To the Hermitage (3 page)

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.

S
O
:
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.

A brooding Nordic gloom wafts through the air. Euphoria is over, winter depression starting. Yet why? Everything here is so neat, so satisfying, so wealthyish, so burgherish. Civic, that surely has to be the word. Everything suggests a common social virtue, a universal sobriety of mind, a decent respect for order, an open-faced moral clarity. Just democracy, expensive simplicity – the things of which so many people have dreamed. You’ll find the same spirit everywhere you go. For instance, in the small clean efficiently modern bedroom of my nice little hotel on Storgatan, which looks out across the courtyard into the small clean efficiently modern rooms of innumerable well-fitted apartments. Both bedroom and bathroom are packed with gentle philosophical instructions – inspirations to citizenship and virtue, all couched in the liberal language of secular religiosity. ‘Please help us save the world. In Sweden we love our beautiful lakes and seas and wish to protect them. Use only official soaps, and use your towels for at least two days.’ ‘Condoms and the Holy Bible are provided in your bedside drawer, for your physical and spiritual content and protection. Please make use of them with the compliments of the management.’

As I walk round, everything is like this. Liberal, simple, decent, without irony. The streets are clean, straight, neat, tidy. The food: crisp, clean, fresh, fishy. The coffee: dark, scented, thick, excellent. The air: brisk, sharp, pure, windy. Quality rules, yet not ostentation. It’s the middle way. Nothing is too pompous, or too tacky; too blatantly conservative, or too vulgarly radical. This exactly matches what the Swedes like to say about themselves: nothing too little, nothing too much. There is plenty of wealth, but how very quietly it’s spent. In the smart shopping streets the well-dressed shoppers stroll. Dark-coloured Saabs and leather-seated Volvos swish by. The cars have their lights on, the drivers have their belts on. The litres may be many, but the petrol’s lead-free and the pace is sober; in fact everyone drives at a blatantly considerate, a truly
civic
sort of speed. The elegant pedestrians – tall girls in their leather thigh-boots, healthy men in their loden topcoats, universal cyclists theatrical in their arrowed helmets and Day-Glo Lycra (always in Sweden there are these reminders that it is healthy to be healthy) – stop, with the same consideration, to let them pass. Then suddenly, thanks not to some officious red light but to justice, reason, fairness and decency, the vehicles all stop in their turn. Whereat, with just the same polite consideration, the pedestrians and the Lycra cyclists, carefully, appreciatively, cross the road to the other side.

The crisp smart goods in the stores are just as well ordered, just as considerate. Don’t imagine it was some chic fifties Swedish modernist with a doctorate in design from Paris who invented all these bleached white woods, pure colours, honest straight lines that deck the smart lofts of the known world. Swedish style was born from the Swedish soul: nature, the outdoors, the woods, winds, sea, rocks, spray, all of it shaped into function by the piney, craft-loving, shipbuilding, homesteading old Nordic soul. Look at it. Those carpentered chairs – so straight-lined and thoughtful. Those handmade tables – so crafted, sturdy, square-edged, crisp-grained. Those woven fabrics – bright yet so restrained. Everything modest, homely, truthful, under-stated. Yet, lest some unfortunate misunderstanding occur, all this simplicity is expensive beyond belief – especially if you’re a wandering foreign tourist like myself.

But, as I’m discovering, the most expensive thing in this decent, pleasant, unpretentious liberal country is money itself. I’m in a bank in a clean tree-filled square at Storgatan, just up the hill above the harbour. An exceedingly nice bank – plain, modern, open-plan, white, computerized, smelling of fresh coffee, filled with nice people. So nice I know something is missing: the demonic rage of money, the danger of coin, not to say the angled security cameras, bullet-proof screens and Kalashnikov-toting guards that modern banking needs. The Land of the Bears is, I recall, famous for its banking. It went with a central role in the Hanseatic League, the mastery of Baltic trade, the role of financier of European wars. If my imperfect memory is right, it was Sweden that devised the notion of the National Bank. Above all, it went with a decent supply of the things money is made of: minerals and paper. To use the mineral reserves of the Upplands, the Swedes dispensed with precious metals and invented the decent plain democratic copper coin: a great invention when you wanted a loaf of bread, though if you wanted to buy something really expensive – one of those Swedish tables, for example – you had to go out shopping not with a purse but a horse and cart.