To the Hermitage (59 page)

‘You did? And you walked right up to the altar?’

‘I did indeed.’

‘You kissed it?’

‘Certainly.’

‘You touched?’

‘
Oui
, monsieur.’

‘What? Touched her where it really matters? Her limbs? Her thighs?’

‘
Oui.
’

‘You didn’t go into her bed-chamber?’

‘Indeed, sir. I walked through the grand halls of Petersburg. I left letters under her pillow.’

‘You touched her . . . pillow?’

‘Uncle, please,’ cries Madame Denis. ‘You are exciting yourself far too much.’

He looks at the Sage of Ferney, who is staring bitterly at him from out of his deep armchair.

‘You were her favourite?’

‘One of several. But I admit, when I left at last, she truly overwhelmed me with her favours.’

‘Favours, what kind of favours?’

‘Many things. A cup and saucer. But I do believe I could have emptied her whole exchequer.’

‘Gifts! Maybe you know she sent me delegations, all the way from Petersburg to Ferney,’ says the Immortal. ‘She sent me gold and gems and silver. Even a ring she’d carved by her own hand.’

‘Yes? Like this one here on my finger?’

‘A little. But it was exactly like the Arabian Nights. No sooner had one camel train arrived laden with treasure and riches than it was followed by another.’

‘Well, you did advise her to conquer Mustapha, did you not? Poland too, if I remember rightly.’

‘I think perhaps she deceived me a little there, over Poland.’

‘And Turkey too?’

‘Perhaps I should not have written all those things I wrote to her. But you know I was besotted with her.’

‘I understand. She gave you fame, and you gave her fame. A perfect long distance love-match.’

‘Well, then, you know more about it than I do. You went there. You enjoyed her full favours. I should have gone there, like you. How I envy you. It’s not the pleasure, dear friend, it’s the ritual. How I would have liked to practise it. Come to the altar, held out my hand to the flame . . .’

‘I don’t think she wanted you to.’

‘She invited me constantly.’

‘Yes, but she told Melchior Grimm not to let you near her, in case your fantasies collapsed. You remember the message she sent to you once? “Your Cateau is surely best seen at a distance.” I think that was right.’

‘The truth is she will have both of us,’ says the Sage of Ferney, ‘because I promise you, I intend to go and lie by her side in Russia very shortly. Just as soon as I’m dead.’

‘Please, please, darling, uncle,’ says Madame Denis, very alarmed now, ‘just don’t think of it. And you, sir, you’ve disturbed him terribly. I can’t imagine what you were thinking of. Why talk like this? Isn’t it time for you to leave?’

‘Ah yes, so I notice from this fine Swiss watch Her Majesty gave me,’ our man says, holding up a Ferney watch.

A month later, and the world’s greatest man is dead indeed, his corpse heading not for Russia but being driven upright out of Paris in the dead of night in a coach pulled by six horses, as the priests condemn him for his faithless life, the people exult, and he seeks his proper burial wherever in the world he can find it . . .

And so the dark end-game begins. A month later still, and there’s another: Rousseau (whom our man also invented) has also suddenly gone to his grave. This time it’s a tomb on the Island of Poplars in the middle of the lake at Ermenonville. Since it’s Jean-Jacques, who was all heart not head, there’s much weeping and wailing: ‘Mothers, old men, children, true hearts and feeling souls! Your friend sleeps in this tomb.’ Soon Marie-Antoinette is there, handkerchief to nose; as with the death of some favourite and fancy princess, the whole nation seems to weep simultaneously. Beyond the tomb lie Rousseau’s confessions, the book where he makes his own grand self eminent and does for all his friends. Voltaire, Rousseau: it’s the end of an enterprise, an era. Better admit it: the self, the grand and glorious self, the only reason for anything, including the existence of the entire cosmos, will soon be on its way to other things, which may amount to nothing at all.

Time passes. His back bends further. Across the Ocean the Americans complete their revolution. Russia takes more of Turkey; a small token or gift or two, but no more, comes from the Russian court. Meantime his eyes continue to fade on themselves, his breath seems to be growing short. His legs feel thick and dropsical, and his heart seems to tug and tussle inside him as it goes about its noble work. From Voltaire, Rousseau too, books and papers go north. One day it will be his study also that will be stripped bare: the books pulled down off the walls, the papers shoved into boxes, the produce of a whole life carted away. Then it will be the tomb and the great necrology, the verdict of Posterity. It’s time now to set everything in order, time to make sure it’s all written down. Writing is everything. Going round the cafés, watching the men playing chess, he finds four youthful copyists and brings them back to the apartment to work. They sit there at four separate desks in the apartment every day now, each of them leafing through thousands of pages in no clear order: notes and scripts and drafts and booklets and letters. When this scribe finishes a sheaf, he hands it on to the next one, who hands back another sheaf in return. Copies are made of copies, from this draft or that, until nobody remembers which was a first original, and nobody knows what’s what.

And now comes a series of strange visitations, weird messages from the north. In a matter of months, three odd figures descend on him. The first is a great white-haired bear of a man, his features growing fleshless, his eyes looking guilty and strained. At first our man has no idea who the caller is: then, somewhere amidst the features, he recognizes Grigor Orlov – once the pride of the court, the most powerful man in Russia, the best lover of Her Highness till the pride rose too high. Ten years ago, he can clearly remember, Grigor hated him, wanted him out of Petersburg. Now he wishes to talk. They spend some perfectly pleasant evenings together, each of them, as it were, perfumed by the same woman. Orlov is bitter and seems haunted, haunted by the recent death of his wife, pursued by the accusing ghost of Tzar Peter the Third, who knows all too well what he has done, though the rest of the world seems to have a fair idea. Orlov carries odd tidings and wild and jealous rumour. With Grigor Potemkin dead, the Empress has changed in spirits. Now she only likes the youngest of Night Emperors – which is why the clever Princess Dashkova, long since exiled and very out of favour, has been travelling all round Britain and Ireland educating her young son in ideas and the arts, so that he can become Night Emperor on his return.

Leaving behind this poisoned cake of malice, Orlov sets off on his anxious way (it will eventually lead to the madhouse). He has hardly gone when the Princess Dashkova arrives herself, staying at the Hôtel de Chine in order to have her bust done, by, of course, Houdon. Her son is with her, Anglicized, soft-stubbled, not much more than a child. He delights in seeing her, relishes her news, taking her to dine. He asks her about Falconet’s great statue: whether it was ever finished, whether it was yet unveiled.

‘I’ve had the most dreadful dream about it,’ he confesses. ‘I dreamt the whole Horseman had fallen, broken loose from those slim back legs and toppled to the ground, crushing all the people beneath it.’

‘No, Didro, it’s there and it’s looking splendid. It stands right there in Senate Square. All Petersburg was out for the ceremony. It was only Falconet who was lost. You see him, perhaps?’

‘Not at all,’ he says. ‘I hear he works at the Sèvres pottery and makes no more statues at all.’ He looks over at the son, young enough to be his grandchild; can this be what things have really come to at the last? He mildly mentions Orlov’s wicked rumour. ‘Orlov was here? But you know Orlov hates me. He goes all over Europe telling everyone the worst. The man is quite mad.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. That explains it.’

‘And besides, if my dear little boy wants to become very good friends with the Empress, isn’t that a matter for him?’

On another day there comes yet a third visitor from the north. This one comes like a secret, and even calls himself the Comte du Nord. His card arrives one day from a servant; its sender simply fails to appear. Then, one morning at Mass (our man does not usually attend, but he’s there with his dancing daughter), a face he recognizes thrusts itself at him out of the throng.

‘Not our famous atheist, going to mass?’ asks the little Archduke Paul, at whose wedding he was a balcony witness just about ten years before. It seems he’s in Paris, buying and buying, Sèvres pottery in profusion, furniture in the wildest quantities, gems and silver; he’s the son of his mother in at least some respects.

‘You can often find philosophers prostrating themselves at the foot of altars,’ says our man.

‘Or at the feet of whores? Like my mother, for instance?’ cries this strange pug-eyed young man who before too long will be the next Russian Tzar.

‘I loved your mother,’ says our man.

‘Of course, so did everybody,’ says the little terror, cackling, ‘but she will return to my father in the end.’

‘She’ll be remembered.’

‘Not if I can help it.’

Our man stares hard at him, and then beyond him, looking for a moment into the bloody hues of a cruel and tyrannical future. Then the church bells ring up above him, the present comes flooding back.

Meantime, as these strange and disturbing ghosts from Russia restlessly come and go, he sits down to write again. This time it’s a play:
Is He Good? Is He Bad?
, he calls it. It’s about himself, of course, as so much human writing is. And it’s about the lesson poor Voltaire found contradictory, and Rousseau has seemed to overlook: human beings are neither wholly virtuous nor wholly evil. They are this and they are that, one person often having a duplicity of self. It’s exactly as Lui once said, long ago at that table on a rainy day at the Café de la Régence, when they talked as the men were playing chess, and Lui turned his life into such a performance. ‘What have I been doing then? What you, me and all the rest of us always do. Good, evil, most of the time nothing. Meanwhile my beard’s been growing and when it got too long I visited the barber and had it shaved off.’

‘You shouldn’t have done,’ he, Moi, has told him. ‘A splendid beard is about all you need to look like a proper philosopher.’

‘Oh, yes, and I’m sure I’d look splendid in marble or bronze. That’s all you men of genius ever think about, isn’t it? Will they manage to play your funeral bells in tune?’

‘Why not, if we deserve it?’

‘When I was the household fool at Bertin’s, we used to have gatherings of philosophers, mostly the failed ones. Never have I seen so many wretched, spiteful, mean and rude creatures in one place. Nobody’s assumed to have any brains, everyone’s as stupid as you are. If you want my honest opinion, all the trouble in the world comes from people who think they are men of genius. I’d smother the lot of them. And don’t think I want to be one of them. I prefer being a common man. Of course it’s all I can manage in any case.’

‘Rameau, you’ve really got a nerve, you know.’

‘I know. That’s why you like to have me here.’

‘A scamp.’

‘I know. At least I’m always the same.’

‘Unfortunately. A fool.’

‘Exactly. But fools like me don’t come cheap. I’m a wonderful bag of tricks, that’s why people need me. Remember, Kings have always had fools. They never had wise men. It’s only just lately they’ve turned the fools into philosophers, which means they are fools. What good did philosophy ever do you?’

What indeed? So what has he been? Good or bad? Wise or foolish? Who can tell? What’s a life? A useful voyage through the universe, fulfilling the grand human plot that’s written in the Book of Destiny above? Or a chaos, a mess, a scribble, a useless wandering, a discontinuity, a senseless waste of time? What’s a moral existence? Who knows, and what difference does it make to a pug-nosed little tzar-to-be who is plainly unaware of any difference between virtue and bitter instinct. What’s a book? What are twenty-eight volumes, including the plates and supplements: a great contribution to human wisdom and science, or a stock of random knowledge already out of date? What’s a story? A discovery or a lie? And what’s the good of all these unfinished, untested little stories: the tale about the one man who becomes two, quarrels with himself, never finds an answer to anything, but still can’t stop asking questions; the one about the servant who thinks he deserves to be the master and the master who could not exist without his servant?

What’s an author? A man who stands on the stage hung with laurels, or a simple pen that drifts over the page, never affirming, never settling anything, just begging a mate from whoever’s there to read? What’s death? The end of things, the eternal silence: or the beginning of Posterity, the start of the journey from the crypt to the pantheon, the standpoint of everything, the angle of vision from the other side of the tomb? He’s feeling robbed now, nearly alone. Sterne gone, and then Voltaire, and then Rousseau. Mademoiselle l’Espinasse dead, and not long after that the d’Alembert she’d been deceiving, taking him off with a broken heart. Condillac’s gone; so has Rameau’s noisy nephew. And then Sophie, dear Sophie Volland, whom he once assured that once creatures had lived they couldn’t possibly die completely, and that we always carried past death the loves of our former life. But how alone now: ‘Alone on earth,’ he writes, ‘having no longer any father, brother, neighbour, friend or company apart from myself.’

But not quite. The Particularist washes at the tub as usual, and shouts at the maid. In the corner the copyists copy, confusedly handing sheaves of paper this way and that. But now the print of the page he’s holding himself suddenly wobbles and shakes. His eyes don’t focus. Then faces from above are looking down. ‘What are you thinking about now, doctor?’

‘I’m thinking about the ways of great men. About how a great man is put together. About how he has cleverly learned to reason, to tyrannize over his sensibility, become the intelligent centre of his own human bundle . . . Now, where’s my hat? Where’s my stick? I’d better be on my way. I have another patient to see in the Marais.’ What can have happened? Why can he not move? He must have had an apoplexy: a stroke . . .