To the Hermitage (16 page)

‘That’s Voltaire, he turns up everywhere,’ murmurs our man, impressed.

There’s more. In fact all this is as nothing compared with the argument the statue has spawned at court over Peter’s physical appearance and character – of which, it seems, everyone has a totally different memory. Some recall him as under six feet tall, while others are quite certain he was over seven. Some claim he was always moustached and trim-bearded, but others pronounce him clean-shaven at all times. Should he have boots on (he generally did)? Should he wear a uniform? Maybe a boyar dress of Russian furs (but he did want them abolished), maybe a Roman toga (a fine form of dress, but rarely seen this far north)? Should he hold a sabre in his hand (he did make great use of one)? Better a legal scroll (he sometimes believed in the law)? The plan of his city (he did kill many people to create it)? And how should his facial expression be depicted? Should he be scowling fiendishly at Sweden, his old, defeated, yet still threatening enemy, always blocking off the other end of the Baltic? Should he be haughty, grand, triumphant, a soldier who was also a man of civilization, art and commerce? Should he be Peter the Absolutely Terrible, a Scythian scourge bringing fear and trembling to the entire world to the west? How about Thinking Pete, a reflective enquirer, asking for eternity, as he so often liked to do, What is dat?

No wonder Falconet has refused to dress the statue with a recognizable face, especially since Betskoi has demanded that the figure should be looking proudly at the Admiralty building, the Peter-Paul Fortress and the twelve colleges he founded on the opposite bank, something he could only manage by means of a very pronounced squint. Worst of all, there’s been the dreadful problem of the snake.

‘You surely don’t mean my snake?’ asks Our Philosopher, looking seriously worried at last.

For his snake it most definitely is. It was he, back in Paris, who first imagined an allegorical serpent lying beneath the hooves of Peter’s great horse: the pregnant image, the perfect symbol.

‘Symbol of what?’ asks Grimm, looking at him amused.

‘Good crushing evil. Humanity mastering nature. Reason triumphing over envy and ignorance,’ explains our man.

‘Unfortunately the Tzarina feels it might be misread,’ says Grimm. ‘She thinks it might be seen as the Russian ruler crushing the Russian people. Such is the slippage of signs in this country. I rather think Her Highness is right.’

At any rate, the snake, it seems, has resulted in one of those imperial letters of instruction that, by the same slippage of signs, may not quite mean what they say.

‘There’s an old song that says, if it is necessary, it is necessary,’ the Empress has written to him, in her gnomic way, in her own fair hand. ‘Let that be your answer regarding the snake.’

So, by the time Grimm has picked up his tricorne and strolled off back to drinks and canapés at the Hermitage, the Falconet Mystification has grown considerably. In fact our man’s seriously alarmed. He can hardly wait to leap to his feet, grab up someone’s bearskin coat, and walk through Saint Isaac’s square to the log-built atelier on the Millionaya, to discover what’s become of his splendid nine-year-old dream. The atelier proves a most strange and remarkable place. In the snowy courtyard outside, a regiment of cavalry officers clatters and drills, each man taking turns to ride the Empress’s own horse, Brilliant, to the top of a vast sharp-angled stone plinth. The sculptor himself stands watching, evidently to see what daring positions a horse and rider can achieve before they tumble to disaster (as, it turns out, several have). The two friends embrace, but Falconet is still sullen. He leads our man inside the smoky den. Here, furnaces blast, smelters sizzle, plaster-moulds seethe. A large general wearing a crown of laurels struts about irritably – waiting, it seems, to perform the role of Peter the Great’s stand-in, impatient for principal photography to start.

In the centre of the studio stands a vast stage draped with a waterproof canvas. Sweet Marie-Anne Collot comes over and joins them, clad in great leather pinafores. Falconet nods an order to his ragged band of workmen. They scramble up the scaffolds; the cover flies off. Beneath it is a vast plaster maquette. A flying horseman, the man almost indistinguishable from the horse, rears up on the brink of a vast plaster cliff. The thing’s not finished, in fact, it’s nowhere near. But that’s Peter all right: crowned in laurels and three times lifesize, as if in real life the man wasn’t already big enough. Our man stares up. As a construction, it is amazing. The whole thing is unreal, pushed beyond all the rules of form, the laws of gravity. Horse and man are strangely backweighted, held to earth only by the horse’s hind legs and twisting tail. But whatever’s happened to the meaning, what has gone wrong with the sign?

The snake remains, true, twisted beneath the horse’s hooves – though now it seems to be removable. The face is faceless, blank, expressionless (and so it will remain until the very last minute, ten long years from now, when, as it is written, Marie-Anne will hastily sculpt the features on the night before the statue goes up). As for the cunning allegorical content (our man remembers every detail), that has quite dropped away. Barbarism is no longer present. Popular Love and the Spirit of the Nation – what has become of them? It seems they have been discarded: for something quite other, some raw and plastic simplicity wrested directly out of the sculptural materials themselves. Classicism has quite disappeared, along with the art of allegory. Everything’s replaced by something different: looser, stranger, more tempestuous, haunting even, weirdly sublime. Some strange power – can it be Russia? the Tzarina? the shifting soul of Falconet himself? – has altered everything. This is not at all what they meant in Paris. This is not the statue of their dreams . . .

At once our philosopher comprehends everything. Nothing could be clearer: the ungrateful welcome, the friendless friendship, the already bagged bed, the faceful of sullen expressions and angry embarrassed looks. This man is afraid. Nine years’ work, and here comes Teacher; and Teacher ain’t going to like it, ain’t going to like it a bit. Teacher stands back. He reflects, considers. He turns in his mind the strange paradox of sculpture, which he’s spoken of many times, in fact to anyone who would listen. Sculpture is the highest art; it’s also the deepest craft. It does not embody realities, depict known myths. It finds itself within the objects of its own use. One should not (he has often said so) suppose that inanimate things lack living characteristics. The world is one. In wood, in stone, in clay, there are vital secrets; and art is craft, a skill in chiselling, shaping, working out the secret of the life within. That is the paradox of art: an imitation of reality that upturns the reality, finds the single pregnant instant, the
coup de théâtre
, the great
découpage.

He looks again. He thinks, like the critic he is, of the power of the patron, the hunger of the audience. But he’s not just a critic and a teacher, a creator of creators. He’s a creator himself, after all . . . He turns to the bulky, sour-faced sculptor. He takes him in his arms.

‘My dear fellow,’ he declares, ‘I always used to think you were a young man of the very highest talents. Didn’t I always say so, when I reviewed your work in the salons, all those years ago?’

‘You did say so, monsieur,’ says the sculptor. ‘How else do you think I ended up here in hell, doing this?’

‘Well, may I drop dead on the instant if I thought for a moment you ever had a conception in your head like this strange beast here.’

‘You don’t approve?’

‘Do you know, I could grind this up and eat it.’

‘It’s that bad?’

‘Not at all. There’s nothing I would love better than to be a statue just like this myself. Only without a horse, perhaps.’

‘So you do like—?’

‘I love it, my sweet young friend. It’s quite original, it’s quite sublime. It’s a wonder.’

‘You mean it?’

‘I’m a professional critic, remember. It’s not my way to say nice things often.’

‘My dear kind friend.’

‘My dear friend too,’ says our man. ‘You’re making a masterpiece. And you can quote me on that wherever you like, to whomever you like. Now then: I’ve said what I’ve said. And as soon as I meet the Empress I shall tell her what I think.’

When at last they let go of each other, even sullen Falconet is smiling. As he usually does in the end, our man has found his way to the perfect flattery. He’s passed on a generous, a fraternal, a perfectly intended compliment to another. And he’s no less found the way to keep a big piece of the praise for his own splendid judgement and himself.

‘And how is my dear darling Marie-Anne?’ our man asks now, reaching out and hugging her too. Soon all three of them are in the most enormous tangle. ‘What became of my wonderful fond welcome to Sankt Peterburg?’ Our man booms, ‘Kiss kiss kiss.’

‘You’re truly welcome,
maître
,’ says Marie-Anne, giving him the kiss kiss kiss. ‘Do you know, one day I would like to make a bust of you myself?’

‘And so you shall, my dear one, you shall.’

‘In that case I would like to make one too,’ says Falconet, holding the Philosopher in his arms.

‘Both of you? A statue for me, then? Well, why not? I deserve it.’

‘These days everyone gets one,’ murmurs Falconet.

‘I know, we’ll make it a competition, master and pupil,’ our man says. ‘And then I shall decide which one’s best. Or maybe we’ll ask the Empress.’

‘You haven’t met her yet.’

‘Tomorrow night, at the great party at the Hermitage.’

‘You’re invited?’

‘Of course. Everyone is,’ says our man.

‘Except me,’ says Falconet.

Meanwhile, up on the scaffold, faceless and unfinished, Peter astride his snorting house stares out over the talking heads at the big blank wall of the studio. One day he’ll have all the Baltic to look at with imperial menace. He’d better get this right . . .

A
LITTLE LATER
. Pleasant civic Stockholm is gently slipping away behind us into the chilly clear late afternoon. There it goes: the copper-clad spires of Protestantism, the great granite halls of liberal democracy, the big-roofed palaces of a long-lived monarchy are all floating off in our rich oily haze. I can see the tall shaft of Storkyrkan Cathedral, where they tried but failed to bury Descartes; I can spot the modern brick pile of the City Hall, where they award the Nobel Prizes to the famous and the totally forgettable. A fine view of a web of urban motorways, a towered spectacle of welfare high-rises stacked on the hillsides above. The urban buildings go out of view. We’re looking at small rocky bays, threading between rocky and tree-fertile islands, with neat waterside houses, each with a boat dock, a white motor cruiser, a blue and white national flag flapping away on each separate pier-end, each a little free state on its own. Bright-sailed dinghies tack in the water, performing another regatta: back and forth, hither and thither, this way and that.

‘Now we’re in the archipelago?’ I ask. Beside me is the red-haired Swedish Nightingale, who has generously agreed to come with me up here, to the high empty bridge deck, to watch her native city slip from view.

‘
Nej, nej
, those are dangerous waters, wild and lonely and truly beautiful. Here you are still in Stockholm. Those houses were once summer cottages. Now they’re all thermalled and belong to commuters. In summer they go to work in their motor boats. In the winter when the ice comes they go on their skates, with a briefcase under the arm. You will know the real archipelago when you see it. It is very dark and strange, that is why we like it.’

We stand together, staring over the side. The red sun’s sliding, the skies have cleared from Prussian to bright blue, the wind’s faintly rising, sweeping across our faces as we look out. Here on the bridge deck the cruise has scarcely started. The swimming pool is drained and empty, the scatter of wooden deckchairs lacks its cushions. A cossack swabs the deckboards with mop and bucket. Beneath the bridge-house where the captain stands in his huge white hat, staring out through formidable binoculars, there is foxy Lenin, impassively, emptily, bronzily brooding over us all.

The red-haired diva seizes my arm. ‘Is it true you are quite clever?’ she asks.

‘No, you’re confusing me with someone else,’ I answer.

‘It doesn’t matter, at least you are a professor. Quickly – tell me something about this Diderot. So I will not look all the time like a silly fool.’

‘Well, in a word: French philosophe, the son of a knife-maker in Langres in Burgundy. He was going to be a priest, but he married a sempstress. Went to Paris, worked as a hack and teacher, wrote a funny dirty little novel called
The Indiscreet Jewels
. Travelled to Petersburg in 1773. Which is why we’re here, I presume. Died suddenly of an apoplexy while eating an apricot at his own dinner table, 31 July 1784. Wrote the big book that changed the world.’

‘Surely not another book that changed the world?’

‘Yes, the
Encyclopedia
. It ran to twenty-eight volumes, something like that, with hundreds of articles and plates. It was supposed to sum up the knowledge and the progress of the age.’

‘Did it?’

‘Oh yes. It was the Bible of the Age of Reason. You read it and the whole meaning of the world changed. It was the spirit of knowledge, the power of philosophy. The authorities tried to suppress it. That just made it more famous.’

‘Why was it so important?’

‘In the old world you consulted the priests. In the world of new science you consulted the philosophers. Philosophy became a great occupation, there were philosophes everywhere, remember. Voltaire, Hume, d’Alembert, Condorcet, Rousseau.’

‘So why are we following Diderot?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe because Diderot was the most interesting and engaging of all of them. At least that’s my opinion. Wilder and more generous than Voltaire. Much much wittier than Rousseau.’

‘That can’t have been hard. Why don’t I know him?’

‘In his day he was mostly famous for talking. His finest books weren’t printed until many years after his death. They turned up all over the place. Maybe there are still some that haven’t been found. I seem to remember that’s why I thought I’d like to come on this trip in the first place.’