To the Hermitage (46 page)

‘You know me perfectly well,’ the composer’s fat-faced, dolled-up, lank-haired relative has said to him, sitting down. ‘I’m a fool, an idiot, a glutton, a madman and perhaps a bit of a thief. A real old cuss, as the Burgundians say. But why should you expect me to be humble, starve or beg, my dear sir, when the world’s filled with rich fools and spendthrifts at whose expense I can live? All right, I’m a parasite. But I do have one virtue: I do by the light of reason what the stupid rogue only does by instinct. And if only I could be rich, famous, powerful, be fawned on, stroked and tended and flattered by all the pretty women, I’d be just as clever, charming and pleasant as you. No, I wouldn’t, I’d be better. Much more elegant, far more clever. I’d develop the most advanced of ideas, the most sophisticated of vices, the most refined of corruptions. I’d be a true philosopher, I’d take advantage of everyone and everything. Wouldn’t it be delightful?’

What should he tell them all: Helvétius, the lank-haired nephew, the police spies, the fawning courtiers who hang around only to please? That reason says that human beings, though animals first of all, do have their own special powers and splendid passions: sentiments of taste, feelings of charity, instincts of altruism, a warm admiration for virtue, the capacity to feel the most sublime and profound forms of love. And what’s more they have reason itself: wise, calming, illuminating, civilizing reason. Is all that no more than nature, brute cunning, survival, self-interest, struggle, the selfish genes? No, it’s only human to be a little human for once. Persons can do good, and what’s more they can love good. It’s not just the cunning of reason. The great Leibniz didn’t think the way the great Leibniz thought simply in order to win food and shelter and mate with the prettiest of women. And surely, surely, something far more than a desire for fame, reputation, rank or profit brought his own elderly self, groaning yet bright and energetic, a thousand miles through the wasted tracts of Europe to share his highest thoughts and warmest feelings with a great empress, the shining Minerva of the North? Or is he wrong, and is reason his delusion, the folly he travels across the world to promote?

Which somehow takes him back to the pages of that other tale he’s been writing: the story he worked on in the Hague, the story of the clever servant, barber, postilion, valet, and his dull master, which started when he first read the Shandyisms of Doctor Sterne. Sterne’s book is there in his baggage, its covers stained and tattered from the many rains and soakings that penetrated the fabric of Narishkin’s grand carriage. He picks up the manuscript again; nothing is quite right.

‘Reader, excuse me,’ he writes apologetically, ‘I see I’ve totally failed to describe the exact positions of the three characters we happen to have standing here: Jacques, his master, the mistress of the inn. This means you’ll be perfectly well able to hear them speak, but you won’t be able to picture them. Just give me a moment, and I’ll put that right.’ He puts it right . . .

And so he finds himself staring at the last lap of the book, and the awful business of ending. He’s thought of several already, put in a number, including one that’s been lifted right out of Sterne. It still doesn’t seem right. Stories don’t close in life, or not till death; so a conclusion is an evasion. How should the story conclude? He looks at the river, the winter; he picks up his pen and tries all over again. There is Jacques, putting his master on his horse so he can tip him off again; there is the past, there is the future. There are many more stories to tell, but who should tell them?

‘Come on now, master, admit it,’ he writes:

‘They do not move,’ he adds. Then he finishes writing, folds the paper, and slips it inside Sterne’s battered old book. It’s one way of doing it, for the story that just won’t end.

So, then, a little something – an alternative ending, a second or fourth choice – to tease the spirit of fiction and confuse Posterity. And, speaking of Posterity, it’s time to go and visit Falconet again. For, despite that never-to-be-forgotten moment of rejection, when the city offered him its first and hardest hour, he has never given up on the sculptor. In fact, far too warm to stay unforgiving for ever, far too curious to neglect the drama of the great atelier, he’s lately taken to seeing a good deal of his old and ill-tempered friend. And, now the Empress has left the city, and he no longer needs to spend the morning writing a paper on the improved Russian police force or the Siberian economy, he’s begun wandering often to the atelier on the Millionaya, where furnaces grow red at the heart of the dusky city, and seeing how the Horseman proceeds.

It’s wonderfully warm here, in fact an inferno, as casting ovens flare, furnaces bubble, and foundries hiss. Molten metal bubbles, hot torches sear. In the middle of the huge atelier the Peter maquette sits waiting, brooding, still faceless, under its massive canvas. Our man sits, or at least attempts to, in a quiet corner. A scarf knotted cavalierly around his neck (for a sculptor must always look like a sculptor, as a general must look like a general), Étienne-Maurice sits on a stool to one side of him, looking him over. And on a stool to the other sits Marie-Anne Collot, staring hard at the Thinker’s other profile.

‘Two statues, it’s amazing,’ he says.

‘Be quiet,’ says E-M.

‘This way a little,’ says M-A.

From time to time a young man wanders in. It’s the Falconet boy, back from London, the cause of all the original troubles. Now, from his exaggerated gallantries, his liquidic stares, his hesitant touchings, his fumbling hands drifting uselessly here and there, it’s quite clear the upstairs bed has not been wasted. M-A and Falconet
fils
have clearly constructed an intimacy. Casting a quite fresh
lumière
on the sculptor’s first clumsy rudenesses, and that bitter territorial struggle for the guest-room bed.

Still, never mind. Now it’s slap-slap-slap on this side of him, chip-chip-chip on that. Étienne-M plasters away on the one hand, Marie-A carves away on the other. Tossing clay and modelling stone, they’re each one bringing to life a little eternal clone of the Thinker. A little Moi takes shape on the turning table, a small Lui is coming into being on the easel.

‘I suppose it would be far too much to ask our Great Thinker to sit quite still just for a moment?’ asks Étienne-M.

‘And please do try to turn your head a little more this way,’ says Marie-A. ‘And at least you could put down the book.’

‘I never put down the book,’ he says. ‘Besides, I’m trying to learn Russian.’

‘Quite impossible, at your age,’ says Étienne-M. ‘And surely to learn grammar you don’t need to bob your head up and down like that.’

‘You don’t know Russian.’

‘You’re quite wrong, I know it only too well.’

‘Do you mind if I get up and walk up and down for a bit? I want to look at the furnace.’

‘Of course we mind.’

‘It annoys you?’

‘Naturally it annoys me.’

‘I thought perhaps it might put a little bit more life in it. A statue isn’t the model of a corpse.’

‘I put the life in it, not you,’ says Falconet. ‘In any case most of my best sitters have been dead.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ our man says wearily. ‘You wear them out. And I do happen to be one of the best sitters in the world.’

‘Oh, is that what Houdon says? And Pigalle?’

‘Houdon has done me, more than once. I’m still waiting for Pigalle, or rather he’s still waiting for me. After all, isn’t the sculptor made by the quality of his sitter?’

‘Not in this case,’ says Falconet.

‘What does Levitski say?’ asks Marie-A.

A good question, for our man is also having his portrait done, for court or archival purposes, by a designated painter on the Empress’s orders. The young man is Dmitry Levitski, a Russian, one of some new breed in the making; it’s his task to make sure our man will survive for good, somewhere on the long walls of the Hermitage (and in time our man will acknowledge he has done a perfect job).

‘Levitski says I’m the most fluid, the most mobile, the most interesting sitter he’s ever had the pleasure to work on in his life.’

‘You’re not even a sitter, you’re a stander,’ says Étienne-M. ‘You’re a getter-upper and a walk-arounder. It’s all very well for Levitski. He uses paint, not stone or plaster.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘With paint he can wipe you down and rub you out.’

‘And why would you want to wipe me down and rub me out?’

‘Can’t you imagine?’

‘I do hope you’re making me look like Peter. Can’t we find me a horse?’

‘I have no intention of making you look like people. Surely you’d like to look like you?’

‘That’s quite impossible.’

‘Oh yes, why?’

‘Because the subject I call “I” in no way resembles the object you keep on calling “you”. You call me an angry man, I call me a charmer. You think I’m a chatterbox, I think I’m a sage.’

Falconet stops and wipes his hands on a rag. ‘In that case, maybe you’d better chisel your own damned bust.’

‘I should do a far better job of it than you, old friend. At least I think I know who I am.’

‘Go on, then, tell me. Who are you?’

‘A witty wise man. Certainly not that effeminate old flirt you’re turning me into over there. What will my grandchildren say when they see that? I’m sending them a quick message through the atmosphere to Posterity right now: don’t believe it, it isn’t me.’

‘Well, it will be,’ says the sculptor firmly, ‘just as what’s under canvas over there will be Peter, and what he sits on will be the universal horse. It’s not what you look like that counts, it’s what I make of it. And I’m sorry, but it’s my bust your grandchildren are going to believe in, not you. It’s not that stuff you inspect in your mirror every morning you’re going to have remembered. It’s what the sculptor, the painter, the genius has made of you that will count in the ages to come.’