To the Hermitage (57 page)

Still waiting news from his northern patron, he attempts a number of topical inventions of his own. He devises a household printing machine that allows a man a simple means to make his own books; if pressed, he thinks he’ll call it a type-writer. He creates another machine for the encoding and decoding of messages, modelled on the lively brain of d’Alembert, and designed to help politicians transmit their secrets. In his spare time he tries to square the circle. A fresh spring comes, and still nothing arrives from Russia. By now it’s not too hard to grasp the point. There will never be a Russian encyclopedia. No one will ever build his glorious Russian university. His daily papers for Catherine must be mouldering away somewhere in the back rooms of the Hermitage; as for the sixty-six notebooks he created them from, he shoves those away under lock and key. Now he goes round the galleries and starts to sell off his Russian treasures and trophies, which would have served for his new encyclopedia: the cabinets of Siberian minerals, the glorious Orthodox bible in Cyrillic presented to him over the Christmas ceremonials by the glittering and dome-hatted archimandrite.

Time to think again about what it means to be a modern Seneca. Perhaps the whole great question of the good society, of the thinker’s proper service to morals and society, needs a totally different solution. But what? He goes to see his old friend, the fat Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal. Big, burly, a loud laughing noise at all the finest dinner tables, he too has created one of the greatest books of the age:
The History of the Two Indies
, the most wonderful and vexing book of the day. Some have called it the other
Encyclopedia
; and, banned in France for its liberalism, it’s published in Holland and Geneva, and read almost everywhere. Our man has contributed to it before in its earlier days. What is it? Well, a sort of a history, a kind of philosophy, a handy compendium of the promises of international commerce and industry. It’s a work of reform, a work of anthropology, a work of true human feeling. But in truth it’s really a grand lamentation: a dark cry over the lost of the two great French empires, one by the Himalayas, the other reaching in a great arc from the icecaps of the Arctic to the tropical richness of the Bay of Mexico, the Indian lands so sweetly called Louisiana – two French imperial lands which, thanks to an accident of history and the incompetence of a now-dead monarch, have been lost by the French to the British just a little more than a decade before.

Lovely Louisiana, from the icecaps and codbanks of the Arctic to the tropic plantations of the Mexique Bay, from the wonderful downpour of Niagara to the turtled lands of the Floridians: what Frenchmen could resist it? The British have been there and now they have won it; but it’s the French who have explored and toured it, asked its great questions, mapped it, found the way down the four great rivers – Mississippi, Ohio, Saint Lawrence, and Oregon – which have carried the pelts, floated the Indian canoes, opened the bluffs and the prairies, and spoken of the soul of nature and natural man himself. While the British sat on the coastlines and saw trade, the French – the great explorers and missionaries like Champlain and Hennepin – found wonders, mapped landscapes, named the continent in French. America is a French fiction into which the British have blundered, and now they are blundering still. Clearly Raynal’s book calls for yet another revision. Our man is happy to offer his services. The Abbé sets him on.

Soon he’s writing frenziedly, ‘doing a Raynal’, as he tells his friends, working on it night and day. He lets Raynal record the economic data, the prospects of trade, the dry statistics, the historical evidence, the facts of geography and the dreary details of noontime temperature – while he adds the great decorations and deconstructions of philosophy, speculations on the spirit of society, the sins of despotism, the dangers of arrogant monarchy, the wrongs of slavery, the rhythmic vision of the rise and fall of empire that only he (and Edmund Gibbon) could give. Thoughts that served well in Petersburg strangely fit the Americas too.

‘God hates tyrants,’ he writes, ‘and has printed on men’s hearts a love of freedom. Under the supreme will of despotism there is only terror, servility, flattery, stupidity and superstition. That intolerable situation ends either with the assassination of the tyrant, or the dissolution of the empire.’ Little wonder his writings are once more fated to be burned in Paris by the public hangman.

‘Democracy arises on this corpse,’ he adds, ‘and the annals are filled with heroic deeds. Laws reign, genius flowers, sciences flourish, the useful trades are no longer held in poor esteem. So, Kings and Ministers, love the people, and you will be happy.’

Then, remembering a great empress and the difficult problems of writing on human skin, he adds a coda: ‘Unfortunately this state of happiness is only momentary. Everywhere revolutions succeed one another, at a speed one can hardly follow. But the laws of nature tell us that all empires are born and then die.’

And our man isn’t the only one to think these matters important. ‘The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are two of the greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind,’ writes, at just this time, a certain dry Scots professor, Adam Smith, in a grand account of
The Wealth of Nations
. ‘Two new worlds have been opened to industry, each of them greater and more extensive than the old one.’ Smith may think he is writing of a British empire possessed, a project that can be realized. But he seems already to have sensed the illusion: ‘The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold-mine, but the project of a gold-mine.’

But Smith writes as a Briton, from the land not of wit but common sense. For a Frenchman things are different; all there is to see is a lost world, a fading paradise, a land of dying wonders, of tumbling ruins, mournful landscapes, vacant spaces, fallen dreams. Yet soon that will be true for the British too. For, in the lovely lost lands of Louisiana they too have chosen to display power and monarchy in a grand act of political folly. Even while the dreams of their colonists on the Eastern seaboard begin to spread ever westward, they are stirring them to fury, arms, and rebellion. And in that hasn’t philosophy – true philosophy, French philosophy – played its crucial part? When, in the year Smith publishes his book, a congress of these British American colonials gathers to declare its Independence (‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’), the self-evident truths they choose to commit to paper (‘all men created equal . . . endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights . . . Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness . . .’) all seem curiously familiar to our man. It’s just as if he has written them himself; in fact he thinks he very probably has.

Well, the transatlantic insurrection is naturally more than enough to delight any Frenchman. Soon all of Paris is filling with heroic American dreams. An entire generation of young nobles, longing to give the British a pasting, exhausted to boredom by a whole dull decade of peace, still smarting to the quick from the old American losses, is ready to be up in arms. Seeking to be a national hero, the youthful Marquis de Lafayette is already fitting out a ship, the
Victoire
, and filling it up with troops and weapons to go filibuster for the great transatlantic cause of liberty and Anglophobia. Even our man’s own theatrical creation, the rogue-clockmaker Caron, now come to fame as Beaumarchais, is devoting the profits of his barber-drama to the cause, and trying to rouse the King, in whose ear he is known to whisper, to action: ‘It is Britain, sir, whom you must humiliate and weaken, if you do not wish her to humiliate and weaken you at every turn.’ Now he’s devised his own distinctive mystification. He’s invented a fake import-export firm to smuggle arms to the insurgents, and charted a vast freebooting fleet of forty ships, aided by money from France and Spain, but mostly at his own expense. The truth is it’s Figaro the barber-valet who will devise and finance the American Revolution. And his money will never come back.

One evening, with the Great Particularist riding at his side, our man goes out for dinner chez Beaumarchais. Clockmaker Caron now lives very grandly, entertaining like a gentlemen and keeping several mistresses on the side. Indeed the man is everywhere these days, one minute engaged in some elaborate sexual shenanigans in Seville, the next just back from London where he’s been engaged in high level spying and revolutionary conspiracy. But tonight he’s entertaining a rather special and unexpected guest: a guest who has come over in considerable secrecy from the Americas. He’s a truly noble savage, a man who has all the skills and wisdoms of the greatest Parisian scientists, yet combined with all the innocent sagacity and the instinctive political virtue of one of nature’s own self-constructed philosophers. Ages have not withered him, nor history shaped his infinite variety. Now he’s crossed the Atlantic on a thirty-day voyage much-menaced by the British – which has not deterred him from making a whole new set of scientific discoveries on the matter of flying fishes and the flow of the Gulf Stream.

He’s been landed exhausted at Nantes, but promptly whisked in secret to Paris. Now he resides in grandeur at a safe house presented to him in Passy, where his covert presence has soon become a matter of general knowledge. For good homely things can’t be kept secret for long, and genius merits its homage. In fact he’s already in the process of becoming perhaps the most famous man in France. They’re making teapots with his shaggy, folksy, sexy head on. He’s already much better known than Marie-Antoinette, and a good deal more popular. Half the most elegant and beautiful ladies of Paris have been tempted by his wit, his wisdom, his lumbering gallantries and his naked indiscretion. Madame Brillon is known to be besotted with him. Madame Helvétius is publicly considering his recent generous proposal of marriage. And even for the husbands, who have all of course read Rousseau, he is none other than Poor Richard: one of nature’s heroes.

Such great things he’s done, and all that without even leaving the American swamps and forests (give or take a visit or two to the Royal Society in London). He looks like a trapper or a logger, but he’s revolutionized the radical art of printing, and transfigured the household stove. With a Bostonian’s self-reliance coupled with a Philadelphia Quaker’s simplicity he’s reached his hands into the heights of the sky and plucked down lightning. In short, he’s the Electrical Ambassador, wired to the universe. Now he arrives, wearing that famous, original Canadian beaver pelt on the top of his head (oddly enough, Rousseau used to wear one exactly like it). His suit is plain, his hair shaggy and undressed. His expressions benign, he beams at the world over a pair of bifocal spectacles he’s believed to have invented and ground himself.

‘
Mon cher
Monsieur Frankling!’ our man cries out, embracing the grainy, tweedy, eye-glassed figure warmly.

‘And who have we here now? Not the great Doctor Dee Diderot?’

‘Yes, this is Diderot, or whatever’s left of him. A wearing-out sort of fellow, a little halt and lame now.’

‘You’re but a child, sir, I’m older. Listen, that was one of the best books I ever read, your encyclopedia.’

‘You actually read the
Encyclopedia
?’

‘Sure I did, all of it. You know the entry I remember best? The one on ‘Encyclopedia’. Who wrote that?’

‘That’s mine, I wrote that.’

‘I recall you made some observations on the enormity of our revolution in modern thought. Imagine, you said, the dictionaries of just one hundred years ago. And you added: “You won’t find under ‘aberration’ any notion of what astronomers now mean by the term. As for electricity, you added, you will find only false notions and ancient prejudices.’

‘Of course you were the great transformer I had in mind.’

‘Well, you see, sir, I always remembered the lesson I put into the mouth of Poor Richard. “If you don’t want to be forgotten, / As soon as you are dead and rotten, / Either write things worth the reading, / Or do things worth the writing.” I hope I’ve done both.’

‘You have, sir, and now you are giving us the hope of freedom.’

‘True. What we may shortly have – if the Great Creator allows it, your King supports it, and dear Beaumarchais here will pay for it – is a brand-new nation.’

‘A nation, I’ll pay, of course I’ll pay,’ says Caron, otherwise Beaumarchais. ‘But that’s simply the beginning, my dear man. After freedom we’re going to need a society, I mean an entire social system, a right and equal way of doing things. Now there’s the problem for us philosophers. Tell me this, have you ever been in America, Louisiana, Monsieur Diderot?’

‘Only in my mind. And my writings.
Les Deux Indes.
’

‘I know. I send Raynal his statistics. That’s why it’s so boring.’

‘Hardly boring. I believe we have a better America on paper than you yet do in life.’

‘But that’s what I mean, sir. You must go there. I really wish I could put you on a ship there right now.’

‘My legs, sir.’

‘You’d see wonders. A glorious land or continent that represents nature in its perfection, its mystery, let me say its grossness. A world that still has to cross the bridge from nature to society.’

‘Monsieur Diderot too has seen wonders,’ says Caron.

‘Yes, sir, I think you went to Russia?’

‘I did. Another society at its own beginnings.’

‘No, sir, Russia isn’t new, it’s just pretending. You went for the right reason to the wrong place. North America is the first time civilized human beings have ever been in a position to devise an entirely new society without suffering the weight of an old history.’

‘Then you do need philosophers. After Eden there has to come civilization.’

‘And after civilization?’

‘Decay and ruin, such is the course of empire.’