Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [292]
No, Alexander thought. No, I cannot turn back. I have come too far. Better to gamble – to win an empire or lose all – just one more time.
And he took the silver coin he was to have tossed, and threw it out of the window, into the night.
‘Dear Alexander!’ She was smiling. ‘I am so glad you have come.’
‘Daria Mikhailovna.’ He bent down to kiss her. ‘You are looking wonderful.’
In fact, the countess wasn’t looking too bad. One could even see that she had once been attractive. Her little face, rather too heavily painted, always reminded him of some bright bird’s, especially as now, with age, her hooked nose had become more prominent. Her small, blue eyes were lively, darting glances from place to place. She was wearing a floor-length antique dress of mauve gauze, decorated with white lace and pink ribbons, which made her look like a figure of the previous generation from the French court. Her hair was fine; but somehow, despite the fact that it was powdered, it had a strange yellowish tinge at the sides, like tarnished silver. It was swept up high above her head into a daunting coiffure topped with curls and decorated with pearls and a pale blue ribbon.
To receive her guests, Countess Turova was seated on a gilt chair in the middle of her salon, which lay up one flight of the staircase in the great marble hall. Like most such rooms in Russian palaces, it was huge and magnificent. Its ceiling was over twenty feet high; its gleaming parquet floor contained at least a dozen woods. A gigantic crystal chandelier glittered above.
The guests were still arriving; many of them Alexander recognized. A German professor, an English merchant, two young writers, a distinguished old general, an even older prince: it was one of the pleasures of St Petersburg that one might find people of all nations and classes in such an aristocratic setting. For there was a warmer and easier spirit in Russia than in the noble houses of western Europe.
And it was a long tradition that, once a week, such people should come to the great Turov house on Vasilevsky Island. For the count had been a remarkable man. He had helped the great Shuvalov found Moscow University thirty years before; the writers of the mid-eighteenth century – the first such intellectual group in Russia – counted him their friend; even Lomonosov, Russia’s first philosopher and scientist, used to call upon him. Turov had travelled widely – even visited the great Voltaire – and brought back many treasures of European painting, sculpture and porcelain as well as a fine library, all of which were still housed in this splendid palace. And the countess, whose magpie mind had picked up a number of ideas in the course of her life with him, now clung to these with a tenacity which was in perfectly inverse proportion to her understanding of them. She kept open house for the intellectuals who, partly from habit, and partly amused by her eccentricity, continued to come. ‘They rely upon me,’ she would say. ‘I am their rock.’ She was certainly unchanging.
And upon nothing was the Countess Turova more constant than her devotion to the chief object of her worship. For if she revered her late husband, to her greatest hero she had erected nothing less than a temple. ‘In this house,’ everything seemed to say, ‘the enlightened worship the great leader.’
Voltaire. His quizzical image was everywhere. There was a bust of him on a pedestal in the huge marble hall, and another at the turn of the great staircase. There was a portrait in the large gallery at the top, and another bust in the corner of the salon. The great philosopher was her icon. His name came into the conversation ceaselessly. If someone made a good point, the countess would say, with finality: ‘So Voltaire himself might have said.’ Or even better, and with warmth: ‘Ah, I see you have read your Voltaire.’ Something which, Bobrov was sure, she had never done herself. It was astonishing how any subject could