, or chocolate brown, and which is repeatedly mentioned in memoirs of those times. The Sans Culottes, who were shivering in their rags — they were already walking quickly, all four of them, through the empty streets — told him it was Léonard Bourdon who wanted to see him. He knew Bourdon, who held the neighboring section of Gravilliers since Jacques Roux had been imprisoned. He did not like him very much. They walked a short distance up Rue du Temple, they turned left: they were indeed headed toward the erstwhile Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs church, now the Nicolas church, headquarters of the Gravilliers section.

They had arrived. They were already climbing the little steps.

The doors were wide open.

Under the porch they skirted around the bells, which had been taken down but not yet carried off to the foundry, the monstrous pendants of the eternal Father, silenced. The nave was icy and stripped of all objects of worship — Bourdon, who was very busy with defanaticization and regeneration, had gotten rid of everything that could not be melted down or reused. Quickly they walked the length of the whole darkened building to the apse. Beside the aisle to the left the lantern revealed an improvised stable, with straw bedding and an indistinct rack, where the shadows of two or three horses were stirring. Close to the stable along the left wall, they opened the door of the sacristy, heated and illuminated by a good fire in the hearth: the section had withdrawn there because of the cold. The guardroom lantern was placed, still lit, on a large table. There was another Sans Culotte in the room who had taken off his wooden clogs and was warming his bare feet by the fire. Corentin knew him as well, it was Ducroquet, the clerk for the wine merchant whose store was at the corner of Rue des Haudriettes and Rue des Blancs-Manteaux. On Corentin’s arrival he rose (he seemed good-natured, and he was; a little mad, and he was), he said that Bourdon and the others would not be long; and with a knowing look and a deferential tone of familiarity in which a hint of mockery heightened the deference, he nodded that they were up there. Corentin understood that they were at the Jacobins, in the great sound box of the erstwhile Dominicans’ chapter room between here and the Seine, the great oratory vault filled, for the last four years, with the roar of emotion and opinion, the best and the worst, the stone drum from which the stamping and cheering was heard each night from one end to the other of Rue Saint-Honoré. He looked at Ducroquet’s bare feet on the stone. He was asked to take a seat and wait. The other four sat down to play cards, paying no more attention to him.

Corentin made himself comfortable. He knew the place, he had come here as neighbor, as painter, as citizen as well, since that was the mask one wore then, and which he had been willing to adopt, like everyone else. On the floor near the fire, the other four played their hands. Corentin glanced about. On the large table on either side of the lantern there were four-pound loaves of bread, a plate of bacon, and wine in carafes, all of it untouched; and on the other side, a little cloth bag, half open, that intrigued Corentin. He moved closer and, opening it wider, he saw and felt under his fingers small fragile brownish things that he recognized to be very old human remains, vertebrae and a few broken long bones. He asked what those remains were doing there. Without looking up, one player answered between deals that they were the remains of an erstwhile saint whose reliquary the section members had taken and melted down that very day at the Mint, and that had been left there, who knows why, before being tossed into the fire, since they were not burning them any longer on the Place de Grève (Robespierre, or rather the Robespierrots, had indeed put a stop to those official excesses since the end of the summer, prompted by distaste or politics, for they were already secretly preparing to counter those holocausts to the goddess Reason, the pale queen of hearts exalted by the Factions, by playing the Supreme Being). The men played on; Corentin ran the little bones under his fingers; from the other side of the wall in the nave he heard the horses making their usual horse noises, snorting and breathing, warm and comforting, vaguely frightening. Corentin wondered for a moment what had become of the old bones of the two saints he had martyred, under the earth in Combleux. Then he thought again of the little girl, who must have been terrified at that moment in the garret. It all gradually merged, the bones, the old women, the little girl. He thought of other women, dead, gone off, left behind. Then he no longer thought of women, because the men were there.

It was well past midnight. They hurried into the warmth, all three of them, greatcoats pulled up to their noses, two-cornered hats pulled down over their eyes, cockades, boots; the third man more self-assured than the others. As they entered, they threw their greatcoats and hats next to the bust of Marat on the little table, as Corentin had done with the coat the color of the smoke of hell. Corentin had placed them immediately, as they turned toward him, he fully recognized the features that loomed up in the glow from the fire and the great lantern: the ugly look and flat hair of the first; the thick, light blond Flemish hair, the bulging, astonished but impassive Flemish eyes of the second; the equally flat, straight hair, the small gold earring, the copper complexion and vertiginous self-assurance, despite being rather short, of the third. There they were, in order: Léonard Bourdon, the squealer, the erstwhile schoolmaster, now champion of the goddess Reason, defanaticizer and regenerator, melter of bells and reliquaries — the little runt whose yelping made him a pack all by himself; Proli, the man with the golden touch, the banker of the patriots — Corentin was surprised he was there, he thought there was a warrant out for his arrest, that he had fled; the third man was Collot d’Herbois. He knew all three of them, but Collot he knew differently.

It had been a long time since he had seen him. They were friends in a certain respect, since 1784 in Combleux the year of the Sibylles, when Collot was preparing a play for the theater in Orléans where he was director and Corentin had set up the scenery and designed the costumes for him for a Shakespeare production, dulcified as only those times knew how, translated and adapted by Jean-François Ducis or by Collot himself; they had seen each other often because they greatly appreciated one another on points I may relate to you; Collot, with whom, in short, he had done the whole revolution, the good years, who had introduced him everywhere to those newly in power before things took a strange turn, before Collot, in this strange turn, came into his own and took wing, after which they no longer saw one another.

They embraced. As always when they met, there was that similar look in their eyes, as in a mirror, the same dark cheer, and more cheerful still than dark for Corentin, but now for Collot more dark than cheerful. He was a little drunk as usual: the brandy, the shouting at the Jacobins, the self-assurance, the panache, the power, the fear, the compassionate zeal for the unfortunate that was for him a very strong and lasting liquor. But otherwise, he seemed to Corentin a bit changed; he had just returned from his long mission in Lyons, from the vertiginous proconsular heights, from the carnage; he had exercised absolute power unprotected, he had seen the abyss and the God of armies. The copper complexion was redder than usual, and mixed with the dark cheer was a kind of absence. Corentin saw all that very quickly, the three Jacobins were already at the table, breaking the bread and attacking the bacon; Proli had the best seat, in a prince’s or bishop’s richly colored armchair, the other two in chairs on either side; as he ate, Bourdon commented on the meeting at the Jacobins, in short, sibylline sentences that Corentin had trouble following, in which it was a question of Maximilien, of Camille who was done for, of Danton who was done for, of the Cordeliers who would not be pushed around, of the war, of fear, of power, of conflicting powers, of Robespierre again — this last name a little drawn out, as though falling from a cloud or emerging from a crypt; Collot sometimes nodded assent; Proli said nothing. They offered Corentin Clamart wine, which they were drinking from aristocratic glasses set there before their princes by the Sans Culottes. Whom Bourdon moreover soon ordered to be gone and added, as they were leaving, “Have this trash burned,” indicating the small sack of bones. Ducroquet, who had just stoked the fire, threw it into the bright flames, where it blazed and vanished in an instant like kindling. Ducroquet regarded it with a kind of melancholy or regret. “What are you waiting for?” asked Bourdon. The other man stood there foolishly for a moment, then let out a laugh and turned on his heels. Then the four Limousins on duty could be heard noisily seeing to the horses in the nave, then taking off under the vaults, and they were no longer there.

It was not Bourdon, it was Proli who spoke. He silenced Bourdon; he half turned toward Collot and asked him a brief question in a low voice, in which Corentin thought he heard the words confidence and secrecy. Yes, said Collot several times in a loud, firm voice. Proli looked at Corentin with that mixture of repulsion and respect that he often prompted, whether intentionally or not we do not know. He said: “Would you execute a commission, citizen painter?”

The question surprised and amused him. It also rejuvenated him.

He no longer really had private commissions. Not that he was unemployed, very much to the contrary: he was working for the Committee of the Arts, for the Nation, that is, for David, under David; under David’s orders he knocked off statues of liberty, scales of justice, red hats over Spartan skirts, commemorative plaques to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, odds and ends. They formed a team to do this, all of French painting or what remained of it: because David kept a cool head and needed manpower; and although he had ousted, imprisoned, and exiled all his direct rivals, those of his generation, the forty-year-olds, he had retained the old hands of the has-beens, Fragonard, Greuze, Corentin; and of course the lively hands and ambitious hunger of the young ones, Wicar, Gérard, Prud’hon, his assistants, small fry you had to keep an eye on like the plague. David, who feared Corentin because he was a master, also scorned him because he was old, Tiepolonian, obsolete; but he employed him; he knew that Corentin feared David more than David feared Corentin: because David sat on the Committee of General Security, so that he put his signature next to those of the eleven at the bottom of decrees, he had the ear of Robespierre — while his other ear and his sidelong glance somnambulistically lingered in Sparta, where his models, plans, and successive crazes came from, which Corentin executed with great seriousness and with irrepressible inner laughter.

“Would you execute a commission, citizen painter?”

Yes, he would — he might. He said so. He answered Proli without really looking at him, his glance shifting toward the bust of Marat, the two-cornered hats set before it like offerings, the fire, the wine. The fire was dying. Proli, prey to something more powerful than the annoyance and repulsion inspired in him by Corentin, regarded him with a cold intensity; neither Bourdon nor Collot spoke a word but regarded him with the same intense look. Corentin said (not to Proli but to the bust of Marat or to the fire) that his consent depended upon three things: if it was in his line of work, the wages, and the due date. Proli answered, his Flemish eyes losing none of their intense stupor, that so far as the delivery date was concerned, it was yesterday or tomorrow, that is, as soon as possible, days rather than weeks; from nowhere he pulled out a sack, opened it, and emptied it onto the table, a little beyond the empty plates, where the relics had been earlier: out spilled gold coins, piastres from Holland, Portuguese coins, ecus bearing the effigy of Louis, some three hundred judging from the looks of it, at a time when there was no more gold in France. Proli said that this was only the first payment for the painting, he would receive twice this amount upon delivery. Corentin thought to himself that this was nearly as much as for the large Marigny commission for the great hall at Louveciennes in the time of maman-putain, Jeanne Antoinette de Pompadour. His dark cheer increased: the wages were royal, the deadline tight, but at that time when he was painting very quickly, Corentin felt quite capable of knocking off some Fraternité or Égalité shrew in a couple of days. “And what am I to paint?” he asked. This time he looked squarely at Proli, as if Proli were a lackey. Proli looked at him the same way. In a sharp, fluty voice resembling Robespierre’s for a moment, Proli came out with it: “You know how to paint gods and heroes, citizen painter? It is an assembly of heroes that we ask of you. Paint them like gods or monsters, or even like men, if you like. Paint The Great Committee of Year II. The Committee of Public Safety. Do what you want with it: saints, tyrants, thieves, princes. But put them all together, at a real fraternal gathering, like brothers.”

There was a silence. The fire was dead, only the light from the great square lantern fell straight onto the spilled gold in the exact place where the old bones had rested earlier. The faces were in shadow. Suddenly from the other side of the wall in the Saint Nicolas church an invisible horse snorted violently and reared, its hooves could be heard falling back like hammers on the empty paving stones of the empty vessel; then it let out a tremendous trumpet blast. It seemed to be laughing. All four of them laughed as well. Still laughing, Corentin rose and calmly put the gold pieces back into the sack, tied the laces, took it. He said that his answer was yes.

II

This commission, Sir, there have been two centuries of exhaustive efforts to understand the reason for it. It is a political commission, that goes without saying: so let us lower ourselves for a moment and talk politics. Let us get that old theater of shadows moving once more.

This period, which is a kind of climax of History and which, consequently, is justly called the Terror, one late winter, one spring, and one early summer, from the snows of Nivôse to the hot hand of Thermidor, is made of tight knots impossible to untangle, short-lived enthusiasms, reversals, wild fluctuations more uncontrollable than a seismograph needle when a volcano erupts; or if you prefer animal life to geology, it is like a rabbit hole when the ferret is released, except that here, all are both ferret and rabbit for all the others. The brothers, accomplices in the killing of Capet le Père, the orphans who no longer slept after the father’s death, were killing one another through the increasing force of momentum, mechanically and machinelike — and that is why the great cutting machine located on the Place de la Révolution, the guillotine, is such a perfect emblem of that time, in our dreams as in reality. With the Royalists fallen, the Feuillants fallen, the Girondists fallen, there were no more truly divergent opinions within the triumphant Montagne; as Michelet said so clearly, as you read in the antechamber, the brothers, the killers, who were still trying to distinguish themselves from one another since distinction is in man’s nature, all the brothers could find to put between them was the distinction of death. These men have excuses, Sir, and deserve our admiration on more than one account: they slept three hours a night for four years, like sleepwalkers they worked for the happiness of humankind, they throbbed in the hands of the living God. All that, the single distinction of death, the terrible hand of the living God, the ferrets in the hole, you have read between the lines in the notes in the little antechamber, even if it is not written there in black and white; in black and white it is written that there were, broadly speaking, three clear-cut partis, the orthodox under Robespierre, the moderates under Danton, the extremists under Hébert, and it is written that Robespierre thought this, Danton thought that, Hébert thought something else again; but you, Sir, who will not be taken in, who can read between the lines, you have read and read clearly that, with only the slightest nuances, Robespierre, the good Danton, and the bad Hébert wanted the same thing, that is, a more or less just Republic and within that Republic, power, but that death in them (exhaustion and death, the living God and death) wanted the big knife of distinction.

Thus the three partis, the trinity, you could say, a split trinity with its three great roles: Robespierre who was, in person, the Rights of Man; Danton who no longer disputed that title, who was the most weary, who put on a show of slowing the momentum but whose heavy bulk was sliding faster and faster toward the blade; Hébert and his masses, extremists, populists, or Bolsheviks, I do not know or want to know which, whom rightly or wrongly we have come to consider the dregs of the earth, and who still hoped to challenge Robespierre. This trinity is the cliché: there were multitudes of other parties, just as real but less spectacular, that grafted themselves to this trinity by playing this or that hypostasis against the other two, to save their own power or skin, which was, at that time, the same thing. Among these more diffuse clans there were clubs, the Jacobins who belonged to Robespierre, the Cordeliers who belonged to Hébert one day, to Danton the next; the newspapers, from which Hébert drew most of his power, as Marat in his lifetime had done before him. The social classes were also parties, you could say: what remained of the aristocrats, in hiding or active; the greater and lesser bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, that is, the Limousins, all these blew with the wind from one party to another; and on top of all that, pulling in every direction and disorienting everyone, the other Limousin contingent, the mother of monsters, the packs of misfortune, the shrews of both sexes, the oil on the fire, the salt in the wound — the complaining, murdering packs of the eternal, barking plebeians: and through all that barking, no one heard anything anymore.

Finally, there were the great institutions of year II, which were then parties as well, but definable ones and very localized, limited in number, that gesticulated and prophesied under the narrow vaults of consecrated places. Those venerable vaults under which the erstwhile writers switched register and stage, appeared on the political scene without even having to change costume, were the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries, and at the end of the Louvre adjoining the Tuileries, the Flore pavilion.

In the Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, the Commune de Paris, which had been carried there by the district sections, the Limousins with their great pikes, the People, you could say, vociferated, which had had a great audience but now had hardly any, which was hungry and weary and whose wings were being clipped by the bureaucrats of the committees; deliberating and decreeing in the Salle des Machines of the Tuileries was the Convention, the true nominal power, the elected and all-powerful assembly, all-powerful and terrorized, which had no power other than to obey the Committee, which nevertheless issued from it and could theoretically be dismissed by it, but which it renewed each month without Robespierre even needing to raise a finger — the Convention, for which the only way out appeared to be the hand of Providence, a kind of miracle, a deus ex machina of the fifth act, which it had not yet learned to call Thermidor. In two lower halls and communicating by the Queen’s Stairway to the Flore pavilion, then called the pavillon de l’Égalité, in that Flore pavilion at the very end of the Bord-de-l’Eau gallery in the Louvre, under our feet, under The Eleven, the two committees made up another party, the Committee of General Security, shadow and executant, standard-bearer for the other, the true one, the Committee of Public Safety, which had to retain absolute power or die — the tightrope-walking party, which subjugated the people through the Convention and the Convention through the people. And please note, Sir, that this power was a phantom power, that, in fact, did not exist, because the executive position that it held at the top of the pyramid of power no longer existed, had been abolished as something left over from the execrable position of the tyrant — this power did not exist, but nevertheless with its phantom voice it demanded, obtained, and severed forty heads a day. Within the Committee itself there were parties, perhaps eleven parties, which history and the little notes have reduced to three, because three is a good number that works for all occasions: first, Robespierre and the Robespierrots, two of them, Saint-Just and Couthon, so three with Robespierre; second, the scientists, engineers and lawyers, captains, excelling in the liberal as well as mechanical arts, who constructed canons out of the ruins of bells and fashioned decrees in the fine rhetoric of year II out of the ruins of the fine rhetoric of theology, empty rhetoric that, to render to Caesar what was his, had actually been invented by Robespierre’s Saint-Just: these good scholars with dirty hands were Carnot, Barère, the Prieurs, Jean Bon, Lindet, six men of science. And finally, two independents, Billaud and Collot, impassioned and unpredictable. The one principal point all these men had in common, these eleven writers, as I have told you, was affixing their eleven signatures to the bottom of various decrees where it was a question of canons, of grain, of requisition, of execution, of the guillotine.

What has this to do with the painting? First of all: these “parties,” Sir, what I have called parties, in this period of theatrical crescendo, of the ultimate round when each player only raised his voice to outbid his rival, to drown him out and finally toss the talking head into the basket, these parties were only roles now. It was no longer a matter of opinions, but of theater; this often happens in politics; and it always happens in painting when politics are represented in the very simple form of men: because opinions cannot be painted, but roles can be.

What has this to do with the commission, the small commission transacted that night of Nivôse in the Saint-Nicolas church? You ask me who, in that climactic scene in the fifth act, could have wanted the painting? What lead or supporting role wanted to make that phantom committee into a real committee, theatrically real? I am coming to that, Sir. Let me tell you about one more party, one more caste or occupation, and I will be finished.

This last party, this caste, those great leading roles distributed throughout France, sent out by the Convention and the Committees for brief mandates, were the Représentants en Mission; the men of the great missions of 1793, the ad hoc warriors, peacemakers, proconsuls, the amateur generals who had complete power over the generals; the spearheads for the Jacobin plan of action who, forged in the midst of storms, were to have the force of lightning; who had returned from their missions, or their tours as we say of actors, who were returning, in the months of Ventôse and Nivôse, after victories; who, on their missions, had worn the costumes and accessories à la nation, that is, the three colors, the extravagant tricolored silk waistband, silk an inch thick, three or four yards long, wound four times around the waist, sumptuous, clerical; the costume à la nation that Corentin himself had designed, under David, and which I think, even more than the Sibylles, is his true masterpiece, before The Eleven: triple collars high at the nape of the neck, alla paolesca, in the style of Paul, that is, Paolo Veronese, not Paul of Tarsus, although those who wore them had more in common with Paul of Tarsus than with Paolo Veronese — thus in the Veronese style, since it was Veronese, via Tiepolo, who had thought of it in paintings before Corentin thought of it on actual impetuous young necks; woolen cloth in national blue, erstwhile royal blue; white cravat, frothy, high, lavish, phallic; hat à la Henri IV and rosette, plume à la nation. Young men of flesh and iron wore that plume, Sir, which History, luck, fortune, the muse of the theater, perhaps God as well, because God is a dog, remember with tenderness and terror: that plume that did not tremble running up the hill, sword drawn, under fire at Fleurus, at Wattignies, at Wissembourg, because the young man who wore the plume had it on good authority that the canon fire could not touch him, that its rumbling was a sound effect, a zinc plate rattled backstage by the Great Machinist, that the cannonballs falling like hail around him were flies — the great magic, Sir, the pocket of luck. And neither had the plume trembled when its wearer, camped under the torches on the Quai de la Fosse in Nantes at the end of the Loire at midnight, wild, trembling with wine, trembling with joy, with terror, watched, melancholic, as the barges set off on his order, rotten traps that would open in the middle of the Loire and send shrieking to the bottom their cargo of nuns, rustic priests, Jean-Chouans, and beggars from the Vendée, erstwhile hussies with their brats — because all that, Sir, hussies, brats, priests, they were flies, and the Loire was a famous republican torrent; and in Lyons at dawn on the Brotteaux plain the plume in the mist did not tremble either, or only mechanically so in the wind of the grapeshot when the marine canons fired, even though the one who wore it trembled with wine, with joy, with terror; not the least trembling either when from the back of the famous oxblood carriage hurtling full speed through the phantom city of Bordeaux with a company of dragoons at full gallop, the plume’s wearer gave the order to fire randomly in the night at windows, trees, stars; and likewise in Avignon, Marseilles, Toulon, Moulins, Arras, everywhere. Some of them returned with stolen gold filling their pockets and their oxblood carriages, so that indiscriminately Robespierre called them all rogues; while others returned as poor as before, having forgotten in the beauty of the gesture that gold itself possesses a beauty more lasting. Thus the plumes had returned to Paris, were returning or were about to return, the borders and the cities were secured, the Vendée quelled, the mission accomplished, the tour completed; in Paris they had taken off the plume with the uniform and changed back into civilian clothes: Collot of Lyons, Tallien of Bordeaux, Carrier of Nantes, Carnot of Wattignies and Saint-Just of Wissembourg, and Rovère, Fouché, Fréron, the two Prieurs, the two Merlins, called Merlin of Douai and Merlin of Thionville, the almost twins Lequinio and Laignelot, Mallarmé of the Meurthe, the other Bourdon, not Léonard Bourdon but Bourdon of the Oise, and Barras, Jean Bon, Baudot, Lebon, Le Bas, among others. These men, these fine names, all these generals, had even more blood on their hands than the others; better than the others they knew the meaning of the word expeditious; they had the epic halo, the gloria militar, the plume; thus they were extraordinarily popular, celebrated as heroes, larger than life. And the civilians, Danton, Hébert, Robespierre alike, Robespierre above all, feared them, feared that one of them, in the wake of Fleurus or riding the Republican wave of the Loire, might seize power with the support of the masses or the armies. But that would be for later; in its pocket, luck was keeping warm that most professional plume and enchanted sword of the general Bonaparte.

So you can see, Sir, that I am coming back to the painting. The plume appears there three times. So consequently, three times the three colors. And the collars alla paolesca, eleven times.

Let us review them, from left to right: Billaud, Carnot, Prieur, Prieur, Couthon, Robespierre, Collot, Barère, Lindet, Saint-Just, Saint-André. The commissioners. Billaud, civilian clothes and boots; Carnot, the greatcoat, civilian clothes and boots; Prieur of the Côte-d’Or, à la nation, wearing the plume; Prieur of the Marne, à la nation, plume on the table; Couthon, civilian clothes and useless buckled shoes on his paralytic feet, in the sulfur chair; Robespierre, civilian clothes and buckled shoes; Collot, the greatcoat, civilian clothes and boots, no cravat; Barère, civilian clothes and buckled shoes; Lindet, civilian clothes and buckled shoes; Saint-Just, in gold; Jean Bon Saint-André, à la nation, plume in hand.

And all the collars, alla paolesca. It is a Venetian painting, Sir, do not forget that.

III

What has become of the night, Sir?

It has not moved. All four of them are still there in Nivôse in the sacristy lit only by the square lantern since the fire has died. They are under the triple screen of darkness, Nivôse, the Terror, the extinguished fire. The horses can no longer be heard. Corentin is still standing, he has finished closing the sack and is weighing it in his hand, he is not yet facing the sacrosanct canvas of The Eleven, to tell the truth, he is not thinking about that, he is thinking that it is heavy, that it is good; he is thinking of similar sacks passing long ago from Marigny’s hand to his own, he is thinking of the vanished beauty of maman-putain and the more lasting beauty of gold; he is thinking that it is all an excellent and profitable farce. He is wearing the crocodile’s smile. And still sitting in the radiant armchair, Proli is thinking similar thoughts, but from the perspective of the one who is paying and thus risking his head, wearing the crocodile’s smile as well, but more worried and as though already duped; his protruding eyes gleam a bit, Proli is closest to the glow of the lantern, almost visible. The bishop’s armchair bears him. Bourdon is there as well, no doubt wearing a nasty smile in the dark, he does not like the erstwhile manners of this Corentin, he does not like his little old wig, he does not like it that beneath the wig Corentin’s face slightly resembles his own, he would gladly reduce him, too, to the level of equality, as he said of the French church steeples when he wanted to have them all razed to the ground. And Collot is not in Shakespeare, he is here. Nevertheless he is a little in Shakespeare, necessarily, because all of this is nocturnal, Caravaggesque or Shakespearean, villainous. Gold gleams from Collot’s ear. And as always in these scenes where the men’s faces are finessed, shifted into the dark, suspended in shadow, the square light is falling squarely on the symbols, the holy table of the contract, from which the bones and gold have disappeared, and on the holy table what remains of bread and wine; also perhaps the cards and the dice tossed there as they left by the Sans Culottes, the good old extras, whose role is always to leave in place a few obvious symbols before clearing out. Corentin has already taken three steps, he is getting ready to put on his greatcoat before clearing out himself.

It is at this moment that Proli, from the depths of his ceremonial armchair, stops him curtly and speaks up again. He adds that the contract has two minor but imperative clauses, to which Corentin is bound.

First of all, he must paint this painting in the greatest secrecy, as a conspirator, without informing anyone at all, and he must keep it concealed until someone comes to collect it from him.

The second clause is that the Robespierrots, Saint-Just, Couthon, Robespierre, must be painted more visibly and centrally, more magisterially than the other members of the Committee, who should appear in it as minor figures.

Corentin agrees. He says that is how it will be.

Finally, Sir, I want to repeat here the reason for the commission, its small necessary and sufficient cause, the design of its sponsors. Who they are. And I know very well that you have read it in the little antechamber, that you are supposed to have read it — but I know you, Sir, you and your kind: in your reading you go immediately to what shines and what you crave, the skirts of maman-putain, the plume, the gold coins; or to what is perfectly matte black, the guillotine, Shakespeare; but the political quibbling you find tiresome, you skim over it. The drab history and theory, the class struggle and the infighting, you tell yourself you will read all that tomorrow. And I know very well that you do not need to hear it, but I need to tell you.

So here it is: no one knew yet in Nivôse if Robespierre was going to be triumphant or perish; and everyone’s fate hung on that knowledge. The roles were assigned, the hands were dealt, but the bets were not yet placed. In the panic, fleeting alliances were forged, those who wanted to compromise with Robespierre, those who wanted his defeat, those who wanted to pull out. Among those alliances, the one that concerns us — that concerns The Eleven — had found its source in one of the desperadoes of the Commune, among the delegates of the sections, vandals and melters of bells, those who had chanted ça ira in 1790, for whom ça was no longer fine at all; that handful of Communards who had put their trust in the most impassioned of the Hébertists, who lived under threat of the guillotine and were beyond worrying about costs. So much for the left wing of the alliance, those who would be toppled in two months’ time, in Germinal, into Hébert’s cart. As for the right wing, which would not be toppled in Germinal and would close the hand of Thermidor, the desperadoes had had the marvelous idea of appealing to Collot d’Herbois, a man whose sentiments were to the left and even beyond, but who had been driven by the reality of the situation to forge alliances on the right: as a representative returning from a mission, he overshadowed Robespierre; although he came back from Lyons penniless, he was grouped by Robespierre together with the most corrupt, Tallien, Fouché, Barras, and had to join forces with these men whom he disliked. Thus Collot joined Tallien and Barras; who then rallied the powers they had brought back from Bordeaux and Toulon, clinging to the slatted sides of oxblood carriages full of the ringing coins — the elite of the right wing, the bankers, the backbone of war. All this fine society had plotted together to save their heads from the basket. And among their devious plots (said to be Collot’s idea, the enigmatic Collot) was this one: to secretly commission a painting of the Committee in which Robespierre and his cronies would be represented in all their glory, a painting giving official existence to the Committee that theoretically did not exist, but by the simple fact of appearing in a painting would be taken for what it was: an executive power seated in the contemptible place of the tyrant, a tyrant with eleven heads, existing and well and truly reigning, and even presenting an image of its reign in the fashion of tyrants — or perhaps, if things took a different turn, if Robespierre affirmed his power without possible recourse, by means of the painting the Committee would appear as a very legally sanctioned executive power, the cream of the Representatives, fraternal, paternal, and legitimate as syndics or a conclave.

It was a joker, do you understand? This painting was a joker to be played at a crucial moment: if Robespierre really took power, the painting could be brought out publicly as spectacular proof of his grandeur and the reverence in which his grandeur had always been held; it would be declared that the painting had been commissioned in secret to pay homage to his grandeur, and to the great role for which he was destined; and it would tell him clearly that these men were with him, that they had even been represented with him, that they had insisted on the honor of appearing at his side. The fraternal alibi would be played. If on the contrary Robespierre faltered, if he was brought down, the painting could also be produced, but as proof of his unbridled ambition for tyranny, and it would shamelessly be claimed that it was Robespierre himself who had commissioned it secretly to have it hung behind the presidential rostrum in the subjugated Assembly, and to be worshipped in the abhorred palace of tyrants. And thus this painting, The Great Committee of Year II Seated in the Pavilion of Equality, as it was originally to be called, suddenly made public, would be evidence of flagrant abuse of power — the scene of the crime, you could say. That is the reason for The Eleven. Ah yes, Sir, we have to accept it, the world’s most famous painting was commissioned by the dregs of the earth with the world’s worst intentions.

I will add this: in either case, Robespierre’s annihilation or apotheosis, it was necessary that the painting be right, that it work; that Robespierre and the others be seen there either as magnanimous Representatives or as bloodthirsty tigers, according to which reading events would require. And that Corentin painted it and succeeded in this way, in both ways, that is undoubtedly one of the reasons why The Eleven is in the last chamber of the Louvre, the holy of holies, under protective glass five inches thick.

Proli says none of that. He has put his greatcoat back on and has mounted one of the phantom horses, he is galloping toward Passy where he is hiding out, from the warrant for his arrest, from the guillotine. He is already passing through the Saint-Martin gates at a gallop. And neither does Bourdon stay to talk, he has left as well, on foot into the night of wolves to yelp with some other pack or to sleep with his own. All that — the trap in the form of a painting, the political joker — we can suppose it is Collot who explains it to Corentin, accompanying him back to the porch of Saint-Nicolas. Because they remain there a moment, the two of them among the opaque masses of the lowered bells; and we can see them distinctly, the big lantern has followed them that far, it is on the ground and projects the large shadows of the bells upon the three walls of the porch and upon the night, which is the fourth wall: black greatcoat and greatcoat the color of the smoke of hell, two-cornered hat on Collot’s head, three-cornered hat on Corentin’s, even the little theatrical plumes of breath from their mouths, under the porch of Saint-Nicolas, which is like the stage of a theater with its double doors open at the deadest hour of the night of wolves, erstwhile the Night of the Three Kings. They are very cold. Collot does not forget that he is in Shakespeare, a country where it is cold as well, he is leaning theatrically with his back against the mantle of the largest bell. The Elizabethan ruff blossoms at his neck. He is more garrulous than earlier. He has found the appropriate grand gestures again, the appropriate grand sentences. In hushed tones he has explained the trap, the tactic by which the painting is a war machine, and now he raises his voice, he exaggerates a bit: he speaks as the wind blows, in gusts, as if on a rostrum or a stage. He says laughing: “So you are going to represent us. Take care, citizen painter, representing the Representatives is not something to take lightly.” He tells him that he wishes him much pleasure in painting these portraits, because he, Collot, no longer dares to look at himself in a mirror, and in a voice too low to be heard Corentin says that neither does he. Collot remains silent for a moment, then he goes on in an affectionate tone: “We have pulled through, the two of us, since the beginning, and here we are already in ’94.” He speaks with a hesitant tenderness, as one would recall a night of carousing or a murder committed together: Do you remember Macbeth in Orléans in ’84? Yes, Corentin looks at him affectionately too, remembering: Collot’s youthfulness, his self-assurance, his irrepressible laughter in the darkest scenes, his rough and tender soul; and his madness, his constant drunkenness, on words, on wine. And suddenly the mixture of all these things, the bells, Orléans, Macbeth, come together and awaken a very old memory.

He remembers a beautiful morning when, as the two of them were strolling along the great levee toward Combleux, searching for ideas for the play, Collot was moved to pity for a woman collapsed under the Saint-Jean-le-Blanc bridge, famished and hysterical; that he had squatted down beside her and spoken to her for a long time; that during this time he, Corentin, had listened to the chiming bells answering one another along the length of the Loire from Saint-Jean to Combleux, from Combleux to Chécy — perhaps it was noon, or Angelus, or a holiday. He had been drawn from that joyous pealing by shouts: the girl was crying out, she had risen and thrown herself on Collot, baring her claws. There had been a brief semblance of a struggle, Collot was healthy and well fed, the girl was weak; very quickly he had her firmly by the wrists, in his power. He was smiling, in his smile there was always a shadow of compassionate zeal, but otherwise it was the mask of lust and its accompanying cruelty. Eventually he had calmed the poor creature down and taken her away with him. Corentin can still see the girl clearly — she had a red birthmark on her face that she tried to hide with a kind of mechanical coquetry, despite being famished. Collot had taken her in, fed and no doubt bedded her, had comforted her and set her back on her feet; he had found her lively and not without intelligence, and had eventually given her a small, silent part in the play, as one of the monstrous creatures leaping about at the witches’ feet on the moor in Macbeth; and she was ashamed of it, rightly or wrongly convinced that it was her birthmark and not her liveliness or her poverty that had brought her salvation and employment. Looking at Collot now in the night of wolves, Corentin is thinking that it is a strange and marvelous thing, that all that compassionate zeal for the unfortunate should have come to this, to the witches of Macbeth, to the Brotteaux plain, to the pikes and the carts, to the moor from Macbeth reappearing under the great cutting machine on the Place de la Révolution. (He is also thinking that he, Corentin, is completely familiar with such marvels, feats of magic, that he has performed them many times: that is how his mother and grandmother, lovesick creatures, became the terrible Sibylles by his hand, five times as there are five sibyls.) All the while his thoughts are thus wandering, Collot is speaking, with his dark cheer, the little plume of his breath. He is saying: “Yes, we have pulled through for the moment. But now it is in God’s hands. And we are going to need a holy hell of a hand to get us out of this. A hand of iron. Yours, perhaps?”

Collot laughs, as one laughs when shivering with cold. They can both see that crucial hand — for they really cannot believe, Sir, neither Corentin nor Collot, in their possible innocence, in a good future earned by their good innocence, in their good Right, in men free and equal by right, frolicking happily in the great fraternal garden. They were awaiting the hand. They believed more in luck and, yes, you could say, in Salvation, Sir. In the bells.

Corentin does not laugh. Perhaps he is not listening to Collot, but he is looking at him. With a kind of joy he thinks that the compassionate zeal for the unfortunate and the Brotteaux plain, the welcoming table and the Macbeth moor, the helping hand and the murder, Nivôse and April, is all in the same man. It is in Collot, one of those eleven men whom he will paint. That he is destined to paint. He is also thinking that every man is capable of anything. That eleven men are capable of eleven times anything. That that can be painted. No, he is certainly not listening to Collot. His joy is growing. His joy rings out. He is listening to the memory of the bells. He hears them as they begin, as they grow louder, as they ring out fully, as they subside. As they cease. In the dark Collot does not see his tears of joy, or he attributes them to the cold. It is three o’clock in the night. Come, it is time to part, Collot has already gone to saddle the other horse. He leads it under the porch, holding the bridle: the horse, the two men, among the stilled bells. They have extinguished the lantern. They embrace. They will not see each other again.

IV

All that you have read as well, Sir, in the framed notes in the antechamber. You have even paused before the reproduction of the oil sketch by Géricault, which is not here at the Louvre, which is sleeping among the Girodets in the Montargis museum: Corentin in Ventôse receives the order to paint the Eleven. The title assigned after the fact is approximate, the painting is hardly roughed out, there are large areas of white, because Géricault painted it with death looking over his shoulder. But it conforms exactly to what I have said.

It could not be otherwise.

Because, Sir, Géricault’s sketch is only valuable for having inspired Lord After-the-Fact himself, Michelet, Jules Michelet was his complete official name, to write the definitive twelve pages that discuss The Eleven, that assign The Eleven a place and set them before the historiographic tradition for centuries to come.

What really happened on that night when luck loosened its generous purse from its belt and produced the possibility of The Eleven, we do not know, Sir. Are we even sure it was night? All we know, knowledge or legend, are the theatrical effects, the coat the color of the smoke of hell rushing past, the self-assurance of four men in two-cornered hats, the empty nave and the horses in the nave, the lowered bells, the pile of gold and glowing bones of saints; three characters who are types, Collot in the role of Macbeth, Bourdon as Iago, Proli as Shylock; and before these stereotypes Corentin, struck dumb between the spilled gold and the phantom sound of bells, plays the role of Saint Matthew, who is not in Shakespeare. That is how we see it.

That is how it was arranged. Because, I repeat, Sir, all that originated — or rather was given definitive form, for Géricault had already hinted at it before Michelet — was formalized and dramatized in the hazy, hibernal mind of Michelet, under his impeccable hand, in the city of Nantes at the end of the Loire in the winter of 1852, in the Barbin quarter in the house called the Haute Forêt, the erstwhile Barbin quarter now called the Michelet quarter, where he wrote the pages on the Terror; when banished to Nantes by Napoléon III and broaching the subject he rightly considered to be the climax of History, he identified with both Carrier and Carrier’s rotten barges, with Providence and its old enemy Liberty, with the guillotine and the Resurrection of the flesh. When, like us, he entered with his subject into the night and into winter.

Michelet’s twelve pages on The Eleven in the third chapter of the sixteenth volume of the History of the French Revolution, those twelve pages extrapolated, that novel was taken at face value by the whole historiographical tradition: it comes up everywhere and is treated in various ways by all the schools that have commented upon, vilified, or celebrated the Terror. And, whether they vilify or celebrate it, all those historians, followed by the educated who read them, and then the uneducated who hear vague talk of them, and I myself, Sir, in my rambling, all of us, despite our various opinions that vary only slightly, all of us see at the physical origin of the great painting in the Louvre the night of Nivôse or Ventôse in Saint-Nicolas; from the corner of our eye, we all take in the gold and the bones; we are, of course, under the spell of the square lantern, the lantern of horn; we hear the horses; and, if we are romantic, we hear the bells as well. But it originated with Michelet. And as it comes to us from Michelet, it is the soul of Michelet that speaks in us: that thus seems to emerge from a painting by Caravaggio and not by Tiepolo.

Of those twelve pages, an entire page and a half are devoted to the commission: to the occasion, to the small extraordinary moment that the Greeks called the kairos — that is the moment, Sir, when luck unhooks from its belt the special little purse, the one that is no longer expected, that, moreover, is never expected. And in that page and a half Michelet tells how, in February 1846, he went to Saint-Nicolas, not to pray, given that the death of God was something understood once and for all, but to visit the sacristy where The Eleven was commissioned — he had seen Géricault’s painting once ten years earlier, during one of his little memorial tours through France. He went to see it, to verify it, and we in turn can see Michelet at nightfall, the pale, trembling, prematurely white-haired man with his greatcoat entering the sacristy that, as you see, we cannot escape. He saw it. He saw it, he writes in italics, although we do not know if that vision applies to the sacristy still enduring as a sacristy, or to the inspired place where The Eleven was decreed, that is, the brief headquarters of the Gravilliers section. He saw the chasubles on the little table upon entering where one evening in year II the coat the color of the smoke of hell coexisted with the bust of Marat; he saw the fire dying on the hearth; only the square lantern set there on the holy table was still flickering in the remains of daylight; reflections on small gold or copper objects; and perhaps even on the holy table the remains of a snack left by the sextons and guards. Above all he saw the armchair in which he says Proli had sat, the sulfur armchair, the yellow volcanic armchair in which, quietly, Couthon is sitting at the center of The Eleven. He saw the yellow armchair; he says that it is there that Corentin got the idea; I do not think I agree with Michelet: because I, too, Sir, have seen the yellow armchair, but it was not the same, not in the same place, because each real thing exists many times, as many times perhaps as there are individuals on this earth. I saw the armchair of The Eleven and it was not the same armchair as Michelet’s; I saw it in the Carnavalet museum where it is on display every day of the year, except Mondays and holidays because it is a public museum, the seat of impotence and glory — the chair of the paralytic Couthon, mounted on three wheels with a large wheel on either side and a small wheel behind, his wheelchair as we now say, his wheelbarrow as they said mockingly after Thermidor, the wheelchair that no longer has the slightest color, faded with time, or rather only the color of time, but which the little plaque at the Carnavalet museum describes as having once been yellow, because it is yellow in the painting of The Eleven.

Michelet saw those objects that were so many symbols in the sacristy in February, that den of the priests’ party into which he entered in his greatcoat under cover of darkness to verify The Eleven. And we will go along with him, despite all reservations regarding the yellow armchair; we will also go along with him when he speaks with terror of the nocturnal faces looming up, piercing, issuing from the night, and when he speaks tenderly of the oak table with the broken bread, the Clamart wine — the remains of the beadles’ afternoon snack. We might just possibly believe that he saw in 1846 the horses in the nave of 1793, the medieval relics thrown in the fire, the lowered, humiliated bells, his great bronze friend as he said, one of the only baubles of the priests’ party that he accepted because it rang not only to glorify God but also to announce uprisings, don Tocsinos as they said in 1793, that great friend who in February 1846 he heard plainly above his head sounding the hour of seven or eight in the evening: all that conforms to what we might think, might reconstruct of year II, and Michelet with greater reason than ours, who every day heard men of year II speaking of year II. It also conforms to what we know of Michelet. But when he transposes this scene of the commission, as is, onto the painting of The Eleven, then we can no longer go along with him.

For this confusion, this transposition, we can hazard a few hypotheses.

Perhaps Michelet had not revisited the great painting in the Louvre for a long time: we know that the painting frightened him, he remembered the excessive shock his first view of it had caused him, he avoided it because it possessed him, he praised it, detested it, idolized it, from a distance. Moreover in 1852 when he wrote of his vision and his visit to Saint-Nicolas in 1846, he was in Nantes at the end of the Loire, not on the banks of the Seine that bears The Eleven. So in the scene of the sacristy, lived in 1846, recounted in 1852, he redraws it from memory and falsifies it, in good faith perhaps or with the perversity of priest against priests, for which he is known. And in that falsification, that reconstruction from memory, in the famous twelve pages, he thus applies to the great painting what he saw, imagined, and cobbled together that day (in the sacristy and regarding the sacristy): he says that in The Eleven itself we see the great oak table and the horn lantern on the table; above all he says that we see the horses there, the horses in their stalls of sulfur, of gold, of basalt, their stalls à la nation, the horses of hell and the adoration. To be fair to Michelet, we can imagine that, among the prodigious and prodigiously cluttered bric-à-brac that served as memory for him, he had other paintings for guides and markers, Géricault’s Charging Chasseur, a battle by Rubens, the illustrations that Fuseli did for Macbeth, or the emblematic mare in The Nightmare by that same painter — or again, perhaps, that Michelet at his writing table, having just invented and articulated his own fable of a horse laughing in the night behind the partition, in the scene in which the three sorcerers commission the painting of The Eleven from the enchanter, Michelet is no longer the master of his fiction, that this perfect fable that just sprang from his mind intoxicates him, transports him, and he mounts it without a second thought. I myself do not see the square lantern there before us in the painting at the Louvre; I am afraid that it may come directly from Madrid, from Goya’s Tres de mayo, the Third of May, where it lights the scene of a slaughter, a mass murder, not from The Eleven — although something like a lantern does light The Eleven, but what? Nor do I see the holy table, although no doubt there must be something like a table to hold Prieur de la Marne’s hat at that level, since it cannot stay there by itself, cannot float at waist height by the sole virtue of the Holy Spirit. And above all I cannot see the horses. And you, Sir, can you see them?

And certainly Michelet, in that first shock caused by the painting (he had thought he would faint, he writes, and we can well believe it), immediately had the revelation from which he would later draw the famous exegesis that is contained in twelve pages. There he saw a secular last supper, perhaps the first secular last supper, he notes, the one in which bread and wine are still resolutely sacrificed but in the absence of Christ, despite that absence, above and beyond that absence, man having become stronger than that absence; he saw and saw clearly that it was a true last supper, that is, in eleven individual men a collective soul, not just a collection of men. And in that he is not wrong; at most one can object that if God is a dog, the absence of God is a bitch. And since it was a last supper, there must certainly have been a table, and on it the four-pound loaves and Clamart wine; so he extrapolated them, the table, the bread, and the wine. It did not bother him that the eleven men were standing, and not dreamily seated as in classic scenes of the last supper; on the contrary he writes that his republican last supper renews the tradition of the original evangelical meal that was to be taken standing, staff in hand, loins girded, girded for marching, or girded à la nation, ready for action. And the presence of Collot in the painting, playing both sides, did not bother him either; on the contrary, it confirmed his view, because among the guests at this type of meal, it is hard to do without Judas even if we can do without Christ, as The Eleven proves.

Of course, but this is another story, Michelet detested this painting as much as he admired it, because it is a last supper that is rigged, not by the absence of Christ, which he cared little about and which even pleased him — no, rigged because the collective soul visible there is not the People, the ineffable soul of 1789, it is the return of the universal tyrant who presents himself as the people. Not eleven apostles, eleven popes.

No matter. In the great wind of light that so shook Michelet at the Louvre in 1820, the pale and trembling young man, his hair still black though not for long, there is also this: Michelet, who always said and thought that the true painting of History was only true when it did not try to represent History, Michelet found himself refuted here. And he acknowledged it openly. The Eleven is not a painting of History, it is History. Perhaps what Michelet saw at the end of the Flore pavilion was History in person, in eleven persons — in terror, because History is pure terror. And that terror attracts us like a magnet. Because we are men, Sir; and because men high and low, scholars and beggars, passionately love History, that is, the terrors and the massacres; they hasten from afar to contemplate them, the terrors and the massacres, under pretext of deploring them, even of rectifying them, so they claim, the good creatures — and that is why we are here, Sir, with the crowds from all over the world before the ever enigmatic wall of eleven men upon which History is perched. That is why the crowds from all over the world shoot past the Mona Lisa without seeing it, since it is only a woman dreaming, past Uccello’s Battle of San Romano although it is, in its way, History in person and one of the indubitable precedents for The Eleven, past the red specter of the cardinal-duke painted by Champaigne, past thirty-six times Louis the Great under his monster wig, and plant themselves here, before the bulletproof glass.

Michelet, as he noted, understood here at age eighteen why David’s Death of Marat is only a small Caravaggesque canvas, inconsequential, exiled to the peripheral museum at Versailles, while the great Venetian canvas, The Eleven, enthroned at the end of the Louvre, is the Louvre’s final raison d’être; its ultimate aim; he understood why the whole colossal arrow of the Louvre, the colonnade where you enter, the Cour Carré you cross like the wind, the Apollon gallery that you cover in three steps, the four hundred and forty-seven meters of the Bord-de-l’Eau gallery that you race through, why perhaps all that in the final analysis was only conceived by the Great Architect to carry us to the heart of that target into which the Louvre plunges straight as an arrow. He understood why David is in the purgatory of minor painters, those who are nothing but painters, while Corentin, haloed, sits enthroned at the zenith: because David’s Marat is only a dead man, a remnant of History, perhaps its corpse. And the eleven living men are History in action, at the height of the act of terror and of glory that is the basis of History — the real presence of History.

We are here before it.

See how they change when you move to the left. I can almost see the holy table, under Prieur’s resting hand. And is that the glass of wine in front of Couthon? No, it must be the red and blue plume of Prieur’s hat. But neither bells nor horses.

No, undoubtedly, no horses. And yet: see the eleven pale heads one after the other, aligned, detached, springing naked from the mass of silk, felt, woolen cloth; the eleven masks: — Billaud, pale and long, from the black clothes under the fiery mane, pale Carnot from the black greatcoat, the two Prieurs emerging from the fitted jackets à la nation, lower down, the sunken head of the seated Couthon borne by the double robe of sulfur and basalt, and higher up once again, the pale face of Robespierre offered in worn clothes blacker than black — and the mask named Collot suspended above his pyramid of inverted collars, and all the others likewise to Jean Bon springing from the redundant tricolored jacket. These perched forsaken heads make you think of something, something older and less conjectural than severed heads on the ends of pikes, as has too often been said. And again, if you do as I advise you and move back from the painting, if you resolutely turn away from it, if you carefully retrace your steps, if you leave the room and take a few steps into the Bord-de-l’Eau gallery, turn around once again, once again, deliberately, enter the great hall where to the exclusion of all other paintings The Eleven stands; then if you stop on the threshold and look at the eleven as if you were seeing them for the first time — then, yes, you almost know what they make you think of. And if moreover when you are not at the Louvre you happen to go riding, to practice for memory’s sake that very old and obsolete occupation of men, or if you simply happen to frequent places where riding horses stand in fearful repose; and if perhaps you remember a day when, coming from the other end of the field and approaching at your own pace the wide angle of the stable where the horses lined up in their stalls are facing you, but all you can see of them are their heads, cut off and accentuated by the small lower door that hides their bodies, so that they appear to be suspended above by virtue of the Holy Spirit, spectral, alive, fixed in the dread and the slow expectancy of beasts — then perhaps you think that Michelet is not altogether wrong in his dreaming and that there in the Louvre are eleven forms similar to horses, eleven creatures of terror and temper: as sculpted by the Assyrians of Nineveh in the royal equestrian lion hunts; as they gallop toward the damned that are us, seven times and under seven forms of horses, in the Apocalypse of Saint John; as rearing under Niccolò da Tolentino, the condottiere of the night in Uccello; as rearing too under the Philippes of France and the Louis of France as well, the thirty-two Capets, later under Bonaparte; as Géricault painted them in the uproar of artillery lines exploding one after another, terrified by the smell of powder and the smell of death, but charging as if unafraid. And since this is what it has come to, you and I are suddenly standing before any divine beast whatsoever, not only horses but all of them, horned beasts, barking beasts, other roaring beasts that turning around suddenly leap on the king in the Nineveh hunts, the great frontal threats that resemble us and are not us. The ones that were painted at the very beginning, before Assyria and Saint John, before the invention of carts and cavalry, well before Corentin and poor Géricault, in the times of the great hunts, in the times when game was worshipped and dreaded, divine and tyrannical, on the deep walls of caves.

This is Lascaux, Sir. The forces. The powers. The Commissioners.

And the powers, in the language of Michelet, are called History.