La Comédie humaine, which portrays the nobility’s slow socio-economic decline alongside the rise of the bourgeoisie, contrasts various meanings of the “science of manners”. As a taxonomist of “social species”, Balzac foreshadowed sociology in his unprecedented deciphering of the gestures, behaviours and vocal inflections used by individuals to ascertain how they measure up to their interlocutors and assess their place in the social arena. At a time when politeness had become harder to read—sometimes verging on insult or impertinence in the “right” tone—, the science of manners required an exegesis that illustrates what Montandon called a “general crisis in semantism”, whereby literature responds to a “widespread semiological impulse”. Hermeneutics as a search for meaning intertwines with the risk of insignificance, an expression of the ontological vacuum facing an elite taking refuge in the “science of nothings”.