To the Hermitage (11 page)

The day on the true calendar is Friday, 8 October Gregorian. Here they call it something quite different. Somewhere in the lost days between two calendars his sixtieth birthday has spiralled into the void. Or perhaps the whole thing’s the other way round, and he’s going to be sixty twice, giving his miserable ageing a double birth. No doubt now in charming Paris it’s still autumnly mild; leaves hanging yellow on the plane trees, light evening shawls for the painted ladies strolling through the Palais Royal to the opera. Not like that in Catherine’s strange capital. The first winter snows are already starting to fall, the temperature is slipping, the day is so drearily downlit it looks remarkably like night. Freezing and shivering, hacking and coughing, the Philosopher stares through the icy mud-splattered screens of Narishkin’s bouncing Berliner as it trundles down the new-built granite English quay.

Trade flourishes to great effect offshore (he notes this in his notebook). High-rigged ships of the line, lumbering merchant tubs, fat barges lie roped at their moorings between the marshy islands. Rows of masts flutter their pennants at the Exchange Wharf on the far shore, Vasilyevsky Island, where European manufacture is being off-loaded on to Russian mud. Dirty loggers’ barges, drifting ferries swirl about in the muddy floody Neva. This is just a wide shallow flow crossed by one rough bridge of floating pontoons – though, as stakes in the water show, other bridges are a-building. Over the water the thin spike of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where past imperial corpses lie, rises gold and glittering from the brown reeds of a wind-blown marsh.

Then, on this side, the city. A city that’s been built from nothing, over the course of, out of the stuff of, his own lifetime. A new European capital, that just appeared like a mirage when no one was expecting it at all. Our Philosopher gazes: this place! He’s already dreamt it, sketched it, mapped it, rebuilt it over and over. What’s strangest of all is the real thing does look imaginary: everything fragile, fleeting, shifting, just like a dream. It’s been planted on nowhere, except under-salinated Baltic water and Finnish fen, autumn fog and winter ice. It’s shaded by chill Northern light. Everything here – idea or reality – was imported from somewhere quite different, probably devised for somewhere quite different. Its polyglot people – Scythians and Slavs, people from the fur-clad choruses of Rameau’s operas, exotic foreigners of every kind – have come here from everywhere too, imported by fiat, threat, servitude, patronage, favour or inducement. Its building materials have all been carried in, log by log, stone by single stone. True, they’re rebuilding Paris now, altering London, changing, they say, the face of Vienna. But this is different. This northern Palmyra has been forged from all the different fashions, torn from all the tastes: Italian, German, Dutch, French, English; romanesque, classical, oriental, baroque. Everything’s mixed together, turned into opera, stage-set, travesty, pastiche. The result is nothing short of novelty. At the age of sixty, he’s ended up in the world of Baltic Baroque.

They trundle on, into the heart of the new capital. Everywhere huge palaces, shining yellow, pink, blue through flaky veils of snow. Some are cracking already; some stand in Venetian fashion with their ground floors rotting to decay in swirling water; some are already sliding back into the universal mud. Many are illusions. Baronial façades are stuck on hovels, classical pediments deck the fronts of wooden sheds. Rag-wrapped workmen swarm over unfinished stucco, scramble up rocking scaffolds with half-trimmed stones. All this is rising – when it’s not falling – over rough-hewn canals being edged with granite, whose water, gelid with cold, looks like damaged marble. And while this goes up, that, thanks to the divine impatience of the Tzarina, is already coming down. There has been fire and flood through the city already, and some buildings are blackened ruins. Roads are being carved, shops and warehouses rising everywhere. They’re turning old wood into fresh stone, taking down huts to put up palaces, half-dismantling the not long-built Church of Saint Isaac to turn it into something other. New architects replace old, Italy remodels what Germany started, high classicism contests with fussy baroque.

Squads of thick-coated soldiers march, green-coated horse-guards ceremonially ride. The place resembles a huge military and naval barracks to which, in careless profusion, palaces, churches, academies have been wildly added. Noblemen’s carriages clop through grand unfinished squares, or roll down wide new
prospekts
that run for miles in straight lines to some distant nowhere. Merchants and foreign seafarers sit talking and trading in coffee houses; paupers and beggars huddle under buildings; decorated vermilion-cheeked tarts strut through new arcades. The place booms like a workshop. Crafts, trades and manufactures prosper, as our man, son of a provincial cutler, can see with half an eye. Shoemakers tap, blacksmith forge, ropemakers weave. Huge sleds heaped with produce or vast blocks of ice are manhandled through the streets. Sheep and goats are herded along embankments; ambassador’s carriages with frog-coated footmen stand outside grand buildings. Strange flaring lamp-posts, burning some kind of rank hempseed that scents the whole city.

Banners wave everywhere. To Narishkin’s bouncy and braying pleasure, they have managed to arrive precisely on time. The imperial wedding will take place tomorrow, Saturday, when the Archduke Paul – the bitter neglected son of the Tzarina – will unite with his princess, one of three bright German sisters he has been granted his choice of in the usual way. Our Philosopher can take personal pleasure in the matter. This angry little bridegroom is the royal pupil his friend d’Alembert had once been summoned north to tutor, till his fear of the haemorrhoids put him off. As for the timely union of dynasties Prussian and Russian, well, every detail – the presentation of charming portraits of the three young princesses (‘I’ll take that one – I think,’ the Grand-Duke has said, ‘no, the other . . .’), the terms of the contract, the collecting up of the chosen bride-to-be from the court at Sans Souci, the delivery of her person to Sankt Peterburg all intacta – has all been managed through the matchmaking and couriering abilities of his old gossip of a friend: dear squat-faced, court-loving Melchior Grimm. Meaning that, wonderful to say, he must already be somewhere in town, taking one arm of the journey while our man has taken the other, and now waiting to meet and greet, embrace and toast him with his familiar frog-like joy.

So, as he rides on through the city, there’s no way our philosopher can resist a sentimental tear or two. It’s all so strange, so surprising, so fantastic; yet so exactly what he expected, a mystery of a city, polyglot, multi-cultured, a city that seems to express every fancy yet has acquired no firm shape. Having lured its citizens, its styles, its tradecraft from everywhere, planted them down in this frozen Utopia, it has allowed them to be the best or worst of whatever they are. But if this banging, clanging place is a fantastic invention, a reverie, a dream, who’s the dreamer? First a tzar, of course, then a great tzarina. But others can claim some credit. Didn’t he – along with d’Alembert, the thinking man’s mathematician, and grand old Voltaire of Ferney – raise altars of homage here, pursuing their conviction that power and light, the electricity of reason, the bright brush of reform, would spread enlightenment downward, from the north to the south? Hasn’t much of this dream been dreamt in clever critical Paris, smarting under its divine disappointing kings, witty corrupt courtiers, lawyers, priests, tax-farmers, its elderly unphilosophical God? In fact (and fair’s fair) hasn’t much of it been dreamt by him, sitting in his old dressing gown at a writing desk in the rue Taranne – the place he wishes, as colic stabs once more, he was sitting at right now?

So, if they’re expanding Rastrelli’s fine Winter Palace (it shines pinkly and wonderfully in sight now, further along the Neva bank), tying vast baroque wings together with huge display galleries and strange hanging gardens, isn’t that because he, on paper, thought up much of the scheme? If these galleries are a-building because thousands of crate-loads of art, tapestries, collectables, general world-finery can’t wait to be displayed, hasn’t he filled hundreds of the crates? If buildings need the best architects, sculptors, carpenters, hasn’t he personally interviewed and recommended most of them, not to say the mathematicians, musicians, generals, comedians and tragedians who fill their rooms each night? If the city is creating new arcades, streets, squares, didn’t he sketch them? And if the whole grand plan is to be capped and crowned with a vast new statue, to be raised up high in Saint Isaac’s Square . . . well, isn’t that an invention sprung from his own mind too, devised amid the dusty books of his Paris study – with dear Étienne-Maurice at his side?

Falconet, Falconet! His dear, his companionable, his ever amusing, his sweet-hearted old friend! No sooner does he think of him than a fresh tear springs to his eye. He just can’t wait to see him; he’ll hug him, embrace him, kiss his cheeks, weep in his arms. And when they come together once more – kind master, fond pupil – he doesn’t mean to ask for much: just a fabulous welcome, some herb tea, a syringe to help the colic, an ordinary bed for the night – and then all the other nights he’ll be in the city till his philosophical services are done. Well, why not? Didn’t he, in a sense, invent Falconet too? When that angry young man was no more than an indigent maker of small busts and sculptures for the art-salons of Paris, he chose him out, wrote him up constantly in articles, praised his works to the skies. When Catherine needed a fast-track Michelangelo, he promoted his talents – though, true enough, it helped that he offered himself cheap. And when the scale of her scheme for a grand new statue for her grand new city grew evident, it was master and pupil who sat down in his apartment and dreamt it together – the ideal triumphal figure, classical and allegorical, Big Peter the Horseman, rearing up high and mighty over the streets and waters of his fantastic city, just as he had in life.

Which reminds him. He can’t wait to see the statue either; the whole vast and terrible thing must surely be nearly finished by now. The truth is, our man dearly loves statues. He seeks them out, plans them, imagines them. Didn’t Plato say each human body is both a sign and a tomb? In a godless world, statues are our one ideal Posterity – what we should be aiming for, an apotheosis, a final and complete granite selfhood, created by art from the fast-shifting fluidity of our material being. They’re the figure for what, in our best moments, we aspire to be: the perfect epitaph, the last tableau. Art at its highest, motion in stasis, life held in marble, biography done in bronze. To please the great Tzarina, Voltaire wrote a thousand pages of the history of Peter the Great. With our man’s instinct for art’s pregnant moment, Falconet’s gift for knowing the limits of tensile bronze and stone, they can do the whole thing in one shot.

So, day after day, they’ve together planned the ideal statue, the ultimate heroic hieroglyph. He still remembers every fine detail of the splendid plan they drew. Peter on his horse, high-rearing and betoga-ed. Around him fur-clad figures of Barbarism pay fealty to civilization and greatness. Popular Love there too, making obeisance, naked and freely extending her arms and her charms. Beneath him, the female form of the Nation, outstretched and adoring, supine in yielding gratitude. How long ago was it? Could it be nine years? Nine years since he last saw the sculptor, and argued so wittily that the sole goal of life was Posterity (Falconet disagreeing with him as usual)? Nine years since the young man set off north in the diligence, accompanied by twenty-five articles of luggage and a pleasant, clever seventeen-year old pupil called Marie-Anne Collot, also carefully selected by him by our sage? And here they are already. Falconet’s house and big wooden atelier have not been hard to find. The Tzarina has housed him within sight of her own pink Hermitage, right on grand Millionaya, Millionaire’s Row. The Berliner stops, he gets out, another spasm jabbing his inside. He claps the knocker. The door swings open . . .

. . . only to reveal that something’s badly wrong. Nothing is as he’s been expecting. Falconet stands there all right, stiffly holding the door. But why no grand welcome in the entrance? Why no laughter to greet him? Why no loving embrace to enfold him as he walks inside? Why no shout of filial joy from Falconet, no fond kiss-kiss-kiss from Marie-Anne? Even the long-expected, the so-much-desired bed seems not to be on offer. Falconet, standing there rigid, is grotesquely explaining that his young son has just arrived from London, where he’s studying (what? Art, of course, naturally . . .), and has bagged the spare room already. It strikes our Philosopher something in his manner – an unease? a dismay? an embarrassment? a distance? – suggests the pupil is no longer delighted to see his wise master, the creation no longer feels at one with his creator. He’s reminded Falconet never really was a warm man. He’s temperamental, tempestuous, jealous, a man who appreciates nothing that’s done for him and is quite easy to cross. Oddity. Disappointment. Rejection. Total and utter mystification.

Fortunately Narishkin’s carriage waits still. Chastened if not hurt, our man makes some quick cold farewells, gathers his spirits and his cloak together, gets back in. By slippery squares and glassy embankments he trots back to Prince Narishkin’s grand palace. It’s nothing to be sneezed at, not even with this bad cough, in this tightening cold. More than a just reward for all the duties Narishkin has played as court clown, chamberlain, playmate, pandar, it stands in grand decorated classical nobility on the corner of the square opposite Saint Isaac’s Church, only a step away from orthodox worship, just a muffled assignation away from the Hermitage, and right opposite the spot where, as it happens, the Bronze Horseman is meant to stand. Good Narishkin is, as ever, his clownish hospitable self. He offers a bedroom, in fact a choice of several tens of them, some once used by the Tzarina herself, for purposes not clear. There’s a helpful bevy of servants. A comfortable much-needed commode. A hot Dutch-tiled stove, a cold thermometer, proudly announcing a temperature well below freezing. Family portraits, of boyars with unbelievable hats and no less impossible beards. All a good man might need for the rest of his stay, however short or long it might prove to be. He’s here at last, in the chilly city. He’s comfortable. He’s cosy. He’s tired. He’s hurting. He’s hurt. Yes, it’s definitely time for sleep . . .