That Kantorowicz’s exclusion of the Roman precedent was not a product of negligence or oversight is shown by the attention which Giesey, with his teacher’s full approval, gives to the matter in a book that can be considered a fitting completion of The King’s Two Bodies, namely, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (1960). Giesey could not ignore the fact that a genetic connection between imperial Roman consecratio and the French rite had been established by such scholars as Elias Bickermann and the very eminent Julius Schlosser. Curiously enough, Giesey nevertheless suspends judgment on the matter (“as far as I am concerned,” he writes, “I prefer not to choose either of the two solutions” [p. 128]) and instead resolutely confirms his teacher’s interpretation of the link between the effigy and the perpetual character of sovereignty. There was an obvious reason for this choice: if the hypothesis of the pagan derivation of the image ceremony had been taken into account, the Kantorowiczian thesis concerning “Christian political theology” would have fallen by the wayside or would, at least, have had to be reformulated more cautiously. But there was a different – and more secret – reason, and that is that nothing in Roman consecratio allowed one to place the emperor’s effigy in relation to what is sovereignty’s clearest feature, its perpetual nature. The macabre and grotesque rite in which an image was first treated as a living person and then solemnly burned gestured instead toward a darker and more uncertain zone, which we will now investigate, in which the political body of the king seemed to approximate – and even to become indistinguishable from – the body of homo sacer, which can be killed but not sacrificed.