XI

A VOYAGE TO RUSSIA: POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND CATHERINE THE GREAT

After Mademoiselle Volland, the second-most important Sophie in Diderot’s life was a Prussian princess by the name of Sophia Augusta Fredericka. We know her, as did Diderot, by a different name, Eкатерина Aлексеевна or Catherine the Great, empress of all the Russias.

Sophia was born in 1729, some sixteen years after Diderot. Growing up in the Baltic seaport of Stettin (now part of Poland), she was raised in the great tradition of Prussian nobility, with a range of tutors who schooled her in music, dancing, and various forms of etiquette.¹ In addition to being exposed to the protocols and pastimes associated with life at court, the princess also received an education dispensed by a dogmatic army chaplain who forced her to memorize what he believed to be the main points of history, geography, and the Lutheran religion.² Sophia’s most fruitful instruction, however, came from her Huguenot governess, Elisabeth (Babet) Cardel. In addition to introducing the princess to the fables of Lafontaine and the plays of Molière, Corneille, and Racine, the tutor taught her student the joys of thinking and writing in the continent’s lingua franca.³

Sophia brought her love of French culture and literature with her when she moved to Saint Petersburg in 1744, at age sixteen, to wed the heir to the Russian Empire. (It was at this point in her life that she took the name Catherine.) Effectively alone in a foreign country, and now married to the abusive and alcoholic Grand Duke Peter, the grand duchess found sanctuary in the era’s literature and philosophy. In the mid-1750s, she willed herself through her horrible marriage and postpartum depression by reading Voltaire on world history, Montesquieu on the varied political systems found around the globe, and abbé Prévost’s compilation of travel writing from Asia to the New World.⁴ During these unhappy years, Catherine also had occasion to pore over the first seven volumes of the astonishing Encyclopédie, though she, along with the book’s other subscribers, was disappointed when the dictionary was banned after the letter G.

Her relationship with the faraway world of French ideas, culture, and literature changed abruptly after she led the successful coup d’état against her husband, Emperor Peter III, in June 1762. Among the first things that the new empress did after coming to power was to reach out to the French luminaries whom she had so admired. This “cultural offensive” began with Diderot.⁵ Contacting the French writer through one of her chamberlains in Paris, she made the Encyclopedist a remarkable offer: leave France and its repressive intellectual climate behind, come to Riga, and publish the remaining volumes of the Encyclopédie without constraint.⁶ She also contacted Diderot’s former partner, d’Alembert, and asked him to serve as tutor to her son, Grand Duke Paul, for the colossal annual salary of one hundred thousand rubles.

Both men politely declined. Diderot explained that he was honored but, for better or for worse, he was unable to leave Paris. D’Alembert sent back a gracious letter that claimed that he was not qualified to teach a prince about matters of government. The two philosophes also had other reasons for not relocating to what they believed to be a violent and politically unstable country. D’Alembert quipped that he would have made the trip to Saint Petersburg, but he was too “prone to hemorrhoids, and they are far too dangerous in that country.”⁷ This was, of course, a joke made at Catherine’s expense: the Russian government had announced to the world that her late husband had died from complications related to piles, although virtually everybody knew that he had actually been murdered shortly after the coup by Catherine’s lover’s brother.

Bons mots about the empress’s ruthlessness notwithstanding, the news that this cultured and enlightened despot was willing to sponsor the contentious Encyclopédie project solidified her reputation among the philosophes; it also opened up what would be a line of communication between Diderot and the sovereign.⁸ While the intimacy and frequency of their correspondence pale in comparison to the exchange between Voltaire and Catherine, the empress ultimately had a far greater effect on the Encyclopedist’s life than she did on Voltaire’s. Her most dramatic gesture toward Diderot came in 1765, only months before the final ten volumes of the Encyclopédie were to appear. At the time, the philosophe was both delighted to be bringing this thankless task to completion and apprehensive about losing the relatively stable income that he had been receiving for years.

Diderot was hardly an extravagant spender; his basic expenses — food, rent, and the salary that he paid to the family’s servant and various tutors — were actually quite restrained. But one sizable financial burden loomed large: the dowry that he was preparing for the future husband of the then eleven-year-old Angélique Diderot, who would soon be old enough to marry. Faced with the prospect of this substantial disbursement at the same time that his income was about to drop, Diderot fell upon the idea of selling his one possession of real value: his personal three-thousand-book library, most of which had been funded by the publishers of the Encyclopédie as part of his salary.

In early 1765, Diderot began hinting in various circles that he would be willing to sell his books to a French bibliophile. Grimm had a better idea: why not inform one of the philosophe’s foreign admirers that he had fallen on hard times and that he was now willing to part with this legendary collection? On February 10, 1765, Grimm sent off a note to Catherine’s chamberlain and unofficial cultural minister, General Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy, not only proposing the sale of Diderot’s books, but suggesting an asking price of 15,000 livres. When the empress received news of this proposition, she immediately agreed to the terms and sent back orders that the deal be concluded on two conditions, both of which were to Diderot’s benefit. First, she insisted that Diderot remain in possession of the books during his lifetime. The second condition was equally warmhearted: she appointed Diderot as curator of his own library with an annual stipend of one thousand livres.

Catherine surpassed this act of goodwill the following year after her plenipotentiary minister in France, Prince Dmitry Alekseevich Golitsyn, discovered that Diderot had not received his annual fee as curator. According to Naigeon’s account of what happened next, Diderot supposedly told Golitsyn that he had not even thought about this money because he was perfectly satisfied with the sum that had come from the purchase of the library.⁹ The ambassador brushed off Diderot’s modesty and pointed out that these were not the terms of the arrangement. Shortly thereafter, he sent off a note to Betskoy informing him of the Russian treasury’s administrative oversight.

The exchange between Paris and Saint Petersburg obviously took time. But several months later, Betskoy informed “Monsieur Diderot” that the empress had no interest in letting some underling delay or overlook her librarian’s stipend in the future; accordingly, she had decided to pay him for his services fifty years in advance. In due course, he was told, he would receive the staggering sum of fifty thousand livres. The empress had also added an amusing addendum stipulating that, at the end of this half-century (Diderot’s 102d birthday), the two parties would once again renegotiate the terms of the contract. Diderot was “stupefied.” Writing to the empress via Betskoy, his gratitude poured out from his pen: “I prostrate myself at your feet. I reach my arms out toward you, I would like to speak, but paralysis grips my soul, my mind is hazy, my ideas confused, and I melt like a child, while the true expressions of what I feel inside me expire on the edge of my lips.”¹⁰ Diderot’s fascination with Russia’s enlightened despot — and international politics in general — had entered a new era.

ART COLLECTING, DITHERING, AND A PAINFUL WEDDING

The large sum that came into Diderot’s possession — the rough equivalent of perhaps $700,000 — had no real expected quid pro quo. Diderot nonetheless made clear to Catherine’s Russian emissaries that he intended to live up to this act of generosity by serving as her cultural attaché in several capacities. To begin with, he helped Prince Golitsyn convince a number of artists, teachers, and even the occasional physiocrat philosopher to resettle in Saint Petersburg.¹¹ Diderot’s most successful recruit was the great sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet, whom Catherine commissioned to produce the twenty-foot-tall bronze statue of Peter the Great that now stands in Saint Petersburg’s Senate Square. Alluding to this and other such examples of successful conscription, Diderot boasted that he and Golitsyn made an excellent team: the prince, he explained, weakened the will of their targets with his “generosity, kindness, affability, [and] honesty,” while Diderot’s job was to “finish them off.”¹²

Over the next few years, Diderot also became one of Catherine’s most important art brokers, jubilantly spending her money (in consultation with Golitsyn) on what he believed to be the best available canvases and sculptures. His most significant impact as cultural agent began in 1768, after Golitsyn left Paris to become ambassador to Holland. Collaborating far more closely at this point with Grimm and François Tronchin — the latter a Genevan art enthusiast who would later sell his own collection to Catherine — Diderot utterly transformed the empress’s burgeoning holdings.

The foundational contribution that the philosophe made to Catherine’s art collection, which the empress had begun only two years after her coup d’état, was negotiating the purchase of five hundred superlative paintings that had belonged to Louis-Antoine Crozat, the baron of Thiers, who had died in December 1770.¹³ Crozat’s collection was generally considered the second-most important in France at the time, not only containing Raphael’s transcendent small-cabinet painting Saint George and the Dragon (c. 1504), but numerous Rembrandts and Van Dycks, as well as selected works by Rubens, Veronese, Correggio, Dürer, Titian, Poussin, Watteau, and Chardin.¹⁴ When this assortment of canvases finally arrived in Saint Petersburg in 1772, it became the core of the Hermitage Museum.

That a French collection of this magnitude and value — Catherine bought it for 460,000 livres — could leave the country for Saint Petersburg caused quite a stir in both Versailles and the capital. The Marquis de Marigny, who was then serving as the director of the “households” of the king of France (including the Louvre and Versailles), lamented that the pitiful financial state of the kingdom prevented the crown from competing for these paintings.¹⁵ Diderot was unmoved by this hand-wringing. Indeed, he seemed to take a certain amount of satisfaction in the impotence of the once-great French state. If the collectors, artists, and the wealthy were all up in arms, he suggested, it was because they were both ashamed and envious, ashamed that “we [France] are obliged to sell our paintings during a time of peace,” and envious that “Catherine can purchase them while waging war [against the Turks.]”¹⁶

Some of this cosmopolitan nonchalance regarding the exodus of France’s best paintings stemmed from Diderot’s gratitude to Catherine. But the philosophe had also become bitterly disappointed with the state of affairs in France. Life in the capital, he lamented, had changed a great deal in the decade after the expensive and humiliating Seven Years’ War, which had ended in 1763. Besides the fact that this world conflict had deprived France of much of North America — unimaginably huge swaths of land stretching from Louisiana to the shores of Nova Scotia — the expenses and compounding debt incurred during the conflict had pushed the crown toward near bankruptcy.¹⁷ Bad weather on a seemingly annual basis during the late 1760s made things worse. Terrible grain shortages not only drove the price of bread to unaffordable levels, but gave rise to rumors that the crown had cunningly organized a “pact of famine” in order to produce yet more profits.¹⁸ By 1770, riots had broken out across much of the country, and thousands of businesses began to fail, leading to further, crippling falloffs in tax revenue.¹⁹ Diderot summed up these dire days with trepidation: “half of the nation is going to sleep financially ruined, and the other half is afraid of hearing their own ruin broadcast in the street when they wake up.”²⁰

Contributing to the country’s difficulties, from Diderot’s point of view, was what he believed to be France’s descent into despotism. In 1771, he and many of his fellow philosophes were outraged when France’s chancellor, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou, used the king’s musketeers to disband the Paris Parlement and the country’s sovereign courts.²¹ While the Parlement was anything but a friend of the philosophes, Diderot was nonetheless a firm believer in maintaining this important check on monarchical power. Lamenting the fact that the pope would now be able to disseminate bulls in France without the mediation or approval of the Parlement, he sighed that the country was regressing to the medieval era.²²

The depressing political situation in France led Diderot to think far more seriously about accepting an open invitation to travel to Saint Petersburg to meet his benefactress. Although the philosophe was well aware that Catherine was an autocrat of the first order, he also considered her a souverain civilisateur, a monarch who had declared herself interested in promoting a tolerant, enlightened empire. Indeed, in the same years that the aging Louis XV had begun veering toward despotism and religious conservatism, Catherine had actually convened a commission of elected representatives from a broad cross section of Russian society, charging them with the task of helping her reform the Ulozhenie — the archaic and feudal code of laws enacted in 1649. Even more significantly, Catherine wrote a series of directives for this commission, which she published in both French and English in 1767 under the title of Nakaz or Instruction. Drawing heavily from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments, Catherine showed herself to be open to some of the most liberal reforms ever advanced by a sitting monarch, including progressive penal and judicial reforms that outlawed torture.²³

Catherine never implemented the most important changes that she discussed in the Nakaz. Yet her best-selling book, much like her magnanimous gestures toward Diderot, functioned as effective propaganda outside her empire. By publicly advocating for a significant restructuring of her empire based on the ideas of some of France’s greatest thinkers, she consciously differentiated her own philosophical values from those of the more conservative monarchies to the west. This message was not lost on Diderot. Unlike Louis XV, who had blocked the Encyclopédie on two occasions, signed the lettre de cachet that sent him to jail, and even personally interceded to deny the philosophe’s admission to the Académie française, Catherine seemed to be actively sponsoring the liberal ideas proposed by the French philosophes. While Diderot was under no illusions regarding the feudal society upon which the Russian nobility depended — millions of serfs who were little more than slaves — the political climate in Russia seemed utopian compared to that in France. Not only had the Russian monarch proposed to finance the Encyclopédie; she had also made sure that Diderot was named a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts of Saint Petersburg in 1767. By 1772, Diderot had concluded that there was a fundamental cultural and intellectual realignment taking place in Europe, one where “science, art, taste, and wisdom are traveling northward,” while “barbarism and all it brings in its wake, is coming south.”²⁴

In addition to the political regression in France, there were also a number of personal reasons that pushed Diderot toward Saint Petersburg. By 1772, the last volume of Encyclopédie plates finally appeared, which freed him from any responsibility vis-à-vis his employers of twenty-five years. Of even greater consequence, however, was that his once intense love life in the capital had seemingly come to an end. Not only had his passionate relationship with Sophie Volland faded by the late 1760s, but his breakup with Madame de Maux continued to bedevil him in 1772; it was, as he put it, a “pain in the flank.”²⁵ In May of that same year, he confessed to Grimm that he felt timeworn and unappealing, like one of those “old pieces of furniture that you shouldn’t move too much” because “their planks are wobbly and separated and you can’t put them back together very well.”²⁶

The most painful change in Diderot’s life, however, occurred later that fall, when his daughter Angélique married Abel-François-Nicolas Caroillon de Vandeul, the son of a distinguished family of Langrois industrialists whom Diderot had known for forty years.²⁷ Despite (or perhaps because of) his own love story with Toinette, Diderot had claimed the right to decide whom his daughter should marry. But he had also insisted on bringing Angélique and Abel together to see if they approved of this decision. In March 1770, Diderot invited the twenty-four-year-old Abel to the rue Taranne. While all concerned were favorably inclined to this union — Angélique, Diderot, Toinette, and Abel — the philosophe and patriarch successfully put off the day that his daughter would leave the household for three years by declaring that both these children were far “too young” to be married immediately.²⁸ Abel readily agreed to this prolonged engagement, but he soon proved to be far more hardheaded when it came to matters of money. In the final year and a half before the wedding, Abel and his future father-in-law entered into often-painful and protracted negotiations concerning the all-important marriage contract. When they finally had this document notarized on the night before the wedding, the young man had negotiated a prodigious dowry of thirty thousand livres. The whole process had not endeared Abel to Diderot; he found him to be grasping and money-oriented.

The actual ceremony took place on September 9, 1772, in the Saint-Sulpice parish. This turned out to be smaller and far less joyous than Diderot had hoped. Toinette had refused to let Diderot invite any of his impious friends to the wedding: certainly not d’Holbach, not Grimm, and not Madame d’Épinay. Those present included a few members of the Caroillon family and Diderot’s own sister, Denise. Diderot’s brother, Didier-Pierre, had not only refused to come to Paris, he had actually done his best to ruin the wedding.

A month before the ceremony, Angélique had attempted to repair the enormous rift in the Diderot family by writing her “dear uncle” in Langres. She not only pleaded with the priest to reconcile with her father, but to officiate at the wedding itself. Didier-Pierre’s answer surely numbers among the most caustic letters that he ever penned. Informing Angélique that he regarded Caroillon as an unworthy unbeliever like her own father — this was far from the truth — he then went on to threaten that he would no longer consider her as his niece if she went through with the marriage. The only people he recognized as family, he put it curtly to her, were the truly “devout.”²⁹

Angélique never saw this letter until much later in her life. A few weeks after the wedding, Diderot, who apparently intercepted the letter, replied ferociously on his daughter’s behalf. Accusing Didier-Pierre of dishonoring his vows, he asks the priest to imagine himself on his deathbed and think back on his past actions before predicting: “you will see that you are a bad priest, a bad citizen, a bad son, a bad brother, a bad uncle, and an evil man.”³⁰

In the weeks after marrying off Angélique, Diderot entered into a somewhat depressive state. Alienated from his only brother, married to the ill-tempered Toinette, forsaken by Madame de Maux, and now abandoned by his daughter, Diderot complained of feeling terribly alone. In a revealing note that he sent to Abel’s mother, who had been one of Diderot’s childhood friends in Langres, he lamented that life without his daughter would have been easier had he had been married to a woman who would have helped him “forget [his] loss.”³¹ This, alas, was not the case.³² Several days after the wedding, Diderot summed up his psychological state to his married daughter, whom he now addressed as Madame Caroillon:

I am letting you go with a pain that you will never be able to understand. I will gladly let you off for not suffering the same agony. I am now alone, and you have followed a man whom you must adore…Adieu, my daughter, adieu, my dear child. Come press yourself one final time against my chest. If you sometimes found me more stern than I should have been, please forgive me. Rest assured, however, that fathers are cruelly punished for the tears that they caused in their children, be they justified or not. You will know that one day, and you will excuse me…I don’t understand other fathers. I see all their worries evaporate the moment that they separate themselves from their children; it seems to me that mine are beginning. I was so happy to have you under my wing! God willing, I hope the new friend that you have chosen will be as good, as tender, as loyal as me.

Your father,

Diderot.³³

The philosophe’s mood improved in the following months, and sometime in November or December 1772, he announced to Falconet, who had been living in the Russian capital since 1766, that he was coming to Saint Petersburg to pay his respects to Catherine. Diderot also had two other thinly concealed objectives. The first was to act as a sort of political counselor to the empress, to encourage her to initiate programs of reform that, while compatible with monarchical power, would nonetheless inch Russia toward a more representative government. The second was to convince the Russian empress to champion a new and uncensored version of the Encyclopédie that would serve as a “literary monument to her.”³⁴

PETERSBURG

Diderot initially hoped to head off to Russia on or around June 1, 1773. As was often the case, he ultimately dithered for more than a week. This indecisiveness came to a head on June 9, the day before he was finally scheduled to depart. At midday, he, Toinette, and the then-pregnant Angélique all sat down to what everyone in the room thought might be their last meal together. None of them ate; no one spoke; all three sobbed with grief. It was, as Diderot described the moment, the “cruelest scene” that he as a “father and husband” had endured during his life.

Later that same night he announced to his friend Jean Devaines, who had stopped by to say goodbye, that he was going to cancel this dangerous trip: “I am staying, I have decided; I am not going to abandon my wife and my daughter.”³⁵ According to Devaines, who recorded these events, this conversation was interrupted by Madame Diderot, who had suddenly barged into the office, as if on cue. Standing in the doorway with her fists ground into her hips, a dainty bonnet incongruously tied under her chin, she supposedly screeched at Diderot: “Well, well, Monsieur Diderot, what are you doing?…You are wasting your time talking nonsense, and you are forgetting your packing. You need to leave tomorrow morning early…Oh, what a man! What a man!”³⁶ This scolding perhaps helped Diderot change his mind yet again. The next morning he began the months-long voyage to Saint Petersburg.

Five days and five hundred kilometers later, Diderot arrived in The Hague, the first real stop in the journey. He had come to this Dutch town for several reasons. The first was to meet up with the empress’s chamberlain, Aleksei Vasilyevich Naryshkin, with whom he had arranged to continue on to Saint Petersburg.³⁷ He had also wanted to spend time with his good friend Prince Golitsyn, whom he had not seen for four years.

Diderot enjoyed a two-month stay in this small foreign city of 38,000. Having never really traveled outside the somewhat humdrum corridor between Langres and the Paris region, he now had the luxury of becoming a sightseer for the first time in his life. The first thing he did upon arriving was to make the short trip from Golitsyn’s house on 22 Kneuterdijk to see the sea for the first time.³⁸ In addition to contemplating “Neptune and her vast empire,” as he put it, Diderot soon relived his days as art aficionado by traveling with Golitsyn to Leyden to see the city’s Dutch paintings and engravings.³⁹ During his stay he also visited Amsterdam, Haarlem, Zaandam, and Utrecht.

Living away from Paris had many advantages. Freshly caught ocean fish impressed Diderot no end. “The more I get to know this country,” he wrote to Sophie and her sister in July, “the more I get used to it. The sole, the herring, the turbot, the perch, and everything they call waterfish, are the finest folk in the world.”⁴⁰ In addition to enjoying the food and escaping from his less-than-perfect life on rue Taranne, he was also able to concentrate on his own writing. Among other things, he completed a draft of his Paradoxe sur le comédien (Paradox of the Actor), a philosophical dialogue in which one of the speakers maintains, against prevailing opinion, that the greatest actors are those who master themselves completely, who replicate emotional states without feeling any passion or sentiment themselves. Stanislavsky would later say that the Paradox, published posthumously in 1830, was among the most important theoretical works on acting ever written.⁴¹

Two months after arriving at The Hague, on August 20, 1773, Diderot finally set off to Saint Petersburg with his traveling companion. After only 230 kilometers, the sixty-year-old philosophe had to interrupt the journey in Duisberg (Germany) to seek medical help for a serious gastroenterological infection. The next major stop along the way was Leipzig, where Diderot apparently made quite a spectacle of himself by preaching atheism in front of a crowd of savants and merchants, including the younger brother of the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.⁴²

While traveling, Diderot spent much of his time preparing for his upcoming meetings with the empress. The first document he composed en route was a sweeping assessment of the state of French politics entitled a Historical Essay on the Police in France that moved from Clovis to the overthrow of the Parlement by Maupeou. The message contained in this relatively large essay was unambiguous: with the exception of several bright spots — including the efficient police force managed by his friend Sartine — France was not a country to imitate.⁴³

Weeks upon weeks of monotonous travel also gave Diderot time to compose a number of short poems, some of them quite obscene indeed. A month after leaving The Hague, Diderot and Naryshkin stopped for the night at a tavern in the port city of Riga where they apparently laid eyes on a beautiful servant in whose honor the philosophe composed a poem entitled “The Auberge of the Cloven Hoof”:

She is cute, very cute,

For all of Riga she is a hoot,

Oh the servant of the Cloven Hoof.

For an obol, one day, I lifted her pleat.

For a double teston — for a double teston,

Oh yes! What did I get? I grabbed her teet.

The rest of the poem — it becomes far ruder — culminates in the servant providing each and every one of her favors, as well as a case of syphilis.⁴⁴ Diderot, who often expressed his aversion to such houses of ill repute, presumably played the role of the poet here only for dramatic effect.

Several weeks after Diderot produced this smutty rhyme, Naryshkin and Diderot finally rolled into Saint Petersburg. After 2,400 juddering kilometers through what is now Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, both men were no longer laughing. Naryshkin had come down with a terrible respiratory infection and a throbbing toothache. Diderot’s chronically weak digestive system had also rebelled against foreign microbes and contaminated water. Suffering worse than ever from fever, cramps, and terribly inflamed intestines — presumably dysentery — he forced himself to soldier on for the last 150 kilometers, arriving “more dead than alive” as he pulled up to what he thought was his final destination, Falconet’s flat on Millionnaia Street.⁴⁵

Falconet had always been a dear friend, and yet an enigma for Diderot. Sometime before he left for Saint Petersburg, he had described the sculptor as “hard and tender, sophisticated and argumentative, eager for praise and scornful of posterity; envious of the kind of talent he lacked, and caring little for the one he possessed; loving passionately, and cruelly tyrannizing over those he loved; rich in talent, and a hundred, a thousand more times so in self-esteem…; made up of all sorts of contradictions.”⁴⁶

Falconet added to his list of inconsistencies on the day that Diderot landed on his doorstep. In the months leading up to his voyage, the sculptor had promised his writer friend a warm welcome and lodging in the apartment that he shared with his mistress and fellow sculptor, Marie-Anne Collot. Diderot had accepted and had actually imagined a moving scene where the three friends would fall into each other’s arms after years of separation. “What a moment this will be for [the three of] us,” he wrote to Falconet, “when I knock on your door.”⁴⁷

As it turned out, the reception was hardly what Diderot had imagined. Greeting Diderot rather coldly, the sculptor rescinded his invitation, explaining that he had given the guest room to his son, who had arrived unexpectedly two months before. While Diderot graciously accepted his friend’s explanation, Madame de Vandeul later wrote that her father was “wounded forever” by this humiliating brushoff.⁴⁸ Unwell and adrift, the weary traveler quickly got back in touch with Aleksei Naryshkin, with whom he had just spent two months. The young chamberlain immediately arranged for Diderot to stay with him and his brother, Semën Vasilyevich Naryshkin, in their majestic three-story town house in the heart of the city. The so-called Naryshkin Palace, built twelve years before, was ultimately far more convenient for Diderot. In addition to its comparative luxury, the building was but a short walk or coach ride to Catherine’s quarters in the Winter Palace.

CATHERINE

Obliged to remain close to a chamber pot for the first few days in Russia, Diderot finally had the opportunity to meet the empress at a masked ball (at the Hermitage) about a week later. True to his sartorial preferences, Diderot wore the understated and distinctive uniform of the philosophe, which is to say black breeches, waistcoat, and dress coat. In a courtly world where one was measured as much by one’s finery as by anything else, it was hardly a surprise that Petersburg’s ambassadors, dignitaries, and nobles mocked this Frenchman who took himself for a modern-day Diogenes. Their scorn soon turned to envy, however, when it became clear that Catherine intended on welcoming the famous philosophe in a way that few if any of them would ever experience.⁴⁹

CATHERINE II, PAINTING

Diderot had actually appeared in the capital at an opportune time. During his five months’ stay in the capital, the forty-four-year-old Catherine was effectively “between lovers,” something that was exceptional for her.⁵⁰ The turmoil in her love life had begun sixteen months before, when she replaced Count Grigory Orlov — the father of at least one of her children — with a young member of the Horse Guards named Alexander Vasil’chikov. By the time that Diderot arrived in the capital in October 1773, the empress had become so bored with this fetching yet characterless man that Diderot had far less competition for her time than he might have had otherwise. Among other things, the philosophe traveled with the empress to visit the Smol’ny Monastery, a school for aristocratic girls for which Diderot had recruited several professors, and of which he had been named the official counselor. In early December, Catherine also invited him to be her guest in Tsarskoe Selo, at the so-called Catherine Palace — named after Catherine I — which is about twenty kilometers outside of Saint Petersburg.

But the vast majority of the meetings that Diderot had with Catherine took place at the Little Hermitage, the three-story Neoclassical town house and art gallery that the empress had built as an addition to the 700,000-square-foot Winter Palace.⁵¹ By Diderot’s own account, he was introduced into Catherine’s study three or sometimes four afternoons a week. Outside of these meetings, Diderot spent much of his time feverishly preparing a series of essays for her — these are now known collectively as the Memoirs for Catherine II — that served as the point of departure for their discussions.

On the afternoons that the philosophe arrived on time — he was frequently late — Diderot entered Catherine’s study at three p.m. The empress tended to sit on a sofa, at times occupying herself with needlework while Diderot generally took a seat in front of her in an armchair.⁵² The intensity (and the lack of ceremony) that Diderot brought to their conversations in the Little Hermitage is now a thing of legend. During sometimes heated exchanges, the philosophe cajoled, contradicted, and even reached out and pounded on Catherine’s leg as he would while speaking to d’Holbach or Grimm. In a letter that the empress sent to Voltaire in January 1774, she admitted to being impressed by the limitless imagination of the most “extraordinary man” she had ever met.⁵³ Diderot, too, felt a similar exhilaration, as he explained to Toinette: “Do you know that I have my interviews every day at three p.m., at her Imperial Majesty’s house? You should know that this is a notable honor, and that I cannot not appreciate its worth. I swear to you that the Empress, this astonishing woman, does everything in her power to lower herself to my level, but it is in this very movement that I find her a hundred cubits tall.”⁵⁴

In the first weeks that he met with Catherine, Diderot believed that the empress might be the rarest of all beasts, a monarch who was not only a member of the republic of letters (she ultimately produced two dozen plays, a history of Russia, fairy tales for her grandsons, and her memoirs), but also willing to let Diderot help her liberate Russia from its irrational traditions and medieval institutions. How wonderful, he clearly thought, to put the values of the Enlightenment into practice in Russia, particularly since they certainly did not seem to be taking root in France.

POLITICS AT THE LITTLE HERMITAGE

Well before Diderot had arrived in Saint Petersburg, Catherine had a pretty good understanding of the philosophe’s political and intellectual inclinations. As the driving force behind the Encyclopédie project, Diderot had become famous for waging a protracted battle against superstition and religious bigotry. But he had taken up more explicitly political questions in his dictionary as well, among them the biggest one of all, namely, what gave a handful of European kings and queens (and one Russian empress) the right to rule over 160 million human beings?

In the few instances where Diderot himself wrote on this sensitive topic — his entries are generally more courageous than innovative — he categorically rejects the long-standing belief that God himself granted monarchs the authority to rule over their subjects.⁵⁵ The right to command, as he makes clear in the article “Political Authority,” flows directly from the consent of the people and the natural and civil codes that define their relationship.⁵⁶ While Diderot believed that princes had the validated right to rule over their nation, they still had an obligation to reflect or embody what he called the “general will” of the nation. In exchange, he explained, the people were bound to respect and preserve the sovereign’s power and right to govern.

Diderot’s overall political philosophy during his Encyclopédie years was the reflection of what might be characterized as moderate humanism. Anything but a demagogue or a revolutionary, he was primarily a reformer in the 1760s: one of the philosophes interested in persuading the era’s monarchs to restructure their institutions so that individuals would be protected under the rule of law from the abuses of the state and the Church.

Catherine had had no qualms about inviting someone who held such opinions to her court. In addition to the fact that Diderot had served as her cultural attaché for years, he was also a generous and creative thinker, not to mention a legendary communicator. What was more, both she and Diderot had drawn their political theory from the same well, from the basic contract theory of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Montesquieu. On paper, they seemed like a good match: an open-minded reformer and an enlightened Russian autocrat who was, as she wrote for the inscription of her own tombstone, “good-natured, easygoing, tolerant, broad-minded…with a republican spirit and a kind heart.”

As liberal thinkers went, Diderot was certainly more palatable and far less threatening to Catherine than someone like Rousseau. Rousseau’s early political career, very much like Diderot’s, had begun in the pages of the Encyclopédie. After the mid-1750s, however, the so-called citizen from Geneva had also begun publishing a series of increasingly influential political works that combined a powerful interpretation of humanity’s moral potential with quotable, maxim-driven criticism of Europe’s “social system.” (The most famous of these is undoubtedly “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”) Advocating for much more than superficial changes to the era’s political institutions, Rousseau sought to revolutionize not only the way people thought about themselves, but their political birthright as well. More than any other thinker before him, he positioned the subjugated peoples of Europe on the right side of history.

Rousseau’s most influential book of political theory, Du contrat social (The Social Contract), appeared the same year that Catherine came to power, in 1762. Building on many of the same criticisms that he had levied against the “social system” in general, Rousseau claimed provocatively that monarchies were necessarily inferior to more democratic forms of government since they could only function thanks to self-interest, political corruption, privilege, and venality. His remedy for what he believed to be rampant inequality was nothing short of a wholesale transformation of society: the creation of a new binding political pact that would replace the individualism and self-love of current society with a form of absolute democracy and collectivism guaranteed by the general will of the population. The dialectical message proposed by Rousseau was that the people were supposed to sacrifice their freedom in order to be truly free. Those who violated this trust, he argues in The Social Contract, must be put to death.

Diderot did not supply Catherine with the type of long, abstract political treatise at which his former friend excelled. Though he had written entries on political questions for the Encyclopédie — including the articles “City,” “Citizen,” and “Political Authority” — he limited himself during his stay to the more isolated nuts-and-bolts questions associated with her political regime, such as how can the Russian relationship between government and the individual be improved? and how can the state use its power in such a way that it succeeds in getting people to accept its policies?

To her credit, Catherine seemed to have been more than willing to discuss these ideas with Diderot. The wide-ranging memoranda that he left behind examine a number of subjects, including the relationship of religion to the throne, the importance of a meritocracy in Russia, the situation of the country’s Jews, the source of revolutions, the definition of tyranny, the importance of public schools, the administration of justice, and the role of luxury, divorce, universities, and scientific academies. Diderot invariably embedded suggestions in all these disquisitions. He encouraged Catherine to mandate that her schools teach young girls about their sexuality with lifelike wax models, as he had done with Angélique. More brazenly, he cited a litany of political and military reasons why the empress should move her court back to Moscow. Having a “capital at the end of an empire,” he writes somewhat mockingly, simply did not make sense; it was like having “an animal whose heart would be at the end of its finger, or its stomach at the end of its big toe.”⁵⁷

Perhaps Diderot’s most telling and radical essay was his meditation on “Luxury.” Lashing out against a world where, as he had already suggested in Rameau’s Nephew, gold was the only real “God,” Diderot provocatively crowns himself as “King Diderot” in order to right the wrongs of a country that seems a lot like France. To begin with, this philosophe monarch decrees that he must secularize the religious orders and nationalize the clergy’s property, essentially predicting what the French Revolutionary government would enact fifteen years later. In another attempt to raise capital and pay off the state’s debts, he then proposes to sell off much of the realm’s land and properties, significantly reducing the number of stables, hunting grounds, pensions, useless voyages, ambassadors, and foreign offices.⁵⁸ (It is worth remembering that Diderot would have read this indictment of luxury and royal pomp out loud to the most powerful woman in the world, while they both sat comfortably in the Little Hermitage, surrounded by some of the greatest treasures in existence.)

By December, Diderot had shared dozens of such forward-thinking memoranda with the empress. And yet he also began to realize that she was not taking his ideas to heart. According to an account that circulated in the 1780s, Diderot interrupted their discussion one day to ask the empress, who always was very attentive during their conversations, why none of his suggestions had been implemented. Her answer spelled out very clearly just where Diderot’s jurisdiction began, and where it ended.

Monsieur Diderot, I have listened with the greatest pleasure to all the inspirations flowing from your brilliant mind. But all your grand philosophies, which I understand very well, would do marvelously in books and very badly in practice. In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything: it is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or to your pen, whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive.⁵⁹

Before this decisive moment, Diderot had probably had at least one other indication that Catherine was unlikely to change course so easily. In November, the French ambassador to Saint Petersburg had dragooned him into using his supposed influence with the czarina to float the idea of signing a peace treaty with Turkey, a country with which Russia had been at war for five years. Catherine was immediately vexed that Diderot had the audacity to go beyond his normal “sphere” — that of the philosophe — and had made a point of throwing the proposed terms prepared by the embassy into the fire.⁶⁰

Though Diderot continued to prepare essays for Catherine during the first two months of 1774, he also began to fall into a somewhat lethargic and deflated state. By February, the volume of his correspondence, often an indicator of his mood, dropped to almost nothing. Some of this disenchantment surely came from a realization that his hope of transforming Russia into a beacon of enlightenment was destined for failure. But he also had an additional concern. As if to chase him from the capital, the other supposedly enlightened monarch on the continent, Frederick of Prussia, had taken it upon himself to make Diderot’s life miserable during his last weeks in Petersburg.

FREDERICK AND THE RETURN HOME

Long before Catherine had become the darling of the philosophe coterie, Frederick had established himself as the greatest enlightened monarch of the era. An ardent lover of the era’s philosophy, a talented musician, as well as a strong believer in the freedom of the press and religious tolerance, this top-down authoritarian and warlord also saw himself as a public intellectual, writing and publishing, among other things, an influential historical account of the modern era in 1746. But the most alluring part of his reputation among the French philosophes did not come from his books; it stemmed from the fact that he often offered sanctuary to persecuted members of their cohort. When Voltaire, the abbé de Prades, La Mettrie, and Helvétius, among others, were exiled from France, the German monarch immediately welcomed them to Berlin.⁶¹

Despite Frederick’s generosity, Diderot had always remained far more wary and skeptical of the Prussian ruler than most of his friends. Indeed, in 1770, Diderot forever soured on the ostensibly enlightened despot when Frederick published a scathing attack on d’Holbach’s Essai sur les préjugés (Essay on Prejudices).⁶² D’Holbach’s book, to which Diderot had presumably contributed some of the ideas during a stay at Grandval in 1769, called for more social equality, more religious tolerance, and more freedom of thought.⁶³ As importantly, the Essay did not advocate for political reform by speaking to the continent’s enlightened monarchs; it addressed the people themselves. It was this, as much as anything else, that had incited Frederick’s caustic and disdainful seventy-page retort. Shortly after the Prussian monarch’s so-called Examination on the Essay on Prejudices appeared, Diderot wrote a response (unpublished) in which he sounds more like Danton than Diderot: “I will no longer patiently put up with a highborn wretch who insults me because he is the last of his race — me, who am perhaps the first of mine.”⁶⁴

Three years later, Diderot took great pleasure in turning down Frederick’s invitation to spend a few days in Berlin on his way to Russia. The Prussian monarch, who had fully expected the philosophe to pay his respects, was annoyed and quickly evened the score by writing a blistering review of Diderot’s literary career for the December 1773 issue of the Nouvelles littéraires (Literary News).⁶⁵ As soon as this mean-spirited piece of journalism was published, Frederick dispatched multiple copies to Saint Petersburg, where Diderot had been meeting with Catherine for several months. The article, not surprisingly, found an enthusiastic audience among the Russian courtiers, virtually all of whom resented the philosophe’s atheism, his unaffected simplicity, and, above all, his privileged relationship with the empress.⁶⁶

As the Russian capital became frostier, Diderot planned his trip home. Despite his increasing disillusionment and homesickness, he nonetheless felt a certain amount of sorrow to be leaving Catherine, a ruler whom he described on numerous occasions as having the soul of “Caesar with all the charms of Cleopatra.”⁶⁷ Catherine, too, had grown attached to the aging philosophe, and had actually “forbidden les adieux,” presumably to avoid a tearful goodbye.

In one of his last meetings with Catherine, Diderot had nonetheless asked three favors of the empress: safe passage back to France, a traveling companion to accompany him as far as The Hague, and a keepsake or “trifle” that his friend the empress had actually “used.” Catherine granted these wishes and more. In addition to providing for his travel, she gave the philosophe the considerable sum of three thousand rubles for his travel expenses.⁶⁸ She also had a new English coach (a dormeuse) especially equipped for him with a bedstead and mattress so that the philosophe could lie down and sleep during the trip. Her final and most symbolic gesture took place at court, on Friday, March 4, the day before Diderot set off for home. Rising to speak in front of a group of court aristocrats, Catherine conspicuously took a ring off her finger and asked her chamberlain to approach her. She then carefully handed the ring over to the court official while making an announcement in front of all those present: Monsieur Diderot “wanted a trifle, and this is one. He wanted me to have used it, and you will tell him that I wore it.”⁶⁹ Later that day, the chamberlain delivered the cameo ring to the departing philosophe. As Diderot held the ring between his two fingers, he realized that he was looking at a portrait of the empress herself. According to Madame de Vandeul, her father cherished this present for the rest of his life. More than a simple gift, the ring symbolized the powerful yet undoubtedly complex relationship between autocrat and philosophe.