Free To the Hermitage by Malcolm Bradbury Page A

wonderfully clever and ingenious. She does more, far more, than that: more than a chancellor might recommend, a philosopher imagine, a maker of mystifications ever devise. ‘It would be a cruelty to separate a wise man from his books, the objects of his delight, the source of his work, the companions of his leisure,’ she pronounces. She buys his library, for a remarkably generous price (15,000 livres). She also refuses delivery, and instead appoints our man his own librarian, at a salary of 1,000 livres a year. With the graceless consent of King Louis, she even makes our man court librarian to the Hermitage – and all this without him ever leaving his room. And so his books will stay on his walls, support his wisdom, accompany his leisure, require some wifely dusting, for the rest of his mortal days. Only then will they be crated and shipped to their own library in the Little Hermitage; and the deal will fully be done.
    Our man can only feel deeply grateful. Indeed he makes sure no one now or in the future will ever doubt the joy he feels in this amazing benefaction. ‘I prostrate myself at your feet,’ he writes in one of the world’s warmest thank-you notes. ‘I stretch out my arms to you. I long to speak to you, but my mind has shrunk to nothing! I am as emotional as a little child! My fingers of their own accord reach out for an old lyre, of which Philosophy once cut the strings! I unhook it from my wall! Bare-headed, bare-chested, I feel myself impelled to joyous song! To You!!’ True, there are little local difficulties, as occur with any great court bureaucracy. A year on, Denis the Philosopher is still struggling in deep poverty, and politely writing to complain that not a penny of the promised money has been paid. But, grand as usual, the Tzarina has made perfect amends. She not only clears the blockage, fires the chancellor, remits the money. She actually pays our man the next fifty years of his salary in advance (50,000 livres), making his presumed lifespan a healthy one hundred and four.
    Grateful as ever, he’s written a warm ode in her eternal praise. He’s offered his respectful services in all directions, done everything he can to repay the debt. So, even while up on the Neva the world’s strangest water-city grows and grows, the architects, engineers, artisans, actors, economists and even the generals of Paris keep on turning up daily at his door. It’s his task to vet them, sift them, crate them, send them north. When Catherine suddenly acquires the idea of a most enormous statue of homage to be raised to her predecessor Peter, he finds from his encyclopedic list of contributors a co-operative sculptor, Etienne-Maurice Falconet: perhaps not the best, or the most level-tempered, certainly the cheapest to hand. When books and manuscripts circulate in Paris suggesting the Tzarina has been guilty of shameless crimes, the liberal philosopher takes it upon himself to try and suppress them. ‘It’s really bizarre the variety of roles I play in this world,’ he reflects.
    And, in thrall to the world’s greatest shopper, he shops. How he’s shopped! With or without his two greatest friends, big Golitsyn, little Grimm, he’s scoured all the grand arcades of Paris, tripped in and out of all the secret doorways of Saint-Victoire. Print-shops, galleries, garrets, ateliers, workshops, salons, auction-rooms: he has scouted them every day, shop-shop-shopping for the great Tzarina. He buys vast shelffuls of books; he gathers up prints and bibelots and necklaces and knick-knacks, he gobbles whole collections of
beaux-arts
. Feeling a little flush now, he even treats himself a little: to a beautiful new dressing gown, which sadly fails to suit him, for he is not himself at all a grand man. Meantime all over Paris the art prices start to soar. Auctions become battlefields. Prints sell like tapestries. The most seasoned collectors withdraw wounded from the fray. When Gaignat – a former secretary to Louis XV