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Doppelgangers

Pierre-Denis Martin, Le château de Conflans. Early eighteenth century. Musée de Sceaux.


"As Saadi sang in earlier ages, ‘some are far distant, some are dead.'"—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin


Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot to whose Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire we owe the Second Law of Thermodynamics,

died prematurely of cholera at 36 in 1832.

Named for the Persian poet Saʿdī—famed for his poem Gulistan, or,The Rose Garden—

he himself had a nephew named after him, Marie François Sadi Carnot, who as president

of France would in 1894 be murdered by an anarchist.


II

When strolling in his Château de Conflans garden with Paule-Françoise, duchesse de Lesdiguiéres, his sweetie, François III de Harlay, archbishop of Paris, both lover and priest, had a gardener follow them at a respectful distance with a rake to efface all traces of their faux pas.†

Barrès, that "great unknown," Godo calls him, thought this a mark of true civilization—Bohemian in spirit, but, on the surface, strict: “dans l’âme, le bohémianisme ; à l’extérieur, l’austérité !”‡

Saʿdī Shīrāzī might have agreed—

inasmuch as he was, he said,

a Sufi seer and a traveling salesman simultaneously—"like two almonds in the self-same shell."

Maybe we all have our doppelgangers, even more than one in the same chest, some to smell the roses and some to explore hell?

Pushkin, killed in a duel in the year of President Marie François Sadi Carnot's birth, put it well:

some of them are far away, he said

—and some of them are dead.


President Marie François Sadi Carnot’s assassination in Lyon, as depicted in Le Petit Journal, July 2, 1894.


† So says Saint-Simon, cited by Emmanuel Godo, Maurice Barrès: Le grand inconnu, 1862–1923 (Paris: Tallandier, 2023), 155.

‡ Ibid.

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