To the Hermitage (53 page)

T
HE SLOW JOURNEY HOMEWARD
is going to prove just as terrible as he’s already started to fear. In fact well before it’s over it will turn out to be one of the worst adventures of his life. Illness – that eternal Neva colic – and the locked-in winter weather have kept delaying his departure. Every day Grimm has called, seeking to change his mind and travel with him to the King’s court at Potsdam, where all is forgiveness, and the banquet has already been laid. Every day he’s refused. By the time he leaves the city it’s early March. A disappointed Grimm, a sweet Marie-Anne Collot, a dear foolish Narishkin – his perfect Lui, the eternally generous host whose debts, in a last act of thank you, he has managed to get the Empress to say she will repay (and maybe she will) – are all there in Saint Isaac’s Square to wave him on his way. Only Étienne-Maurice Falconet is missing: the man he once had the kindness to invent remains, for some unknown reason, grudging to the end. And then, to his great surprise, Monsieur Distroff de Durand, shortly to be leaving Russia himself, turns up outside the Narishkin Palace to wish his journey well.

‘Just a little something to fill up your luggage,’ he’s said with a friendly wink, handing a package into the carriage. ‘It might just prove useful to you when you get back to Paris.’

‘Tell me then, what?’

‘It’s a map of some new Russian fortresses they’re building against us along the Black Sea,’ says Distroff. ‘Simply pass it to the Foreign Ministry when you get there. And maybe they won’t hang you after all.’

It’s four o’clock on a cold afternoon when, at last, he rides out of the city where all the dreams of his lifetime have been so very fiercely tested. Behind him he can see its high onion domes and golden flèches, disappearing into a gelid green fog beyond the still deep blanket of snow. Winter has certainly not departed yet, but the earth is warming now, and the snowcap is shrinking. The ice in the Baltic has begun to crack open, the rivers of Livonia and Courland are all running fast and deep. He’s riding high in that gleaming and brand-new English carriage which the Empress has newly purchased and, in all generosity, then put at his service. It’s delicately made, plushy, varnished, huge-windowed, vast enough to carry a comfortable bed inside. Truth to tell, it would probably be far happier rolling genteelly down London’s Piccadilly. For these northern routes are hard still, ice-packed, deep-rutted. And the grand shining English coach – which everyone confusingly calls a Berliner – is soon making very heavy weather of the very heavy weather.

So in his own way is he. On one finger he wears the splendid agate ring into which is carved, with her own knife, the Empress’s portrait. He knows very well he’s not really left her service, and he probably never will now: all he’s doing is carrying off his duties somewhere else. As, in the great warm bearskin coat she has given him as another parting gift, he rides away from his life’s most remarkable experience, he knows something has happened. Everything has altered, and he’s not a bit the man he was when he came. The difficult journey, the hard and imprisoning winter, the jealous court, the amazing dreams, the Neva fevers, and the unreal and remarkable pleasures that have been so strangely granted to him by the most formidable and powerful woman in the world, the Cleopatra of the age: every one of these things has deeply changed him, aged him, somehow brought him several steps closer to the dark silence in the eternal nowhere and nothing that lies just beyond life’s short burst of light. He thinks of the great château where, in writing, he’s had Jacques and his master spend a night. He recalls the fictional sign he’s set over its portal: ‘I belong to nobody, and yet I belong to everyone. You were here before you entered, and you will still be here even after you’ve left.’ But is any person ever still here after they’ve left?

It isn’t that any of his ideas have changed; not really, not exactly. But they’ve grown more contradictory, volatile, unreliable, inconsistent, passionate: quite unpredictable, even to him. And still more has happened to his vital emotions, which seem to have become strangely frosted in this hard arctic weather. Wife, darling dancing daughter, Sophie Volland; they all feel infinitely distant, like figures seen on the other side of glass, waving ghosts who can never be fully regained. The huge English coach, dragged in the Russian fashion by three shaggy post-horses, shakes, rattles, bounces, slips. The bedded carriage seems to have become his house for ever; he even refuses to stop and eat. The colic is with him again, made more stabbing than ever by the rough passage, the bad water, the even worse hotels and inns that appear on the way.

Happily the chancery companion the Empress has provided, Athanasius Bala, is a pleasant and honest young fellow. In fact he’s a bright likely lad who’s been given a shaggy old patriarch to look after, and tries to do his best. He’s been solicitous beyond belief, encouraging our man to lie down on his journey (and the carriage bed is rather wonderful), to read and snack and talk and drink. Now, as the trip grows more tiring, Bala spends much time sitting anxiously and thoughtfully beside him, occasionally shifting the fur coat that lies across him, wiping his brow, or handing him his volume of Horace. Of course it’s completely unnatural for our man to stay silent for any length of time; and of course he doesn’t. In the feverish spaces of his mind, the most urgent and torrential ideas are seeking to flow – as fierce and fast as the spring torrents clearing away the ice and rushing down the rivers they kept crossing as they slip and splash their way down the Livonian coast.

‘The dome of Saint Peter’s in Rome . . .’ he begins.

‘Domo?’ asks Bala. ‘I don’t know domo. Duomo?’

‘Like. But that means cathedral. So what rises up high above a cathedral?’

‘Angels? Spirits?’

‘No, the drum.’

‘Drum, pipe and drum?’

‘The dome.’

‘I don’t know dome or drum, I come from Greekland.’

‘Greek? You’re a compatriot of Plato?’

‘Domo? Plato?’

‘Where from in Greece?’

‘Him, Plato?’

‘No, you.’

‘Athena, you know Athena?’

‘Yes, I know it very well.’

‘You have been there?’

‘No, I haven’t been anywhere. Except Sankt Peterburg. Do you know where we’re going? The Hague?’

‘I don’t know Hague.’

‘It’s a place in Holland. You’re supposed to be taking me there.’

‘Holland?’

‘A free republic, like the cities of ancient Greece.’

‘We go in Greece?’

‘No, we don’t go in Greece. We’re going the other way.’

‘In Germany?’

‘No no, don’t go to Germany.’

‘We have to go to Germany.’

‘Then don’t go to Berlin. Anywhere but Berlin.’

‘Where, please?’

‘Go to the free city of Hamburg.’

‘Where is Hamburg?’

‘Never mind. What are you interested in?’

‘Everything. Politic. Historia. Government. Law. Poesy. Love. Mostly love.’

‘All right, Bala. Just sit there, and read your book.’

‘I don’t read.’

Oh, young Bala is charming, helpful, open, delightful. But where, oh where, is Lui?

On the third day he appears in the carriage. ‘You know me perfectly well,’ he says, bouncing up and down on the seat opposite. ‘A real old cuss, as the Burgundians say. How did you like your empress?’

‘A most formidable woman. Impulsive and impassioned, yet extremely open to reason.’

‘Women like that exist to claim that one day they will be quite as important as men. I had heard she has the most amazing powers. I hope you tried them.’

‘Perhaps I did. But why would I tell you?’

‘I tell you everything, don’t I? Did you make your peace with Falconet?’

‘No, I didn’t. I shall never speak to him again. I invented Falconet.’

‘That must have annoyed him.’

‘I praised his work to the skies, I sent him to Catherine. All his conceptions were mine.’

‘Except he doesn’t think so.’

‘He should.’

‘Sons must always struggle with fathers.’

‘And nephews with uncles?’

‘Precisely. Didn’t you hate your father?’

‘No. Well, a little. When I was young and stupid. And he was old and stupid.’

‘Why?’

‘He resented my marriage.’

‘There you are then. One generation never understands another.’

‘No, he was right. In the end so did I.’

‘Didn’t you once try to commit him to prison?’

‘Only when he tried to commit me to a monastery.’

‘There you are. There are always some of the dead who plague the living. Can’t be helped. Goodbye, Mr Philosopher. Time for the opera.’

So onward they go, by Narva and Revel, through this province and that one, curving round the shores of the Baltic. Then they are at the border, at Riga, the place where long ago she offered to print a fresh version of the
Encyclopedia
, French, free and uncensored. He’s a step nearer Europe, the fever has diminished a little, though the weather has not improved. Indeed here the winter seems deeper, the wind seems to bite harder, and they nearly come to grief. Thick ice still covers the waters of the River Dwina, the border that marks the end of this imperial nation and the start of the next one. But when the weighty English carriage rides out on to the ice, the wheels break through, the horses struggle in the water, and flood and ice-flow rush into the cab where he lies. His volume of Horace goes floating away under the ice. Only a quick-thinking Bala proves his worth, and manages to save the day. He summons men with hooks to help them; then, standing in the freezing water up to his waist, he tugs, heaves, gets the whole endangered enterprise and a shaking and shivering philosopher back on to the hard shore.

Our man responds to the great misfortune in the best way he can. He writes a poem celebrating the rescue of philosophers, verses that he’s improvised, or so he claims, at the very moment of disaster (‘Muse of immortal glory / If for laurels you grow keener / Come quick, and tell the story / Of the crossing of the Dwina’), and sends it back to his dear empress. This mishap on the ice is only the beginning. For the grand English coach – which has manifestly not been made for the rough Baltic winter – is steadily failing as it drags on and on its way. On the bridge at Mittau it finally comes to grief: shaken to bits, it sags into a shapeless plywood pile, collapsing down on to its broken wheel-hubs for all eternity. Our man falls down in the escape, then nearly kills himself a second time by dropping in the river. Bala helps again. He’s survived once more, though this time there’s a very expensive coach to explain away. He writes a letter of apology back to Sankt Peterburg (‘It’s this adventure on the Mittau bridge that makes me appreciate the kind admiration of Monsieur Bala. He has promised to explain himself to Your Imperial Majesty the heroism I displayed at the unhappy moment of the strange rupture of the most beautiful and commodious coach you issued me with . . .’). By the time they’ve reached Hamburg – steering by Konigsberg, Danzig, Stettin to avoid the fearsome Junkers of Brandenburg-Prussia, and any possible claims on his duties from the Philosopher Tyrant – they’ve already smashed their third carriage.

Not till they get to Hamburg does he start to feel safe. Here big Protestant churches rise high on the skyline; fine Hanseatic ships and tarry merchant barges rock back and forth in the inland harbour, spars clicking and chains rattling in a glorious water-music. There’s the jollity of sea-captains, the proud sturdy spirit of a free and independent state. With churches like this, here’s a city of fine and high-sounding music. Its kappelmeister is Hamburg Bach: Karl Philip Emmanuel, the great organist (though probably yet another protégé of the flute-playing Prussian king). But where geniuses gather it is only polite for the one to announce his arrival to the other. ‘I am French, my name is Diderot,’ he says in the little note he sends off to the great organist. ‘I’ve arrived in a chaise from Sankt Peterburg, with no more than a dressing gown under my topcoat, and no decent change of clothing. I would love to acquire a sonata from you, but I’m really not fit to be received.’ The sonata, in the great musician’s own autograph, duly comes.

So at last, four carriages, 635
versts
, 31 days onward, he reaches his intended destination: the Hague. Now it’s the very start of April: spring. The charming fields, so amazingly flat that every little sand heap becomes a Dutch mountain, are already full of blooming daffodils and those egregious modern tulips. There at their residence on the windy Kneuterdijk, Dmitry Golitsyn and his German princess – who has already fattened and grown much more pious, as people seem to as a result of a Dutch winter – are hospitably ready and waiting. Much of his heavy luggage has come already, coached on down from Hamburg. Dear Bala is thanked, rewarded handsomely, and sent off on his return journey – though, since he appears to think he’s somewhere in Hungary, our man is left worrying a little about where he will finally end up. But he’s tired now. At his age it’s all been far too much. With Dmitry’s permission he retires to bed and sleeps for several days.

Then, after a day or three, he’s up again. He’s chosen to live here for a short while, rather than to return to Paris, because he’s quite sure it’s not all done yet; his mission as imperial philosopher is by no means over. Now the siren call of the Empress is with him again. Their arguments, their banterings, their tiffs, their makings-up, the shuttlecock and battledore of daily conversation: they’re all still vivid in everything he writes. He no longer yearns for entertainment. The learned Dutch professors now bore him, and even those stout and big-bosomed burgher women don’t seem to lure him any more. Another woman is on his mind: a lover, or the ghost of one. She’s reminding him he’s nowhere near finished his enquiring vital life; in fact he’s hardly started. He gets up early every morning. He writes, he writes, he writes . . .

Yes, the frenzy’s back, and he knows he can do it all again: begin, all for the benefit of Russia, a whole new and fresh encyclopedia. He’ll use the arctic wisdom culled from all his notebooks. It’ll be even bigger, better and wiser than the biggest and best book in the world. As already arranged with a helpful Chancellor Betskoi, it will all be paid for, printed, distributed in Sankt Peterburg. And of course it will have a fresh royal dedicatee: this time not some over-dressed waster of a French monarch who, soaked in pleasures and amusements, has managed to lose half his empire and spend all his treasury, but a true modern Minerva.