To the Hermitage (8 page)

Our man can only feel deeply grateful. Indeed he makes sure no one now or in the future will ever doubt the joy he feels in this amazing benefaction. ‘I prostrate myself at your feet,’ he writes in one of the world’s warmest thank-you notes. ‘I stretch out my arms to you. I long to speak to you, but my mind has shrunk to nothing! I am as emotional as a little child! My fingers of their own accord reach out for an old lyre, of which Philosophy once cut the strings! I unhook it from my wall! Bare-headed, bare-chested, I feel myself impelled to joyous song! To You!!’ True, there are little local difficulties, as occur with any great court bureaucracy. A year on, Denis the Philosopher is still struggling in deep poverty, and politely writing to complain that not a penny of the promised money has been paid. But, grand as usual, the Tzarina has made perfect amends. She not only clears the blockage, fires the chancellor, remits the money. She actually pays our man the next fifty years of his salary in advance (50,000 livres), making his presumed lifespan a healthy one hundred and four.

Grateful as ever, he’s written a warm ode in her eternal praise. He’s offered his respectful services in all directions, done everything he can to repay the debt. So, even while up on the Neva the world’s strangest water-city grows and grows, the architects, engineers, artisans, actors, economists and even the generals of Paris keep on turning up daily at his door. It’s his task to vet them, sift them, crate them, send them north. When Catherine suddenly acquires the idea of a most enormous statue of homage to be raised to her predecessor Peter, he finds from his encyclopedic list of contributors a co-operative sculptor, Etienne-Maurice Falconet: perhaps not the best, or the most level-tempered, certainly the cheapest to hand. When books and manuscripts circulate in Paris suggesting the Tzarina has been guilty of shameless crimes, the liberal philosopher takes it upon himself to try and suppress them. ‘It’s really bizarre the variety of roles I play in this world,’ he reflects.

And, in thrall to the world’s greatest shopper, he shops. How he’s shopped! With or without his two greatest friends, big Golitsyn, little Grimm, he’s scoured all the grand arcades of Paris, tripped in and out of all the secret doorways of Saint-Victoire. Print-shops, galleries, garrets, ateliers, workshops, salons, auction-rooms: he has scouted them every day, shop-shop-shopping for the great Tzarina. He buys vast shelffuls of books; he gathers up prints and bibelots and necklaces and knick-knacks, he gobbles whole collections of
beaux-arts
. Feeling a little flush now, he even treats himself a little: to a beautiful new dressing gown, which sadly fails to suit him, for he is not himself at all a grand man. Meantime all over Paris the art prices start to soar. Auctions become battlefields. Prints sell like tapestries. The most seasoned collectors withdraw wounded from the fray. When Gaignat – a former secretary to Louis XV – dies, our Philosopher tips off the Tzarina the man has collected a magnificent library without knowing how to read, created a great art collection without being able to see anything in it more than a blind beggar. Buy, she says. He buys. When the great art collection of Louis-Antoine Crozat is offered in the market, our Philosopher-Fixer is first one at the door. He drives the hardest of bargains, devising another of his stratagems, another great ‘mystification’, running round Paris to divide the various heirs from one another with cunning mischievous rumour and gossip.

Soon Leonardos and Van Dycks, Raphaels, Rembrandts (
The Danae
), Veroneses, Durers, Poussins, Titians, five Rubens sketches – seventeen crates in all – are making their way north to Petersburg’s Imperial Palace. Now
le tout Paris
is furiously complaining: patrons, politicians, tax-farmers. Thanks to this unfair northern competition, the art market has gone mad. They will say the same of greedy Americans a hundred years later, greedy Japanese a hundred years after that. They’ll be saying the same in England not much later, when the glorious contents of Sir Robert Walpole’s debt-ridden Houghton Hall, destined to deck the new pavilion in the British Museum, are handed over to good Mr Christie, auctioned to the usual Russian buyer (absent), crated, shipped off up the Baltic. It takes a sage like Denis to explain these things properly. As he explains, art follows power, there are laws of history. ‘How things have changed,’ he declares. ‘We sell our paintings and sculptures in peacetime, Catherine buys them in the midst of war. Now the sciences, arts, taste and philosophy have left for the north, and barbarism and its consequences retreat to the south.’

Which is why for the last ten years he’s done everything a true courtier and a devoted librarian can possibly do for his patron. Except, that is, for one thing: the last, the greatest, hardest service. Again and again the summons has come, ever more imperiously, inviting the philosopher to crate himself up and make this journey north.

‘It is not that Didro would be coming to settle in Russia,’ the lady carefully explains. ‘He would be doing something very much finer: coming to court to express his gratitude.’

Year by year the invitations have grown more pressing and precise. He’s been urgently asked to bring all his friends, ship his relatives, take the whole project of the
Encyclopedia
northward with him.

Similar summonses, he knows, have gone to his fellow philosophes – Voltaire, d’Alembert. All have sent homage, but displayed strange reluctance actually to go. No doubt bruised by his Potsdam experience, now happy in Ferney where he has set up his own private court, crusty foxy Voltaire has announced himself perfectly willing but found a charming and cunning excuse. He too writes a florid poem in the great lady’s honour (‘You astound the wise man with your wit, /And he’d cease to be wise the moment he saw you’) and explains that, while too busy to visit the court while he’s still alive, he’d be over the moon to do so the minute he’s dead – ‘Why should I not have the pleasure of being buried in some corner of Petersburg, where I could see you passing back and forth, crowned with laurels and olive branches?’ Offered a palace and fortune to go to court as tutor to the young archduke Paul, d’Alembert is more graceless, publicly telling a friend: ‘I am far too prone to haemorrhoids; they take too severe a form in that country, and I prefer to have a painful bum in safety.’

Our man takes a different view. He’s never believed in travel, would stay home if he could. But he’s given far too many hostages to fortune. ‘I love to see the wise man on display, like the athlete in the arena,’ he has announced. ‘A man only recognizes his strength when he has the chance to show it.’ That’s why, for years, he has not been so much refusing as deferring and excusing. ‘I shall do what you expect of me,’ he faxes north, ‘I repeat my solemn oath. But so much, so very much, to do.’ Being our man, there always is. Four books of engravings and two supplements to the
Encyclopedia
to finish; in the ever-changing universe, knowledge is growing apace. A short novel about a servant whose fate has already been written in the great Book of Destiny above to get on with, as soon as he can find enough time; as well as a dreamlike reflection on human existence and psychology posed round the slumbering figure of Jean d’Alembert, his friend the great philosophe with the painful bum.

Then a more delicate matter: ‘I am attached by the strongest sweetest feelings to a woman for whom I would sacrifice a hundred lives if I had them,’ he advises the Tzarina through his old friend Falconet, now irritably sculpting away in Petersburg. The delicate fact is that the woman he would go to jail or watch his house burn down for is not his wife, the Great Particularist, now getting cantankerously old, but Sophie Volland, his sweet clever mistress. Still, in this demanding world there are some invitations that cannot be refused, some deferrals that cannot be deferred for ever. A generous empress requires her gratitude; promises are promises. The time has come to . . . well, go.

He goes. But how typical that he chooses to take the route of indirection. Which is why he’s here in Holland, the land of free trade, free thought, Protestant instincts and inexpensive gin. It takes but a day or so with his charming hosts to decide he likes it. He likes these long low fields, grinding wooden windmills, endless sand-dunes holding the human fort against grey northern water. He has never before seen Neptune’s vast empire, the Ocean. Unlike almost everything in the world, it never comes to Paris. So the first thing he does is to visit coastal Scheveningen. There he is, a grey sparkling man in a grey wig, gazing out on the equally grey and not so sparkling North Sea. He loves it: ‘The vast uniformity, accompanied by a certain murmur, invites reverie. It is here that I dream well.’ This soon has him reflecting with fraternal warmth on fish: ‘The soles, the fresh herrings, the turbots and perch, what they call “waterfish” – these are the best fellows in the world.’ He likes the people, plodding wooden-footed through the streets. He finds himself delighted by Dutch men (‘full of republican spirit from highest to lowest’), decent pipe-smokers quite unlike the snuff-taking French, red-faced men who care not a scrap for style and rank. No doubt for purely literary reasons, he even more admires the women. They have the hugest breasts and buttocks he has seen. Yet somehow they appear seductively modest, as French women only do when they are returning from confession.

Soon he’s nicely settled in: wig on floor, pen on desk. Within days he’s off writing yet another book or three. He’s hardly got here and looked out of the window before he produces a brief guide to Holland. He works on his running tale of the travelling master and his roguish servant, who reads his fortunes and misfortunes in the great Book of Destiny above. He starts another story in dialogue about meeting the nephew of the famed composer Rameau. He produces a commentary on a work of Helvétius, thoughtfully adding a deft little dedication to Catherine II. He writes about actors and comedians, considering the paradox that great actors display most passion when they invest the least; already he’s invented Method acting. He slips out to meet the Dutch professors of Leiden, the cheerful little heirs of those who betrayed Descartes and dislodged him from their liberal republic just about a century before.

They greet him warmly, take him to dinner, fill up his wine glass, delight in his curious medical questions, enjoy his wit and teasing, admire his republican, atheistical cast of mind. He travels to Amsterdam, that bookish city, to buy more notebooks and meet the publishers. Some already publish his books; others, for the purposes of mystification, or just the avoidance of censorship, are purported to. Like most travelling writers, he’s arrived in town with a brilliant idea. Why don’t they undertake a collected edition of his works (if only he could remember what he’s written, and what he’s done with it now)? When the edition appears a year or so later, half the books in it are not by him. All’s well here then. All’s very well.

Until . . . one day a summons arrives on a very touchy matter. It’s a message from little Frederick of Prussia, now known, since he slaughtered his flute-playing way through Silesia, as the Great. He has heard of our man’s journey in the usual fashion: through the endless gossip of his good friend Melchior Grimm, who is even now at Potsdam collecting up some marriageable little princess to take her on to Russia. The Philosopher-King observes that if our sage is also travelling to Petersburg, he will surely have to pass by way of Sans Souci. He therefore issues a polite command: come to court. Now it so happens our man is no admirer at all of the Philosopher-King. In fact he has abused him in print on several occasions, as a cloth-headed tyrant and slaughterer masquerading as an enlightened thinker. Worse still, he remembers what happened to Voltaire (a much-loved friend, even if he has never met him) when, two decades earlier, he answered just such a summons from Potsdam on the Havel.

Admittedly Voltaire was in disgrace in France as usual. Small wonder the most famous court in Europe – with its 150,000 oversized hussars, operas and concerts, pavilions and vineyards, trumpets and violins, and its all-male dinners in the company of the king – at first seemed to him a pleasant carefree paradise, a genuine Sans Souci. While his miserable queen did the court-work and entertained foreign ambassadors, His Highness sat amid gardens and vineyards and talked of music and art. But that was before the philosopher saw His Majesty burn one of his own books in the public square, before those bitter public rows over share-certificates, pensions, honours; before the gunpoint arrest in Frankfurt accused of poetic larceny, before he was forced to return his philosophical pension and then driven into present Swiss exile. There’s is even a private note come from cunning Grimm warning our man to be careful at Potsdam. With his friendly open manners, he is even more likely than Voltaire to put a foot wrong. So, sagely, our sage declines – unfortunately creating an insult that will have to be paid for in the future. As His Sagacity will duly discover, the fatal words are already being written in the great Book of Destiny above.

Meanwhile, up in Sankt Peterburg (the Venice, the Amsterdam, the Palmyra, the Wherever of the North), doubt, distress, alarm are growing. Six months have passed, the red carpet has been long unrolled, the welcome drinks poured. But where’s the great philosophe?
Où est notre
Didro? One day in August, a carriage, a vast sprung Berliner, rolls up to the embassy in the Hague. It’s the grand private coach of Prince Alexis Narishkin, chamberlain to the Russian Imperial Court, sometimes known as the buffoon of the Winter Palace. His European travels have been diverted to capture our man and take him northward; in they both get. The weather’s nice, the carriage stout. But what lies ahead is a real dog-leg of a journey, since at all costs they need to avoid Berlin, where diatribes against our man are already being distributed in the streets. Which way did they go? I’m not quite sure. They both have severe colic in Duisberg; they certainly turn up in Leipzig, another bookish city, the Saxon city of Bach and Schumann, the Paris of the East. Not much earlier Goethe had studied here: ‘Paris in miniature,’ he called it. And, when one day in the future he sits down to write his
Faust
, he’ll send the errant professor by magic-carpet to the student taverns of the city, where, with the help of Mephistopheles, his body can explore its desires, his mind risk the most wonderful wanton thoughts.