The Unlikely Friendship Between a Philosopher and an Empress

A much-awaited carriage carrying the philosopher Denis Diderot arrived in Saint Petersburg. His initial welcome, unhappily, failed to make him feel any more alive. Before leaving Paris, he had arranged to stay at the house of his friend, the sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet. Along with his assistant (and companion) Marie-Anne Collot, Falconet had gone to Saint Petersburg in 1766 in order to undertake, thanks to Diderot’s enthusiastic recommendation, Catherine the Great’s commission for a monumental equestrian statue of Peter the Great. When he wasn’t cheering on Falconet as he labored over his commission—“Work, my friend, work with all your force! Above all, give us a beautiful horse!”—Diderot was busy imagining their happy reunion in Russia. In fact, he scripted and staged the moment they would again see one another: “What a day! What a moment that will be, for both of us, when I knock at your door, enter the house, throw myself into your arms and we begin to cry out confusedly. ‘It’s you.’ ‘Yes, it’s me.’ ‘Well, you finally made it.’ ‘Yes, I did.’ Yes, we’ll babble! And pity the person who, seeing again a friend after a long absence, can speak clearly and not babble.”

When Diderot arrived at Falconet’s residence on the Millionaya, the aptly named street across from the Winter Palace, the only element from his imagined tableau was the babble. But it was babble bred of embarrassment. The weary traveler had barely stepped into the house when Falconet informed him that his son had unexpectedly arrived in Saint Petersburg. Indeed, Pierre-Etienne Falconet, who had been studying with Sir Joshua Reynolds in London, had in fact showed up without warning at his father’s door. What he didn’t tell the uncomprehending Diderot was that Pierre-Étienne had arrived nearly two months earlier. In a letter to Catherine, in which he announced that it was “raining Falconets,” the less than pleased father allowed his son to take the bed he had prepared for his friend Diderot. Oddly, though, he neither sought to find different lodgings for Diderot, nor seemed especially regretful over the turn of events. Stricken by his friend’s news and seeming coldness, “the philosopher’s heart,” later wrote his daughter Angélique, “was forever wounded.”

Diderot did not have the time to tend to his wound. What was he to do, where was he to go? How could he, in his weakened condition, think of putting up at a hostel? Was this, then, to be the climax of his epic trek across the continent? “There I was,” he reminded Nanette, “sick and a stranger in a city where I didn’t understand a word.” At that moment, he suddenly thought of Narishkin. Penning a desperate note to his traveling companion, Diderot had his reply within the hour: a carriage pulled up in front of Falconet’s door to carry the homeless philosopher back to the Narishkin palace, a snowball’s throw from the Winter Palace and sharing the same wide square dominated by the Cathedral of Saint Isaac.

At his host’s firm insistence, Diderot would remain there for the entirety of his stay. Tellingly, though, he almost immediately began to dream about his return to France. It would be a roundabout return, he mischievously tells Nanette. Continuing east to the Great Wall of China, he announces, he would push across Asia and the Ottoman Empire, pass through Constantinople and sail to Carthage. Once back in France, he would stop at several cities, lay over in Langres and, only then, come home. “But you will tell that it’s hardly worth so much effort to find one’s resting place; and you would be right. You will also tell me that I must return as quickly as possible by the shortest route; and you would be right. And so, that is what I will do, and we will have, after the torments of our long separation, the quiet joy of being together again.”

Just as the great distance now separating him from Nanette cast a golden haze over the realities of domestic life, the close proximity to Catherine began to clear away the comforting illusions Diderot had held about the Russian empress. He certainly had time to dwell on the matter, since a week passed between arriving in Saint Petersburg and meeting his host. Yet another bout of colic, which he blamed on the waters of the Neva, forced Diderot to spend several days in his bedchamber. The delay suited Catherine, who was attending to a crucial matter of state: Paul’s wedding to Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt, a marriage Catherine arranged following her son’s recovery from his bout of influenza. Orchestrating the many festivities then unfolding in the city, Catherine had little time to think about her newly arrived guest.

As for the guest, barely strong enough to lift himself from bed, he had nothing but time to think about his still-unseen host. More precisely, Diderot had time to think about his proper relationship to Catherine. This was an unusual, if not unprecedented, situation for a philosopher. It was even more unusual in Diderot’s case. He was, after all, someone who, when not being kept in prison by his own government, was kept at arm’s length by salonnières because he was as careless in editing his conversation as he was his writings. But Diderot knew that Catherine already knew all of this, just as she knew—or so he assumed—that he had not made this cross-continent trip simply to express his gratitude for the gifts she had showered on him.

As soon as Catherine had bought his library, Diderot understood that she had also bought, if not him, at least his nonrefundable ticket to Saint Petersburg. That he would have to go one day was clear; less clear was how he should act once there. “How can Denis le philosophe,” he wondered, “deserve to be called a collaborator of Catherine’s? How might he also work for the happiness of the people?” There was little modesty in these repeated self-interrogations, and why should there be? “I’m high-minded and, on occasion, come across great and powerful ideas that I convey in a striking fashion. I know how to captivate, move and touch the minds of others.” Granted, d’Alembert is better at differential equations, Diderot allows, but his erstwhile colleague cannot match his gift in “elevating and inspiring the love of virtue and truth.” But therein lies the rub! How could such a man survive at the imperial court? “I always wear my heart on my sleeve! I am incapable of lying, incapable of hiding my affection and distaste, and incapable of avoiding traps that others might lay for me!”

Instead, he had explained to Nanette, his mission was to show Catherine, a ruler who could do so much good, her proper image. “Don’t scold me for this trip,” he pleads: “I had a duty to do.” But how would he reconcile this particular duty toward an empress with the philosopher’s general duty to seek and tell the truth? In his Pages contre un tyran, Diderot did not hesitate to lecture Frederick: “To whom should a philosopher address himself frankly, if not to a sovereign?” But even though Diderot had been able to give Berlin wide berth, he could not escape the gravitational pull of Saint Petersburg. Having resisted for so many years, he finally resigned himself to address his thoughts to Catherine; now, he had to find the means to gently couch his candor.

One rule was never to pretend that he knew better than the empress. This was the fatal mistake committed by his fellow philosophe, Lemercier de La Rivière, whom Diderot had the misfortune to recommend to Catherine in 1768, declaring that if the empress had the hankering for truth, then La Rivière was her man. So much her man, Diderot emphasized, that La Rivière is “our consolation for the loss of Montesquieu.” Catherine, however, decided she had been sold a false bill of lading. Though La Rivière met the empress just once, that was clearly more than enough for Catherine. The “beautiful soul” and “brilliant mind” that Diderot saw in La Rivière were quite lost on Catherine. While a solid economist—Adam Smith thought highly of La Rivière’s work—the Frenchman was a bumptious diplomat who had clearly come to Russia to lecture, not learn. During his shorter-than-anticipated stay in Saint Petersburg, La Rivière’s imperious character so annoyed the empress that she dismissed him as “Solon-La Rivière.”

Diderot thus sought the role not of Solon, but of Socrates. Not only had others cast him in this role—Grimm liked to call his friend “our century’s Socrates,” while Voltaire dubbed him “Diderot-Socrates”—but Diderot believed himself to be suited to it. He spied the same philosophical lineage in his dedication to virtue and love of dialogue, as well as in the same fates nearly shared by the modern Parisian and the ancient Athenian. In a letter to the royal censor Malesherbes, in which he lamented the relentless attacks on the Encyclopédie, Diderot compared his own imprisonment to Socrates’s death: “For ten years, for thirty, I have drunk bitterness from an overflowing cup.” The Socratic reference is clear; among the occupations Diderot pursued to while away the time in Vincennes was a translation of Plato’s Apology of Socrates.

Who can say whether Diderot saw Catherine as Alcibiades, the Athenian leader who had been one of Socrates’s students and, depending on one’s view, either spectacularly realized or rubbished the master’s teachings. Diderot did see himself, though, in the Socratic role of gadfly, as a bringer of questions as much as truths. But crucially, he knew he was a gadfly that could be swatted away by the flick of an imperial wrist. In his preliminary notes for his sessions with Catherine, Diderot seems determined to remind himself as much as his imperial host that he is not La Rivière. The economist, he agreed, was someone who “rather ridiculously gave himself too much importance.” Do not think, Diderot announces, that I will be the sort who, having just arrived and my bags still unpacked, declares: “Madame, stop what you are doing. Nothing good can be done until you hear me out. I alone know how to administer an empire.”

This led Diderot to embrace a second rule: gratitude always means saying you’re sorry—sorry for unavoidable missteps and misunderstandings, sorry for the inevitable impression of not appearing grateful enough. Far from being another La Rivière, Diderot exclaims, he is himself “nothing, really nothing at all.” Everything he now has—“well-being, peace and security”—he owes to Catherine. Indeed, if he is anything at all, he is like a child whom Catherine will “permit to say all the stuff and nonsense passing through his head.” In another memo, he instead portrays himself as “Denis le philosophe”—a dreamer, one who “takes the liberty of addressing his daydreams to Her Imperial Highness.” Yes, these reveries might well contain information, even insights on occasion. More important, though, is the light Diderot wants to throw on the utterly different worlds the two interlocutors inhabit. Their conversations, he proposes, will reveal “all that separates the thoughts that occupy the mind of a ruler and the ideas of a poor devil holding forth from his garret.” Nothing is easier, Diderot admits, “than to run an empire while one’s head rests on a pillow.”

Rarely has such a commonplace been given such uncommon force as, a week after his arrival, Denis le philosophewas well enough to raise, not just his head, but also the rest of his body in order to meet Catherine at a masked ball in the Winter Palace.

*

Who was the actor, then, and who was the audience when Diderot and Catherine finally met at the palace masquerade? When Diderot, stooping slightly and hesitant, was led to Catherine, who was surrounded by a knot of courtiers, the contrast could not have been more jarring. Not only had he crowned himself with a borrowed and ill-fitting wig—replacing the one he had lost in Germany—but he had also donned his philosopher’s mantle: a plain black suit. Standing in the midst of more than a hundred brilliantly masked and garbed guests, Diderot’s drab appearance sparked expressions of wonder and shock. “Everyone judges him on this [sartorial] singularity alone,” observed L. H. Nicolay, an adviser to Grand Duke Paul. For Nicolay, the Russian aristocracy’s reaction to Diderot’s appearance underscored “how terribly hard it is to maintain a great reputation, and how dangerous it is to leave one’s study for a brilliant court.”

Yet Diderot was more aware of this “singularity” than Nicolay. Despite his nearly comic appearance and gestures, the philosophe was anything but naive. Shortly before he had left Paris, he sent a note to Madame Geoffrin, thanking her for the gift of a new dressing gown. Touched by her gesture, Diderot was also saddened. “Cursed be the miscreant,” he exclaims in mock outrage, “who invented the art of rarifying a piece of ordinary cloth by simply dyeing it scarlet!” The new gown, he moans, is not only stiff and rigid, but conveys a public image at odds with its wearer’s self image. While he now looks like a “mannequin,” the old one’s streaks of ink and layers of dust “showed me to be an author and honest laborer. But now I look lazy and rich, and nobody can tell who I am.”

No doubt as Diderot wished, everyone that night at the Winter Palace could tell who he was—or, rather, who he wished to be seen as. His “philosopher’s coat” stood out as starkly among the masked Russian aristocrats as did Saint Petersburg’s palaces among the military barracks and workers’ hovels. It was the sartorial equivalent of Diderot’s short story “This Is Not a Story,” which both adopted and undermined the foundations of fictional realism. In short, it was a costume that was not a costume.

Catherine, perhaps, was alive to this particular masquerade and determined to play an equal role. Superbly indifferent to her guest’s appearance, she asked him to sit down and recount his trip. Though they conversed for nearly an hour, Diderot later swore he was so “agitated and flustered” that he could not remember a single word he said. Whatever Diderot did say, though, “pleased her greatly”—so much so, he reported, that he could tell from Catherine’s responses that she was “deeply affected.” While we cannot plumb the depths of Catherine’s feelings, she was no doubt moved. Standing in front of her, after all, was the man upon whom she had showered so much attention and money, and to whom she had issued so many indirect, yet increasingly insistent invitations. Have him come to Saint Petersburg, she instructed his friends, if only to show his gratitude. Voltaire was too old, d’Alembert too rude, and Diderot was the last great philosophe standing. And now, here he was: What greater claim to the applause of the Republic of Letters? Or, for that matter, what greater promise was there for conversation as entertaining as it was enlightened? As Catherine gazed on her visitor, his wig registering his frantic arm gestures while his words cascaded above the heads of a mesmerized audience, she admired the role she played in the spectacle as much as she did the role played by Diderot.

As she brought their conversation to an end, Catherine pointed to the door that led to her private apartments: “Monsieur Diderot, do you see that door? It will be open to you every day from three to five.”

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Adapted from Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment by Robert Zaretsky, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.