With the great book goes the great plan: the Russian university. He conjures it into existence every night, imagines its grand halls and corridors, always thinking of her serene majesty, who has been so kind to him and who still fills his dreams every night. The Russian university will be built, of course, in the great strange city he has already half imagined. It lies by the water, staring into the Neva. It has high façades, great Aulas and windows. Everyone can attend it – without exception, whether from cottage or palace. It will be a living, moving encyclopedia, and all the fruits that hang on the living branches of the tree of knowledge will be its province. Except there will be no departments of theology to turn its enquiring students into demons of fanaticism, preachers of only one truth. There will be no departments of medicine, which are otherwise known as departments of murder. No departments of pure philosophy, for they produce ignorant lightweights who become actors, soldiers, tricksters and tramps. There will be no first-year courses in the wisdom of the ancients: who wants to learn how to be a Roman citizen when the age of Rome is done? No one will be compelled to study Greek or Latin, when there are so many new languages to learn. None of the professors will be priests or Jesuits, and no robes or tonsures will be required.
No, this new university’s bright and beautiful students will live in fine buildings and chatter in every tongue, nourish every decent and civilized opinion that is of service to humankind, freely, frankly and liberally discuss all the ideas. All the subjects will be practical, useful, contemporary. There will be instruction in the making of chairs, the building of perfect domes. There should be lessons in machinery, and how to grow mulberry trees, as they do all over Russia. The best students – but only the very best, the students of genius – will be allowed to study verse and tale-telling and become philosophers or poets. A university should, he pronounces, have only one goal: it exists to make people virtuous, civil and enlightened, so advancing human progress. For the problem of our world is this: too many of its minds are dull, vacant and empty. Even the poets and philosophers of the new age are witless, and bray their noise and cackle through the nightwaves without thought. Yet such too is the age that on every street-corner the young people are crowding, shouting, ‘Education! We know nothing! Teach us! Education, education, education!’ He has the perfect solution: a democracy of general education, topped off with an elite of thought and art.
No sooner has he worked out this beautiful, fantastic, splendidly unworkable plan (the Empress files it away in a locked drawer, in the hope it will be forgotten for ever; in fact one day two centuries on it will become the commonplace lore of every drab weary western polytechnic) than he sits down to a second task he has assigned himself: a deep critique of the Empress’s ‘Grand Nakaz’ – ‘The Great Instruction’. He studies with his usual care, pronounces it to be one of the greatest and most important documents of the age. It’s such a pity just a few small things are missing: ‘The Empress has somehow said nothing at all about the emancipation of the serfs. Yet this is a most important point.’ He adds a proposal or two for the abolition of tyranny: ‘A society should first of all be happy. It is impossible to love a country that does not love us.’ Rounding off his notes, he draws the frank, instructive, very bold conclusion: ‘If in reading what I have written she finds that her conscience stirs and her heart jumps for joy, then she will know she no longer needs serfs and slaves. But if she trembles, feels weak, grows pale, then she has surely taken herself for a far better person than she is.’
Meantime, as he waits for the Empress to gather up her response and declare her gratitude, he wanders round Holland, making notes for yet another book. Sometimes he goes to gaze on the great lonely windmills that grind at all hours round about Zaandam, or stands and considers the geometry of the flat grids of fields, which neither the usual rise and declivity nor the history of settlement and ownership seem to interrupt. Sometimes he goes to Scheveningen to stare at the imperious North Sea, where the wooden warships moor (he goes aboard one), the fishing boats swing their booms, and the herring are rushing. Sometimes he visits the synagogues of Amsterdam, sometimes he calls on the publishers, who have published or plagiarized so many of his books. He pronounces that Holland is the land of liberty, the Hague the most pleasant village in the world.
People now find him strangely gloomy and detached. Surely this isn’t the same Monsieur Diderot who came to them bubbling with so much scandalous atheism just the summer before? Perhaps this is because no news at all comes back from Russia. The messages he’s awaiting, the funds he’s needing so he can set properly to work on the new Russian encyclopedia – a couple of hundred thousand livres for editorial expenses, the price of an apartment in Paris to house its demanding activities, fees for the editorial assistants he’s already set out to hire – simply do not arrive. Instead what comes are whispers and murmurs that, much as she admires and loves him, the Empress has begun to have doubts. She’s no longer sure about her new encyclopedia. She’s put his proposals for a Russian university firmly away. As for his considered comments on the Great Instruction, they have been disposed of yet deeper, forbidden from sight and locked up under quadruple lock and key.
‘Genuine twaddle’: this is how she’s described his splendidly liberal opinions in one of her fond frank letters to Grimm. Who, like any good old friend, hasn’t wasted a minute in passing on her adverse reaction to the place where it will hurt most. His letter enclosing her views passes on some further information. It seems afternoons in the Small Hermitage have not been the same since he left. Nowadays it’s big Grigor Potemkin who is granted the full attention of the Empress in those pleasant quiet hours between three and six. Victorious over the Turks, the man wanders the corridors in his oriental kaftans and turbans, if not totally naked; and now he’s taken possession of the apartment-bedroom next door to the Empress. The entire court has responded by growing extremely louche and eastern since his arrival. Oh, one other thing about him: he doesn’t like the French.
Little wonder our man feels increasingly bewildered and adrift. At home his mystified wife and daughter are asking about him, sending their messages. One day very strange news arrives from Paris: the king, that wastrel old monarch, is dead of the smallpox against which he’d refused to inoculate himself (unlike the Northern Minerva, who put herself first in the firing line), and has been quietly buried at dead of night. An inglorious reign, elegant, clever, lush, sophisticated, marked by display, misery and historical woe, the loss of the two French Indies in America and the East, is over at last. An heir has succeeded, new ministers have been appointed. Yet, writing, our man hardly notices. Until one day a chaise halts outside the Embassy. From it, in the company of a couple of rich young Russians, steps a very, a very very old friend. It’s Melchior Grimm, looking rich, conceited, perhaps even a mite concerned.
‘My dear dear fellow. You’ve dashed here with some good news from Petersburg?’ our man cries in delight, embracing him in his usual hearty way. ‘I’ve come from there, yes. By way of Warsaw and Potsdam. Oh, Stanislaw of Poland and Frederick of Prussia both asked after you.’ ‘Name-dropper.’ ‘And I’ve been appointed as a courtier to the court of Hesse-Darmstadt.’ ‘Wonderful. Take a bow.’ ‘I turned it down.’ ‘I’m glad to hear it.’ ‘I got an even better offer from the court of Saxe-Gotha. Also the court of Saxe-Weimar.’ ‘Take two bows, then. Why not? You must spend all your time bowing and scraping at one court or another.’ ‘People do find me useful.’ ‘I’m sure. But do remember, you used to be a philosopher.’ ‘So did you.’ ‘I remember you when you were an honest man. Before you started all this dining with royalty. Why is it when we two travel we always swing about like the arms of a compass, one going in the opposite direction from the other?’ ‘Because I like to visit San Souci, and you always try to avoid it.’ ‘Yes. Well, did you bring me a message from the Empress? I’m still waiting news of my Russian Encyclopedia.’ ‘It so happens I have business in Antwerp, then Brussels, then back in Paris. That’s why, my old
friend, I thought I’d come and take you home.’
Our man stares. ‘To Paris? How can I go there? After what happened in Russia they’d throw me straight into the Bastille. Surely you know that?’
‘Nonsense,’ says Grimm, ‘the old king’s dead. The new one’s young, fat and innocent. Paris is wonderful. Turgot has taken charge, and turned it into a city of philosophers. It’s electricity everywhere, bright light all around. Everywhere there are little philosophers, strutting about, pronouncing their atheism, preaching new parliaments and great reforms. Science prospers. Music soars. Mozart plays. D’Alembert’s been made secretary of the Academy. Intellect flourishes. Everyone reads. Everyone’s buying your encyclopedia. The Age of Reason has come to the Palais Royal at last.’
‘No. It just can’t be.’
‘I assure you,’ says Grimm. ‘And now the Americans are coming, so anything’s possible. And you remember Beaumarchais, the man you said you taught to write plays?’
‘And so I did. Did he write any?’
‘Indeed he did. But now he’s the close favourite of the new king. He’s sending him everywhere as spy and emissary.’
‘Beaumarchais here, Beaumarchais there.’
‘Yes. I tell you, it’s time to come home.’
‘No,’ says our man, ‘I must stay here and await the bidding of the Empress.’
Grimm takes him quietly by the arm. ‘My dear old friend, this is the bidding of the Empress. Travel’s over. Go home.’
‘Ah. How is she, then?’
‘She writes to me almost daily,’ says Grimm. ‘Sends me her epistles to the Grimmalians. Tells me what she means to do with Poland. I truly think I’m her closest confidant.’
‘What does she confide?’
‘I should say she’s feeling very happy.’
‘Does that mean Pugachov’s out of the way?’
‘Tortured and beheaded. But it’s all a bit more personal.’
‘You mean she’s in love with that bear Potemkin?’
‘Head over heels in it,’ says Grimm. ‘Just listen to what she writes in her latest letter to me: “This is quite extraordinary. The alphabet is just too short, its stock of letters really not enough, to say just what I feel.”’
‘It was big enough for the Encyclopedia,’ says our man. ‘Very well then, I see she has other things now. All right, I’ll come to Paris.’
But, before he takes the high road, ventures the last lap, the long way round through Antwerp and Brussels, he sits down and writes a thoughtful letter. He addresses it first to Sophie Volland, but then adds in the names of her sisters. And he says:
My dear ladies
Perhaps you are trying to drive me to utter despair, since I haven’t heard from you for at least a century. Perhaps you have forgotten me. Or perhaps you imagined – I confess I did myself – I had gone away and would never come home. It’s true if anyone had said when I left Paris I was risking a journey so hard, so long, so strange and so absurd, I would have flatly called them a liar. I remember what I told myself: ‘You will travel to the court and be introduced to the Empress. You will thank her for her patronage. Perhaps a month later she’ll request to meet you, and ask you a few questions about a few intellectual things. Then you will bow, take leave of her, and come home.’
Dear friends: Isn’t that just what would have happened at any other court beside Petersburg? Yet there I had access to the Empress’s quarters every day, from three in the afternoon to five, even six. I entered, I was shown a chair. I had prepared many ideas in Paris, but they fled from me on the very first day. I began to talk, in that frank way you know of, which some call wisdom and others think total folly. For five months I lasted at court, without, as far as I know it, raising any ill-will, or from her at least, and without in any way having the bit set on my tongue.
So, as for this journey, which you warned me was so foolish (and I was glad to agree), I really would not have missed it for anything. I’m left with the satisfaction of repaying a great obligation (to become the librarian of my own library!), and making a new friend, and a most powerful protector, for the rest of my life. When I left, she truly overwhelmed me with favours. I return, let me tell you, laden with honours. I really believe that had I wished it I could have stripped the Russian treasury bare on my departure. But with her I acquired something far more precious than money: my freedom and my frankness of speech.
I confess to you, then, that this has been quite the most remarkable experience of my whole life, and that when I return to join you you will have to put up with everything I have to say about the world’s most remarkable woman. For that is what she is. But now, dear ladies, I am returning home, for good. There will be no more journeys. I suppose I might have . . . well, let us say ten more years left in my bag. Two or three of them will be wasted on colds, colics, dropsies and rheumatics, and other annoyances of body and age. Two will go on food, drink and society, and two more on mistaken projects or foolish thoughts and ideas. The rest I must try and preserve for wisdom, and whatever other few pleasures a man past sixty might expect.
Oh, the horror and the misery of age! Once I imagined that with the years the head grew harder and the heart grew tougher. It’s not a bit true, I find. All things in the world continue to touch me, move me, thrill me, seduce me, upset me, terrify me. And when you see me again I shall be the biggest and most sentimental little cry-baby you ever saw—
If you were to ask me, I really can’t tell you whether I liked Russia or not. Perhaps I went there in search of some strange but important illusion, a splendid yet truly absurd human dream. Certainly, like a dream, it has lost me, bewildered me, baffled me with fresh new ideas of sense and nonsense, justice and order, virtue and vice. Russia is the strangest and most unreal of countries. Its people are mystics, obsessed by the promise of the future and the wonder of their vast land. Yet they cannot let go of old history, which haunts them like ghosts, and in the end they must always look more into the past than the future, and more into the darkness than the bright light. I fear they have been encouraged in too many fantasies, have had too many leaders, followed too many impostors, suffered under too many despots, known too many revolutions, been told too many lies. It’s as if they have only lived in a time of floods and earthquakes, tremblings of the soil, and have never known how to feel the solid ground beneath their feet.
So the truth is that, for all my foolish questions, all my nosy wanderings, all my enquiring visits to the academies, libraries and studios, all my interviews with shopkeepers and traders, craftsmen and artists, bankers and sailors, all my consulting of books and papers and histories and charts and maps, all my notes and drawings, I could write you an encyclopedia about it and still not for a moment understand it. I was foolish, I confess, not to travel further, go onward to Moscow or the lands of wolves and snow, the way to the Orient; now I realize that. But there was plague in Moscow and bloody Cossack revolution in the regions, and I have never been enamoured of such things. I prefer my thoughts and books. In consequence I never once left the strange city of Petersburg, and I never strayed far from the court – in other words, that babbling, gossiping, stabbing, poisoning confusion of boyars and generals, nobles and shopkeepers, patriarchs and whores, divinities and satyrs, dreams and secrets, elegances and cruelties, grandeurs and utter debasements and decadences which is the Russian court.
Maybe that’s how it always has to be with philosophers. We who think we understand truth, wisdom, utility, freedom, liberty, happiness and the cosmos really know nothing at all about life as it is. Those of us who think we really understand power – state, monarchs, tyrannies, despotisms – have seen those things only as we enjoy wine by looking down the neck of a bottle. For what a difference there is when we see a painting of a tiger painted by Oudry at the summer exhibition, and when we meet a real tiger in the forest.
Well, I have seen the real tiger in the forest.
In a short time we shall meet again, dear ladies. I’m bringing you tre
asure from Siberia, I have collected some of the very finest shards of marble and precious mineral for your cabinets of curiosities, and every single one of them worth a kiss. In fact I can’t imagine how our kissing will ever stop, since Siberia is, as you know, one of the vastest places in the world.
Goodbye, ladies. Soon I shall reappear on your stage and never leave it . . .
Je suis, etc.
Even the final stretch of the journey to his home is strange. The night before he leaves the Hague, he observes by the light of a candle his dear old friend Prince Dmitry Golitsyn on his knees in his guest’s bedroom, carefully forcing, opening up and going through every single one of his trunks. When he inspects the outcome in the morning, checking through all his hoard of papers, the packed ranks of his notebooks and drafts, he discovers that his much annotated copy of the ‘Nakaz’ – the Empress’s ‘Grand Instruction’ – has been removed; so have all the notes he’s written about it. Before he has time to consider what to do (surely these can only be his empress’s orders?), Grimm’s carriage arrives. Farewells are warmly said; nothing is mentioned on either side. He and Grimm ride off through the wind-milled landscape, across the Austrian Low Countries, to Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels. But here, strangely and suddenly, Melchior announces he has important business, and places our man on the Paris diligence. On this, the last leg, an English lady resident in Paris rides with him. Taking out his notebook, he asks her questions. Which of the two languages she’s used is the purer?
‘I like English for my mouth, French for my ears,’ she says.
He thanks her, writes it down.
‘Monsieur, sir, my good dear sir,’ she says, in extremely good English and French, ‘forgive me for mentioning it, but that is your hand upon my knee.’
To the Hermitage Page 46