If you find yourself in the Place de la Concorde, you may walk toward the Seine and the sumptuous, ghostly Pont Alexandre with its petrified luxury of verdigris and gold, or else, with your back to the river, step out onto onto the Rue Royale, passing by the door of Maxim’s, which is now, in essence, an international restaurant, but the utterance of the mere name of which continues to evoke figures from Colette, strutting personages drunk on champagne, glimmering with precious stones. Or you can turn right, and will pass beneath the arches of the Hôtel de la Marine – a distant memory of cannons and bombards, the pure silence of veils in the Martinican sky – which will soon bring you out onto Rue de Rivoli.
The arcades stretch on and on. At the far end glimmers the gate – iron spears, black and gold – of the Tuileries gardens. Here, along the covered passageway, the Rue de Rivoli is almost exclusively commercial, its shops not so costly as those of the Fauborg Saint-Honoré, closer to Maxim’s, but still glamorous and varied enough in kind to arouse the curiosity or greed of the foreigners lodging in the Ritz or the Intercontinental who, without walking far, will inevitably end up standing before this solemn, alluring, unbroken row of display windows. Everything is impeccably cared for beneath the ancient and noble stone of the archways, everything seems sparkling new. All at once, a plaque appears on the wall – gilded letters on a backdrop of black stone, if memory serves – telling you that this street, too, has a story. The plaque commemorates the house where Count Leo Tolstoy lived for a season in Paris.
Often, Tolstoy’s characters – like Dosteovsky’s, among others – converse in French, following the custom among the cultivated of their century, particularly in Russia and Poland. This is true even for discussions of trivial matters. It is natural then that certain of Tolstoy’s protagonists – like Pierre in War and Peace – are only fully graspable as people who inhabited the France of the Encyclopedists, the Revolution, and Romanticism, but who did so from the heart of the Slavic world; people who – in a literal sense, but also, clearly, in a figurative one – think in French. Our tendency however is to imagine Tolstoy as somehow remoter, kin to the nights of Petersburg or Moscow, the mute repose of the snowy plains, the distant, barbarous luxury of horses amid the cold, cutting clarity of the grasslands.
Such a landscape was the setting of the writer’s mature years and his moving, solitary death. The Tolstoy who, in 1857, lived in an elegant house alongside the Tuileries on Rue de Rivoli – everything a Russian nobleman in Paris could ask for – was a twenty-nine-year-old man who had yet to publish his greatest novels, and who came to recognise, during that stay in Paris, all the things that bound him to and separated him from Western Europe. Fifty-three years later, senile, in his eighties, Tolstoy, who decides one day to run away from home during the harsh Russian autumn, is a man who will brook no compromise between his morals and day-to-day life.
He runs away, and leaves a letter telling his wife he has done so in order ‘to go on living alone with my conscience’. At five in the morning on 28 October 1910, in the company of his doctor and daughter, Alexandra, the old man leaves his house undercover and spends the night in a monastery. He will still have time to write a long article on the death penalty; but his implacable family is close on his heels, and he must hurry through the stages of his journey. On the train, he falls ill, and has to stop at a station in the provinces, where he will die on November 20. At first, this solitary, persecuted man, agonising in an obscure Russian train station, seems the furthest thing from that young aristocrat passing a season in a Parisian mansion. But if we look at the august letters on the plaque in the Rue de Rivoli – the only tangible reminder of the Russian count’s presence in Paris – we may perhaps be allowed to muse that, in a certain way, the agonising Russian patriarch and the dazzling nobleman, hungry to see and know France, are complementary rather than opposite. The one explains the other, because they have in common the desire to live truthfully.
21 November 1979