Falconet remained in Russia for nearly twelve years, but eventually, he could not continue. In 1778, tired of the delays, exasperated by criticism, and broken in spirit and health, Falconet asked permission to leave, Catherine paid him what was due but refused to see him. He returned to Paris, where he became director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1783, he suffered a stroke, although he lived another eight years. He continued to write about art, but he never sculpted again.
After Falconet’s departure, another four years—sixteen years in all since the sculptor had come to Russia—were to pass before his statue was unveiled. Catherine did not invite the sculptor to return for the ceremony. But time has made up for her ingratitude. The result of his twelve years of work became a permanent landmark in St. Petersburg, Russia’s best-known monument and, then and now, one unparalleled in the world. During the nine-hundred-day siege in the Second World War, the city suffered constant German air and artillery bombardment. Falconet’s statue, exposed on the riverbank, was never touched.
On August 7, 1782, Catherine presided over the formal unveiling of the statue. Looking down from a window of the nearby Senate building at the massed Guards regiments and an immense crowd in the square below, the empress gave a signal. The drapery fell away and cries of admiration and awe burst from the crowd.
There was Peter, immortalized in bronze, his head almost fifty feet in the air. He wore a simple Roman shift and was crowned with a laurel wreath. He faced the Neva flowing before him. His left hand grasped the reins of his horse, rearing on the crest of a wave frozen in stone. His right arm was outstretched, the hand pointing across the river to the fortress and the first buildings of the city he had created. The serpent, symbolizing the difficulties he had overcome, lay trodden and crushed under the horse’s rear hooves. The horse’s tail rested on the serpent, providing the three points needed to give the statue balance. On either side of the granite base, metallic letters embedded in the stone bore the inscriptions TO PETER THE FIRST, FROM CATHERINE THE SECOND—on one side in Russian, on the other in Latin. Thus the empress paid tribute to her predecessor and identified herself with him.
In his classic poem “The Bronze Horseman,” Alexander Pushkin wrote:
The Image with an arm flung wide,
Sat on his brazen horse astride …
Him, Who moveless and aloft and dim
Our city by the sea had founded,
Whose will was Fate. Appalling there,
He sat, begirt with mist and air.
What thoughts engrave his brow!
What hidden Power and Authority He claims!
Proud charger, whither art thou ridden
Where leapest thou? And where, on whom
Wilt plant they hoof?
This was the greatest of all Russian poets’ description of a French sculptor’s representation of the greatest of Russian emperors, created by the inspiration and determination of a German-born empress. The statue was the culmination and embodiment of Catherine’s effort to identify herself with her predecessor. Catherine was Peter’s equal—his only equal—in vision, strength of purpose, and achievement during the centuries that Russia was ruled by tsars, emperors, and empresses.
“They Are Capable of Hanging Their King from a Lamppost!”
HIS MOST CHRISTIAN MAJESTY, Louis XVI, king of France and Navarre, was a gawky, amiable, well-intentioned man whose joys in life came from eating heartily, hunting stags, and tinkering with the inner workings of locks. Surrounded by ministers offering contradictory advice, he had difficulty making decisions. Demands that he choose one way or another threw him into confusion; once he had chosen, he continued to vacillate and sometimes changed his mind. This unfortunate thirty-five-year-old monarch was in his sixteenth year on the throne when, in May 1789, he summoned the Estates-General to meet at Versailles. Louis did not do this because he wished to, or because it was part of the usual practice of French kings. Rather, Louis acted because he had no choice; his government desperately needed to raise money to avoid national bankruptcy.
