And then? Now what happened next? Standing here, in the cold of old Stockholm, I try my hardest to remember. The Queen, I recall, was contrite, and demanded every honour for her thinker: the father of the cogito, the inventor of the passions of the soul. As I recollect it, he was buried with state honours and eulogies somewhere here – surely in the Storkyrkan Cathedral. There were, though, a few small problems. The Queen herself was now in the process of becoming a secret Catholic, and some blamed Descartes. Not long after she abdicated, rode off to Rome in the costumeless costume of an Amazon, and settled in the Vatican. Her monarchical ambitions were by no means over. She sent her royal c.v. to most of the European nations and states; none accepted her well-intentioned offer to rule despotically over them. She took to hanging around the Vatican, quarrelling to the last with the great pontiff, who wanted her out of town. Finally, just as warm-blooded René met a frozen death in the Land of the Bears, the Northern Ice-Lady met a warm one in the Eternal City, arguing to the last with His Everlasting Holiness about those worrying passions of the soul.
That’s all I remember; all I think I remember. But the great philosopher dying of cold in the interests of thought has always managed to move me. Now here I am in Stockholm Old Town: gloomy, at a loose end, a whole afternoon to spare. I decide to track down Descartes’s tomb. For the next several hours, I do just that. I start my quest at the logical place for a state burial, Storkyrkan, which raises its great high-spired bulk at the core of the Old Town. In its noble space I discover royal tombs, fine chandeliers, a quite splendid Saint George and the Dragon. But though I look round everywhere, I see neither hair nor hide of the thinker. I move on and on, from church to church in the Old Town. Soon I’m wandering the whole city, tripping from island to island, going from this high-sided Lutheran church and chapel to that. I gaze on an infinity of cold monuments, a surfeit of funerary inscriptions, a whole handbook full of scan pine-wood pews, stone statues, Latinate mottos, slate-filled boneyards. Between big Swedish gravestones I halt black-robed pastors, skull-faced vergers, Bergman-like widows in eternal weeds. They all long to show me the site of the Swedish Bloodbath. Not one of them knows where to find the resting place of poor René Descartes.
Mystification overtakes me. My instinct for detection grows. My investigative blood runs warm. Walking through an afternoon of drilling rain, I spread my Holmesean net ever wider. I scan maps, hunt clues, follow every hint. I stop perfect strangers, tour guides, American tourists, determined to find out the facts of the case. I’m sent to the Finnish Church. To the German Church. To the Russian Church. To the Kungholm Church, which looks promising, but isn’t. To some church on an island that can only be reached on a little puffing steamer, and holds yet more royal tombs. Remembering France and Catholicism, I go to the Church of Maria Magdalena; not here. For all its liberal morality and sublimated lust, Sweden stays a religious country. And there’s really no end to its churches, graveyards, tombs, effigies, epitaphs, its kindly but uninformative pastors, its weary widows in weeds.
By now the wind’s blowing up, the cold’s coming down. And I’ve seen most of Stockholm: not just Gamla Stan, but the functional modernities, the out-of-town shopping centres, the blank pedestrian precincts that surround it on the hills. The one thing I haven’t seen is a single trace of Descartes. The creator of the metaphysics of human presence, the founder of the great I Am, the prophet of the modern soul, the man who gave us doubt, anxiety, mind over matter, who taught us to question, investigate, observe, is notable only for his uneffacing silent absence. Of the thinker’s thinker, there is neither tomb nor trace, effigy or epitaph, residue nor relic, sign nor signification. I’m confused, I’m engaged, I’m seriously dismayed. Could it be that something a little strange and fantastical happened to the late excellent René Descartes?
FOUR (THEN)
THIS ALL GOES BACK ten years now, to another time: the heyday of the great book itself. ‘ENCYCLOPEDIA: Noun, feminine gender. The word signifies unity of knowledge,’ our man wrote then. ‘In truth, the aim of an encyclopedia is to collect all knowledge that now lies scattered all over the face of the earth; to make known its general structure to those among whom we live; and to transmit it onward to those who come after us, our Posterity.’ It was the truly grand projet, the Book of the Age, the great narrative of all things known and thought, and nothing in the universe mattered more. But writing the book of the age was to prove dirty, ill-paid and bitter work; dangerous and persecuted work too, with court, church and censor rightly suspicious of every tendency, every word, every hidden hint. And if there’s also a sharp-tongued wife who’s always complaining about the condition of literary poverty, and a decent dancing child of a daughter who when she reaches the age of sexual reason will require a handsome dowry, then our dear Denis the Daydreamer will need to do something quite serious to survive . . .
Why not, then: why not let considerate husband and admiring father despoil the philosopher and man of letters? For his richest treasure lies right in front of him – in the grasp of his own two hands, or piled up there on his desk, or stacked round the walls about him. His library – 2,904 leather-bound volumes – is among the finest of the day. In fact it’s nothing less than the library of the Encyclopedia – which makes it the library of the Enlightenment itself. He buys all books, he reads everything, he translates many languages. He grabs up every kind of learning, classic and modern, philosophic, medical, mechanical. He accumulates every printed wisdom. He corresponds with everyone of interest. And he’s annotated the books, all of them, in his own small hand, with his own large mind. Some of these volumes contain a brand-new book of their own, an entire supplement written crabbedly into the margins or across the type. And hasn’t he in turn, using the books, himself written the bulk of the book of books, the Encyclopedia itself: a work he’s struggled with, suffered with, nearly rotted in jail for? Isn’t it time to put it all to market?
No sooner thought of than done. It’s not so hard to work out who might buy. The notion has only to be mentioned to his dear, dandyish, tuft-hunting old friend Melchior Grimm – fat dapper traveller, visitor to every court in Europe, cultural correspondent to royalty, marriage counsellor to the aristocracy, escort agency, whisperer of secrets, sponsor of little Mr Mozart, patron and critic, supplier of the latest Parisian thoughts and notions to all the finest European gentry – than a deal is dealt. Grimm has only to drop one of his graceful, witty, superbly well-informed notes to his old and no less widely travelled friend, Baron-General Ivan Ivanovitch Betskoi of Sankt Peterburg. He serves the great Tzarina as chamberlain, court adviser, purchase-master, and – at least according to one of the innumerable gross rumours that surround her – her mother’s lover, and he depends for his cunning political insight on the wit and wisdom of Melchior Grimm. Betskoi recommends, of course. ‘Buy,’ he then whispers in the Empress’s ear, ‘it will show you are a lover of reason and everyone will admire you for it. Especially the French.’
But the great lady is, as always, wonderfully clever and ingenious. She does more, far more, than that: more than a chancellor might recommend, a philosopher imagine, a maker of mystifications ever devise. ‘It would be a cruelty to separate a wise man from his books, the objects of his delight, the source of his work, the companions of his leisure,’ she pronounces. She buys his library, for a remarkably generous price (15,000 livres). She also refuses delivery, and instead appoints our man his own librarian, at a salary of 1,000 livres a year. With the graceless consent of King Louis, she even makes our man court librarian to the Hermitage – and all this without him ever leaving his room. And so his books will stay on his walls, support his wisdom, accompany his leisure, require some wifely dusting, for the rest of his mortal days. Only then will they be crated and shipped to their own library in the Little Hermitage; and the deal will fully be done.
Our man can only feel deeply grateful. Indeed he makes sure no one now or in the future will ever doubt the joy he feels in this amazing benefaction. ‘I pr
ostrate myself at your feet,’ he writes in one of the world’s warmest thank-you notes. ‘I stretch out my arms to you. I long to speak to you, but my mind has shrunk to nothing! I am as emotional as a little child! My fingers of their own accord reach out for an old lyre, of which Philosophy once cut the strings! I unhook it from my wall! Bare-headed, bare-chested, I feel myself impelled to joyous song! To You!!’ True, there are little local difficulties, as occur with any great court bureaucracy. A year on, Denis the Philosopher is still struggling in deep poverty, and politely writing to complain that not a penny of the promised money has been paid. But, grand as usual, the Tzarina has made perfect amends. She not only clears the blockage, fires the chancellor, remits the money. She actually pays our man the next fifty years of his salary in advance (50,000 livres), making his presumed lifespan a healthy one hundred and four.
Grateful as ever, he’s written a warm ode in her eternal praise. He’s offered his respectful services in all directions, done everything he can to repay the debt. So, even while up on the Neva the world’s strangest water-city grows and grows, the architects, engineers, artisans, actors, economists and even the generals of Paris keep on turning up daily at his door. It’s his task to vet them, sift them, crate them, send them north. When Catherine suddenly acquires the idea of a most enormous statue of homage to be raised to her predecessor Peter, he finds from his encyclopedic list of contributors a co-operative sculptor, Etienne-Maurice Falconet: perhaps not the best, or the most level-tempered, certainly the cheapest to hand. When books and manuscripts circulate in Paris suggesting the Tzarina has been guilty of shameless crimes, the liberal philosopher takes it upon himself to try and suppress them. ‘It’s really bizarre the variety of roles I play in this world,’ he reflects.
And, in thrall to the world’s greatest shopper, he shops. How he’s shopped! With or without his two greatest friends, big Golitsyn, little Grimm, he’s scoured all the grand arcades of Paris, tripped in and out of all the secret doorways of Saint-Victoire. Print-shops, galleries, garrets, ateliers, workshops, salons, auction-rooms: he has scouted them every day, shop-shop-shopping for the great Tzarina. He buys vast shelffuls of books; he gathers up prints and bibelots and necklaces and knick-knacks, he gobbles whole collections of beaux-arts. Feeling a little flush now, he even treats himself a little: to a beautiful new dressing gown, which sadly fails to suit him, for he is not himself at all a grand man. Meantime all over Paris the art prices start to soar. Auctions become battlefields. Prints sell like tapestries. The most seasoned collectors withdraw wounded from the fray. When Gaignat – a former secretary to Louis XV – dies, our Philosopher tips off the Tzarina the man has collected a magnificent library without knowing how to read, created a great art collection without being able to see anything in it more than a blind beggar. Buy, she says. He buys. When the great art collection of Louis-Antoine Crozat is offered in the market, our Philosopher-Fixer is first one at the door. He drives the hardest of bargains, devising another of his stratagems, another great ‘mystification’, running round Paris to divide the various heirs from one another with cunning mischievous rumour and gossip.
Soon Leonardos and Van Dycks, Raphaels, Rembrandts (The Danae), Veroneses, Durers, Poussins, Titians, five Rubens sketches – seventeen crates in all – are making their way north to Petersburg’s Imperial Palace. Now le tout Paris is furiously complaining: patrons, politicians, tax-farmers. Thanks to this unfair northern competition, the art market has gone mad. They will say the same of greedy Americans a hundred years later, greedy Japanese a hundred years after that. They’ll be saying the same in England not much later, when the glorious contents of Sir Robert Walpole’s debt-ridden Houghton Hall, destined to deck the new pavilion in the British Museum, are handed over to good Mr Christie, auctioned to the usual Russian buyer (absent), crated, shipped off up the Baltic. It takes a sage like Denis to explain these things properly. As he explains, art follows power, there are laws of history. ‘How things have changed,’ he declares. ‘We sell our paintings and sculptures in peacetime, Catherine buys them in the midst of war. Now the sciences, arts, taste and philosophy have left for the north, and barbarism and its consequences retreat to the south.’
Which is why for the last ten years he’s done everything a true courtier and a devoted librarian can possibly do for his patron. Except, that is, for one thing: the last, the greatest, hardest service. Again and again the summons has come, ever more imperiously, inviting the philosopher to crate himself up and make this journey north.
‘It is not that Didro would be coming to settle in Russia,’ the lady carefully explains. ‘He would be doing something very much finer: coming to court to express his gratitude.’
Year by year the invitations have grown more pressing and precise. He’s been urgently asked to bring all his friends, ship his relatives, take the whole project of the Encyclopedia northward with him.
Similar summonses, he knows, have gone to his fellow philosophes – Voltaire, d’Alembert. All have sent homage, but displayed strange reluctance actually to go. No doubt bruised by his Potsdam experience, now happy in Ferney where he has set up his own private court, crusty foxy Voltaire has announced himself perfectly willing but found a charming and cunning excuse. He too writes a florid poem in the great lady’s honour (‘You astound the wise man with your wit, /And he’d cease to be wise the moment he saw you’) and explains that, while too busy to visit the court while he’s still alive, he’d be over the moon to do so the minute he’s dead – ‘Why should I not have the pleasure of being buried in some corner of Petersburg, where I could see you passing back and forth, crowned with laurels and olive branches?’ Offered a palace and fortune to go to court as tutor to the young archduke Paul, d’Alembert is more graceless, publicly telling a friend: ‘I am far too prone to haemorrhoids; they take too severe a form in that country, and I prefer to have a painful bum in safety.’
Our man takes a different view. He’s never believed in travel, would stay home if he could. But he’s given far too many hostages to fortune. ‘I love to see the wise man on display, like the athlete in the arena,’ he has announced. ‘A man only recognizes his strength when he has the chance to show it.’ That’s why, for years, he has not been so much refusing as deferring and excusing. ‘I shall do what you expect of me,’ he faxes north, ‘I repeat my solemn oath. But so much, so very much, to do.’ Being our man, there always is. Four books of engravings and two supplements to the Encyclopedia to finish; in the ever-changing universe, knowledge is growing apace. A short novel about a servant whose fate has already been written in the great Book of Destiny above to get on with, as soon as he can find enough time; as well as a dreamlike reflection on human existence and psychology posed round the slumbering figure of Jean d’Alembert, his friend the great philosophe with the painful bum.
Then a more delicate matter: ‘I am attached by the strongest sweetest feelings to a woman for whom I would sacrifice a hundred lives if I had them,’ he advises the Tzarina through his old friend Falconet, now irritably sculpting away in Petersburg. The delicate fact is that the woman he would go to jail or watch his house burn down for is not his wife, the Great Particularist, now getting cantankerously old, but Sophie Volland, his sweet clever mistress. Still, in this demanding world there are some invitations that cannot be refused, some deferrals that cannot be deferred for ever. A generous empress requires her gratitude; promises are promises. The time has come to . . . well, go.
He goes. But how typical that he chooses to take the route of indirection. Which is why he’s here in Holland, the land of free trade, free thought, Protestant instincts and inexpensive gin. It takes but a day or so with his charming hosts to decide he likes it. He likes these long low fields, grinding wooden windmills, endless sand-dunes holding the human fort against grey northern water. He has never before seen Neptune’s vast empire, the Ocean. Unlike almost everything in the world, it never comes to Paris. So the first thing he does is to visit coastal Scheveningen. Th
ere he is, a grey sparkling man in a grey wig, gazing out on the equally grey and not so sparkling North Sea. He loves it: ‘The vast uniformity, accompanied by a certain murmur, invites reverie. It is here that I dream well.’ This soon has him reflecting with fraternal warmth on fish: ‘The soles, the fresh herrings, the turbots and perch, what they call “waterfish” – these are the best fellows in the world.’ He likes the people, plodding wooden-footed through the streets. He finds himself delighted by Dutch men (‘full of republican spirit from highest to lowest’), decent pipe-smokers quite unlike the snuff-taking French, red-faced men who care not a scrap for style and rank. No doubt for purely literary reasons, he even more admires the women. They have the hugest breasts and buttocks he has seen. Yet somehow they appear seductively modest, as French women only do when they are returning from confession.
Soon he’s nicely settled in: wig on floor, pen on desk. Within days he’s off writing yet another book or three. He’s hardly got here and looked out of the window before he produces a brief guide to Holland. He works on his running tale of the travelling master and his roguish servant, who reads his fortunes and misfortunes in the great Book of Destiny above. He starts another story in dialogue about meeting the nephew of the famed composer Rameau. He produces a commentary on a work of Helvétius, thoughtfully adding a deft little dedication to Catherine II. He writes about actors and comedians, considering the paradox that great actors display most passion when they invest the least; already he’s invented Method acting. He slips out to meet the Dutch professors of Leiden, the cheerful little heirs of those who betrayed Descartes and dislodged him from their liberal republic just about a century before.
To the Hermitage Page 6
