To the Hermitage Page 2

Seventeen (Now)

  Eighteen (Then)

  Nineteen (Now)

  Twenty (Then)

  PART TWO

  Twenty-One (Now)

  Twenty-Two (Then)

  Twenty-Three (Now)

  Twenty-Four (Then)

  Twenty-Five (Now)

  Twenty-Six (Then)

  Twenty-Seven (Now)

  Twenty-Eight (Then)

  Twenty-Nine (Now)

  Thirty (Then)

  Thirty-One (Now)

  Thirty-Two (Then)

  Thirty-Three (Now)

  Thirty-Four (Then)

  Thirty-Five (Now)

  Thirty-Six (Then)

  Note

  PREFACE

  This is (I suppose) a story. It draws a great deal on history; but as history is the lies the present tells in order to make sense of the past I have improved it where necessary. I have altered the places where facts, data, info, seem dull or inaccurate. I have quietly corrected errors in the calendar, adjusted flaws in world geography, now and then budged the border of a country, or changed the constitution of a nation. A wee postmodern Haussman, I have elegantly replanned some of the world’s greatest cities, moving buildings to better sites, redesigning architecture, opening fresh views and fine urban prospects, redirecting the traffic. I’ve put statues in more splendid locations, usefully reorganized art galleries, cleaned, transferred or rehung famous paintings, staged entire new plays and operas. I have revised or edited some of our great books, and republished them. I have altered monuments, defaced icons, changed the street signs, occupied the railway station. In all this I have behaved just as history does itself, when it plots the world’s advancing story in the great Book of Destiny above.

  I have also taken the chance to introduce people who never met in life, but certainly should have. I have changed their lives and careers, allowed them fresh qualities, novel opportunities, new loves. To my chief character – Denis Diderot, the most pleasing of all the philosophers, though alas now generally remembered only as a Parisian district or a Metro stop – I have been particularly kind. Diderot suspected himself that it was his fate to be a transient figure, a toy of Posterity: that strange form of collective memory that remembers and forgets, buries and retrieves, celebrates and defaces, constructs and deconstructs. He knew history was the future’s complaint against the present; but that past, present and future eternally interfere and interface with each other. In this book I have been Posterity’s spin-doctor. I have reshaped his life, adjusted his fame; I have granted him (as he would have liked) some pleasant extra months of existence, extended some of his ideas, developed some of his plots and mystifications. In fact I have amended and reorganized his entire website in the big Book of Destiny above.

  I have been just as bold with our so-called contemporary reality. There really is a Boris Yeltsin. And there really is a Diderot Project: a splendid set of international conferences (organized by Professors Bo Goranzon and Magnus Florin of the Royal University of Stockholm) which over the years has encouraged some of our most splendid dons, writers, philosophers, scientists, actors and craftspersons to extend Diderot’s educational and intellectual heritage, and for that purpose brought them comfortably together in some of the great cities of the world. I too have taken part in these congresses. In October 1993, when, as so often, Russian history trembled, I took a voyage with them over the Baltic. So this story began.

  As all you practised readers of stories know, this means there can be no possible resemblance between the real pilgrims, our real hosts in Petersburg, or the real Diderot Project itself and the imaginary people and plans you find depicted here. This is, as I mentioned, a story. But I dedicate it to those real people (Bo Goranzon, Jon Cook, Stephen Toulmin, etc.), many of whom are my friends. I hope they remain so. My debts continue. This story was greatly encouraged by my splendid late editor John Blackwell who had much help to give me, if from another perspective, having once lived as a spy in a submarine under the Baltic. Another friend, Martin Hollis, late Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, contributed greatly. A believer in the cunning of reason, he often led me, wandering and peripatetic, up the Enlightenment Trail, aiming for the pub at the top, The Triumph of Reason. I fear we never reached it.

  Many fine books helped me (see the coda), but one above all: P.N. Furbank’s wonderful portrait of my deceptive hero in Diderot: A Critical Biography (1992). It was Furbank who recalled the difficulty of pinning down not just Diderot but his splendid writings. ‘Diderot’s stories present enormously complicated textual problems, since the manuscript copies all display all degrees of accuracy or carelessness, and Diderot continued to tinker with his texts . . . until the end of his life; moreover, new manuscripts have continued to turn up in quite recent years,’ he notes in his edition of Diderot’s This Is Not a Story, And Other Stories (OUP, 1993). So they do; that explains why I crossed the Baltic in the first place. And that explains how I came to write this . . . well, shall we call it a story?

  M. B.

  INTRODUCTION

  HE’S AN AGEING SAGE NOW: warm and generous, famous and friendly, witty and wise. His journey across the huge mass of Europe has been a long and hard one, starting off in the southern spring, and ending in the chill of northern winter. He’s certainly not a natural traveller: ‘Travel is a fine thing if you’re without any friends,’ he once wrote somewhere, ‘but what would anyone say about the owner of a splendid mansion who spent all his time wandering off alone through the attics and cellars, instead of sitting down comfortably by the hearth with his dear family and his friends?’

  He’s old, but he’s done it; and the sheer fact of his arrival in Petersburg, his sudden appearance at the great Court of the North, is itself prodigious, one of the little wonders of the world. It so happens he arrives just in time for the great imperial wedding; the pug-nosed archduke Paul is marrying his sweet German princess. Royalty and a great corps of European ambassadors have all gathered in town. Within days – once the Orthodox pomp has been gone through, the fireworks exploded, the caviar digested, the champagne and vodka settled – they are all writing their duty letters home. The French ambassador, Monsieur Durand de Distroff, is soon alerting Versailles to announce the Philosopher’s arrival and promising to make contact at once.

  ‘I shall of course remind him, Your Serene Highness,’ he advises his slothful and silk-stockinged sun-monarch, ‘what is to be expected of him as a loyal Frenchman who has now acquired the most unrivalled access to a foreign court.’

  The Swedish ambassador ferries the news down the Baltic to Stockholm: Our Cunning Beautiful Russian Despot has succeeded in dressing herself up in the false clothes of liberalism yet again. In Petersburg, Sir Robert Gunning gets word back to the court at Whitehall: terrific wedding, lovely food and nibbles, bit of trouble out in the hinterland with the Don Cossacks, British presence gratefully appreciated as per usual (after all, the British have managed to provide the Empress with one of her favourite lovers), some French intellectual hanging round promoting daft Gallic thoughts. And with the greatest speed the news is shipped to Potsdam – where King Frederick the Philosopher King, feeling rudely neglected (don’t all philosophers, like all countries, really belong to him?), puts down his flute and bursts into a right royal fury. Voilà la trahison des clercs.

  In the shining corridors of the Hermitage, simply everyone is asking to meet him. It’s only the Empress herself who’s detained. But weddings are like that: great and demanding occasions, even if it’s the marriage of an obnoxious son she once thought to dispose of in much the way she had his supposed father, the last tzar. For weddings, at least this one, are state events, demanding so much attention to this, so much protocol about that. There must be balls, parties, fireworks, cannon-shots, church blessings, state receptions, each one of which she must be seen at. There are faces to kiss; mother of the groom. There are foreign ambassadors everywhere, each to be entertained, courted, or threatened. There’s a new daughter-in-law
to induct into the ways of the Orthodox Church (just as happened to her, twenty years before), and whose duties as bearer of tzars and progenitrix of dynasties need to be very carefully spelled out. Treaties to sign first thing in the morning, relatives to see, new alliances to be forged in the Hermitage corridors, for in the wake of weddings all the treaties change. And to complicate matters there’s the rumoured Cossack rebellion, a problem with Turkey, a fresh batch of royal impostors to jail, and conspiracy and turmoil all round the court as, thanks to the wedding, allegiances shift. No, it’s not always great, being Great.

  But she’s certainly not forgotten her French philosopher, a man whom she’s been trying to tempt here for the past eleven years: ever since, with the aid of a conspirator or two, she managed to ascend to the throne. And in other respects the timing couldn’t be improved on. Right now she’s between Night Emperors. Long ago Sergei Saltikov, probable sire of the pug-nosed and just-married archduke, was salted away: to Stockholm, was it, or Paris? Stanilaus Poniatowski, so kindly placed in her way by the previous British ambassador, is well out of the way, having been offered the Polish throne by way of grateful thanks. With his endless bluster and promiscuity Grigor Orlov, once so fond a lover, and so very helpful in ensuring her ascendancy, has exceeded his terms and been dispensed with – the dangerous secrets he holds bought off with continued fond friendship, a pile of roubles, a vast estate, and God knows how many souls.

  And since then his handy stand-in, shy young Vasilchikov, picked out from the usual source, the stock of handsome Horse Guards, has not served too well. The last few days have seen his brief contract terminated: ‘I was nothing more than a kept woman,’ he can be heard bleating sadly as he wanders round the court. Love-sick ambitious Grigor Potemkin, with his glorious achievements and his one working eye, is out there in Turkey, where he can be left steaming over the nougat for a few months longer. The Tzarina has found herself a window! The afternoon hours between three and six, the lovers’ hours, are for the moment free. She’s a studious lady and has always wanted a little patch of thinking time to spare. Of course she’s dying to meet her Philosopher, the man whose library she purchased for her own.

  A week after Our Man arrives in Petersburg comes the Friday masked ball at the Winter Palace, the Hermitage. He’s still troubled with the colic (the malady of the Neva, apparently), but at least his clothes and possessions have been returned by the port customs. In borrowed bearskin topcoat and someone’s spare peruke, he walks through the crisp winter evening to the crisp Winter Palace, a bundle of good spirits as ever. Gold coaches and huge sleds wait with their hand-slapping fine-liveried coachmen on the frosted and snow-dusted gravel. Music – all the kinds, French, Austrian, German, Italian – pours through the air and rattles the hundreds of windows along the great façade, where, in space after space, thousands of tallow candles flicker. Feathered hussars from the Empress’s White Guard stand like pregnant tableaux at the many doors.

  Inside footmen by the hundred, in brocaded coats and knee-britches, gather up the topcoats, the bearskins, the Paris cloaks, the Siberian furs. Ballnight always glitters, but tonight it glitters more than usual. Because of the wedding, everyone’s still in town. Ambassadors, court-chamberlains, boyars, British and Swedish sea-captains, Dutch merchants, wandering harlots and courtesans, monks, mathematicians, academicians, imperial officers, provincial nobles, patriarchs and archimandrites, boyars, dwarves, innumerable court ladies from ancient to childish are all there. Gold, silver, pearl, amethyst, official decorations and sashes. Panniered dresses, elaborate coiffeurs, deep and distracting décolletages. Wigs, perukes, caps, shakos. Paris fashions, Cossack furs. Men dressed as women, women dressed as men.

  As for Our Sage himself, he’s presented himself (as is only good and proper) in his philosopher’s black suit. Courtiers snigger at the outfit behind face-masks and fans. Musicians play in every corner, large sociable mobs wander the innumerable halls, one room after another, each filled with all an opulent Scythian monarch might ask for: Rembrandt nudities, Canova protuberances, Siberian wine cups, Roman busts and frescoes, oriental gems, cabinets of curiosities, strutting mechanical dolls, strange astronomical clocks. There’s dancing, card-playing, pipe-smoking. There’s singing of ballads, nibbling of pastries. Groups of women playing billiards, groups of men playing chess. The chink of coins from gaming tables. In one room there is French dancing, with a great billowing of skirts; in another thin girls from the palace ballet school are prancing up high on their points. The new gallery extension of the Hermitage is open, displaying the great collections shipped from Paris and Amsterdam. The place has even acquired a good French name for itself: for doesn’t Her Serene Majesty’s other admired philosopher, Voltaire, live at a Hermitage in Ferney, and Rousseau think away in another? Here then is hers: one of the busiest, noisiest, biggest, brightest places of retreat and quiet contemplation in the world.

  He walks on. And on. Apollo and the Four Seasons – all of them aged about eleven, refined little creatures from the Tzarina’s new Smolny Academy for Noble Girls – are performing an elegant masque to the music of Rameau. It could all be Venice or Vienna. Apart from the odd barbarity, it could even be civilized Paris itself. He enters yet another room. Here his good old friend, the gallant courtier Baron Melchior Grimm – international broker of the imperial wedding, his face thick-powdered, and sporting a fine peruke from the Nevsky Prospekt – is being charming, gossiping splendidly with the inner circle of the court. His own noble host, Prince Lev Narishkin, is there too, idly wondering what happened to his best bearskin coat. They quickly greet our man.

  ‘She’s expecting you,’ they say. They lead him across to the premier lady-in-waiting, the prim dark-haired Princess Dashkova, whom he remembers, having entertained her some time back in Paris.

  ‘My dear Philosopher,’ she says, ‘she knows what to expect of you.’ She waits a moment, then pushes through the crowd.

  And suddenly there she is: a living statue in herself. Despite what the portraits tell you, she’s definitely in her middle years, fiftyish or so. She’s high-foreheaded, long-faced, pointy-chinned, rouge-cheeked. She’s big, plump and round, but very stately and now wearing something very masculine and half-regimental; on her ripe shape it’s the costume of a diva. Dashkova suddenly ushers him forward. The courtiers watch. The moment has come; he looks up, looks down, bows low, reaches out, kisses the plump imperial hand that appears before him.

  ‘I’m French,’ he says. ‘My name is Diderot.’

  ‘And I am Catherine, Russia,’ she says, ‘the Hermit of the Hermitage. May I welcome my dear librarian to the place where one day his books will come to rest for all eternity.’

  ‘Yes, Your Imperial Majesty, that was truly my most wonderful piece of fortune. My pension and my Posterity. How happy I felt when you promised me that. I knew I should be happy even when I was dead. I took my lute down from the wall and sang a love-song to you.’

  ‘My good fortune too,’ says the Empress Autocratrix of All the Russias, Tzarina of Kazan and Lady of Pskov. ‘Never did I think by buying a man’s dusty library and letting him continue to use it I’d win so many compliments. Tell me, how do you like it, my Palais d’Hiver?’

  ‘It’s exactly as I expected,’ our man says. ‘I do believe I dreamt it once.’

  ‘But you only dreamt, I built,’ she says. ‘In truth I build like mad.’

  ‘You know you’re now considered the benefactress of the whole of Europe?’

  She nods her diamonded head: ‘So they do say.’

  ‘No other person does more for art or humanity, or more generously spreads the fine new light of reason. No one more sees the wisdom of sense. In you we have perfect proof that the light flows from the north to the south.’

  ‘Shall we say each day in my private boudoir? Excepting weekends, feast-days, state days, and all grand imperial or religious occasions?’

  ‘Indeed, your—’

  ‘After lunch, I have always found that my
very best time.’

  The noisy courtiers round about seem for some reason to snigger.

  ‘I’m honoured.’

  ‘Let’s say between three and five.’

  ‘Your most gracious and remarkable supremacy,’ he says, minding his manners.

  ‘Your most grateful pupil,’ says, gracefully, the most powerful woman in the world.

  PART ONE

  ONE (NOW)

  SO: WHERE’S THE PLACE? Stockholm, Sweden’s fine watery capital, laid out on a web of islands at the core of the great archipelago. Time of day? Middle to late morning. Month? Let’s see, the start of October, 1993. How’s the weather? Cool, overcast, with bright sunny periods and occasional heavy showers. Who’s coming on the journey? I think it’s best to wait a bit and see.

  The fact is that the Swedish summer season – the super-physical, island-hopping, boat-building, skinny-dipping, crayfish-eating, love-feasting, hyper-elated phase of this nation’s always rich and varied manic cycle – is reaching its dank autumnal end. Smart white tourboats with perspex carapaces still cruise the narrow canals of Stockholm’s Gamla Stan, the Old Town. Noisy guides are megaphoning out their wonderfully gruesome tales of the Swedish Bloodbath. But now they are not very many, just an end-of-season few. On the ruffled waves of the city’s inner harbours, dinghies with multi-coloured sails tack back and forth, hither and thither, up and down. But this is positively their final flurry; they’ll all be winched out of the water and put into dry dock in a matter of a few more weeks or days.

  In the neat windswept parks that surround the harbour, the leaves flop wetly, the last open-air coffee or sausage stalls are starting to hammer down their shutters. Here and there groups of men – some sporting summer shirts, but most in puffed-out winter anoraks – play chess with man-size pieces. Small crowds of children and various time-wasting persons, walking little dogs, gather round as they menace black with white. On the benches, at the few final tables left outside the few final cafés, hopeful people sit with their chins elevated. Blank-faced, mystical, they’re staring at the sky, hopeful of gathering a last sight of that most precious of all the northern treasure hordes, the sun. Aware of just how desirable it is, the sun keeps showing and then going, in a sequence of short sexy glimpses: now you see me, now you don’t. It drops patches of gold dazzle onto the green-brown copper roofs and spires that cap and crown the grandiose national buildings over the water, the buildings of a big old empire: the Swedish Royal Palace, the Storkyrkan Cathedral, the Parliament Building. A bit further over in the panorama is the modernist City Hall, where the Nobel Prizes are awarded to the sound of a gunshot intended to celebrate Sweden’s two most noted gifts to humanity: the sweet dream of universal peace, the big bang of dynamite.