To the Hermitage (21 page)

Our Man is walking where he walked yesterday, where he will walk tomorrow. He crosses the noble end of Nevsky Prospekt. Its fine fresh stores and new arcades are already busy, with wandering colonels, big-wigged bureaucrats, minor officers of the court, wives, mistresses, courtesans. Its great straight line points heroically to the distance, toward the marsh, sedge, lake and snowdrift of mysterious, infinitely extensive, positively illimitable Russia, spreading off beyond the senses. For all the glory of its name, that frosted open world – in these strange days of black-red sky and snow-flurried gloom – seems a less than inviting prospect. He prefers the city. He crosses the Moyka Canal, where he sees unpleasant ice-lumps from upstream tumbling furiously together before they burst into the harbour. Luckily, given this weather, it’s but a bird-flight from Narishkin’s mansion to Palace Square and the entrance to the Hermitage. He stares up at Rastrelli’s lush façade: such a Viennese torte, a marzipaned cake, of a building. Huge guardsmen in green and red and grey-faced watchmen protect the residence, eternally standing in ground-sweeping raincoats against autumn rain and growing cold. Now, starting to know him, they step back to let him pass.

He’s coming. His notebooks on Russia – begun back in the Dutch republic, worked on in the rattling confines of Narishkin’s shaking Berliner, filled out by candlelight in his fine bedroom in the palace across the square – have grown fatter day by day, filled like the crops of Burgundy geese with more and more refined and intellectual fodder. Each time he walks out, the muddy Russian reality he observes serves as a fresh provocation. His real Russia, the Russia of the mind, is growing all the time. And he’s coming well-prepared. For Petersburg is full of good friends and useful warnings, so he already thinks he knows what he can expect, and what he might fear, from the Great Imperial Mother who has welcomed him so grandly, and now awaits her enlightenment within . . .

Lui, for instance, young Narishkin. Night after night, over his well-stocked table in the dining room of the huge Narishkin Palace, he’s been a bubbling fount of useful wisdom. He gaily recalls past times: times when this stout and noble Empress was simply just another of those slim German archduchesses, married to just another of those snub-nosed imperial heirs. She was unhappy, bullied. She was clever, sprightly, restive, never quite sure what was expected of her from the last formidable empress, Elizabeth. She was supposed to produce an heir, yet her marriage was known to be white. Lui recalls how his own father, himself a court chamberlain (Narishkins always were), realized something had to be done. He would have obliged himself; in the end the chosen solution was another of the chamberlains, the charming Sergei Saltikov, always willing to risk Siberia for a sexual intrigue. So Papa Narishkin would smuggle the archduchess in heavy disguise across Senate Square into this self-same mansion, where she could enjoy emotional rest and recreation in private. Saltikov would then come from court disguised as a woman, risking strange assaults from the ever-sparky Imperial Guards. Thus noble families have their uses. Since those days Narishkins claim special intimacy with the most private ways of the bedchamber, the unbuttoned, the so frequently unbuttoned, closet manners of the court.

‘So how do I behave then?’ our man asks. Lui, a courtier to his fingertips, is warm in his advice. Be as simple and natural as I am (really? – sometimes, to be honest, the man seems just another holy fool). Remember: though the outer court is grand, formal and ceremonial, the inner one is the opposite. Pomp lapses, ceremonial fades as you pass deeper into the building, until in her private rooms, where the queen bee hides, it goes altogether. Here, in the centre of the hive, a courtier pleases not by bluster or flattery but pleasantness or simplicity, not least because these are not usual Russian qualities. Never flatter – or not obviously. Never bully – she knows her own mind, a good one. Never compete for attention, or it will compete with you. Never gossip meanly; everyone else will do that for nothing. Never conspire; there are too many conspiracies already. Never presume.

You’d do best, suggests Lui on further reflection, to treat her as a mental equal, address her as one civilized and high-minded thinker to another. Remember that when she was still a newly married pubescent she loved to call herself the Little Philosopher, and sat for hours in the gardens reading the works of Voltaire – while, in his own militarized quarters, her little husband, trained as a Prussian soldier, sat interrogating rats that had strayed into the palace and sentencing their leaders to death by hanging. Take her no presents; the woman has everything except things beyond your purchase. Admit, if you like, you are an atheist (she has read your work, must know it already), but remember she’s chosen to be matriarch of the Orthodox Church, and considers God Herself chose to anoint her to the throne. Laugh with her, amuse her, delight her, tell her stories: just do what you always do. But whatever you do, he warns, don’t let her make you court adjutant. That means you could be in line for the post of Night Emperor. The next thing you’ll find yourself having a venereal inspection with Dr Rogerson, who will provide the stiffening aphrodisiacs, before your talents are tested in the boudoirs of the two éprouveuses, Countess Bruce and the Princess Protassov. Then you would be delegated in the Night Emperor apartments, just along the passage from the suite of her serene majesty, and thereafter enjoy a mixture of energetic night exercise and futile daily boredom which has already finished off several younger men.

‘Dear friend, thank you, thank you,’ says Our Sage. But if Lui, with his friendly chatter, has proved useful in his warnings, dear old Melchior Grimm has been truly wise, as usual. These days, his successful matchmaking finished, his diplomatic reputation vastly increased, the robust satyr has changed a good deal: he’s grown rounder, fatter, more full of himself. And he’s in the most wonderful of wonderful spirits, as only a dwarfish clever German from Ratisbon who has developed all the arts of French wit and manners could possibly be. The fellow is no longer hungry, he’s content; been there, done that. He’s no longer a philosopher, he’s a universal presence; no longer out but in. What better, he says, than that the two of them have come to court together? For now the unpleasant pug-nosed boy with Saltikov’s ears and all those bitter memories of 1762 have been maritally disposed of, now there’s a good bed-match of Russia and Prussia, the Great Imperial Mother is free at last to do what she wants. And what she’s longing for is pleasure, wit, humour, thought, art, amusement, fashion, anything European; anything better than the daily round of loud boyars, boasting generals, pleading gentlefolk, prancing hussars, conspiring chamberlains, flattering ambassadors, adulterous maids-in-waiting, hirsute priests, fearsome black monks and ambitious nobles from remote provinces who’ve bent her ears these last ten years.

‘She dreams of what she always wanted,’ says Grimm. ‘A clever French philosopher who will refine her mind and enhance her reputation in the drab afternoons. Then a witty German courtier who can amuse her to distraction in the calm of the evenings.’

‘What? Oh you mean you, Melchior?’

‘Of course me,’ says Grimm. ‘You bore her with your wisdom and science after lunch. Then I’ll cheer her up over dinner.’

‘How will you do that?’

‘I sit by her side. I listen to her little rages. I encourage all her spite. Her little whipping boy, that’s what she calls me.’

‘Don’t let it go too far. Whips can hurt.’

‘She loves me,’ says Melchior. ‘You know I dine with her every single night at eight? She likes to have little suppers
en cabinet
. Wonderfully amusing. I wish you could be there.’

‘Why can’t I? Voltaire dined with Frederick every night.’

‘It’s far too intimate. A chosen band, never more than ten of us. Quite informal. We select our places at random, pop our names into someone’s hat. There are no servants. We have an arrangement of pulleys and ropes, we pull up the dishes from the kitchen with our own fair and noble hands.’

‘I prefer servants.’

‘Not when they report everything to the head of the Secret Office,’ says Melchior.

‘The Secret Office?’ asks our man, staring at him in dismay.

‘Of course. It’s the same in all imperial courts. Our Empress learned all her lessons from Paris, you know. The Russian spying service is modelled on Sartine’s. Everything gets reported, every spoken word, every writing, every sexual probe, down to the doings of the monarch herself. Luckily the chief of the secret policemen is getting a deaf old man. But all the rest can hear everything, of course. And do.’

‘All servants are unreliable, you mean?’

‘Naturally. Everyone is a spy in someone or other’s employ. By definition. A court’s a conspiracy, why else would you attend it? One minute you’re basking in royal favour, the next you’re drowning in an underground dungeon of the Peter and Paul.’

‘But not you, I hope, old friend.’

‘Not me, no. I’m in very good favour. I did get that unspeakable son of hers off her hands. So that’s it, you see.’

Grimm sits back: squat, powerful, self-satisfied. He’s a wonderful fellow, our man recalls. For half a lifetime they’ve done marvellous things together. But can it be court life has gone to his head, and he’s getting too big and paranoid for those shiny Prussian boots?

‘You’re quite sure she really does want a philosopher?’ he asks anxiously.

‘No one more so. She dreams of being a great despot with a huge army, a splendid mind and a glorious soul.’

‘Like Frederick of Prussia.’

‘Except she’s much sweeter, and you don’t have to sit through endless cantatas. But I can assure you she’s nothing like the barbarous monarch they talk of in Paris. That’s Parisian envy and spite.’

‘I see she’s charmed you completely, Melchior.’

‘Not a bit. I flatter myself it’s the reverse. I believe she loves me. You and Voltaire were quite right when you chose to call her the Minerva of the North.’

‘Minerva is the owl of history that flies by night. You might be wise to fly by night too.’

‘It’s not my graceful body that concerns her, it’s my lively mind,’ says Grimm, tidying his splendid cuticles.

‘Your subtle German wit and so on?’

‘My wide political experience. My close relationship with everyone who matters in this world. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you—’ Grimm stops, looks round.

‘Since we met, all those years ago, haven’t we always told each other everything?’ asks Our Sage.

‘Very well then,’ says Grimm, trimming away at his tips, ‘she’s offered me a great position. Chancellor of the Court. Head of the river. Top row in the Table of Ranks.’

‘You accepted, of course?’

‘I refused, of course. Who’d elect to be a barbarous Russian when there’s the rest of European civilization to choose from?’

‘You just gave me the impression that being Russian was highly fashionable these days.’

‘I have quite enough to do already. Compiling our much-loved court newsletter. Introducing everyone here to everyone there. Looking after little Mozart. Visiting all my good crowned friends. In any case, I’m completely dependent on the wit and wisdom of Paris.’

‘It is where all the best gossip starts.’

‘The point is, I’m useful where I’m useful.’

‘True,’ says our man, ‘half the thrones of Europe would be vacant without you. Dynasties would fade. Little German princesses would die unmarried and untouched. Cradles would lie empty. Wars would start. The map of Europe would fold up, just like a broken tent.’

‘Exactly,’ says Grimm, nodding, ‘and the Imperial Mother understands all that. That’s why she’s done for me exactly what she did for you.’

‘Bought your library?’ asks our man, suddenly feeling a real twinge of fraternal jealousy, which only the quickest and most generous stab of reason manages to settle. ‘You only have three books.’

‘Given me a pension for the rest of my life,’ says Grimm. ‘Made me her permanent adviser, her lifetime correspondent and her roving ambassador.’

‘She’s making you me? She’s not asked you to buy paintings for her?’

‘My dear fellow, I can be just as useful as you are. I’m just as well informed. In fact better. I know what’s hanging in every throne room in Europe.’

‘Well, you do enter so many. But isn’t it hard to see the pictures when you’re always down on your knees?’

‘I don’t get down on my knees,’ says Grimm sharply. ‘She’s also asked me to buy her cosmetics.’

‘And who better? You do wear so many yourself.’

‘And advise her on the education of her grandchildren.’

‘I thought there were none.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Oh, you’re going to have to attend to that too?’

‘Very probably, if Paul is like his father. If he can’t manage, there are plenty of shaftsmen waiting in the wings. Why do you think the court is full of handsome guardsmen?’

‘The place sounds like a stud farm.’

‘Just what it is. Anyway, my dear friend, there’s no need to be jealous of me. She cares for us equally. She’s proposed us both for the new Academy of Sciences. Attached us both to her Smolny School for Noble Girls.’

Our man sighs. ‘But is she ready for a course in the spirit of human reason and reform? A modernized vision of the monarch and the state?’

‘No monarch more so,’ says Grimm sweetly. ‘Louis loves his bacchanals, Frederick loves his Bach, George of England loves his roses, her Serenity truly loves her thoughts. Nothing pleases her more than to spend half an hour in meditation. Nothing makes her happier than to hear the court reader recite twenty pages of Voltaire. Rousseau even.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘She loves everything of his except
The Social Contract
.’

‘I know the feeling.’

‘She shares it,’ says Grimm. ‘She’s just banned it from Russia.’

‘Ah, I see. Your wonderfully enlightened lady is a censor too.’

‘Not at all. She says she’ll admit Rousseau to Russia as soon as the time’s right.’

‘With Rousseau the time is never right.’

‘I tell you, she loves all the works of reason. She simply asks they don’t defy God, offend manners, or threaten her authority.’