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MEMORY, CONTEMPLATION, RETROSPECTION, AND DEATH JAY ROGOFF Leonine Franco-Prussian War Tragedy struck Louis, 2 September 1870, gripping his ghost-white scrap of cloth as he felt France slip from his grasp. At Sedan, Louis-Napoleon lined up his soldiers like a corps de danse, 80,000 curtseying at one stroke to Prussia, and saved his imperial skin, leaving the enemy a clear shot at Paris. Gallstones ground his guts, the histories state; his saddle so squeezed his billiard-ball prostate, he’d rouged his death-pale face. Saint-Léon, creator of Coppélia—the talk of Paris last May—dined near the Opéra. Though the dance had shut for war two days ago, damp skin of dancers lingered in his nostrils. A stroke of genius, asking Coppélius to stroke Giuseppina’s cheek, then strut in a state of rapture. His doll’s steel shell had turned skin! Twenty-four hours would pass before the Lion of the Forest’s humiliation at Sedan’s high citadel—September’s talk of Paris. The nobles cursed and the mobs reeled as Paris embraced the Third Republic, eagles struck from the Tuileries façade. A masked dance pumped Louis into a pneumatic state before defeat, an ass dressed as a lion, waltzing with a dazzling marquise; his foreskin yielded. Her marquis would gun down in cold skin hundreds of Communards force-marched from Paris to stand trial at Versailles. As Saint-Léon quaffed a cognac with his roast quails, a stroke bloomed in his brain, an apoplectic state unraveling in canon. Death would dance him off before his colleagues in the dance world could form his ambulance. No close kin; his ballets his ethereal estate. Delibes’s dirge moistened Giuseppina, but Paris 82 heard only the Second Empire’s thunderstroke, the crumped thud of Louis-Napoleon who’d dance no more, no more patronize Paris or traffic in its skin. France, at a stroke, gave up its state, its art, its holy lion. 2 September, Saint-Léon collapsed and died. No one could guess he had triumphed where Louis failed: choreographing empire. ...

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