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| Jean-Louis Laneuville Portrait of Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles ca. 1793 oil on canvas Musée Carnavalet, Paris |
"In the last few days I have laid hands upon a book which I have been tracking down for years and which has fully redeemed all the expectations I had placed in it. Courting the danger that you already know the work, I cannot resist the pleasure of sending you here three, almost arbitrarily selected, maxims from it in my own translation."
XL
The ideas which are important to an individual should be coordinated with his ten fingers and their individual joints.
XLI
What someone presently most has to become, must be associated with those things and those people he loves, but especially with those he hates.
XLII
If one intends to concern oneself with things, or to deal with people, then those ideas which are important to one should be coordinated with a series of objects which lie constantly before our eyes as we pass.
– Walter Benjamin, writing from Paris in 1935 to Theodore Adorno in Germany, quoting from Théorie de l'ambition by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles (1759-1794) who, in the 1780s, was Advocate General in the Parliament of Paris. Subsequently, Hérault de Séchelles participated actively in the French Revolution, was associated with the Jacobin party, and became a member of the Commission of Public Prosperity. He was guillotined in 1794 on charges of having collaborated with Royalists.
The passage of Benjamin's letter is quoted from Theodore W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940, edited by Henri Lonitz and translated by Nicholas Walker (Harvard University Press, 1999)