NATURALLY, for all his years and for all his weariness, our man is quite incapable of staying idle very long. Soon he’s again taking his five o’clock walks through the streets of Paris, wandering through the elegant and erotic refurbishments that have been done to the fine Palais Royal, where everything is on offer. Here the newspapers and periodicals are sold, the banned books are eagerly distributed and taken home, the city’s finest whores in their most elegant and teasing costumes flit through the arcades in front of the shouting merchants and the wandering beaux. In the old way he discusses with himself questions of politics and love, taste and philosophy, letting his mind rove wantonly. By night he dines as he always used to with the city’s great men of learning, who are also beginning to show their years: d’Alembert, d’Holbach, Helvétius. He hears of the strange solitary doings of Rousseau, the sharpest new barbs of Voltaire. He returns to the salons of the great married ladies – so many of them now, all offering their services as players of music, writers of books, grand Semiramises, mistresses to philosophers and men of true wit. But the grand ladies are younger now; so are the men of true wit. When the weather is wet, he strolls to the cafés, sitting down, as ever at the tables of the Café Procope, or wandering into the Café de la Régence, watching the clever men shift the pieces across the chequerboards while he digests the latest scandals, reads the latest broadsheets, scans the latest fops.
And as usual Grimm’s political instincts have proved entirely right. Paris has changed. It’s changed completely, entirely, epochally, epistemically. For the moment at least there’s a quite new spirit to this relaxed, youthful, louche new reign, with its pastoral dreams and its panderous court at the Hermitage. Everything feels just a bit more tolerant, a bit more permitted, though somehow also more anxious, more volatile, for this is a world where freedom is taken almost too freely, to the point where it dissolves in all directions. Decadences multiply, sex is grosser. Women tease men in a great claim of power. It’s grown more difficult to enrage the censor, though his Jesuitical friend the Abbé Raynal has already done it, and his own turn will surely come (as indeed it does, for it’s already written there will be one more grand brush with the book-burners before his days on earth are done). At his age it gets harder, ever harder, to sound like a fiery torch or a radical young man – especially when there are so many much younger men doing just the same kind of thing.
In fact a whole grand gallery of young philosophers is now beginning to fill the clubs and cafés, as if these days there were simply no occupation other than thought. There they sit, drinking their wines, supping their rich Arabian coffees, dressed up in their fashionable silks and brocades and their large Voltairean turbans: having their shoes cleaned, flaunting their wit, pronouncing their atheism, confessing their humour, dissecting the universe, chattering like monkeys about whatever it is – life, or liberty, or the pursuit of happiness – that happens to be the vogue of the week. When do they think? When do they find time to write?
Certainly there’s no shortage of their scribblings, and our man knows exactly whom to blame. It’s Panckoucke, of course, the great media mogul, who has been buying up everything: grabbing newspapers, book-titles, imprints, novelists, thinkers and journalists by the score. Now he’s publicly rebuked our man for failing to update his own encyclopedia, and is announcing the need for a mega new one, the biggest and grandest multimedia project the world has ever seen. Where our man has invested wisdom, intelligence, risk and exile, he simply invests money; for in the new Paris everything is for purchase. And yet the whole greedy thing has the King’s blessing, it seems: as long as the game is commerce and not criticism, nobody minds at all. Now Panckoucke and his agents are running round all the cafés and clubs, tempting the philosophers, hiring the researchers and the copyists, hunting down hacks. Money is no object; he’s paying absurd fees for absurd thoughts, and inveigling the investments of any kind of subscriber, not simply the wise and learned readers his own grand volumes were meant for. Critique has become commodity, light has become power. As for our man: truth is he’s famous, he’s fashionable, he’s failing, and he’s finished.
Yes, Paris now is exactly as young Beaumarchais – another of the many men he’s invented and set off on his profitable way – describes it in his newest play at the Comédie-Française, the one about the barber-factotum, another tale of a servant and a master: ‘Such a barbaric age we live in. I can’t see it’s produced a single thing we should be grateful for. Only every kind of stupidity and trash: atheism, magnetism, electricity, religious freedom, inoculation, quinine, terrible plays and modern rubbish, Diderot’s Encyclopedia . . .’ Yes, times have certainly changed – but it all goes so far and no further. There are political reforms and new freedoms. Sex is coarser, passions are cruder, appearances are crasser, violent actions win more approval. Science prospers, invention flourishes. Thought has grown far more instrumental, far less abstract. There’s a great flurry of discovery: inoculation, the flowings of the blood, the marine chronometer, the wily ways of mad Dr Mesmer who stares into everyone’s eyes, magnetism, electricity. Distant islands are set foot on. People are trying to travel on rivers by the aid of paddles and steam. In the parks outside Paris, in front of the most enormous crowds, others are tying themselves or their animals to huge floating bladders and trying to ascend high in the sky.
Still waiting news from his northern patron, he attempts a number of topical inventions of his own. He devises a household printing machine that allows a man a simple means to make his own books; if pressed, he thinks he’ll call it a type-writer. He creates another machine for the encoding and decoding of messages, modelled on the lively brain of d’Alembert, and designed to help politicians transmit their secrets. In his spare time he tries to square the circle. A fresh spring comes, and still nothing arrives from Russia. By now it’s not too hard to grasp the point. There will never be a Russian encyclopedia. No one will ever build his glorious Russian university. His daily papers for Catherine must be mouldering away somewhere in the back rooms of the Hermitage; as for the sixty-six notebooks he created them from, he shoves those away under lock and key. Now he goes round the galleries and starts to sell off his Russian treasures and trophies, which would have served for his new encyclopedia: the cabinets of Siberian minerals, the glorious Orthodox bible in Cyrillic presented to him over the Christmas ceremonials by the glittering and dome-hatted archimandrite.
Time to think again about what it means to be a modern Seneca. Perhaps the whole great question of the good society, of the thinker’s proper service to morals and society, needs a totally different solution. But what? He goes to see his old friend, the fat Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal. Big, burly, a loud laughing noise at all the finest dinner tables, he too has created one of the greatest books of the age: The History of the Two Indies, the most wonderful and vexing book of the day. Some have called it the other Encyclopedia; and, banned in France for its liberalism, it’s published in Holland and Geneva, and read almost everywhere. Our man has contributed to it before in its earlier days. What is it? Well, a sort of a history, a kind of philosophy, a handy compendium of the promises of international commerce and industry. It’s a work of reform, a work of anthropology, a work of true human feeling. But in truth it’s really a grand lamentation: a dark cry over the lost of the two great French empires, one by the Himalayas, the other reaching in a great arc from the icecaps of the Arctic to the tropical richness of the Bay of Mexico, the Indian lands so sweetly called Louisiana – two French imperial lands which, thanks to an accident of history and the incompetence of a now-dead monarch, have been lost by the French to the British just a little more than a decade before.
Lovely Louisiana, from the icecaps and codbanks of the Arctic to the tropic plantations of the Mexique Bay, from the wonderful downpour of Niagara to the turtled lands of the Floridians: what Frenchmen could resist it? The British have been there and now they have won it; but it’s the French who have explored and toured it, asked its great questions, mapped it, found the way down the four great rivers – Mississippi, Ohio, Saint Lawrence, and Oregon – which have carried the pelts, floated the Indian canoes, opened the bluffs and the prairies, and spoken of the soul of nature and natural man himself. While the British sat on the coastlines and saw trade, the French – the great explorers and missionaries like Champlain and Hennepin – found wonders, mapped landscapes, named the continent in French. America is a French fiction into which the British have blundered, and now they are blundering still. Clearly Raynal’s book calls for yet another revision. Our man is happy to offer his services. The Abbé sets him on.
Soon he’s writing frenziedly, ‘doing a Raynal’, as he tells his friends, working on it night and day. He lets Raynal record the economic data, the prospects of trade, the dry statistics, the historical evidence, the facts of geography and the dreary details of noontime temperature – while he adds the great decorations and deconstructions of philosophy, speculations on the spirit of society, the sins of despotism, the dangers of arrogant monarchy, the wrongs of slavery, the rhythmic vision of the rise and fall of empire that only he (and Edmund Gibbon) could give. Thoughts that served well in Petersburg strangely fit the Americas too.
‘God hates tyrants,’ he writes, ‘and has printed on men’s hearts a love of freedom. Under the supreme will of despotism there is only terror, servility, flattery, stupidity and superstition. That intolerable situation ends either with the assassination of the tyrant, or the dissolution of the empire.’ Little wonder his writings are once more fated to be burned in Paris by the public hangman.
‘Democracy arises on this corpse,’ he adds, ‘and the annals are filled with heroic deeds. Laws reign, genius flowers, sciences flourish, the useful trades are no longer held in poor esteem. So, Kings and Ministers, love the people, and you will be happy.’
Then, remembering a great empress and the difficult problems of writing on human skin, he adds a coda: ‘Unfortunately this state of happiness is only momentary. Everywhere revolutions succeed one another, at a speed one can hardly follow. But the laws of nature tell us that all empires are born and then die.’
And our man isn’t the only one to think these matters important. ‘The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are two of the greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind,’ writes, at just this time, a certain dry Scots professor, Adam Smith, in a grand account of The Wealth of Nations. ‘Two new worlds have been opened to industry, each of them greater and more extensive than the old one.’ Smith may think he is writing of a British empire possessed, a project that can be realized. But he seems already to have sensed the illusion: ‘The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold-mine, but the project of a gold-mine.’
But Smith writes as a Briton, from the land not of wit but common sense. For a Frenchman things are different; all there is to see is a lost world, a fading paradise, a land of dying wonders, of tumbling ruins, mournful landscapes, vacant spaces, fallen dreams. Yet soon that will be true for the British too. For, in the lovely lost lands of Louisiana they too have chosen to display power and monarchy in a grand act of political folly. Even while the dreams of their colonists on the Eastern seaboard begin to spread ever westward, they are stirring them to fury, arms, and rebellion. And in that hasn’t philosophy – true philosophy, French philosophy – played its crucial part? When, in the year Smith publishes his book, a congress of these British American colonials gathers to declare its Independence (‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’), the self-evident truths they choose to commit to paper (‘all men created equal . . . endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights . . . Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness . . .’) all seem curiously familiar to our man. It’s just as if he has written them himself; in fact he thinks he very probably has.
Well, the transatlantic insurrection is naturally more than enough to delight any Frenchman. Soon all of Paris is filling with heroic American dreams. An entire generation of young nobles, longing to give the British a pasting, exhausted to boredom by a whole dull decade of peace, still smarting to the quick from the old American losses, is ready to be up in arms. Seeking to be a national hero, the youthful Marquis de Lafayette is already fitting out a ship, the Victoire, and filling it up with troops and weapons to go filibuster for the great transatlantic cause of liberty and Anglophobia. Even our man’s own theatrical creation, the rogue-clockmaker Caron, now come to fame as Beaumarchais, is devoting the profits of his barber-drama to the cause, and trying to rouse the King, in whose ear he is known to whisper, to action: ‘It is Britain, sir, whom you must humiliate and weaken, if you do not wish her to humiliate and weaken you at every turn.’ Now he’s devised his own distinctive mystification. He’s invented a fake import-export firm to smuggle arms to the insurgents, and charted a vast freebooting fleet of forty ships, aided by money from France and Spain, but mostly at his own expense. The truth is it’s Figaro the barber-valet who will devise and finance the American Revolution. And his money will never come back.
One evening, with the Great Particularist riding at his side, our man goes out for dinner chez Beaumarchais. Clockmaker Caron now lives very grandly, entertaining like a gentlemen and keeping several mistresses on the side. Indeed the man is everywhere these days, one minute engaged in some elaborate sexual shenanigans in Seville, the next just back from London where he’s been engaged in high level spying and revolutionary conspiracy. But tonight he’s entertaining a rather special and unexpected guest: a guest who has come over in considerable secrecy from the Americas. He’s a truly noble savage, a man who has all the skills and wisdoms of the greatest Parisian scientists, yet combined with all the innocent sagacity and the instinctive political virtue of one of nature’s own self-constructed philosophers. Ages have not withered him, nor history shaped his infinite variety. Now he’s crossed the Atlantic on a thirty-day voyage much-menaced by the British – which has not deterred him from making a whole new set of scientific discoveries on the matter of flying fishes and the flow of the Gulf Stream.
He’s been landed exhausted at Nantes, but promptly whisked in secret to Paris. Now he resides in grandeur at a safe house presented to him in Passy, where his covert presence has soon become a matter of general knowledge. For good homely things can’t be kept secret for long, and genius merits its homage. In fact he’s already in the process of becoming perhaps the most famous man in France. They’re making teapots with his shaggy, folksy, sexy head on. He’s already much better known than Marie-Antoinette, and a good deal more popular. Half the most elegant and beautiful ladies of Paris have been tempted by his wit, his wisdom, his lumbering gallantries and his naked indiscretion. Madame Brillon is known to be besotted with him. Madame Helvétius is publicly considering his recent generous proposal of marriage. And even for the husbands, who have all of course read Rousseau, he is none other than Poor Richard: one of nature’s heroes.
Such great things he’s done, and all that without even leaving the American swamps and forests (give or take a visit or two to the Royal Society in London). He looks like a trapper or a logger, but he’s revolutionized the radical art of printing, and transfigured the household stove. With a Bostonian’s self-reliance coupled with a Philadelphia Quaker’s simplicity he’s reached his hands into the heights of the sky and plucked down lightning. In short, he’s the Electrical Ambassador, wired to the universe. Now he arrives, wearing that famous, original Canadian beaver pelt on the top of his head (oddly enough, Rousseau used to wear one exactly like it). His suit is plain, his hair shaggy and undressed. His expressions benign, he beams at the world over a pair of bifocal spectacles he’s believed to have invented and ground himself.
‘Mon cher Monsieur Frankling!’ our man cries out, embracing the grainy, tweedy, eye-glassed figure warmly.
‘And who have we here now? Not the great Doctor Dee Diderot?’
‘Yes, this is Diderot, or whatever’s left of him. A wearing-out sort of fellow, a little halt and lame now.’
‘You’re but a child, sir, I’m older. Listen, that was one of the best books I ever read, your encyclopedia.’
‘You actually read the Encyclopedia?’
‘Sure I did, all of it. You know the entry I remember best? The one on ‘Encyclopedia’. Who wrote that?’
‘That’s mine, I wrote that.’
‘I recall you made some observations on the enormity of our revolution in modern thought. Imagine, you said, the dictionaries of just one hundred years ago. And you added: “You won’t find under ‘aberration’ any notion of what astronomers now mean by the term. As for electricity, you added, you will find only false notions and ancient prejudices.’
‘Of course you were the great transformer I had in mind.’
‘Well, you see, sir, I always remembered the lesson I put into the mouth of Poor Richard. “If you don’t want to be forgotten, / As soon as you are dead and rotten, / Either write things worth the reading, / Or do things worth the writing.” I hope I’ve done both.’
‘You have, sir, and now you are giving us the hope of freedom.’
‘True. What we may shortly have – if the Great Creator allows it, your King supports it, and dear Beaumarchais here will pay for it – is a brand-new nation.’
‘A nation, I’ll pay, of course I’ll pay,’ says Caron, otherwise Beaumarchais. ‘But that’s simply the beginning, my dear man. After freedom we’re going to need a society, I mean an entire social system, a right and equal way of doing things. Now there’s the problem for us philosophers. Tell me this, have you ever been in America, Louisiana, Monsieur Diderot?’
‘Only in my mind. And my writings. Les Deux Indes.’
‘I know. I send Raynal his statistics. That’s why it’s so boring.’
‘Hardly boring. I believe we have a better America on paper than you yet do in life.’
‘But that’s what I mean, sir. You must go there. I really wish I could put you on a ship there right now.’
‘My legs, sir.’
‘You’d see wonders. A glorious land or continent that represents nature in its perfection, its mystery, let me say its grossness. A world that still has to cross the bridge from nature to society.’
‘Monsieur Diderot too has seen wonders,’ says Caron.
‘Yes, sir, I think you went to Russia?’
‘I did. Another society at its own beginnings.’
‘No, sir, Russia isn’t new, it’s just pretending. You went for the right reason to the wrong place. North America is the first time civilized human beings have ever been in a position to devise an entirely new society without suffering the weight of an old history.’
‘Then you do need philosophers. After Eden there has to come civilization.’
‘And after civilization?’
‘Decay and ruin, such is the course of empire.’
‘See for yourself. Come, sir, I shall arrange it. Promise me.’
‘But my legs, sir, truly, my legs.’
‘And what do you do next in Paris, Monsieur Frankling?’
‘What do I do? What can you possibly do after meeting Diderot? You go and meet Voltaire.’
‘He’s in Ferney.’
‘But is he, sir, is he? Ask again.’
‘You mean he’s here? Then I have to meet him.’
When our man returns to the rue Taranne that night, he finds himself staring again at the manuscript he has left lying open on his desk. He thinks again of the big man in the half-glasses and the beaver hat. He thinks of the Indian wonderlands, the great swamps and forests and tree-frogs of Louisiana, the great downpour of falls at Niagara, the Indian peoples, the smell of the skunk, the caribou splashing in the lakes, the noise of the whippoorwills in the woods. He writes a little blessing to those dear Louisiana lands, the old transatlantic provinces, now to have a different future: ‘May there never be born in any one of them, or if so may he die at once, by the stroke of the hangman or the dagger of a Brutus, a citizen who is so powerful, and so much the enemy of human happiness, to devise for himself the project of becoming its master.’
He thinks a moment, and then adds a benign coda: perhaps if so the world might create just one republic that is able to defeat the law otherwise written in the great Book of Destiny: ‘The decree pronounced against all the things, all the societies, all the people of this world; that all have a birth, a flowering, a tiresome old age, and then a death.’
And so, thanks to Franklin, it finally happens. The two men who really do have to meet sometime during their lifetimes manage to meet at last. There, in the bare darkened drawing room of someone’s Paris hotel particulaire, he sits, clad in a dressing gown, the most famous man of the age. He’s been carefully arranged in a big armchair. His bony feet are naked, a turban is wound round his head. He’s eighty-four years old now, visibly tired, coughing heavily. Over that long lifetime that reaches across reign after reign he’s written more words than almost any other wordsmith could manage: more even, when our man honestly thinks about it, than he has himself. His collected works will run to over a hundred volumes, constructing yet another financial disaster for poor Caron, Beaumarchais, who when he turns his eyes from sponsoring American insurgency will decide to buy up all his posthumous papers and rights. Then his papers themselves will scatter themselves like parachuting seeds through all the libraries, private and public, of the world. His letters already cover the world in hopeless variety: so many, to so many people, on so many different things. He’s performed in all the familiar genres: poetry and prose, comedy and tragedy, fiction and history, satire and squib. He’s assumed many identities, taken over a hundred pseudonyms; even the name by which all know him, Voltaire, is not his true name. Just finding the man again – tracing his signatures, discovering his different roles in life, finding his books and records – will provide many with their own life-work.
Now, in this April of 1778, he’s come back to Paris. Posterity stalks him everywhere he goes. Even his old enemies have become his friends. ‘Author! Author!’ they shouted out two nights ago at the Théâtre Français, where his latest creation, the tragedy Irene (neither age nor travel stop him writing) is now playing. Court and censor have always denied him; yet court and censor were there in the audience to hail him – with the one conspicuous exception of His Serene Majesty himself. Mozart is playing in Paris, but this particular auditorium is on this night where everyone wishes to be. The dark classical tale has unfolded, but that is nothing compared with the second and greater drama. The author’s bust by the excellent Caffieri is set centre-stage. The comedians and tragedians reappear to place laurels on his head, in the supreme apotheosis. Then, as rumour buzzes through the theatre, the shout begins to rise. ‘Author! Author!’ Soon the plaster cast is replaced by the living author, fetched down from his box, the laurels on the bust removed and placed on the living head. ‘Author! Author!’ The standing ovation lasts for more than five minutes. ‘Author! Author!’ shout the vast street-crowds of Paris the moment he sets foot outside. ‘I may suffocate, but it will be under a shower of roses!’ he cries with his usual grace and felicity, as he struggles through the mêlée to make it to his carriage. Apotheosis!
‘Monsieur Talleyrand was here, and also Monsieur Frankling,’ says Madame Denis, stout and ever self-interested, as she leads our man up the stairs of the private hotel.
‘How was Monsieur Frankling?’
‘Oh, the American insisted in speaking in French, and he insisted in speaking in English, so nobody understood anything. But it was very important. If only Rousseau had been there as well.’
‘Oh yes,’ murmurs our man. There are vast paintings on the staircase, torches on the walls. In a room where the shutters are almost closed, he’s sitting there shaded in half light. It all feels so familiar, as if it has happened once before. There are the monkey features, there is the wicked grin, perhaps just a bit sunk back into itself these days. There he is, witty and snappy and spiteful at an age when most men would be bent and bitter and glum: the brigand of Lake Geneva, jack of all trades and master of most of them too. His spiky tongue licks his large red lips as he sits there shoeless in the armchair: exactly as he sat in the statue that haunts the Empress’s court.
Madame Denis moves the rugs and cushions and sits down to eavesdrop on the talk. But what can be said to him? He’s often been bitter and spiteful, yet no one has done more for humankind: defended liberty, supported freedom, brought the wisdoms of Locke and Newton into the Popish thought-world of France. He’s known exile, beating, disgrace, prison and excommunication. He’s lived with the great powers of the age, and played his part in raising them high or bringing them low. He’s paid plenty of homage to princes and popes and potentates, but with cleverness and cunning enough they now pay homage to him. These days it’s Frederick of Prussia who flatters the philosopher, rather than the other way round, and who plans monuments in his honour, even sending him his bust from Potsdam with inscribed on the base not his name, Voltaire, but one simple word: ‘Immortal.’ So he is.
Now he’s a crown prince of Philosophy: grand, glorious, very rich. His wealth sometimes seems a mystery, given his claims to persecution. Yet however he won it he’s put it to use: acquired his own hectares and territories, founded his own city, created his own Hermitage. Once Ferney was said to be on the edge of Geneva; now it’s Geneva that sits on the edge of Ferney. He’s cultivated his gardens, grown his pomegranates, tended his vineyards, reared his fat sheep, thousands of them grazing once uncultivated fields. He’s set up studios, workshops, lofts, factories; eighty watchmakers depend on his employment. He’s entertained everyone, either at his huge table at Ferney or through the more abstract means of print and book. Ferney itself has become his private city, empire, court, a principality where princes come to attend on thinkers. His plates are of silver, his coat of arms decorates every door. He wished to be honest, and he wished to be famous; he wished to be virtuous, wished to be noble; wished to be Olympian and indifferent, wished to be very rich. In his eighty-four years he’s succeeded, made his grand deal with Posterity. He’s written and performed in all of his own plays; and for an eighty-year lifetime he’s played in the biggest play of all, the one with the noble hero whose name was Arouet but is now called Voltaire.
He’s coughing, spitting, and probably dying, wearing himself out in Paris in one vast final moment of fame. Yet as Frederick has admitted at last, he truly is immortal. He’s become his own statue, transfigured himself into his own waxwork, grown into his own bust. He’s sitting there Houdon-like, the same grinning monkey, but lit up with sparky animation; the stout niece sits protectively beside him, eyeing his visitor distrustfully, handing him protective cups of chocolate. He’s the talk of all Paris now, everyone chattering about his safe return.
‘Cher maître,’ our man says, going forward, kneeling, putting out his hands. ‘Embrace me, as one honest man to another. I am Diderot. I think I’m not entirely unknown to you.’
‘My dear Diderot, my fellow Socrates, my honest and able brother in thought. We’ve known each other for ever, but we’ve left this meeting remarkably late.’
‘I hoped one day I would come to Ferney.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘So it was written, or not written.’
‘Was it? Well, what should we say to each other now?’
Madame Denis sits watching, listening carefully, no doubt knowing every wise and witty word is worth at least a livre.
‘Shakespeare,’ says our man, trying a fast opening serve.
‘Don’t mention it,’ says the grinning monkey.
‘I love him,’ says our man.
‘Amazing. And I do not.’
‘Nothing in the world would please me better than to be able to stand beneath his enormous statue and reach up to touch his fine testicles,’ our man ventures.
‘Indeed?’
‘If by that means I could inherit by proxy what is surely the world’s greatest act of generation.’
‘I fear you’re as vulgar as he is. And I had you for a man of reason.’
‘So, as I admire him, you condemn him?’
‘I condemn him, my dear sir, for his grossness of imagination. I denounce him before the seats of judgement for his want of philosophy. I dismiss him for his grotesque naïveté, his confusion of artistic purpose, his unwavering want of taste.’
‘In that case you hate him for his greatness, surely? For not writing like yourself?’
‘It’s a good standard.’
‘You are condemning a man who was cleverer, wiser, more capacious even than you.’
‘Now, sir, you’d better go,’ cries Madame Denis, rising.
‘No, Marie-Louise, I have to answer this,’ says the Immortal. ‘I am over eighty, older by decades than you, old enough to be truly proud.’
‘You are also old enough to be dead,’ says our man. ‘No one could ever wish it, but before it happens tell me what I always wanted to know. You’ve written more than any of us, cher maître. Written more wisely, more fluently, more wonderfully. But did you never perhaps . . . tire of it?’
‘Tire of it?’
‘Tire of writing, I mean.’
‘No, I never tired of writing. That would be like tiring of existing. Writing is everything. What about you? Did you? Surely not?’
‘I’m here to confess at your knees, as I would never confess to any other soul in the world,’ says our man.
‘Tell me, my son.’
‘I know my sins,’ he says, getting onto the floor. ‘I have talked too much. I was born to chatter foolishly and tell the truth. To anyone: friends, enemies, total strangers. It was rarely in my best interest.’
‘Get up, sir.’
‘I was never wise. I fell into the delight of ideas, the joy of imaginings, the wonder of fictions. I loved dialogues and dramas. I watched truth come and go. I dwelt among plots and mystifications. You know I made the Encyclopedia.’
‘You know I know,’ says the Immortal, ‘I wrote for it too, at your request. Along with so many other honest men.’
‘Yes, everyone wrote, everyone with a decent mind and enough honour. But I’m not proud even of that. I’m much prouder of the things I never finished, the work I left undone.’
‘Why do you want to tell me this?’
‘I’m already well past my sixtieth year . . .’
‘Your sixtieth? I’m way past my eightieth.’
‘I’m weary of strife and harassment. The world’s turned foolish and gone way past me. I seem to long only for obscurity and a nice quiet death.’
‘There’s nothing quiet about death.’
‘But, sir, when the day comes to us, what will it all have meant? For you to have been Voltaire? For me to have been Diderot? Though I realize your two syllables are destined to survive far longer than my three.’
‘Of course we’ll survive. All of us. Ours is the age that made the difference. And not just in France, my dear sir, in the world as it rolls.’
‘In Petersburg, I saw your bust by Houdon.’
‘There are several, you know. There’s another in Paris. It made his name. Now they are asking him to do a plaster George Washington.’
‘And Pigalle is doing one of you? To tell you the truth, he’s done me too.’
‘Yes, Frederick of Prussia is paying. And Rousseau is going mad with jealousy.’
‘Good. It’s wonderful.’
‘Listen to the poem I wrote about it: “Poor Jean-Jacques, with hostile stare, / Cries: ‘Not a statue to Voltaire? / Please, I’m the one your chisel should / Honour for the greater good / I must protest, it isn’t fair, / Not one more statue to Voltaire.’ ”’
‘It’s perfect,’ cries our man, chuckling. ‘How Jean-Jacques despises us.’
‘Of course. He’s made an altar to himself alone.’
‘Perhaps we all have.’
‘And they will remember us all, sir, but in very different ways. They will remember Rousseau’s empty weeping foolish heart. Your spinning chatter. My infinite wisdom. Each of us has his own metamorphosis.’
The Immortal coughs.
‘I think he’s tiring,’ says Madame Denis. ‘He got quite exhausted after his apotheosis.’
‘Of course,’ says our man rising.
‘No no, my friend, don’t go. You must tell me. What was she like, in the fair flesh? The Semiramis of the North?’
‘The Empress?’
‘Cateau.’
‘Cateau?’
‘That’s what I called her. I loved her, of course.’
‘But you never even met her, I thought.’
‘There was a cosmic radiance. A fatal attraction. An electricity. A magnetism.’
‘Obviously something to do with power.’
‘I have never despised power. I helped her to her power. I did all I could to make her great.’
‘She is.’
‘But what was it like to go there in the flesh? To see her? To stand before her?’
‘I’ll confess everything to you again. It was truly wonderful. When I went there to her court from our land of the free, I was a slave. When I left her land of slaves, I felt a free man. I dare say I loved her too.’
‘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 . . .
The Virginian is riding into Paris. A grave and ambitious man, recently widowed, he travels across France in his own splendid phaeton, built on his own estate, Monticello, by his own two hundred slaves. The grand vehicle has crossed the Atlantic Ocean with him, first getting unloaded at Plymouth, then taking ship again across an unpleasantly rough and rocking English Channel before the shores of France are revealed. At his side rides his shy, anxious eleven-year-old daughter Patsy. Up on the box is his mulatto servant and house-slave, James Hemings, whose sister, the slave Sarah, will in due time come and join them in the city too. And now they pass over the Seine in Paris by the new bridge, the Pont de Neuilly. He’s happy to confess it’s the most beautiful bridge in the world, as far as he’s ever seen.
Presently he’s travelling splendidly down the wide and tree-lined avenue of the Champs-Élysées, into the heart of surely the world’s most elegant city, certainly the biggest city he’s ever seen. The sandy-haired American – and that is what he most certainly is, thanks to the new Treaty of Paris, signed here last year between the British and Americans, which affirms that the First New Nation truly exists – rides his coach between the great buildings, and books his party into a hotel beside the Palais Royal. Later this year he’ll be all set up in his own grand residence, the Hôtel Taitbout, as befits a Minister Plenipotentiary come to court. ‘Behold me at length on the vaunted scene of Europe!’ he soon writes homeward. Then, fearing this might just sound a tad too enthusiastic for one who is worried over foreign ties, he goes on to qualify things: ‘You are, perhaps, curious to know how this new scene has struck a savage of the mountains of America. Not advantageously, I assure you.’
But Europe still impresses. Though Paris is not America, though cities are bestial places compared with Virginian woods, though the poor are slaves here, and the rich put saddles on their backs, though the water’s polluted, and the women are worryingly powerful and frank in desire, he does have to admit the place has its pleasures. He loves food and he loves wine; the French have both. He simply adores the architecture. There’s the chance to wander the bookstores, inspect great classical buildings now in composition, examine the most beautiful and ancient of ruins. One can dine with philosophers, go to the elegant play, attend the opera. Sometimes it seems a man might pass his life here without a single rudeness. ‘In the pleasures of the table, they are far before us, because with good taste they unite temperance. I have never yet seen a man drunk in France. Were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music, I should want words.’ But now the world has turned upside down there are so many matters to attend to, so many negotiations for a clever lawyer to perform: alliances, rights, treaties, Dutch bank loans, shipping and trade deals, the import of American tobaccos, the elimination of Barbary pirates. And when old Franklin finishes his term in Paris very shortly, he’ll be the next American Ambassador, staying there till the end of the 1780s, when for the second time in a lifetime he’ll see the world turn upside down.
‘Really, my dear friend, you must meet him,’ says Melchior Grimm. ‘His name is Thomas Jefferson.’
‘Why should I meet him?’ our man says, from his bed. ‘You see how I am.’
‘He wants to meet you.’
‘What does he want? How did you meet him?’
They’re talking together in a most handsome new apartment on the Right Bank. It’s a comfort the Empress in Petersburg arranged for him since the apoplexy, insisting that Grimm moved wife, papers and entire library across from the inconvenient rue Taranne to the smart rue de Richelieu. She has sent her fond wishes, and a warning to Grimm (‘Take care nothing goes astray, not even the least scrap’). She has been truly generous, and the apartment in the Hôtel de Bezons is wonderfully convenient for a man who can hardly rise from his couch now, though it would be even more convenient if he could only summon his powers again, get out into the street and go to the Palais Royal.
‘We’ve been working together on the American negotiations. Oh, didn’t I tell you the French government has appointed me to conclude a treaty over their American affairs?’
‘No, you didn’t. Now you’ll be sporting American titles and honours.’
‘The Americans are a simple and undemanding people. They don’t have any titles and honours.’
‘Believe me, they will one day. Fame and celebrity always insist on their reward. Everyone wants their fifteen minutes in the sun.’
‘Anyway, Jefferson assures me I’m the pleasantest and most companionable fellow he’s met in the entire French diplomatic corps.’
‘I’m not surprised. You did tell him you were German, I hope? Just so there’s no confusion.’
‘He understands my international influence. We’ve become really excellent friends.’
‘You buy his cosmetics for him?’
‘I doubt if he wears any. He comes from the back-country, or so he says.’
‘Well, you’ll be off to America soon, then?’ our man says. ‘I can see you with a naked bosom and turkey feathers stuck in your hair.’
‘Really, old friend, you will have to meet him. He firmly insists, and I’ve promised to arrange it. He says it’s one of the greatest wishes of his life to meet you before you . . .’
‘Before I die. Very well. Bring your noble savage here then, Melchior, if you must.’
And now the Minister Plenipotentiary sits in a chair in the corner, grand in his twenty guinea ministerial suit; no tacky beaver pelt on the head for him. He’s come with a black servant, bearing a basket of sweet potatoes and another of American apricots, which the Great Particularist is now inspecting with evident disgust. ‘I always care to bring some novelties from the New World with me when I visit,’ the sandy-haired minister explains. ‘I gave Condorcet a maple tree, some pecan nuts to Monsieur Malesherbes, and an entire moose to Monsieur Buffon.’
‘Good, better him than me,’ our man says, lying on the fine new bed a Scythian empress has purchased.
‘I can’t explain, sir, what this visit means to me,’ says the visitor. ‘I have one of the biggest libraries in the col . . . in North America. I mean to give it to the nation when I die.’
‘I know the feeling.’
‘I came to tell you, sir, that back in Virginia where I come from, I devoted months of my life to the acquisition of an Encyclopedia. I have a canine appetite for learning.’
‘Our Encyclopedia truly reached to the lands of America?’
‘It did indeed.’
‘And how much did you have to pay?’
The Minister laughs. ‘How much? A fortune. Guess what, it cost me fifteen hogshead. That’s fifteen hogshead of sotweed, tobacco. In fact it was a good deal more than a poor lawyer could afford. Happily I succeeded in getting the state of Virginia to pay for it.’
‘Tobacco? Maybe you don’t know, but in France we use money.’
‘We do too, sir. But this happened just at a time when the British were advancing. We had to ship the books to the far end of the State for their safekeeping.’
‘I hope the trouble was worth it, Monsieur Jefferson.’
‘Oh, it was, Monsieur Diderot. And one thing leads to another. Books often breed books, or so I find. Your great book started me writing a poorer book of my own. A book of American facts, sir, which I think will be of great interest in your country. I have it here with me in Paris, and mean to publish it while I remain. Monsieur Malesherbes is assisting me. Perhaps you know him.’
‘Indeed. He censored the Encyclopedia. Your book, then, have you a title?’
‘Yes, Notes on the State of Virginia.’
‘Really? I can hardly wait.’
‘It’s an account of the wonders of American nature, the newest of the wonders of the world. I write it to explain the wonders of the New World to the eyes of the Old.’
‘It’s all really so different?’
‘It would truly amaze you, sir. The great torrent of Niagara. The divine splendour of the Natural Bridge in Virginia, an extraordinary trick of nature I liked so much that I bought it. I mean to make it my Hermitage. The Mississippi river, sir, the longest waterway in the world. But most of what’s there we still have to find out.’
‘The wonderful lands of Louisiana.’
‘Yes, that’s right. But first we need to become a nation. Unite the thirteen states. Create a true constitution. Found a legal system. Construct a police force.’
‘A common currency, perhaps?’
‘True, sir, I’ve already proposed it. The copper cent, the silver dime and the golden dollar.’
‘A supreme court?’
‘Definitely, sir.’
‘Manufacturers and industries?’
‘Yes, sir, but only in due time. First we build a nation founded on the free farmer, and generate the spirit of an independent and republican people.’
‘The emancipation of the serfs?’
‘The slaves, sir. Not at once, but one day, definitely.’
‘Education?’
‘I believe learning is everything. That’s why I have a plan for a university.’
‘You have?’
‘Sure. I intend to found a fine new university in Charlottesville.’
‘I hope no parish priests for professors?’
‘Certainly not. It will be a whole new democratic and practical way of universal learning.’
‘In your country, do you have mulberry and hemp?’
‘Do we, sir? There’s no vegetable resource America is short of. I can give you a list.’
‘Iron and bauxite?’
‘If not yet, in the future, when we’ve settled the land properly.’
‘Population of Virginia?’
‘Look, let me bring you a copy of my book. It’s full of that kind of dry detail. But remember, mine is just one state, admittedly the most beautiful, out of a whole thirteen. That’s not counting the endless territories that reach out and out to the distant Pacific.’
‘Louisiana.’
‘Louisiana, right. Or whatever name we decide to call it. But first what we need is a true union. A just constitution. A civil plan. A relationship of the parts to the wholes. A capital city. A living nation.’
‘You’re building a new capital city?’
‘Yes, sir. Somewhere where no one has ever built before. Every day I survey and measure the new buildings of Paris. Soufflot’s dome, and so on. Maybe that will help make our new Capitol building.’
‘But do make sure your capital city isn’t just a stomach stuck out on the end of a finger.’
‘I’m sorry? I guess that’s a little too metaphorical for me.’
Our man raises himself, points across the room. ‘Go and look in that drawer, monsieur.’
‘What would we look for?’ asks the Minister, waving to James Hemings.
‘There are sixty-six notebooks in there. The plan for the ideal and perfect republic. The description of a whole new land without pain or tyranny. Where light and happiness shine out over all. A great capital city. A new university. A police force.’
‘What, over here, master?’ asks Hemings, hunting round the sideboards.
‘Yes, there, boy, wake up, do you see them?’
‘Sah.’ Hemings lifts out the notebooks, puts them on the table.
‘“The Daydream of Denis the Philosopher”?’ says Jefferson, picking one up. ‘“On Drawing Benefit From Religion and Making It Good For Something”?’
‘Oui, monsieur.’
‘But on the front of this book it’s written: For SMI Catherine, Rousse.’
‘Why don’t you change that? Make it to Monsieur Jefferson of Louisiana.’
‘You really want me to have all these?’
‘If you read them carefully and use them well.’
‘Yes, my dear, sir, I will, I most certainly will. Anyway, you’ll excuse me now, I hope, philosopher. Only today I’m meeting a Mrs Cosway and she’s taking me to have my bust done. By this well-known fellow Houdon. I’ve bought six of his things already. Including a really terrific Voltaire.’
That evening our man feels most wonderfully better. In fact he’s never felt as well since the distant day when, heart in mouth, he walked into the throne room in the Hermitage over the Neva, and there saw the great Empress. His spirits soar. He’s sure he’s done it; he’s invented a country. For Jefferson will go home, and the great lands of Louisiana will open. Beyond the coastal stretches where the once British colonials sit in their stockades or their cities, farming the land, inventing electricity, trading with their former home, lie the wonderful spaces of the interior: the unknown landscapes, the untravelled passes, lands wandered by migrant Indians, travelled by Jesuit missionaries, explored by French trappers and Spanish adventurers. There are great rivers, high mountains, vast prairies, great deserts, animals and birds of species not yet recorded, trees and vegetables still not properly described. He knows the wonders, the wealth of unnamed places, the muddy waters of the Mississippi, flowing down from Lake Itashka into the land of the hereafter, the precarious routes and untravelled passages that still have to be found . . .
With a country if not a continent invented, written on, written over, authored, with his imaginary Russia, the best fruit of his daydreams, not wasted after all, he feels well enough this evening to sit down at the table, between his wife and darling daughter. He’s well enough to take some soup, and then even a little mutton stew. At the end he reaches for the great basket of American apricots his two visitors have left.
‘I wouldn’t, mon mari, no, I really wouldn’t,’ says the Great Particularist, fussing over him as usual.
‘Nonsense, such fuss. American apricots, the fruit of the New World. What harm can they possibly do?’ He eats. He coughs, his head drops. Good night, ladies, good night . . .
The autopsy required by modern medical science and the great spirit of reason reveals that the bile sac is dry, the liver is hard, and there’s a severe problem of colic cystitis. The first cause of death is apoplexy, but the brain is still that of a man of twenty. The funeral is held not far away, in the fine city church of Saint-Roch, which is close to the Place Vendôme. Grimm and Jefferson are both present. It’s the late summer of 1784. There’s still fresh scent from the lime trees. Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro is playing at the Comédie-Française, and Rameau’s Gallant Indians at the opera. Montgolfier is taking people up in his fire-propelled balloon, and d’Abbans has set an amazing paddle-steamer chugging up and down the Seine. There are still five more sunny years to go before the age of reason turns into the age of bloodletting. Inside the fine church, the incense surges up toward the dome, and fifty hired priests carrying lighted candles accompany the philosopher’s coffin as it is carried toward the altar.
It’s a rich and solemn church funeral. But why not? All this religion is paid for out of the atheistical Encyclopedia. As the priests intone, the remains are solemnly lowered beneath the stone slabs of the Chapel of the Virgin, the elegant domed chapel at the heart of this splendid church, beneath the great stuccoes by Falconet, depicting Glory and the Annunciation. But how odd, how very very odd . . . When, only a short time later, these same slabs are lifted up again, both the coffin and the body have completely disappeared. Neither the one nor the other has been seen anywhere since. ‘Diderot le philosophe? Disparu,’ the sacristan will tell you, if, as I do, you care to visit Saint-Roch today. But he who laughs last laughs best, or that’s what they always say . . .