The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  So you lay things at his feet. Alongside all the news you bring stories, or music, yourself.

  Or you bring objects. You come like the embassy from the king of Siam, heralded by trumpets, with tributes of gems, tortoise shells, lacquer furniture, bronze and silver and 1,500 pieces of porcelain, a procession of notables up the Escalier des Ambassadeurs, under a new and splendid glass roof, so that the sun illuminates your entry.

  You arrive in the newly completed Hall of Mirrors. This hall is 240 feet in length of glittering reflections, silver tables and gilded statues holding candlesticks with martial triumphs painted above. You are dressed in ikat robes, you wear conical hats. You lay treasure and then more treasure before the king on his throne. More works well with Louis.

  And this palace is a satiety of sound and texture, a galerie de bijoux for the gems from Siam, galleries of pictures and statues and tapestries. But all this news from China of an emperor in his palaces attended by workmen who can fashion anything from jade or gold, of the king of Siam with his storehouses of gems and porcelains, is provocative. It is not that Louis wants to emulate these potentates, for that implies a relationship of deficiency rather than equality, or indeed superiority.

  It is that he wants new places to stage desire.

  ii

  Chinese porcelain arrives at Versailles. The rooms of the son of the king, the grand dauphin, have 381 pieces of Chinese porcelain according to a sumptuously illuminated inventory of 1689. Number 111 in the inventory is ‘Un Vase couvert en forme de Buire de Porcelaine’, the Gaignières-Fonthill vase, not yet named, another treasure amongst all the other clotted treasures. Number 112 is a gourd, dead-leaf colour, decorated with white flowers. Number 113 another. The lid is broken.

  And images of porcelain arrive at court too, including the first pictures of the odd, spiky porcelain pagoda of the emperor Yongle. Nieuhof’s book has been published in Dutch and then French, in German and Latin by 1656, and finally, in English. There are 150 illustrations, real pictures rather than conjectural whimsy. In the book the pagoda is rising high above knots of tiny people with parasols, bowing formally to each other, mountains framing its distinctive profile. Pagodas start to sprout up in the most surprising places, copied in cobalt on to blue-and-white dishes for export from Jingdezhen, then turning up in the background of fantasy Chinese landscapes amongst the willows. The Delftware factories in the Netherlands start to create pagodas as tall as a man for tulips, turning window apertures into slots for one glorious parrot bloom after another.

  And the new French Dictionary, just published by the academy in 1688, rhapsodises over the pagoda: ‘Il y a dans la Chine une Tour appelée Tour de porcelaine’, this porcelain tower is one of the wonders of the world. ‘All of the pieces of porcelain are inlaid with extraordinary craftsmanship, so much so that the joins are barely visible.’

  Mme de Montespan, Louis’ maîtresse-en-titre, is witty and beautiful and needs diversions. She needs to be taken away. So the king builds her a porcelain pavilion, the Trianon de Porcelaine, a place that they can escape to for intimate dinners, for music, for making love in a Chinese bed below a ceiling painted with Chinese birds. And that is it. A building to take you away from the dogged, costive formalities of court into a space that has a different emotional register, an altogether elsewhere. It is a mile away, a mile of slight delay.

  Louis Le Vau, the king’s principal architect for his palaces, designed a central single-storey building five windows in width, flanked by two smaller lodges, set in a walled garden. The pavilion had a high mansard roof on the ridge of which ran lines of small blue-and-white vessels. Other urns punctuated the facade and there were panels of tiles with scenes of oriental luxury. Inside the fantasy took hold. There are a few contemporary engravings of it, and if you disregard the filler stuff of courtiers on prancing horses and stray dogs in the foreground, the impression is of a low, handsome building with lots of pots stuck on to it.

  It isn’t a pagoda at all, of course. But it is a pagoda, in that it is outside, singular, peculiar and terribly expensive. And an absurdity. What are all those pots doing roosting up there, and there, and there?

  And the urns and jars are not porcelain either. The pots were Dutch faience, decorated to look like Chinese porcelains. The problem is that the French can’t make porcelain. They have to buy it, or be given it, and even with the great minister Colbert’s stern prohibitions against foreign goods, faience from Delft alongside French ceramics has had to stand in for the real thing.

  The Trianon de Porcelaine was thrown together, and was damp from the start.

  There is a dip in the ceiling. Faience isn’t normally supposed to be outside in rain and ice; the glaze starts to shiver and peel. Tiles slip on the plaster and lath walls. You might not notice this by candlelight, as the music soars and returns around you and your lover, but fantasy can be a little ramshackle at dawn.

  Not much is white here in Versailles, but the ermine hem of a gown, the face of an actress, lead-white, light up the glare from the banks of candles on a stage. The glass ceiling over the Escalier des Ambassadeurs leaks too.

  Etching of the Trianon de Porcelaine, Versailles, c.1680

  Chapter seventeen

  cream-coloured, provincial and opaque

  i

  I’m here in Versailles because everyone else is here. I list my Jesuits first, then my philosophers. And then the rest. Finally I add the younger sons from royal households on their Wanderjahre, their gap year from court.

  The seventeen-year-old Prince Augustus of Saxony, removed from Dresden because of a liaison with a lady-in-waiting, arrives in Paris on 14 June 1687. He is travelling under the name Graf von Leisnig. This journey is in order to perfect his princely virtues.

  Prince Augustus stays for three months. Two fifths of his allowance goes on wine and a fifth on clothes. God knows how much goes on women. He visits Versailles and is received by the king. He is taken to see the Trianon de Porcelaine in its disrepair. A decision is taken early in July to demolish it, to make way for a new Trianon in pink marble and golden stone. For a different lover. Augustus is just in time.

  ii

  Colbert announces that he intends there to be porcelain made in France. He doesn’t care if it is contre-façon, counterfeit, fake. He wants porcelaine.

  Colbert, brilliantly, has analysed how money can be raised through investment in the commodities that bleed the king’s coffers dry. Alongside the five trading companies that are to span the world, including the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales and the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, he has set up companies or given support for their foundation.

  Mirrors, for instance, are a monopoly of the Venetians, and hence punitively expensive, so he establishes the Manufacture Royale de glaces de miroirs, which not only supplies the mirrors for Versailles, but garners customers. The Siam embassy orders 4,264 mirrors to be shipped back, alongside telescopes, two globes – one terrestrial and one astral – harnesses for elephants, and pleasingly, seven large rugs from the royal carpet-manufactory at Savonnerie. Tribute one way becomes income the other.

  Royal privilege has been given to the Reverend family who establish themselves at Saint-Cloud – a useful distance between Paris and Versailles – to ‘produce faience and to imitate porcelain in the manner of the Indies’.

  The king’s brother, the duc d’Orléans, has his palace at Saint-Cloud, and starts to fill both the Palais Royal in Paris and his country seat with porcelain.

  At Rouen, they are achieving porcelain of a kind. A factory there has also been given a royal privilege. They too have ‘found the secret of making true Chinese porcelain’. It is blue and white – a good clear white – but the materials they are using are deficient. As no one knows what the true constituent elements of porcelain are, you have to trial diverse materials. This means adding various kinds of ground glass to the clay in order to achieve a simulacrum.

  Saint-Cloud porcelain is warm and milky, slightly ivory, sometimes white, de
pending on the economies in materials, or in milling, or the fuel they use. These kinds of porcelain are called ‘soft-paste porcelains’. Their glazes are easy to scratch.

  And they are not translucent. Their opacity is a rebuke.

  These contre-façon porcelains with their grotesques and arabesques painted in cobalt blue – an urn sprouting flowers that swag down to a Chinese roof, a bough turning into a winged woman – are Edward Gorey porcelains. Everything looks pleasant on the surface. You look again and everything is slightly wrong.

  iii

  I’m stuck on the description by Colbert of this porcelain as contre-façon. It suggests passing off one thing as another.

  I keep coming back to it. It takes me uncomfortably back twenty-five years to the end of my Sheffield street as I try out my new white. What am I going to make now that I have abandoned the countryside for an urban life? No one needs pots here. Jobs would be useful.

  I am going to make kitchen porcelain, try and make ordinary things out of this extraordinary material. I make bowls and mugs and large coffee cups and saucers, espresso cups, ginger jars. This is my project. It does not come easily, as porcelain is both too facile, it slips between your fingers like water, and deeply intractable. The longer you spend working on a pot, the less it responds.

  And because I’ve read Edward Said on orientalism, I’m not interested in authenticity, per se, just a conversation with the Orient, the elsewhere that I love. So I don’t decorate them. I’ve put away childish things – the orientalist shorthand of willow trees, a branch of something – and I start impressing seals into the wet clay.

  In studio ceramics there is a tradition of putting your personal seal on the base of the pot, and sometimes a studio mark to show where you made it. Bernard Leach had BL and St Ives. I have had EdeW and, briefly, Cwm to register my habitation on the wet Welsh hill. Now I push a Japanese seal, made in the West, discount ware, into my pots. My attempt at an Empire of Signs.

  Show your workings, said the exam papers at school, show where you have come from, your pathways.

  This is belated adolescent white. Lonely white. Impatient for grandeur, and complexity and transcendence, white.

  If you picked up my Sheffield porcelain, you would work this out. An elderly friend, a Viennese émigré photographer who lived in monochromatic austerity drinking and eating only off the pared-down porcelains of Hans Coper and Lucie Rie, examined my bowls. Tell me dear boy, voice lowers and strengthens, the ‘w’s plosive ‘v’s, vy the veight?

  The weight, I say twenty-five years too late, was not my intention. They were not light, porcelain is light. They were rarely translucent, porcelain is translucence. And they were not particularly white. I’d built my own kiln again for reasons of desperate economy, and I struggled to get it to fire to the high temperatures necessary to give porcelain its salient qualities, 1,280 degrees Celsius and above. The hours would unravel, expensively, roaring with yellow heat.

  Porcelain is the promise. It takes me away. Up the road and through the demolition sites of Attercliffe, past the building site where they promise the biggest shopping centre in England, on to the motorway at Junction 31 and four hours down to London in my van to see my girlfriend, to take my porcelain to the shops and galleries. I am twenty-four and I make Sheffieldware.

  It is cream-coloured provincial porcelain, contre-façon.

  iv

  The Grand Colbert for all his icy brilliance is nowhere near discovering the Arcanum, laying true French porcelain at the feet of his king. You can put as much money into the project as you want, but it remains earthbound. It does not ring true. In the factories at Rouen and Saint-Cloud they are missing something crucial.

  Colbert has, however, found a young tutor for his son, a mathematician from a good aristocratic family in Lusatia, on the border with Poland.

  And this is where the story lifts into the air.

  This young man with the unwieldy name of Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus is my next witness, my next lead in the journey into porcelain.

  He has come highly recommended to Colbert by both Leibniz and by Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher and grinder of lenses. Colbert is exacting in all things, from taxation to the maximum number of hours it is possible to work in a day. He insists that the members of the Académie française arrive on time and are not allowed to leave before the cessation of the session. Colbert likes the idea of this severe young man named Tschirnhaus, and is pleased that ‘his ignorance of the French language would compel him to speak to his son in Latin’.

  Chapter eighteen

  opticks

  i

  So I put a portrait of Tschirnhaus on my wall. I’m not sure how accurate it is. He has a high forehead and a good, direct stare, but the engraver was mostly interested in his wig. I wonder if I will call him Ehrenfried, or Walther, or if he is to be Tschirnhaus. We stare at each other.

  The young German mathematician was also twenty-four when he reached Paris and his first position as tutor for Colbert’s son. To be a mathematician, a philosopher, an enquirer into the properties of the world, you need someone to support you. You cannot be brilliant without a sponsor. Tschirnhaus was adept at making friends, good at learning how to create an impression, the result, I am convinced, of being the seventh child in a family.

  He was the youngest son, born on the family estate in Kieslingswalde, Germany. It wasn’t a grand house, more old rectory than schloss, comfortably set amongst the rolling Silesian hills and birch woods. And it was a modest household, the family unusual amongst their neighbours in their fierce attentiveness to education – something due perhaps to the mixture of a Saxon father and a Scottish mother. Unlike other boys who could have spent their hours fencing and hunting he was given private lessons in mathematics. At seventeen he left home for the University of Leiden to study medicine, mathematics and philosophy. It was at Leiden that Tschirnhaus met Spinoza.

  Spinoza was the exception to every rule. Spinoza had given away his patrimony to his sister, was independent of patronage, expelled from the Jewish community of his birth, excoriated by the Christian, he was living as a private scholar, making his living from grinding lenses. Imagine meeting him as a young man. His writings strip away your remaining pieties.

  Spinoza gave Tschirnhaus his first letters of introduction. They were to the secretary of the Royal Society in London and to Isaac Newton. He was on his way. For four years he travelled in Holland, Italy, France, England and Switzerland, a series of extraordinary encounters with philosophers and ideas. And it also feels slightly enchanted, one letter of introduction leading to another, one door opening to a year in Paris with Colbert, another to a visit to one scientist in The Hague and then to another in Milan until you see a beautiful diagram, a map of thinking about the world.

  Tschirnhaus, 1708

  If x means y, go to z.

  Tschirnhaus began work on his first mathematical equation, A method for removing all intermediate terms from a given equation. He published it in the Acta Eruditorum, the journal of empirical learning across Europe. These are four pages of brilliance in which he takes on algebraic equations and sets down ‘some things concerning this business, enough at least for those who have some grounding in the analytic art, since the others could scarcely be content with so brief an exposition’.

  Idiotically, I buy the Latin exposition of The Tschirnhaus Equation from a bookseller in Amsterdam, and in one moment prove how caught up I am in the world of ownership when his exposition is about thinking, simplifying, lucidity, cutting away the extraneous. It is about brevity.

  I pay far too much. Who else wants these four pages?

  ii

  Tschirnhaus’s journey towards his discovery of porcelain is a series of reflections and mirrorings.

  Optics are at the heart of debate because light is a problem. How does it move? How fast does it move? Where does the heat come from? Lenses and mirrors are provocative artefacts, bending and intensifying light, exploding distances, b
ringing planets and dust into focus. Porcelain is white and hard but lets light through. How can this be?

  Caute, be cautious, says the ring on Spinoza’s left hand in his room in the village outside Leiden. He grinds his lenses, day after day, deepening then eliding the curves, working out his problems as the fine white silica dust settles on the bench. He has written, amongst everything else, on the rainbow.

  Light causes fearsome argument. No one can agree.

  Isaac Newton’s Opticks, or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light examines the question of how light is not modified, but separated:

  I procured me a Triangular glass-Prisme, to try therewith the celebrated Phaenomena of Colours … I have often with Admiration beheld, that all the Colours of the Prisme being made to converge, and thereby be again mixed, reproduced light, intirely and perfectly white … Hence therefore it comes to pass, that Whiteness is the usual colour of Light; for, Light is a confused aggregate of Rays indued with all sorts of Colours, as they are promiscuously darted from the various parts of luminous bodies.

  Newton writes to Leibniz: ‘I was so persecuted with discussions arising from the publication of my theory of light that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so substantial a blessing as my quiet to run after a shadow.’

  To be a young philosopher is to be part of this turmoil and it seems that everyone on his journey across Europe grinds lenses, dreams of telescopes, writes about prisms and rainbows, sends instruments across the world to delight the Chinese emperor, makes mirrors or employs them to create great heat.

  In Lyons Tschirnhaus meets François Villette, the inventor who has demonstrated a great burning mirror in the Petite Galerie at Versailles in front of the Sun King, illuminating the whole room using only the mirror and a single candle. In Milan, Tschirnhaus recounts to Leibniz, he has spent time with the scientist and mathematician Manfredo Settala who uses burning mirrors to melt materials, and has talked to him of its potentialities for ruby glass and porcelain.