Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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The ropes tightened, the pulleys squeaked, she rose higher and higher. Peter stood on a ladder, and fixing the statue to the pedestal, he held her with both arms, as in an embrace.

“Venus in the embrace of Mars!” Leblond, the emotional lover of classics, could not help ejaculating.

“How beautiful they both are!” exclaimed a young maid of honour belonging to the Crown Princess Charlotte’s household. “Were I the Tsaritsa, I should be jealous.”

Peter was almost as tall as the statue, and his human face remained noble in the presence of this divine one: the man was worthy of the goddess.

A last tremor, a last vibration, and she stood immovably upright and firm on the pedestal.

It was the work of Praxiteles: Aphrodite Anadyomene, the Foam-born, and Urania the Heavenly, the ancient Phoenician Astarte, the Babylonian Mellita, the Mother of Life, the great foster mother, she who had scattered the seed of stars over the blue vault, and shed the Milky-way from her breast.

She was the same now, as on the hillside in Florence where Leonardo da Vinci’s pupil had looked at her with superstitious fear; or, yet earlier, when in the depths of Cappadocia, in the forsaken temple near the old castle of Macellum, her last true worshipper had prayed to her, that pale boy in monk’s attire, the future Emperor Julian the Apostate. She had remained the same innocent yet voluptuous goddess, naked and not ashamed. From that very day when she rose from her millennial tomb far away in Florence, she had progressed further and further, from age to age, from people to people, halting nowhere, till in her victorious march she had at last reached the limits of the earth, the Hyperborean Scythia, beyond which there remains nought but chaos and darkness. And having fixed herself on the pedestal she for the first time glanced with a look of surprised curiosity around this strange new land, these flat moss-covered bogs, this curious town, so like the settlements of nomads; at this sky, which was the same day and night, these black, drowsy, terrible waves so like the waves of the Styx. This land resembled but little her radiant Olympian home; it seemed as hopeless as the land of Oblivion, the dark Hades. Yet the goddess smiled as the sun would have smiled had he penetrated into Hades.