I am drunk with dominion

“I am drunk with dominion” is a phrase Jacopo Belbo uses to perform the authority he imagines waiting within the Plan. Its decisive significance lies in the performance itself: Belbo presents a private, long-carried secret as a source of power, while the words he uses come from a fictional speech he recites to test Aglie.

The Phrase and Its Variants

The expression appears in two related forms. In a private moment, Belbo tells himself that he is drunk with command; later, while speaking to Aglie, he concludes with the more resonant dominion. Both versions associate imagined power with intoxication, turning control into something that overwhelms the person who claims it.

Belbo’s Private Claim

Returning to his small apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Honore, Belbo looks at himself in a mirror and imagines himself as the King of the World, ruling the universe from a hollow spire. He calls himself a master of energy and describes command as intoxicating. The mirror gives this claim a solitary, self-directed frame: the authority exists as something Belbo tells himself, not as a power demonstrated to others.

The Secret as Performance

In his conversation with Aglie, Belbo says that he destroyed the map, then identifies its true location as his own forehead. He explains that he has carried the secret there for more than ten years, like an obsession, and fears the power he might gain by grasping the heritage of the Thirty-six Invisibles. He connects this concealed knowledge to his persuasion of Garamond to publish Isis Unveiled and the History of Magic, and says he is waiting for the right contact.

Belbo becomes increasingly absorbed in the role he has adopted and recites, word for word, Arsene Lupin’s speech at the end of Z,’’Aiguille Creuse. The borrowed declaration is also a test: he uses it to put Aglie definitively to the test. The scene makes the supposed secret difficult to separate from its theatrical presentation; Belbo’s claim of dominion is voiced through a passage of fiction, even as he presents it as evidence of hidden power.

Significance

The phrase joins Belbo’s private fantasy of sovereignty to his deliberate performance before Aglie. Its recurrence shifts the emphasis from command to dominion, but both forms expose the same tension: Belbo speaks as though mastery were within reach while describing a secret that remains concealed, feared, and sustained by obsession. The expression therefore marks less an accomplished triumph than the intoxicating role Belbo takes on as he tries to make the Plan—and his place within it—seem real.