Now it just so happens that – according to what, as it will all so clearly turn out, has already been written in the great Book of Destiny up above – in just two years on from this time I shall visit Saint Petersburg once again. On that occasion that still sits waiting for me in the future it will be slightly later in the year: in fact in the last days of November, when the final crisp sunshine has gone, the days have grown short, the statues in the Summer Garden have all been shuttered, and the snow, bitter and hard, has already begun to fall. The skies at that time will be as dark as lead. The streets will be an ice-rink or a skid-pan, and on the Nevsky Prospekt, outside my guard-protected hotel, it will be almost too dangerous to walk out. Times will be no better and probably quite a good deal worse. Women will still stand on squares of cardboard in the street, selling their old dresses or a household pet. Beggars will lie drunk and dying in the subways, wrapped passive bundles will sit outside on doorsteps, more armed men will guard even more shuttered banks.
This time I shall be not sailing but flying, and I shall be travelling with a small group of British writers, who have come to open a library in a charming room of old books that doesn’t exist yet. The library is a writers’ library, a library with a purpose, a library with a strong literary idea: it’s the Mayakovsky Library, housed in the centre of Petersburg, in a charming old Golitsyn Palace which overlooks the black Fontanka. In its charming rooms private and public collections will come together, helped by the British Council, which also resides in this building, and the Petersburg Public Library, which I shall recall as the Saltykov-Shcherdrin, but which by then will be called the Russian National Library. I will come because, as you now know quite well, I love travel and libraries; but also because I hope to see, again, Galina. When I arrive, my very first question will be about her. And I shall be told at once that Galina is dead: that she died, in fact, just after our Diderot pilgrimage which right now is ending; that she never managed to do the thing she most wished to do, make a trip to Paris; that the Voltaire collection is still being re-assembled, but perhaps not in the old wonderful way . . .
But all this is a matter for the future, and who now can possibly know any of these things? In any case the present is all too present, and busy and demanding enough. I’m checking my flight time, and riding in a taxi through the heart of Stockholm, most pleasant and decent of cities. ‘No smoking, no drinking, no eating. Airbag provided, side-impact protected, air-conditioned, safety locks. Fasten seat belt, do not speak to the driver. Special supplement to the airport,’ it tells me on the dash. Inside this safe and highly informative cage I sit, surrounded on each side by slow-floating Saabs and considerate Volvos, all of them with their lights warningly on. We’re navigating the great motorway web that links the city and ties together some of its many islands. Now we’re passing the gardening centres, the furniture warehouses, the automobile franchises, the fast food palaces, the Ikea superstores and all those smart-looking out-of-town sheds that mobile phone and personal computer companies need these days to keep us in touch with the global traffic in signals and signs. All around me there’s the triumph of the bourgeois, the reign of the decent, the tedium of the commonplace, the lure of the expensively commercial, the grand if faded wonder of social democracy, the waste and redundancy of the age of shopping, overload and far too much. Then we pass on into pleasant lakeland, pine-and-birch forest. And now, suddenly, all the motorway signs up there are pointing the right way: Arlanda, Arlanda. I’m riding home . . .
But why, oh why, do I have the feeling this trip is going to cost me a bomb?
THIRTY-SIX (THEN)
NATURALLY, for all his years and for all his weariness, our man is quite incapable of staying idle very long. Soon he’s again taking his five o’clock walks through the streets of Paris, wandering through the elegant and erotic refurbishments that have been done to the fine Palais Royal, where everything is on offer. Here the newspapers and periodicals are sold, the banned books are eagerly distributed and taken home, the city’s finest whores in their most elegant and teasing costumes flit through the arcades in front of the shouting merchants and the wandering beaux. In the old way he discusses with himself questions of politics and love, taste and philosophy, letting his mind rove wantonly. By night he dines as he always used to with the city’s great men of learning, who are also beginning to show their years: d’Alembert, d’Holbach, Helvétius. He hears of the strange solitary doings of Rousseau, the sharpest new barbs of Voltaire. He returns to the salons of the great married ladies – so many of them now, all offering their services as players of music, writers of books, grand Semiramises, mistresses to philosophers and men of true wit. But the grand ladies are younger now; so are the men of true wit. When the weather is wet, he strolls to the cafés, sitting down, as ever at the tables of the Café Procope, or wandering into the Café de la Régence, watching the clever men shift the pieces across the chequerboards while he digests the latest scandals, reads the latest broadsheets, scans the latest fops.
And as usual Grimm’s political instincts have proved entirely right. Paris has changed. It’s changed completely, entirely, epochally, epistemically. For the moment at least there’s a quite new spirit to this relaxed, youthful, louche new reign, with its pastoral dreams and its panderous court at the Hermitage. Everything feels just a bit more tolerant, a bit more permitted, though somehow also more anxious, more volatile, for this is a world where freedom is taken almost too freely, to the point where it dissolves in all directions. Decadences multiply, sex is grosser. Women tease men in a great claim of power. It’s grown more difficult to enrage the censor, though his Jesuitical friend the Abbé Raynal has already done it, and his own turn will surely come (as indeed it does, for it’s already written there will be one more grand brush with the book-burners before his days on earth are done). At his age it gets harder, ever harder, to sound like a fiery torch or a radical young man – especially when there are so many much younger men doing just the same kind of thing.
In fact a whole grand gallery of young philosophers is now beginning to fill the clubs and cafés, as if these days there were simply no occupation other than thought. There they sit, drinking their wines, supping their rich Arabian coffees, dressed up in their fashionable silks and brocades and their large Voltairean turbans: having their shoes cleaned, flaunting their wit, pronouncing their atheism, confessing their humour, dissecting the universe, chattering like monkeys about whatever it is – life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness – that happens to be the vogue of the week. When do they think? When do they find time to write?
Certainly there’s no shortage of their scribblings, and our man knows exactly whom to blame. It’s Panckoucke, of course, the great media mogul, who has been buying up everything: grabbing newspapers, book-titles, imprints, novelists, thinkers and journalists by the score. Now he’s publicly rebuked our man for failing to update his own encyclopedia, and is announcing the need for a mega new one, the biggest and grandest multimedia project the world has ever seen. Where our man has invested wisdom, intelligence, risk and exile, he simply invests money; for in the new Paris everything is for purchase. And yet the whole greedy thing has the King’s blessing, it seems: as long as the game is commerce and not criticism, nobody minds at all. Now Panckoucke and his agents are running round all the cafés and clubs, tempting the philosophers, hiring the researchers and the copyists, hunting down hacks. Money is no object; he’s paying absurd fees for absurd thoughts, and inveigling the investments of any kind of subscriber, not simply the wise and learned readers his own grand volumes were meant for. Critique has become commodity, light has become power. As for our man: truth is he’s famous, he’s fashionable, he’s failing, and he’s finished.
Yes, Paris now is exactly as young Beaumarchais – another of the many men he’s invented and set off on his profitable way – describes it in his newest play at the Comédie-Française, the one about the barber-factotum, another tale of a servant and a master: ‘Such a barbari
c age we live in. I can’t see it’s produced a single thing we should be grateful for. Only every kind of stupidity and trash: atheism, magnetism, electricity, religious freedom, inoculation, quinine, terrible plays and modern rubbish, Diderot’s Encyclopedia . . .’ Yes, times have certainly changed – but it all goes so far and no further. There are political reforms and new freedoms. Sex is coarser, passions are cruder, appearances are crasser, violent actions win more approval. Science prospers, invention flourishes. Thought has grown far more instrumental, far less abstract. There’s a great flurry of discovery: inoculation, the flowings of the blood, the marine chronometer, the wily ways of mad Dr Mesmer who stares into everyone’s eyes, magnetism, electricity. Distant islands are set foot on. People are trying to travel on rivers by the aid of paddles and steam. In the parks outside Paris, in front of the most enormous crowds, others are tying themselves or their animals to huge floating bladders and trying to ascend high in the sky.
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 th
e 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.
To the Hermitage Page 48