“Here she is!”
The lead was already being melted for the soldering of the iron tie-rods which were to fix the foot of the statue to the pedestal. The architect Leblond busied himself in getting ready a kind of hoist with steps, ropes, and pulleys. But the statue had first to be raised by hand out of the case.
The servants were assisting Peter. When one of them clasped “the naked wench” in coarse joke, the Tsar rewarded him with such a ringing buffet on the ears, that every one present at once felt a certain respect for the goddess.
Flakes of wool were falling off the smooth marble, like grey clods of earth, while again, just as two hundred years ago in Florence, the risen goddess was emerging from her tomb.
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.