To the Hermitage (2 page)

Indeed one can’t help wondering whether he had some strong intimations of his own mortality as he was writing these last chapters. Malcolm’s attraction to Diderot as a character, which lured him well away from his usual fictional territory, was no doubt in part an identification with the Frenchman’s total dedication to the life of the mind and the profession of letters, his readiness to turn his hand to any literary task in a variety of forms and genres, but the focus of the novel is on Diderot in his later years, afflicted by illness and depression, which gives it an elegiac emotional tone. Again Laurence Sterne casts his shadow over the book, for
A Sentimental Journey
and the final volumes of
Tristram Shandy
contain many poignant hints of the author’s awareness that he was suffering from an incurable illness (tuberculosis). Interrogative variations on the theme of Postmortemism become more and more insistent in Diderot’s stream of consciousness as
To the Hermitage
moves towards its conclusion.

That is almost Diderot’s last thought before he suffers a stroke. But the novel continues for several pages, as if its author cannot bear to let it go, introducing at this late stage a new historical character, an American admirer of the
Encyclopaedia
, Thomas Jefferson, who visits Diderot on his sickbed and tells him ‘Books often breed books, or so I find. Your great book started me writing a poorer book of my own. A book of American facts, sir, which I think will be of great interest in your country . . .’ Diderot is greatly cheered by this conversation, which opens up to him the vision of

another great country waiting to be imagined. ‘With a country, if not a continent, invented, written on, written over, authored, with his imaginary Russia, the best fruit of his daydreams, not wasted after all, he feels well enough this evening to sit down at the table, between his wife and darling daughter.’ Where, choking on an American apricot, he dies. The literary project foreshadowed here is almost certainly a kind of trailer for the book Malcolm planned to write next, about Chateaubriand in America,
Liar’s Landscape
, of which, alas, we have only a posthumously published fragment.

To the Hermitage
ends balanced precariously on that question.

TO REMEMBER

JOHN BLACKWELL

How did they meet? By chance, like everyone else. What were their names? What’s that got to do with you? Where had they come from? The last place back down the road. Where were they going? How can anyone ever really know where they’re going? What were they saying? The Master wasn’t saying a word. And Jacques was saying that his old captain used to reckon that everything that happens to us on this earth, good and bad, was already written, or else was still being written, in the great Book of Destiny above.

MASTER

Now there’s a weighty thought for you.

JACQUES

My captain also used to say that every bullet has its billet.

MASTER

And your captain was dead right.

Ah, how happy all the people will be, when all the Kings are philosophes, or all the philosophes are Kings!

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE

One (Now)

Two (Then)

Three (Now)

Four (Then)

Five (Now)

Six (Then)

Seven (Now)

Eight (Then)

Nine (Now)

Ten (Then)

Eleven (Now)

Twelve (Then)

Thirteen (Now)

Fourteen (Then)

Fifteen (Now)

Sixteen (Then)

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)

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?

H
E
’
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.